Day 3875 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 52:11 NIV

Why

It’s not a question, though most of the time it’s a word that seems to demand an answer. But sometimes in life what we will find is that why is the answer. Or at least once we find our why, the why we then finds the answer. And indeed, sometimes the why we find as an answer to why is as simple as that childish reason we used to give back when we were children faced with this question of why.

Why? Because. Because I said so. Because I want to. Because it makes sense.

Or in this case because He said so because He wants us to because it makes sense both from His perspective and thus too for our pursuit of the promise toward which it leads.

After all, what might be a better answer to why than our living a life in which we’ve found our answer and thus know so well why we do what He leads us to that we feel never again any need to justify or substantiate our stance nor to answer for why it’s caused us to stand what is both so far apart from the place in which we once sought a part and even there ever further?

Indeed, there is a reason for faith that seeks not applause, needs not approval, desires no acceptance and seeks then none of the above.

Why?

Because.

Because faith as placed in another is bound to lead to the doing of whatever the other might delight we do. And indeed, while this may so clearly seem to be quite silly to so very many, the fact is that faith learns to not care about what doesn’t matter as it simultaneously learns about what always mattered more. And sure, there’s something of an embarrassment to that, a measure of regret perhaps, a feeling of foolishness, folly and failure to be felt. Why? Because as we grow in the hope that only He can bring we’ll only find that our only wish is that we’d have started sooner than this.

After all, the sooner the departure the sooner the arrival, right?

But where are we going?

That seems a logical and thus entirely reasonable question to ask in regard to any and every travel. Where to? Indeed, even taxi drivers ask this of us whenever we arrive in what is a place in which they’re our first means of getting somewhere having never been there long enough to have enough to not need their services. Only in this case the Driver came to find us and remains the only One who both knows where we’re going and how best to get us there.

And sure, it’s a little alarming that He keeps driving toward the fires we see and has this really weird thing about asking us to keep throwing our luggage out the window. But see, that’s the beauty of every belief. It’s that it offers us a strange willingness to just trust and see. See what happens. See how it goes. See where it goes. See what goes on along the way and what goes away as well. And well, yeah, it’s weird as it has what seems to be increasingly little to do with us.

But that’s bound to happen when you agree that you didn’t pick the path or purchase the ticket. Eventually you’re just going to understand that you may as well pick your feet up and grab that travel pillow you purchased for the trip. And yeah, being travel-sized it’s quite a bit smaller than normal, but that’s all part of the experience and indeed one we should have well seen coming thanks to all this eye of the needle talk our taxi driver’s been talking about.

Problem is that we’re the kind who’ve so known the life that He asks us to throw out the window that we’re the ones who tend to keep asking the questions.

And indeed, chief among them is often why.

Why do you want me to get rid of this thing that I’m pretty sure I like, and maybe a lot? Why do want me to stop doing this thing that I quite enjoy and that rather often? Why does it have to be this narrow? What does it have to be this hard? Why must it be often so scary? Why is this life getting so hairy? Why can’t you just hurry up and just get wherever we’re going? Indeed, why can’t we know more about where we’re going or at least the path that gets there?

Why can’t we see the map?

Why can’t we feel it near?

Why aren’t we already there?

Why are we still here in what has become a place we agree we don’t want to be?

After all, that’s why we hailed the taxi!

It wasn’t because we were happy where we were and wanted to stay. Taxis don’t work that way. Nobody calls a cab just to have it show up so that you can sit in it for a second, give the drive a couple of dollars and then get right back out right where you started. That’s silly. That’s foolish. That’s stupid. Why? Because you got nowhere. You changed nothing. You stayed the same.

And yet if we were to be honest, well, that’s most often what it seems we want in life.

Why?

Because we’re okay with things as they are. We’re good with where we are. We’re used to who we are and how we live and why we think we like it like this. And in fact, we’re all so content with the content of the current that we often times go out of our way if not out of our minds trying to continue to find a way to make it all seem okay. Why? Because if we were to ever see that nothing is okay about who, what, where we are today, well we might just find that we might just feel the need to do something.

To change something.

To choose something new at what would then likely only prove the express expense of the old that was so long allowed to hold the place of the new we think we might enjoy more.

Because that’s how life works as we’re simply not quite so limitless as our arrogance has learned to imagine we are. Rather each of us have but so much time, and these days likely less attention, to live giving to what are the things that we think, that we believe to mean the most. It’s like this whole idea of multi-tasking. It’s nothing but a lie we’ve cooked up in the effort to make it seem like we can juggle multiple things at once.

We can’t.

Rather multi-tasking is really nothing more than just giving everything we’re trying to focus on what is then a fraction of our focus. For the reality is that we start out with 100% and can never feasibly go beyond that. And thus each thing that receives a percentage only drains from the 100 we initially had to give. That’s why He’s said that nobody can serve two masters. Nobody can walk in two directions. No one alive can give their lives fully to two devotions, much less these two we’re talking about today seeing as how they’re so perfectly opposed.

What are the two?

God and the world.

Why?

Because He has His design for what mankind should be and thus do and yet so too have we as a fallen man decided upon our own way of doing things that has left us wanting things that have increasingly little to do with God and thus what He wants and/or delights for us to be.

It’s called enmity, and well, in short it’s not a good thing.

Why?

Because life is a good thing and that makes it a dumb thing to argue against He who created it. That would be kind of like flying to a place you’ve never been, hailing a taxi, telling the driver you’ve never been there and thus have no idea where to go or how to get there, asking him to then take the lead and get you where he thinks is best for you to go, and then arguing with him every step of the way as if you somehow know better than he does where you’re going in this place you’ve never been.

See what I’m saying?

It’s that when it comes to such things as faith, hope, belief we’ve each no idea what to do nor where to go as, well, we’ve never really visited them before. I mean, we’ve each had our dabblings but those have largely been those placed inside ourselves. Indeed, we’ve all experienced the trust and reliance and curiosity that form the foundation of faith, hope and belief, but alas they’ve always been placed in either us or some other human to whom we’ve looked in what’s been a life lived asking others to lead the way to where they might know better than we how to go and there to get.

But when it comes to such a hope as eternal life, well, ain’t a person alive who’s ever been and so ain’t one of us got any idea how to get there.

That’s why we call the cab that is the cross that was carried by the Christ who is the Life that beat the death that we have lived so that, in Him, we might live again that way of life that He at first designed inside.

Get it now?

It’s that we’re not who we’ve become convinced we were. You are not some mere human who is vastly stuck inside this place in which every other human does largely nothing different than whatever everyone else is doing. We are not these robots meant to run on what is nothing more than the replication of whatever already is. Rather we’re here to be different than what this world has become.

Why?

Because what this world has become is immeasurably different than what He designed it to be. This place was at first a Garden called Eden in which God created man to do nothing but simply enjoy the fruit of His beautiful labors as offered unto us in exchange for our appreciation and praise. This entire creation was created in love to love. We just found the one tree that we didn’t really need to take anything from and chose to take from it anyway.

And well, here we are!

We are indeed at what daily seems almost the hard rock bottom of what’s been such a slippery slope that it’s actually quite amazing that we’ve not all hurtled down it at breakneck speed only to crash violently into the death that should have been sure to come from our having made a choice so very dumb as to do the one thing He simply asked us not to.

And make no mistake, the death is sure to come because, yeah, we have been so dumb as to continue eating the very same fruit.

Thankfully the cab that is the Christ did come to find us so that we could hop in and be driven to something better.

Why?

Because we are something better. Granted, we’ve clearly not lived like it. In fact, the way of life we’ve come to live seems as if we’ve never had any idea that we were made for better, made to be better. We’ve all gotten so used to settling for so much so lesser that He who created us chose to come amongst us and let us think we’d killed Him just to prove both how far we’ve fallen but also how far He’s willing to go to get back those few who are willing to admit that no, this isn’t really the outcome we’d hoped to find.

And too then that maybe, just maybe we don’t really know what we’re doing, where we’re going nor then any real reason to keep trusting ourselves to get there.

No, everything from what the world’s become to who’ve we been whilst trying to live the normal way of life within it is evidence of just how little we know of the more we could have remained. Indeed, we’ve each of us given so much away that we literally think this is normal. That it’s okay. That all this life is all about us finding some way to make all we see seem as it ought to be.

It isn’t.

Why?

Because God didn’t create us to live like this. He didn’t design us to be vessels of such venom and violence. He never asked us to find a home inside of hate. He created us in love! He created us to live! He created life! What sense then does it make that all of life dies?

Can’t we see what we’ve done to what He did?

Friends, I know it’s clear that we’ve vastly forgotten God and thus have no possible way of knowing who we are or who we were thus meant to be. But can’t we look around and see so many signs that this way of life we’ve come to live ain’t got nothing to do with living? Can’t we see that such things as doubt and depravity are not at all conducive to living a life appropriately? Don’t we understand that all the hatred and hardship is the result of our actions?

And yet we blame God.

We ask Him why He lets all these bad things happen.

Why?

Because we’ve forgotten who we are and that so much that we remember nothing of the better we were created to be. All we see is instead the evidence of fallen man and yet we can’t, as the fallen men, bring ourselves to admit that we’re the ones who lost the line. We can’t allow ourselves to confess that we made this mess. We can’t seem to see that it was our choices that all but demanded His.

Sure, technically He could have done nothing. He could have let us just go off and continue killing ourselves. He could have turned a blind eye to our many chosen sufferings and a deaf ear unwilling to hear all our cries from our lives spent a slaves to everything under the sun. But instead He sent the Son.

Why?

Because He’s not as quick to give up on us as we’ve been to give up on Him.

Rather He remembers why He created us, sees in fact still inside of us His initial design for us. And He came in Christ to give His life so that some of us would open our eyes and finally see that we’ve so royally screwed this up that we’ve no hope left whatsoever. After all, who in their right mind would think that this world as it sets is as good as it gets?

No, that each of us can comprehend even the most distant idea of better only proves that He has indeed placed both eternity and thus Heaven in the human mind and is just waiting up there for us to find that we’ve gone so out of our mind trying to be like this world that we’ve forgotten that we were created to be like Him. Friends, He created us in His image. But look around. Does what you see seem like the image of perfection? Does it look like hope? Does it even look happy?

Or does it kind of look like hell, and thus too us who’ve so lived to live like this world?

We’ve forgotten who we are and why we’re here. It’s not to be like this world. It’s not to be liked by this world. It has nothing at all to do with this world. This world is now spinning so wildly out of control that He’s determined to just rid Himself of the whole deal.

And that’s our why.

That’s the answer.

Why does He call us to come out from the world?

Because He knows His plans for the world as made in response to the plans this world has made against Him. He knows what’s coming to this place, and yet He’s patient with us as He wants still to save as many of us as we’ll allow to be saved. Sadly, there are indeed to be quite few who do find the narrow road to life. Why? Because that narrow Way is the very same as He who drives this taxi and keeps on asking that we keep on throwing things out the window.

And that’s just not something we know.

But friends, nor does it seem that we know that we were made in His image, nor thus to do His bidding, nor thus to be His children, nor then that we are vessels of the Holy Spirit sent to spin us around and help us get home.

Rather this world lambasts that hope. This world lampoons those fools who believe in something so much better. This world hates those who trust in that home. This world kills those who try their best to live like the One they thought they’d killed already.

They didn’t.

Why?

Because again, He ain’t so quick to give up as we’ve become.

No, God will not surrender His plans nor their intentions unto the fallen inventions of a man so lost in contention against their Creator. If we want to continue denying Him, He’s said He will deny us too. He’s supremely fair like that! But so too is He so incredibly merciful as to allow back every prodigal who has ever sought to prove they knew better only to squander all they had and end up living in squalor.

Friends, is this what we want out of life? Has living like we know what we’re doing, where we’re going truly gotten us anywhere we want to be? Has living as if we’re better off having nothing to do with God given us the kind of life that anyone would hope to have? Do we truly love that this world’s gotten so bad or find ourselves excited to see that it’s only getting worse?

Or are we maybe ready to live for and thus toward something better? Are we maybe interested in trying that way of life in which we live as if we’re here for a reason and that said reason has something to do with the better we can all imagine? Are we perhaps willing to lay down what we’ve so completely messed up and try this His way for once?

The fact is that as this verse says we are all here carrying articles of the Lord’s house. We are the articles of the Lord’s house. The articles of the Lord’s house are in us as that is where He placed His purpose and sent His Spirit and why He calls us temples thereof.

Now sure, we can do as most seem happy to and continue living as if that’s not the case. We can keep on doing as we’ve done having already always done just that and thus keep on finding what we’ve already found in having always done just that. But friends, looking around at all that we’ve found in our having lived like He’s not there and He don’t care and we thus needn’t care either, well, that choice all but begs a really simple question be asked:

Why?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold