Day 3900 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Jeremiah 11:10 NIV

The Conspiracy

That of an entire culture, the whole of creation conspiring oddly together against the very One who called them thus but rather to the rusted lust of misplaced trust and truth, hope and proof that we’re somehow doing right via doing wrong and thus able to perceive, societally, that wrong is right and light is dark and we’ve then no heart to endure the sound of a teaching found in ways which our ears remain willfully unwilling to hear. No, around here we continue our working together to work against the work done by the One who calls us at first unto some rest and then into our rest from there.

Our culture’s problem is that His rest is from our workings, leaving us thus unsure as to how we’re supposed to earn the rest that is said to be ready having been prepared as if a place before enemies.

An issue further confused in that for most of our lives our chief opponent has been whomever opposes any of the doses we’ve prescribed to take or been prescribed the same by those to whom we go in search of the only help and healing we’re willing to know. And this is where the problem is in that the only hope we’re willing to know is that we’re not sick nor stumbling at all. Rather we delight to hear that things are good down here as this allows in us a continuation of that rusted trust placed in that for which we’ve learned to lust.

A lesson passed down unto us by those who learned how to do the same before our time too had finally came to awake unto a life in which so much is new and yet nothing ever at all.

For rather than appreciate enough our daily opportunity to grow into a life in which we could know more of that Heavenly hope as is still held down by He who lifted up our cost and paid them all upon the cross, no, no instead we seek to know only the same ways as those who’ve gone before alongside an impossible estimation that we’ll somehow manage to avoid the outcome that they all ended up finding.

Because surely such things as death and discipline aren’t really that big of a worry anymore. I mean just look around! We’re at the point in our technological and largely theocratic society in which we’re able to even start trusting in computer programming to drive us to work every morning so we can finally skip the hassle of what was once a hope we couldn’t wait to enjoy, and we have no worries as to entrusting the fullest measure of everything from our personal safety to our economic security unto those in fancy clothes who can say the Name but sure don’t seem to know what it means.

And sure, I suppose you could call that mean, my calling out our general laziness and blind willingness to continue to trust in those who are so proven as being liars that we’ve no basis to complain as to the fires they’re still starting that are all but burning our world in two (mostly evidenced in the two-party system that so many still believe we have). And indeed, perhaps we really do. Maybe there really are a collection of but two sides to what is a life in which everything is given unto divide.

Problem then becomes that it’s not right and left, red or blue, but rather lie and truth. It’s dark and light. It’s right and wrong. And the hard part for us to swallow is that we’re all quite clearly darkened in our chosen fealty to that which is wrong and those who have left so much hope in better behind that all we can mostly hope still to find is that we’re somehow externally justified having ourselves given away most of our trust to those who we likely knew would only sell it further to whomever had backed their campaign.

Which leaves us all running on the “No Common Sense” platform in what is a race to both last place and that in a place that so few seem to see is no place anyone should ever want to be.

In fact, as I believe I’ve mentioned in a post now passed, I’ve literally even seen videos of folks so unbothered by the promise of eternal torment that they speak as if winners of a tournament to win a first class ticket there. Even saw one person asking to be sent to hell.

And well, I think it should be safe to say that they’re not well.

Like, in the head.

Because after all, who in a right mind would wish for an outcome that’s said to be a place in which the living are dead and the dead kept alive forever so as to continue the suffering from which they’ll only be able to beg an end but only to never find one?

And furthermore, seeing as how we’ve each of us lived a life in which that thought in mind was all but shared in the messaging spoken forth through our actions and failures, what right then have any of us to imagine that we’re different now? What are we saying or doing, considering actions still speak louder, that’s sending a message that we’re different than who we were as is evidenced in a different way of walking, talking, living life at all?

Indeed, what evidence have we that we’re alive?

Other than such common responses as the lungs with which we breathe what is the air that God created or hearts that continue to beat to the tune of the song God created or the bodies in which we dwell that only move so effortlessly well because, well, God created them to do so?

See, what’s ironic about even our common responses as to such questions as those asking for even a basic sign of life, much less those wondering as to how and why we’re so sure we’re right about how we’re living it, is that they can all be traced back to God in some way. And that is because all of this that has been created, including you and me, it’s all simply an impossibility without some sort of divine design as even hope itself can only exist thanks to divine intervention.

Problem is that we’ve been handed down so much contention from those who at first conspired an intention to slap away the literal hand that made them that so too is what still we know to do. It’s the proverbial looking a gift-horse in the mouth before leading him to water only to drown the poor thing when he refuses to drink from the cup we’ve insisted we can.

Indeed, we’re of such arrogance and pride that we continue to insist that we can guzzle from the muzzle of God’s wrath and manage to make it out all but eternally unscathed. And that likely if not largely because we look at ourselves and our lives and see still no scars. Because we all still believe that we’ve done mostly everything right and definitely nothing wrong enough to have earned for us a meeting with some as of yet unmet day of judgement.

Judgement for what?

Again, we haven’t done anything wrong! And so even this promised day seems something of a mostly fantastical fairy tale meant to coax a few fools into being good little boys and girls and not doing anything to upset some myth in the sky. Or at least that’s the message that’s been believed all throughout time and thus the same as has been passed on down to us who, thanks to, continue to ourselves fall down in what remains a rock bottom that we don’t mind because the rock concerts are cool and some of the rocks we’ve found are pretty enough to be fashioned into jewelry that we’ve made that continues to make us think we’re winning.

At what I’m losing my ability to imagine, but we’re apparently all doing quite well in regard to whatever it is that has us so unwell that folks are asking for hell.

But even should we ignore such blatant extremists, what of the rest of us? For it’s blatantly obvious that all of us continue in this conspiracy mentioned here in Jeremiah. I mean, that’s literally what God himself refers to it as. The very verse just before this is a line from God in which He says that “there is a conspiracy among the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem.”

Maybe then what lets us off the hook now is that we’re not in Judah or Jerusalem. Yeah, that makes sense. It does say “the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem”, and well, we aren’t and don’t and so I suppose that that right there is enough to prove our alibi and set us free. Although, Judah was but one of the tribes that descended from Jacob which traces his ancestry back to folks like Noah and Adam, from whom all of us come too. And Jerusalem was but the place God chose to meet with His people whom He had chosen and so loved that He sent Moses to Egypt to affect their freedom from enslavement.

Meaning then that the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem are but those who are in fact living evidence of everything from God’s presence to all that He will freely do to protect them, save them, help them, heal them and set them free from anything and everything that elsewise dampens their lives.

Even going so far as to send His only begotten Son to die so that we can all now have the undeserved hope of eternal life.

But by all means, let’s keep on fighting against Him in what remains a conspiracy with a fallen man who collectively so delight to so continue that they’ll all but do just about anything to either excite us to fall in line or exact from us our very life should we refuse such a warm invite. Yes, we’re anymore so certain that we’re right that we’ve become a people all but willing to kill for that belief.

Must really mean it then!

And oddly enough we’ve watched, or at least read, of how our very ancestors acted upon this willingness in their becoming adamant that Jesus needed to die simply because He brought with Him the rude audacity to say that we all deserve to alongside a promise that we’d only have to once and that it would only last a second before our eyes could reopen from their blinking goodbye to all that wasn’t all that good unto seeing for the rest of forever a good so great that He died for us to have the chance to get there.

Yes, humanity has fallen so far that we once resorted to killing our only hope of salvation, simply because He offers what our feelings of such things as guilt and regret prove that we need.

What a jerk, am I right?

No, no I’m not! And well, that’s pretty much the point!

It’s that we’re not right. It’s that we’re not good. It’s that we’re all but not alive at this point in what are lives in which we’re willing to cut short those of those who speak a word we don’t like or look a color we’re not fond of since it isn’t our own or come from a place we’ve never been and thus must be spies sent to learn all of our secrets and steal all of our stuff. Yes, that’s why Jesus came unto us, or at least why many here still believe He did.

It was just to steal from us the way of life we’ve all come to love so much. All in His openly asking of us to simply stop and reconsider what it is that we’re doing and where the road we’re holding is bound to end up going.

But no, we don’t want to think about such things. We don’t want to entertain the implication that our chosen destination could at least in theory be worse than death (I mean, dying once is bad enough!). And thus we definitely don’t have the heart to endure the sound of any teaching that may well happen to even accidently convince us or convict us in such a way that we turn from ours unto His, something we most certainly don’t want to do seeing as how we can all see or at least clearly understand where His road ended in this world.

And well, a cross just doesn’t sound nearly as fun as the plans we tend to make for our weekends!

So we continue to conspire together against Him with those around us who are so clearly against Him that they use His Name in vain, mock Him with theatrical performances at award shows, write movie scripts that spin His life’s story into a horror movie, sing songs degrading His sons and daughters, find plenty of laughter in the lives of those who repent from such things and live then on as evidence that you can live without the filth and depravity that so many find fun and somehow rewarding enough to settle for accepting as the grand reward of a lifetime won at the promised expense of any kind of prize to be found later on.

No, so many here will have indeed had their reward, and well, it’s easy to see just how many here are fully enjoying it. Granted, they don’t really seem all that happy or filled with hope. Not many are ever seen smiling or giving off that “Heaven or bust” kind of glow. Nobody here really seems all that content or able to truly prove the lasting worth of their lives spent in mostly discontent. No, none here have much joy anymore.

But we have lots of stuff, and well, more is better right?

Indeed, it is! But where we seem to have missed the bus is that that which we should want most of is life itself. Because more life is better, so much so that Jesus died so that we find in Him life forever. But rather we’ve continued to settle for what’s at best 80-90 filled with everything that both everyone else wants to find or feel but that all of us are promised to leave.

And we’re supposed to be good with that?

We’re supposed to be okay with this grand expectation of winning the whole world? We’re expected to just go along with the expectations of those expressly still living as God’s enemies? What good can that bring?

I mean, I’ve read the Bible and that kind of choice never once worked out to the benefit of those who chose it.

So indeed, why do we still continue to choose to throw our support behind them or seek their support for ourselves? Why do we still look to a fallen people to either hold us up or tell us who and what to trust? Why do we still work so hard to please a people pleased with violent movies and by pornographic videos that anymore act as a common replacement to true human companionship? Why do we still try to make ourselves look like, sound like, seem to live like those who ask us to so perform?

Are we truly nothing more than trained monkeys who are thus here only to do the dances that our furry ancestors have taught us?

Oddly enough, there are literally still those who actually think we came from apes!

All while humpback whales managed to come from the very same clump of cells that just so happen to have to taken a couple different turns and ended up being amongst the largest of all creatures that exist only in the water. Yeah, we’re the same as they are, at least come from the same somehow boiling pit of dna and thus can trace ourselves back to some magical explosion that set all of this in motion.

And yet we’re the crazy ones who believe in a God who created everything after its own kind, and thus us after Him as we were created in His image.

No, that’s just too hard to imagine!

So by all means, let’s just kill off those weirdos who would believe in such a thing, but not even because they do but rather because they dare to believe in such things as right and wrong and how none of us have ever happened upon all that much of the first.

For how dare anyone say we’re wrong? How dare anyone suggest we’re sinful? How could anyone speak unto our promised death that we’ve literally seen every other human we’ve ever known experience? Indeed, it’s not that we don’t know we get things wrong and that some of them could then be defined as sin nor then that such could at least plausibly be the reason for all the deaths we’ve seen those we’ve known already experience.

We just don’t want to be reminded of any of it.

And so we conspire against everyone who mentions it. And, thus quite obviously, against He who literally wrote the book on it. Again, never mind the parts about love and salvation and the promise of Heaven. No, those are all fine. In fact, if it wasn’t for the cross and the suffering of Christ I doubt many would so be always ready to deny the wisdom and thus at least potential authority of Scripture.

No, we just hate to think that some of the things we’ve liked to do do in fact deserve such a death.

And perhaps even more so, we really hate to feel as if we owe anybody anything.

And well, if He really did die even having lived an innocent life at the hands of those who have in fact taught us all the doubt and denial in which we still share, then we might really owe Him everything and thus have to take back everything we’ve given to the world and give it all to Him instead.

And well, we know the world really wouldn’t like that. And well, that’s because it’s far easier to see the world’s wrath than it is God’s.

But just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

May just mean that it’s too big to be seen. And make no mistake, His wrath is huge, so vast in fact that it has only ever proven entirely unsurvivable. But by all means, let’s continue worrying about those who, at best, have only ever proven able to, at most, kill the body.

Friends, my point is that we’re running with the wrong crowd. And that’s because no matter how big or bad people may make think themselves to be, ain’t a one of us that can stare down death and make it blink. But Jesus did even more than that. He welcomed death and managed to render it powerless in three days. Who then should we be living to please?

Sure, this world clearly all but demands our loyalty, and promises all sorts of miserable things should we refuse to give it.

I’m just more worried about what He’s said He will refuse us should we refuse Him. For the cross proves that, yes, we are sinners who deserve to die. But it also proves that we can definitely survive the wrath of man. Don’t continue to live to please those who continue to deny the wrath of God.

For again, history cannot offer us even one example of how that can work out well.

But the Bible gives us plenty of examples as to how trusting in God can work out so well that not even death gets a say.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold