Friday, November 5, 2021
Dark Is Dark
Always Dark
Always Filled with the Light of Christ
even as Aurora Borealis
Isaiah 5:20, 23
Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! … Ah, you … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!
1 Peter 2:21-22
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’
Words of Grace For Today
How is it that given all the literature about the corrupt nature of humans, their deceit, greed, scheming, and wilful destruction of other people … how is it that I lived so many years thinking that we had evolved beyond this and that people were basically honest, kind and good?
There are people who are so and I lived as one of them, assuming that all people live so, or those who did not were a minor exception deviating just for the moment under some temptation or variance of life that dragged them down to a darkness that cannot be survived except were one to be rescued.
How is it that I lived so long assuming that other pastors, bishops, church leaders and people friendly to me were basically good, and not basically corrupt at the core, taking advantage of anyone and any situation possible to advance their own greed, lusts, covetousness, and to fill the void in their pathetic souls?
But I did. Thanks be to God?
A more complete extract from Isaiah tells of the consequences to the corruption so rampant: Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! … Ah, you … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!
Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will become rotten, and their blossom go up like dust; for they have rejected the instruction … and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
There it is: it is so often a story lived out and told, retold and preserved that we can learn from it … and yet we simply do not! The corrupt continue their corruption and those naive like me continue to live naive until some corrupt, mentally ill, pathological liars use me yet again and scoff at me as if I were the one, and not they, who were so corrupt (as not to supposedly recognize the reality they make up where light is dark, dark light, bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter – which is a definition of hell).
How are we to live then?
The answer is simple and impossible:
We are to live as Jesus the Christ lived: follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ … For to this we have been called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example … of how to live!
Pure and blameless, no sin, no deceit at all. Perhaps those of us so wired as not to be able to be deceitful can approach having no deceit (which is seen as some kind of abnormality! by the world.) DOCH there is not one of us who can be pure and sinless!
So what are we to do!?!
We can only rely on the Grace of God to use Jesus’ record in place of ours when we are judged. Knowing that God exercises exactly this Grace for us, not just at the end judgment but every day, we are free to choose …
And we are then freed to be able to choose … not to deceive others, not to turn reality inside out, not to destroy others, and even not to sin!
We are able to do these not on our own, but only as the Holy Spirit enables us to choose and to do these. We get no credit for living this way. We can only give God thanks and …
We GET to choose to exercise this same Grace for others.
We GET to be the agents of God’s Grace for others.
We GET to be the ones who set others free from their past sins and to live by Grace.
We GET to leave the judging to God, in God’s time, in God’s way.
And We GET to rejoice that God has given us eyes to see evil in and all around us, and to respond with the only response that can change the world back to light being light, dark being dark, bitter being bitter, and sweet being sweet.
We GET to live in God’s reality, in God’s kingdom, by Grace alone.