2025-03-01 A Meditation on Our Need for Certainty

“15 What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. 16 Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say “Amen” to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying? 17 For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up. 18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. 19 Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue. 20 Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. 21 In the Law it is written, “By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.” 22 Thus tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers but for believers. 23 If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds? 24 But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, 25 the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.” (1 Cor 14:15-25 ESV)

Living a dream, is distinct from living a lie. The Christian easily comforts him or herself knowing God has a plan. What is startling is that this Plan remains for us to be further tutored in. It is both not a “Save the day” according to Man’s thinking, and yet it is meeting a more ecstatic Need, a deep Need, a deep Capacity for pleasing embrace that… yes! All is forgiven! The world may go to pot, and Jesus startlingly does not show up to save the day… but as that denouement carries on, the Christian is safe in her or his Certainty: God saves as though through a furnace. As though through a blip on the radar only comprehended for what it is by the Faith-Filled observer. As though only “relevant” if we stepped out in faith.

It is no becalmed sailing ship that then tells us to Wait, to Hold our Horses, to go furious and fast in Pursuit… of the Embrace… of the gentler motherly lap and being held, the father’s embrace and pat on the back… it only means anything to us if we’ve “Graduated” to the knowledge that we needed that. God carries all mankind according to Plan, but for so many who have never felt the need to surrender, felt the need to Ask… for these, too, He guides and makes owners of some impoverished variant on the Christian’s religion. In hope they will Convert. In hope they will Die to self. In hope they will Learn and Adjudicate as though Soldiers under the glare of a spotlight: Be the solution, O man! Be the solution, O woman!

That is, in some purely Religous—not sensuous, not craven longing, not gorging feasting—in this purely Religious sense we see and meet a God who may indeed allow phase two of evolution’s tale to be Man at the hands of his machines. May indeed allow a strange and voluptuously wild Future. Not… not solving things because “God has a plan”, but solving them because just what that plan consists in, is a Mystery. Only accessible if we’ve graduated from managing our own longings and needs, unto Surrender and Peace in that strange Room: a Room for us to long after the Eternal Life, to long after the Gift of a Friend who died on a Cross for us. As though we aren’t giddy enough already! As though we needed the actual factual harshness of that message, to turn giddy and elated: God raises the dead. And again, this is no promise that our own visions of Peace shall prevail since, after all, God is in the business of fixing things. No. Our visions are paltry compared to what He intends for the biomass. Our visions are grasping after winds, while He—on wings and a prayer—asks if we’re strong for the third and fourth and fifth waves of Judgment. Strong in that certainty: I am, hey, clean and capable. I am, after all, beholding myself as though in a mirror and… I for once start to like myself. A bit. With patience and the energized modicum of Peaceful Encounter that halts our self-made storylines, and begins anew: Christ for us, a recognisance of the Human as being a creature in Need of only one or two things. Not the fancy house. Not the stylish car. Not even the winsomely-managed Corporate Plan. His Plan is convicting, as time and again we’ve thought, “God will show up”, “God will give the invite”, only He intends for us to be “in the field”. He intends for us to be “embedded”, “implanted”, “seeded”, an orgiastic joy because the Gospel really does apply to some group-think or the gift of being able to nod or bow in another’s direction… as though we were each Precious and worth Dying For. We submit to each other. We live as though tomorrow will never arrive, this day’s prospects enough fodder for the appetite. We learn to cage our appetite, that we may indeed Die to Self, our appetites pleasantly Cleansed. And in all this we surrender no Principle, only knowing that the Principled One went to His Cross for us.