Day 3903 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Judges 10:13-14 NIV

But when

And no, as we discussed yesterday, such is not a question but in fact now a promise as was at first given us as it was given them who had then the opportunity to turn and repent via the manner prescribed which involved them going out to those insisting they die. And yes, that remains in every way the horrific request as it comes not as an idea in which He’s tried to suggest that such might happen to be one of many options that can work, all of which can save you and me. No, rather this is a guarantee that both trouble is coming and the only way to survive it is to at first admit we’ve ourselves lived to invite it.

Then to welcome it to the tune of whatever turmoil or tragedy such degeneracy may demand.

I’ve been reading through Jeremiah for days now, those many chapters leading up to the world’s favorite 29:11. Indeed, not there yet on this run through, but what I have come to is this conclusion in which, as we’ve discussed in the past, context matters more than we might imagine, but that also the contextualization of pretty much all of life itself is that in which He tries to tell the story of why there comes this living hell.

For you see, it’s no wonder as to why we’re all so in love with 29:11 as it speaks to the hopeful outcomes that still we seek for even ourselves today. Plans had for us which involve for us hope and a future, plans then not of destruction nor disaster. But it’s within the build up that we see what that promise is being built upon. And, well, oddly enough it is disaster. It is destruction. It is in every way the very decimation of what was an entire civilization right down to people killed and buildings burnt, even the Temple itself.

Both of them, both the one human hands had had a part in constructing and too the human’s hands which only God alone had created.

Because yes, each of them just as each of us were and are temples of the Holy Spirit designed then to house the divine intentions of He who created us to be His hands and feet holding His Word and carrying it to whomever needs it. And yet we, like they, have continued to forsake both He who created us, what He created us to be and even the promises given in response to both faith and failure as determined by us.

For in this life such are the only two choices as there remains but a single path ahead upon which all of us will either wind up dead or find inside that audacity to turn around and head back to life.

Issue remains that we remain most clearly adamant that the way in which we’re going is the same in which life’s spent knowing itself. That we’re headed for life simply because we are, at present, alive. But you see, such is the warning decreed in such places as Jeremiah 19:15 in which God said, “Listen! I am going to bring on this city and all the villages around it every disaster I pronounced against them, because they were stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.”

A problem now passed down to us because we’ve learned quite well ourselves how to remain so stubborn and stupid that neither have we much interest at all in any words or warnings which might find us offended or speak of our normal way of life upended.

For we’re certain that, unlike those people then, the Babylonians aren’t coming.

No, we’ve now no fear of Nebuchadnezzar coming near. We’ve today no cities which can be threatened with siege works. No Temple which might be leveled, at least that we pay much attention to. No, we in fact don’t pay much attention to much anymore. Rather we live with hearts as if open doors more than ready to always invite the plenty that this world continues to tell us we need to fill us so that our lives can feel ever more so.

And so we continue to welcome the words that soothe our ears and bring no fears. Thus we’re still a people of wounds dressed who are comforted always by this hearing still “peace, peace” when there so often is so clearly so little of the same. And thus we too remain a people paying so much attention to those promising this “peace and safety” that we see not that “destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

Nor then that it’s not a matter of if but rather a promise with no when.

And, as that verse in 1 Thessalonians just finished, no win.

No, for the fact is that still we exist as those who at best pick and choose which verses we read and which messages we lose between the cracks of a life cracked in two seeking to still serve two masters, only one of which might barely perhaps be God. Rather these days, as the passage we’d been discussing of Jeremiah 11 went on to say, we have still as many gods as we have cities and as many damnable alters upon which we burn all we can as the very streets within them.

Indeed, it’s terrifying to me just how many things we live to serve today. From money to mainstream media, we all awake only to align ourselves with whatever line we’ve been implored to walk by those who themselves are so clearly getting nowhere anyone should want to be. Not that here is bad, though it’s most certainly getting that way. But rather just because when given the promise of something so much better as Heaven must be, well then you’d think that we’d be a bit more willing to do whatever He’s asked in order to find it.

But I guess when we’ve all but lived as if we’ve basically replicated it in homes filled with gods of gold and all the many more hopes of the many more treasures and triumphs we’re still sure we can someday find, then I suppose we’ve not much left of Heaven to worry about.

Definitely not enough to welcome unto us the very destruction of the way of life we’re at present living quite well enough to have enough that says enough to mean for us that we’ve measured up the very pinnacle of our preferred potential.

All because we still seem to live as if even our very own personal potential has some reliance upon what we do and do not prefer.

Yeah, we’ve become so prideful that we even feel as if we’re the ones to determine for ourselves what our very best is and thus when we’re done having reached it.

And we walk alongside so many who are alive who live within this lie that they have themselves arrived at what is a life so very wonderful that they deserve nothing of His warnings of wrath coming to wipe us off the map. For that would be mean, a true betrayal of trust we’ve placed in the many things we let take His place. Guess we just never cared to learn the difference.

But friends, such is what we should agree needs to be destroyed within us.

Because we ought to know by now that it’s indeed neither by the will of man nor the strength he alone perceives within him that we can stand or move or breathe. No, for we’ve not ever proven of such ability as to create that which can do much of any of the above. We’ve not created life, merely our own spins upon the ones we’ve been given from Him who did create them, who did create us.

Alas, we’ve so little appreciation for such a gift that we still daily live to give it all away to whatever and whomever may ask so little and promise, well, pretty much anything at all.

So long as the little they ask is whatever we’re already ready to give away and too the promises they offer sound like something we want to have.

Leaving then obviously God to still come in last considering how what He asks is that we lose our lives and that alongside the promise given of only finding them again in death.

None of which either makes sense nor then seems reasonable.

And so we continue in that way in which our ancestors walked within the walls in which they trusted to keep every enemy army at an always safe enough distance. Yes, still we live believing our enemies are at such a distance that we can still feel safe to go on about our daily business of buying and selling, laughing and yelling all about how great our lives are and thus how little we’ve now to fear.

All because we’ve drifted so far from Him that God has all but agreed and left us. Indeed, in the past several days I’ve happened to read in so many places that God would turn His face from us, not listen to us, all but in fact just give us away to that which they kept and we keep on asking Him to let us have or become. All because we’ve remained numb to the nuance of faith and failure and how we’re all choosing only one or the other.

We are either walking faithfully with our God or we’re still falling short in our common failures to live as if He’s God at all.

All while the enemy waits just outside the walls we’ve built between we and He who could save us, died in fact to do just that. But no, still we trust in the walls made of the idols we’ve carved in lives now starved for lack of Bread and no Water to drink. Because there’s not enough of the Word heard nor the Water drank. All because such things are not popular even now, perhaps even less so than back then.

When?

Well, when God sent the Babylonians to do His divine bidding against the people He’d chosen that only went on to choose to not choose Him in return. Same as those who’d made that choice before them back in the time of the Judges, those about whom we read here doing the very same things that God eventually agreed was enough to enact exile and destruction.

All of it because the people kept on choosing to forsake Him unto the serving of other gods who still we serve in what are just ways that look different thanks to our wealth of technological advancement and societal decay both reaching peaks that those people back then probably never could have imagined. Indeed, we’re seeing and doing and saying things today that I wouldn’t have believed possible just 10-15 years ago.

But such is the life that we know, this one in which we still go to such great lengths to stay convinced that nothing can touch us, nor trouble come our way.

A belief we believe simply because it really hasn’t yet.

At least not in ways that we’re not at present fairly capable of dealing with.

In fact, some of the ways that trouble is already presenting itself are seemingly liked and enjoyed by a great and growing many. The best example I think of at the moment is politics. I remember being a kid in a world in which it was something nobody ever talked about, almost considered taboo to do so. It was something like a birthday wish in which you were told that if you talked about it it wouldn’t come true. And so people mostly kept it to themselves, and well, wouldn’t you know it but we had more civility then too.

But now?

No, now our fascination with political machinations had found us all but virtually walking within a society in which we’re basically a living, breathing example of how a house divided against itself cannot stand. And indeed, such is pretty much all we’re but to the very point of putting into words and even actions too. For anymore we literally cannot stand one another. Our world is filled and filling with so much hatred that we’re just devolving to the point of killing those we disagree with.

But we keep going. We keep doing as we have been. We continue to serve these ideals and the idols we’ve made of them thinking them able to save us somehow. Yes, if we could only convince, via agreement or argument, everyone around us to agree with our personal politics then the world would be a better place. If we could just coax or coerce folks into seeing things our way then we’d finally see a better day.

If the world would just settle for seeing us as being as always right as we’ve always thought ourselves to be, then we’d have no problems that needed any fixing anymore.

Because we’re each so great at life that doing wrong is impossible.

Much like the warnings of Scripture talking about the world being destroyed and people being cast into lakes of fire and finding there unending death. It’s insanity. It’s preposterous. It’s ludicrous, and not the singer guy. No, for the sky’s not parted and our many walls still stand and thus too every idol and false hope that we’ve learned to trust within. Yes, we are living as if still convinced that our walls cannot be breached, our way of life then not lost.

All because we’ve come to believe God so very small that we think that all we have that we can see or touch will keep Him from seeing in us anything that He could do anything about anyway.

No, to most He’s still just a vending machine from which we daily ask our requests and expect them filled expediently. And then too a punching bad when our said orders take too long or never arrive at all.

Indeed, we love to hate God, so much so that many here have just arrived upon that frame of mind that tells them that He’s not there at all. And it’s that mindset that’s found us set against one another, and us against Him, He then against us and thus too all of us against one another. A house divided all sharing the same way of life within the walls of the worlds we’ve built in which we’re each kings who create gods who then act on our behalf and promise to keep us safe.

A belief we have because so far they have.

For truth is that life here is far from bad, at least in some ways. Because we all have so many things that we don’t really know what trouble is. We don’t remember what trial was. We have next to no recollection of what it’s like to go without, to live in fear, to find ourselves struggling to survive. No, rather we, like they, have too grown fat and overfed right up to the point in which we’ve come ourselves upon this idea that tells that we’ve managed to accomplish all this all on our own.

That we’re the ones who determine life and its many outcomes.

And well, as such, we’ve then clearly nothing to worry about as with such power and control, well, nothing can threaten us.

We’ll just overcome it all.

But friends there comes a storm that we’ll none of us survive. It’s called death and oddly enough we’ve all lived our lives earning us and saving such a wage in the same that there’s simply no way to avoid it being owed. No, every life owes a death, even ours, even now. And one day that bill will be paid and we will leave this place and all we’ve been and done and wanted and won within it.

Because the very enemy of life is what we all deserve for our having ourselves lived as enemies of the Life.

Problem is that we can’t see it now from where stand in what are lives so full and filled that we struggle to imagine anything of struggle possible. Indeed, we’re all so accustomed to living life that we cannot fathom a day in which we won’t have it anymore. But that moment comes for us all. Question is will it be but a moment, a short time of exile, a period in which we lose it all only to find that all is not what we lost at all but rather all we still get to find?

Or will our exile from life be felt forever?

Either way said enemy of death is just outside our walls. And still above a God that calls that we each go out and surrender unto the same in what is a final show that we’re finally willing to do as He asks in what’s then a sign of trust from us to Him and thus a measure of faith found within. Yes, whomever lays down their life for Christ will find the life of Christ given unto them. But whomever so refuses and continues to trust in rather the walls they’ve built of a fortress they think unsinkable, well, remember the Titanic my friends.

For there is nothing that we’ve built or can build that withstand what God’s determined to do. And in fact our hubris will spell for us a similar disaster. All because He tried to warn us what is still on the way and why it comes. And we just continue to choose to not listen but rather to place our trust in gods that have not life to give nor any help to offer.

It pains me to see just how many false gods we have and how much we continue to trust in them. Thankfully He’s willing to help us with that, only until the trouble comes. For once Judgement has arrived, our time to reach out for such divine assistance will have forever ended.

So do be careful as to just how much longer you allow yourself to trust what you cannot prove is able to withstand that which you cannot see.

Because for this moment we have the opportunity to throw every such idol in the fire and turn our lives back to He who went to death and back to get us back.

But that moment will not last forever. For His promises and warnings are not questions of if.

But when.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold