Day 4265 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 63:10 NIV

The war within

It’s the one waged without what is the hope of hope itself as, well, we’ve become of a mind who so believes that we alone know always best in life that we cannot risk being proven wrong. And this fear of our folly being what our failures know it to be but our pride insists it isn’t has left us taking always to arms against even the long arm of the Lord who uses said length so as to reach those who are so very lost as to think they’ve found what life is in this place in which life isn’t.

Because indeed, while we may have a life here the truth of life is that for us to so assume that all of it is supposed to be here, to fit here, to stay here, this has left us lost in a willingness to lose it all.

For no matter how great we may come to think we are, still comes the fall.

I reckon the problem is that as a people we don’t experience it for the most part within this place. Rather this place had become a pride’s paradise in that nearly every aspect of life itself is anymore lived for and toward and to and through that lie which says that life is what we make it even though we’re not the ones who make it but rather only, as history shows, destroy it. In fact the very existence of death is due to our denying the life that He created us to live.

Not that He wanted us to die nor even now wants us to do so as it’s clear He both gave us these lives and even sent He who is the Christ to save our lives from ourselves and the harm we’ve done to them so as to turn our lives back toward the light that is the Life that lights the Way to that place in which we might stay with Him for all of forever.

And yet we still most days can’t be bothered by such a hope of something better somewhere else and that at some point later. No, instead we’re a people of perfect impatience always seeking for the best of everything now even though the very thought is so impossible that we then prove daily that we know not what we’re doing as reality tells us that the best of something cannot be known until all of the rest is known too.

Because for something to be the best we’ve to know every other option, outcome and input.

Thus something has to have reached its end before the determining of which parts were best can begin.

And yet we spend our entire lives fighting against the dimming of the light that is this life as we all contend that as here we begin so too shall here our every hope remain.

And as I said the other day, at some point He’s just going to stop arguing. He’s going to reach this point in His patience in which He simply agrees to agree to let us go, to let us do our own thing and that our own way. Yes, He is so good and kind and fair that He will let us have our say and live these lives in whatever way toward whatever win we might want by the end, an end that we, again, spend all our lives looking away from.

Trying to find what’s best before we’ve left what’s become to us a life we cannot imagine we’ll lose as we manage only to find every morning a brand new day just as we’ve done all the days before.

So granted, it does offer some reason this assumption that the days and mornings will keep coming.

But at some point we might ought to consider the question which asks why He who gives life would so continue to give life to those who hate Him for His asking them to do good with it.

For indeed, I’d say that by this point He’s seen more than enough to know that we’ll never know enough of all He is and all He gives to turn ourselves on our ways and for once fight against them instead of against Him. No, He’s witnessed even our every wonder and worry as He knows the heart of us all.

And yet still the Book says that said hearts remain deceptive beyond measure and there without healing, without remedy, without reason and thus without hope.

All because these people we’ve become continue to believe hope something we can have in what are lives we think we can keep.

Maybe we can.

But friends, what hope is there to have in lives in which we keep only fighting against the very One who gave them to us and gives us in them so many gifts and blessings and even the audacity to imagine new beginnings?

We’ve all wanted to start over, begin afresh, slow down and catch our breath and try to figure out what we’re doing and why we’re losing what has so often felt the hope of hope itself, have we not? We’ve all felt the weight of life continue to grow until it feels as though all we know is only doubt, anger, despair and danger. We’ve all of us known that way of life in which has grown so much worry and confusion and fear and delusion that we even ourselves knew we knew not what we were doing.

And yet we still opt for the version of life in which we continue to find those things more than their opposites.

Why?

Why do we so like this version of life in which nothing ever fits, nothing much goes quite right? Why do we continue to take it upon ourselves to so trust in ourselves that we ourselves have to play the part of both shepherd and sheep? Why do we allow for our allure in regard to this lure that is the lie that says these lives are only our lives when we inside of every single moment continue to find something that’s undeniably out of our control?

How much further do we want to go in this direction in which we’ve gone in which, well, even hope itself doesn’t ever stick around very long?

Because honestly, nothing does. Rather in our approach to life in which everything around is all that progresses, advances whilst we stand always stuck in the middle, motionless, emotionless even, it all just then keeps changing. Indeed, I spend a good deal of most days thinking back to those things that I knew in the past in which grew to know what was a world that isn’t around anymore. So much of the life I lived in the place I lived it is gone.

And how I sometimes long for the life I knew because, well, this place in which we live it now just isn’t the same.

Everything’s changed.

Yet so often we don’t because the fact that everything else does seems unto us more than enough progress to make up for our preference to avoid it.

Indeed, maybe God will prove pleased by our relying so much and so heavily upon everything else changing for us, making always our lives easier rather than us better.

Yes, surely He’s to be impressed with our decision to pour all of our stress into the desire for us to stay in bed and let everything else, everyone else live our lives for us. Surely He won’t have any problems with our allowing a fallen world to help us to fall away too.

No, He’s probably okay with it as, well, it’s simply the way we want it and what parent doesn’t want for their child to be happy?

No friends, while happy is great, holy is better. And yet we know nothing of holiness as it’s a decided separation demanded between things that, while can fit, were never meant to. We were not made to become so like this place from which He created us by taking us from it. He pulled us out of the dirt, using this world’s dust to fashion all of us.

Breathing then the breath of life into these lungs that we alight with a fight that asks endlessly that we contend similarly against Him, seeking daily to return to the dirt in lives lived so dirty and dingy and disgusting.

All because we think we know better than He who managed to take dirt and air and make us who’ve only taken what He’s made and ground it back to dirt.

Indeed, all of humanity has decided upon hostility shown His way. We’ve all of us rejected His will, refused His Word, so hated His Way that we killed Him. We literally butchered the hope and healing sent us from Heaven simply because we didn’t like the message He was sending in all of His asking that we stop doing what’s caused all of us the promise of dying.

We demanded the life of the One who gives us life because we just didn’t like, still don’t, that He calls us to live these lives He gives us as if we appreciate the fact that we’re alive.

And we think that we’re right in doing this, many even still living as if He never did and thus doesn’t still.

Friends, as we’re the sources of all apparent knowledge and wisdom, let us then ask ourselves this question:

How long would you go on allowing someone to hate you, to hurt you, to deny you, refuse you, reject you before you finally agreed to just let them go?

Wouldn’t take very long, would it?

Indeed, we’re all like the dog that we find on the street that looks so cute, so hungry, so weak that we just want to help it however we can, to give it the best life we know how. And so we take it home, clean it up, maybe even deliver it to the vet who makes sure it’s okay, that it’s healthy, that it has all that it needs to make the best of this new lease on life. And then we get it home and all it does is bite us every chance it gets.

For all we do is continue to hate the One who is simply trying to help us, to heal us, to lead us toward the place where our every hope is best kept. And we bite, we snap, we growl and grimace every chance we get. We all but insist He leave us alone.

And again, one day He won’t argue anymore.

Because we’ll have by then been given so many opportunities to have chosen to do all of this differently that if we don’t then He won’t keep asking us to.

Rather He will agree to leave us be whatever it is that we’ll have by then become that is apparently, to us, better than the children who live forever in peace and prosperity that He’s all along called us to be.

Indeed, He loves us so much that if we remain convinced that we’ve found something better than the promise of life lived with Him forever, He will let us have it.

Problem is that such a thing doesn’t exist as the only other option than that of an eternal life lived in peace perfected with Him in Heaven is one lived in the everlasting torment of hell.

A place deserved for those who decide to give their lives to waging a war against the One whose very words have long since proven of the ability to restore hearing to deaf, sight to the blind, hope to the lost and life to the dead.

Do we really still think that we can manage to win a fight that we’ve made this life as is anymore lived only always against Him?

Because we sure keep trying.

I just don’t know how much longer He’s going to prove willing to keep watching us walk away, hating Him within every step we take.

Again, I wouldn’t keep chasing someone who clearly wanted to get away from me as it just makes no sense to so try and catch those who would only be miserable around you. And that’s what we live our lives telling Him we think we’d be. That with Him we’d be unhappy. That near Him we’d find no joy. That only without Him, far from Him do we find any excitement or hope or purpose. Indeed, we live as if our life’s purpose is to prove that we know better than He ever could.

And we’ve been fighting that battle for all of forever!

Because pride still has us all convinced that we can’t lose. But that only because we’ve not yet lost it all.

One day we may.

And if we do then it’ll simply be too late because He will have given us over to what we wanted and, since it’s clear that so much of what so many want is only everything that He isn’t, then they’ll in the end be given everything He isn’t in the place that He isn’t.

And we watch a world fighting so hard for that to be the outcome. For them to be left alone. For Him to leave us alone. For Him to just go away and take all of His rules and requirements, His callings and commandments, His healing and His hope and His peace and His promises with Him as He goes.

One day He will.

But for today He’s still loving and patient and willing then to wait for one more day for us to have one more chance to our lay our weapons down and stop hating Him.

Will we?

Or will we just continue refusing Him simply because He asks of us that we try for life instead of continuing to think we’ve already got one?

We’ve all heard it said that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and this is true. But so too then must it be true that you can’t know what you’ve lost until it’s no longer able to be found. And the problem with our way of life is that we’re living as if we’ve only everything to lose and nothing left to find. And it’s because of this lie that we’ve all come to find this hatred of faith and the One who calls us toward it. It’s because we can no longer fathom how something else could better than whatever we have already or plan to have soon.

And His calling us to wait, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling and a great and here ongoing repentance as we do, it makes no sense to us.

And we hate those things that don’t make sense.

But friends, we can only hate Him for so long until He agrees to hate us right back.

Because, just like that dog that always only bites us no matter how much we do or give or try to show it love, eventually we’ll tire of hurting and bleeding and wondering why and we’ll let the thing go.

He will let us go if we reach the end of this life having spent it only asking Him to.

So let us then be always careful what we ask for as biting the hand of He who feeds us may very well inspire Him to stop doing so. And yet, if He who is the Bread of Life and the Living Water too does indeed rescind all He is, what will we then have left to live on?

Perhaps it’s time for us all to start wondering about such things before we find the answers and spend then the rest of forever wondering why we didn’t want to, wouldn’t dare to listen sooner.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold