Day 3891 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hosea 9:7 NIV

The Confusion

Call it a reckoning, a retribution, a rebellion as built against our own rebelling against He who was and is and yet watches us act is if He wasn’t and thus isn’t. It doesn’t really matter whatever way in which we delight to define it for the dilemma is that we’ve designed a time in which so much has turned out so wrong that we’ve even turned against ourselves. And in that I’m not merely, not only talking about all of this fighting and arguing seen and heard amongst us as a people. No, I’m even talking about the divisions we’re designing within us as a person.

Divisions and destructions, confusions and chaos that we ourselves are bringing upon ourselves.

For that is what is this time in which we live. It’s a sullen reality in which each of us live daily in such a diverse directory as to what matters most, as even anymore itself measured by the minute and moment in which we take it upon ourselves constantly to weigh the gravity of everything so as to try and ensure that we’re doing the right thing. But even then, what’s right is anymore something to be seen so subjectively that we’re even to the point of losing our ability to legislate and criminalize those things that are undeniably wicked.

All because some of us truly enjoy them.

And so what we have at hand is a hand we’ve both dealt and tried our best to play in such a way as to guarantee the win. Because, well, that just makes sense as, well, that’s what you do in any game you play. You play to win. But the issue is that we weren’t actually the ones to deal the hand and nor has life ever been anything of the game we’ve collectively fought so hard to make it seem. Rather life is a linear experience aimed into the heart of eternity.

We’re all either then walking toward the winning of what are two outcomes which exist in such staunch disparity that we should see enough gravity to grace that we give away living life as if a game and instead allow He who came to help us come apart from a world falling the same.

Apart.

This is something we’ve been discussing for days now, weeks maybe. In all actuality, it’s something of such a long-running theme within these daily discussions that it could arguably be found in probably 90% of them. And that’s because the idea is that if we’re ever to get where we should all hope to be we have to at first see that both where we are isn’t where hope is and that simply because what we’ve become is everything He simply asked us to never be.

Indeed, God’s first request as recorded in Genesis was for us to simply stay away from that tree as He knew that you and me would only eventually come to see so much of all we never needed to know that we’d know nothing but how to do wrong thanks to our eyes and hearts and minds and lives being then opened unto knowing what wrong is. It’s called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And He asked to stay away from it as He created us in His image.

And thus we already knew was good was.

And He knew that if we knew what evil is that we’d simply be entirely too intrigued by this alternative to reality that we’d come daily unto this buffet of disbelief and blaspheme to sup upon the seedy disfigurement of our very own identity. Because such is simply all that can happen when we turn away from the good we knew, the good we were as having been made in the image of He who is goodness, unto instead the knowing of the nothing good that we so clearly know so much of now.

So much in fact that finding good is in many ways becoming such a struggle anymore that many here are just giving up on it altogether and falling in line instead behind those who are blind and plenty willing to lead.

To where?

Well, that’s kind of the problem.

It’s that we’ve been told where this road leads. We’ve in fact been shown a taste we could see of what this path will hold for you and me, all of we who continue to delight to do nothing of the new that He so clearly came to that He chose the place we’re headed to as the place to finally do all He intended to in order to from the last place we’d imagine break on through to helping us fathom both the fate of our fall and thus the need of our faith.

But alas we’ve become so far gone that those of us who at first hear the warning then opt to heed the warning and further then seek to help others realize the warning are anymore labeled as whatever it takes to inspire the world to think us freaks and fakes who are thus not at all worth listening to.

Why?

Because we don’t lie anymore.

Because we rather speak the truth in a kind of love that this land has lost. Because rather than seeking our praise or acceptance from people, as promised only when we do as we’re asked or expected to by those very same people, we understand that we’ve already all the praise and acceptance we could ever need to survive. Indeed, rather than seeking to survive upon the meager mundanities within which this fallen world thrives, we seek instead the promise of another prize that cannot be itself so lost to time or tide.

No, we’ve a promise sealed by the blood of He who died in our place, a promise placed in our heart’s hope and thus forever safe from those who are clearly nearing the willingness to inflict harm out of hate upon the body they see and the words they hear as spoken from the same.

And with this promise that none can take from us we daily dive back into the downfall seeking to scream as humbly as we can as to the horror so already on the way that we see its foreshocks arriving every single day.

Yet still we’re the fools who speak to what is both obvious to see but remains willfully unseen by those who delight to remain so defiant against simple decency that they must stay oblivious to it all.

Indeed, we are walking in the fall, and no, I’m not just talking about cooler temperatures and leaves of brighter colors. Rather I’m talking about the general drift away from the gravity of our reality. I’m talking about those balking at the beginning of birth pangs. I’m talking about the fact that we’re fighting such an uphill battle based upon the odds alone that we’re likely to be seen as odd and left alone simply because this world’s so far gone collectively that the vast majority think us maniacs for having hope.

And that simply because, well, looking around at where we are it’s easy to see why it hard for anyone to even believe in hope anymore.

After all, what of where we are and who we’ve been is there for any to hope within? What of the things we do and all we say is speaking this joyful expectation of the best still on the way? What of how we treat one another in what’s as far from the Golden Rule as we can possibly get is going to prove able to get us anywhere close to a place of streets paved in something other than lead and lust? Indeed, within this life in which we’ve all known that rusted trust as placed in metal and wood, what hope have we in finding anything eternally good?

For all we know is what all is. And yet what all is is too what all ends. And if what all ends is where our hope, our joy, our zeal for life is, well then, yeah, it’s easy to equate how and why we stay up late trying to soak up as much stuff as we can possibly stomach. And indeed, for this world we’re all so filled with greed that our gluttony knows only hostility. Because we want so much of what we’ve been and where we are that the same is all we’re to then be filled with.

Simply because it’s all that we’ll allow ourselves to be filled with.

And we see this reality unfolding in more heartbreaking ways all the time. Just look at all the things people are doing to people who are so vastly similar and yet just slightly different enough in thought or theory that they’re defined as those we must eliminate so as to allow to further germinate this general discontentment with all of life itself.

Indeed, from what I see it sure does seem that we’ve reached the point in time in which some are just angry for being alive.

Perhaps that’s because life brings with it a personal responsibility to live it well, or at least decently. Maybe it’s because life asks of us a general degree of appreciating it for the gift it is. Maybe it’s because we anymore have to live our lives watching others do with their own so many things that just confuse the brain and break the heart and contribute only to our further falling apart.

Maybe it’s just because we’ve all collectively forgotten how good life is at an equal pace to our forsaking how good He’s been.

And indeed, I honestly believe that many here don’t want to think about how good our God is as is witnessed within the fact that we’re still here in what is a life with a little more time to wrestle our minds away from the mangled tangle of a society torn asunder. And we don’t want to think about it because doing so would define us all as those who chose to fail.

And well, that just really doesn’t do much for the ego and vanity in which we’ve found our insanity.

What insanity? That born of the confused cohabitation of hatred and disillusion. It’s something we witness in increasing frequency as our radios are tuned into the dials of those dying to live as if He didn’t ever do either. It’s this existence in which each of us have chosen, willfully, and that repeatedly, to consider fools and maniacs those who dare speak a word against any of that in which we delight. It’s a cancer caused by our counting idiots any and all who no longer fall in line in our fall from life.

It’s our confusion.

And yes, as spoken in our verse discussed yesterday, it has arrived.

And yes, it does, as spoken of in today’s verse, coincide with the arrival of a reckoning which brings with it such a divine punishment that none will escape it. Not even one. Remember that part of yesterday’s discussion? How there is not even one who is good? Not even one who seeks God? Not even one who cares all that much to imagine anything of any portion of who God is and what He does and what that means? Not one who does not mean to be so mean as to either deny Him outright or perhaps even entertain a false replacement that agrees to their placement of their hope and trust in things that rust and people that kill?

Yes, He daily watches us near a willingness to just seek to erase those we deem unfit to live thanks to their doing or saying things that our feebleness cannot comprehend. Indeed, we’ve become a people so scrambled in our search for something to give us the right to not feel bad about what we’ve become that we’ve become unwilling to admit that there’s much of life we don’t understand. Because rather than embracing that humility that could and would help us learn, rather we lean upon a humanity that left that ability long ago.

All in search for some way to know more of what we never needed to, as then is allowed to take the place of the simplicity of hope as was given us from the very beginning.

Because in that Garden we didn’t need to hurry, to hate, to hurt. We didn’t know of the difficulty of denial, of debate, of delight in anything other than the beautiful bounty of the rest of what God had made for us to enjoy. We didn’t understand the existence of evil nor then the depths to which we’re still trying to mine it in these minds so mangled that we hate so badly those who call us back to grace’s gravity that we’d rather kill them instead of hearing about how we deserve to die because of what we’ve done.

No, save it. Take that mess somewhere else. Get away from me with this story. Yes, still the majority of those in this world “say to the seers, ‘See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!’”

Stop with this Bible stuff. Quit telling us about this Jesus fella. Enough of this truth that cuts so cleanly between what is good and what we are. Give it up. Leave it be. Leave us alone and just go away.

Why?

Because it does cut. It does hurt. It does cause eyes to open and hearts to shatter. It seeks indeed those very things as what are but the opening gambits of a grace given so deeply that He who gives it still gave His life for us to have it in such fullness that nothing of who we’ve been and what we’ve done is allowed to remain. No, He came to do a new thing. And He’s indeed done it so wonderfully that we’ve no recourse but to change course and welcome the cost of the life we knew lost in the hope the He’s not lying like we’re known to.

And no, as of now we’ve no concrete reason as can be proven in our preferred scientific ways. We have no relic from Heaven brought back by someone who’s ventured there just to take some photos and prove it real. We haven’t any way to testify to the existence of Christ nor then His proclaimed resurrection as was achieved from our demise.

All we have are our lives and the many ways in which they’ve changed to offer up as evidence of all He’s done in us.

And yet the world won’t listen because their own lack of growth, of hope, of joy even has rendered them unwilling to believe in even those things anymore. Rather the world has grown so cold and stagnate that it simply delights to hate those who do have hope, who do know joy, who do seek growth both from what they’ve known and that toward what better they’ve not.

This world hates that because those “fools and maniacs” who embrace this existence as but a sort of undressed rehearsal for the next prove with their words, actions and deeds that something else does exist. And this demands that others either consider this something else for themselves or remain secluded in their chosen delusions wherein they die a little more every single day.

Never would have thought that there would be so many who would choose so proudly to lose their lives.

And yet they’re so sadly content in their contention against Him that they turn their knives toward us simply to try and silence us when their calling us losers and freaks no longer works to keep them blissfully unaware of where this world is headed.

Because try as many have and most still are, it’s undeniable the direction we’re going as a people.

But still it remains easier to deny who we’ve become and all we’ve come to do because of it than to admit all we’ve done at the hands of who we’ve become and welcome the mercy such so desperately needs to even imagine a better place being anywhere that a people like us would be welcomed.

I think that’s the problem, or at least some part of it. It’s that we’re all so well aware of how unwell we are that we’ve arrived at the time in which we don’t even wish to trouble the doctors to try and save us. I think we know we’re too far gone. I think we know that the life support that is hope would all but merely delay the inevitable. Indeed, I think we all know that our unique depravities deserve to die in such a demise that nothing of life can again be known.

But I think that admitting it and accepting it are two vastly different things.

And that because the Gospel and He who gave it simply ask us to admit where we are and who we’ve been.

Never once does He ask us to accept it as the outcome.

But so many have that they know now only to hate those few who haven’t. They know only to call names and make fun of those weirdos who speak to the honesty of our fall from humility. They only wish to destroy those who warn against our further destroying ourselves.

Because the destruction is found in fun and enjoyment and pleasure and success and the entertainment of it. We’ve grown comfortable in our collusion against God. And all we’ve left of it now, this life we’ve lived the way we have, is but such a deep delight in deception that we hate those who don’t deceive us with false visions or prophetical illusions.

Indeed, we’ve all lied and been lied to so very much that we don’t know what to do with the truth. And well, seeing as He is the Truth, nor then shall we know what to do when He comes. We’ll just each of us face the reckoning in whatever manner we have or have not prepared to meet it. But while it will remain common to argue with or likely even despise those who warn of time running thin, such probably isn’t the best way to get ready.

But with so much confusion alive in our culture, we mustn’t be surprised when such is what most choose for their lives.

Confused? Sure. Shocked? Yes. Heartbroken? Absolutely.

But not surprised.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold