Day 3480 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:10 NIV

I fear the ravages of our rebellion have caused sins that’ve left stains that have become scars that have borne stories of doubt and disbelief that have left us a million miles from anything by which to hope.

For here we feel as if hope is somehow housed within something held by the very hands that are the same as those which have grasped for the ghastly and ghostly, leaving us all gone farther than we might have ever dared figure in terms of our trading faith for foolishness and folly. Indeed, as we discussed a bit yesterday it’s that our iniquities have hidden God from hearing all our indifference has thus far had to say from within these lives defined by the death of decay and distress designed by what has come to be an utter moral indignity and spiritual dishevelment.

Yes, such is anymore our only temperament as tarnished by these treasures of pleasures that we’ve pursued at the expense of this now impossible expanse across which we often fear our scant few humbled prayers able to be heard.

Simply because, as we talked about within the last attempt to make some of this make sense in light of all the senses we singed due to sins and songs sung by souls so starved for hope that we reach out for anything in which we might be coaxed or convinced into assuming might bring meaning to whatever it is that we’re doing down here, the fact is that we’ve no idea what we’re doing. Indeed I find the fear is felt within just how far we’ve fallen into this rock bottom upon which we revel in that same rebellion that perhaps while not began by us has been allowed to become us all the same.

We are in every way a mere replica of those who refused to lose a life already lost to the wrong side of right as defined by He who wrote our lives into the way in which they should go as directed by His most wonderful will for us. Alas it seems that all these scenes and screens have shown us things that have become thoughts all our own that have left us alone to own what we’ve done as decided by our will waging war against His Way, His will confining our way thus to this rock bottom of doubt and indifference.

For it’s a sad truth in that the two seem nigh inseparable down here. Because where there is doubt there is too plenty reason to not care as to anything which might ask us beyond it along the only path past it. And as well, wherever one finds indifference or feels indifferent, well, the same will assume that there’s really no reason to try for more than they’ve already settled for. Thus we’re a people perfectly content within this content of our pretense of a life of pretend portraying a life lived without any evidence of anything alive inside.

No, this is indeed one of those Scriptures that proves just how alive and active God’s Word really is, thus defining us as living a life far from alive in light of just how little action we’ve taken in light of the action taken by He who came to save us from our enslavement to us and our infatuation with dust and rust and trust placed in always only the wrong and worst of places. Yes, that is the only life we’ve known and thus we’ve not known life at all.

For among the strong we are like the dead.

And this reality is found and felt, if we were to ever be honest and deny our doubt’s demand that we remain indifferent in regard to this chance to be different, in nearly every day we’ve lived so far as told in the stories we still seek to hide of things we want not to be seen out in the light. Yet as we discussed a few days back, that which we seek to hide is but a chain keeping us held within the here and the now assuming that this is the closest thing to home we’ll ever know.

Simply an assuming that we see fit to keep on doing as it designs a darkness all around us that has come to invade us and persuade us to pretend that both we know what we’re doing and that somehow God doesn’t.

And within that sort of lunatic’s logic we’ve lost this war long before it’s ever even started.

Which is something of a growing urgency in my life anymore. It’s this looking around at the world and all that’s done under the sun whilst denying the Son and too realizing that I’ve myself joined in with that sort of misunderstood understanding. Yes, I sadly but certainly must confess that I’ve done as everyone for that is what we’re here expected to do, to be.

Indeed, I’ve agreed with whatever society so screams inside their songs that sing that again we know what we’re doing and that we’re too so good at hiding whatever we’re ashamed of having done or won as realized at times through eyes that accidentally see what we might have lost to live this life the way we have, that we have to believe only that God isn’t there, doesn’t care or at worst doesn’t see.

But He does.

See, we talked about that yesterday. God has seen our every deed as done for whatever wicked reason or worldly reception. He’s heard our every word spoken both with lips that lies and too these hearts so deceptive as well. He knows who we’ve become as He holds still the blueprints for that son or daughter that we were created be, and so He sees just how far we’ve run from being His daughter or His son. Yes, He knows it all, even more than we can remember.

And that’s to me a reality far scarier than the humility needed to embrace that this life is one in which I’ve fallen so that I might hope in that that He has come calling me to reconsider this horrid rebellion and in Him leave behind all that I was never meant to become.

For that war mentioned above that’s all but yet to have begun, one day that won’t be something any will be able to say anymore. For His Word regales of His wrath as won by all we’ve done to become so blind that we’re in every way better off dead than continuing to live these lives for what is the same outcome only longer lasting. Because that is the second death, and yet by some conspicuous kindness we’ve been offered to endure only one.

All because that is somehow what God saw fit to do through the Son from which we’ve run all these years listening to all these fears that our foolishness and foolish friends have inspired us to imagine. For that is all that fear as felt within this world really is. It is merely an imagining of an experience or its outcome that inspires us to worry, to wait, to walk away sometimes. And that is what we’ve sadly done more times than our memories might remember.

Yes, we’ve been walking away from God for all our lives as all our lives we’ve lived in fear of His being there more than in fear of our not someday being where He is.

And to me that’s a sort of blindness that even belief might never defeat.

Because when you stop to allow yourself a second spent outside of your insanity as pursued and perused for things we might use to allow our lives to finally feel alive for what would truly be the very first time, you realize that all of us have indeed been afraid of God. And while that’s ironically exactly what we’re called to do, to live our lives here in a reverent fear of the Almighty Father up there, we’ve even managed to mangle that simple expectation.

For we have chosen to fear that He is there as we know that should He be, as He is, He would then be able to actually see all we’ve done, hear all we’ve said, remember all we’ve forgotten, and thus have no reason to do much forgiving in light of just how forcefully we’ve fallen so far away from who He at first made us to be. And yet, again by a miracle otherwise impossible, He made a way for us to not stay where we’ve come into this life lived in the fear we should have but have only had in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.

Because we should fear God, but in terms of respect and reverence, not because He is too the antithesis to our lives so lived in both doubt and indifference.

We should want to honor God, to serve Him, to share Him, to revere Him and reflect Him into this world so dark and dim that all of us have indeed known only blindness because of doubt and indifference designing inside of us a kind of disbelief that has left us unable to see that He is good simply because of how good we’ve never been. And we fear Him wrongly, so much so that we’ve agreed to at times doubt Him, deny Him, debate Him, evade Him, all so that Him we wouldn’t disappoint anymore.

Or, and more apt perhaps, that we’d not disappoint ourselves either from within the humility that opens blinded eyes and leads lost souls back home.

We’re too blind to know that hope. Too afraid to imagine that home. Too complacent to leave what we think this here is still somehow able to be, supposed to be, but alas never going to be. For how can here compete with up there when here we live a life so broken and hard that we have such things as hate and hustle? Is that what life is meant to be? Is that who we want to be? Do we really want to be here, living like we belong here in this hole in the wall that we’ve merely managed to crawl ourselves into so as to feel as if we’ve a spot to stay?

Is this where we want to stay, so mixed and mingled with a life of misunderstanding and mayhem all but demanded of mankind for a mankind that wants only, clearly, to stay so blind as to doubt God and deny Him any presence in the present. Even knowing that His presence provides provision of not only life and love but the very Son who combined the two into a tomb from within which He calls out in a truth that asks us to follow Him there so that we can there start over again.

Only this time with eyes that see and ears that hear and hearts that want only to honor God so that we might, somehow, achieve that joyous recognition of being found again living a life of rebellion, but only now one against who we’ve been and who this world wants us to stay. No, I will not stay so broken and blind as I want only to hear that “Well done” as offered unto those few who do as David so tried as a man defined as one after God’s own heart.

Yes, I want whatever His heart wants for me because now, though I was blind I can see that somehow He is so good to me that He did come for me when I wouldn’t have given an inch to move in His direction. That is this life of moral rebellion as ruined alongside a mankind already dead inside. It is a way that’s left us unwilling to move toward God as we see Him through eyes so blinded to hope that we believe only that He must hate us and thus want us only to suffer in all the ways we’ve heard that Jesus did.

But friends, that’s why we need a faith that is willing to move beyond, believe beyond this doubt and indifference that’s thus far always already defined us. Because doubt and indifference, so blinding and binding, they leave us only broken down and unwilling to try anymore whenever we see that more is needed if we’re to be better than we’ve been. We’re afraid of something different, that’s why we’re so afraid of change.

But again, is this here who we want to stay, where we want to stay? Or is it maybe time to move on toward something other than living a death in what is a blinded fear that God might truly be there as the enemy we’ve always seen Him as rather than the Savior He sent Christ to prove He can be too?

That is the beauty of God’s benevolence. It teaches us that while we have been His enemies in these lives lived in enmity, we can now be something different as His patience wants for none to perish but rather all to come unto repentance in which is life found both finally and forevermore. What then is so much more that we here have to lose that we honestly feel is not worth the loss in a life in which even a single regret is evidence of our having not lived the life He created us live?

For such things as guilt, regret, remorse, shame, sorrow, sadness, those are not the things that are felt in His presence. Indeed that’s what we hear of Heaven as His Word closes out in the waning chapters of Revelation, 21:4 to be certain. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

And so you see my friends, God didn’t create us to live however we have down here. Because all of these pains and persecutions, all these mistakes and all that’s been mistaken, all the doubt and all the fear, all the hatred and hardship that we endure down here, it isn’t found in His Heaven. And considering that Christ too restored sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and yes, even life unto us all, well then it’s also safe to say that He didn’t create us to be without sight as seen inside this life lived blind to such beauty as belief and that it might lead us to being something better, everything better than whatever we’ve been.

No, in Him we can now trade all we’ve been for all He made us to be for it seems that He’s never yet agreed to give up on us quite so easily as we have so far. That’s why we’re still here alive inside what is another gift called ‘today’. For today we’ve one more chance to open that door of our hearts upon which He’s been knocking, knowing hopefully now more than ever before that our having denied Him these hearts has only held us apart from the hope we’ve not found anywhere else.

Where else are we still to look? To whom else shall we go? For He has the words of life and sight and love and hope and healing and health and joy and peace and meaning. And who knows but that if we finally agree to allow ourselves to believe in such a blessed Savior, He might then hear from Heaven all these words we’ve never said such as ‘I’m sorry’ as we turn off this broken road onto the prodigal’s path in hopes that He might take us back even as slaves if not as sons.

But as with that tale, we just find that His welcome is far warmer than we know we deserve. But alas, we’ll never know if we don’t find a reason to leave our death inside spiritual blindness beyond and set out to go and see for ourselves.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold