Abandonment or Force

Pastor John Abbott said something in his sermon today that got my mind going. He said that fear is a feeling of not being in control and anger is our attempt to regain control.

Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest talks persistently about abandonment. Jesus said if we want to follow after Him we have to deny ourself and take us our cross. When all the disciples forsook Jesus and Peter denied Him they were abandoning their public connection with Him. They could not control Him or what was happening so they abandoned Him in fear.

This is the very same thing Jesus insists we must do to follow Him, only to ourselves instead of to Him. Maybe this plays into a definition of the “fear of the Lord”. What we fear actually controls us. If we understand fear as lose of control and we abandon control of our lives to God, then the fear of God makes more sense. Satan's version of fear is always based on force and intimidation. God's version of fear is based on abandonment of control induced in a response to love and attraction to the beauty of His character.

Forgiveness is also abandonment. It is letting go of our craving for revenge, our hatred, our bitterness, our scorekeeping. It is releasing our attempt to control the other person both directly or indirectly through our comments about them to others.

The beast of Revelation and the image to the beast both represent the innate principle of the world's system of using force to conform and control others. God's system is not any variant of that principle but is totally different. God never uses force to control. His ways are so different that our language does not contain very many words to approximate or explain it. Most of our words reflect centuries of satanic principles and relationships.

The essence, the root concept underlying the beast and it's image is using political and physical force to achieve spiritual results. Religion is largely a very distorted imitation of real spirituality, an amalgamation of spiritual internal moral principles mixed with external performance-based behaviors designed to achieve value. When we personally or collectively appeal to civil authorities to settle any problems we have between believers we have ourselves set up an image to the beast. We are now worshiping power and force and have aligned our thinking with the world's principles of relating to one another. No matter how adamantly we believe we have the truth or worship on the right day, the motives we demonstrate in our relationships with each other betray the true character that will determine our choices when the real test comes.

The cross is a symbol of absolute control and complete loss of control. It was the epitome of control and intimidation by the Romans who were obsessed with the use of force. A person attached to a cross was stripped of all control over himself by sheer force. He even lost control of his ability to die quickly to avoid prolonged and excruciating pain - total control by the executioners and total lose of control by the executed.

But Jesus advocated and demonstrated something very different. Instead of resisting the torture and shame, He abandoned control voluntarily through continuous forgiveness and love. He abandoned Himself to God and did not resist evil done to Him. Resistance is the attempt to overcome force with force. This is the world's system and lies at the base of Satan's kingdom. Jesus demonstrated that evil cannot be so bad, so horrendous that goodness cannot outshine it. Darkness cannot destroy light, it ends up highlighting it. Lies cannot be assembled and rearranged long enough to create truth, they end up confirming it.