Day 3904 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Micah 3:4 NIV

Hidden

Because such are not we then as of now has He decided that still will He be. And indeed, it’s no wonder as to why He has so determined to hide. In fact, for now it might be for our benefit. And that’s because His choosing to hide his face from us has given us a little more time to reach for a mirror by which to find what we’ve become and see in said reflection our infection and determine for ourselves then to no longer hide from the truth that says we’ve not only nothing to lose, but that because we’ve already lost all we once had.

All because we became a people so willing to imagine that we’re hiding.

We’re not. And, well, upon this day that seems to be the scariest story of them all. For despite all the tales to be told on this day of all hallows, the true horror is the tale which follows what are a dead people living in between two ghosts, living so wickedly that neither wants anything much to do with them as they’ve lived in such sin that they’ve not really anything left by which to be of use. Rather we’re to the very dregs in our common search for something to do that’s not been done before.

But rather than that something to do being something better, no, instead we only continue to settle deeper into the lower rungs of a life lived in which both His call still rings but for it we never reach thanks to all of which our hands are full. And if only they were just filled with candy!

Unfortunately such is not in any means the misery of which we’re promised to meet in response to our having met with what is our very end and somehow determined then to prove we can sink lower. No, we’d have been counted amongst the lucky to be living a way of life in which the worst costs we could possibly pay were toothaches and dental visits to alleviate the damage done by colored tongues from having eaten so much sweet stuff that our sweet tooth needed to be pulled out.

Which is, ironically enough, exactly what He calls us to do unto any part of this vessel that causes us to stumble.

Thankfully it seems that He was being more figurative than literal because, well, we’d all have long since torn out both eyes and lobbed off every limb we had having used them all to at first look for ways to do all the wrong we’ve done and then reached for those ways insisting they come so close that wrong has become us. And we’ve in fact become so wrong that we’ve now a yearly celebration of all the ways in which such things as those which shouldn’t be done are celebrated and done more than any other day.

And granted, I’m among those many who spent their childhood getting all ramped up to hit the bricks and score as much free candy as I could stomach, then eat one or two more just to be safe. And so I’m not even looking to put the kibosh on the commonly shared excitement known by most kids. I’m rather saying that maybe we should have stopped with the giving away of candy.

Because not much else that so many do on this day, and the weeks leading up to it, is in any way so worth celebrating as so many so clearly do.

It’s something that’s proven somehow able to affect me more deeply every single year. Just when I think I couldn’t be more shocked and surprised by the depths to which our world seeks to display its apparent fascination with death, every October I’m surprised once more!

And this year it’s hit me harder than ever having moved into a neighborhood after 10 long years spent in apartment in which the most folks could decorate was their front door and balcony.

These folks out here go hard when they’ve got a whole yard to work with!

And indeed, driving around these past several weeks it’s become increasingly easy to see that, again, we’ve got some sort of fascination with death that I simply don’t understand. I mean, every other time of the year folks spend so adverse to the topic that they nip the bud of whomever dares talk of it. It’s part of why the Gospel is so hated. It’s because it deals with death as it defines how we deserve it, were offered to be saved from it, asked to die to the way of life we’ve lived in order to share in Christ’s having come to overcome it, and then live out the rest of our days knowing we’ll die and desperately trying to help others see there’s a way out.

But anymore, something we’re all clearly and especially reminded this time of the year, folks don’t want out. They don’t want to avoid it. In fact, they want to fill their yards with expressions of it. They want to watch movies all about it that show us how our moral degeneracy has inspired someone to write a script all about the most horrible and gruesome ways by which folks can insist upon the demise of others. Folks love it! There are channels on TV dedicated to it and it’s shared in all the commercials for the newest installments all the time.

We love death, torture, brutality, every form of social decay that a people can come upon.

What then do we expect God to want to see?

I mean, again, driving around I’m to the point that I try my best to see as little of it as I possibly can because it both breaks my heart and yet makes we angry. I’m sick to death of all this death we celebrate. And it’s even something that’s spilled outside of the end of October. I know we all know of the tragedy that just happened here recently regarding a widely known public figure.

There were and remain people who are celebrating his death, happy that he died, rejoicing in the fact that a life has ended!

Again then, what do we expect God to do?

We’ve made a holiday out of every darkness we can be coaxed into thinking harmless. And every year that bar gets lowered, and then lowered, and then lowered again. Friends, where does it end? I mean, when I was a kid I went trick or treating dressed as a pumpkin and my little sister a princess, or mostly Laura Ingalls Wilder. But these days those things are considered inadequate. No, you’ve got to dress up as a witch, a zombie, a ghost, goblin, gruesome killer from your favorite horror movie.

What kid should have a favorite slasher film?

I just can’t help but see every single year that we’ve fallen down yet another rung upon what’s become a ladder that apparently only goes downward. For again, it’s not even that halloween is a holiday that defines the depth of this danger we’re in, though it is most certainly a problem! No, the issue is that we’re not stopping to see the danger we’re in but rather just seeking to always prove a little further that we just don’t care.

How are we supposed to balance all this? Granted, there are those who don’t celebrate the different holidays we have. But yet there are some who somehow do try to enjoy as many as possible. But what can something such as halloween have to do with Easter? How can we be a people who celebrate both? What fellowship has light with darkness?

I know I’m kind of rambling at this point, but hopefully you see my point.

It’s that we’re basically a people without a direction. Only the direction we seem to be heading is downward into a yearly celebration of moral depravity that has us buying $100 blowup skeletons to stick in our yard to either scare the kids or just prove that we’ve more money than sense.

And no, I’m not talking from some moral high ground as I myself do things all the time that I shouldn’t. But friends, I don’t make movies about them. I don’t write books about them. I don’t find some way to have made a giant inflatable version of them that I can display in my yard. I fight them. I forsake them. I rebuke them, and him who continues to do them. Indeed, that’s the only dead person I care to know in my life. Just that freak who did all those things that I can’t imagine ever doing again.

I hate him!

Because he was dead. He was empty. He was as useful as a 12-foot plastic dummy that looks like a witch or whatever. Good for nothing and doing the same, nothing good. And that’s what I can’t help but see these days when this day comes around. It’s just nothing good. It’s the very perpetuation of this downward spiral that will leave folks laughing and cheering and eating candy on their way to unending misery.

And I just don’t see what’s supposed to be so fun or worth celebrating about that!

For long gone are the days of little boys dressing up like cowboys or their favorite baseball player, little girls like ballerinas or butterflies. No, these days you have to make yourself look dead if you’re to impress. Why? Because again, we’re apparently impressed with death, and that so much that we made a holiday to celebrate upon which we watch movies centered upon it and toss a bunch of what are basically idols in our yard to make sure everyone knows where we stand on the subject.

But friends, that’s just it, where do we stand? Where do you stand? What’s your opinion? How does this day make you feel?

Or do we even feel anything anymore?

Sadly I don’t know that we do. Just the other day I watched this video of some church in Florida having a halloween-themed service during which the day’s entertainment, formally called worship, was sang by a woman dressed up as a witch. We’ve literally reached the point in which witches are in our churches!

And again I ask, what do we really expect God to do with that?

What do we expect Him to do with us?

We think He’s just gonna do as we do and continue to merely wink and smirk at this kind of stuff? We think He’s just going to chalk it up to kids being kids? Think He will pat us on the back and tell us how great we did at making sure we enjoyed as much of the world as we possibly could?

Think He’s waiting up there with arms open wide to welcome everyone dressed up in the regalia that emulates witchcraft or with faces painted to look like death itself?

Yeah, I imagine He’s real pleased with our show!

Or at least judging from what we’re seeing it sure seems like we expect Him to be. Because, honestly, it just doesn’t seem like anyone cares anymore what He thinks, who He is, what that means. No, just have fun. Do as the world does. Watch some movie in which some maniac is torturing people. Nothing wrong with that! Not doing anything bad. Nothing to see here.

And indeed, there you have the problem!

It’s found in that we’re doing so little that God deserves to see that we have left no ability to even pretend we’ll be surprised when upon that day odds are that He turns us all away and allows us to leave His presence for an eternity spent indulging in what we’d lived celebrating. All because, as we’ve been talking, He’s a kind of fair that should be just about all that scares us.

In fact, we should be absolutely terrified as to His justice being so fair.

Why?

Because He’s promised to let us choose our reward.

And while that sounds really nice of Him, because it is, and that because there’s just so much here that we’ve grown so fond of that we all act like little kids in a candy store sampling all the delights that we might cram into a life, the problem’s become that we only sample what’s in the store we’re in. We only consider our possible rewards from the plethora of options given us by the world around us. And we are in fact so surrounded by so much that so many so clearly enjoy that we ourselves just follow the crowd and do what they do.

But friends, today’s among the very best examples as to why we shouldn’t just resort to doing as the world does!

Why?

Because while getting candy is fine, celebrating death to get it isn’t.

Accepting witchcraft isn’t. Enjoying these horrible and absolutely grotesque movies is absolutely nothing at all that anyone who is a child of God should be involved in. And yet that line has become so blurred that we all but set aside at least a day, if not some weeks spent getting ready, to all but celebrating these things.

And then we manage to somehow still act surprised when the world continues to be in the shape it's in. How could that happen? How could there be so much suffering and crying and pain? Yes, why does God allow bad things to happen?

Well, because according to how many will spend this here day, it kind of seems like we’re kind of into bad things!

Seems like we enjoy bad things.

It’s almost as if we love bad things so much that even as adults we still get all ramped up, not for the candy anymore, just to show off our personal appreciation for the fall.

And all the while God sits enthroned in Heaven seeing there all that we’re doing here. And that’s because He’s hidden Himself from us, you know, considering how we’re not all that interested in life or morality or even modesty anymore. No, He’s hidden Himself from us because He knows that we don’t want to seek Him thanks to hearts having fallen victim to a world enjoying its chosen fall from Him. But He’s not hidden us from Him.

No, still He’s quite well aware of all that’s going on down here. Even told that He knows the very number of hairs upon our every head! Sees all we do. Hears all we say. Knows all we think!

But yeah, nothing to worry about, right? We’re not doing anything so wrong that He’d actually send us to hell, right? He’s a nice guy, right? He’s a big ole softy, right? He surely understands that we’re just having fun! Wouldn’t punish us for having fun now would He?

No.

No, I’m sure He’s quite fully impressed with the things we’re doing. Yeah, I’m confident that He doesn’t mind any of it. I mean, Jesus dying the cross kind of says something different. But hey, that part’s been solved right? Yeah, we can now bask in the freedom that He affords us to apparently remain idiots who act like nothing we do can ever possibly prove of any cost or consequence.

Other than the price of these decorations and their blatant declaration that we mind not a little death so long as it isn’t ours to such sin as celebrating devilry and dismemberment.

Friends, we are so far gone in the worst of all possible directions that, again, we’ve left no possible way to even pretend to be surprised when upon our exit from this life we may well not find life waiting. In fact, many here will only find He who is the Life eager to turn them away. Not that He wants to, but simply because He’s given each of us an awareness of His existence and thus the choice as to whether we live to honor Him or not.

But looking around, well, it’s clear to see that honoring God and pursuing His gift of eternal life is by far one of the least popular and thus least common things to do. Especially today.

And no, I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t have fun. Not saying that eating a truckload of candy is bad. Not even saying that we shouldn’t do things that celebrate who we are and what we enjoy in life as God has given us the ability to enjoy things and to live these lives as the individuals we are.

But I am saying that maybe we should stop and really take a good look at who we are and ask ourselves if it’s worth celebrating or just in some really bad need of a whole lot of fixing.

Because the fact is that nobody can fix what none will admit is broken. But friends, that’s just it! If we can’t look around at what the world’s become, what we’ve become and realize that it’s broken and we the same, then nor will we ever find the audacity to turn to Him and admit our failures and flaws.

And the scariest part is that He can’t forgive what we won’t confess.

Look, the bottom line is that we’ve made this mess and it is sending a message that God most certainly hears. But friends, what is that message saying? That we’re okay with celebrating death? That we don’t mind a little bit of harmless horror? That we see no problem with folks dressing like witches in churches?

Have we truly so forgotten what Jesus did to those buying and selling in the Temple? His church is supposed to be a house of prayer, and yet so too have we each turned our bodies, that are His Temple, into dens of thieves. And we’ve sold so much of ourselves to buy so much of the world that there’s not much left of who He created us to be.

And well, who He created us to be are living ghost stories told of evil men who died and were raised to life so that they could live out the rest of their days here telling others about what’s been done for them, and then the rest of forever with He who died and came back to life in order to lead the way.

Indeed, He gives us all the Holy Ghost, and yet we watch the world continue to settle for walking around as faceless sheets void of any meaning beyond that which the world has settled for.

Friends, don’t be surprised when this world continues to live as if they can’t see God. Because, well, at some point we’ve just got to understand that in light of all He’s seen, eventually that light will go out and all hope shall be gone.

That doesn’t mean that we should celebrate it. In fact, that promise should inspire us to start asking why we have.

Because again, His promises are not matters of if.

They’re just promises that end in us either with Him forever or without that hope ever again.

So be careful what you agree to take part in because there’s a whole lot going on down here that He will accept no part of.

No matter how much fun we may see so many others clearly seeming to have in their thinking they’re hidden.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold