9 June 2013 - renewed

9 June 2013 - renewed

O LORD, you brought me up from the nether world;
you preserved me from among those going down into the pit.

The LORD wants the world to understand that he has power even over death.  Even the most inevitable and permanent of circumstances is neither inevitable nor permanent to our God.  By his cross and resurrection Jesus has power over death.  And since he has power over death he has power over all sickness and affliction unto death.

He frees us from the slavery to fear that death brings about (cf Heb 2:15).  It is precisely this fear which is so opposed to love.  It is this fear which turns inward and claws and scrapes for individual existence in the face of the certainty of death. He does not free us from this by calling us to some purely spiritual state where death is no longer relevant.  It is still relevant.  It is still painful.  It is a cause for weeping and sorrow.  The LORD does not ask us to simply deny this.  Instead he conquers it.  In this victory, the victory of the cross, we find our hope.

With Elijah the LORD begins to reveal that he has power even over death.

The LORD heard the prayer of Elijah;
the life breath returned to the child’s body and he revived.

Jesus raises several who are dead to reveal God's power over the grave.

and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!”
The dead man sat up and began to speak,

It is much easier in one sense to see the suffering of the world and to grow to hate the world.   There is the temptation to focus on the purely spiritual, on souls, on some disembodied heaven.  When we have inappropriate desires we no longer fault the desires but instead fault the world for not being correctly aligned to our passions.  The disregard of many for the concept of gender is an example of this.

There is a certain longing for heaven which is born of suffering that isn't entirely good because it rejects the goodness of the LORD's creation.  But the world is the LORD's.  He made it.  Although it is wounded by sin he does not give up on it. By showing us his power over death God plants in our hearts the desire, not to escape from this world, but to see it renewed.

At nightfall, weeping enters in,
but with the dawn, rejoicing.

Of course the solution to our troubles cannot be found within creation.  Scientists won't find it by eventually achieving the singularity.  They won't find the true antidote to death within our biology.  Entropy is a law that we can't circumvent on our own.  The answer comes to us from outside of creation's resources.

I want you to know, brothers and sisters,
that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin.

We are so blessed and fortunate that God does not leave us to struggle on our own.  The fear of death causes us on our own resources to either lose faith in the creation or to expect more of it than it can provide.  There is no other path we can find on our own.  Fortunately God comes to us to show us the way.

“God has visited his people.”

And in so doing he puts  to flight all that opposes us and shows us the way to true and lasting joy.

You changed my mourning into dancing;
O LORD, my God, forever will I give you thanks.

Hillsong - This is How We Overcome