Day 3399 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Micah 6:7 NIV

“With what shall come before the Lord?”

That simple contemplation begins this little passage from the book of Micah, a lone pondering put forth by another who was as we are, a people who’re in Christ and fighting to find the ability to grow even deeper despite our fallen human nature insisting we fall still further away from the Way that is the Life that brought the Truth which set us free from a way of life we still at times don’t mind the thought of revisiting, reliving, reviving some days. A wondering wandered toward only because there’s little easy in all these eternal realizations that He opens our eyes to seeing.

Such as the gravity of knowing that God’s grace cannot be bought or bartered, leaving us nothing but to come before Him with nothing other than the fearful hope that He’s willing to accept the nothing we have left of the everything He created us to be.

And I dare say that such an understanding is one which stands among the ultimate stumbling blocks in regard to faith as it finds for us a forever failure to find for ourselves something with which to please Him from among all the prizes and possessions and performances we’ve put on in which we’ve perfected the play of pretend trying to prove ourselves a people with purpose, with profit, with pride found to abide in all we do as if such a self-perception might actually mean anything beyond a self.

How can it? How can anything I set out to seek, see or assume accomplish for my life a meaning that means anything to anyone other than me? If my priority as needed to inspire the pursuit is one of personal gain, be it profit or popularity, any potential benefit that another may even accidentally reap is one that I’m more than willing to ruin so long as my reward isn’t missed. And while such blatant self-absorption is by and large the lay of this land of the lost, it’s indeed one of the many things which must find itself humbled and lost if we’re to ever hone our hope toward the home of Heaven.

For our ways of living and doing and thinking and speaking and breathing and being always sure that all the above are only supposed to leave us looking good and feeling great, they don’t amount to anything in the vast expanse of eternity. Nothing as done here can have any true bearing on forever when this finite and futile fumbling of a life is done in such depth and to such length, only to still be bound by the laws of mortality. Everything in and of this world, and thus our lives as lived within, it all has an expiry that is most undeniable and also entirely imminent.

Thus faith’s leading us to leaving us at a loss for as to what we may have or have become that gives us now anything to come before the Lord, as if we belong where our pasts prove and our present doesn’t always seek to disprove that we’ve no care to be there.

Such is the gravity of the objectivity of the Old Testament’s defining of rites and rituals in regard to what’s become mere religion. Sacrifices and sacraments assuming safety inside something bought or sold or had or held. Atonement offered at the cost of a goat, a ram, a bull at times, a couple birds or some coins tossed in the kitty for those who couldn’t afford the standard cost of sin. Yes, we’ve taken what God meant to open our eyes to see the life lost due to our mistakes and instead chosen to see only the price we can pay to not feel as if we don’t belong before a righteous God.

It’s amazing what this humanity can imagine when our guilt is felt in ways that leave us unwilling to want for what’s left us feeling guilty. Indeed, we seek to offset our selfishness without ever offloading our selfishness. And yet such is the sign of safety and salvation, but as Christ Himself says to what was, as we are still, “a wicked and adulterous generation”, “none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.”

Three days in death only to be sprung back to life on the right side of every wrong turn we as a wicked and adulterous generation can imagine.

That’s the calling of the cross having paid our cost and our now being eternally indebted to He who hung where we should have stayed. Yes, Jesus calls us to take up our cross and count it all as loss for what faith knows to be the surpassing worth of knowing Christ and His salvation. For that is what we all so desperately need, and too what we all so desperately fear. Yes, we want the salvation for the safety it doesn’t have to assume, but alas, we try to count the ways in which we can buy another way that doesn’t demand the death our sins deserve.

And thus that which has been will be again, nothing new under the sun. For the wages of sin are still death, we’ve just now no temple toward which to flee with some innocent animals in tow. No, Christ is the final sacrifice in the form of a life lost as bought by blood shed. And so we still today find ourselves unable to breach beyond, breathe beyond the realization that Micah mentions here in his attempt at the honesty of the humility which helps us all see that we’ve nothing with which to earn our entrance into His presence.

We have nothing.

For as Micah wonders in the verse just prior to this one for today, “shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?” Indeed, “will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?” Even going to the lengths that Abraham embraced, “shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” Because the reality is that we know well that sinners we are, and that understanding resides deep down inside alongside the confession that we’ve nothing left of who we were created to remain with which to come before the Lord we’ve had to deny to become who we weren’t meant to be.

And there is just nothing about that understanding that is in any way easy for us to accept. Because we’re a people accustomed to buying our way out of things. In this world we can lie our way out of traffic tickets and offer up shameless apologies for things someone else doesn’t see our way. Or even if our words fail to find our freedom as found in forgiveness, we can pay the tickets or buy some gifts in a monetary search to soothe whatever soul we’ve crossed or crushed.

Yes, here everything has a price, everyone has a price, and so the grandest difficulty in this way of life as we’ve so willfully wasted it is merely finding the figure that finds whatever we happen to be needing at the moment.

But friends, that’s where we got God all wrong. For as we see in Hosea 6:6, a quote quoted by Christ in Matthew 9:13, He desires mercy, not sacrifice. That’s actually part of what the next verse here in Micah points out, a verse we discussed yesterday. “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” To love mercy. Because He is a merciful God who desires then mercy not the sacrifices with which we’d still like to accomplish our own atonement without the humility of our needing what Christ already did for us.

No, there is now no other Name, and thus nothing we do, because of the nothing we can, can possibly accomplish what Christ already has. And thus we cannot kill a bunch of livestock or offer a fraction of our prosperity or pretend ourselves pious and pitiable as He already knows that very well, so well in fact that He killed the only Son in a show of the heartbreak that mercy really is. Because friends, mercy isn’t a light idea. Mercy isn’t some harmless outcome with an effortless input.

Mercy is a dirty word that demands humility and honesty and kindness and compassion and forgiveness and understanding, because mercy is defined as “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm.” And thus we find that God is the purest embodiment of mercy possible as He is well within His right and authority and power and sovereignty to crush us for all eternity. And yet, instead, no, instead He offers us the out we need without the other way we’d prefer.

There is no buying His benevolence as we need in His presence as none of us have any business being before such an upright and righteous God as ours has always been. For the fact is that we have never been any of what He is, and that is simply unacceptable as at first He created us in His image, and thus our sins are only evidence that we didn’t care to remain something good but chose instead to lose what hope we had with the assumption that hope, like everything else we want or need in life, could just be bought with a lamb from the flock or a couple bucks from our pocket.

How dare we assume God so easily bought as our believing that our salvation should cost us something that we can afford to lose?

Because you see, that’s just it. The calling of the cross calling us to take up our own, the ask to follow Him into a share of His suffering, the pricelessness of being persecuted by the same world that still hates Him without reason, it’s all to help us see that He desires us to love mercy rather than lean on sacrifice.

It’s because He’s not impressed with us offering Him something we can afford to buy or give or lose. Again, back in the day people could take some money and buy the proper sacrifice needed to “pacify” God via some ceremony in the Temple. But was that ever the point? Is God just wanting us to feel bad about something else losing its life so that we needn’t change our own? Is the Gospel given unto us as a gift just so we needn’t feel guilty anymore about our being still perpetually guilty of letting God down?

Yes, is God’s whole purpose, entire passion to see a bunch of innocent animals or our innocent Savior butchered so we can feel better about ourselves?

Or was such not designed to tug upon the heart of humanity so as to perhaps lead us back to humility? Was it, is it not for us to realize that a death was, is owed for every wrong we chose, choose? That was the point of sacrifice. And that’s why He doesn’t desire sacrifice. Christ already took care of it! No, now God desires mercy as, and let’s be honest, mercy is something we can’t afford. Mercy is something we hate to give, and even then, in all our rampant pride, it makes us furious to have to offer someone else mercy.

Indeed, we’re a people of presumptive prestige, power, popularity and these petty little platforms from which we pretend ourselves better than we know ourselves to be, and that sort of pride is the antithesis of mercy. Pride thrives on power and feeling important. That’s why we hold grudges. It’s to keep from being merciful, to keep from being wronged. “Why not rather be wronged?” Because such mercy is necessitated by humility and humility is again the opposite of the pride in which we abide. Can’t stand being merciful.

And thus mercy is something we can’t afford because our pride knows that if we offer someone else mercy, we can’t then continue to hold anything against them. We have to forgive, and thus we have to be willing to be wronged. Unjustly at times even! Oh the humanity! Yes, mercy to us is worth the weight of another soul feeling so guilty that they sheepishly live only to earn back our favor. And we don’t want to lose that sort of power over anyone. And that’s why mercy is what God desires. Because He knows that we could afford to sacrifice something, or to buy a sacrifice were we still living in those Old Testament days.

But He’s not impressed with what we give up but rather what we give away. And it’s only when we learn the difference that we can finally say that we honestly do know a little something about Christ and the cross.

For without God giving us what He didn’t want to lose, His very Son, His only Son, we’d have no hope in anything better than everything we are. And so with what can we come before a God like that? How can we possibly enter the presence or ask for the attention of a God so good as to come in the flesh only to lay down His life that His enemies may live again on the right side of everything wrong? How can we come before God knowing that all we have to offer Him is the guilt that cost Christ His life?

Friends, that’s why salvation is supposed to change us. It’s not something so light as to leave us the same, it can’t. Because if we truly admit that we have sinned and thus earned well the death sin deserves, and too confess that Christ did die so as to pay our debt and save our souls for all eternity, how then can we go on sinning and doing what we know to be wrong? What have we left to re-earn the salvation we couldn’t earn the first time?

Because you see, God has no needs, leaving us only to agree with King David in his understanding defined in Psalm 51, another which ironically points out that God’s not pleased with sacrifice. Indeed, Psalm 51:16-17, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

And thus we find the only way in which we can come before God. A broken spirit, for the spirit of pride must indeed die if we’re to ever know even the slightest hint of the humility needed to confess ourselves sinners thrown upon the mercy of a God we’ve warred against. Yes, a broken and contrite heart He will not despise. For the reality is that we are as sinners morally and ethically and thus eternally bankrupt.

All that’s left is to let Him finish breaking us so that He can then be the One we trust fully to build us back into what we’ve never known to be, never tried to be. For without such humility, we’ll simply never be anything but locked inside this enmity against Him that sin is, and thus that we are.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold