Studies in the Gospel of John #11; John 4:46-54 September 29, 2013 Isaiah 42:16 I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do. I will not forsake them. Ephesians 1:11 In him we were also chosen (made heirs of God), having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will.
On up the road, far in the distance We can see the light, shining in the night It’s penetrating, life’s heavy fog Oh, it’s Jesus, He conquers all His light shineth brightly, as we move close to Him Yes in Him the light shall never grow dim For there’s a brighter day, brighter day, brighter day ahead, A brighter day ahead. (by the late Margaret Aikens-Jenkins, “Brighter Day Ahead” 1958)
Keep your finger on these verses for a moment. Jesus had arrived in Cana of Galilee. He was in a safe place. Now he could rest. But, of course, Jesus had not come to rest, he came to save. Jesus did not come to hide. He came to give light. Jesus did not come to be searched for, he came to search us out, and guide us on the way to life. So before he could get comfortable in a chair, a nobleman from Jesus hometown, Capernaum, a Jew connected with one of the royal households came knocking. "Come back with me now to Capernaum and heal my son. He is about to die." The air of authority in the demand was obvious. This man spoke with a false consciousness, which he nevertheless believed, about his power and authority to get Jesus to do what he wanted him to do. But Jesus did not jump at the chance to please the royal or the crowd.
The distance by foot between the two towns is about 15 miles. This would mean that Jesus who had already traveled a distance of some 80 miles from Jerusalem over several days, would have to get up and go another 15 miles northeast with the royal. Jesus addressed him with another kind of authority--that of the Son of Man, the New Human Being, the Christ of God. In verse 50 we read that Jesus said to him, “Go, your son lives.”
“That’s it?” Is that all Jesus was going to do or say? He didn’t wave his arms. He didn’t cry out to God. He didn’t fall on his knees and call everyone in the room to an immediate intercession. All he said was “Go, your son lives?”
The NIV tries to soften it with the paraphrase, “Go, your son will live.” But that is not what Jesus said in the actual Greek. He just said, “Go! Your son, he lives.” We know that Jesus was tired but how could he be so insensitive? How could he not take this man’s need—to save his son’s life with the utmost urgency? How could Jesus ignore the authority and social station that this man had in Jesus' own home town, Capernaum? Why would Jesus not do what he wanted him to do--go back to Capernaum with him. No. Jesus looked at him and said, “Go—Your son lives.” Really?
As the crowd around him listened, Jesus seemed to respond with irritation, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” And then instead of doing what the man wanted him to do, Jesus did what God wanted him to do. Claiming his own authority and power from God, far beyond that of the royal official, Jesus sent him home in faith. "Go on home, God has acted already, God is way ahead of our needs, our desires, our situations."
What does God want us to do? God wants us to exercise and live in our power. God wants us to send people in faith. Let them know that God has made a river for us in the deserts of life. Let them know that God has turned the rough wildernesses of our lives into highways of blessing. Let the world know that— I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do. I will not forsake them.
I believe Jesus sent him home to Capernaum with the truth. Jesus said literally, “Go, your son, he lives.” When did the fever leave his son? The servant said “at one in the afternoon.” He remarked, that was the exact hour that Jesus said, “Go, your son lives.” We too easily conclude that John is trying to get us to believe that when Jesus spoke these words the boy was healed. I do not believe that to be the case.
Jesus did not say, “right now, I will heal him.” Jesus did not say, “Right now I will save his life.” Jesus said, “Go! Your son, he lives.” There is a double meaning here as in all prophetic utterance in God’s word. I believe John was affirming the resurrection of life that would be experienced in God’s raising Jesus from the dead. At the same time, John let’s us know that the man’s son was healed as the man traveled to Cana of Galilee to find Jesus to heal his son.
It was the royal official’s faith that God could heal his son that removed the fatal illness and restored his son to life. It was in the exercise of his own faith in the power of God that saved his son. Jesus was proclaiming the fact that his son had already recovered, and the fact that God is the God of the resurrection. God’s son lives. God’s children live. The children of life cannot die, will not see corruption, because through the Christ, God has decreed everlasting life, life eternal upon all who believe.
When Margaret Aikens wrote this song in 1958 she was a young woman. She had cut her musical teeth in the blues and jazz world of that time, so her lyrics and rhythm were crude and unacceptable for much of the Black American African churches. Many Black American African churches at the time were trying to have worship music that reflected our assimilation into white America. But I believe that God raised her up, and Sally Martin, and Albert Tindley and Charles Price Jones and Prof. Thomas Dorsey (“Precious Lord”) and hundreds of other musicians in the Spirit to give us the “songs of Zion,” the music of worship in our own cultural context.
I believe that God raised these musicians and this music up so that we would understand that if you come to God in truth, you don’t have to sing like the oppressor, those who think and that we in our former idolatry thought, were to be emulated and worshiped). Isaac Watts, Fanny Crosby and Charles Wesley and countless other poets and musucians did the same thing in the 18th and 19th Centuries, putting the words of the Gospel and their experiences in Christ in the music of English taverns, pubs and American folk songs like Azmon and Duke Street. We still have these songs in our hymnals, but God has raised up musicians in our own culture to give these words new life through our own Black American African cultural forms and expressions.
We discovered through songs like “A Brighter Day Ahead” and “Walk in the Light” and “The Only Hope we have is in Christ Jesus” and “Beams of Heaven,” and the works Magnolia Lewis-Butts, Lucie Campbell, Kenneth Morris, Roberta Martin, M. C. Hammer, Walter and Edmond Hawkins and Andre Crouch and many others, that we do not need to copy the culture, the expression and the witness of another culture, another people, just because they happen to have the natural power in this world.
Through this new breed of Gospel musicians and those who were to follow, God proved that the words of Jesus to the woman at the well were true—“The time is coming when those who worship God will not have to copy the worship of the Jews, or the worship of the Samaritans, or the worship of the majority culture, but those who truly worship God will worship God IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH.”
Her words are simple but powerful: There’s a brighter day ahead, for Jesus has said, if by him we will be led, There’s a brighter day ahead. There’s a brighter day ahead, in God’s word we read, if we trust him he said, there’s a brighter day ahead. There’s a brighter day ahead, on the cross he bled, and his blood for us he shed., there’ll be a brighter day ahead. (And then the chorus): “On up the road . . . .”
Margaret Aikens-Jenkins went to glory in 2009, but her words inspired Dottie Peeples and Kiera Sheard as they have rewritten her song for new generations to come.
On up the road, far in the distance We can see the light, shining in the night It’s penetrating, life’s heavy fog Oh, it’s Jesus, He conquers all His light shineth brightly, as we move close to Him Yes in Him the light shall never grow dim For there’s a brighter day, brighter day, brighter day ahead A brighter day ahead.
The royal returned home to find his son had recovered. He asked, when did he begin to recover? When did the fever leave him. His servant replied, “Yesterday, the seventh hour.” The royal remembered that it was exact time Jesus had said, “Go! Your son, he lives.” At that moment, he believed. His household believed. God was glorified. God had gone ahead of him. While he was on his way to Jesus, God had already accomplished the healing in his son. God went ahead of Israel, preparing manna in the wilderness, water from the rock, long before they felt hungry and thirsty, long before they had started to complain, long before they realized that they had needs that seemed to be unmet, God had supplied all their needs according to His riches in glory.
God has gone ahead of us. He has prepared the road we are yet to travel. He is doing a “new thing” in our lives and he is just getting started. Today we celebrate our past, with faith that the God who brought us this far on the way, is waiting for us “on up the road, far in the distance” with an eternal weight of glory.
We need do nothing more than get on the road of life, live in his power and will through faith, and in faith our travels on the road of blessing and power and honor and wisdom, in will begin anew even as they continue.
Studies in the Gospel of John #10 John 4:31-42; Exodus 16:1-12 “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles" (Psalm 103:1-5).
“Fonny: chews on the rib, and watches me: and, in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing at each other. We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have enough food for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe, something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling (from If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, page 114, New York: The Dial Press, 1974).”
The disciples walked up to Jesus as he was finishing his conversation with the Samaritan woman. They were dumbfounded that he spoke with this woman, a mixed race person, an inferior, an unclean individual worse than a Gentile. But their silence meant that they had already learned something. Whatever justification there might have been in the past for Jews to have no dealings with the Samaritans, this no longer held true.
It was now obvious to them that the Christ of God had come to earth, full of grace and truth, and the good news concerning the presence of the Christ in their midst must be proclaimed to all people, not just the Jews. They had brought food, so they urged him, “Master, eat something.” But Jesus replied, “I am already full—my hunger has been satisfied.” The disciples, missing the spiritual truth asked, “Could someone else have brought him some food?” Jesus went on, “I satisfy my hunger by doing what God sent me here to do.”
What did God send him to do? What had he done which satisfied his hunger? He made a connection with the Samaritan woman. It was not just any connection. It is so easy to connect with people of our own socioeconomic class, educational level, cultural community, with someone we have shared values with. So often our churches become little more than extensions of other social venues we participate in, because we, like the disciples have not yet understood the miracle and meaning of the Christ being made flesh in the world.
God’s will was done because in the words of singer Traci Chapman, Jesus went: “Across the line. Who would dare to go, over the bridge, under the track, that separates?” God wants us to make connections with people that we do not normally connect with. That’s the power of the Gospel. That’s the miracle. Every time we connect with someone who does not have what we have, think like we think, sing like we sing, play the games, know the slang, know the stories that we know, we are reconnecting humanity from its disconnectedness. And when people get connected to the Christ through us; they begin to recover their own Christlikeness, their own specialness, their own giftedness, their own inheritance as children of God.
In James Baldwin’s novel, "If Beale Street Could Talk," Clementine, known by all as Tish, and Alonzo known by family and friends as Fonny, had been childhood friends, but as this chapter unfolds, they had just discovered each other as lovers. They had gone to her father and announced their plans to be married. They had a small one-room basement apartment in Greenwich Village; they were poor. Fonny had no regular work, but his real gift and calling and vision was sculpting, which Tish supported fully by working a menial job. Just as they came together and were discovering their own love, their own happiness, Alonzo encountered his friend Daniel Carty on the street. He had known him from high school. Daniel, at age 23, had already had a hard life, and already showed signs of being beaten down by all that young black men were facing in white supremacist America in the 1960s in New York City. He had served two years in jail for stealing a car that he had never seen, and was distraught and depressed.
Fonny and Tish were just exploring their togetherness, their love. They had no money. But they invited Daniel to their place, listened as he shared his story, took turns holding him as he cried in their arms and held on until he would stop and rest. Finally they fixed him a sumptuous soul food meal. Baldwin suggests that this enhanced, rather than took away from the newfound love that Fonny and Tish discovered with each other. Love has a generative quality. Real love is contagious; it’s infectious. It does not lose its power. It reaches to the highest mountain. And it flows to the lowest valley. Love never loses its power. Love enables us to connect with others. And the connection grows, it spreads, it heals, it reveals, it renews.
As Jesus says to his disciples in "The Message" paraphrase of John 4:35ff: "Take a good look at what is right in front of you. The Samaritan fields are ripe. It's harvest time! The harvester isn't waiting." Likewise the time for us to make meaningful connections with all sorts of human beings, who may or may not be very different from ourselves, is like some of our credit card bills, past overdue.
The Samaritan woman went to her village and spread the love Jesus had demonstrated towards her. She connected with her people, people who had perhaps looked down on her, maybe they felt sorry for her at one time, but something had changed. She approached them with a new boldness, a new attitude, a new self-confidence. She had discovered her own inheritance as a child of God. But the Samaritans did not stop with her testimony. They went to meet Jesus for themselves.
The first encounter that people have with the Christ is with us. This is why we need to seek to live holy lives, lives set apart for love, and lives committed to making connections with all kinds of people from all kinds of places. We need to let God heal us, to allow us to let go of preferences, biases, and predispositions about who is and who is not in our circle. Some of our circles need to be abolished anyway, because they exclude rather than honor the God of inclusion, the God of connection.
All of us have a hunger that needs to be satisfied. It is a hunger for the bread of life. But it is not bread that we will eat, but like Tish, it is "bread" that God would have us prepare and give to others. Share your food with others and in so doing, become the Christ in the world. The Word (the Christ) must become flesh and live among the people of the world, in order for the complete satisfaction that God has for us to be achieved--that we connect with each other in love.
“We are happy, even, that we have enough food for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe, something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.”
Oh, something wonderful had happened to Jesus. He had gone across the line and connected with the Samaritan woman. And this something wonderful happened to her as well, and convinced her that her life could be different, that she could experience God’s recovery through the Christ. And Jesus was full, because as James Baldwin wrote, “Its wonderful anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.” It is time for us to satisfy our hunger. It is time for us to experience being full through connecting God with someone else, and ultimately our being connected with him or her. In this we satisfy the hunger.
Gospel of John #9 John 4:5-15; I Kings 12:20-30; 13
Jesus had to pass through Samaria, and found himself in the village of Sycar, built on the ruins of ancient Shechem where Jacob had purchased land for his son Joseph. His ancient well was still a source of water for that village. Jesus was worn out from the trip, so he sat down at the well. It was noon.
As a Samaritan woman approached the well to draw water from it, he beckoned to her, “Would you give me a drink of water?” After two millennia, this well exists today, and is enshrined in an Eastern Orthodox monastery on the site. Earlier 19th Century biblical scholars had doubted the authenticity of this well and of this story. What they did not know, for lack of archeological research, and their own unbelief, was that it had been safely hidden through the centuries below five successive churches built on that site. The Bible, again, proved to be the authentic record, the scholars were wrong.
Jacob's well is situated a short distance from the archaeological site of Tell Balata, which is thought to be the site of biblical Shechem. In accordance with the 33rd chapter of Genesis, Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Muslim traditions all associate the well with Jacob. The well then becomes a metaphor for the true life of faith, the life of the Spirit. It is ironic, but no accident, that these four religious traditions all see the well as a sacred place.
Jesus’ request to the woman seemed reasonable, but the response he got was not quite what one might expect. In fact the Samaritan woman was taken aback, she was indignant saying: “How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink? (Jews in those days wouldn’t be caught dead talking to Samaritans).” Immediately she raised the issue of racial and religious conflict. The Samaritans had intermarried with Moabites, Jebusites, Ammonites, and had practiced their religion. First Kings gives us a background of their initial conflict. This wasn’t just about Jews feeling as if they were better; that the Samaritans were inferior and that they were superior. It was that and much more. They felt that the Samaritans were unclean, lost, no longer worthy to be called children of God. Not only had they, as Jews, written them off, but they believed that God had written them off as well.
So the first wound that exists between Jesus and this woman, and hence between God’s people and the Samaritans, is a political wound, compounded by a religious wound, and exacerbated by a racial wound. We can collectively refer to this as an social wound—the collective social contradictions that existed between Jews and Samaritans, which now seemed to impair the possibility of this woman receiving the Christ of God. And yet a miracle is taking place here, because what happens between Jesus and this woman will heal a 500-year-old wound.
Jeroboam had been an official, a prince in Solomon’s court. He was intelligent, tall, handsome and popular among the people. His ego got the better of him, and he rebelled against Solomon, only to find himself in exile in Egypt. He had a mass following, because he was a member of the tribe of Ephraim. When Solomon died, nine other tribes followed Jeroboam out of the kingdom headed by David’s grandson Rehoboam. Israel, the Northern Kingdom proclaimed Jeroboam as their king. Judah, the southern kingdom, along with the tribe of Benjamin, remained loyal to Rehoboam. King Rehoboam attempted to go to war with Israel, but God said, “No. You shall not fight them. They are your brothers.”
O how tribalism has been the bane of existence for so many African people. Our tribes are important. Being a member of the Black American tribe of Africans is to be a part of a great cultural heritage, just as to be Zulu or Yoruba or Igbo or Xhosa. But tribalism was senseless in the face of the oppression of subjugation brought on all of the people by the Roman Empire. They needed to forget old hatreds, old wounds, and move toward a common unity as oppressed people. They needed to understand their immediate need for mutual goals; a mutual unified society, a mutual social ethic, and mutual faith experience.
The wound was not only old it was deep. King Omri (I Kings 16) had gone so far as to buy a hill from a man named Shemer, so that a new capital city could be built. He called it Samaria, after its former owner. He built a temple there where idols of Baal and Baal’s consort Asherah were constructed. He had the people construct two more golden bulls as Jeroboam had done in Bethel, proclaiming, Israel, behold your gods. Jeroboam had even brought foreigners, people who practiced divination, worship of the stars and planets, and other strange beliefs that God had forbidden into the shrines and temples as priests of God.
Then finally, of course, the Samaritans (Israel=Northern Kingdom) had intermarried with women and men of the nations around them, violating the command to sanctify themselves before YHWH so as not to practice the idolatry of their neighbors. When Judah returned from Babylonian exile, the Samaritans were already living in the land, but of course had no interest in rebuilding Jerusalem or reestablishing the Kingdom of Judah (southern remnant of Israel). The northern kingdom which had been unfaithful to YHWH was scattered and never rebuilt as a nation, yet the small region known as Samaria continued to exist in the north, although no longer referring to itself as “Israel.” The Jews are descendents of the faithful kingdom, Judah. In German there is no word for Jew. Jews are referred to as Juden (the people of Judah).
With all of this negative history, Jesus does not begin by addressing her historical, ethnic, religious and racial issues at all. His response is curious, “If you knew the generosity, the grace of God and who I am in relation to that grace, you would be asking me for a drink and I would have given you living water. It seemed as if Jesus was flirting, he was speaking to her in a very personal way, and so she began to speak to him in a flirtatious manner. “How are you going to give me water, man? You don’t have a container to place the water in. How then will you give me this “living water” to the extent that I will “Never thirst again?”
Then Jesus made it even more personal. He ignored the personal flirtation and its implications and went on, “Everyone who drinks the water you are talking about will get thirsty again and again. Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst, not ever. The water I give will be like an artesian spring within you, gushing fountains of endless life.” To this she replied, “Sir, give me this water so I won’t ever get thirsty, won’t ever have to come back to this well again.” Now she was hooked. Now she knew he was not “talking some jive talk” that a man might if he had unscrupulous motives. At that point he took it another step even more personal. “Go call your husband?”
Repentance is not about feeling bad. God is not interested in us feeling bad about our lives. We already do that quite well without any help from God. Repentance is God’s way of leading us out of the trap of addictive behavior that life sets for so many of us, toward the light of a recovered self, a new self filled with the Christ of God. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Her life was a sad a tragic one. Contrary to many commentators and popular opinion, there is nothing here to suggest that she was an immoral woman, a person of bad character (for a good reference on this I would refer you to "Inner Healing for Broken Vessels," by the late Dr. Linda H. Hollies).
In fact, that she had been married five times meant that she was quite a catch. Five different men had produced money, livestock, property or all three as a dowry to gain her favor as acceptable spouses. Obviously she was, or had been quite beautiful, quite attractive, quite desirable (what made for a desirable wife often had much less to do with beauty than with ability and efficiency). After this succession of marriages (we don’t know if they had died, if they had divorced her), she was now living with a man with no seeming desire to marry him. Who would want to marry again after five marriages? Given the social position that most women found themselves in during the first Century, it is highly likely that she was, herself, needing a husband in the same manner that one might need “a hole in their head.”
She had been in relationship after relationship, but it had not found satisfaction, joy, love and peace. Now she wasn’t even going to try to go in that direction again. She was ready for a change. She was ready to have the old wounds of all of these relationships and the seeming failure (or loss) that accompanied them, healed.
In the Bible in Contemporary Language paraphrase we read Jesus words in Matthew 11:28-30-- “Come with me, get away with me, and you will recover your life. I’ll show you how to find real ultimate peace and satisfaction. Learn the unforced rhythms of God’s grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly."
This is what he was inviting her too. How do we know that she got it? How do we know that both the old political, religious, racial and social wounds and that the wounds inflicted by personal, addictive behavior were also healed. Because John tells us in verse 28, she left her water jar. She went back to the town and said to all those Samaritans, come see a man who told me everything that I ever did. Is not this the Christ? They came out of the town and made their way toward him. She did not say, come see a Jew. She did not say, come see a paternalist who accepts us even though we are not as good as he. She did not say, come to see a Jew who is different from other Jews, he accepts us.
No. She said come see a man who is a prophet, who has gifts, who comes from God. She left her water jar. It had represented 500 years of bitterness and enmity. It represented old wounds from five marital relationships that had ended in loss. For the fact that she was coming to get water at noon when all of the respectable women had gotten theirs early in the morning, as was the custom, the jar represented her shame. It represented all the attempts through various relationships, trying to find the real and only satisfaction that exists, the renewal of our relationship as children of God through the Christ.
She left that old thing behind. She didn’t need it anymore. She went in faith with the promise of living water. Jesus rose above old wounds, old hurts, “The time is coming, when the true worshipers will worship God, neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, for those who truly worship God, worship God in Spirit and in Truth.” Wow. What Jesus has is for everybody. No matter what tribe, what ethnicity, what race, what religion; the promise of God’s reality through the Christ, through the powerful Spirit of life in the Christ of God is there for all.
He heals old wounds. Deep ones—ones that we can’t talk about-- he plugs up the holes in our hearts. Come see a man. Come to Jesus. Come to the Christ and experience new, full everlasting life, as Christ recovers the child of God in you. Amen.
In John 3:31 we read Jesus words, “The one who comes from above is above all.”
Last week we discussed the importance of reclaiming our spiritual heritage. We are from God and of God. Our right mind is our spiritual mind, the mind of Christ. In order to know who we are, we must experience the second birth to counter the curse of Adam’s sin. We must be born anew, born again, born from above. That is where we get our identity from. Jesus gives us contrasting ideas in verse 31 for further clarification. “The one who is from the earth belongs to the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all.” Our first identity is from the earth, but God gives us a new identity. Nicodemus just didn't get it. He was too earthbound in his interpretations. "How can a man enter his mother's womb and be born a second time?" Jesus marveled, "Wow! You are a master of divinity and yet are missing this entirely. Do not wonder that I say you must be reborn into your spiritual identity, lost in Adam, your oneness with God.
Abram’s natural human heredity, his identity is well documented in Genesis 11:27-31. He is the son of Terah. His family consists of his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, who he was charged to raise as result of his brother Haran. He was born in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in what is now the modern nation of Iraq. The family then settled in Harran, in what is now Syria, but at that time was not quite in Paddan Aram or Hittani. It was “in between.” It gave Abram what Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP and Crisis Magazine referred to as “double-consciousness.”
We read in Deuteronomy 26:4 concerning Abram, “a wandering Aramean was my father.” Geographically and culturally this is a bit of an overstatement, probably due to the fact that Aramaic became the lingua franca of the commercial world, which included that small nation on the Levant known as ancient Israel.
He could have equally been called a Hittite (present day Turkey), since Harran was geographically in the old Hittite Empire. The point here is that while he was born in Ur, he was raised in the kingdom of Paddan Aram which is the modern nation of Syria, and this gave him a double-consciousness.” It is that which has enabled Black American Africans to be loyal to the USA, but not “blindly loyal.” The two-ness, this otherness which is the outcome of having our culture, language and religion violently and suddenly stripped away from us, leaves us with a collective unconscious of otherness, so that we are not “stuck in America and with Americanism" the way so many blindly patriotic people are. We have that “something else” that informs a more “humane consciousness” regarding cultural and social criticism, American foreign policy, human rights issues and so on.
I believe God had Terah move his family to Harran because God wanted it to be easy for Abram to obey Him when he called him away from his country, his people, his culture, his earthly identity. John Wesley taught the doctrine of prevenient or “preventing grace,” whereby God prepares us for God and God's will and way in our lives by the active work of God’s Spirit in our lives. God, our of intense love, enables to say “Yes” for our good--which is always God's goal for every human being.
God does not force us, but God’s motive toward us is unconditional, intense and intimate love. God desires to be in relationship with us at all costs. God prepares us for His expectations, his plan. Just as we know that God never tempts us, tests us, beyond what we are able to bear, so God never calls us to do something without making it possible for us to say yes. And God prepares us by birthing us anew, renewing our relationship to God as sons and daughters of light, children of God, heirs to all of God’s promises. It is all of God and by God.
Like Abraham, we are socialized into the sin of Adam, into the lust for things and money and approval and position and power, for familial, ethnic and national loyalties—all the things that are unspiritual, contrary to our God nature and draw us away from God and seeing all people as the family of God, united by our One Spirit.
In Genesis Chapter 12, God says to Abraham, “I’m calling you to leave that identity behind. Go from your country—go from your people. Then God says this—even as you are surrendering your people, your country, your heritage, your upbringing, I will make you a great nation. I will make you a new people. I will give you a new name. God promises Abraham a new identity. Jesus said, from the earth: old identity; from above-from God: new identity. Jesus also said in John 3, “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God.” He and she is given God’s Spirit, God’s mind, God’s wisdom, God’s intellect without measure.
Why, then, has God so blessed those who are born of God? Why is God determined to bless Abram and make his name great (Abraham=father of a multitude? Why does God insist that Abram be a different kind of person than his father, his brothers, his family and his people? Because Jesus said in verse 35, “The Father loves the son and has placed everything in his hands.” This is God’s purpose in having us reclaim our spiritual selves, reclaim our heritage as children of light, and to remake us in the image of the Christ. God is placing everything in our hands.
God’s purpose for humankind was to rule over the earth, to tend and cultivate it, to govern it, to bring order and beauty to it. By surrendering to disobedience we lost our birthright, but now, through Christ we have been born anew. Our identity is “child of God, child of the King.” We are in the poetry of Songs of Solomon, "God’s beloved-God's lover." God desires us as one desires the ultimate intimacy of a lover. Why are we to be responsible for all things? Because like Abraham and children of his promise, our purpose in life is to be a blessing. We have the power to make things new, to make things happen in accordance with God’s direction. This is what Jesus modeled, lived, died and rose for. God said to Abram, “through you shall all nations of the earth be blessed.”
God has designed the plan of salvation, not only to save us, but to save the planet itself, to save humankind, by recreating his life in us, that we might be a blessing to others. This is our purpose—to agitate for a new world, to witness to God’s life. Through us, the spiritual power, the power of God's mind and purpose is released through our prayers, our actions, our praises and our devotion to God. Ultimately we will send Satan to the Lake of Fire which is his destiny and we will also send those angelic messengers (demons=messages, ideas, ideologies, plans contrary to the Word) who serve him with him.
We are to exercise our authority as heirs of God through Christ in us, to free the earth and its people from the shackles of "the Prince of the Power of the air." In order to be successful warriors for God, we must forever keep our new identity in front of us, and through confession and ongoing repentance let the old identity go.
Finally there is the issue of direction. Jesus said, “Whoever believes on the son has eternal life.” Whoever is guided by, trusts in, adheres to, and relies upon the Christ has life to give to others. We are to take up God’s work. That is our purpose. But in order to do this, we must be directed by God.
In Genesis 12:4, we read, Abram went as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.” Lot was not invited by God to go, but even in his act of obedience to God’s call to go, Lot was converted. Lot was blessed by Abram’s obedience, and many will be convinced by our obedience of faith.
Abram did as the Lord told him. Abram set out for the land of Canaan. He did not know what to expect there. Other people were already there. It didn’t make any difference to Abram how different, how unusual it seemed. God was directing him. In verse 7, Yahweh appears to Abram and says, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So there Abram built an altar to the Lord. Abram went from there and pitched his tent in the hills. There was nowhere else to settle in the plain. Lot chose one of the already established cities of the plain, the unfortunate city of Sodom.
Nevertheless, Abram knew that what God was calling him to do required a new city, a new society, a new human reality and identity. What did Abram do when he set up his homestead, “He built an altar and called on the name of the Lord.” When we have the eternal life of Jesus, we are participating in the life, the plan of God. We are ever-moving forward toward a fuller and more complete life in Christ Jesus. Eternal life is ours because we now have the mind of Christ, because we have the righteousness of Christ, and because we live in the love of Christ. Christ is all in all. A faith that surrenders all to the will of Christ finds its purpose in that will.
And so our identity is: “the beloved of God, heirs to the promise of God, to the promise of Abraham to God, sons and daughters of God our king.” Our purpose is: “to be a blessing to others, to the world, because God in Christ has ‘placed all things in our hands’ until ‘Christ comes in final victory and we all feast at the heavenly banquet.’” Our direction is to be directed by God, in all things and all times.
May the Love of God our savior fill you with His Mind (Spirit of the Christ) that the world will witness "Christ in you, the hope of glory!
