2023-07-14 A Meditation on Theory and Necessity
“4 Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. 2 For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. 3 For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’ ” although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. 4 For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” 5 And again in this passage he said, “They shall not enter my rest.” 6 Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, 7 again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”” (Heb 4 ESV)
There’s much theory, then there’s necessity. There’s all the ways we try to please the Lord, then there’s that one thing needful. Out of a forlorn windswept landscape we turn from being the theoretician to being the actor, immediate and certain in our outlay, confident and redeemed in our thought.
The tinkerer may arrange mighty conduits, panels of thinkers, terms and safeguards. Indeed, from some perspectives, there is such a blank slate of directions to go in with this, that he or she stands astonished. But the soldier’s necessity, the reality of a climate under assault and siege, the born-again witness’s reminder: some things, for all our patience and broad viewports, are today at war, under assault and siege; we do not delay!
These are unique to you and to me; they may be like the plague that Phineas stopped short, as the sin caused twenty-four thousand people to die (Nu 25:7-9), or as the ground opened up and swallowed the rebels against Moses (Nu 16:31). We ponder: how much to balance work and play, prophesy and practical thinking, discipline with love. In each of these ponderings, we instead today pray for a convicted heart, wherein there is no time to delay but rather we accept the cruciform gift of God on High who mourned a bit, who invested His Son’s conscientious heart in the squalor and plague of Death, death on a Cross. That God cared, somehow begins a journey towards healing.