Wrote this many years ago in a distant past, forgive if you will any immaturity or disrespect or irreverance you might appear to find here, it is all part of the growth process. THE GREAT DILEMMA 1. Adam. It all started with Adam. Adam disobeyed God and now we have everything you see today. It could have been so different, should have been, so different. You know the story, right? God is looking for Adam in the garden and Adam is in hiding with his wife. ‘Where are you?’ he calls. Eventually he comes out. He is looking sheepish, draped in fig leaves. Now I ask you. Fig leaves? Is that the best you could do, man? FIG leaves? I wonder if in that moment God was not more disappointed with the fig leaves. Imagine. They are naked. There is no knowledge of their nakedness. In all their glory, as God made them, they walk the garden in innocence. Tell me. Are we not all longing, in our heart of hearts, to walk the garden in that same way, the way Adam and Eve did, in the beginning? Do you allow yourself to think that? Do you dare think that? Why not? Why should you not walk in the same light, the same atmosphere, the same intimacy of fellowship that you did before, when you were a man called Adam, and everything was perfect, including you? Just because things have changed for the worse, does it mean that things cannot change for the better? That you can have, once again, the thing you used to have? Imagine a little, Adam. How each one of us would love to relive that moment again. It seems so trivial, so insignificant, the thing they did. One could hardly notice the difference between one tree and the next, one fruit and the next. What made the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil different, more pleasing to the eye, than other fruit? Also, it says, the fruit was presented to her as being something to make you wise, and I wonder: is it wise to want to be wise? Can you cope with the wisdom of God? Can you handle the knowledge of good and evil? If so, you are more of a man than me. Things, you can see, were becoming complicated. It was simple up to that point. One commandment. One only. Don’t eat from either of those trees. The only thing I ask. Of course, God put them there for a reason. No point in having creatures made in his image, with free wills, if there was nothing for them to exercise their free will with. Enter Satan. Satan was created for a purpose – to serve God. He chose not to, and we can too. He knew that, and of course, God is not that small that he needs our love. On the other hand, if we choose to love him, he is very happy, and so are we. We are God’s woman – his first love – and we can choose to hurt him if we like. We can refuse him, reject him, run after other lovers – but it is not through lack of love – or effort – on his part. Have you ever considered that the power of the universe is not in God’s hands – or Satan’s – but yours? God gave that power to you – because he trusted you. Do you see, in this way, God is as weak, as dependent, as vulnerable as you are? He was not afraid to make himself less than God for you. He was not afraid to ‘lower’ himself for you. He would have done anything (did do anything) for you. Eve, as it worked out, did not understand that. Neither did Adam. They had no idea, really. And I ask you today, Adam, if you got a second chance, what would you do? Would you put the flesh first, before yourself? Would you put your love for a woman first, before your God? Would you serve her, become a servant to her, become a servant to Satan, for her sake? Would you be a fool for love? To men I say, as God said then, it is your choice. To women I say, don’t listen to the snake. God is mad. He wants to kill them right there and then. He wants to destroy the man He has made in his image, for he has brought shame, disgrace to him. Apart from the hurt, he has humiliated him. Fig leaves? Is that all you have to offer for a world gone wrong? I can easily imagine God being in a rage – because of the fig leaves more than anything else. For HEAVEN’S SAKE! CAN’T YOU JUST BE HONEST WITH ME AND TELL ME YOU ARE NAKED! WHY TRY TO HIDE, COVER YOURSELF?!? DO YOU NOT KNOW YOU HAVE SINNED?!? He had no choice. The choice was between being mad and being embarrassed. ‘GET OUT!’ he thundered. ‘GET OUT OF MY SIGHT! GET OUT OF MY GARDEN!’ raging against himself for making the man in the first place. If he had never made him, he could never have been hurt by him! Still, he kept his peace. Kept his patience. Held back his temper. Self control. Self control. Self control. If I cannot show them what it means to be God, how can I expect them to serve me? I couldn’t help but think, when I was reading that passage, that our future could have been different if Adam had just said, God, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I’ve messed up. I’ve done the wrong thing. I’ve failed. God, I’ve failed. I’m so, so, so sorry! Please forgive me, God. Please forgive me.’ But no. He must pass the buck. He must say, the woman you gave to me gave it to me. In other words, you, God, are to blame. Not me! It’s YOUR fault! The woman says no, it was the snake. Not MY fault. The DEVIL made me do it. There was no one left for the snake to blame, and at last, God ran out of patience. He tells them to get out (self control preventing him from using stronger language) and commands Gabriel to command an angel to stand guard against his pride and joy ever entering back into the perfection into which he was formed, standing guard, on top of that, to make sure he never touches the tree of life that will make him like God in every way, knowing good and evil, and not knowing death. I almost forgot. The fig leaves. There was nothing God could do but look around him and say, ‘come here’ to a goat, a lamb or a sheep that happened to be passing by. The next thing there were clothes, ‘coats’ made for the man and woman (the record doesn’t show what he used, a knife, a stone or his teeth.) All we know is, as quick as possible (so as to cover the man and woman, and cover his embarrassment) he had killed the next best thing to them. Thank God for the goat. Thank God for the sheep. Thank God for life, for air, for blood breathing oxygen. The bible does not record the first sacrifice, the slaughterer was in too much of a hurry. Even the writer cannot get through his story fast enough, skipping out that bit about the killing. Top priority, it seems, was for God to clothe man, thereby hiding his (His) nakedness, and in another way, his (His) failure. This was, after all, His child. Here we have the first recorded moment in history of a father covering up for his son. Doing anything, so long as his son escapes without being punished. Don’t say, for one second, God is not a good dad. On the other hand, God is also just. He cannot be both. He cannot compromise. If his son has done wrong, he has done wrong. He must be punished. Otherwise there was no point to him making any condition in the first place. Therefore, he drives them out, and curses the earth under their feet. ‘TO HELL WITH YOU!’ he is in effect saying, but it is not as bad as that. It is, at best, a prolonging of judgment. At worst, it is a foretaste of hell. ‘What do I do now?’ the creator asks. ‘I have killed a lamb. I have shed innocent blood to clothe guilty nakedness. For man’s sake, I have become guilty too. The universe is witness, for the love of man, I have transgressed the law of my own creation. I am God. How can I be God, if I am not just?’ With that headache in front of him, God goes into hiding. He has a lot of thinking to do, a lot of reconsidering. ‘What have I done?’ he cries to Himself. ‘What have I done? For love of myself, for love of God, I made man. But look what man has done to me!’ So ends the first sacrifice. 2. Abel. Later, Abel is sacrificing to God, and I ask, why? What gave Abel the idea a sacrifice was going to make any difference? Was it something he felt, something he thought, or something he knew? What made him think the further killing of life, the further sacrifice, the further bloodshed would make a difference? What was behind him doing something so unnatural, for something so unnatural? Surely it goes against nature to kill. Surely it goes against nature to kill in the name of God. Surely one would not want to have anything to do with such unnatural practices. Are the animals we share the earth with not related to us, after all, in a way nothing else is? Do we not breathe the same oxygen, use of the same blood? Is our life not given, sustained, by that oxygen, and that blood? What made a man think that to save his life, he needed to take life? Perhaps it was something his dad told him. Something his dad saw, that he remembered. Something his dad was wearing at the time when he told him. ‘Son’ you can imagine Adam telling Abel. ‘If you want to live, something has to die.’ Cain thought otherwise. He was a humanist. Why did anything need to die, he reasoned. Why did anything living, anything that breathed, pumped the lifeblood, pumped the future, be sacrificed? Could God not accept vegetables, for instance, or fruit, like any life respecting vegetarian would do? He had not got that far, of course, as Abel in his thinking. The fact that God could never accept anything less than Cain himself on that altar escaped him. Abel sacrificed a lamb because he knew it was the next best thing to HIM being sacrificed. Before God, he knew, something was wrong. Something was between them – something that separated them from the perfection they had enjoyed in the beginning. The earth was cursed, man was cursed, and all he had to offer for his life was the life of an animal. God accepted it, because he had no choice. It was all that Abel had, all that God had. Abel paid for it, of course, in the only way he could, thereby justifying God. The lamb was never anything more than a substitute, and when Cain took offense to his fruit and vegetables not being accepted, he took offense against his brother, whose lamb was. In God’s strange way, justice was served against man. Abel paid for his sins with his blood, like all of us are required to. Or did you think Jesus was joking when he said take up your cross and follow me?’ Where did you think he was going with that cross? On a holiday somewhere? To die is what it means to be a man. To live is what it means to be a god. We are born to death. We are born again to life. Abel, in this way, was the first Christ. He paid, as Christ paid, for the sin of man. We who are born to Adam are born to Adam’s sin, therefore to Adam’s judgment. Before he took the bite, it was not so. Today, we are no different to Abel. We are aware, are conscious, the way he was, of the gulf between him and God. How he longed to have the relationship with God his father had enjoyed. How he longed to be one with his Father, the way Adam was before. This is the heart of the true man, the true God, and the true Christ. To be one is all any one of them prayed for. 3. Noah. Noah’s sacrifice is the second sacrifice recorded officially in the bible. So much had gone wrong by then. If you thought God was in a state before, try this: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the lord that he had made man on the earth, and it GRIEVED HIM AT HIS HEART.” It goes on. “And the Lord said, ‘I will destroy man who I have created from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, FOR IT REPENTETH ME THAT I HAVE MADE THEM.’ ” Regret, regret, regret. Funny that God has no one to say sorry to. Nobody to weep bitter tears of repentance to. No one to say to him, ‘don’t worry, it’s OK, everything is going to be alright.’ Enter Noah. “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Just like that first animal (we don’t know what it was) saved our skins, so Noah, the man who ‘found grace in the eyes of the Lord’ did the same. Without him, we do not exist. Without him, God’s universe, as we know it, does not exist. How is it possible, one asks, for not one man, one woman, other than Noah, to be godly? How is it that man, made in the image of God, can be such a failure? If it was not for Noah, let us say, if it was not for ONE MAN that found grace in the eyes of the Lord, would everything else, the whole of creation, the earth, the stars and the universe, be not the greatest failure of existence? That God could make everything, put everything on display, put man at the pinnacle of it, the centerpiece of his glory, only for him to betray him so! One part of me thinks God still smarts at it, the terrible pain, the terrible shame we brought upon ourselves, and upon him. Yet above it all, his love, and his grace, was more. Any one of us who has a father, anyone of us who has a son, let us remember him when we remember God. There was nothing more, nothing less, that drove him to us. The story tells of a man who found grace in God’s eyes, and salvation. Also, a man who did not question, only obeyed. Don’t you wish for that in your life? Despite the need you have to be your ‘own’ man, your ‘own’ woman, your ‘own’ free will, nevertheless you need someone to command you? Does it not take the pressure off you, to be commanded? Does it not lighten your load, to think someone else, apart from you, takes responsibility? Someone you can talk to, to unload the burden you carry on your own? Someone who gladly removes it, knowing your heart, knowing your hardship, knowing your labour? Is it not easier, after all, better, to have someone? Is it not better to live as you live in partnership with somebody, not yourself? The good news is, for all men who have carried their burdens alone, there is someone to share it with. There is someone to tell you what to do. Noah’s obedience saved him. It was not enough that he found grace in the eyes of the Lord. It was enough that he did what God told him to do. Now we have a human race. I wonder when I think about Noah. I wonder how quickly he got that second sacrifice going. I wonder was he quicker than God in the garden when all he wanted to do was cover man and his nakedness. Did he really look for anything in particular, or did he just see a goat, or a sheep, whatever it was and say ‘YOU! Come here!’ Maybe it was no different this time. Forty days. Forty nights. A lot of days after that, waiting for the waters to go down. Eventually God saying OK, come out. There you have it. “And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his son’s wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark. “And Noah built an altar unto the Lord, and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Imagine. Imagine what it took to build the ark in the first place. Could you do it now, in the age of machines? Could you do what he did later, collect all the animals, the way he did? Could you get them in, lions, tigers, elephants and all, feed them, water them, clean up after them for forty days and nights? Could you keep them all under control, under cover, under grace? Forget that. Think about the human beings. Think about the laughing, the joking, the scoffing of men who had never seen rain. Think about the gossip. Think about the noise. The sound of man’s depravity hammering against your faith. Then, forty days and nights of rain later. Days of waiting for the water to go down. Opening the door, at last, on a world without people. No animals. No life. No living thing. No noise. No sound at all. Just nothing. Silence. Perfect quiet. Nothing but you and your ark and your God. Think about it from the animal’s point of view. Always, the animals come to our rescue. You get herded, right? You get loaded onto a boat. Hey, there’s plenty of straw, plenty of water, plenty of females. You’re just getting used to it, getting cozy with all your new friends when they open the door and you are out. Hey! Cool! A fresh new world! We’re saved! YES, YES, YES! THANKS GOD! Then Noah points at you the way God pointed at the sheep and you’re thinking uh oh, what have I done now and before you can get away or run back into the ark they have you by the neck and you’re wondering why they’re looking for a knife and rushing back and forth with boulders. “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and the Lord said in His heart, ‘I will not curse the ground anymore for man’s sake, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth – neither will I again smite anymore every thing living, as I have done. “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” It goes on. God blesses man, gives him the animals to eat (since there was nothing else to do with them) and lays down the law. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you – even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely the blood of your lives will I require – at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man. At the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whose sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed – for in the image of God made He man.” Obviously, the sacrifice meant something. Here, for all to see, we see the importance of the relationship man has with God, the relationship he has with animals, and the relationship man has with animals. We can see, clearly, how important they are, how close they are to man himself. God respects life in all forms, therefore, we should respect it. If an animal could take your place, you could take an animal’s place. An animal, in the context of this scripture, is as accountable – as answerable – for the shedding of blood, AS MAN IS. 4. Job. “There was a man in the of Uz, whose name was Job, and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil.” Obviously, the book of Job is a bible unto itself. Certainly, the man is a sermon unto himself. But let us look quickly at the man in context to his sacrificial life, since we are dealing here with sacrifice. “And his sons went and held a feast in the house of each one upon his day (of birth, no doubt) and they sent and called for their sisters to eat and drink with them.” What a happy family this was. No in-fighting, no petty jealousies, no squabbles. NO SEGREGATION (more importantly) in a time that was surely more progressive than ours. “And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all, for Job said: ‘It may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts.’ ” Is this not just the most wonderful man on earth? Is he not just the most glorious? We all have our heroes on earth, but is Job not the most heroic of them all? We have all been through difficult times. Let me tell you that in my time, when no one else was there for me, Job was there for me. Job, of all the men in the bible, is the closest to God for me, and the closest to men. He makes sense of all the nonsense, justice of all the injustice, faith of all the faithlessness. If ever there was a reason for man (and God) to take hope, it is Job. Job did it ON HIS OWN. God was NOT THERE FOR HIM. God purposely removed himself from Job, like he does with all of us, for a time, in order for us to prove ourselves to him. God bless Job, and God bless God for giving us Job. If ever a man who did not believe in God needed something to believe in, he could believe in Job. Job, then, is the next best thing to God, and is this not what it says? That Job was a PERFECT MAN, upright, one that feared God and eschewed (spat out) evil? The question I will ask, though it might appear to be irreverent, is this: did Job need a sacrifice? Since he was perfect, by God’s judgment, who is there to judge him? Could any of his friends, could any of his neighbours, could any of his family condemn him? No. He was a perfect man – one who held to the truth, and to his integrity. God bless you, Job. God love you. The human race, like it depends upon Jesus, depends on you. Job, then, did not make sacrifices for himself. Rather, he made sacrifices for others – starting with his sons. This is the first time we hear of a priest in the chronology of the bible. We do not know when Job lived, or when his story was written, but we must assume it was a long time ago, when wealth was still measured in livestock. Let us say, for the sake of this sermon, between the time of Noah and the time of Abraham. If we look at the figure of Jesus, the ‘Son of Man’ the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, we see, in all perfection, the complete offering of God that is at once both sacrifice and priest. The priest, dear friends, dear brothers, dear followers of Christ, is a man who takes responsibility for the sins of others. It is a man who is not thinking of himself alone, but everyone. It is the man who is aware, is conscious of the sin of man in contrast to the holiness of God – one who tries, by supplication – to stay the wrath of God, and his judgment. Look at God. Did he want to destroy man? Did he want to bring the flood? How long did he wait, before at least, he said, ‘enough?’ God is a lover at heart, not a killer. He would rather you love him than hate him. He would do anything he can – absolutely anything – not to lose you. How can he communicate this to you? How can he tell you, this is how he feels? How can he let you know, he is not the monster you make him out to be? It is through us. Through me. Through you. You are his mouthpiece. Now brother, tell me. What will you do, now that you know the will of God? What will you do, now that you know the heart of God? What will you do, knowing what God thinks, knowing what he wants? Will you obey Him? My feeling is, if Job knew there was anything amiss with his sons – if he knew they were thinking in a way that was not right – if he knew that in their hearts they had ‘renounced God’ he would not have been making sacrifices. Rather, he would have been at their feet, begging them to turn back to him. Job’s faith was not in sacrifices, but in God. He knew, no amount of bloodshed could reconcile a man to God. Yet he sacrificed anyway, for this is what, until that time, served to stay the judgment of God. Yes, dear brother, there was no Jesus then. There was only a man’s heart, a man’s hands, a man’s thoughts, a man’s decisions. It was by willpower alone that Job served God, and served Him completely. It was by willpower alone that Job, regardless of his sinful inheritance, ‘found grace in the eyes of the Lord.’ Do you imagine that God, looking down on the one man who made him proud, who vindicated his faith in man, was not vindicated? Do you think, dear Adam, dear Noah, dear Job, that you are not the same as them? That you are not born from their loins? Do you think, dear brother, you are not a priest, like them, a perfect man, a man after God’s own heart? I want to ask you, brother. I want to ask you, sister. I want to ask you to put your name in the place of Job in this piece of scripture. “ Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also amongst them. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence cometh thou?’ ” We can imagine the Lord saying this. In what way did he say it? As if Satan was answerable to Him? No. It was with dread that the Lord asked that question, for of course, He knew where Satan had been. “Then Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” Very cheeky, very insolent, for he knew God knew where he had been. “And the Lord said unto Satan,’ (can you hear how quick he is to respond?) ‘Hast thou considered my servant Job? (you!) For there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil.” 5. Abraham. Abraham was the first man, according to scripture, who God made a personal covenant with. We read, in Genesis, that God made a covenant with Man after the flood, but not with Noah himself. The bow was for us – the men to come – to remember, with God, his covenant never to destroy us again, like he did, with water. One can speculate here. Did God say he would not destroy us some other way? God appeared to Abram, it records, promising him the earth. Abraham believes him. About a hundred years later (God has promised him his descendents will be as the stars for number, as the sands of the sea) he is still without a child. No matter. Sarah falls pregnant after giving up hope, (having given her maidservant to Abraham to sire an offspring.) The promised child is born healthy and normal, from the mother of God’s choice. About 13 years later, (Bar Mitzvah age) God tells him to sacrifice his son. No. Simple. No. Did he tell the wife what God said? No. Did he tell the neighbours? No. Did he tell the passing traders? No. What he did, on the other hand, was go to sacrifice his son. That is the difference between a man who obeys God and a man who doesn’t. The difference between Noah, say, or Job, or Abraham – and us. We’re not quite there yet, are we? And we’re not quite sure if we ever will be. Sacrifice my son? No. Sorry. The sacrifice of Abraham was like no other. Here, a man was not simply killing the next best thing – a sheep or as goat. Now, he was killing himself. This was what god was looking for. Greater love has no man than this, than to lay his life down for his friends. In essence, that was what we were looking for from him, and maybe, that was what he had in mind when he told Abraham to do that. If you can do it, I can do it! So, once again, we owe our lives to a man of obedience. Without Abraham, we would not have got Jesus – traditionally, and spiritually. Think about it. You could not give your son up to God, right? No. Sorry. But he must give his up for you? What makes you so important? Are you above him? Are you more than him? Are you more emotional, more human, more attached to your loved ones – than him? We’re getting somewhere, aren’t we? We’re beginning to see a pattern here. Some picture forming. God, I guess, just needed to see that the man of his making was as perfect as he was. As uncompromising. As faithful to death. As HOLY. You can take that word holy and call it something else: ruthless. This is not a woman’s God. This is the job of a man, to believe in this One, and to obey Him. For those women who get as far as to serve Him the way a man serves Him, they have to become Men in the process. Abraham was no less a priest than Job was. Abraham, by faith, sacrificed his son for the world. The fact that God stopped him makes no difference. 6. Israel. Isaac, the story goes, had a relatively easy life. He had it handed to him on a platter, as it were. He suffered no real hardships, the way his son Jacob did, who later gave his name to the nation of Israel. Israel was a man of sacrifices. Of all the men since Adam, this man left the most altars. God would appear to him here and he would build an altar here. God would appear to him there and he would build an altar there. It was like a knee jerk reaction with him. Meet with God? Build an altar. Jacob (as he is more commonly known) was a man of endurance. A strong man, strong willed – strong enough to contend with God himself. “And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he (the man) saw that he prevailed not against him (Jacob) he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint.” (My emphasis. Imagine. God cheating like that.) “And he (God) said, (desperately, one assumes) ‘let me go, for the day breaketh.’ And he (Jacob) said. ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’ ” Imagine! God dumbfounded, flabbergasted. In a state of panic! He has cheated, crippled the man he is wrestling with, but the man still will not give up! What kind of man is this? “And he (God) said to him, “what is thy name?” This question begs the question, did God not know? Did he just somehow run into this guy by accident? Did he just decide to go walking around on the earth one night, like Satan, doing his rounds, when he happened to run into this fiendishly stubborn man who seemed to have in him more than God had! How strange that the creator did not know the power of his own creation! Or was it simply a test, one he failed miserably, but not minding at all, because his creation triumphed so magnificently! God, obviously, has had enough by now. This man is too much for Him. He is ready to throw in the towel, to say, ‘I give up!’ in effect: ‘You be God! You take over! You beat me fair and square. You are the stronger, you are the victor, you are the winner! That’s our God. He’s no sore loser. And he’s fair, righteous and just. He gives a man his due. ‘Jacob’ said Jacob. God takes a long look at him, we can imagine. He is exhausted. “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel – for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” Great God! Can you believe that? Can you accept it? If ever you had any doubt that God created you in his image, equal to him in body, never doubt again. Remember, it is God’s life in you, God’s power, and God’s strength. In reality, the contest of God with Jacob was not the contest of God against man, but God against God. For the first time, it seems, God put himself into the body he made, to see how it felt to be a Man. Man against man, strength against strength, God will always win for he is the source of all strength. Jacob goes one further, of course, in this delightful encounter. Jacob, you know, was always driving for a hard bargain (one can assume, at this point in the dialogue, he has still not let go of God.) “And Jacob asked him (Him) and said, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.” Again, God is surprised! This man has no end! Will he forever be taking him unawares?!? Obviously, Jacob at this point has still not worked out that he has been wrestling with God in the flesh all night. It seems amazing to God that Jacob still considers him to be a mere man! He is in awe of Jacob, it seems, incredulous – beyond amazement – when he says: “WHEREFORE IS IT THAT THOU DOST ASK AFTER MY NAME?” God is more perplexed, more puzzled than he has ever been since the beginning. He thought he had it all under control. Under wraps. But here he finds himself confronted with the truth of his own creation. And he is IMPRESSED! Is it any wonder then that God blessed Jacob and founded a nation bearing his name? The nations of the earth that refuse to recognize the existence of Israel better watch out! He most definitely exists, and his sons too! At last, like the last man on earth to see the light, the truth arrives for Jacob too, who now goes by the name of Israel. “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Hello? What makes a man so dumb? But can anyone tell me why there exists no statue to this man, surely the most mighty, the most heroic of us all, ever? What was Michelangelo thinking? Jacob, called Israel, is the one man you need no God to feel inspired about – take His word for it. You could say that was the high point in Israel’s life, but if you think about the stages of his career, the pillars of stone he left along the way, from his first encounter with God to the last, one sees a man who surely had power and influence with him. God appeared to him more than any other of the patriarchs, telling him the same thing over and over, about his name, and the people that would inherit his name. When God first appeared to him at Beth-el, and he woke up in wonder saying (characteristically) ‘surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not’ and he grew afraid, ‘how dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’ he set up the stone he had been using for a pillow as an altar, and offered oil upon it. Is it not interesting that he was lying, unawares, upon a sacrificial stone? Was this not his way of offering his life, of saying, ‘I have sacrificed myself’? Afterwards, he makes a vow. “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God, and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house, and of all that thou shall give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.’ What a sharp man, even if he was slow to catch on sometimes. As if he had a choice! Where else was he going to get all that from? Where was he going to find that ‘tenth’ to give back? It took a long time, a long life, to get Jacob back to Israel. It took an even longer time for him to realize his inheritance. Years of bitter hardship and struggle, a life lived largely by physical courage, physical strength and physical effort. By the time he was ready to return to the Promised Land he had lost everything that was dear to him. Still, he was able to bless his sons, raised from the dead, as it were, before he died. In the words of Jacob, Israel, to his son Joseph, we receive all the blessings of a life of sacrifice. “Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over a wall. The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him, but his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong, by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob (from hence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel.) Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee, with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb, the blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors, (Abraham, Isaac and all the rest) unto the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills, they shall be upon the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.” 7. Moses. God, in the meantime, had been working on the problem of what to do about the problem of sin that separated him from Man. Noah was a part of that, of course, but not by intention. God, we must believe, had been waiting until there was only one man left. Before he died, or went the way of the others, he stepped in. We saw in Job good reason for God saving the human race. Another good man, the last, standing between us and the knife, kneeling before an altar with blood on his hands. Abraham was one of those men, we have seen, that had in him that same thing – faith, the bible calls it – and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. The relationship between God and man took on new dimension with the covenant between God and Abraham. God was working on a plan to put the relationship back in place. Without Abraham, it would not work. The dialogue between Abraham and God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah reveals two things: the willingness on God’s part to be persuaded against taking action by a man, and the power of a man to persuade God to change his mind. Out of these two we see the heart of God in both, to save rather than severe. The heart of God is a loving heart, therefore, a forgiving heart. As long as there is a man somewhere praying to God for other men, there is hope for other men. He might not listen, but then again, he might. If there were as much as 50 righteous men in the city, Abraham ventured an opening bid, would God consider not destroying them with the rest? From 40 to 30 to 20 to 10, Abraham raised the stakes, but even he knew at ten, there would be no point in being righteous, if the cost was so high. Yet I wonder. If God was willing to destroy everyone for the sake of Noah, would he not have done the same for Lot? If, for instance, Abraham had bargained him down to two, would it have made any difference? God destroyed the city for the sake of the one man, Lot, who he removed from the fire in the same way that he removed Noah from the water. The point being, God is righteous and just, but he would prefer to be merciful. If there had been another one, apart from Lot, he would have relented for Abraham’s sake. These astronomical odds are what constitute the great dilemma. On the one hand, God does not want one of us to perish. On the other, he will kill us all for the sake of all of us. Or, he could kill one of us for the sake of all of us… What he needed was a priest. An intercessor. Someone who could turn his wrath away from us. Someone who could take his wrath upon himself. Moses was one of these men. Surely, as we see the line of men from beginning to end, we see the dilemma. On the one hand, man is consistently evil. On the other, he is consistently good. This good man is the one that God is concerned with. Understand me. God was quite content with one man to keep him company. That’s why he made one man. Then he saw (as if surprised) that man was still lonely, despite his company. So he creates Woman, and if you want to know why now we have zillions of souls heading for destruction is because God did not want man to be alone. By deductive reasoning we arrive at the truth. The price of your salvation is the damnation of all those others. Or, put another way, if it was only you Jesus had to die for, he would have done it. It’s all the same to God. Holy. Ruthless. One man. One body. One bride. One church. The mystery of God. The mystery of one flesh. The ancestors of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, meanwhile, had outdone themselves. They were now a Nation. The idea, then, was for this nation to serve God as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had served God. Faithfully. At the heart of this relationship God has with his people is love. No lover would want to admit it, but isn’t it obvious, God just wants to love, and be loved, like any of us? He gets hurt just like any of us, gets angry like any of us, jealous, vengeful, wary of rejection. He made us this way, in his image, so we know. We have the heart, the nature, the emotions of God, being made like him. Is it not ironic, in contrast to that, that the areas on the world map where there is no commerce, no trade, no economic activity at all – in other words, where there are no men – you will find God? Find the most isolated spot in the world. Take the poles, if you like, or the high places – the high peaks, the high mountains. Take the deserts, the wastelands, the spots inhabited only by the wild beasts and the elements. Take the wind and the sun and the rain. Take the empty vastness of the universe. Wherever you are close to the raw power of life, unprotected by gold, you will find God. This, again, has to do with sacrifice. The children of Israel thought they had it hard in Egypt. How they prayed, cried out to God, day in, year out, for four centuries! When eventually he responds, he leads them out into the desert (after nearly drowning them in the Red Sea.) He goes before them in the elements – a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire at night – but the stomach is mightier than the cloud, and thirst more thirsty than fire. It would take any of us three days without water in the hot sun, with wives and kids to answer, not to rebel. Don’t think you or I would have done any better than the Israelites. It is, after all, not possible for a nation to be one man, not possible for the mob to have the relationship with God that one man had. Enter Moses. Moses had spent his time in the desert, in the wastelands, under the hot sun. He knew what it was to have sheep to take care of. He knew what it was to have lives depending on him, looking to him for food, water and shelter against the elements. Ask you something. You think God could have survived a wife? You think he could have found a woman to marry him? Obviously not, judging by the lack of success he has had with us. He’s just too impossible, isn’t he? Too beyond our sense of reality. It was this reality, which is a worldly reality, that was opposed to him from the start. The sooner we were under the sun, under the elements, exposed to heat and cold, fire and water, the sooner he could burn it out of us, burn up the fat layer we had gathered around us to protect us from him. This was our reality, us Israelites, sons of Egypt for 400 years. What was it we asked for? Flesh pots. It was a bit much, granted. But here we see again, God running out of patience. This idea was not working the way he wanted it to. This people were just not cooperating! ‘Let me kill them,’ he says to Moses, ‘and I will make a great nation out of YOU. Wow. You see what I mean? One for all, all for one. It happened a few times along that never-ending pilgrimage toward the Promised Land. From the moment they were free, under the reality of God, they were bound to the reality of the flesh. Either or, it seems. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Consider Abraham. Did he stop, because of Isaac, obeying God? Did he put his own life first, before God’s commandment? Did he have anything to say about it? Did he offer up the sacrifice of Adam –– words of denial and self-justification that only angered God instead of appeasing him? No. In the back of his mind, Abraham knew the law. The wages of sin is death – as he knew in his heart, and as he had been told. God was within his rights to demand the payment for that first sacrifice of old – the death of a man, or a man’s son. It is no coincidence that when Israel left Egypt, they left all the first born sons dead. My point is, we are living by grace. We are being passed over. God can take away our life anytime. “Should we expect good from the hand of God, and not evil?” countered Job to his wife, when she found herself in the awful position of being Satan’s mouthpiece. Job understood, as did Abraham, that God is not here to please us. We are created for his pleasure, not his for ours. So shut up, I would have said, if you want to carry on living. This sounds very judgmental and out of character for a loving and forgiving God. But don’t you think it is worth trying to quantify just how much patience God has already invested in us? Is it not something we can credit him for, instead of crediting ourselves for being brave? Is it not worth comparing ourselves to him, in order for us to see, as Job did, that we have nothing to say, but to “abhor ourselves, repenting in dust and ashes”? Ah yes. Job had his say, and we are so grateful he did – grateful to God for allowing him – but the story goes only to show that man is man and God is God and while the ignorance of being human blinds us from seeing him the way he sees us, we will need a sacrifice. With Moses’ help, God succeeds. With Moses’ help, we survive. Please. It might take you one day, or me, to do that job. Don’t think for one second that you are not able to. Moses himself thought the same thing, but God used him anyway. A nobody in the desert. That is how Moses saw himself, and nothing God could do could change that. No amount of signs. No amount of miracles. No amount of words coming from a burning bush. Moses still saw himself as nothing, no matter what God thought, did or said. And you want to say God does not have patience? “JUST BELIEVE ME, DAMMIT!” is what any man of flesh would have said. Sometimes you have to just throw the child in the deep end and hope he will swim for fear of drowning, if nothing else. Our theme is as strong as ever. The reason given to pharaoh for ‘letting us go, we pray thee, for three day’s journey into the desert’ was to ‘sacrifice unto the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence, and the sword.’ Perhaps that had something to do with why they had found themselves enslaved in the first place. God was not being served. The contract was not being fulfilled. There was no sacrifice being made on behalf of the sin of man. One sees the pattern emerging clearly now, the pattern of the first tabernacle, the desert temple, the canvas abode of God by which the people became, after the law, the ‘children of God.’ It cost a generation of Israelites to accomplish that goal. It took 40 years in the wilderness, avoiding the ‘Promised Land.’ 40 years of exposure, 40 years of thirst, 40 years of deprivation – until the memory of the fleshpots was burned out of their blood and dust was all that remained of the pretty things they brought with them from the city. There is none of that stuff in the wild places where God removes himself from man – only the fire of God himself – and the will you have to obey him. Now his people were ready, according to Old Testament (as ready as they were ever going to be under the law) and Moses, of course, must pay for that one time that he slipped and got angry with his people, thereby striking the rock with his stick instead of talking to it, like God said he should, when the people were complaining for water once again. We can almost end this discourse on the Old Testament at that point, because everything that happened after that is history. Up to now, it has been revelation. The blood sacrifice had become law. The Levites had become priests. The tabernacle was divided as it would be in stone, in order of holiness. Only the High Priest, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, could enter the Holy of Holies, where God made his dwelling on Earth for a time – upon a ‘mercy seat’ covered by golden seraphim and cherubim over an ark holding Moses’ staff of many miracles and the tablets of stone cut with His finger. “THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME,” it started, like that, in caps. That did not leave us with much of a choice. 8. Jesus. Maybe you can take that first commandment as a prophecy instead of a COMMANDMENT. It means something different then. By faith God was saying, ‘One day, thou shalt have no other gods before me!’ It sounds different, put that way, doesn’t it? Makes you want to laugh and clap and shout and scream saying YES, YES, THANKS GOD! God could never, after all, force you to love him. That would be against the whole idea of us having a free will he created us with to love Him because we wanted to. So I see no other way to accept those commandments literally without accepting them as a prophecy of God over my life. By faith, by the reality of God, which knows know place in space and time, I will have no other gods before him! As I say to this to myself, as I meditate on it, it becomes true for me. The just shall live by faith. There you go. Another prophecy! I shall LIVE BY FAITH! Thanks God! I shall LIVE BY FAITH now and I shall LIVE BY FAITH in the future. I shall LIVE BY FAITH forever! From the days of Moses, to the days of Joshua to the days of the judges, the ark traveled lightly. Around David’s time a temple was being planned on the design of the tabernacle (the tent.) Solomon it was, who asked for neither gold or riches or long life, got it all. Finally, the house of God was built – on the place where Jacob first put up his pillow. The sacrifices were ritual, the priesthood unchanged. From Levi to Aaron to Eli to Samuel, the priests served. Around Saul’s time God had relinquished the idea of him being the king. His people, apparently, did not want to be ruled by an invisible God. They wanted a more conventional version of him, one who walked among them as a man. They wanted a priest, in effect, and who knows what else, perhaps an idol too. The point being, THEY wanted. Not God wanted. So God gave it to them. God gave them Saul, but he was set up. He was no man after God’s heart, and he wanted them to know the difference. Samuel, the appointed priest, God’s ‘man,’ his representative, anointed him. Thus a man became the earthly glory of God on the throne, to serve the people, and in doing so, lead the people. He found a better man in David, and by the time Solomon came, the world was ready. Finally, God saw His plan working, so far as a nation on earth, and a king, that gave him glory. God became Solomon for that time, we can imagine, for where did the wisdom and glory of Solomon come from? Yet Jesus was to remind us later, no lily of the field, that is here today, gone tomorrow, was less glorious than him. Kingship, at best, was an earthly model of a heavenly state. Kingship, perhaps, was the only way men could understand God. If there was such a thing as authority, and judgment, no better way for it to be explained than to exercise it. But before these things – before kings and lords and nations and rulers – there was just man and God, one to one. That, we must believe, is what the original order was all about. Nothing was further from God than THOU SHALT NOT when he walked the garden with his magnificent son, Adam. The fellowship was too sweet – as far away from the knowledge of good and evil as he could imagine. He was not even thinking about that – which was why it must have come as such a surprise, such a shock, to see him in fig leaves. God could have looked at the future if he wanted to, but he chose not to. Well, that’s just the infantile imaginings of a man trying put his heart and mind into a place it will never be – still way below God’s ways, way below God’s thoughts. But we cannot help but wonder, can’t we? In an effort to know him, we become like him, and that is the danger, I guess, of being too close to God. Can you ever be friends with your father in a way that does not undermine his greatness? Let us remain men, I say. Let us remain children. Let him reveal what he wants to reveal when he wants to reveal it. Enter John the Baptist, marching into history like God himself – in an animal skin. For with one swipe of his arm, with one swipe of his hand, he swept away everything we have heard about up to this point. In denial of the sacrifice, in denial of the temple, in denial of the priesthood, the veil and the Holy of Holies; in denial of all our teaching, all our religion, all our law, our statutes and our commandments, he thundered out of the wilderness, ‘REPENT, MAKE STRAIGHT THE WAY OF THE LORD!’ As if all that was nonsense, which of course, it was. God has no pleasure in slaughter, no glory in burnt offerings. To obey is better than sacrifice. Let’s go back to the opening text. “John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And there went out unto him all the land of Judea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” How was it possible, I ask you, for one man to set aside the blood sacrifice? How was it possible, I ask you, to confess your sins, and be remitted? How was it possible, as a man, to believe it was possible? Through Jesus Christ, the son of man, the son of God.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 10:12:20 +0000
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