Why Am I Writing?

I have been becoming more aware lately of a growing reason why I continue to write down what I am discovering and learning. I have probably said this before but it has come up in discussions with people close to me lately and I have been thinking about it more.

It could be assumed by many that I post these thoughts in order to convince others of what I believe. However, that is not the case, that is not my motive. When that thought comes to me I tell God that if He wants the Holy Spirit to lead someone to this site to teach them something Himself that I will be very glad to be used in that way, though most likely I will not know anything about it anyway. I certainly enjoy learning more about truth and warming my heart in the presence of God in association with others, but so far this forum has not contributed much to that end. So that is not a reason why I write what I have been learning.

The main reason that I have become so “addicted” to immersing myself in intense scrutiny of the Word of God and writing down my thoughts during the process is the powerful influence that it is having on my own heart as I do it. I very seldom have any idea what is going to emerge when I begin to write except for the few thoughts at the beginning that I want to capture before I forget them. I have found repeatedly and have come to appreciate that what I am discovering is that the process of writing itself has become a very effective form of communion with God for me personally. It usually happens that as I feel compelled to write down what first comes to my mind as an inspiration to me and I follow that compulsion that I immediately receive follow-up thoughts and connections to other texts or truths as I am writing that would not likely have come if I were not engaged in the writing activity.

So I have come to see that, for me writing is becoming a channel of listening just as much as reading. Maybe it is “active listening”. I suppose that is why many people get much more out of sermons if they take notes while listening to it. Engaging the body in participating in what the mind is doing is a means of synchronizing and sinking the things being learned deeper into the soul. Unfortunately, many of the best talks that I want to take notes on are listened to while I am driving so I can't take notes and I often feel quite frustrated about it. I feel that if I could get the main points down in writing and be able to look at them and organize them into outline form I could remember them more securely and have them more available for future retrieval from my memory.

The main point I guess I am trying to address here is maybe to counteract a voice inside me trying to accuse me of coming across as being arrogant by writing when that is not what my motives are at all. I try to deliberately avoid allowing what others think of my writing to influence it as much as possible because I want to maintain it almost exclusively for personal interaction with God as I settle in to listen to Him each day. I have come to look forward eagerly to these times together with His Spirit and many times find it hard to pull myself away to go on to do other things. But He usually gives me a sense of closure at some point and I ask for His sense of peace and timing as to know what He wants for my day.

These times are what I like to think of as “marinating” in the presence of Love and soaking up something new and fresh each day from the limitless resource of His Word. They have become the most important and enjoyable part of my day. I feel listened to and connected and challenged, rebuked, instructed and assured as I ask questions, make stimulating discoveries and have my emotions awakened to new feelings of awe, delight, conviction and deepening love. During these times I begin to feel a peace that seems to quietly collect as silently as the dew as I linger a little longer in His presence to taste His sweetness.

As I write I sometimes stop and ask Him what direction my thoughts need to go before writing more because I do not want to write just to be sounding off. I want to keep my writing in its useful place as simply a means of listening and interaction with the mind and heart of God. Sometimes I have to just lay it aside and let my heart process what it is experiencing alone for a few minutes, or sometimes even for a few days before I come back to the writing again. But always it has been serving a useful function as an instrument of growth in my own heart and is bonding me to my God and Savior.

Why did I feel like writing about writing this morning? I am not sure, except that I have been thinking about it more lately as I previously mentioned. I also would like to encourage anyone who might be reading this to consider something similar if they feel moved to try it. I know how resistant I used to be when people urged others to journal during their devotion time. They expressed many of the same thoughts and benefits that I have just described which certainly sounded attractive to me. But it seemed to be a discipline that was too much work or carried with it a negative “obligation” burden that I just wasn't ready to take on right then. I suppose that came from being raised in a religion that was nearly 100% obligations and little to no joy. With that mindset, taking on another obligation would feel like the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

So how do I finish this now? Well, I would like to strongly urge everyone to read today's reading from My Utmost for His Highest. I have a link to a web site that offers access to its readings in my Recommended Reading link at the top of my blog if you do not own this book. Today's reading really spoke to my heart about receiving peace and some of the issues surrounding that in our relationship with God. I believe you will be blessed by it.

I have some friends with me this weekend and we plan to take out our boat today and enjoy some skiing and fun on the water for the first time this summer. I look forward even more to the time and bonding that takes place together with them more than the activities themselves, though I certainly intend to enjoy that as well. The only reason I have ever had for owning a boat is for this very reason. I want it to simply be an instrument for making deeper connections with hearts of people willing to join us in doing fun things together. If you would like to be one of those people I would love to know about it. I certainly could use more close connections with other people in my life and I enjoy making good memories. Have a blessed day.

Getting ID on the Husbands

OK, it is finally starting to come together and make much more sense 3-4 days into the questions. I am now carefully looking at each reference to the “husband” in this chapter to get a positive ID on him. This is where some of my previous questions also fell into place to contribute to the solution.

Here is what is emerging with the guidance of the Holy Spirit this morning:

• the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives – v.1 So whoever it is, the only way to become free is for him to die.

• the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband – v. 2 It is not the Law that dies or disappears, it is the husband that dies which triggers release from the demanding control of the Law.

• if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man – v.3 This is a very interesting issue that is not usually addressed. It is apparent that the “woman” can attempt to have intimate relations with the second man she is in love with before the first man is confirmed dead. That puts her under intense condemnation from the Law instead of freedom. This has very serious implications for us when we try to become intimate with Jesus without understanding or making sure that our first husband is dead, whoever that is.

• you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ – v.4 This is the previous question that now falls into place to unlock the baffling question I am grappling with of who is the husband. Ironically it appears that we were somehow married to Christ in some way in a very unhealthy relationship that caused us to resent Him and live in bitterness and rebellion toward God. This needs a lot of examining and unpacking yet, but it is clear in this phrase that the “husband” that has to die is somehow connected with the “body of Christ”.

• so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead – v.4 This gives positive ID to the One we are to have as our second husband. In this verse there is a distinction made between the body of Christ that died and the Christ that was resurrected. They are clearly two different entities in some way with very different characteristics, even opposite ones somehow. This needs more unpacking.

• while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, ...were aroused by the Law – v.5 In our first marriage (and it is becoming clear by implication that we are represented as the woman) we are “in the flesh”. This alerts me as a link back to the transition verse between these two chapters of 6 and 7 where Paul shifts from addressing one group to the other. In 6:23 he introduces the key term “in Christ Jesus”. This is in very clear juxtaposition to being “in the flesh” and is a key ingredient to understanding which marriage we are in during a careful examination of our life. If we find ourself to be “in the flesh”, then we must be married to the wrong Christ; if we are “in Christ Jesus”, then we are joyfully married to a second husband in freedom from condemnation from the Law – not because the Law is gone but because the wrong relationship is gone.

• we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound – v.6 Here is another very key clue in unpacking the ID of the husband and what the first, very unhealthy relationship looks like. In this phrase the husband is referred to as “that by which we were bound”. In an unhealthy marriage in which one is very miserable (which seems to be the case here by implication) there are some consistent, typical elements and attitudes usually present. What comes to my mind are things like fear, force and shame. All the demands of the husband feel very unreasonable to the wife and the husband usually seems devoid of compassion, mercy, kindness or forgiveness, at least from her perspective. The wife usually feels controlled, manipulated, used and even abused and as a consequence is desperate to escape the constant controlling atmosphere that is suffocating her heart. Even if everything the husband wants is perfectly legitimate and technically correct, because of the lack of love and compassion and romance in the relationship her heart will yearn for the spark and fire of real intimacy that she sees in other marriages that are alive and on fire with glowing passion between the two lovers. From this perspective, the phrase here “by which we were bound” would indicate bonds consisting primarily of fear, not love-bonds.

• we serve ...in oldness of the letter – v.6 Here is another important clue defining the first marriage relationship. When we observe in our life a spirit of heavy obligation for keeping the letter of the Law without the spark of passion and romance in a loving relationship, we can be sure that we are in the lifeless, sparkless marriage that will cause our real heart to yearn to become free from. Our hearts were never designed to thrive in the harsh, sterile environment of rule-keeping and letter-nitpicking. Our hearts (which I believe largely is found in the right hemisphere of our brain) are designed for passion, for intense feelings, for joy and peace and intimacy. When we live in relationship to Jesus devoid of these things we are living in a marriage to the wrong Jesus according to what I am reading in this chapter. Does that sound absurd? Yes it does, but it seems that according to Paul it is the real truth.

• we serve in newness of the Spirit – v.6 This is another important clue in its contrast to its opposite condition just looked at – serving the letter of the Law. I believe that while we often think we understand the difference between these two that in fact we cannot really know about this newness until we have tasted with our heart the attractiveness of the living Jesus. We may present theories and explanations and thesis endlessly on this topic, but until our heart becomes the dominate player in our relationship to God we are just spouting off a lot of hot air while still living clueless as to the heart experiences that God wants to have with us. I have to admit that I am largely still in this condition myself and feel that I am just beginning to catch glimpses of the possibilities I could be enjoying living in an intimate, unpredictable, exciting life gazing into the sparkling eyes of the ultimate Lover who is crazy about me. But I must also admit that the attraction is growing more intense the more I observe and learn and experience this love that is far beyond my present comprehension. From this perspective I can now see much better why Paul could not contain himself any longer by the time he reaches the last part of chapter 8 and has to break out into expostulations and exclamations about the love that is beyond all description. That is the very love we are created to thrive in and that we cannot live long without. Just writing these words causes my heart to warm and tingle with the potential excitement that this love intends for me to experience personally on a much deeper level.

• now we have been released from the Law – v.6 Many times when I have read this before it appeared that the Law was the first husband. But in the context of the previous verses it is becoming clearer that the release described here is not from the truths or principles contained in the Law but the resulting condemnation experienced in our heart from living in a heart-suppressing relationship with a perfect husband, yet without any love. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but that's what a legalistic relationship creates – illogical but very intense internal conflict between the head and the heart. If we have any doubt about this just ask any woman, feeling stuck in a lifeless marriage, what her heart is feeling, especially when she observes others up close who are enjoying a vibrant, exciting dynamic love life full of joy and intimacy. If she is a woman of integrity she will feel a heavy obligation to not abandon her marriage based on the letter of the law, but to remain a dutiful wife while her heart is dying more and more every day from lack of emotional nourishment and shared passion. The inner tension becomes overwhelmingly oppressive over the years and the conflicting emotions and thoughts become a destructive source of torment that slowly suffocates her soul. What her heart really yearns for is not so much for the Laws about marriage to change, though that certainly would be a constant temptation to entertain in her mind, but what she longs for most is for a husband who is life-giving, heart-sensitive and unconditionally loving no matter what she looks like or how she feels. Were she to legally be able to enter into that kind of relationship due to the death of her first husband, she would experience a tremendous sense of release from the heavy sense of “Law” that is talked about here, not because the Law no longer applies to her, but precisely because it does apply and she can stay in her integrity and in harmony with the Law while at the same time enjoying a new relationship in a thriving, life-giving marriage that does not produce condemnation from the Law. She could describe to you very accurately what it feels like to be released from the Law. I believe that to understand this phrase accurately requires that one view it through the perception of the right brain more than the left brain. This “release” talked about here is not a release of the technical requirements of the Law but a release from the suffocating condemnation experienced by not having one's heart engaged while trying to satisfy the demands of the Law.

From this point in the chapter it appears that Paul moves on from the analogy of marriage to more detailed explanations of our confusing condition in relationship to the Law and its reactionary effects in our lives when it exposes our inward sinful nature. But to better understand the following verses I believe it is imperative that I first understand the context that comes before it. Romans 7 has been one of the most confusing passages in Scripture for me for most of my life and I have decided that this time I am not leaving it until it becomes very clear to both my mind and my heart. This process of unpacking Romans over the past few months is having its effects on my inner life and hopefully on my external one as well. Thank-you for sharing this journey with me.

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Questions on Romans 7

Notes, thoughts and questions in chapter 7 of Romans. I have been jotting these down over the past few days as they come to my mind and decided to post them pretty much unedited (for what its worth). If everything doesn't seem completely consistent – be patient (and maybe even contribute), it is simply the record of a work in process.

Do you not know?

This starts off the chapter and seems to be a refrain from two places in chapter 6. Also I think it may be a possible link to chapter 2 – do you think lightly...

Speaking to those who know the law. Definite reference to chapter 2 – those who pride themselves on knowing the law, the will of God etc.

the law has jurisdiction – coming off of chapter 6, these people are likely uncomfortable with the slave-bond analogy that Paul used to address the chapter 1 group, but he launches into another analogy that they can understand perfectly well – legal issues and questions about marriage that religious people have enjoyed arguing about for decades.

Both these chapters are about bonds and both describe relationships based on fear bonds. Both offer the solution as replacing fear bonds with love bonds to Jesus.

There seems to be an implied warning in verse 3 about trying to love – be joined – to Jesus while still living in “marriage” under the old, legalistic mentality.

Who is the husband in this chapter? Who is the wife? Who dies and who doesn't? It is not real clear at first. It almost seems that Paul is launching into the “2 me's” concept that becomes much clearer later in the chapter. If so, then does the wife represent our true heart that is designed to produce fruit/offspring? And maybe the husbands are (1.) our sinful flesh and (2.) the Holy Spirit/Jesus.

Whoever the husbands are, both arrangements produce offspring from their intimacy. In the previous chapter there was reference to benefit/fruit from both relationships. In this chapter it seems more like offspring/fruit. If so, what/who are the offspring?

you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ.

Does this mean you were married to the law or does it mean you are no longer bound or under domination by the dictates of the law because death has satisfied the requirements of the law?

What does “through the body of Christ” mean?

Verse 4 and 5 are the two alternatives we have for living in passion that are hearts are designed to do. Both imply marriage and “sexual” intimacy resulting in fertility. The first option can only be realized by first becoming identified in the body of Christ and His death to sin. Then we can become intimate with His resurrected body as a wife is with her husband, with our passions fired up in response to His pure and holy passion for us, becoming fertile with His seed and bearing offspring in His likeness.

The second option is to live in the flesh, in self-trust and working hard to follow the Law. In that relationship the Law will create an arousal in us, firing up reactionary passions in the various parts of our body and mind causing us to become fruitful in reproducing the offspring of our evil nature which always leads toward death. This is not due to any evil in the Law but in the strong reaction that our selfish predisposition has to the presence of the Law. In verse 9 he says, “I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died”.

This whole chapter has to be understood with the realization of multiple “I's” or it becomes terribly confusing. Paul makes that quite clear toward the end of the chapter. If we do not become aware of conflicting identities within ourselves we will remain frustrated and full of doubts about what God is trying to explain to us and do in our lives.

Maybe the husbands are primarily in the spirit realm. The spirit of Satan which is full of selfishness, pride, fear etc. is the husband we are bound to in fear bonds under the law. To receive a new husband the first spirit/husband we are married to has to die. Since that husband lives inside of us and is so integrated into our perceived identity that we cannot free ourselves of him, we have to experience internal death of our “own” desires, dreams and passions that were never intended to be a part of our identity from our original creation by God. But since that is often almost all we can see about ourselves we have to experience psychological and spiritual death to become free from the inescapable principles under which our very existence is governed and externally explained by “the Law”. The Law is simply an explanation of the principles of the realities in which we exist, just like the many “rules” of physics and science that we observe around us. The problem is not in the principles themselves but is in the negative results of violating or getting out of sync with those principles.

There is the ever-present element of passion brought out here that is an important ingredient that must be taken into account to understand this passage. The passion that is stirred up or aroused by the Law is a reactionary, rebellious type of passion that is unavoidable when we are in disharmony with God. It is a tension, a stress that is produced in varying degrees of dissonance depending where we are located in the scale of defiance against God.

The passion of God awakened within us is in sharp contrast, but is similar in ways to our sinful passion. It can also be reactionary but in very positive ways. Healthy, life-producing passion is stimulated by exposure to the real fire of God's passion for us. The more we become aware of the selfless love God has for us, the more clearly we see His beauty and attractiveness without resisting it. The more our own hearts are fired with a reflection of His passion, the more our love affair with Him will surpass anything we have ever imagined or experienced in our relationships with other lovers.

Marriage and sex are not evil parts of life that need to be hidden or kept in a secret box as we have too often made them. They were given to us by God to practice and nurture so that we could experience at a very dim level the true realities of intimacy that He has planned and designed for us to experience with Him throughout all eternity. Humans have become so afraid of anything to do with this part of our life that we have deeply buried and glossed over many of the explicit references to these things in the Scriptures. The translators of the Bible have often substituted very generic, bland and sometimes even misleading words for much more explicit passages found in the original language because they simply rejected the idea that God would want to convey these kind of intimate and even sexually charged messages to the human race. But in so doing we have created a huge chasm between our sexuality and our spirituality that God never intended for us to struggle with.

Properly understood and experienced, our sexual nature with all its passions and nuances are a powerful arena for better understanding God's passions and feelings at a much deeper level than most of us have dared to believe. When we place these passions into their proper perspective and position in our life and not try to hide from them or distort them, we can enter into a whole new dimension of spiritual bonding with our Creator that we never realized was possible to experience. This is the context from which Paul is writing and it is found all throughout the Bible, particularly when you begin looking closer at the original languages in which it is written.

When we fall into denial of this reality, we then are forced to wrest and twist much of the Word of God into our little boxes of theology to keep ourselves from becoming fired with the very passion that is the essence of the heart of God. We formulate all sorts of bland and confusing explanations to gloss over the intensity of God's communications to our hearts and we end up fitting ourselves for hell instead of for heaven. For hell is in reality an experience of being exposed to the unveiled passion of God's desire for our hearts, reflected in the intense sexual passions that we are more familiar with, while being out of harmony with the heart-moving music that emanates from that passion. The pain that is experienced from our resistance to His love and His intimate desires for us will ultimately destroy us in the flames of hell filled with our own bitterness, anger and regrets.

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Saved by the Skin of their Teeth

"It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. "It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28-30)

I wonder if there may be two groups of Christians in that day. One group will be like Abraham living in harmony and close communion with God and keeping a distance between their lives and the corruption concentrated in the cities. The other group will be living very close on the edge of sin, living in the midst of sinful environments and having their witness for God compromised by their familiarity with it. Their families will be contaminated and they will only be saved by the skin of their teeth, dragged out by angels and suffering losses of members of their families in the process. Their works will be tested by fire and will be burned up but they will be saved – barely. (see 1 Cor. 3:12-15)

Intensifying Light

And law came in, that the offence might abound, and where the sin did abound, the grace did overabound, (Romans 5:20 YLT)

A realization came to me this morning while I was listening to God through my morning devotional books, that enhanced my understanding of this verse. I have often quietly puzzled over this statement. It makes it seem on the surface that God gave the law to accelerate sin or even create more sin, which on its face seems counter-productive. But some ideas from the two devotional books acted like catalysts this morning to shed more light on this verse.

In fact, that was the essence of the thought – light. The law is nothing more than a severely condensed, left-brain statement of the character of God. As such, it was like a powerful light that was switched on in a very dark room that had filled with rats, snakes and all sorts of other revolting evils that thrive in the dark. As a primarily intellectual, factual revelation of God, the Law was a light that suddenly exposed or highlighted the many sins in the world that had thrived and multiplied since the first sin of Adam.

Paul says that “before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” (Romans 5:13-14 NIV) “Breaking a command” is the favorite technical definition for sin given by those who insist on religion and righteousness being externally and behaviorally oriented. “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” (1 John 3:4 KJV) I know, I was raised that way very carefully. It is also the natural human condition to view sin or righteousness as external issues of behavior.

That is where the implied question arises in Paul's statement here. He too was intensely trained in the external-oriented mode of left-brained, behavior-based religion so he knew the arguments that his words would arouse. “If you never specifically told me not to do it, then why are you getting me in trouble for it?” Have you ever heard that reasoning before? That is the logic of an immature child who is learning the nuances of how to play the externalism game. If he learns it well it will help keep him in a state of permanent immaturity for the rest of his life.

Paul points out that the symptom, the evidence that sin is present, which is death, was plainly evident even though the legalistic external commands were not obvious between Adam's time and the event at Mount Sinai. The only thing the Law really did was switch on the bright light and as a result all the existing sin became much more exposed. But where God is present there is grace, for He has never changed, and His character also is full of mercy and grace. The people in the Old Testament had to be saved exactly the same way the people under the New Covenant have to be saved – by grace alone. God provided more than enough grace for them to have, but, like too many of us yet today, most of them failed to realize that their only hope was embracing their hopelessness and throwing themselves into the grace that was waiting for them in the heart of their Creator.

The whole span of the Old Testament/Old Covenant was a period of immaturity where God had to relate to the world and His chosen children as a father has to relate to the very immature reasoning of a rebellious child. They were so stuck on defining right and wrong in terms of externals that He had to switch on a bright light to explicitly show them how out of sync they were with the ideals, character and heart of their God. The Law was not designed to save them but to expose their desperate condition and stimulate them to realize their helpless condition and cry out for mercy. Instead, they cried out with promises of obedience which plunged them into centuries of exploring every attempt to achieve righteousness and earn favor with God imaginable. Of course that is impossible – sinful humans cannot become like God by trying harder no matter how intense their desires are or how sincere their motives.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Most of us are still attempting in some way or another to help God out by working on changing our lives so we can somehow motivate Him to do something for us or answer our prayers etc. Jesus revealed that mentality in the heart of the debtor who, instead of asking for and receiving mercy in the face of a ludicrously impossible debt, took the course of promising to pay it off somehow if he was just given enough time. (Matt. 18:23-26) If you look carefully at the size of his debt, any reasonable person would realize the absurdity of his promise. The debt amounted to 150,000 YEARS of wages for the average man. Given enough TIME? Just how much eternal life can you generate on your own to pay off that kind of debt anyway? But his subsequent actions demonstrated that, indeed he fully intended to launch into his grand project of paying off his debt so he could sing, “I did it my way”.

What I realized this morning is that in a sense, a very similar event happened in the New Covenant as what happened at Mount Sinai. Jesus is a perfect revelation of the Father; He is the character of God personified. He repeatedly referred to Himself as the Light of the World. "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." (John 1:9 NRSV) As a light He exposed the intensity and vileness of the sin that had filled the whole world in spite of the light from the Law given at Sinai. But there was a big difference with this Light. For Jesus was not just a left-brain explanation of God's character written in words (left-brain only function) on hard tables of lifeless stone. He was a demonstration, an example (right-brain function of imitation) of what God looks like in attitude and relationships and feelings. He came to expose the real wickedness and helpless condition of our hearts, not just our actions and words.

The light that blazed in the world through the perfect life of Jesus was not primarily to show us what perfect behavior looks like but how to live a life from our heart in total dependence on another Source for everything. Jesus was a much brighter light than the Law because He demonstrated and taught how impossibly great the chasm really is between us and God's perfect character. We must not make the same mistake that the Children of Israel did at Mount Sinai and promise that we will try harder and be obedient. In His teachings Jesus raised the bar of perfection so high that when we realize the truth in what He said we will fall into hopelessness – which is exactly where God wants to meet us.

If Jesus had just come and lived a perfect life and gone back to heaven without dying on the cross for our sins, He would have not done anything much different than what happened at Mount Sinai, only the results would have been much worse. We need much more than an explanation of what God is like and even much more than a living demonstration of what He is like, as helpful as those are. What we must come to realize is that we need to become swallowed up in Christ by dying to ourselves in hopeless despair and throwing ourselves constantly into His grace and mercy. One reason Jesus came was to make us despair of ourselves, for it is only in total despair that we become ready to trust fully in Jesus to save us whatever that involves.

The Light keeps getting brighter; the glory will soon fill the whole earth. (Rev. 18:1) The intensity of God's passion, the fire in His bones, His intense desire to be close to us and have us with Him for eternity – this consuming fire will either ignite our reflected passion for Him and draw us closer to Him as we allow our sin to be consumed in its invading presence, or it will harden our hearts like Pharaoh and we will ultimately be baked to extinction by the very love we rejected. We cannot blame the light for the rats and snakes. The only thing the light does is reveal reality. And likewise we cannot blame the passionate love that God has for us for the ultimate destruction of the lost. But as the light and heat intensify, we are all forced to choose which side we will live on, which view of reality we will embrace, which master we will present ourself to in loyalty and service. (Romans 6) Our choice is the only thing we have in freedom and everyone will exercise it one way or the other.

Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him." The people did not answer him a word. (1 Kings 18:21 NRSV)

He must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. (James 1:6-8 NIV)

See, I am sending you Elijah the prophet before the day of the Lord comes, that great day, greatly to be feared. And by him the hearts of fathers will be turned to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers; for fear that I may come and put the earth under a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6 BBE)

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