As a teenager, I had an adult friend once who said, “I sometimes think I should just carry around a shotgun with my Bible. That way, when someone confesses Jesus as their Savior, I can just kill them right there and send them to Heaven.”
It took years for me to understand what he was actually saying. He felt very deeply the tension between our Western assumptions about reality against the entirely non-Western orientation of the Bible. Were he to seize the message of the Bible entirely from a Western orientation, it would result in some truly bizarre behavior. Explains a lot, doesn’t it? When you survey the American religious landscape within Christianity alone, you see the most bizarre things.
We see people dragging the name of Jesus through all sorts of truly stupid behavior because they see His message through Western eyes.
What is the single critical variable in human life when following Christ? His glory. Nowhere is that glory defined, only characterized in various ways. It scales; to the degree you stand in His glory, so your sense of joy and peace are increased or decreased. You don’t determine rationally what glorifies Him. No, your mind is not capable of containing how that works out. You are fallen; the very choice of relying on human intellect is the Fall. Instead, we are to learn how to hear through our convictions, to be ready for the most unreasonable things.
There is no efficiency, no efficacy that we can grasp. Indeed, our one greatest human desire is to die. Not in the Westernized sense of suicidal obsessions, but in the Ancient Near Eastern sense of hanging around only because Our Lord’s glory is in it. The currency of our Otherworld is His glory. Nothing is more valuable to us, yet more incomprehensible at the same time. Full glory means leaving this prison existence here below, but we have a mission until He calls us home. We are assigned a feudal role and attendant tasks to increase His glory here on earth.
As I sit at my keyboard here, I know a good portion of those who read these words will nod their heads and agree, and still not understand. Not in arrogance, I say that in sadness. They might shudder at the idea my friend proposed in jest, but their actual behavior serves the same broken understanding represented by such sentiments. They engage in political activism and totally miss the message of Joseph and Daniel, neither of whom ever raised a hand to politics and change when serving their pagan masters. Yes, there was certainly grand political fallout from their actions at times, but their aim was the glory of their God, not political activism. Western Christians typically seek crowns that they cannot keep because they simply refuse to understand how God controls human politics. They chase after things God has flatly said were not important for His servants. They somehow imagine God has called them to seek human comfort and worldly wealth, and they fritter away their time on this earth, leaving here with nothing in Heaven to show for it.
How many people understand the morals and ethics of striving to gain enough crowns to throw at His feet?
Reblogged this on dliwcanis.
When I recently went through a bad bout of depression, I expressed to a few people that this life really doesn’t hold any appeal. They said things like, “You have three beautiful reasons to live,” meaning the kids. I held my tongue, but it was really the knowledge that I’m only here to increase His glory that was the biggest factor in enduring. How could I dare to defy His will? Maybe I shouldn’t have remained quiet about that, but expressing it would probably alarmed said people.
I tend to think of it as being on a cultural threshold. It’s dicey telling the truth, but it’s sometimes dangerous to remain silent. Most people misread your state of mind when you say this world isn’t worth much, thinking it is only sadness and depression, not clear thinking about ultimate truth. Only in the moment can you decide whether it is worth pursuing that line.