Day 3943 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 5:19 NIV

Undone

As much is what the Son has done both for all of us but for only those who themselves are inclined as to their own lives entwined within His plan to unwind all we’ve elsewise sought to win within what’s been a life now both done in and yet undone thanks to faith having become what is a new life that we’ve not lived as is aimed in that One Way we’ve not gone. At least not far enough to know enough to measure up to our knowing with certainty what all we’re doing.

Because as they didn’t then, nor do we now.

For that is the great irony of humanity. It’s this self-assumed ideal in which our ideas are something akin to these self-perceived building blocks capable of breaking locks to what then remains a world we know entirely too much of having known already more than plenty of the same. Such is the way called our own. It’s merely an unrinsed repetition of pasts passed but sadly not away as they’re seen still in so many ways inside so many days in which we do so little of His everything new.

All because we’ve become a people of sight-based belief, leaving us then only to remain all that either we or another already was. Simply because it’s inarguably easier for us to emulate what has already been proven to placate what is a selfishness both perfected and yet still perfecting what are plans for paths without pain or price.

All because we’re quite perfectly ill-prepared to prove ourselves willing to offer the either to, well, anything really.

No, truth be told it doesn’t even matter what the matter may matter as if it means any clatter or tatter then we’ll simply not try. Why? Because we still believe in a life of ease. We seek incessantly these paths of both least and then even lesser resistance, all of them thus aiming us at only whatever already was as such will forever be by far the easiest thing to become.

Just a person remained.

Such is truly the grandest of all hope held within this ideal that is our way. It’s just to stay. To try just long enough and just hard enough to finally find a place that mostly measures up to whatever happens to be our understanding of good enough as determined always against what all it would ask should we venture even just a little further.

No, for as it turns out further is always harder.

Unless it’s aimed into the past that is.

And so that is where we seem aimed here inside what is a life in which we’re all walking testimonies to that old adage which posits that the past is probably to be repeated by those who leave in it all the lessons it could have helped us learn otherwise unlearned. Yes, those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it and those who do know history are destined to watch others repeat it.

Either way it’s quite the stomach-turning horror show.

Simply because we know already what all happened. It’s been proven. It’s literally finished, expect those aspects or intrigues that we refuse to let go. Which is sadly what defines most of what it seems we know, which is both little of the past and little of the present and thus little of the better that we could have been tomorrow had we not been so foolish as to find this day worthy of nothing more than rehashing the day before.

But even then only the parts easiest enough for us to wrap our minds around.

Leaving then still mostly unconsidered those many made in mayhem and misery. Because those are quite obviously the ones we never ourselves wish to repeat. And so we give them no seat here at what is a banquet of blinded belief sat next to the obtuse optometrists that botched the procedure to begin with. Liars who just so happen to be the very same we’ll always turn to next time we feel as though we need advice but wish to find only the kind which allows us to remain unchanged in life.

For that is all we think we need to become:

Just more of nothing new.

And granted, this seems to stand to reason what with all this apparent perfection we’ve all managed to achieve in what are lives both just getting started and yet pretty much already over. That is why we quit so often, isn’t it? Because we’ve already found it? It here being whatever we were either looking for or forward to becoming? No other reason to stop looking for something of the everything better that we can, at least here, all still always be.

Indeed, we seem a people so wonderful at living life that we’ve elsewise began giving our remaining time unto the production of such idiocies as, say, artificial intelligence.

Doesn’t just the name alone strike anyone else as at least arguably ironic?

Artificial intelligence? Fake smarts? Crafted competency? A man-made acumen? Come on, that last one’s gotta get you! For acumen is defined as the “ability to make quick decisions and good judgements”. And, granted, seems these computers we see society leaning upon so heavily are pretty good at “thinking” quick.

Just not quite so sure we should be so quick to always trust some machine to make good judgements.

Especially when the machines themselves are programmed by humans who’ve, let’s say, not the greatest fountain of evidence from which to pull something that says we’re good at making good judgements. If anything it’s more of a sewer water treatment pond.

At least it smells the same.

Alas, you’d never really know that if you just looked at how pleased and impressed we are with our always doing never really anything new. Sure, there’s some degree of technological advancement seen inside such examples as the ai we’re using for today. I mean, folks a thousand years ago couldn’t turn to computers to do their thinking. They didn’t have cars they wanted to become self-driving. Didn’t even have floors that needed robotic vacuums.

So yeah, maybe we do have a lot to be this proud of.

Doesn’t change that it’s most only plastic nor then that we’re arguably less alive than those who merely trusted in other humans as opposed to factories compromised of what are literally only the same.

Indeed, it’s funny just how much we’re willing to trust other people, especially those who make the fancy shiny things that do all our chores for us.

And yet we remain remarkably unwilling to trust in the One person who chose to do our dying for us.

Guess that’s simply because we still seem to mostly believe we don’t deserve to endure such a price to life as charged solely because of how we’ve all chosen to individually live it in what is a singular way defined by and thus as sin. Something that our arrogance and ego simply will not ever agree we’re living in. No, because we seem to be doing so good at this living of life.

We even have remotes for our lights!

What then do we deserve to endure of a sound teaching that sounds so bad simply because of the brutal honesty which makes it sound? Sound here referring to something which is assured. Certain. Evident and thus proven. Yes, we do hate those many things which we can’t elsewise disprove. Leaving us to mostly only seek forever whatever reason/excuse we may come up with to simply ignore them.

Itching ears still our favorite.

Because they incline us back toward the lies that tell us such rubbish as how well we’re doing, how brave we are, how inspirational we’ve become and how much influence we have. Affirmations all aimed from the very same mouth which spoke that first lie to that first life that chose to buy the belief in the hope of something seen as believed without the caution to count the potential cost. All because all they heard is that surely they wouldn’t die.

Guess then that means that Adam and Eve are still alive somewhere around here in what’s been allowed to become something less of a garden all the time.

Except for the weeds which continue to grow in our minds.

Sadly said produce provides such a wonderful bounty of misplaced belief that we anymore worry not about where it’s placed nor the place it will prove to provide as an eternal resting facility.

Or one with a potential lack thereof.

Rest, that is.

After all, how can one enter into something that they’ve already been living in? How can we move on to our reward when the “move” seems to indicate a leaving behind of what then already is? Yes, how can we move on to our reward when we’re still living lives so filled and thus apparently fulfilled by the many rewards we worry ourselves weary at the thought of having to leave behind or, and maybe even worse, never known?

Indeed, all of us have still so many ideas to chase and plans to make and accomplishments to accomplish and achievements to achieve.

What then is this about our having to leave? And that simply because some guy came to go where we’ve never really known to start getting ourselves ready to visit? And that because we live a life in which every such trip involves always the return ticket with then the express understanding that wherever we go is nowhere we plan on staying as, well, we’ve a life to get to back to living.

Yes, we are so stubbornly assured that what this is a life we can’t afford to leave or leave elsewise undone before we do one day that we just stay stuck within this way in which we boast all about how our way is what we think best for our chance to help us find this best life that everyone else is also looking for in what remains the one place that every life has to end.

Yeah, nothing at all about any of that that should ever cause anyone to ever stop to ask any questions at all.

Except that it speaks to our tendency unto obedience as is, in truth, a necessity in life. Indeed, all of us are walking in obedience to something, someone. For all of us are following something, someone. All of us are seeking to emulate someone via our doing something that they did before we did. All of us are buying stuff that someone else made in their belief that it mattered. All of us are speaking a language written in rules that we’re supposed to follow simply because someone somewhere at some point decided that ain’t ain’t a word.

Indeed, all of us are walking according to some set of standards or expectations.

Question then is both whose and for whom and what for and where to?

Yes, where are we going as is determined by what we’re doing and just how much of it is anything new as is so easily surmised through merely opened eyes and willing minds willing to imagine that we don’t already have it all all figured out?

Can you imagine what all in life, of life could change, would change were we of the ability to believe that we knew nothing of everything better that, in humility, we could imagine we could always become?

Is that not why Christ came? Is that not why it deemed foolish to ask such questions as why the past was better than the present? Is not nostalgia merely a symptom a life unable to measure up to even that slightly improved mundanity we once thought every day to be? None of us knew growing up that the world would become this smoldering quicksand bog that it’s become. And so we never knew to appreciate as much then as we do now what seemed normal then.

For we’d have never had any reason at all to think that things would get worse.

Because worse is never something we set out to find or become.

But it turns out that becoming better just takes so much constant effort that nor is improvement anything we shoot for anymore.

Except when it comes to technology because we seem so endlessly fascinated with machines running and ruining our lives.

Every face we pass in the streets, in the store, at work, at home, they’re all fastened to screens, each showing a scene of some sort of sin be it pornography or common comparison. And yet we change nothing other than the very rules and laws which once existed to inspire us unto a better direction. No, these days weed is legal and gambling too.

I hate to think of what illegality may become the next app on our phone.

But it will come to pass that every line we once drew is one only crossed in the name of liberty and happiness and pleasure and whatever other worthless pursuit we think we actually need public approval and agreement to find.

Truth is that we need nothing more for such gifts as liberty and happiness than knowing the Name that sat us free from our many chosen slaveries to such things as society and the swollen bellies of those we believe able to live better than we.

But instead we wear their jerseys and collect their autographs and plaster our bumpers with their political stickers so that we feel as if we belong to something that is then nothing more than the very pot we’ve created of the very same dust from which we were taken.

Idols made of everything.

That’s what we’re doing. First it was fruit. Next it was produce again as offered by two brothers competing for a blessing. Then it was a golden cow. Then it was language being used to build a tower to prove we could rival God. Then a birthright traded for some stew because it didn’t matter at the time. Then a collection of legal ideas that some held higher than He who wrote them. Then it was coins as debated as to whom they were owed. Then it was arrogance that was just certain nobody could rise from the dead.

Now we’re right back to worshipping fruit again as held in the palm of our hand created with an apple missing a bite as the logo emblazoned thereon.

Yeah, we’re a people of progress!

Only problem is that it is indeed from bad to worse as promised within the Word which spoke too that He came to save us from repeating the very past that has found humanity always choosing to worry about what we don’t have, think we might need, know we definitely want and never just being thankful for the promises and provision we’re given.

Because it’s never enough. Just like the Garden of Eden wasn’t quite up to their culinary curiosity, thus leaving Adam and Eve to crave the fruit of that tree. God parting seas and going both before and behind in pillars of cloud and fire didn’t meet the desires of the people to have something tangible to praise, inspiring Aaron to make a golden calf. Manna didn’t please the palate enough, and so the same people yelled at God until He gave them meat.

The empty tomb still not enough and so still we eat from what is a buffet of every worldly deceit imaginable.

All because we refuse to become anything other than whatever we’ve already been. Simply because it’s easier to never change and find ways to doubt the improvements we could have met than it is to face down our inabilities and insecurities and find out for sure where our potential really is.

We don’t care anymore.

Don’t know that any of us ever did.

For if we did then we’d know both why He died and understand why He would. We’d understand that He needed to because, well, like with many other things in life, we can’t afford to. Because we only get one life and thus only get one death and yet have lived our lives in such a way that God has no reason to bring us back to what He knows would prove only another forsaken existence like the one we’ve proven time and again that we, like pigs, are entirely happy to return to.

Yes, we have shown Him so little who showed us the way to life. Our backs mostly as we turn daily away back into the ways in which we’ve always walked what is a life in which we talk about how great we are at living what we refuse to accept is a debt owed because of sin chose.

Indeed, we are good at dying as we do it every single time that we incline back toward the sinful ways left behind by those who’ve walked them before.

All because it’s again easier for us to do what the one man started, a pattern all of us have repeated, than to do the kind of something new that Jesus came to do to the very tune of laying down the sinful flesh and living from there on to please only the Spirit.

Can you imagine it?

That audacity to believe in God so very deeply that we delight to die to whoever and whatever we’ve become in the trust that doing so would finally rid us of all that we were never meant to be?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that here inside a world that’s so afraid of changing anything, I’m only terrified of remaining anything. Because I know who I’ve been. I know what I’ve done. And the scary part is that I know I’ve probably forgotten the worst of both out of my share of this common search for self-protection. But I know that God hasn’t forgotten any of all He’s seen.

He knows my very worst.

Yet He offers still to see me, to judge me according to Christ’s very best.

How can that be?

Yeah, it seems entirely too good to be to true because, well, a people like me and you, no, we don’t deserve forgiveness. We don’t deserve life, not considering how we’ve so misused it in the past. We don’t deserve anything other than the death we owe for these wasted lives we’ve lived.

But He offers us something else!

He offers us life, and that promised forever in that place where peace and rest are eternally assured and already accomplished.

But friends, again, from what can we rest if we never do anything? What peace can we know if we’ve known no war against which to compare it?

No, only warriors can choose peace.

All others must beg for it.

Don’t continue living life in such a way that will leave you begging for mercy. Rather start seeking it now and showing Him you feel it found in what is a life changed in so many ways that even your own name doesn’t matter to you anymore.

For there remains no other as only through the One Man does salvation come because the same One Man died in order to put an end to what came from the one man we come from and have shown we do every day thus far.

Yes, let us not live to continue repeating the mistakes made already but to instead magnify the mercy that took our place and saved our souls in doing so.

Indeed, my friends the cross should leave us undone as it should help us see how badly we’ve messed up and now must wish we could undo so much of what we have done.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold