Day 4233 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 25:41 NIV

The last domino

In what is this game we play of life in which we all choose to live through most days and as many nights as if most things don’t matter all that much and sadly that nor do those around us. For we seem to have found inside of us this ability, this opportunity, this excitement even concealed inside the same to remain so plain atop this plane of what is a place so filled with chances to be rather the changes that I pray we can still see this world so desperately needs. Changes that daily slip through our fingers while we’re all busy building our little ruins in the making.

Each day a domino lined up too precariously close in both time and appearance unto the last, leaving them all to fall as one whenever we’re broken before the Son who we too overlooked simply because we were too focused on all that will have by then failed us.

In what are to be then lives condemned to share in the devil’s destination thanks to every wayward desire, every wicked demand, every wanton decision which led us in every wrong direction as we agreed to go simply because we too chose to know, for a breath too long, what it might be like to try and make this life everything we wanted for it to be. For that is the life we see. It’s the goal we hear. It’s literally the hope we feel! It’s this idea that somewhere inside this life is that life that is everything, has everything we could ever dream of.

But dreams turn into nightmares faster than we care to remember.

A fact that will be proven for all of forever should we be found as those who on this ground lived the life of goats rather than amongst those who gave themselves rather to being followers of a faith that was/is offered unto all who’ve ever lived within this place as held inside the chance to change from who we’ve been seeking all we’ve sought to those who know rather that they’ve been bought by He who was brought back from the grave so as to save us from our sins.

Sins He didn’t have but took the sentence of anyway simply to be the Way by which all of us must be saved from all of whoever it is that we’ve come to become in what are lives so numb and dumb to the hope of Heaven that we treat one another like hell’s children. Seeing daily our neighbor as our enemy has become a scene playing out entirely too often. So many victors and victims that you start to wonder if there’s just anyone normal left. Anyone who’s not gotten lost in the comparing and competing. Anyone who hasn’t picked some side in some social war being waged in either the street or some comment section.

Anyone who just understands that we’re here but as drifters meant to make a merciful mark having been shown ourselves so much mercy.

Alas it seems that across the map that hope is daily falling flat as everyone continues to crumble unto this rumble in what is this jungle in which we just don’t care anymore. At least not about anything or anyone other than ourselves and whatever it is what we’ve got going on and/or are going after. That’s become our existence. It’s just this endless process of planning our days unto the finding of things that will hopefully accomplish our feeling the way we want to feel.

And yet we’ve only come to feel nothing. To give nothing. To do nothing. We just quit. We retired from trying to do better, to be more, to live lives that actually matter and might accidentally then mean something. We don’t care what they might mean as, well, we know that nobody cares! So who are we here to impress? The guy so busy working two jobs that he doesn’t have time to notice us? The mom wrangling her kids through the grocery store checkout line, entirely too preoccupied to worry about our probably petty issues?

The neighbor next door who knows your name but nothing more? The friend you haven’t talked to in four years because you’re both too busy to send a text message? The preacher at a church with thousands of people filling the seats on Sunday morning to see the show?

The Bible that sits cold, dusty and all alone because it’s not entertaining enough what with its utter lack of flashing lights, tour-worthy bands, coffee bars and snack stands?

We’ve curated this existence in which everything that we allow to exist alongside us is only there because it offers something to us. It does something for us. It helps us to either look or feel or sound however it is that we want. It’s all truly become all about us and whatever this is that we’ve both come to be and refuse to reconsider.

We are goats which daily wander through wonder and worry but only about everything that might be anything that could offer everything we still don’t have.

Daily bellying up to the buffet that is disbelief in something better all because there’s something closer.

In what is a life lived in what is the one place that will one day be forever far away.

Why?

Because God hates our way of life that we’ve all learned to live down here. He hates how we always manage to take even something good, something respectable, something decent and turn it into a matter meant for making money or friends or simply just us comfortable. Indeed, in His Word we can read that He even grew to hate the very sacrifices that He’d commanded through Moses the people to make so as to atone for their sins and assuage His wrath having so done.

Why?

Because the people grew to see not the life they were ending in all the messed up things they were doing. For to them, butchering sheep and goats and bulls meant nothing. They’re just dumb animals!

No friends, we’re the dumb animals.

We’re the dogs that return to our vomit to see if there’s anything for us to sample. We’re the pigs who rumble daily back to our wallows in the hollows of hearts so cold that we enjoy the filth of every failure and fornication we can find. We’re the buzzards which feast upon the flesh of those we ignore, those we hate, those we literally sign over to being eternally destroyed simply because we’ve not enough time to stop and share the Gospel and they’ve probably themselves no time and likely less interest.

Why?

Because we don’t want to hear about how we’re all a part of this world falling apart. We don’t want to be made aware of our failures and flaws. We don’t care to consider our violent need of change and how easy it is to see why it such the need.

We just want to live our lives focusing only on ourselves and thus doing only whatever we want to do.

Forget everything else. Forsake everyone else!

Because goats know only to roam about nibbling on the novelties around them, sampling endlessly whatever it is that they can find in walking distance.

And, well, it’s hard to walk very far on your knees. And it’s even harder for us to ever hit them whenever we see not the trouble we are in. Trouble promised to the tune of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Trouble promised in the sound of eternal torment sang in the voices of millions who missed the Messiah as was seen inside strangers they ignored. Trouble coming, and sooner than we can imagine, all because we’re all still too busy to fathom just how much God hates our sin.

A fact we can’t see because our sin is fun. Our sin is exciting. Our sin manages always to win whatever we want and us the chance to feel the same. Only however we want. And that’s because sin focuses on self. It cares only unto the pleasing and satiating of what are appetites for arrogance and affluence. It wants for only our lives to be bettered and that the sooner the better.

An impatience achieving for us that domino effect of one small flick managing to drop one-by-one every other piece we’ve placed so precariously close to the one before it.

The pieces being both the days we live and the choices within them we choose.

All of them so alike that whenever He who is the Christ returns, with the outcome of either eternal fire or life the same, His doing so will set in motion the ocean of forever that will sweep us all either toward life or simply away from it.

That’s the promise we see here.

It’s that same promise considered in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares.

It’s the promise of there coming an eternal separation between that which grew as it was supposed to from that that only grew where and what it wanted to. For the entire purpose of any planting is to grow the fruit one so desires. And, well, to keep it simple God has planted us in this place with the intention of our growing to become His Son’s hands and feet carrying the message of the Gospel to everyone we meet to whom we give them said hope freely as we too were freely given it ourselves.

Problem is that we’ve instead allowed for a world that sells this way of life in which we live as if tares rather than wheat. You see, as you’re probably aware, wheat is a very useful crop. It grows a product that can be used in everything from food to even industrial components. Wheat is an amazing thing, something we should all agree to seeing as how we all eat it all the time, and well, that works out pretty nicely for us seeing as how it then helps to keep us alive!

But tares?

No, tares offer no such support. Rather tares are the seeds of vetch, something that you’ve probably not heard of before. But, unlike wheat, vetch is a different plant whose distinguishing feature is “the presence of tendrils at the ends of the leaves, which the plant uses to grasp nearby structures for support as it grows upward or sprawls across the ground.”

Indeed, vetch uses its extremities to “grasp nearby structures for support.” Thus vetch reaches endlessly for that which is close enough around it to offer it something to latch onto, to lean onto, to trust in as it seeks to then keep on growing onward toward the next closest thing. Vetch is also known for its complex root system and yet an impressive ability to decompose quickly, something that allows it to offer nourishment to the ground in which it grows.

Something seen inside how we’ve all lived our lives here planting every root we could in what is this ground we’ll leave, and yet, unlike vetch, probably no better for our having been here.

Why?

Because, like vetch, like the tares which vetch produces, we spend our every waking moment reaching with our tendrils toward that next closest thing that we always look to and lean on for our support, for our pleasure, for our success and treasure. Yes, we spend entire lifetimes seeking for and toward only those things held only in or on this ground. Sinking roots into the very soil from which we came, clearly then unaware that so too shall we return.

Equally then unaware that so shall the soul return to He from whom it came.

And that upon the day when He will separate the wheat we were supposed to be from the tares we’ve all become as this wretched vetch we are.

A promise He gave us ahead of that time so that we could hopefully come to find a way, a willingness to have ripped from within us every useless plant and priority and plan and prize and possession and position and preference and opinion that continues to reap a harvest of only haughtiness, unholiness, ungodliness. Yes, a day is coming for all of us in which all that will matter is how much of Jesus God sees in us.

Something there’s to be very little recognized inside of lives that we’ve all lived and many live still.

And that because, well, Jesus gave. Jesus cared. Jesus cried! Friends, as we all know by now, JESUS DIED!!

And yet we all continue to live as if we can’t afford to lose anything in or of these lives? That we’re here to spend our lives trying always to find something else here? That we’re better off sinking our roots in a world soiled by self and sin than we are asking Him to tear out every tare we’ve ever cared to become?

No, He’s rather told us plain that upon that Day all will be changed. It’s promised to be what will become the final table flipped as those who lived to be first will be found last and those who sought not to so save their lives will be found as those with lives saved. All because they’ll be the few who did as He calls all of us to! And that’s to take up our crosses and live out the losses of everything we’ve tried so hard to gain in what is this place in which grows far more weeds than wheat.

Struggle will continue to be that we all know well the life of weeds. They grow wherever they want taking to the wind to be blown anywhere and everywhere, wreaking havoc wherever they land, ruining land that was planted with a productive product. Weeds overrun everything, just like goats will. We talked about that a few days ago, about how goats are roaming foragers who just drift aimlessly to and through anything and everything, eating plenty of it all along the way.

And too how sheep are more stationary grazers who stay close to their Shepherd and just get by on the little they have in front of them.

Kind of like wheat. It grows only where it’s planted and that with every intention of one day being harvested, giving its life to the hope of producing a crop that the farmer will be pleased with.

Problem is that God’s already told us that He isn’t pleased with us. Instead He tells us in the Gospels that Jesus is His Son with whom He is pleased. Why? Because Jesus lived the life we never have. Jesus lived a life without sin. Jesus came to this place to produce a harvest of hope, a crop which will one day be gathered and that only after the wheat we were meant to be is separated from the weeds we’ve become instead.

Weeds that will too be gathered and thrown into the fire as there’s simply no use for them.

So what’s it to be my friends? The life of a goat or that of a sheep? The life of a weed or that of wheat?

Sure, one side of each is decidedly more boring, more dull, more mundane and thus socially unimpressive and entirely disinteresting unto those who are here living their high life. But let us always keep in mind that one remaining turning of the tables. For, again, we’ve been promised that upon that coming day all will be changed. Thus that which is enjoyable here and thus enjoyed by most, it will be changed into that which isn’t so enjoyable. And so too shall that which is here miserable, mundane, boring and plain be replaced with what is promised to be an outcome bigger than our wildest belief.

Though it sounds silly to say, let us live these lives in such a way that we find life when they end. Yes, let us live to find life. Because, well, just the thought of eternal fire and that found with the devil and his angels sounds like, well, hell.

And that’s because it will be.

Please don’t wait so long living like a goat, like a weed that you run out of time to turn and seek instead for life. Because one day the last domino will fall.

Who will we be and where will we go when it does?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold