Day 4256 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Amos 9:2 NIV

Outrunning inevitability

Amazingly, despite the overall obviousness of our reality, this remains something that we all still clearly consider an in every way feasible ability. In fact it’s something that we all act as if it’s not merely feasible but in every way factual. That we can prove of the actual power to outmaneuver God, to outwit Him, outlast Him, make it out alive without Him. That we don’t need Him, can run from Him, hide from Him, manage to keep from Him both our many flaws and mostly only ourselves who are the ones who wish always to do nothing about them.

Indeed, we’ve all lived, perhaps live still, as those who think they neither owe the bill and yet could pay it easily were it to somehow come due thanks to all that we’ve learned to do that we likewise think we can do well enough to accomplish more than enough to leave us looking Him in the eye with an expectation that He blinks first.

Friends, that’s not how this is going to work.

No, there is no amount of work, no amount of wealth, no longstanding lack of worry or even suddenly found reason to hurry that can ever help us to avoid what’s coming. Nothing. We cannot outrun it. We cannot hide from it. We cannot come up with some sort of technological advancement that proves to save us from it. We can’t work our way around it. We can’t buy our way out of it. We can’t beg our way out of it. There is nothing we can do via either word or deed that can change the fact that we’re all plummeting toward that great and awful Day of the Lord.

I mean I doubt we can even make sense of how something can be both great and awful as, well, to us, those two things seem entirely too opposed to suppose that they could exist both simultaneously and also somehow in unison.

But make no mistake, this Day He’s been planning, it will prove to accomplish both that impossibility as well as every other that He’s had planned since, while maybe not the start of eternity, at least right there just after the start of humanity sadly getting their hands, our hands on it.

I do think often about how things must have been way back at the beginning. Just a couple of kids in a Garden eating, drinking, talking, walking, living what to us would now seem a way of life so very foreign as it was just them and the Father living together for however long it could have been had they been able to understand what harm could come from their coming undone just long and far enough to do instead of what He’d asked them to this other stuff that another suggested they try.

A suggestion they tried which opened their eyes to what was and remains a law through which innocence cannot be imparted but only departed.

For every law exists not to acquit the one who knows not if, how, when, why they’ve broken it as without knowledge there is no responsibility and thus being ignorant of a requirement renders one unbound to uphold it. Rather every law exists only to condemn those who, knowing of its existence, knows then the requirements insisted thanks to it having been written or elsewise rendered unto their awareness.

Indeed, as in Ecclesiastes we read, with more knowledge there comes more grief.

Why?

Because the more you know the more you’re responsible for as, well, knowledge is power and must thus be wielded appropriately as power mishandled can quickly cause many a problem.

Such as what comes upon that Day for, well, all of us.

And that’s because on the Day of Judgement our every flaw, fault and failure will be found out by both He who already knows all of them and too we who’ve tried so hard for so long, and that in so very many places, to hide so many of them that we’ll be then reminded of mistakes that we’ll have completely forgotten we’d made.

And the problem is that you can’t ask to be forgiven for things you’ve done wrong that you don’t remember doing.

And unfortunately you can’t find salvation for those things that you don’t ask such forgiveness should you not remember doing them.

And thus we’re all just dead men walking toward what is the promised eventual falling into the hands of the Living God whom we’ve lived a good portion of our lives leaving behind.

Along what we’ve all come to believe is a life that is a line that, we hope, continues diverging so as to ensure there’s no danger in our coming back toward the One from whom we well know we’ve been both failing and, because of that, fleeing from. It’s kind of like that whole law dilemma. As much as you’re not guilty of breaking a law that you legitimately didn’t know was a law, so too are you proclaiming your very own guilt should you do something that you all but immediately try to hide or claim you didn’t do.

And that we’ve all been running away from God, and in light of this, continuing then to obviously refuse to do all but any of the little He asks us to, this seems to say that we know of some reason to so flee from the Maker of Heaven and earth and us.

Wonder what our reason must have become and what many more we seemingly continue to find that continue to find us fleeing from Him still.

After all, He is everything good. He is love. He is mercy. He is kindness. He is compassion. He is patient. He is caring. He is constant. He is dependable. He is provisional. He is the very source of every good promise that could have ever been given unto a people, much less a people such as us who, for whatever reason, continue to see nothing worth wanting in every promise He’s given such as forgiveness and healing and hope and peace and rest and life lived forever with Him in Heaven.

Yes, that’s what we’re running from!

Why?

Is it because we really don’t want eternal life? Are we not really interested in being healed of our many afflictions? Not interested in experiencing peace perfected? Unsure as to how it might feel to feel whole inside of a hope that He’s promised will never empty? Are we for some reason just terrified of being loved so much that He might have really sent His Son to die for us?

Or are we just terrified of admitting the fact that He did send Jesus to die for us but that it was only because He’d found in us so much sin and death and darkness that He knew that there was no other way for us to be made right and brought back to life without His having come to meet us where we were so as to lead us toward who we weren’t anymore?

Because, again thinking back to the Garden, God made us to be His children who He clearly intended to spend forever in His Eden basking breath by breath in the goodness that He is and all that He did to create not only us but the veritable Paradise from which we were eventually turned away because we’d chosen to willfully turn on Him as was done by at first Adam and Eve who chose to listen to a snake ask them to try some fruit they knew they didn’t need to survive.

That’s the part that blows my mind!

It’s that they were there in this Garden in which they had everything that they could have ever needed, lacking nothing, enjoying everything, not a problem nor care nor concern then as to anything. Life was perfect, a point proven in that God had priorly looked upon all He’d created and said that it was good. He who is the only good said that it was good.

And they who He had made, who were then good too, they were in this Garden doing what He’d created them to do which was to simply exist in and upon His loving kindness.

And they were doing it.

They weren’t merely surviving but they were literally thriving. They had everything they could ever need and thus knew nothing of need nor then of want.

And yet, all it took was one idea, one suggestion, one hint as to this something they were missing, that they knew they weren’t missing because, again, they weren’t merely living but they were rather doing so in utter bliss, until this one hint came along and managed to get them convinced that the life they knew suddenly wasn’t enough.

And then, well, all hell broke loose.

And here we are today in what is the continuance of their walking away, each of us still seeking for ways to do only whatever it is that we alone want to. Each of us still seeking for things that we want to have or hope to feel. Each of us still seeking for those treasures, those pleasures and prizes that our eyes have convinced themselves we need to try to see if they better our lives. All of us doing so many things that don’t go well, trying too many things that don’t end well, living then lives that are not going well that we ourselves are doing as they did way back then once their eyes had been opened to a law they didn’t need to know.

What did they do?

Among the first things they did was to make clothes for themselves as the law of good and evil that came into them thanks to that fruit they let into them had caused their eyes to be opened to the reality of shame and that as was felt, is felt still by all (most of us at least I hope), in the nakedness they then saw they could see. So they grabbed some leaves and things and started to hide themselves. And, when this hiding seemed to work well as it seemed to quell this shame they’d started to feel, they also went a little further and hid themselves from the Father whenever they heard Him walking through His Garden.

Indeed, “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Genesis 3:8-13

And thus it all began all this falling that we’re still doing as is proven in the fact that, like they did then, the first thing we so often do whenever confronted with a failure or flaw, we resort instantly to blaming someone else. Back then it was first the woman’s fault. She said it was the serpent’s fault. God knew it was all their fault as they’d all collectively conspired to accomplish what became the opening of their eyes to the now normal gravity of life that is held inside ourselves that is the knowledge of the difference between good and evil.

A knowledge that ain’t a one of us has ever upheld well.

How do I know?

Because, again, we continue to run from God.

Why else would we so flee from He who is so loving and kind that He took on the mortality of our life so as to take too our sinfulness that we’d found unto Himself with it all being done only to atone for our falling away in order to, having cleansed us with the blood of His innocence as was accomplished in His putting back on the tree the fruit we never should have taken from it (His being nailed to the cross), opened the door to our being forgiven and welcomed back into the Garden that is Heaven that is the new Promised Land to which we’re all invited and yet we all continue to flee from?

Why are we running away from Him?

Why are we trying still so hard to hide from Him?

Why do we honestly think that it’s ever going to work whenever His Word tells us that He knows our hearts and that He died in order to make them new?

Why don’t we want His kind of everything changed if not because we simply don’t wish to change ourselves? But that we rather enjoy the belief that perhaps we can find some way to be those who do hide things from Him and thus, on our own, escape His wrath. Or that we can invent some way to make eternal life a possibility but proven our way. Or that perhaps we dig deep enough into the darkness we’ve chosen to know that He won’t prove able to go and get us back and judge us for our fall. Or that, and pride’s personal favorite, we can climb high enough, accomplish enough, become enough that we can look Him in the eye and He will be then forced to admit that we really are gods too.

After all, that’s what the serpent told Adam and Eve they could do.

Just eat that fruit and you too shall be as gods.

And ever since we’ve all chosen to live as if we really were. Each of us doing so much of whatever we want that we think that life is ours. That this is our existence and that we’ve then the right to do with it whatever we want without any threat or consequence or condemnation.

And sure, maybe it is.

But friends, what if it isn’t?

I understand the elation we feel in our collective assumption as to our power and its ability to do always whatever we’ve needed. And yeah, maybe our ability, our pride, its power, maybe they can make God flinch. Maybe we can manage to hide all of our misdeeds from His eyes. Maybe we can do so well so much inside these lives that He ends up feeling obligated to let us keep them, even if He disagrees with some of what we did along the way.

But just because we may want to believe something that a liar tells us doesn’t mean that believing a lie is the best way to live a life.

If anything, the story of what went down in Eden shows us that living according to a lie is only the best way to lose a life and that because, well, until they took of that fruit there was no death.

Death came because sin came and sin came because they chose to have their eyes opened to the possibility that they too could be gods.

God didn’t intend for His children to die.

We chose to turn away from He who is the Life and we continue doing that as is proven in everything that we do that we still try so hard to hide. But no matter how long we try nor how far we run, we’re all going to one day find that life is a circle that leads always back to the beginning and He who began it.

Will we come back before Him as those who got there willingly, excitedly, expectantly as if we’d been searching for Him, longing for Him? Or will we get there as those surprised to see that all of our digging and hiding and climbing and applauding had only kept us blind to the believing that His way was always better?

We’re all going to be found again before the Father.

But it shall go far better upon that Day should we get there alongside a new heart that wanted to be there than it will still carrying the stone that once was a heart that came to believe in only itself and its ability to do whatever it needed to in order to avoid the One that our sins have caused us to be so afraid of as to try to hide from Him or to, in pride, try to contend with Him.

Get there as if you want to be there because if He has to drag you up from the depths or down from yourself, well, I guess you’ll just have to pretend that hell was always a part of your plan.

Not sure why anyone would plan to suffer for all of eternity, but hey, as they say, you do you.

For however long you both want to and He continues to allow you to think you can.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold