The Finest Table

I am not perfect. I have never been perfect. My life is a mess; it's always been a mess. There's not a day that goes by that I don't somehow get wrapped up in something that tests me in some way, even if that something is a goodness that presses up against the brokenness I wrestle with more regularly. 

Someone once told me that my life is "exhausting" to them. I don't think that my life is any more exhausting than anyone else's, but maybe the way that I'm honest about it makes it seem so. Most of us just aren't as forthcoming about our challenges and struggles. We would rather ignore the hard things, the bad things, and simply push through them, pretending that they aren't real or that they aren't hard or that they aren't bad because, we think, our hard things make us difficult and our bad things make us bad. And we don't want to be difficult or bad. 

But then, we come to a place like the Table, and it feels like we can't ignore it any more. When we come to the Table, we feel every bit of our own failings, every struggle, every challenge, every brokenness. When we come to the Table, most of us have this moment of recognition about the truth of our own lives, and we feel...unworthy. 

Over the years, I have heard it said many times - I don't belong at the Table with Jesus. I'm too dirty. I'm too broken. I'm too bad. I'm too unclean. I'm not worthy of this sacrifice, and I'm not worthy of this fellowship, and I am not worthy to drink this cup or take this bread. Over the years, I have known many who have sat this moment out, thinking that it is not for someone like them. 

This Table is exactly for someone like you.

Recently, I came across some powerful words in the book of Job. Remember Job? Job was a faithful man who had it all, then lost it all, and for most of the book that bears his name, he's sitting in a dust pile with three would-be friends who are not very helpful after all, scratching at his boils with broken pottery and cursing the day that he was born. His life is in absolute ruins, and his heart, too, is wrecked. Job is all of us.

What makes this even more interesting is that all of the biblical scholarship seems to agree that if we were to place the story of Job in its chronological place in the Bible, we'd place it somewhere in early Genesis, probably even before the story of Abraham. Some argue even earlier than that. Which means that at the time in which Job is sitting in his ash pile, there's not a lot in terms of a promise of God to hang his hat on. There hasn't been a Passover yet; that's still hundreds, thousands of years in the future, and Jesus, even further away than that. 

And yet, the book of Job says: 

Job, even now, God is enticing you away from the jaws of distress; He is luring you to a wide, wonderful place free of boundaries where your table will be covered in the finest foods. (Job 36:16)

Long before there is a table, God is setting one for Job. Long before there is the decadent sacrifice, God is filling Job's table with the finest of all things. At the lowest point in his life, when Job seems least worthy - covered in dust and ashes, raw from boils, soiled with tears, holding a measure of indignation, cursing the day he was born - God is drawing Job toward the table. The table that the Lord Himself is setting, right in the midst of Job's distress. 

If ever there was a moment when a man seemed unworthy of the table, it's Job, but God says...even now. Even now, there is a table. 

And He is saying the same to you. 

Whatever your situation, wherever you're at, however unworthy you feel, there's a place at the Table for you. Whatever you think you've done, whatever your life looks like, if you're on the mountaintop or sitting in a pile of dust and ashes, there's a place at the Table for you. If you're stuck in sin that you can't seem to get out of, if your life is falling apart around you, if you've lost everything, there's one thing you haven't lost: there is a place at the Table for you. 

Even now. 

Won't you come?

God Rewards Faithfulness

The saints go first. 

You've probably heard something like this in your time as a Christian - that when Jesus comes back, the saints will be the first ones going to heaven, then the faithful, then the rest of us, and finally, fiery death and a second death upon all who remain. 

I struggle with ideas like this because for some reason, we are always convinced that we are not the saints. That the saints are those who were better than us in some demonstrable way. That the saints probably never sinned. That they didn't wrestle with their own thoughts. That they didn't say things that they shouldn't. We have this idea that the perfect go first, then the close-to-perfect, then all the rest of us who never could quite get it right. 

Friends, that's simply not true. There is no one perfect among us, not even one we are willing to call a saint. Read the Bible, and you will find no one perfect. Not one. And if you think that perhaps someone like David, at the very least, ought to go to heaven before you, remember that he was both an adulterer and a murderer; is he somehow a better man than you? (Or even, are you better than him?)

There are saints, but friend? You are one of them. If you are faithful to the Lord, earnest about following His ways, honest in repentance, hungry for righteousness, and covered in His blood, you are one of the saints. You are exactly the kind of person who gets to go "first," if there even is such a thing. 

There is some evidence about who goes first, as far back as the Old Testament. Judah, the tribe that remained most faithful to the Lord (but still messed up a lot), was the last tribe to go into exile. And 1 Chronicles tells us that when the people of Israel started to come back to the land, there was a distinct group that got to come first: 

The Levites, the priests, the servants.

In other words, the faithful who were committed to serving the Lord in His holy place came back first. 

And for good reason. If God is trying to re-establish His people in the land, if He's trying to restore them after severe discipline for unfaithfulness, then He needs to send back first the persons who will establish faithfulness as the law of the land. He needs to send back those who will invest themselves in restoring proper worship and devoting themselves to the Temple and to the precepts of the law. He needs to send back those who will set the example for everyone else to follow. 

I'm not sure the same is true about heaven; I don't think God needs to establish faithfulness in the place of perfect relationship, but I know that the same is true in the world. I know that whenever God is doing a new thing, whenever He's trying to set something right, He sends in the faithful first. He sends in those who He knows are going to serve Him. He sends in the saints. 

And friend? That's you. 

When God wants to do a new thing in the world, He starts with you. 

God Shuffles Things

There's a certain order to the world; we see it all around us. And amongst ourselves, we have created an order, too. And we don't like it when that order is disrupted. 

For example, if you've been working at your job for 20 years and that next leadership position finally comes open, it only seems right that you should be the top candidate, over and above anyone who has been there less time than you. But then, they go an hire the guy who got there six months ago and is still full of naivete and bravado (he only looks like he knows what he's doing), and you can't believe it. That's not how the story is supposed to go. That's not how the system is supposed to work. 

Tough cookies. 

The thing is, I'm not sure where we got this idea that there is a certain order in the world that can't - or shouldn't - be disrupted. 

That's exactly the kind of thing our God is doing all the time. 

We could talk here, of course, about miracles - about times when God disrupted the natural order of things to do something supernatural. Famines. Manna from heaven. Quail in the wilderness. Water from a rock. Sight for the blind. Speech for the mute. Movement for the lame. 

But these things don't tend to bother us as much as when the social order is bucked.

But God is doing that, too. 

If you read through the Old Testament, you see many a time when the older son is passed over for a younger one. God seems to be doing that all the time. Isaac over Ishmael (a little more complicated by the whole Hagar situation, but still). Jacob over Esau. Joseph over his eleven brothers. Ephraim over Manasseh. Judah over Reuben, when it comes to leading the people of Israel as the kingship is established. 

Many of those times, the older has in some way sacrificed or soiled his birthright - Reuben's sin, Esau's hunger. Sometimes, it's simple favoritism - Joseph being the firstborn of the more-loved wife, Isaac being born of the marriage union and not the slave girl. 

Still, over and over again, God chooses the younger over the older, and every time, the people are like, "no, no, this is not the way." But God says, it is the way. It is the way because this is the way that God is working His good into the world. 

It's a reminder to us that God really isn't looking at things the way that we look at things, that God is looking at something else. He's looking at what is truly good and what is the best way to get us from here to there. 

And if that means upsetting the so-called "natural order" of things, then so be it. After all, upsetting the natural order is how we get something so incredible as the empty tomb. 

God Goes Early

It's tempting to read right past all of the genealogies in the Bible. Adam begat Seth, Jesse begat David, Mary begat Jesus...and in between, dozens of names we don't recognize and...what does it even matter?

Sometimes, we see a name or two that we do recognize, and it changes - at least temporarily - the way that we think about things. For example, when we see Boaz in the genealogy of Jesus, we remember the story of Ruth and how this man was a kinsman-redeemer, and that is important. It changes how we think of things. Or we see Rahab's name, and we remember the prostitute who was faithful to a people she didn't even know because they were the Lord's people, even though she didn't really know Him, either. And that changes the way that we think about things. 

We see sinners and saints and the redeemed and the regenerate in these genealogies, and that's important, but we see something else, too. 

We see God working from the very beginning toward the fulfillment of His promises. 

One of the places that I see this very profoundly is in the genealogy of David in 1 Chronicles, through the story of Judah and Tamar. 

You might remember the story - Judah has three sons. The first son is unfaithful and wicked, so he is killed, and the second son, the same. Judah fears losing all three of his sons, so he doesn't give the younger brother to Tamar, leaving her widowed and alone. After a bit, she knows that Judah is in town, so she dresses herself as a prostitute and sleeps with him. (Apparently, Judah is the type of guy who is okay with sleeping with a prostitute in a strange town, but that's maybe another story for another day.) She then gives birth to twins - Perez and Zerah. 

When you read this story in its context, way back in Genesis, you think...okay, Judah deserved that. He was supposed to take care of this woman and continue his line through her, on account of her marriage vows with his oldest son, and he didn't; so he deserves to be duped into thinking she's a prostitute and now having twins to take care of through her. And it seems validating for the woman and a pretty decent outcome all around. 

But there's more than that. Because the truth is that God needed for Judah to have a son in order to fulfill the promise He was making to mankind. We call our Lord the Lion of Judah for a reason. Israel's kingship descended from Judah for a reason. But in order for that kingship to begin, Judah has to have...descendants. Which he's not going to have because he won't give his youngest son to marriage, so the only way that we get to Jesus is through a fake prostitute who is really a woman scorned and the very legitimate, though-seems-illegitimate, birth of twin boys to a man who didn't know who he was sleeping with. 

And in 1 Chronicles, we discover that one of those twins, Perez, is the direct ancestor of David, son of Jesse, the king after God's own heart and embodiment of the promise and hope of Israel. 

God was working on that all the way back in Genesis, when Judah almost dropped the ball and ruined everything. No way God was going to let that happen.

God is there early, working on the promises before we even know He's making them. Doing good before the sun rises. Blessing us before we even know it. 

God is In Charge

The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it.  You may be familiar with this idea; you may even believe it.

But do you really believe it?

We live in a world that thinks that faith is a private matter, a personal choice, and that there's no such thing as a God unless you believe in Him. So this idea that we, as Christians, hold that God is orchestrating the world...it doesn't gel with a world that says, "I don't believe." How can your God be influencing me if He's not even a thought that crosses my mind? It seems ludicrous.

Much like the world we live in today, ancient Israel was living in a world where every peoples had their own god. Israel had the Lord, whom they believed in wholeheartedly, but there were many other gods around - Asherah, Molech, Dagon. The list is as extensive as the population of the earth, it seems.

And what would have been true was that each people group believed wholeheartedly in their own god, but ascribed very little power or authority to any other god, except in the case in which they might be traveling through that god's territory for some reason. Moab would not have expected the Lord to influence their actions. Ammon would not have, either. Babylon would not have. Assyria would not have. 

When these nations went to battle, when they sought to either attack or defend, whatever the outcome was, they attributed that outcome to their god. 

The same way our world attributes its outcomes to whatever it believes in - science, self, human ingenuity, whatever. 

But Israel, the people of the Lord, attributed everything that happened in the world to their God, knowing that He was the God of the whole world. 

And He proved it. Over and over and over again. 

One of these proofs came in a story recorded for us in 2 Kings. It tells us plainly that in a moment of judgment exercised in His authority, "God summoned the armies" of several non-Israelite people groups. He called them into battle. He convinced them, probably using their own language and the urgings of their own hearts, to go to war. He probably even let them think it was their gods who were doing it. (Undoubtedly, they would have believed this.) 

But the Bible tells us it was God's doing, nonetheless. 

And see, that's the difference between our God and the gods of the peoples, whatever they may be - our God truly controls everything, even what seems like the godless. Even when those who don't believe in Him don't know they're doing His Will, He's still the one pulling the strings and making it happen. 

So when the world says, how can your God be influencing me if He's not even a thought that crosses my mind? the answer is simple: my God is the God of all Creation, and He does what He wishes...whether you believe in Him or not. 

My God is a God who controls even the godless. 

Table for One

We've been talking this week about an individualized faith and a personal Lord and Savior and all of the messages we get that our faith is some kind of private thing that we do that doesn't really affect or connect to anyone else. 

And I think even for those of us in the church, those of us attending worship in fellowship weekly, there's a degree of this that is still true. 

And we see it nowhere more clearly than at the Table. 

I have been blessed to celebrate the Lord's Supper with a number of churches over the years, and overwhelmingly, what happens is this: someone provides a quick message in preparation for the Table, the elements (the bread and the cup) are offered (either being passed or being presented for individuals to come), everyone takes the portion that is given to them, then everyone enters into some kind of moment of private devotion. 

I have seen parents take the bread and the cup, hand a portion to their children, take one for themselves, bow their heads, and have a private moment of prayer. In other words, they aren't even sharing this Table with their children. The same is true for husbands and wives; they aren't sharing this moment with each other. 

I have sat in rooms where 500+ different Communions are happening all at the very same moment, and it seems no one thinks to even raise their head and look at anyone sitting at the Table with them. Let alone speak. 

Somehow, in 2,000 years as we've come to this extremely individualized culture that we live in, we have taken even this shared Table of Jesus, this place that He shared with at least twelve other men (and quite possibly, even more men - and women - than that), and we have made it one more thing we do on our own...and try to call it holy. 

Did you know there was never a person who celebrated the Passover alone? Never. Not once. 

The rule for the Passover was that whatever animals were slaughtered must be wholly consumed; there was to be nothing left of them. So God's command was that if anyone was unable to consume the entire animal by themselves, by having enough persons in their household to help them, then they were to join up with someone else who would not be able to consume the entire animal. Since no one can eat a whole lamb by themselves in one sitting (even, I would dare say, in our land of obesity and over-eating), no one ever celebrated the Passover alone. 

Until we started doing it. 

Until, weirdly, we started doing it while sitting right next to ten, twenty, fifty, hundreds of other folks who are also celebrating the Passover alone...right next to us. 

It's bizarre. 

And it's heartbreaking. 

One of the very best things about being a person of faith is being part of the people of God, and here we are, even in this most holy moment, this most sacred moment, this most wonderful moment that celebrates the togetherness of the people...here we are trying to do it on our own. Because our world keeps telling us our faith is some kind of private matter. 

Friends, faith has never been a private matter. It's always been a communal event. 

Come to this Table and remember to look up from time to time. You're not here alone. You never were. You were never meant to be. 

Together

The world has convinced us that our faith is a personal matter, like almost everything else that we engage in during our lives. Our woundedness has convinced us that we're better off without the church anyway. Our concept of God, created in our image, has convinced us that wherever the Lord is is good enough for us and that He is all that we need. 

But the Bible tells a different story. 

We have seen how even when man was walking in the garden in the cool of the day with God, God looked at the man and His heart broke. Something was wrong. Something was not "very good." The man, in the full presence of God, was alone. 

We have seen how when Israel returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the Temple and the Lord's glory came and filled the space, there was something still missing. Without the people of God, the Temple, even filled with the presence of God, was empty. 

We could keep going. Look at the way that Jesus traveled - not with one man, but with many men and women. He chose not one disciple, but twelve. He continued to do things with them as a group, and even when He was engaged with a single human being for a moment, there were so many others around. Others who, like Him, were not made unclean by a bleeding woman pushing through the crowds. Others who, like Him, would recognize the sacrifice of a poor widow. Others who, like Him, would see the extravagant gift of a sinful woman. 

The men and women around Jesus had Him with them, in the flesh, so close they could reach out and touch Him, and yet, we can count on one hand the number of times He engaged truly one-on-one. 

Our faith was never meant to be personal. It was never meant to be individualized. It was never meant to be a private matter between us and God. 

The faith of the faithful, of God's people, has always been a communal faith. 

So when we convince ourselves that we don't need the church, that we can be anywhere on Sunday morning and still worship the Lord, as long as He is there with us...we have to hear the voice of God who is watching us while we're fishing, sitting on the couch, mowing the lawn even in honest prayer, and He shakes His head and says, "This is not very good. This man is alone." 

When we turn on some worship music in the private of our own homes, crack open our Bible, fill our space with the goodness of God, we have to know that even in the fullness of the space, God says there is something empty about it. 

When we believe that it is enough for us to walk with Jesus on our own, to know Him and to love Him - and even to love Him earnestly - we have to open our eyes and look around and realize that there never was a man who followed Jesus all by himself. There were always others around; that's how Jesus planned it. 

In our individual faith, we think that when Jesus talked about preparing a mansion for us, we're going to one day get to heaven and find a million billion mansions all lined up in a row on perfectly-manicured streets of gold, each with its own little mailbox outside. But that's not what Jesus said. He said the place He is preparing for us is a place with "many rooms," and He does not intend those rooms to sit empty because we can only be in one place at a time. No, He's filling those rooms with the faithful, with friends and neighbors who aren't going to live next door to us, but right down the hall. In the mansion God is preparing, we're going to live together. 

Shouldn't we start practicing now? 

No matter what the world says or how much spin you try to put on it or how much you want to justify striking out on your own, there is no such thing as an individualized faith or a personal Lord and Savior. There is only Christ, only God. 

And God so loved the world. 

Empty

In the beginning, God walked with man in the garden in the cool of the day. 

When Israel left Egypt and started walking toward the Promised Land, God led them in a pillar of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire during the night. 

When Moses met with God on the mountain, the holy smoke of the Lord covered the mountain so thoroughly that nobody could see anything but the smoke. 

After Israel built the Tabernacle and erected it in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord filled the tent in smoke, so much so that nobody else could enter it.

And when Solomon finished the Temple during his reign as Israel's king, that same holy smoke filled the holy place. The Lord was truly there. 

Over and over again, we see that the Lord fills the spaces that He inhabits, that His presence is not only sufficient, but satiating. That when God moves into a place, He inhabits every crevice, down to the tiniest little corner, and there's no space left empty by Him. 

Images like this help us to create this understanding that says that when we have God, we don't need anything else. We imagine ourselves, living temples of the holy Lord, filled with His holy smoke, and we think that with God inside of us, there's not room for anything else. At least, not anything else holy. Not only is there not room, but there's not need; every inch of our being is touched by His presence, and God is enough. 

Isn't He?

This is the same idea that we were looking at yesterday, when we saw that even though Adam walked in physical relationship with God, God still said the man was alone until the woman got there. Today, we're taking another image that seems to suggest that God is sufficient and that we don't need, necessarily, the fellowship of other believers, and we're looking at it to see if it can justify this movement that we have in our individualized faith that convinces us that we can properly nurture our relationship with God all by ourselves. 

The image I really want to look at today, though, comes from Nehemiah; the ideas we've looked at so far were just building up to this. 

Nehemiah was part of the rebuilding effort in Jerusalem. He was part of the restoration of the Temple. In fact, he was there when the work was complete and the Lord came to dwell in the Temple again. He was there when the presence of the Lord filled His holy place. He saw the smoke start creeping in and spreading out into every smallest crevice, every tiny corner. 

And then, he looked around and said, "Without the people of God here, this place seems empty." 

In spite of the fullness of the Lord, in spite of His glory filling the space, in spite of smoke so thick no one could see through it, Nehemiah saw into the Temple, where God was dwelling in His amazing glory, and he declared...it seems empty. Something's missing. There's an unfilled space in this place where the Lord's presence permeates every square inch. 

And that unfilled space was reserved for the people of God. 

Nehemiah's reflection takes my breath away. If the Temple of God can be restored to wholeness and filled with His glory and still seem empty because there aren't enough of His people who have returned to it, what does that say about a faith in my generation that says the people aren't really all that important? That the space God fills is enough? 

It says, to me, that maybe we need to rethink that. That's what it says. 

Alone

We are living in an individualized society that tells us that our Christian faith is a personal choice and that we don't need anyone else to help us practice it; it's something we can do on our own, without anyone else. Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior, and God is all-sufficient. If we have Him, we have everything we need. 

But as we left off yesterday, we said that God Himself said that's simply not true. 

So, what is true?

In the beginning, everything was formless and void. Then, God spoke creation into being with a holy breath over the course of six days, culminating in the creation of human beings - namely, Adam. And Adam had absolutely everything in the world. 

He had a garden to walk in, animals to hang out with, plants to grow, food to eat, trees to rest under, water to drink, rivers to walk by, stones to skip. He was a man alone in the world with literally everything at his fingertips, and he even had the fullness of God right there with him. 

From the very beginning, Adam was in full relationship with God, the way God intended it in creation. They walked together in the garden in the cool of the day. They talked face-to-face. Adam knew what God's hand felt like; he'd had it on him. Everything that you could possibly want from a relationship with God, Adam had it...in spades. Beyond our wildest imagination. Without sin having entered the world, there was nothing imperfect anywhere. Nothing that would separate Adam from the very fullness of God. 

Yet...God looked around at all of creation, at the fullness of the world He had made, at the man who lived in perfect relationship with Him, with whom He was walking and talking...and God said, this is not good. It is not good for this man to be alone. 

Wait a minute. 

Alone? 

Adam wasn't alone. He had God. Isn't that what we say? "I have God; I'm never alone." Isn't that how we justify having an individual faith, separated from the community of God's people? "I have God; He is all I need." Isn't Adam's Genesis 1 life the very life we aspire to and tell ourselves that it is the epitome of connection and relationship and goodness?

It is. And yet, God says Himself it is not good. The man, even in the full presence of God, is alone. 

Then, God - the all-sufficient, all-good, all-wonderful God who lived in full relationship with Adam, who walked with him in the cool of the day, who spoke with him face-to-face, who had breathed the very breath of life into him and given him all of creation in which to dwell - that very same God made Eve so that Adam, hand-in-hand with God in the garden, would not be alone. 

Shouldn't that at least give us some pause about the way we approach our individualized faith? If God says that in a "very good" creation, without the presence of sin, in full and unhindered relationship with man, He is not enough for man to not be alone, shouldn't we stop claiming that we don't need anyone else? Especially when we're trying to make that claim in the name of God?  

Personal Lord and Savior

We live in a very individualized society...sort of. (Anyone who is trying to make it as a single person in this world understands how much of our very "individualized" world is actually created for families/groups.) We have been told that the most important thing about us is our freedom. It's what we choose for ourselves. It's how we invest in ourselves. 

We have a culture in which we are militant about who we are, and we put up this really fierce bravado about whether or not others can "handle" us  - and if they can't, then bye. Because we shouldn't have to change anything about ourselves. We shouldn't have to change a thing about who we are for "anyone," including ourselves. We are perfect just the way we are and anyone who can't see that...well, that's their problem. 

So in a world where everything is about us as individuals, it's not hard to understand how we got to a place where we have accepted Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior. Among the things in the world that are ours to choose and belong to us, we count our faith. So if we have Jesus, it's because we chose Him. If we are Christians, it's because we want to be. If we choose the Christian faith, then that is just one of many personal decisions that we have made for ourselves and one of the things about us that others have to deal with or not. 

We have lessons in our churches about how if it were only us, just you, just me, then Jesus still would have gone to the Cross to reconcile us to God. If it was just one single one of us, Jesus still loves us that much - that while we were still a sinner, Christ died for us. For me. For you. 

We've talked about this before. It's something we have to keep talking about because of the world that we live in. It's something that we can't let ourselves lose sight of. 

Because for thousands of years, this was not the teaching of Christianity. Or of Judaism before it. It was not the teaching in the Old Testament, and it's not the emphasis of the teaching in the New Testament. Christianity has never been intended to be about us; it's always been about Christ. 

And through Christ, God so loved the world. 

This is important because our understanding of the faith as an individualistic venture and our understanding of Christ as our personal Lord and Savior has led us to a place where many believe that they can live the Christian faith alone. Sometimes, they call themselves "spiritual, but not religious." Sometimes, they call themselves "unaffiliated" - meaning they don't have a church home. In Christian college circles, there's a popular concept (at least over the past many decades) of "dating Jesus" - I don't need a boyfriend/girlfriend; I have Jesus.

And on and on and on we go creating these ideas where we can have God without community and convince ourselves, or try to, that this is sufficient. After all, if God is the God of all Creation and He is all sufficient and all powerful and all loving, then having God should be enough for us. Shouldn't it? Anything else is just extra. Just bonus. Optional. Like a create-your-own Christian adventure package. 

But is it? Is Christian community optional? 

To talk about this idea this time, we're actually not going to talk about the church. Not really. We're not going to talk about fellowship and connection. We're not. We're not even going to touch the New Testament (maybe Thursday - I haven't really thought that far ahead yet, but I'm not planning on it right now). We're going old school, Old Testament. Because the very roots of our faith have something very important to say about this idea that if we have God, we have all we need. 

God Himself says that's simply not true.  

Come and Dine

I fell in love with the Table before I ever sat at it. 

Growing up, I wasn't a Christian. I went to Christian preschool, where I colored pictures of Jesus, but I didn't really know anything about this guy. My family was more interested in me learning my colors and letters than learning about the Lord; Christian preschool was simply the primary option in the 1980s. So that's where I went. 

When I finally started coming to church for real as an older child/young tween, I landed in this little country Wesleyan church in a town not far from here, where my great-aunt would take me with her. It was okay as far as churches went. I didn't understand denominational doctrine, if there even was any in this little place. There was an organ and a piano, and eventually a little drum set, and the preacher had a booming voice that carried through the small, antiquated sanctuary, reaching the ears of all seven attendees as he both preached and led the singing. 

That singing frequently included one particular song, an old hymn I had never heard of titled, "Come and Dine." 

Jesus has a table spread where the saints of God are fed; He invites His chosen people, Come and Dine. With His manna He doth feed and supplies our every need; O, 'tis sweet to sup with Jesus all the time. 

Come and Dine, the Master calleth, Come and Dine. You may feast at Jesus' table all the time, O Come and Dine. He who fed the multitudes, turned the water into wine, to the hungry calleth now, Come and Dine.

I loved that song. (Loved it enough that today, more than 20 years after I left that little church, I can still sing it by heart.) 

But at that little country church, there never was a table. Not once. 

That little church never celebrated Communion. That little church never broke the body, never drank the blood. That little church never talked about the Upper Room, about the Passover, about the last night that Jesus spent with His disciples. At that little church, I didn't know there even was a Table on this side of heaven. 

But I dreamed about one. 

I dreamed about what it might be like to sit at a table with Jesus and eat. I dreamed about what manna must taste like. I dreamed about what it meant to have enough to be full, but to linger anyway because the company was so worth keeping. I dreamed about a party, a celebration, with a table not just for me and Jesus, but for everyone. I dreamed about a sacred pitch-in, or potluck, or whatever you call it.

I dreamed about having a place at that Table. 

I dreamed about coming and dining. 

And then, I came into a church that celebrates that Table. Every week. Not as a table that we're going to sit at some day when we are the saints of God, but a table that we sit at now while we are still sinners. I came into a church where I've been invited, every week, to dine. 

Anyone who knows me, who has heard me speak on a Sunday morning, knows how much I love this Table. The truth is, I fell in love with this Table long before I ever knew it actually existed, at least this side of heaven. And now that I get to eat here? I don't take that for granted. 

A Matter of Faith

We've been talking this week about being an anti-people, a people who consistently set ourselves against something. And yesterday, we saw that in a post-faith world where we believe ourselves capable of controlling anything and everything, we kind of have to. 

What is the alternative?

The alternative is real faith. Plain and simple. The alternative is truth, on which our Christian faith is based. The alternative is knowing that what we believe in and what we have in Christ is strong enough to stand on its own and doesn't have to stand against anything. 

That's hard. And it's even harder to believe something like that. 

We live in a world where we are expected to have to convince everyone. A world in which truth is relative, so we have to be able to persuade someone to see our side of things, to agree with us. This is a world in which we cannot just lay out objective facts and expect everyone to believe the same things about them that we do, even the things about them that are obvious. Especially now that AI is everywhere, tricking our minds into believing what we know is not true, we have to ask - what even IS truth and how are we supposed to get anyone to believe is unless we can tear down what they think they have first? 

If you pay attention to most of the arguments on social media, you'll see that a lot of them are not differences of opinion; they are differences of perceived truth. And they quickly spiral into each party trying to tear down the other's truth to convince them of the solid nature of whatever they believe. 

But the truth about truth is that if it is really truth, it will stand on its own. It doesn't have to tear anything else down; those other things crumble on their own when the real truth comes out. 

All that we end up doing by trying to convince the world of the truth is exhaust ourselves and alienate others, because we come across as a very defensive people and truth doesn't need a defense. It is its own proof.

Take the example of a common houseplant. Maybe you believe that the best way to grow the houseplant is to water it every third day and keep it near a window. Maybe someone else believes that the best way to grow the houseplant is to water it whenever they remember and to put it on a high shelf somewhere, the top of a bookcase perhaps, which is where they want to display it. 

We could get into all kinds of arguments about how to care for this houseplant - and we do. But the truth reveals itself when the plant either grows or dies. All of our arguing, all of our posturing, all of our rebuttal...none of it makes a difference. The plant grows or dies based on the truth of what is actually good for it and what is actually not, and it's irrefutable. (We will still try to refute it because we hate being wrong. There must have been something defective about that plant's biology for it to have died like that; it couldn't possibly be that we didn't water it enough or give it enough light.) 

In the same way, we don't have to set Jesus in opposition to the world. We don't have to tell them how wrong they are or why their way doesn't work. Rather, we can simply live out the kind of faith that we have, stand on truth, and the world will see that it works. What is it that the Bible teaches us? We will know things by their fruit. And fruit is irrefutable. 

So when we're tempted to chastise the world for growing weeds, to set ourselves up against the invasiveness of it, to establish ourselves as anti-weed, maybe the best path is really to just be pro-fruit. Maybe the best response to this weed-ridden world is to go out and grow fruit. The world knows the difference between a thistle and a berry; a garden full of berries is our best defense against the thistles. 

All we have to do is go out and grow it. 

To Stand Against

The truth is that we are a people who are simply inclined to set ourselves against things. And in a post-faith world, we kind of have to. 

This is about to get profoundly psychological, so I hope you can stay with me; I'll do my best to try to make this accessible to everyone (but also know I am totally nerding out - I love psychology). 

Humans have always had some degree of finitude. We are limited by things that are often out of our control. We cannot, for example, control our health, whether we get something so relatively common as asthma or potentially devastating as cancer. We can take vitamins, wash our hands, eat a balanced diet, and get vaccinated, but the truth is that there are factors in our health over which we have no control. And we know it. 

The same with the weather. We've always been a species that depends upon weather. Hunters needed favorable winds to track their prey without being tracked themselves, or even to go out hunting at all. Gatherers needed favorable growing conditions for the wild edibles they were seeking. Agrarian societies needed good weather for growing. Even recently, we have seen how one bad season can devastate an entire industry - like the citrus industry experienced a couple of years ago. The winter wasn't cold enough; the spring wasn't consistent enough; the rains were scarce. All of a sudden, we've got nothing. 

For thousands of years, man's response to these things that are out of our control has been faith. It has been trust in a god of some sort. Most of the world's gods have always been thought to have power over things like weather and fertility, the things we simply do not control and know that we don't. People have turned to the gods for favor when life has been unfavorable. 

Even the Judeo-Christian tradition has this in its history, to some degree. Ancient Israel understood good seasons and prosperity as God's blessing; they understood famine and disease as God's curse or displeasure. When Jesus walked the streets and came upon the afflicted, they believed their sin was the cause of their affliction. Favor and dis-favor have always been matters of faith. 

Then, we entered what we called "enlightenment," when we started to believe that we knew best and that we could figure everything out. We started investing ourselves more deeply in what we call "science," investigating the world and learning to control it. And all of a sudden, unfavorable conditions became indicators of our own failings. If there was something in the world we couldn't control or couldn't engineer our way out of, it was because our knowledge was not yet sufficient to conquer it. 

And that is the key to our antagonism - we have become conquerors of all things rather than petitioners of favor. 

It used to be that we would pray and we would worship and we would humble ourselves, confess our finitude, and petition the gods (in our case, the Lord) for favor. But in a world in which we are in control of all things, or at least seeking to be in control of all things, the only way we achieve a new victory, the only way we acquire favor, is by conquering. By setting ourselves against our problem and overcoming it by our own power. 

Thus, we are a people whose entire lives are built on standing against something, not for something. You can see it even in the language that we use to talk about it. When we cure an illness, we have "beaten cancer," not "restored health." We developed advanced irrigation systems to "prevail even in times of drought," not to "consistently nourish our crops." Everywhere we turn, our language reminds us that we are conquerors, and if we are conquerors, we must pit ourselves against something to be conquered. 

Thus, we are an anti-people. In a post-faith age in which we do not simply humble ourselves and seek the Lord's favor, we have to be. 

Heard It Said

The anti-Christian, the person who cannot simply stand on the foundations of the Christian faith but always has to set them in opposition to themselves, will be quick to tell you that he's really not that different from Jesus. 

After all, when the Lord was teaching in Galilee and Jerusalem, we know that He said quite plainly, "You have heard it said, but I say to you...." In other words, Christ Himself was an anti-Christian. (Or anti-Jew, as the case may be.) Jesus, they say, had to tell you you were wrong before He could tell you what was right. 

But that's not an authentic reading of the Gospels, nor is it true to the heart of who Jesus was. (is.) 

It's true that Jesus said those words. It's true that He said them more than once. It's true that a chunk of His most famous sermon records those words for us over and over again. But it's not true that they mean what these anti-Christians, trying to defend themselves in self-righteousness, claim that they mean. They can only be interpreted as anti-establishment words when taken out of context.

The real context in which Jesus said these words, every time, was not one in which He set out to demolish or diminish some former teaching. It was never one in which He said that the word that you've heard is wrong. He never used these words to indicate that there was a bad or error-ridden teaching among you. 

Rather, what Jesus said every time He said these words was: what you have heard is right, but it doesn't go far enough. 

You have heard it said not to commit adultery, but I tell you - don't even lust. 

You have heard it said not to murder, but I tell you - don't even hate. 

You have heard it said not to enact the thoughts, but I tell you - don't even entertain them. 

When Jesus used these words, He used them to indicate that what you've heard is good and right, but it's the bare minimum; the standard of God is higher even than that. 

On the other hand, when He was calling out bad teaching, Jesus very plainly said, You snakes. You hypocrites. You brood. He held nothing back.  

And there are two things at work here, just as there were yesterday. 

First, Jesus isn't making a power play. He's not trying to set Himself up in opposition to anything. That wasn't His style, and it wasn't His mission. Jesus came to save the world, not to correct it. He came to love us, not to condemn us. He came to show us the heart of God, not to expose our every failure. 

Second, Jesus knows that the message He is preaching doesn't have to stand against anything; it stands on its own. The people will embrace it because of what it contains, not because of what it contends against. The people are hungry for what He is offering, thirsty for living water, more than they are hurt by whatever this world has done to them. 

So no, this anti-Christian message is not the way of Jesus. No matter how many of His words they take out of context. You may have heard it said, but I tell you - it's not even close. 

Anti-Christian

Have you met an anti-Christian? 

Perhaps a more important question is: have you been one? (Or maybe you are one now.) 

By now, you know that I follow theological sources that I both agree with and don't agree with on social media. I don't need to pretend that I have everything figured out; in fact, I would probably like to re-write many of the blogs I have posted in this space over the past 16 years. We are human. We grow. And we grow by being challenged to either re-examine or re-affirm what we think we know. 

But it's finally struck me what is so aggravating about some of the theological persons that I follow, and it's this: 

They are anti-Christian. 

Full confession: as I pondered what I might write in this space, I realize that there have been times and seasons in my life, too, when I have been an anti-Christian. 

So what is an anti-Christian? 

An anti-Christian is someone who cannot just preach or teach what he or she thinks the Bible says or believes is the important message to get across. No, the anti-Christian must first throw the rest of Christianity under the bus and proclaim how wrong and backward we've been getting it for so long. They must first make a point about how the teaching you've received prior to this is entirely wrong and not only wrong, but damaging and hurtful, and then go on to preach whatever they think the truth of the matter is. 

This attitude comes out of two places, really. The first is a place of authority. You want others to listen to you and to believe you are right, so you have to put yourself in a position of authority. You do this by getting them to question other authorities in their life. (And acknowledging those other authorities gives you bonus points because it looks like you understand.) So if you want others to listen to something "new" you're going to teach, especially something that goes against the status quo, you have to establish some kind of authority first. Hence, you explain why everyone else is stupid so that you thus declare yourself smart. 

The second place is one of passion. And this is where I'm guilty most often. I come across an idea or something gets inspired in my heart, and it's something I've never heard taught before (or not often enough), and I get excited. And I want others to get excited. I want everyone to understand how lifechanging and wonderful this idea is and how lovely and how theologically defining. I want them to share my passion. So I pull an old Jesus-based "you have heard it said, but I say to you...." and try to get the fires burning. 

The problem is that being an anti-Christian, whether for authority or passion, sets up a hatred in the heart first. It sets up a dismissal. It sets up a rejection. It pits us against everything we've known and grown up with, and that's a hard row to hoe. It's hard to get someone to fall in love with your version of Christianity if you've just thrown all other versions of Christianity under the bus. It's hard to draw a line and say, "We love this, but we hate that," especially when at the end, it's all Jesus. It just overcomplicates things and introduces a hate that isn't necessary.

The truth is...if what you're about to preach is the truth, you don't have to preface it. You don't have to get everyone to hate everything they've always been taught. You don't have to throw the way we've been doing it under the bus and call down fire from heaven on it. 

If it's the truth, it'll preach itself. If it's the truth, it will catch on. If it's the truth, those who hear it will fall in love with it as they fall deeper in love with Jesus.

So I pledge to stop being an anti-Christian. (Or, at least, to try. I'm still human.) And I challenge you to start looking for the anti-Christians around you...and in you. Those who don't think they can build up without tearing down first. This should be a red flag that something may be weird.  

Eleven Other Men

Last week, we talked about the idea that one measure of your Christian faith is not how you sit at the Table with Jesus, but how you sit at the Table with Judas. And there is some truth to that. 

But I don't love that idea all by itself. 

To me, the contrast between Jesus and Judas sets the world into hard lines of black and white. Friend and enemy. Christian and betrayer. Lover and hater. 

The world I live in is simply not that black and white; it's filled with shades of grey. And if we're looking at the Table that Jesus sat at, the truth is that it looked more like the world I live in than just the contrast between Jesus and Judas. 

There was Peter, who boldly proclaimed, "You are the Son of God," but there was also Thomas, who said, "I need to see the wounds first." 

There was John, who dared to call himself "the one Jesus loves," and what do we know about James hardly at all?

There was Phillip, who was very obviously an extrovert, always running off and freely speaking to whoever he encountered. In fact, it was Phillip who ran to invite Nathanael, who was sitting under a tree by himself, to come and see. Nathanael, by everything we know of him, was an introvert. 

There was Simon the Zealot, who believed passionately in a religious revolution and an overthrowing of the state by the faithful, and there was Matthew (Levi) who literally worked for Rome - the state. 

There was Andrew, who strongly suspected there might be something Jesus could do with a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread, and there was Judas, for whom thirty pieces of silver sparkled too brightly in his own eyes to ignore. 

There were two sets of brothers and, by all we can tell, their mothers were not always around. And I'm telling you as a person with brothers...siblings are different when their mom isn't around to referee. 

And let's not forget that two of these brothers were called "Sons of Thunder." And everyone just kind of tolerated that.

There's nowhere else you're going to bring together this kind of group of persons than around the Table. There's nothing else that's going to bring them together but Jesus. In real life, these guys weren't traveling together. But here they are, breaking bread. Because whatever else they were, at that moment, they were followers of Jesus. 

And here we are, at the very same table, breaking bread. Sharing a meal in all of our shades of grey.

Because whatever else we are, whoever else we are, at this Table, we are all followers of Jesus. We are all His. 

That's what makes this Table so special. 

God's Anger

God is always angry with sin. 

I know you probably didn't want to hear that. For thousands of years, the people of God have wrestled with what we like to call God's "wrath," and the truth is that we don't have a whole lot of answers to it. 

We might say that God took His wrath out on His Son on Calvary, but to say that is to say that God killed His Son out of anger and offense when what's really truth is that God sacrificed His Son out of love. He had to show us the lengths to which He would go to love us, not what He would do to us if we kept on sinning. The Cross wasn't a threat; it was a promise. 

So the whole "wrath of God" on the Cross thing just doesn't work. At least, it doesn't work for me. 

But that still leaves us with sin and the problem of sin and the fact that God is always angry with sin, so it leaves us with God's anger with which we must wrestle. 

God's anger shows up no more prominently than in the Old Testament histories about the kings. Saul was who he was, but when David shows up, God seems to be okay with things and makes a grand promise. Then, there is a series of very human kings, kings who are sometimes faithful and sometimes not. Kings who lead Israel and Judah away from the Lord and back to Him and then away from Him again. And what we see is that God seems to have decided on a judgment for His people long before He executed it, and not even their reclaimed faithfulness can save them from it. 

It seems harsh. Doesn't God say that if we turn from our sin, He will return to us? Doesn't He say He will forgive us, not seven times, but seven times seven? Doesn't He say that forgiveness and redemption and restoration is what this is all about? How can He just get mad and stay mad? 

First, remember that God is not mad at us; He's mad at sin. He's mad at the things that the lies and the empty promises and the temptations do to us. 

Second, remember that God has said that He will be our God and we will be His children. Like any good parent, He can't just let the bad behavior go. That doesn't teach us anything. It doesn't help us to learn and grow. 

If you have a child and your child does wrong, then comes to you and admits their wrong and demonstrates that they want do to better, do you simply let them get away with whatever they've done? Of course not. Actions have consequences. The only thing they learn by absolute forgiveness is what to say when they've done wrong so that they won't be punished for it. 

But take a kid who paints graffiti on a public building and make him paint over it, and he learns the cost of his own transgression; he learns what it takes to clean up after him. This makes an impression. Take the kid who uses ugly language and make her read the thesaurus, and she learns how easy a word she's chosen and how rich and full the language actually can be. Take a kid who keeps sneaking out and ground him, and he learns what freedom really is. 

We learn from the consequences of our actions. We learn from the forgiveness of them, too - we learn something about God - but we learn our human lessons from the consequences. And that's why God can never just let sin go. If He did, we wouldn't learn anything about being human. And we'd only learn questionable things about God. 

So when we see God's anger burning in the OT against Israel's repeated sin, even in the face of their repentance, the question we have to ask ourselves is: what is God hoping His people will learn? 

God of Light

In the beginning, everything was formless and void. And into the darkness, God spoke. 

Let there be light. 

But darkness doesn't go away just like that. 

We know that much from living in a fallen world. We know that from wrestling with ourselves, with the same sin that keeps creeping up again and again in our lives. We know that because we can't ever seem to truly shake the darkness, whether it is an addiction we can't break, a habit we can't shake, a lie we can't get out from under. Whatever it is, we know that the darkness simply pursues us. 

One of the questions that has plagued Christianity - and Christians - for thousands of years is, why doesn't God just wipe out the darkness? And of course, we know that He has promised that one day, He will do just that. But we don't live in one day; we live in this one. 

And what's cool about this day is that even if today isn't the day God defeats the darkness, it is still a day that He's controlling the darkness by controlling the light. 

There's a story in 2 Kings about a time when Hezekiah is looking for an assurance from the Lord, and the assurance is offered through darkness and light. At a dark time in Hezekiah's life, God says to him, I will prove it to you by moving the shadows. And we know that the only way to move shadows is to move the light. So God moves the light and the shadows move back and Hezekiah is assured that what the Lord has said is true. 

That's the same thing He's doing with us every day of our lives. 

God has given us His promise - His promise that includes that one day, He will defeat the darkness. And we? We're always looking for evidence of that promise, for some kind of sign, for some signal that God is still in control and that what He says He is doing, He actually is doing. In the darkest times of our lives, we cry out for some kind of proof. And God says, watch; I will move the shadows. 

And then, He moves the shadows by using the light. By putting good things in front of us. By sending friends and family to love on us. By giving us good gifts. By surprising us with the unexpected. By filling us with peace that passes understanding. By being God. 

By still speaking into what seems formless and void. 

Let there be light. 

God controls the darkness by controlling the light. (2 Kings 20:11) 

God Owns the Land

When ancient kings conquered ancient peoples, they would send those peoples into exile and then send peoples from other lands to inhabit the newly-conquered territory. This was a way to throw these peoples off-balance and separate them from all the things that they knew so that they couldn't regroup, gather themselves, and wage a counterattack to try to get their independence back. 

So it was no shock when the king of Assyria sent foreigners to inhabit Israel after he conquered the kingdom of God's people. 

What was shocking was that these peoples found the Promised Land wholly unwelcoming. It wasn't a good land for them. It wasn't a land flowing with milk and honey. They weren't thriving there, as they had in their own land. And the only thing they could come up with to explain why was because they didn't understand the Lord or how to worship Him. They must be doing something wrong in His land. 

Remember, at this time, gods were strongly connected to the land. There was no concept, outside of Israel, of a god of all creation. So these other peoples considered the Lord simply the little-g god of Israel and thought that the key to success in His land was learning to worship Him properly.

On one hand, we know that God doesn't work that way. He doesn't operate the way the gods of the nations operate. He is not a god who is tied to the land, as we've seen in previous stories about Him. He is God of all creation, Lord of everything. 

On the other hand, He did have a special connection to the land of Canaan, to the Promised Land, to Israel. This was a land that He selected all the way back in the early chapters of Israel, in the time of Abram, to give to His people. This was a land He led them out of slavery to inhabit. This was a land He fought with them for to gain possession. This was the land flowing with milk and honey, with all the good things He promised to His people and prepared for them for generations before they even pitched their first tent there. 

God had a claim to the land of Israel, and He never gives up a claim He stakes...even when His people are exiled and there are strangers living there. (God has never met a stranger, by the way.) 

The good news about this for us, for you and me, is that the same is true for every heart to which God has staked His claim, as well. Come what may, come destruction or ruin, come trial or trouble, come exile or wandering, God never gives up a claim that He has staked. 

And that means that when He says we are His, we are His. Forever. (Which is also, by the way, what He said.) So....good news. 

God of Steadfast Love

One of the criticisms of God is that He seems fickle, especially in the Old Testament.

He invested His holy energies in creating the world and specially creating man, only to flood everything and start over just a few chapters later. He promised Israel that He would give them Canaan, but He makes them wander in the wilderness for 40 years first and threatens to abandon them and let them all die again. They finally get to Canaan, to the Promised Land, and a few generations later, He's exiling them to Babylon and away from the Promise. 

Then He sends His Son to die for us and says He's always loved us. But...not all of this looks like love. 

Maybe it's tough love. 

Anyone who has ever been a parent or who has ever cared deeply about another human being understands this concept. When your child is addicted to drugs, sometimes the most loving thing to do is to kick them out of your house. When your spouse is entangled in a love affair with someone else, sometimes the most loving thing to do is to cut them off from your love, even if your heart keeps on loving them and wanting them back. 

And like anyone who loves anyone, sometimes the way we love grows and changes as we have more experience with a person. Sometimes, we look at a situation and think that we know what it calls for, but when we are in a relationship with that person for longer, we understand that what the situation requires may not be what the person or the relationship requires, so we adjust what we're doing to fit the specifics of what we're dealing with. 

I think we see this same kind of steadfast, learning, growing love in God. We see Him trying to be steadfast, trying to keep loving, exercising tough love. But we also see Him growing in how He loves us. 

At first, yes, it's easy to flood the world and start over. And for awhile, it seems to become God's go-to, even though He never does it a second time. He keeps threatening in the wilderness, but He never follows through on that (based largely on the petitions of Moses and the reminders that that's not who God is). Eventually, He comes to the place where He just sends His people away for awhile, to let them deal with the consequences of their own choices. Until finally, His love wins out and He sends His Son. 

Some may bristle at such a human comparison to God, but remember - we are created in His image and relationships are dynamic. God is who He is. Always has been, always will be. But relationships, especially relationships with truly fickle human beings, are dynamic. They are constantly changing, always requiring adaptation, always requiring flexibility and response. And if God were not dynamic with us in this regard, no relationship would be possible. 

But let us be clear - we are the fickle ones; not Him. His love is steadfast and sure. And He shows it again and again by the way that He loves us. 

Even when we're tough to love. 

Jesus and Judas

Many years ago, I heard it said (and I have heard it a few times since) that the measure of your Christian faith is not how you sit at the table with Jesus, but how you sit at the table with Judas. 

The question is meant to create a polarizing choice - the Lover and the betrayer; the Friend and the enemy. The faithful who are gathered all around you and the one who will turn their back on all of it. 

But there's more to Judas than just his betrayal of Jesus. 

Yes, the betrayal of Jesus stung the other disciples, who had given up so much to follow the Rabbi and who had put their lives on the line and staked it all that this was the Messiah. This Rabbi, who was now hanging on a tree (even though, remember, He kept telling them that this was going to happen). Certainly, that would be enough. 

But we have stories about Judas that aren't about just his betrayal of Jesus, and that's important to think about when we consider this question, too. 

Judas was a man who was always more concerned about what he could get than what he could give. He was always looking out for himself. He was the disciple who managed the money bags, and when he saw an expensive gift being "wasted" on Jesus, he grumbled under-his-breath-out-loud so that everyone could hear him, and the Bible plainly tells us - he wasn't upset about the gift; he was upset that there was no way that he could cash in on it. 

He was also the kind of guy who would rather go out into a field and commit suicide than confess that he was wrong about something and try to make amends for it. He was a guy who didn't believe anyone cared enough about him to forgive him, that anyone would care if he was dead because no one was willing to welcome him back. Not even the guys he'd spent three years with and who had taken to heart Jesus's teaching on forgiveness - not seven times, but seven times seven times! If anyone is willing to forgive Judas, it has to be the guys who saw Jesus wash his feet, right? The ones who saw Jesus break bread and give it even to him? But no, Judas was the kind of guy who would rather die than be humbled. 

Know anyone like Judas?

See, it wasn't just that Judas was a betrayer. That would have been enough. The contrast between Jesus and Judas is that Judas could not be more unlike Jesus if he tried. He could not be more opposite what Jesus stood for if he was trying to be. 

So the question when it comes to Jesus and Judas is not just how do you sit not only with your Lover, but also with a betrayer? The question is also...how do you sit with the One who is so hung up on you that He gave up Himself, and how do you sit with the one who is so hung up on himself that he gives you up? 

God of the Few

God makes many promises, especially in the Old Testament. And some of those promises seem like the same one: He will make a nation more numerous than the sands on the sea or the stars in the sky, they will be His special possession, and through them, the whole world will be blessed. 

That was His goal - that His people would be a blessing to the world. So many of His promises rest on the idea that the many will be blessed by the faithfulness of the few, that a faithful life ripples through the world like a stone in a pond until every square inch of water is affected. 

But then, sin. 

But then, disobedience.

But then, unfaithfulness. 

And then, things get a little bit tricky. 

God started by drawing a really large circle, with Israel at the center and the nations all around. But the nations are unfaithful to the Lord, so the circle gets a little bit smaller. Eventually, it's only Israel left in the circle. Or so they think. 

But Israel isn't a homogenous body; there are lots of different persons and personalities in Israel, and it doesn't take long before those who seem on the edges of Israel also break their faithfulness and all of a sudden, the circle gets smaller still. 

This is what's happening when God breaks Israel into two kingdoms - Israel and Judah. The unfaithfulness in Israel means the people who get to inherit that particular promise become fewer. God's not going to break His promise; if He did, He wouldn't be God any more, and He knows that. He'd put His entire reputation to waste if He broke even one single promise. So He's not going to break His promise. 

But He does make the number of persons who benefit from it smaller. 

No longer is Israel Israel. The whole world was supposed to be blessed by Israel, but Israel failed and now, even Israel can't have the full blessing of the Lord. So now, Israel is Israel and Judah, with Judah being the nucleus of the more faithful people. So now, Judah becomes a blessing to Israel and to its legacy and to its promise. 

Then, independently, both Israel and Judah start to fail, and we see God draw the circle even smaller. If you read through Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, this is what you see happening, all the way to the exile. All the way until there is just a small remnant of poor Israelites left in the land, and a few in exile who can't stop dreaming of the Temple in all its glory and Canaan and Promise and a place called Home. 

And then, the story becomes that God blesses these few, and these few bless a few more, and because of them, Jerusalem is blessed, and because of Jerusalem, Israel is blessed and then, hopefully, one day down the road, the promise expands again and all the world is blessed (after Jesus). 

So pay attention to how 1) God never breaks His promises. Never. Not once. but 2) the circles that those promises encompass are not always the same size. 

God is Good

You've probably heard the beloved church saying, God is good; all the time. (You can probably fill in the next part: and all the time....yup, God is good.) 

You've probably heard some kind of misquote of the Scripture that says God works all things together for the good of those who love Him. Or maybe you just know what that Scripture actually says. 

The message is: God is good. 

The truth is: it doesn't always feel that way. 

During the time of Elisha, there was a great famine in the land. The famine was so severe that women were eating their own babies...and refusing to share the meat with others. The Bible actually records an argument between two women who agreed to eat their own children, then one reneged on the deal and stashed her baby away because she didn't really want anyone to eat him. That's how severe the famine was, and how torn the population was between survival and love. 

And it didn't look like things were going to get any better. It didn't look like Israel was learning anything about their sin from the famine, and it didn't seem that any relief was coming. The land was parched. Everything was stripped bare. There were no more storerooms to raid or amounts set aside for a rainy day. The rainy day had come and passed and now, there was just barrenness. 

Then, a messenger shows up to capture and kill the prophet because the king doesn't like the famine and blames Elisha for having spoken God's truth (as the kings liked to do). But Elisha says, just wait. By this time tomorrow, not only will the famine have broken, but there will be such abundance that what you have available will be extremely cheap. 

You'll be able to buy it with the scraps that you have left after trying to survive for so long. 

It's laughable to everyone in the room. You can't just go from famine to abundance in the blink of an eye like that. A prolonged drought and emptiness doesn't just fix itself in a day. Things don't just turn around that fast. 

But Elisha knows that God's been in control of this the whole time. He's been working on it since the very last bit of the last crop was harvested. God, who is good, has been planning good for this very moment, this most desperate moment that seems the most lost. 

God, who is good, is always coming, even when it seems He must be so far off. 

And that's the reminder for us. In those times when God doesn't seem good, when we can't wrap our heads around how things might ever actually change, when the land is parched and the shelves are bare and it doesn't seem like things could ever be good again, God is still good. 

And by this time tomorrow, the God who is good, who is always coming, might just finally be here. 

Just hold on.