Day 4223 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 5:6 NIV

In due time

If only we knew when due time was then perhaps we could understand what due time does. But the sad truth is that we can’t and so then odds are we won’t and that simply because something to be done in due time is a time defined as when it’s due. It’s when something is ready to be done. It’s when the situations and circumstances have either resolved or dissolved into a perfect opportunity for that which is to be done to be done unto the best of its possible meaning. For the reality is that nothing much can mean much unless and until we’re arrived at that time in which the meaning is so obvious that we can’t miss it anymore.

Problem is we continue to miss it more and more.

And this is truly a confusing predicament in which we find ourselves for the reality is that, while perhaps not all of us, the vast majority of us have heard of the Gospel. And, if even we’ve not heard the entirety of the story, nor then have much if any ability unto the consideration as to the meaning, then we’ve most of us at the very least heard the Name of Christ. And yet when we look around we see nothing much coming of it in life. Rather most things remain basically everything other than what He claimed to have came to accomplish.

For He told us that He came to make all things new.

Guess maybe we just don’t really see ourselves as things.

And granted, I can see some reasonability to that, some rationality perhaps. For true, we are people as opposed to possessions. And, well, things are things that people possess. Things are thing that people have or wish to have. Things are things that people consider beneath them, in need of them either wanting or wishing not to have anything to do with. The entirety of life itself as is being daily lived around us is all but defined by things.

And we’re the people who use them, need them, eat them, wear them, do them, hold them, have them, contemplate them, confuse them, lose them, find them, feel them. Things accomplish for us so many things that the entire concept of things basically encompasses all of life as we’ve come to know it.

But, wouldn’t you know it, we don’t see ourselves as things but rather as people.

And maybe this is what’s causing us to miss the whole point of His having come to die in our place.

It’s that, while people, what we’d really become were things. We’d became possessions possessed by those who wish to possess us, namely the devil. And this happened because our eyes happened upon this ability to recognize all these other things in life that looked good, sounded good, felt good. And, trying as always to keep all of everything as simple as possible, we all became of the confidence that whatever looked good, sounded good, felt good was probably then just that.

That it was good.

And that’s where things usually go bad.

Why?

Because good and bad have become a lie. Now I’m not talking about the real iterations of either as good and evil are still very real and utterly distinct from one another. No, I’m talking about our own little versions of them that have been defined either by us or perhaps even for us by those around us who have themselves their own priorities and opinions which form for them the basis of whatever it is that they choose to believe.

And, well, one thing that we all share in common is this belief that anything that looks, sounds, feels, seems in any way good must then be, at worst, fairly harmless and, at best, indeed good. And this overly simplistic boiling down of such pivotal matters has become for us an ability to skew or misconstrue basically anything in order to make it seem as though that which we desire is just fine to desire.

Indeed, we’re all down here just bending the rules so as to keep us from seeing how broken we are.

All because we don’t want to see how wrong we are to have found so much self-perceived goodness or purpose or worth or wisdom within all the varied places and propositions that we have. All because, well, it’s not much fun to sit with the realization that you’ve pretty much only gotten basically everything wrong.

It’s quite the gut-punch.

And, well, that’s just not something that any of us are ever looking for. Instead what we all continue looking for is a good life. A fun life. A successful life. An enjoyable life. A pleasurable life.

Yes, we’re all down here trying to squeeze every drop of anything even remotely decent or interesting or exciting or satisfying out of what is a world that is dead and dying.

And we simply don’t want to admit we can sometimes feel the futility in that.

And so we all continue to still wake up every single day with hearts ready and willing to run right back to the race that all of life has become in this place. Truly, every single one of us still give so much time to things that only detract or subtract or distract from life that one day we’re likely to find that we’ve never really lived a life at all. All while always thinking we were.

All because technically we are, but you see, the problem is proven in what we’re living for.

And this is where the whole idea of “in due time” starts to make sense.

It’s in the realization that, again, something can only really matter whenever the situation has arrived at the point in which the meaning is no longer missable. Or, to put it another way, something can only matter whenever we’re left without the ability to think it doesn’t.

And I believe this is proven best in both how and when Jesus died on that cross.

For it was endured at a time in which all of mankind had become so convinced that they’d figured out life as they were living it always high on everything this world has to offer. Money, fame, power, it was all ripe for the taking. Kings and kingdoms and each and every person well able to consider that they were the former ruling over the latter.

Sound familiar?

It should because it’s still the same exact way that we all still live today. All of us are so easily lost in this idea that we know what we’re doing, that we’re right in doing it, and that we’re so good at doing it that it must then be what we’re supposed to do and we’ve thus then every right to do it. Indeed, we’re still a people so utterly prideful that we now literally have festivals in which we celebrate our lofty and still rising opinions of ourselves and our lives.

They had them back then too, just that now we have the evening news which broadcasts our celebrations to other nations unto the risk of inspiring them to devolve along with us.

And that into what’s rapidly becoming a society so rabid that it’s almost not safe to go outside anymore. For out there is where everything is that’s everything we shouldn’t be.

Problem there is that it’s not safe to stay inside either as there is where we stay surrounded by all of the things that we’ve come to consider as those things that matter most in life. And so either way the sad reality is that we’re all utterly surrounded by a world drowning in this idea that we’re all kings and queens of little kingdoms that we must then retain our rule over.

Meaning then that the time is again ripe for the harvest of the hopeless all because the hopeless are only such because they’ve both forgotten what hope is and why it’s then something that we can’t have here.

All because everyone continues to hope in only things had here in what is the one place in which time is running out for our to have them.

Which is why He called us to go and sell all we have and to become fools unto the ways of this world so that we might become wise unto the way of this world.

Fools as in those who both don’t seek to understand what the world does and are thus considered fools by those who continue to do as the world does and then wise as in to the cunning and craftiness of those worldly ways that have indeed sullied us, soiled us.

In other words He calls us to come apart from the world and to have nothing more to do with all this world does. And that all because due time has come yet again as, well my friends, it’s becoming clearer all the time the difference between wrong and right. And that all because this world is growing darker all the time and that gives us then an easier ability to more easily see the discrepancy between the wicked way in which we’ve lived and the better way that He literally had to die for us to even realize we both could and thus should.

Yes, that Christ had to die on a cross proves just how lost we all were.

That many still live as if He never did only shows how lost many still are.

Question is how much time do we have left before due time is done and we’ve no time left at all?

Again, looking around as the state of our world and namely our many societies within it, I think it’s fairly safe to say that we’re, while not there yet, as close as we’ve ever been. And that because there are things being done today that I cannot imagine God will continue to tolerate. There’s here so much ungodliness, unholiness, unrighteousness, indecency, immodesty, dishonesty, darkness and depravity that He may well be getting ready once more to come down and show this world once and for all the unmoving difference between good and bad, right and wrong, dark and light, death and life.

And the problem is that He’s promised that He will do so but one more time.

When?

That’s the struggle, isn’t it? It’s that we don’t know. We have no idea when the time will come due for His to come back. All we know, or at least have been told, is that when He does that it is done. And by it I mean everything. Yep, when Christ returns it’s going to be unto the sealing of the eternal fate of literally everyone who’s ever lived. He’s coming back to, according to His words, give everyone whatever it is that they deserve in light of deeds done.

Which you would think that promise would inspire us to spend some time considering what all it is that we’re doing and why.

But no.

No, instead we all just keep doing the same things over and over again as if we’ve, again, got life all figured out and we’re thus so good at living it that whatever it is that we’re doing with it, to it, in it is all perfectly justifiable if not, as pride contends, completely commendable.

But is it?

Well, I guess we’ll find out in due time. But the issue by then is that He’s already come the first time and that cross still stands for everything it stood for back when He carried it up that hill and died upon it.

And what does it stand for?

Mercy. Grace. Forgiveness. Freedom. Salvation. Hope. Humility. Honesty. Modesty. Meaning. Majesty. Purpose. Truth. Righteousness. Morality.

Life mostly.

Strange, isn’t it? That something designed to inflict death has managed to become that which gives life?

Yeah, He has this thing about turning things on their head. So much so that He came to do just that with every life ever lived. Why? Because our lives, contrary to the cross, have found us either standing for or standing with or sinking in madness, depravity, darkness, immorality, dishonesty, confusion, delusion, wickedness, injustice, unfairness, ungodliness, unrighteousness.

Death mostly.

And that’s exactly why Jesus came, at just the right time, to die for us. It was because we’d become so morally corrupted that there remained no possible way that those who were created to become His again through an acknowledgement of their need for salvation through repentance could miss it. No, the world and the way in which man had come to live upon it had become so evil, so wicked that His light, His love, His mercy that came to us to call us up and above all that we’d all come to become, it would prove unmissable.

Because what He did on our behalf was so very different from everything we’d any of us ever done that it created waves of wonder that still rip through time and turn lives asunder.

He is still making all things new, even things like me and you!

Are we letting Him? Are we helping Him? Are we trusting Him? Are we chasing Him?

Or are we still just wasting our time and thus our lives failing Him?

Truth is there is no other option. We’re either living lives that show that we’ve both heard the message and got the point or rather we’re still living lives that refuse the message and thus have no point.

Is that harsh?

Yeah.

Is what our way of life forced upon Him even worse?

Absolutely.

Friends, the point is that Christ died for the ungodly of whom all of us are. It’s truly as simple as that. And it’s been made so simple, and thus too easy to see, all because His patience achieved for us an ability to arrive at such a low point in human history that we all gathered gleefully together to literally butcher the very Savior who came only to set us free from lives lived in chains and captivity.

We killed the only One who’s ever lived a perfect life!

All because we’d arrived at such a time in which we thought that our way of life was the perfect one.

A place many still reside.

And thus He intends to come again, in due time, to once and for all open every eye and unclog every ear and thus help everyone to both see and hear that He is God and we are not.

Is that a message that we’ll have accepted before that day?

Or will we spend the rest of forever regretting the fact that we simply never wished to do so?

Friends, He came once to die for sinners. He comes but once more to gather those who, though once sinners, have by then turned from their sinful ways and spent the rest of their days following behind He who is the Way.

In short He will let things get as bad as they need to in order to leave us with no excuse should we continue to choose to miss the message.

And as the choice is then ours to remain oblivious to all that’s wicked and wrong amongst us, around us, within us, so then are the consequences of such willful blindness upon us as well.

He doesn’t want anyone to end up in hell, and so He went there on our behalf to overcome the power, the appeal thereof. But friends, He can’t do for us what we won’t let Him do for us. He came to make all things new. Is there anything new in everything you do, everything you are?

Or are you still at risk of being among the many who are going to be somehow surprised when He returns for a second time?

Sure, it might have been forgivable to have missed Him the first time as nobody knows how to expect, what to expect the first time anything ever happens. But once something’s happened once, those who refuse to realize it could happen again are thus those who continue to doubt it possible.

And His coming back isn’t just possible, it’s promised.

When?

We can’t know.

But that we do know that it will happen should be all we need to know to get ready to go wherever it is that He came the first time to say we could.

Problem is that we can only get there alive if we change.

And make no mistake, His Word says we all will. For indeed, all will be changed.

The difference between eternal life and everlasting death is to be measured by whether or not we’d been practicing in what were, by then, lives that had changed too thanks to His having been allowed in thanks to our having heard Him knocking on the doors of our hearts.

He will come in and make Himself known.

Will we know Him before He does or will He be left to break in as if a thief in this night that we still call this life? Guess we’ll find out.

In due time.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold