Day 3715 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 2:8 NIV

To be or not to be…

Guess it ain’t really a question in regard to everything. For while it does manage to cover a great deal of this grinding ground upon which so many a choice is still waiting to be found, the fact is that when it comes to such things as humility, obedience, gratefulness, no, such things are all eternally inevitable. The only issue then that arising within His rising from what was our death as designed inside His mind as the one way by which to save this sunken mankind He’d made to remain all we’ve never really been.

Simply because the last time we were fully humble, fully obedient, so fully and completely grateful for His being of the both was about a billion mistakes ago.

Which is amazingly where our now normalized indifference in regard to the Gospel’s call seems to scream into what is a picture we’ve kind of painted, but alas a portrait of such perfect pride that piety is not at all a problem. Because we have no problem not being what we’re not. That’s easy! I can spend all of today and probably all of tomorrow and all of every hour spent still here within the thereafter not being a professional chef. Not because I don’t like to cook, simply because I never wanted to work in restaurant.

Imagine people might find the food I like to make quite bland and boring. So long Michelin dreams!

Which are dreams that I never had for a life I’ve thus never lived, sort of the same as that of a reverent righteousness given only unto the God from whom I came and thus to whom I’m set to return at the turning of a life’s keys back into the manager of the sales floor when, after some careful thought and a quite impressively disastrous test drive, I’ve simply decided to not make my own. Not because I don’t know how to drive, just more than anything that I’m tired of driving my life over every cliff of confusion and comfort that I can find.

It’s not even the crashing anymore that keeps me awake. If anything it’s the sudden stop.

For such is what makes falling so terrifying. It’s not the odd sense of finally flying that finds us so fearfully afraid for once. No, it’s knowing that the falling will cease when we cease to prove that we can fly in light of a long-standing, and thus remarkably clear lack of wings. All because it seems that such things as want and wish are rather far removed from being able to prove anything of the breed of propulsion we’d need if we’re to ever get off of this ground and onto our knees in what becomes such a humbled submission unto the God of Heaven that we scarcely from there ever think of anything else. Or anywhere.

After all, when your treasure is truly stored somewhere else, such becomes the lone place your heart too longs to be. And indeed, as with Paul, I often wish to be finally freed of this breed of life in which I try so often to live as if all this freedom I have is something I have to take full advantage of in what always becomes the worst of ways known to man. Or at least to this man, and to the Man Christ who came to save me from what I’ve done to me trying to prove I’m a man with a plan that cannot go caput.

Issue is that it did.

Indeed, my life up until today’s read something of a comedy of errors, only the errors are horrific to even think about, let alone have to sit with hindsight all but insisting I look at, and thus there’s really not anything all that funny and so I’m not quite sure why I hear so much laughing. But then I leave the house and drive back into town from what’s become our long-prayed for hideout from the fallout and realize that the laughing isn’t just in my head in light of how bad I am at all of this but also from those living as if their life too is a comedy meant only for punch lines and dollar signs.

Yes, we do love this continued keeping up with the Joneses. Problem is that we only need to keep up with the Jesus.

Why? Because the Joneses didn’t die. The Joneses probably wouldn’t try. The Joneses don’t even know who we are, and oddly enough, we don’t know them either. Rather they’re one of about a billion families of this apparently fame that’s been bought by a fortune of what’s nothing but a following so faithful unto wherever it is that we’re all just convinced that they’re going that we can’t imagine any better way of life than to let them live it for us while we just do our best to keep up.

And thus we fall further behind. Why? Because these mythical Jones people are going every direction that doesn’t lead to Heaven. For there’s only one direction toward the hope of that home and it’s the one that we don’t any of us want to know. No, it’s the one place that neither the Joneses nor the Johnsons nor the Jetsons want to go.

Maybe that’s why they ended up in outer space.

Just still trying to find that final frontier where they might finally forget the feelings and failings we’ve all found down here.

But friends, not even the cold vacuum of outer space can suck up and thus erase the very real presence of a very real problem that is so very personal that we’ve each got to deal with it one way or the other one day or another. One way or the other because there are only two ways out of this life, and while they both have us dying, only one finds us alive after that. And one day or another because we simply have no idea when that day will come upon which we’ll do what He did.

Leaving then no questions to be asked in regard to doing or not doing. No, we all will.

Just a matter then of how.

Thankfully we’ve been left quite a perfectly logical option to choose. Issue then is that it’s a story found in the waning pages of a collection of stories that were themselves something of an issuance-based release released across the span of centuries. And let’s face it, even if somebody could keep a subscription going that long, I really doubt anybody would. Not only because I can’t even begin to imagine the fees incurred in such a constant delivery of such amazingly good news, no, simply because most of the book isn’t good news.

And that’s the issue. It’s that we find the message largely offensive. In fact, aside from foul language, a clear and present personal favorite for pretty much all of us, the Bible talks about all sorts of things that are considered quite pointed. Such as war. Slavery. Sex. Murder. Rape. Incest. Yes, not really stuff that you’ll find a Hallmark card that manages to find that just-right way to say what you want to tell your loved ones who you can’t visit for the holiday.

No, rather they’re all matters that are only fit for TV shows and Billboard top-100 songs. And that’s because we’re entirely fascinated with them, affixed by them, transfixed by them, transformed by them all being things that the depravity of a dead human heart has desired and thus delighted to do unto someone, something for some reason that to somebody seems or seemed reasonable at one time. Which is why it’s not for us to try and define or decide or defend or defund anything in life.

We’ve made a complete mockery of this opportunity to the very turn of a life’s being lived over the one who seeks only to steal and kill and destroy, and thus leave us dead. Yes, we’ve taken what God created to be so beautifully simple and turned it into a thimble in which we store our every treasure of such worthlessness as power and pleasure. Indeed, everything we’ve come to desire in life is so without merit that it’s no wonder our lives so often feel as if lived without meaning.

It’s because we’re still trying in vain to make immorality mean something!

And forget flying, for yeah, we’ve got engines and stuff that have helped us get ourselves off the ground. But friends, the problem is that the little engine we have to try and fight a fight to prove God wrong and us right, it’s a little engine that can’t. No, there is nothing we can do, say, think or intend that can change the content of what God has already written in stone, first that pair carried by at first Moses and then the Ark and so too then that which became the Cornerstone that all of us foolish builders have rejected and still do more days than not.

Why do we continue to reject the Word that was with God before the Word proved to be God? Why do we still doubt that the Word is God? Does an empty grave mean nothing? Does that cross say nothing? Do we just not hear what He’s been saying?

No, sadly it seems that most of the time we don’t. Because again, the message of the cross remains foolishness to those who are perishing. And last I checked, we’re all perishing for such is the promise of mortality. It’s that we’re gonna die for our sins because to life a live doing little right in God’s sight is a way of life that He doesn’t deserve to have to watch us destroy like that. So we’re all now born into the overall punishment of our sharing in a sinful flesh.

For all of us are now those same that God has said He will not contend with forever. Rather we’ve at best 120 years to figure this out. And as that sand does run out, so too are we getting quite short on time to realize that we can’t figure it out the way we want to prove able to. Because the fact still remains that there will be no other sign given nor thus to be found along this road that is this life that is still to die. No, all we’ve got is the sign of Jonah, only Jesus chose to enter the monster that is our mortality in light of our immorality.

Jonah just found out by surprise that God’s will ain’t so easy to simply deny.

No, truth is that to be or not to be obedient isn’t a question at all for the answer was given when His last breath was as well. It’s something I post about every single Good Friday, just like that we celebrated a week ago now. “It is finished” marks both the end of Christ’s work to overcome sin and also thus our every reason’s hope of proving that we’re not so bad off that we might actually deserve to endure what He did so that we’d not have to. Because that He endured what we ought to so that we don’t have to, well, there simply isn’t any logical reason to continue rejecting that.

Because “to whom else shall we go?” Where else can we go to find the hope of eternal life? Who else is going to prove another option found along a different path along which death isn’t a worry? Who of us would rightly continue a rebellious revelry that both fears death and yet so visually and violently rejects He who overcame it and left the grave amazed at just how empty it felt for once?

How is such a thing even possible? How is there life in death? I mean, that’s like saying there’s dry in wet or cold in hot or dark in light and thus it’s okay for us to dabble with a bit of both day and night, the warmth of a wondering heart and the frigid fear of one that fails to wander away from where and who it’s become, a life lived in the desert and yet one thus really thirsty and in need of some Water to drink that doesn’t leave us right back where we started.

But that’s the whole point of this. It’s to take us back to where we started before we started doing other things. It’s to guide us back to that place that death didn’t exist! For it makes no logical sense that God would go through all the loving trouble of creating life in that Garden only to then just wipe it out without reason. No, that death is now a part of our every human story is something that speaks to His glory. Not because He enjoys killing His creation, but because His Name must remain above all others, and thus His glory something we cannot take so lightly as we have.

And so He came in what was a share of our sinful flesh to show us perfectly just how seriously He takes all of this. And what was that scene He showed? Obedience. Why? Because such is what’s become a rather obvious matter of a pretty gross negligence. And gross not just because of the sheer size of our lives spent living not caring but too because we’ve done some pretty nasty things to both ourselves and to others along the way.

Like killing Jesus.

Yeah, we’ve done some really messed up stuff in life. And that’s why we don’t deserve to live it. And that’s why so many think the Word foolishness. It’s simply because all we can see when blinded by unbelief is the worry awarded within everything that points out the inevitability of our being proven wrong. Yes, we hate the truth that sets us free because we think we’re already there! And we just don’t see then how we could have possibly gotten life so wrong, nor then why to let go of the way of life we’ve lived thinking ourselves always right.

Friends, we’re not. In fact I’m to the point in which I don’t even try to imagine that I get anything anywhere close. Rather I find more logic in trusting that I’m still getting most things wrong, because making mistakes is what inspires us to find the way to stop doing it. And when searched for long enough, yeah, we’re going to find that He really is the Way. Because without Him doing what He did to begin doing in us what He’s still doing, we’ve got no chance.

But for obedience.

Problem then is that the way of life we’ve come to live all but insists upon obedience being a forced-issue. But friends, such is our every fallacy. For if He has to force us to be obedient, then we’ve not been obedient have we? And if we remain so impressively disobedient as our pasts prove we’ve been, then all we’re telling Him is that we either didn’t get the message or we just really don’t care.

And the problem there is that we all did get the message.

Because the cross couldn’t be any clearer.

And so what are we still doing here? Friends, His promise of every knee having to bow and every tongue then laying out a full recount of our every action was given so that we might start practicing. And that so that we could learn to stop doing the things that we’ll not have an answer for in light of our knowing what our mistakes cost the Messiah.

No, we got the message. Just that obedience is the only way to show we care.

Because it’s also the way the Way showed He does more than we have.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold