What sorrow fills my soul. What amazing astonishment for the callous self-righteousness of the human mind. God’s thoughts are far more than can be comprehended with the little knowledge we have and yet we vaunt ourselves so mightily against Him. The puny against the all-powerful. The arrogant self-absorbed master of their own mind, thinking that they have such a towering strength and knowledge over the weak, wondering, worn out, aged Lord of creation. God is not dead, yet He surely must not have long to live if the understanding of their mind is the power upon which he travels. I am devastated to see and know your disdain for His truth just so you can lift the banner of your greatness over His throne. How can I even write this between the tears which fall on my hands?
I look into your defiant eyes, as you wait to engage the tongue lashing driven by a mind firmly locked against any who would have any other thought. You are not only correct in your own eyes, you cannot be challenged, changed nor grow in your knowledge and understanding. If I were to pour out love contrary to what has settled in your heart, I would be scoffed, deemed a heretic and driven in vile contempt from the face of God’s beautiful earth.
I hear the words of your tongue standing up your straw man and defending its facade without scripture. I listen intently to the twisted repetitions of carefully crafted excerpts knowing the pride and arrogance you feel in determining the limits of the power of the God you promote. For He can do no other than what your understanding enjoins. He can not allow for calamity nor calm which evades your ability to explain. My heart is driven to tears and yet my tongue must remain silent before your onslaught.
Ignorance is a powerful enemy. In God’s loving mercy He allows us to see it first used as the barbed fishhook of lies and perversion which invaded the peace and love of the Garden of Eden. “Yeah, has God REALLY said…” “You shall NOT surely die…” The implied is that the lover of your soul has lied for His gain and your diminishing. The cancer is that you cannot trust that there is a love beyond your understanding. The treachery is not just a single instance but in that single instance it is the foundation for millennium of doubt and fear and mistrust and exceptional defiance of the One who loved you. This One who created you, formed you, protected you, strengthened you, drew you to Himself and all of this in spite of your ignorance. In spite of the harm you would do to others who should desire to come to Him in His time and His way, He keeps you eternally secure beyond what you are able to do yourself. You are the woodsmen felling the tree for firewood in which He has made the home of one more generation of songbirds. You mean well. You cannot see the nest in the heights of the tree for your gaze is fixed upon the width of the trunk. Yet for all of your intention, you bring injury and even death to others.
Am I at this juncture choosing to offend you in that I declare His love to be more? I trust not. I have little hope of properly conveying in one small session the love and understanding which is beyond my grasp. I can do no other than repeat His words. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and his love is perfected in us. So in drawing us to Himself and placing His love within us and giving us a new nature within, which is no longer dead but alive unto Him, how is it possible that He would choose to allow His Holy Spirit to inhabit a vessel which is not worthy of His presence?
For He also says that it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.
If God declares it impossible then I for one will not stand before Him and declare it to be possible. Those who would take the presence of the indwelling Spirit of the Living God, God Himself, as co-companion with their soul, could never be re-cleansed and re-certified (in human terms) to be again the recipient of a new propitiation because the previous one was insufficient. For those who would maintain their personal perfection and self-sustaining ability to continue in sinless perfection, mock the scripture which insists that we forgive one another. Forgiveness is only necessary if sin is present.
Some might insist that the multitude or level of sin is the conveyor of the judgment. Yet each has their own standard and God has none of it. For man would declare one sin greater than another while admitting God calls it all sin, and all sin is worthy of the same punishment. Were not Adam and Eve guilty? It was sin to defy God, to disbelieve, to transgress. Did not Joseph sin in arrogant pride? And David in defiance and lust and murder? And Peter, and Paul, and YOU? Where would your current state with God be if it were true that after He had given you salvation there was not total and continual forgiveness? Where would your state with God be if He had not cleansed ALL your sin on Calvary?
Where is the atonement for the child molester who was before a preacher of the Word? Where is the atonement for the arrogant judge who would condemn another for transgressions while dismissing his own? Do you not fear God, seeing you are in the same condemnation? And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For He said “Truly, truly, I say unto you, He that hears my word, and believes on him that sent me, has everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.” For how long? Until which transgression? Does the effect of the cleansing blood only last for seven hours? For seven weeks, for seventy years and then all of the worship and all of the obedience and all of the right living in Christ is done away? Or is there another meaning for everlasting?
There can be but one assessment and that by the Father of all. Do not call unclean what He has called clean. Do you mock the very salvation which you hold to, by judging it sufficient for you, but not for another? If one who claims His grace ever truly turns his back on the savior it can only be because they were always none of His. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. Regardless of Satan appearing as an angel of light, He is NOT! Neither is a pretender a saint no matter how long he professes or preaches or poses as such an example. When in the end the revealing is made there may well be many whom we judged well to which He says “Depart from me, I never knew you”.
I am still in tears. I am pondering the power of the evil one to limit the understanding of our minds with doubts and fears and questions and reasoning of men rather than the acceptance of the instructions of our Savior. How can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s love? Died He for, me who shed His blood? A friend I admire greatly holds these following words close to his heart. I hope you can too.
“Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade, To write the love of God above, Would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky.”
His Love, Mercy, Grace and Forgiveness is beyond our human ability to describe or explain. Our best testimony to it, is to stand as if naked before the world of men, with head bowed and whisper “I, am not, worthy”.