Day 4134 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 8:13 NIV

realizes obscurity’s obsolescence

For it soon shall prove to have forever been inevitable that the God of all creation would have created a way for said creation to understand so easily the overall gravity of their having been created that there could not forever remain any vail of confusion nor uncertainty in regard to both His regard for us and so too then our need to have a similar if not shared regard for Him from whom we came thanks to His having created us to be His.

It just makes sense.

Problem is that we’ve created so many problems and pretenses that all we seem to understand now is, well, problem and pretense. For the both exist in everything that we’ve seen, assumed, considered, estimated, believed in and debated about. Everything that’s had insisted upon it the misfortune of humanity having had its hands on, it’s all now so corrupted and confusing that even something so simple as appreciation for our having been created is anymore so misconstrued that nobody seems to know what to do.

And so daily we do everything that serves to only keep us distracted from the fact that we know not what we do nor why we’re doing nor, if we’re honest (which we’re not that either), the overall goal or gain for which everything is done that we do. We just do stuff. Usually the same stuff over and over and over and over again. And that simply because it will always prove supremely easy for us to copy, mimic, replicate, reproduce, rehash, reconsider, reconfigure, even mock really that which already was.

Which has seemingly become a really strange new problem for us in that, when at first guided unto the outermost consideration of faith, the journey starts in what seems this place of laws and rules and guidelines and things that all would venture to suggest that we’re all supposed to uphold, honor, appreciate and do our very best to comprehend as part of the call is to go into all the world and share the message with whomever we happen to meet along the way.

Issue is that those we’ll meet are only those who don’t really like such things as laws and rules and guidelines and things because, well, what we’ve become is nothing short of absolutely certain that we know perfectly well what we’re doing.

Challenge will prove that our understanding of such things has long been allowed to be based upon and built within this meager measure of everything from our estimated power to the overwhelming pride which allows it alive.

In other words, we continue to think we know what we’re doing because pride will always be there to tell us that since things are going fairly well most days, we must thus be doing fairly well the same.

Thus no need for change.

Which, wouldn’t you know it, is pretty much all we’ve all longed to hear for as long as we’ve all been down here.

Where?

At the rock bottom that is our refusal to even approach anything that could even remotely resemble an honestly humble perusal of both His law and why it was given in the first place. Rather, down here where we’ve all fallen, both away from His glory and that by falling in love with our belief in our having our own, we think it all only there to hinder our freedom and tarnish our trying to always live doing only whatever it is that we want without anything, such as cost or consequence, there to get in our way.

Which is why so many here continue to consider the message of the cross to be utter foolishness.

It’s because it speaks blatantly to, and that by showing visually too, the gross detestability of whatever this has become of our humanity. It shows us perfectly the fullness of our fall thanks to our every failure to care still that He died there and too the fact of God’s full wrath being completed upon what remains in every way the very innocence that we can only ever be inside our every delusion.

And we hate all of that.

Never mind that it was done to take what was elementary and make it immeasurably simpler. Never mind that His having died erased the necessity of such things as making sacrifices every time there’s a new moon. Never mind that His having paid our debt made us square with God and thereby welcomed home by the same. Never mind that we now have no need to fear our all having to die!

No, we just loathe so deeply the sheer honesty of such clear brutality because, again, all we want to hear is that we’re killing it down here in what is the living of lives so amazing that we’re right in thinking we’re doing so well as the cross says we aren’t.

Thus it seems to be the confrontation of Calvary that remains the blinders that continue to keep most from coming to see the violent simplicity of what He accomplished in the work He’s now finished.

Rather all we can see is still the need to uphold laws, observe rules, remain then forever lost in our amazing inability to do either. And, well, as a people vastly afraid of any and all failure, not because we’re afraid of messing up but simply because we’re terrified of anyone else finding out just how often we have and how much we do, we thus avoid anything and everything that we assume we can’t do well.

And, well, as Scripture itself exists to basically testify against all of us and all we’ve done, all we do still, yeah, makes sense that we’d remain all but willfully confused as to the whole ordeal.

Problem is that, again, the God of all creation has, according to Scripture, so too created a way for all to come unto the knowledge of who Christ is and what all He did.

Thereby leaving us all nothing upon which to continue basing our blatant rejection of pretty much all of it.

No, there comes a day in which every knee will bow and there hear every single tongue begin finally to say that Christ is King and that because He is everything that we never were, never wanted to be.

And that will be as horrifying a day as many have ever had because upon that day every eye will see, finally, the amazing simplicity that faith always was in that never once did anything He ask ever rely so fully on us as the way of life we’ve come to live in its place. No, on that day we’re all going to see just how hard we made it and that compared to how easy it was supposed to be.

Only question is will we be among those few who, seeking to fit their lives through the eye of a needle, set to practicing said impossible before the impossible finally proves inevitable?

After all, that’s why He made it so easy as to require of us only belief.

And yet we can’t even manage to offer Him that!

And that simply because all it seems we’re willing, able, interested in believing in is only ourselves and all the amazing plans and hopeful dreams we have our lives. That’s all we care about. So much so that we remain obviously willing to break any rule, obliterate any law, literally rewrite human understandings in order to better justify where we’re standing and why it is that we’re so adamant to never move from it. No, we are even now a people who are daily inventing new identities for ourselves in what’s become a way of life in which we continue to try on different roles seeking the one that validates all the holes.

Not one that fills them but rather makes it seem to us okay to have them.

Both those in our souls and thus too inside our every argument still being made as to how it is that our way is better than His.

Proven again in only that we continue to win whereas the cross considers that He lost everything.

Something we see no gain in agreeing to do.

Leaving then, obscurely for now, the reality that we then stand still to lose everything we have and all thus that we are upon that day when the grave stands up and proves that it was always going to take it all away anyway.

Only with nothing left to look forward to having spent an entire lifetime living a life that looked only to what we had, who we were, where we wanted to stay so as to always be able to enjoy that ability to say that we did it our way and thus earned every ounce of whatever glory we had.

Key word had.

Because one day it will prove that we had none at all but only the replicas that we reproduced from those who refused Him before we learned from them to.

For that’s humanity’s story. That’s our apparent glory. That is the goal we’ve gained! It’s a life spent standing in the midst of strain and shame but never once able to see that both are so well known because we ourselves are the ones who are now known as those who continue to seek for them instead of seeking for Him. Simply because we apparently find it easier to find excuses and blame than the humility that’s willing to admit that the blame is on us as we’ve never once had any excuse for our having made all of this so much harder than it ever needed to be.

Literally, the entirety of humanity’s history was began in a Garden in which our only task, His only expectation was for our to enjoy and appreciate His creation as was to be undertaken in simply not doing one thing:

You shall not take from that one tree what is then the one fruit that you do not need.

Why didn’t we need it?

Because He knew that as soon as we ate it, it was all over. As soon as we had the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, we thus became responsible for said knowledge.

And too then every single time that we’d come to choose to do wrong in life.

He gave us one rule that was seeking to avoid what we all know now. That being that with more knowledge comes more grief. Maybe not right away. Maybe not even within this life!

But still, one day we will be grieved by the things we come to know as are taught, either now or later, in what is His truth as is written in His law, a law we’ve all failed to uphold, but so too in His Son who came to fulfill our every past failure so as to redeem us from our flaws and refusals and open to us the way by which we could again be made right.

Jesus died to put the fruit back on the tree and calls us all now to know only He and all He did for you and me.

Can’t even offer Him that, can we?

No, because we’re now so affixed to the laws and the rules and expectations, the religion we made of it, that we can’t see Him without it. We can’t believe in Him without some list of things we need to accomplish along the way. We can’t comprehend the simplicity of salvation nor then the simplicity of His asking us to simply trust Him enough to listen whenever He says repent. To go and sin no more.

A kindness offered all of us because He came not to condemn the world but rather to save the world from our chosen, yes, chosen condemnation!

Because we’re the ones who chose to take the fruit that beget the responsibility to uphold His call to be holy. Something we didn’t even need to know about before because there was no separation prior.

Now that’s all we have.

Separation. Confusion. Misunderstanding. Ongoing rebellion. It’s all we know.

And that even though Jesus came to be the Way by which we can all be saved.

Indeed, within the Bible we read that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13. Something echoed in that entirely well-known John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Something itself echoed in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Which itself proves that there is nothing we need to do as grace is a gift meant to save us from our sins, something then given freely from He who determined to give it!

Something itself considered necessary thanks to such verses as Romans 3:20: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”

It all adds up to His showing us that He knows we messed up, and that so badly that we’re now so very confused that He determined to do what we couldn’t and honestly knew we wouldn’t even if we could.

He died to sin.

Denied Himself the very ability to live and instead chose to be brutally tortured so as to prove that those who suffer in the body are indeed done with the sin that causes all such suffering.

Either way, the suffering comes!

Salvation is offered to ensure that we come through it. Not unscathed. Not unharmed. Not unchanged.

The new covenant made in Jesus Christ’s name offers us the promise of eternal life.

And that only if we do change. If we do turn from our sins. If we do turn toward the Son and never once ever again dare imagine turning away. Because why would we? He made it all so unimaginably simple!

Why do we still make it so hard?

Friends, what Christ offers us is clarity. He tore the veil and welcomed us back into communion with God in doing so. His death makes us right in His eyes. His blood washes clean. His suffering, His sacrifice, the loss of His life, it brings life back to us and us back to life. All because He fulfilled the old covenant, offered the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. He finished the work that we couldn’t do!

All we need to do now is simply believe in Him. Trust in Him. Call on Him. Lean on Him. Look to Him.

Love Him!

That’s it!

All the old rules about what to eat and what not eat, what to wear and what not to wear, how to cut your hair and set up the Temple, it’s all ended. It’s over. It’s finished!

Because it was only there to try and guide us to the place that Christ has already gone: The end of us and our sinfulness.

All of that is finished now. And all then that’s left is for us to follow Him. But again, we’ve even managed to make that so confusing that there are an estimated 40-50,000 different Christian denominations around the world. Each of which have then some at least slightly different approach to what remains a path said to be so very narrow that we cannot walk it!

And yet still we’re trying!

Friends, what I think we need to understand is the point and purpose of obsolescence. It refers to something which existed at one time, perhaps still does, that has since been replaced by something that works better. Take my phone for example. I’m still rocking an iphone 7 that is now so old that it won’t run most apps and is heading toward the end of its run if I’m being honest (got me a flip phone ready and waiting for when it dies out). That phone, both actually, are now vastly considered obsolete. Do they still work? Yeah. Are there newer, fancier versions that work better? Also yes.

The difference is that we’re now a people who just completely think we have to get rid of everything old as soon as something we deem better or fancier comes around.

And we’ve sadly seemingly taken an approach to faith in the same way that’s led then to a kind of confusion that has left us all entirely uncertain as to what to believe and what we don’t need to worry about anymore.

What I’m getting at is that the old covenant still has some good use. The Ten Commandments for example, all ten of them are good things that we would do well by upholding.

What’s changed is that they’re not the goal anymore. Are the helpful? Yeah. Can they aid in our living of better lives as thus better people? Absolutely.

But the thing is that faith isn’t about the rules, the rules are about the faith.

Do you get what I’m saying?

It’s that we get so lost trying to make sense of everything we don’t understand that we end up only coming up with all sorts of ways to make it even more confusing. At the end of the day, the coming end of all our days spent here, what will matter is whether or not we knew Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Will doing so help us to live better lives as better people? Yes. Will following His perfect example accomplish our upholding His will and Law? Yes.

But He is the goal because He is the fulfillment of the New Covenant. Not that the old one was meaningless or without merit. We just couldn’t uphold it. We continued to fail it. We continue to fail it!

Thus He came to do what we couldn’t and/or wouldn’t in laying down His life to pave the way into the grave wherein every promise He’s given us is waiting for us. Not to do all the things we think we’re supposed to. Not to learn all the right words to all the right prayers. Not to figure out how to go about living some perfect life.

He did that.

All that’s left for us to do is to believe that He did.

Everything else is obsolete. It’s fading. It’s nearing its inevitable end.

And it will all be forever ended just as soon as we leave this earth.

Let us be done with it now then. Let us spend out the rest of our days focused on Him. Serving Him. Sharing Him. Honoring Him however He helps us to see that we can.

Because change is coming whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or not.

The point of this life is for our to get ready.

And the only way to get ready is to surrender our need to know, understand or control everything and simply step back and let Him be God while we learn to just be His.

However simple we determine to see that isn’t or is.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold