Day 3946 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV

The unknown

It’s oddly enough a place known now by all as Calvary whereupon a scene was shown of a life that had known nothing of what it was paying the price as if it had known plenty. No, Christ is He who knew no sin having not sinned and thus fallen not a step short of the glory of God. Rather our Savior is our Savior because He came from the Father to honor the same, a feat accomplished in God having chosen prior to make perfectly clear that Jesus was His Son and of Him was He pleased.

Indeed, Christ came to live a perfect life, one so spotless that even His bloody end left only purity in its wake.

But alas, for only those who live now the life they too hadn’t known before the cross became our home.

Or at least it’s now the house of the only hope we have of what is that life that we’ve yet to live and thus yet to lose. It’s that life as is to be lived as all of life was at first intended. Forever. I mean, logic has to still have some basis in reality, even if not within our fallen version. And, well, logically, it just doesn’t make any sense for God to make all of life for all of life to end.

Who would do that?

Speaking personally, everything I’ve ever sat out to do or be or accomplish or see, I wanted it all to last for as long as possible. Such seems the baser reality of, well, reality. Granted, we’ve since become of such substance as planned-obsolescence, a rather commercial concern aimed at protecting the bottom line by all but forcing consumers to keep coming back. But still, outside of that, no, the general approach to creation seems logically based and thus perfectly interested in the very existence of that which is created.

That’s all a fancy way of simply trying to say that God wouldn’t be the God I understand Him to be, a God of both love and life combined so perfectly one night that night became day and He became the Way who came to save me and you from what’s always been no way to live a life.

Because I can’t for the life of me even begin to understand why He would create all that is with only the intent of it eventually becoming only all that is no more.

Why not just skip all the effort and anger, effort on His part and anger caused by ours?

No, it’s clear to me that He created us to be alive, a fact proven in how we were made in His image and He is still the Living One. And so too then that the life for which He created us was to be then the same as that which He lives, which is lived beyond the limits of time, space and other similar measures of our existence. Because indeed, He is the Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.

Thus since He has no beginning as in Him and for Him and through Him all that is created was created, He then has no end either as He which wasn’t created cannot then uncreate Himself as a house so divided cannot stand.

Meaning then that this house we’ve built of these lives we’ve lived that have for centuries stood against Him as is evidenced in our living in what are still ways that are the very walking antithesis to the life He walked amongst us, well this just proves that one side will win and one side will not.

I’ll let you guess which.

Thankfully this is something He never intended to leave that up to a fallen intuition. No, rather He again came in the clarity of Christ who lived here a life that is as historically verified as any other that was ever. Indeed, the existence of Christ is something for which there is beyond enough evidence to accomplish at least in us a halfhearted willingness to be at least somewhat curious as to the plausibility of what He said was His Word really says.

Which it has a lot to say if you’ve not read it yet.

I mean, I’ve literally been talking about it every day for over 10 years in these here posts. And somehow, despite the millions of words I’ve had the privilege of writing in regard to His Word as written for our benefit of everything from life to the wisdom needed to live one right, I find I have still as much I feel I need to say as I did ever before.

For it does turn out that His Word remains alive and active, and yeah, it’s still slicing me up in ways I learn to love more and more as time fades away.

Why?

Because it’s new. And yes, you read that right. His Word is new. I don’t know how many times I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover, handful at least, but every time I do I seem to catch something new. I read something I don’t remember having read before. I feel a movement that I never felt. I experience this constant shifting thanks to the words He’s written and these they have me writing.

It’s life-giving.

And I say this because this life I’m living is new.

And yes, I say that at now under a month away from 38.

But who I am today is new in so many ways that I can say with every ounce of humble honesty that I can possibly offer I would have never found or felt if this were truly as up to me and about me as I, and you, we have long thought it to be.

Because I know that life. I know all about who I’ve been. I know at least plenty enough of all I’ve done to admit now that I shouldn’t have done a fair majority of it. Indeed, I am, somehow, of the humility to confess that I have in fact sinned. For I have in fact known often the right thing to do only to have done what I now cannot even begin to imagine having that audacity to.

Perhaps I might paint a picture:

There was a time in my life, and yours too I’d imagine, when I was 18-19, somewhere in there. I had just graduated high school, with honors actually, and I was being then sent out into what was a world of which I was familiar but not quite in the sort of unbridled limitlessness of what was an open schedule and no tests to study for or homework to get done on time.

No, I was going into life on my own all but completely blind.

And what did I find? Or, rather what did the world find of the life I found?

A thief.

Indeed, I don’t know that I’ve ever told anyone this before. But there was a time in my life, don’t remember how long but I’d say a year or so if not more, in which I was a thief. I stole things. Took things not my own. Because growing up I was always a kid who collected things, sports mostly. And so, when I look up all of the sudden and don’t have a class to go to or a paper to write but do have a truck to drive and time to kill, I have then all of the sudden the ability to go do whatever I want to.

And yet, as a collector, I wanted to have things. I wanted new things. I wanted so many things that, being a kid without a ton of money, I needed to find some way of having anyway.

And, well, what better way than a five-finger discount?

And it worked.

I would go to the sports card stores, Walmart or whatever, and I would pocket what I wanted. Ended up with a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise had the means to have. And it satisfied the emptiness inside, at least for a while.

Then I got caught. Red-handed, jacket pockets full.

Busted.

It was in every way one of the very scariest moments in all my life up until then and ever since. Because you see, growing up I always tried to be the good kid. I tried to make my family proud. Tried to impress my teachers and get good grades. I wanted to be someone that others valued and appreciated and again were just proud of. And so I’d never gotten into trouble. I mean I can literally count on both hands at most the number of times I got spanked, sent to principle and pulled over all combined together.

I have always tried to do what was right.

And yet here I find myself in a card shop on the north side of the city we lived in awaiting what I could only imagine would be sirens and handcuffs and a very hard call to my parents.

Instead I got what became one of the biggest miracles I’ve ever been given.

The manager simply asked that I never come back.

And I didn’t.

Not just to that store but nor to that life. I never went back. In that moment, that drive home with hands shaking, I was given the chance I didn’t deserve in light of what I’d been doing to realize that what I was doing was nothing that should be done by the kind of person I’d always tried to be.

I hear the same request every time I see the cross. “Never come back.”

“Leave the life you’ve been living and don’t come back for it.”

“Never go back.”

“Go and sin no more.”

What love is that?

That God, like that manager who saw me doing what I shouldn’t have ever chosen to do, that He’s see it all and chose instead of letting me hang where He did, He instead chose to not only forgive me but to hang where I should have.

You know my friends, I can write one of these posts every day that I have left with the same hope I’ve always had for them, that they find whoever needs them and that they send them to Him, and I will unless He tells me to stop. But I can do this every day and still know that I can never find any way to say just how incredible this story really is.

Because I was a thief. I’ve been a liar. I’ve been a cheat. I’ve been a coward. I’ve been addicted to filthy images on a screen. I’ve spoken in a language filled with foulness that I now cannot stand the taste or sound of. I’ve been a glutton. I’ve been unwilling to work. I’ve been unwilling to help. I’ve known so much selfishness and arrogance and pride that I still sometimes find that I have plenty of work still to go.

That is the life that I know I’ve known.

Jesus never did any of that.

He literally walked this world every day He was here healing the sick, helping the poor, caring for the lost as were placed into His trust. And He upheld it. He carried out the task for which He had came.

And He came to save.

The blind from blindness. The deaf from deafness. The dead from staying lifeless!

And we’re all all of this!

Because we have been blind to the truth in what have been lives lived in lies that we chose to buy. We’ve been deaf in heads and hearts unwilling to hear the Word that wants only to set such captives free. And yes, we have all been dead in our trespasses and sins.

For the wage of sin is death, and looking back, I’m just surprised that I’m not dead yet.

And indeed, never told anyone this either, but I never imagined that I’d be around that long. I see all these stories regarding the life expectancies of those in this place and I’ve always kind of almost laughed at them as I had, have no plans on being here that long. Just the other day I mentioned in another post how the current average lifespan of a male in these disunited states is 75.8 years, meaning then that at 37.9, I am literally, apparently, halfway.

That I’ve been here almost 38 years surprises the life out of me!

And yet I see it now as only that God’s not done with me.

That He still has more for me to do, to see, to be. And thus that there’s still life I’ve not known. And thanks to the Word, I wonder only what all of it has to do with my finally finding the freedom I’ve never known in my letting go of things I’m doing still that I shouldn’t be.

Indeed, I am one of the freaks who wants to change. I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to know the better parts of life that I haven’t yet. And I also know that that means my letting go of what I’ve always thought was good enough. Of no longer doing some of what I had, have no plans of stopping. To welcome whatever He asks knowing that He asks only because He knows better than I do.

A fact I find in a faith that knows that He’s the One who knew no sin and yet died as if He did.

A gift which brings renewed hope every breath of every day because that seems to say that since He became what He didn’t know, so too can I become what my past says I haven’t known.

Friends, that means that I don’t have to be a thief anymore. That I don’t have to lie anymore. That I don’t have to give time anymore to a cell phone showing me images I now hate the very thought of actually existing.

He changes everything, and for the better every single time.

My only fear is that you, whoever is reading this, that you’ll never know what He wants to do for you. Because, as we’ve been talking, we so often see it as the losses. We see the cross as the reminder of the leaving behind of the life we’ve known. And we worry of that. We hesitate because, well, we’ve enjoyed the life we’ve lived. Enjoyed it a lot perhaps.

But friends, as good as the past may have been, and trust me, dabbles in criminality aside, I’ve had an amazing life. But my point is that it doesn’t have to be so blended, good and bad, right and wrong. No, in Him there is no such darkness, no doubt, no fear, no worry, nothing of anything heavy at all. He is light. He is love. He is mercy.

And friends, we need only know that He who knew no sin became sin for us to know that He has plans for us that thus do not entail the death we deserve.

So what then are we waiting for or still running from?

Yeah, He should be angry. Bible tells us He is. He should hate us because of our sins. Bible says He does. He should unleash the fullness of His wrath upon this sinful flesh that all of us, yes, all of us have lived to please rather than trying to please, honor, serve, glorify Him.

Bible says He did.

On Jesus.

Friends, that’s the Gospel. It’s that God loves us all so much that He sent Jesus to die for us, but even more than that, that because He is Jesus and Jesus is Him, He came to die for us. The God who created us, the same as which defines sin, the same then as which determines the debt sin owes, He is the very same as which offers to pay that debt and set us free then from owing it.

Jesus came to take all of the hatred, all of the wrath, the full weight of God’s justified vengeance, all so that we’d not have to endure what He both knows we deserve yet knows too we couldn’t survive.

Thus God’s capacity for mercy is greater even than His ability to punish.

Sit with that for a second.

Please.

His capacity for mercy is greater even than His ability to punish.

Because He loves us.

Why then do we not love Him if not only because that’s the only life we’ve known?

Friends, that’s why He calls us to let it go, to leave it behind, to take up our crosses and nail upon them every one of the losses found in our coming to find yet another sin that’s been allowed to live in our lives. For that is what crosses do. They merely kill that which doesn’t deserve to live as is decided by whomever feels it within their power to so determine that which is right and that which is wrong.

God has that power, that ability, that authority to determine what is right and thus what all is not. And He too then has the authority to determine what is owed for every wrong turn taken.

And yet He chooses to forgive because His wrath has now been satisfied in Christ on that cross.

And all He asks is that we take up our own and carry them with us so that we too will have something to crucify all that is in our lives that He will lovingly help us learn should not be there.

That’s all He asks.

He took care of the rest.

I will never stop being amazed that Jesus endured the punishment for sins He didn’t know, mistakes He didn’t make, failures He never chose, all so that I too could now, in Him, come to live the life I know I too have never known.

It’s just that I know that I’ve known a life of sin, mistakes, failures and the like.

That means that in Him I get to find myself living the life of a righteous child of God. Not because of anything I’ve ever done or have the ability to do now. No, it is all because of Jesus.

He died to free us unto the leaving behind of the life we’ve known so that we can, in Him, find the life we haven’t lived.

Please do not miss this opportunity to step into the unknown.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold