Waiting on the word

It is as we wait to hear the word from God that the Spirit begins preparing us to be fitted to what He is about to say. Revelation involves more than what we can think up for ourselves. It involves a gracious work of redemption whereby the Holy Spirit draws us up to Himself, crossing the infinite chasm between our limitations and God’s wisdom, and making us adequate to resonate with His speaking.

It is no wonder, therefore, that we have to be patient to let his work be done in us as we wait for Him at full stretch, pointing all our attention towards Him.

It is at this point that most people give up just because they feel so distant from God, so distracted and so “out of it” with respect to the presence of God. This is understandable because for many people the seeming silence of God and the background noise of other voices is discouraging.

Yet the psalmist is assured that God will speak, and what He speaks will ultimately be a word of peace; not destruction or ruin. Though we don’t know what He will speak, we are convinced that the word He speaks will call into being a new order that is shalom in our land.

Waiting to hear involves an alignment of expectation in accordance with God’s intentions of peace to us. The framework of listening has to be an obedient one. This is one of the ways that we prepare our hearts with obedient expectations.

When the word is heard, when it comes, it hits us not as a data point, but a transformative encounter. You are done to by it, apprehended by it; not merely controlling or applying it.

In a culture that values strategies for making oneself heard, listening involves a whole set of opposite practices and attitudes relating to receiving, welcoming, understanding (as in “standing under”) and humble non-presumption. Patience is an essential part of listening, and necessitates being hospitable to the voice of God. Think about it!

Changing Dimensions

In 2 Corinthians 3:15-18, we see a quantum change in perception when a certain veil is removed from before our eyes. In this transformation, although we were not able to see spiritual things, now when we turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away and we have liberty and sight because the Spirit is present. We begin to see things we never saw before. Things strike us differently. Our view and attitude to things and people is now colored with love. Our outlook is touched by faith and trust. The panic and dread is replaced by hope. Instead of looking at things, we seem to be able to look into these same things. It’s as if new spectacles have been put on that make us see things in multi-dimensionality, rather than to see things “flat”.

“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

It is as we turn to the Lord and listen for the word of Shalom, that we enter into a different dimension in which “salvation is at hand to them that fear Him”(v9). That is, while we may ordinarily think that a long process is needed before we see God’s deliverance, now the distance between us and deliverance is collapsed, and made near. Space-time experiences the shortening of distances between ourselves and salvation. That’s because we are not counting the distance of time between now and the things we think will take a long time to come to fruition. As we draw near to God, we find that it is in God, rather than the things themselves, that deliverance is found. Our mistake is often to fixate on things that we want to happen, and their distance from our present, but when we find ourselves in God, these distances are relativized “in the light of His glory and grace”. That’s why an extraordinary thing happened when the disciples toiling against the wind in the boat on Galilee, received Jesus into the boat. Immediately, the boat found itself arriving on the other side of the sea!

We are often put off from engaging in faithful processes because of how long they would take. That may be true if we are in the dynamics of Jesus’s absence. But when we totally surrender to Him and indwell His presence in obedience, we enter a different dimension-that of His presence. In this dimension, 5 loaves and 2 fishes become enough to feed 5000 people with plenty to spare.

The psalmist goes on to point out that steadfast love and faithfulness kiss each other, so that the land will yield its increase. Faithfulness and truth spring up from the ground, and “set us in the way of His steps”.

Cultivating Faithfulness

It’s funny how faithfulness is so little valued in contemporary culture. Yet faithfulness has to do with consistent faith-full action in spite of the fact that these actions may not amount to much, certainly not what is needed to achieve what is desired. But faithfulness that is directed towards God is like the 5 loaves and 2 fishes that when put in the hands of Jesus, miraculously multiply beyond their natural limits. This is not some dogged, inane ineffectuality. It is the subversive obedience to the Kingdom that breaks the oppressive power of the Empire of this world.

Two things combine to cause our land to yield its increase – faithfulness, and seeds. The word of God is dropped into our spirits. And as that happens, if there is amidst all the instability of our times, a rhythm of faithful, repetitive, incremental nurturing of it, an amazing thing happens. That faithfulness will cause the growth of the seed to outpace and outlast the pulls and temptations to cease faithful watering. Regular, faithful prayer is one of the chief aspects of faithfulness that will cause growth in our loved ones, and in our outreach. For some it would mean calling your children who are living away from you regularly. For others, it would mean turning up at meetings whether you feel like it or not. Faithfulness can be cultivated, to the extent that it becomes no longer a chore but a delight. And it is faithful actions that cultivate to harvest, a vision that came to you initially as no more than a seed word.

“Righteousness will go before Him and make His footsteps a way”.

Recently, I came across a post on Facebook from Buddhist Humor that advised, in keeping with the holiday mood:

Forget the past-you cannot change it. Forget the future-you cannot predict it. Forget the present- I didn’t get you one!

The beginning of the New Year often opens up the the question of how new the new year really is. Is the new year merely a date in the calendar that doesn’t carry with it any real newness? This is especially crucial because so many of us experience the carry-over of unresolved issues and consequences of the previous year, and even that of previous years. By what compelling reason would we believe that 2016 should be really new, if there is no new substance in our lives that can generate new things? Where is the “substance of things hoped for”?

And it is this pun-intended view in the joke from Buddhist Humor, that when all is said and done, we have no present, no “purchase”, no new substance to begin with to build upon in the new year. Only recyclings of the past year, including the continuing reverberations of previous sins and mistakes.

Psalm 85 – The Staggeringly Good News

That is why Psalm 85, and the whole biblical witness, is such staggeringly good news. The psalm begins with the decisive disjuncture between our sin, our past and the future and present that God has for us. In fact, our path is determined not by our past but by God’s righteousness:

“Righteousness shall go before Him; and set us in the way of His steps.” (v13).

In other words, the year ahead need not be predetermined by the overhang of last year’s wrongs, but by the gracious act of God setting us “in the way of His steps”. Instead of being left alone to to the consequences of our past, God has a year ahead that is touched by the sense of being accompanied. How?

In the first 3 verses of Psalm 85, we see that God had pardoned all the sins of Israel, forgiving their iniquity, pardoning all their sin and turning from His hot anger. We are not able to ascertain any particular historical event that is being referred to, but can safely say that the psalmist sees this reference as paradigmatic of the pardon without which Israel cannot exist. This radical forgiveness and restoration of favor was fully realized in Christ. whose finished work on the cross avails for us today. If any person be in Christ, she is a new creation. All things are passed away. Behold all things are new.

Like ticking time bombs, our past sins and unresolved issues follow us into the new year. They subvert our future and diminish our powers in the present. We all live under a sentence of death. As sheep, we are appointed to Sheol. Death is our shepherd. The portrayal of life as a sort of death march in modern literature is accurate. There is no lasting hope for the new year. That’s what makes the work of Christ so amazing. It was He who laid down His body upon the bomb and covered our sins. This is what it means by the pardon, the atonement in v.3. He has turned his anger upon Himself and absorbed it all, making Himself the object of His righteous wrath.

This wrath is not some arbitrary character trait of punctilious peevishness in God, but a function of His love and delight in us, so much so that we matter infinitely to Him. That is, His wrath is not a balancing counterpoint to His indulgent love, but essential to his love because we matter to Him. This is contrary to postmodern ethics that seek to absolve ourselves of guilt by abrogating sacredness from the body – so that it doesn’t matter what you do to your body, as long as what you engage in is consensual. When we dismiss the sacred from the discussion, love does not win. It becomes desacralized.

But the amazing thing about God’s love at Calvary is that in confronting how much it matters, Christ bore our guilt upon Himself, the horror of His suffering standing in direct proportion to the fact that we matter! Therefore, our past has been absorbed by Christ, and as a consequence, we can experience everything as new. Truly new.

Personalizing the Good News

Yet everything we’ve spoken about up to now is not merely an abstract generalization. The truth (Heb. ‘emet) is not fully Truth until it’s realized and personalized “by us”, as John would put it. So in the next 4 verses (vs.4-7) the psalmist speaks as if the nation still lives under the overhang of past sins. So he strains under the burden of impending calamity and oppression.

“Wilt Thou be angry with us forever?” How long more must we endure this before change happens? The cry for revival rises up from the depths of crushing burdens.

And herein lies the turning point. At the precipice of all our tomorrows the psalmist says,

“I will hear what God the LORD will speak: for He will speak peace unto His people, and to His saints” (v8)

And this is where the juncture lies. The psalmist is not content to live in the comfort of a once-spoken promise. He has to hear God speaking his word in real time, in this time. And it is the same with us. We too must hear the Lord speak His word of peace to us-not just to know things in principle and promise, but to have it spoken in real time to our spirits, so that conviction rises in us. The word must step out of eternity and enter into our time. It must be heard.

This point cannot be overemphasized. We have to have the word spoken by the Spirit, or administered unto us. Not just cognitively gotten at. Even though the psalmist has the narrative of God’s past saving acts, that information is not the same thing as hearing God actually speak. So he listens and waits for the word that will re-order his insides, activate faith, open up a path through the impossible waters, and make all things new.

All truth has to be embodied truth. It has to be administered by the Spirit unto us. Until that happens, it is external to us. True nevertheless, but unrealized. It is in this state that we wait on God to speak. It is when He speaks personally to us that His word brings life to us, and not merely information.

Coming up… in part 2 of the post, waiting on the word, changing dimensions, cultivating faithfulness