2023-02-04 A Meditation on Merging With the Divine
““Behold, in this you are not right. I will answer you, for God is greater than man. Why do you contend against him, saying, ‘He will answer none of man’s words’? For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, while they slumber on their beds, then he opens the ears of men and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn man aside from his deed and conceal pride from a man; he keeps back his soul from the pit, his life from perishing by the sword.” (Job 33:12–18 ESV)
Our moments are precious, and merge with the divine. Somehow there is a reach we make unto holiness, visions and reassurances easy to file away when in fact these are God’s word to us His people. God’s recovery posture, us as the ones manifestly in need, find quiet and assurance, yet then banter and chat as though no longer assured.
We were assured, only we allowed such heavenly lottery-winnings to go the way of forgetfulness. We today are called to bring our burdens unto the Lord, and to allow that heavenly to merge with the daily routine, the grind, the banal, the plain. We see ourselves now called, hearing today words courageous for the journey ahead. We see the unexpected, then fuss as we try to retrofit life according to our own more “conscious” understanding.
That is, today we invite the Holy Spirit to bless. We invite God to reveal that He has a plan. We have seen pain of epic proportions, perhaps, horror scenes played out, wokenness from our customary night’s rest, with hurt on our hearts and terror in our minds: see what of all the Lord’s goodness, has here been undone. See the pathetic or erroneous, insane, bouts and excursions of these our would-be friends. We would be friends if not for a punch that landed squarely on our hearts. We would be friends if not for an inner need or weakness that does bring man’s plan rather than God’s. So each hour is wrested from our self-chosen works, and God reminds us of His fidelity to a promise, to a Word, to a vision or reassurance.
Sometimes we almost get superstitious: we opened Scripture, and right before our eyes was a verse for us this day. We had a dream, and right before our eyes was something we feared a bit too much to face up to. Yet face it finally we do, and therein are reassured by Scripture and by the hard labors of reformers and believers in a Church catholic for all people, that the once-saved is always-saved. We are fools for Christ, not just in a polite or laughable way, but in our child-like need. For reassurance. For hand-holding through the dilemma. For coping, when the prognosis of dream or vision seems too stark. Words come to us, “This is a ten-year mistake”. That you have made. That a peer has made. And we shy from it, coping instead by more empty self-chosen assurances. But love us God does. And unfold His plan, that He does. And remind us, so He chooses to do. In His incarnate Word. In His Son. In His reckoning not just with our own errancy, but with the mad shenanigans of our interlocutor or peer; we long to forgive, if only because we are rightly known as those ones ourselves forgiven.
Therefore it is a taste we have adopted for plain vision, for simple assurance, not for the grand and proud but for the artfully sincere, basic, shared with each of these our peers, capable of informing the weak in faith, that God is for us; that life is His pottery studio, that we are being shaped for heaven.