2022-10-19 A Meditation on a Bedrock Faith

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” (1 Co 15:3–8 ESV)

Staking a claim. Leveling the field. There is something basic and bare bones about the Christian faith insofar as we are confident to have done sufficiently well as to merit salvation. Only the merit is not ours, but is Christ’s; so bare bones and basic, we are simply to thrive. If there is something pestering us, then we look forward in faith that a step forward does alleviate, does distance from, does allow the Good Spirit time and space to operate. So our hang ups are mysteriously healed precisely because we have ceased to try to address them ourselves. In some current of existence, in some streams of life, all is magnetically withdrawn and mysteriously extracted: our lives become those of the incidentally healed. We are incidentally healed because Jesus drew all of us, not just our finer points, but all of us unto His heavenly bosom to go to the Cross.

On that Cross, Jesus dealt with the frustratingly persistent sin. On that Cross, Jesus fought a forward battle, pitting determined love against self-help and bored efforts to redesign ourselves. Now we walk on a level field because we have reached the basic plateau and bare bones new reality: New Life, in Him who came for us and who therein, in our world, did die.

The wake, the aura, the trailing tails of the comet of life, in these there simply is no stomach for sin. There simply is no clingy, needy, habitual home base; instead, there is flying high, soaring broadly, yesterday’s cuts today’s purity; that is, things learned to be called “sin” are things that extract themselves and make themselves plain as day, thereby simply to be too tedious and boring for us to continue to entertain, meanwhile, coincidentally, as we sail forth in that long trail and tail of our heavenly orb and glowing presence.

The flaming presence is the sense of having served. It is the resolve of one for whom all life is a battle, and who properly thinking and willing, did sign up for the fight, to enlist, to train, later to lead, to sacrifice, to have no time to delay dwelling on that same plateau, nothing to lose, nothing to boast in save in the merits of Jesus, who is in us and with us, who is in a friend, who is in a boss or frontman or woman, who divided the world properly, between the saved and the rest. The rest may have their own savior, who knows. But this we know, that God licenses us to seek out these higher thoughts, to seek our answers to a puzzle we see the fruits of, the relics of, on all sides: fight each day, and sickly, inimical, demon-possessed culture on all sides, church culture and civilian culture; in our own ranks at times, and elsewhere.

So we are calm whilst brave and ready and bold in our calling unto knowledge of the war. As those knowledgeable, we expect strange trials and unifying of differing realities, words we speak sometimes taking us to a strange place wherein somehow another reality edges in to our conscious thought: a deep reality, a dreamscape reality that is familiar to us even as it feels like it before resided in the subconscious. That is, we draw near to a God who we trust will save us at the last, but in part as through a furnace. We rehearse the prayer of added persecution or suffering, yet God reassures us not to try to get everything right; He will succor us through and nurture us along when that time comes, as He already has, and is right now. So we are not ashamed to live in the joy, and to dwell in the heavenly.