Day 3890 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Micah 7:4 NIV

We gone

And that both in a way that we never should have even had the ability to barely imagine might be alright and thus too away from everything that is right as remains defined by God alone rather than us. And yes, this fact, both that God defines that which is right and too that we all basically exude what it is to both do and thus be wrong, might well hit some of us quite hard. After all, how could it not when considered against our collapsed culture’s common concept of “fact” as is found in how most of us think we’re doing mostly okay?

Indeed, how can those who’ve come to believe so much within themselves become the same as they who confess that we’re not even fit for jail?

And that because the prison system exists with the hopeful intention of problem correction via a form of, let’s just call it rehabilitation, that’s aimed at reforming the ways of those who spend their days within those walls walking those halls alongside others who’ve likely done things even worse. Yes, jail is an idea of our society that hopes to address the particular aiming of someone deemed a criminal for their having at best fractured a law or two.

What then is there to do when a person has broken every law ever written and that so many times that nobody can count them? What hope for such a hopeful reform is there to be found by those who’ve become so much like the ground upon which they walk and the godless with whom they talk? What kind of rehabilitation has any possible degree of achieving the sort of introspection that is so vastly needed to utterly turn a person from what was not merely some drunken dare gone too far or a tragic mistake that was absolutely never intended?

Yes, what is to be done when the villain in question has done all the wrongs they have, or at least a good majority of them, with every intention of doing them and never once caring as to the cost or consequence that they so clearly so fully rejected that the life they came to live was that so able to fit within what is a place that lives as if God’s neither there nor thus good nor then worried as to whether or not we even try to be?

And well, what are any of us to do when we come to find that we’re each of us that very villain inside our own lives?

See, that’s the brutality of the Gospel’s truth. It’s that it’s not just some story about people a long time ago who did some things that they shouldn’t have done. It isn’t just a tale told that’s so old that it has nothing left that is in any way applicable to our lives today. It is not just a message meant to be received by those who don’t need to hear it as He who lived it said Himself that it isn’t the well who need the help but rather those who are sick that need a doctor.

Problem is that we seem to see that none seem to see anything of anyone being as sick and twisted, debased and demented as we’ve all so sadly become. Rather most days find us patting ourselves on the back and even cheering one another on in our one-man races to these most shameful places in which we continue this placement of our every hope and every happiness inside the very things that are already destroying us.

Yes, you read that right.

These days all but all of society delights in every wrong done simply because our collectively continuing to each of us fall to pieces seems to bring unto us something of a validation for our doing the same ourselves. And granted, there seems to be some utterly maniacal sort of logic to be found in that. After all, if everyone we see is in some way contributing to what is a world so clearly getting worse, and yet are still able to smile and laugh and pretend then that it ain’t all that bad, well then maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s not as bad as it sometimes seems. Maybe the world’s in better shape than it so often looks.

Maybe we’re not each of crooks who are all but to the point of what’s basic burglary in regard to how we’ve kind of just been all but stealing our time away from what is the Way that both created and called us to do with it pretty much anything other than what we’ve done with it.

Yeah, maybe we’re not the sadistic criminalistics that form the very statistics recounted in Romans 3:10-12, which is a retelling of the truth told in both Psalm 14:1-3 as well as Psalm 53:1-3.

“As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’”

Not even one.

Meaning then that we are in fact, proven by literal statics, now even worse off than those two places we discussed in yesterday’s post.

And indeed, I would dare to imagine that many have heard of such places as Sodom and Gomorrah. For they’re places that are widely regarded as the epitome of human depravity as proven in how God destroyed them so fully. And yet, if you’d read through the story of their rapid fall from both glory and even life itself, what you’d realize is that Abraham had himself pleaded with God to not do as God did in His decision to destroy them.

And even he started low at asking God if He would truly destroy this city if there were 50 righteous souls found within it. And God said that He’d indeed relent if the 50 were found. And Abraham, being reasonable, lowered his expectations from there. First to 45. Then to 40. Then to 30. Then 20. Then 10. Then Abraham, able to imagine that God could find 10 people who weren’t heathens, returned home in what was probably the expectation that this place wouldn’t then fall victim to what God had intended.

Problem is there weren’t 10.

Rather there was Lot who God saw as unworthy of the destruction He’d ordained and sent the angels to save as they hurried to usher Lot and his small family unto the safety that could only be promised outside of that place in which not even six others could be found who could be saved.

Just four, one of which then did too as the angels had said not to and turned then into the proverbial pillar of salt that’s now renown for looking back upon what was a life as lived within a place that God saw of such little redemptive worth that He chose instead to simply wipe it from the earth.

And yet here we are in what is a world in which both the Psalms and the book of Romans have defined as a place in which “there is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.” For rather “all have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

Not even one.

And yet, looking around, well, that is in no way the message you’ll see nor hear as instead around here what you’ll see and be so often told is all about how we’re all so bold in our doing of whatever it is in which we’ve come to delight that we know nothing of any decline, of any decay, of thus any danger that could, in theory, be already well on the way. No, we’re good people doing mostly good things almost every day. And even those off-days in which we don’t do the best of things, even our worst isn’t all that bad.

No, as far as we care to know, we’re all doing alright.

We’re living our best life!

Never mind that we’ve each taken it upon ourselves to so define what’s best both in and to do with a life. A fact which asks that I refer you back to that mention of our being burglars who are but living a life of what is by no means petty thievery. For answer me this: What’s petty or insignificant to be found in our choosing to so willfully deny God that we’ve become the ones who define for ourselves alone what’s best in life and thus how best to live it?

Indeed, and even if we could have had a say in what could have been the very best way in which to live this life, well, is there anything we see in the happenings or goings on happening and going on around us that does indeed seem to define anything near whatever anyone might think is best?

What is our best? I mean, according to us, well, this is it. We’ve apparently arrived at what is the very pinnacle of life. And so then, again, what is there in regard to what we do, what we say, what we see that can in any way be what is truly best?

Or did not any feasible attempt at our even being decent all but die when we all but demanded that God’s version of what’s truly good, truly right, truly important and truly life all but leave us alone so that we could define, alone, what we want those things to mean? And if we’re the ones who have defined what those things do seem to mean, as is anymore done by each of us always only individually, then what can good or right or important or even life really mean?

For if such things mean something different to each of us, and we’re none of us ever wrong, then they must mean nothing.

Because what we see is a life in a world in which we all live as if we alone know better than everyone else, God included, what’s best for us to be doing.

But do we?

And if we do, as we all so often so clearly seem to continue to contend to, then again, what of all that we’ve become or chosen to do in light of it is truly able to be plausibly found as what could be a hope as small as His finding of 10 decent people so as to stave His wrath and save this world?

And well, how can we even pretend we any of us care when most days you’ll just find us here worried so much about only ourselves that we all but turn a blind eye as the world sets itself on fire even before reaching the promised hell that awaits what we’ve all become.

And I say all because, again, there is not one who is good.

Not even one.

Rather we are all, as defined here, at best a brier. It’s a pointy/prickly bush that thus blocks, perhaps even painfully, the path of anyone who may happen upon it. It’s an obstacle. A hurdle to overcome. A stumbling block blocking the way to basically anything better than whatever this is that we’ve come to become collectively. And sure, that’s not to say that some here aren’t trying to do better. But friends, even then, for any of us to try and do better demands that we begin by admitting then that what we’d been wasn’t good.

For who seeks to improve what is truly already good enough?

No, we all know deep down in those places we don’t talk about at all the parties we have that we’re basically nothing but bad. We know that we are, as the verse yesterday described us, a corrupt and wild vine taken from the venomous vinyards of Sodom and the now forsaken but never forgotten fields of Gomorrah. We are at best prickly stumbling blocks that live a kind of life that only blocks the way to He who is the Life as we live our every single day speaking in the language of lies and deception seeking to play our desired role as one of those many who are living only to deceive and be deceived.

And at worst we’re an entire hedge of those very hassles that blur, skew, deny, debate, destroy the way to what is a better day than whatever is this wicked way that we’ve so fully won that we all live as if that we’ve done.

Yes, we all live in this so-called “best life” as if we’ve won the game and can then live out the rest of our days resting from our trying to improve, grow, learn, look for better, leave what isn’t and perhaps even come to love what life should have always been instead. But no, we’ve all vastly settled for our own measure of what’s a good enough treasure to have defined for us the line upon which we have all but finished.

And there is none who has not, at least once, given up on trying to do better.

Not even one.

Thus comes the day of God’s visit.

And what’s going to make it so horribly horrific is that He’s already been once. He has already walked amongst us and did all He could to love us so as to help us learn what love is so that we could live a new kind of life in which we loved what is just, what is right, what would have us unafraid of His coming light to shine so bright that nothing of all we’ve said, done, become is allowed to remain hidden.

Yes, Jesus came to wash away every part of all of us that have fallen apart in our fleeing from Him to play our part as if our part is to be played as one of those all who have fallen away.

What do we think He’s going to do when He returns to sift those who chose to heed His love as poured out for us from those many who continue living as if He didn’t?

And what makes us think that we’ve nothing to fear when we can daily look around down here and see, hear, feel so much that’s so wrong that we ourselves witness the wickedness within our own reflections?

Friends, we are in the days of our confusions!

Just look around.

Again I ask, what of all you see happening these days is in any way anything that’s anywhere near enough good enough to please Him who died to save us?

And yes, there are those some who are trying to do better, but friends, why are they so few and hard to find? Why are they sometimes even hard to find in the mirror? Do you get the picture? For it’s something of a self’s selfish portrait in which we’re not yet quite so broken that we’ve resorted to cutting off our ears or gouging out our eyes or lopping off limbs seeking to stop doing unto Him anything that is in any way to be defined as sin!

Friends, the problem is that we’ve all proclaimed that we’re done with sin, that we do no wrong, that we’ve ceased our disgrace and are living now such better ways that we’ve nothing to fear of His again coming near. Yes, we tell the world that we’re done with sin, and the world claims the same.

But folks, it sure doesn’t seem like sin’s done with us.

Rather every single day we continue to witness, and even ourselves still say, so many things that are in so many ways so very wrong that all we should have is fear. And in fact, His very Words reads that such is indeed to what we are called. A fear of God. Why? Again, just look around.

And then think again about what He did to Sodom and Gomorrah, the places from which we’ve been defined as those who’ve lived a vine.

And that because He couldn’t find even 10.

What do we think is coming now that “not even one” tries at all hard at being the good that He is?

See, that’s the problem. It’s that we were all created in the image of God and thus endowed with His glory and goodness as He is both in limitless perfection. Why then do we not see either in really any measure whatsoever?

Friends, we’re in trouble. And try as we might to deny that fact, our denials mean nothing as they can only ever accomplish the same. And why is that? Because at our very best we’re but briers. And that because we’ve each become salt pillars who’ve gotten stuck in place looking back at all our sins so very often that we know only to repeat them.

And yet we live as if we don’t.

Thus defines our confusion.

There is to be no denial of our many falls and failures when we’re all found before our Father. All that’s left to be determined is whether or not we’re of the discernment to see our sins and repent from them or if we’ll, as many are promised to choose, choose only to continue to deny them and hope in only then that He’s somehow not seen them.

But seeing as how He could pick four to save out of a place that is now only alive as a lasting warning to do all we can to avoid His wrath, well, I don’t think we’ve all that much reason to hope so much in that as so many have and continue to try.

No, He knows our very hearts my friends. And thus too He knows just how far gone we’ve gone and whether or not we’ll ever make it back from what is in so many ways a way of life gone so very wrong that none of us know where to turn.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold