Our prior letter reflected on the first half of Isaiah 35. The persons appearing in that segment have "fearful hearts, trembling hands and knees that give way". As we observed, The Cross of Jesus Christ --His blood actually and not abstractly -- is the promise spoken to that fearful, anxious, traumatized heart in the coming of God, with vengeance and divine retribution to save that one. We attempted to communicate the fullest meaning of the Cross, the cost to Jesus and his Father required by the Holiness of God and the Love of God for his creation.
Unfortunately, as we have encountered person after person over seventeen years of praying with individuals, and as we have observed both our secular and Christian cultures, we realize how the power of the Cross, the covenant of Jesus blood, has been trivialized, abstracted and conceptualized. This abstraction has occurred over a long period of time as the exclusively rational has replaced mystery and as recognized time has become limited to the horizontal and sequential. As this shift has taken place, starting at the very least with the so-called "enlightenment" philosophers, two other devastating shifts occurred, devastating both to sacramental reality and spiritual wholeness. The first is the elimination of the acknowledgement of supernatural evil and supernatural good as impacts on our world. Eliminating one eliminates the other and settles for and explains life on the basis of an enclosed, delimited rational box. Descartes maxim, "I think therefore I am" takes up this banner, reducing all reality to the size of our own brain, which defines the second devastating shift in determining what is reality or real.
Thus, the "thinking mind" of today can only conceptualize, reduce, define and examine as affected by these shifts. It cannot intuit, imagine, describe or be in awe. It cannot entertain a paradox and it cannot engage the reality in co-existence or confluence, if you will, of two times: One a creature in created time; the other divine, eternal, uncreated in the great "I Am" of God. Knowing God, something the purely rational mind is not designed to do, requires the apprehension and reception of both, namely through the heart, which has been referred to by Leanne Payne and others as the deep, intuitive, imaginative capacity to know God. If this capacity to receive is shut down by culture, generational sin, personal pain and other attacks on our capacity to be fully human, we are painfully diminished in our capacity to love and receive love, and to know God rather than simply know about Him.
Of course, the refusal to recognize supernatural evil as an actual influence and enmity against our life, relationships, prospects, family, cultural norms, politics, etc. does not, as any objective observer must acknowledge, insulate us from evil's effects. Furthermore, the elimination or refusal to acknowledge the access to or presence of supernatural good, cuts us off from the life-giving sacramental realities -- such as living in the present, the Eucharist, baptism, marriage as well as Scripture -- and keeps us from falling to our knees asking for and believing for healing, wholeness and intervention in fellowship with that great cloud of witnesses.
So much more could be said about these things, and indeed many have written about this dilemma. The consequences have been devastating and demoralizing to our culture and the personal lives of many believers who know it should be different but it is not. In that state, particularly in their inner-most psyche where anxiety and fear bear far more resemblance in reality to the world that is broken and falling apart, despair, addiction, materialism, among other symptoms, grows rather than diminishes and Scripture seems to accuse rather than encourage.
Hope. The revealed reality of the Cross, the wounds that heal us, that save, are transformational person by person as Isaiah 35 announces and promises in the geography of the human heart: A territory of desert parch and jackal screeches, unhealed; a geography more precious to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit than any other geography in all of creation, and promised, this transformational reality, through the blood of Jesus alone:
"Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy;
Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert;
The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs; In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow."
Paul relates that he has determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. Paul prays that the eyes of the believers’ hearts would be opened to the realities of the unseen but real -- the big "R" as Oswald Chambers puts it. Far from hating His creation, then, He redeems it by his blood and incarnates it with Himself, unifying His creation with Himself and His Father through His Spirit that He might be the incarnate real in us. May it be so among us.
We would love dialogue and response to these comments or other focuses you may have. In the next letter, we will consider the rest of Isaiah 35 and the promised Highway there.
Blessings,
Trip