lucky number seven: why i am thankful today
i am going through the pentatuch again, and i am falling in love with it. i am beginning to resonate with and understanding the psalmist when he exclaims "Oh, how I love your law!" (psalm 119:97). a lot of this is actually for environmental reasons; something i've been meaning to write another post about but haven't yet (it sort of boils down to: we wouldn't have all these environmental issues on our hands if we'd followed Old Testament ruling. the details of why are pretty cool; God is a genius).
i long for a time of lawfulness, and my spirit quickens to discern how it can better dwell in obedience to the tiniest details of divine command. simultaneously, i am thankful for the Spirit - that by its help we can realistically strive for this. whereas before i'd felt thankful that Christ came so that we didn't have to adhere to the law, felt glad that we didn't have to deal with seemingly nagging and tedious acts and compliances, i am beginning to understand how it is that Christ really fulfills the law - and how if we love Christ, we should love the law. in this i am coming to realize that none of the law's commands are nitpicky or out of place, but that every single one of them is for an intensely intelligent, well-thought-out reason. it shows how caring God is, that he would think of these things for us; and it shows how creative he is, that he would be able to find a way to maintain perfect balance in a cause-and-effect way. truly, this is a reminder of the logic of the logos - it is not simply magic that anything in God would function absolutely and perfectly, but by literal intelligent design. as George Herbert says, "When thou dost favour any action, / It runs, it flies: / All things concur to give it a perfection."
to me, to someone increasingly aware of the sin and brokenness in the world, to someone susceptive to being brought dangerously close to despair in watching man hasten to his own demise (in both spiritual and physical senses), to come to an understanding of God's perfecting character is to come to new and real hope. it is encouraginging to me as much as it is humbling: i fall into woe when i decide the whole world going down the drain, and then find myself having to remove my own decisions and conclusions and realize the truth - that the world has been and is being redeemed. and this is undeniable.
it is further humbling to realize that i am humbling myself for a reason that is a gift: that i have to change my mind so that He can give me His Kingdom. i am not simply humbling myself to some set, forced, dismally predictable outcome that "God" is at the head of, no; i am humbling myself to the living, dynamic, loaded-with-treasures-and-gilded-by-perfection eternity that God, Creator of the Universe made for me and my brothers and sisters by his own hands. more hope is laid upon my spirit as i come to learn, through various sources of repetition daily, that this latter blessing is not something i must wait for or endure until, but something that i am invited to take part in today. how can i do that? by following Christ. why?
in Genesis, after Cain kills Abel, God promises the repercussions of murder: "if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over" (Genesis 4:15). there is grace in this in that God speaks to instill protection against Cain, the murderer himself; there is recognition of the sort of downward-spiral aspect of sinning in the multiplying of vengeance.
Leviticus hosts the best example of this exponentially-getting-worse aspect of sin. when God curses the land, he says, "If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over" (Leviticus 26:27-28). it is interesting that God asks man to maintain the law in an eye-for-an-eye fashion, but that God himself enforces the law in a seven-eyes-for-an-eye fashion. is this wrong, unjust, or unfair? no: i truly believe that it mirrors the weight with which we are to view human dominion in light of Divine power, and begs that we adhere more closely to the commands of the latter. He who made us knows better than he who simply dwells next door to us. if we never sin in the first place (if we never take out anyone's eye), as God first commanded, we don't have to deal with either repercussion, human or heavenly.
this is frustrating for me, spiritually, because i understand the justice of it and i understand the logic of it, but it still pains me to see it occur in the world and in my own life. i wallow into my own sort of justified-hopelessness: i despair for the world, though i know that i am personally saved by grace. this is terribly, terribly wrong of me because it does not attribute the weight of God's glory. it is not a worshipful attitude to have or assumption to make. it is easy to question if God's glory is truly good, if it manifests itself in a justice that allows for this much decay and demise, but the only reason i would question it is because i fail to trust Him enough to look past the decay. my sin, lately, is that my eyes remain set on the fall and not on the redemption.
God comes to earth as man not only to redeem his creation, but also to explicitly tell us how he redeems it. when Peter asks, "'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?'" Jesus replies to him, "'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:21-22)f]">. here is the Son of God and the Son of Man, bestowing the greatest of graces: as he prepares to die on a cross for the man he is talking to and all the men he is talking about, he gives him the formula for fighting against the fallen world: forgiveness. when Christ is crucified, he forgives the sin of every man, all the way back to that first instance in the Garden of Eden. Christ's greatest act goes in vain to an individual, to me, unless we find new life in him, the kind of life where we take up an active role, through him, in the redemption of creation by the forgiveness of his greatest creations: our brothers, His sons. i am wary of this sounding like we have the same sort of power that Christ has: i mean to emphasize that we can have none of this without Christ, but we can have all of it only by Him, with Him, and in Him. as we begin to truly internalize his forgiveness, his Spirit works in us to aid us in actively redeeming the world with him. since we are created for dominion over creation, we have a large responsibility to maintain it. just as it is our fault that creation is in a state of a decay; it's improvement can occur at our same hand, again, only by Christ as an interceder. a thing breaks down at a sevenfold rate; Christ commands that we give it the patience to repair at a seventy-times-sevenfold rate. this seems to hold whether the thing referred to be the land or the heart of man, but because Christ commands it of man, he maintains the established created heirarchy of dominion. by recognizing the human soul's consequential place in creation (which is not simply a burden but actually extremely generous in that man would reap all the fruits of creation were he to use his given dominion properly, i.e., follow the law), emphasizes the importance of man's heart as a thing truly worth dying for. in this way, in his Son's weighty death and resurrection, God's infinitude surpasses every countable repercussion of sin. whatever the rate that sin unleashes into the world, the infinitely powerful blood of Christ covers it to a literally exponentially greater degree.
i suppose this is just a lengthy, personal way of coming to understand what Paul gets at in Ephesians 1:7-10: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." forgiveness as a plan for the unifying fullness of Christ's kingdom? oh God, you are more gracious and more genius than anything ever; more gracious and more genius than any man, any me, will ever know. that we would live in thankfulness, that we would show it by following Christ - what a grace that is, that you give us pages and pages and pages of sacred legislation and then allow us to imitate one man to fulfill the same requirements. oh, that we would rush to meet your invitation to redemption. thank you, Lord.
i long for a time of lawfulness, and my spirit quickens to discern how it can better dwell in obedience to the tiniest details of divine command. simultaneously, i am thankful for the Spirit - that by its help we can realistically strive for this. whereas before i'd felt thankful that Christ came so that we didn't have to adhere to the law, felt glad that we didn't have to deal with seemingly nagging and tedious acts and compliances, i am beginning to understand how it is that Christ really fulfills the law - and how if we love Christ, we should love the law. in this i am coming to realize that none of the law's commands are nitpicky or out of place, but that every single one of them is for an intensely intelligent, well-thought-out reason. it shows how caring God is, that he would think of these things for us; and it shows how creative he is, that he would be able to find a way to maintain perfect balance in a cause-and-effect way. truly, this is a reminder of the logic of the logos - it is not simply magic that anything in God would function absolutely and perfectly, but by literal intelligent design. as George Herbert says, "When thou dost favour any action, / It runs, it flies: / All things concur to give it a perfection."
to me, to someone increasingly aware of the sin and brokenness in the world, to someone susceptive to being brought dangerously close to despair in watching man hasten to his own demise (in both spiritual and physical senses), to come to an understanding of God's perfecting character is to come to new and real hope. it is encouraginging to me as much as it is humbling: i fall into woe when i decide the whole world going down the drain, and then find myself having to remove my own decisions and conclusions and realize the truth - that the world has been and is being redeemed. and this is undeniable.
it is further humbling to realize that i am humbling myself for a reason that is a gift: that i have to change my mind so that He can give me His Kingdom. i am not simply humbling myself to some set, forced, dismally predictable outcome that "God" is at the head of, no; i am humbling myself to the living, dynamic, loaded-with-treasures-and-gilded-by-perfection eternity that God, Creator of the Universe made for me and my brothers and sisters by his own hands. more hope is laid upon my spirit as i come to learn, through various sources of repetition daily, that this latter blessing is not something i must wait for or endure until, but something that i am invited to take part in today. how can i do that? by following Christ. why?
in Genesis, after Cain kills Abel, God promises the repercussions of murder: "if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over" (Genesis 4:15). there is grace in this in that God speaks to instill protection against Cain, the murderer himself; there is recognition of the sort of downward-spiral aspect of sinning in the multiplying of vengeance.
Leviticus hosts the best example of this exponentially-getting-worse aspect of sin. when God curses the land, he says, "If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over" (Leviticus 26:27-28). it is interesting that God asks man to maintain the law in an eye-for-an-eye fashion, but that God himself enforces the law in a seven-eyes-for-an-eye fashion. is this wrong, unjust, or unfair? no: i truly believe that it mirrors the weight with which we are to view human dominion in light of Divine power, and begs that we adhere more closely to the commands of the latter. He who made us knows better than he who simply dwells next door to us. if we never sin in the first place (if we never take out anyone's eye), as God first commanded, we don't have to deal with either repercussion, human or heavenly.
this is frustrating for me, spiritually, because i understand the justice of it and i understand the logic of it, but it still pains me to see it occur in the world and in my own life. i wallow into my own sort of justified-hopelessness: i despair for the world, though i know that i am personally saved by grace. this is terribly, terribly wrong of me because it does not attribute the weight of God's glory. it is not a worshipful attitude to have or assumption to make. it is easy to question if God's glory is truly good, if it manifests itself in a justice that allows for this much decay and demise, but the only reason i would question it is because i fail to trust Him enough to look past the decay. my sin, lately, is that my eyes remain set on the fall and not on the redemption.
God comes to earth as man not only to redeem his creation, but also to explicitly tell us how he redeems it. when Peter asks, "'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?'" Jesus replies to him, "'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:21-22)f]">. here is the Son of God and the Son of Man, bestowing the greatest of graces: as he prepares to die on a cross for the man he is talking to and all the men he is talking about, he gives him the formula for fighting against the fallen world: forgiveness. when Christ is crucified, he forgives the sin of every man, all the way back to that first instance in the Garden of Eden. Christ's greatest act goes in vain to an individual, to me, unless we find new life in him, the kind of life where we take up an active role, through him, in the redemption of creation by the forgiveness of his greatest creations: our brothers, His sons. i am wary of this sounding like we have the same sort of power that Christ has: i mean to emphasize that we can have none of this without Christ, but we can have all of it only by Him, with Him, and in Him. as we begin to truly internalize his forgiveness, his Spirit works in us to aid us in actively redeeming the world with him. since we are created for dominion over creation, we have a large responsibility to maintain it. just as it is our fault that creation is in a state of a decay; it's improvement can occur at our same hand, again, only by Christ as an interceder. a thing breaks down at a sevenfold rate; Christ commands that we give it the patience to repair at a seventy-times-sevenfold rate. this seems to hold whether the thing referred to be the land or the heart of man, but because Christ commands it of man, he maintains the established created heirarchy of dominion. by recognizing the human soul's consequential place in creation (which is not simply a burden but actually extremely generous in that man would reap all the fruits of creation were he to use his given dominion properly, i.e., follow the law), emphasizes the importance of man's heart as a thing truly worth dying for. in this way, in his Son's weighty death and resurrection, God's infinitude surpasses every countable repercussion of sin. whatever the rate that sin unleashes into the world, the infinitely powerful blood of Christ covers it to a literally exponentially greater degree.
i suppose this is just a lengthy, personal way of coming to understand what Paul gets at in Ephesians 1:7-10: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." forgiveness as a plan for the unifying fullness of Christ's kingdom? oh God, you are more gracious and more genius than anything ever; more gracious and more genius than any man, any me, will ever know. that we would live in thankfulness, that we would show it by following Christ - what a grace that is, that you give us pages and pages and pages of sacred legislation and then allow us to imitate one man to fulfill the same requirements. oh, that we would rush to meet your invitation to redemption. thank you, Lord.
Comments
One word to describe your post: Excellent.