Day 3795 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 40:18 NIV

With what images have we replaced Him?

See, there are so many of these such questions that both need to be asked and yet never are by we who already know the answers so very well that we’ve no intention of admitting that we do. Why? Because for us to admit that we too, despite all the warnings strewn throughout His Word and even our own pasts as met within the many mistakes we’ve made ourselves, even still that we’ve still gone along within that lane within which they then “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles”, it’s as foolish as faithfulness as any could imagine.

And yet we’ve all managed to somehow still imagine it both so well worth trying that we have and that only because we’ve too considered it to be without cost or consequence that could ever come from our, again, having been ourselves wrong plenty of times in the past.

Just never quite wrong enough to have produced problems quite large enough to have left a shame quite deep enough to have measured up to a humility all but willing to die if changes aren’t made that would mean things change that stop bringing the shame so deep that we can’t even see the surface to tell if we could recognize the problems.

Rather we just got used to swimming in our own insanity seeking always for some other shore upon which we were sure was awaiting the substance of something that wouldn’t let us down like every other metallic mistake already always had. For surely the bigger the prize the better the outcome. Or the more expensive the excitement the more exclusive the experience. Or the more rare the reward the more royal the reception. Or perhaps the more worldly the win the deeper warmth of the welcome within.

And indeed, such has become a fairly decent list of things we’re all but convinced we need. Bigger prizes, exclusive experiences, rewards so rare that those who don’t have them float on the very air we breathe seeking themselves to glean something from our tales of gain that they can take away and go find their own. Yes, we live as if what we own both helps us to be known, and that so much that others seek only to know how we managed to so succeed at life.

How did you do it? How did you find it?

How did we get here?

Where are we anyway?

See, it’s not always the initial questions that get closest to the point but rather those met a little further down the same line of thought.

And indeed, where are we? What are we doing here? Where is here? Who are we? What are we? What all have we been, still seek to be? Where can we go from wherever it is that we are? What more is there to prove of a life we’ve lived in which we’ve proven ourselves more capable of making mistakes than confessing we have? What freedom is there to be found within a way of life lived running away from the mistakes we’ve made into those we both haven’t made yet but also haven’t found yet the humility to avoid making at some point ahead?

Yes, where did our humility go, and can you take humility back from a million misplaced hopes into which you’ve both unwittingly and yet quite willingly poured it, placed it, put it?

Do we even have the guts to consider the difference and how we’ve never known a distance between them? Unwitting and yet willing?

How is that we can be so amazing at both? For to do something unwittingly means without the wisdom as to what’s even being done. It’s a choice made to simply make a choice without any willingness to think it through. It’s the path we pave when at first we’ve gave away all the personal responsibilities we have in life to ensure our life is lived in light of the Light that literally left Heaven to walk among us heathen so as to physically guide us unto the path of both far more resistance but also exponentially more substance.

And yet we’ve done so so incredibly willingly that you’d almost not be outside the lines to ask us why we’ve done it so very often. For surely we’d have managed to learn something in the way of wisdom that would have by now begun to inspire us to do better. Right? I mean, that’s the often missed and thus largely unseen beauty of making mistakes in that they allow us to glean the understanding as to the wrong turns we’ve taken so that we don’t repeat them should we ever be given a second chance.

Which, friends, that’s exactly what we have!

We have a second chance to reconsider what it is that we’re doing in what it is that we’re serving in what is a manner to be measured as a devotion thus given to whatever it is that we’re serving that has us doing what may be causing still those same mistakes to be made.

Problem then being that our mistakes we’re not seeing when at first we determine to deny them possible.

But friends, they’re not only possible but they’re in fact still present. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that we have more problems at this moment than we did in that last one we had in which we likely hadn’t given any time to having considered the problems we had then that thus remain now having not admitted them there and thus us in need of addressing them. Rather, when living never confessing them, we just think they don’t exist. Because, well, if you don’t admit it’s there then you don’t have to do anything about it, right?

And sure, that seems to all be still working for now. But friends, what happens when now doesn’t become the later that we’ve learned to live expecting it to? What happens when things change around us? What happens when things happen to us that even entice us to consider making some changes? Indeed, what happens if we do make a change or two?

What then are we saying but that we’re clearly agreeing that we’re definitely needing to do something different in light of our not liking the outcome we’re finding?

And considering we have done just that with everything from dinner plans to radio stations, why then do we struggle so much on the larger changes that we, in all honesty, know we need far more as they’re clearly far more important considering the consequences themselves grow in step with the size of the choice? I mean, if we decide to go to a certain restaurant only to get there and find the line too long and us thus not willing to wait as our hunger isn’t at all so willing to do so, we can leave and go somewhere else.

No big deal.

But if we get tired of shopping and just buy some random car without really caring to see if we like it, we might end up hating the thing and being quite stuck with it until the times comes in which we can again afford such things as down payments and credit dings. Or houses. What if you become so tired of living in an apartment that you just sign off on a mortgage just so you can get some sleep without neighbors above you having midnight dance parties?

Hard to back out of that one easily!

Or, what if you, say, spend 96% of your life serving 9,600 different gods seeking inside each of them the very same hope or purpose or meaning that you looked for in the 9,599 that you tried before only to reach that line as awaits within every life in which there is no more time left and thus you’re left having left only a life in which you lived trying to find what almost 10,000 different ideas couldn’t give you in the end?

How do you come back from that considering there is no coming back to a life we’ll have then lost forever?

Again, it’s not the initial questions that always best prove the point but rather perhaps those deeper considerings to which they’re all only pointing.

The deepest of such, at least in regard to this post’s point for today, is just how much longer can we continue onward living as if most of what we’re doing is of so little consequence that we never really even think to think about it? Friends, as we’ve discussed in the past, everything we’re doing is a message we’re sending, and while much of the world literally has no idea that we’re even here and thus no possible way to know everything we’re doing, let along the reasons why, God does.

And this defines the problem that we’ve both chosen but since then chosen only to ignore within what’s remained a sort of replacement theology within which we just exchange our priorities, and that in which they’re placed, just as soon as we don’t like how something goes. And we’ve done this so much that we can’t even remember all the things we’ve tried in which we’ve hoped that they’d finally be the one that managed to fulfill our expectations, which are themselves anymore so incredibly tangled that we don’t even have any idea what we want out of life anymore.

Rather we just wake up every day entirely open to anything that may look good, sound good, taste good to either the tongue or the temptation which abides within all the above.

For indeed, we’re anymore a people of such selfish greed that we’ll give nothing to anything that asks us to experience anything we might not like. We won’t even try it to find out! We’ve just decided the things we won’t do, don’t like, won’t try, don’t mind. And no matter the outcome, it seems anymore that the selfish satisfaction we glean from always getting our way, no matter how lost it may leave us, it’s more than enough to convince us to keep comparing God to whatever we’ve come to imagine able to do for us any of what we won’t admit He’s already done.

And why won’t we admit it? Because again, if we did, well, we’d have to do something about it because there is no such thing as a crucifixion that doesn’t bring change. And surely the very Son of God laying down His life was meant to accomplish more than our watching it all only to walk back home as if nothing major had happened.

A man lost His life! And He was innocent the whole time!!

What then can go ahead unchanged?

Nothing!!!

And yet what has changed with regard to how we live our lives and what we look to continue filling them with?

NOTHING!!

Still we awake nearly every single day more than ready and fully willing to seek one more god in one more thing in one more hope that it can truly be so easy as for us to make something we can serve that both gives us everything we want and yet asks of us nothing we want to surrender. All because we want exactly that! We want to be the gods in this story who are always endlessly rewarded with all we hope to have or feel in life, all while having to offer nothing to anything or anyone other than our attention.

But friends, is our attention truly worth so little that we’re still willing to give it to all of this stuff that we’re leaving? And sure, that may not happen today. In fact we may not leave this place for another hundred years! But as I asked a while back, friends, what’s a hundred years when compared to forever?

Forever is forever and so everything on this side of that line in which the rest of eternity starts is all the stuff that can’t come with us when we’ve crossed that line and left this life.

What then are we doing in this life still seeking all these gods that themselves stay on this side of eternity?

And if you say you’re not as you think you haven’t, then friends, just ask yourself what all matters to you in this moment. What are you worried about right now? What are you focused on getting done today? What are your plans for this weekend? What are you thinking about this very instant?

And I’m not saying that God will always be the only thought inside our minds as I don’t know that we can manage that. But friends, if we’re thinking about anything more often than we’re remembering He’s there and watching all we’re doing and hearing all we’re saying and realizing every reason behind all the above, if He’s not ever even considered, well, we’ve got a huge problem!

Why? Because one day we’re going to see Him face to face and it will be a horrible thing to have fallen unsuspectingly into the hands of a Living God that we lived our lives never looking to, looking for, hoping for, praying toward. Why? Because if we leave this world without having any idea as to what or who may be waiting there when we do but rather only our every such worry being left behind to those things by then left behind, then friends, our every hope will thus be behind us too!

And hope just seems a truly sad thing to lose when we leave this life in exchange for whatever comes next.

And sure, you may not even believe anything comes next, and that’s fine if that’s truly what manages to give you hope and inspires you to get up daily and go through what is a life as lived in a land so very lost that often nothing makes sense.

But friends, there’s only so much world for us to gain, and thus only so much meaning to be found in a life lived living that way!

Eventually we’ll run out of things here to take His place. Eventually we’ll run out of things here that we hope can bring us hope. Eventually we’ll run out of reasons to make more gods of possessions, places or experiences. Why not then do now what we’re all going to have to eventually?

So ask yourself, please, to what are you looking to bring your life purpose or meaning? To what have you looked to have done so in the past only to have so obviously failed considering how you’re still looking? Indeed, to whom since have we compared God? Within what have we confined God? Into what are we pouring still our trust or honor or praise or hope that is not God and thus neither able to do anything with any of the above nor then worthy of being still given any of the above?

Friends, all of us have made gods of everything from the more common things like money to the less normal like mac and cheese. But the same issue underscores them all. And that’s a severe discounting of devotion as is done only because we’ve somewhere along the line fallen into agreement with a world that lives as if nothing has any real meaning. After all, people everywhere just keep bouncing from one hope to another, each of them always only failing.

Is that what we want out of life? Just this line of shattered hopes and failed attempts to put it back together? Just some string of things we’ve bought trying to buy some purpose for ourselves and these lives we’re living? Just a bunch of false gods that did so little for us that we threw them in the trash? Friends, why serve any further any gods like that? If it can be thrown away, lost, stolen, broken, well then what can it possibly offer us in the end?

And again, no, we’re not there yet to that end but friends make no mistake in that it is coming.

What god will we be leaning on to lead us on when our end has come and the rest of whatever comes next has begun? All this stuff that can do nothing for us now? Or will we instead come to lean on Him who did do something massive both for us now and that for us later on as well?

For Christ remains the only God who laid down His life for those who are His to find, in Him, the courage to do the same. Money can’t do that. Trophies can’t do that. Titles can’t do that. But friends, they all can keep us from finding the courage to change.

And if we do continue to fail to find that willingness to lay down our lives and let go of anything and everything still tying us to this one place in which we’ve always sought to live them, well then, this one place will remain our Heaven and we’ll too have had our reward.

And maybe that’s fine for you. Maybe you’re biggest hope and greatest dream is to have your preferred portion of this world’s everything. As for me, I don’t want my reward to be only money that can only be spent or houses that can fall down or cars that rust or trophies that gather dust. I do not want any more hopes that are liable to be ruined.

I personally want a hope that can’t be stolen, tarnished, torn or lost. And so I’ll continue to struggle to serve well a God that gave everything for me to do the same. Because at least when I struggle with Him, I know He suffered for me and thus that He is willing to do whatever it takes to get me where I do truly hope to be. Simply because Heaven must be worth the misery of enduring a life here that was never promised to go our way anyway.

After all, Christ came to lose a life lived in this place that offers still what all it offered then. And friends, only a God with a really big plan for an even greater promise would do what He did.

Why then try to confine Him and/or the promise given us in His presence, by His presence unto something, anything that is both found in this world and yet then has to stay in this world as well?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold