2024-05-03 A Meditation on a House Swept

“7 What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. 10 The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. 12 So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” (Rom 7:7-12 ESV)

The house swept and in order, it bears reminding that sin has no lasting power over the saint. The blocks are arranged. The soul a facsimile of Christ, the structures soar. The tangibles receive double spiritual salary because they are Holy. Holy tangibles, holy substances touched and manipulated, worked over and utilized. We utilize and lean on our holiness in Christ Jesus in full assurance: if the heart is accepting of Christ’s leading mercy, then sin will have no dominion over her or him. Sin becomes a jest, an unfulfilled what-if, we are reassured even the deepest subconscious thought is redeemed in the bright light and shade of His reign.

Festering visuals, de-trained habits, barricades of righteousness that once upon a wandering time were breached: these give pause to the admissions committees of the churches: surely so-and-so is surface-level healed, but still festers and wallows in what was once injected in the veins; surely the lustful or the concupiscent newly minted warrior has a few tidying up busy-nesses to get down to. And this may be so, but too it is the case that God redeems overnight, in an instance, and gives gladsome memories of a Christ-intervention at work, playing out, lonesome soliloquy, elegy sublime, recollection that by this or that roadside, fixed in memory, was something Meaningful. Meaningful as His special hour. Meaningful as His calm demeanor and gratitude: the reinforcements have arrived! Brother meeting brother, not with an eye to competition, but with an eye to the gladsome exchanges of men upon men, or lady upon lady, or both intertwined and welcome committee dually inspired. We welcome because amidst all notions of rampant, festering sins, is also a faith that God gets His people up to some good works ‘round here in the name of systems theory or managerial technique or prophetic lance or thoughtful attention paid.

To the bullhorn, then, and to the quiet gratitude, then: God has not left His people without council. God has not left His people without ambient, abundant, technique and prospect: we work, that His works might shine forth from corner and avenue and glade. No, we never concede to a corrupt intervention or priesthood, for it is their sins that God is most concerned about in the Person of His Son: the corrupt or blind or lazy-boned clergy. Who were entrusted to things perhaps better off never having been dreamt up. Who were in this trust being used to show a mightier salvation to mankind, the last becoming first, the first now last. God who did not spare His own Son, will humble the proud and discomfit the lazy. God has no time for the rumors of a “new Christ” to pin our own sins upon; that would be blasphemy. That would be an occasion to ask what in fact we do believe. Do we love the Lord and know no matter how much backing we give, He and we shall be persecuted? Do we mourn the wicked theologians who dreamt up substitutionary atonement (is it in the bible? Yes. It is), but rather no crime in thus dreaming up, but in bandying it about so carelessly. It is not a dead theory so much as a living Exchange: God our night’s love affair, the immediate heads banging together on some winning vibe, the caress only of the soul not of the more corrupt or tried flesh, the one night affair our Broad License to preach boldly, bravely. Because if by one man came sin, by one man came Righteousness.