Feeding Lust's Opportunity at the Back Door
From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope,
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith.
5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm.
8 But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manlayers, 10 for fornicators, for sodomites.
Show me an ink blot, or a list in the Bible, and I am likely to find a pattern. Moreover, I am likely to give phrase to that pattern with a reference from Charles Spurgeon, or C.S. Lewis, maybe with an occasional insight from Tim Keller. I confess that openly before my tolerant reading brothers and sisters. Then I dive back into what Christ or the apostle Paul as human author may tell me in Heaven was just a list in 1 Timothy 1. I would rather expect too much of every jot and tittle of the gift of God's Word than not enough.
Lewis spends a disproportionate amount of his spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy as a polemic against his prep school. A place, he laments, that could have engendered habits of reflection and authentic community seemed designed to do violence to those very impulses. Even over decades of distance as an adult author, Lewis despises the school's constant insistence on activity and primacy of hierarchy there. These, he argues, are unfit replacements for parental bonds unnaturally severed.
A culture of fagging, his contemporary word, which involved upperclassman adopting younger boys to run errands and provide physical intimacy seems like an easy target for a man on the attack. Lewis passes. On examination, he says that what passed between boy and boy in those private moments may have been the closest thing to affection within the school walls.
Paul, if he doesn't chastise me for working too hard to connect the dots on his list, might understand. Something like Lewis's insight into the human craving for connection, albeit on our own terms, explains but doesn't excuse the digression. We are good at declaring that relationships have irreparably disappointed us, or declaring that we have finally disappointed ourselves in them too often. Our remedy, if not murder, is estrangement. Just short of that, we will formalize a sort of cold truce.
As soon as we do, like the small child who erupts because a relationship hasn't met her expectations, we erupt and react because we are lonely. Having torn down society and its benefits on a small scale, we soon seek to rebuild it. We are Cain's descendents.
Cain dealt with the pain of comparison to his brother Abel by murdering him. Then, disliking the idea of coming to terms with God in honest vulnerability and repentance, Cain built a city for protection. He laid the foundations for a society that would gratify rather than challenge his desires. For all the generations between, we haven't come so far.
Cain didn't see the cross. We have. As Christians, those freed from the cyclical curse of the Law Paul describes, we have seen just how far God came in reconciliation and recreation. Having murdered the exact likeness of the Father, and having sought intimacy and affirmation everywhere else, the Godhead STILL reaches out to the residue of Cain in us. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit offer healing we won't fully know until Heaven but which day by day is a balm offered for every wound and disappointment we discover, or inflict on ourselves.
Vertically renewed as we understand how the Partners in the Trinity relate to each other and relate to us, we can look to other humans as something besides inevitably disappointing surrogates. Men and women are made in the image of God. At their best, for fleeting moments, they will reflect Him and express His desire for us. At their worst, in what seems like a looping playlist of this section of 1 Timothy 1, they will make us long for Heaven, long to know as we are known in Christ.
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith.
5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm.
8 But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manlayers, 10 for fornicators, for sodomites.
Show me an ink blot, or a list in the Bible, and I am likely to find a pattern. Moreover, I am likely to give phrase to that pattern with a reference from Charles Spurgeon, or C.S. Lewis, maybe with an occasional insight from Tim Keller. I confess that openly before my tolerant reading brothers and sisters. Then I dive back into what Christ or the apostle Paul as human author may tell me in Heaven was just a list in 1 Timothy 1. I would rather expect too much of every jot and tittle of the gift of God's Word than not enough.
Lewis spends a disproportionate amount of his spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy as a polemic against his prep school. A place, he laments, that could have engendered habits of reflection and authentic community seemed designed to do violence to those very impulses. Even over decades of distance as an adult author, Lewis despises the school's constant insistence on activity and primacy of hierarchy there. These, he argues, are unfit replacements for parental bonds unnaturally severed.
A culture of fagging, his contemporary word, which involved upperclassman adopting younger boys to run errands and provide physical intimacy seems like an easy target for a man on the attack. Lewis passes. On examination, he says that what passed between boy and boy in those private moments may have been the closest thing to affection within the school walls.
Paul, if he doesn't chastise me for working too hard to connect the dots on his list, might understand. Something like Lewis's insight into the human craving for connection, albeit on our own terms, explains but doesn't excuse the digression. We are good at declaring that relationships have irreparably disappointed us, or declaring that we have finally disappointed ourselves in them too often. Our remedy, if not murder, is estrangement. Just short of that, we will formalize a sort of cold truce.
As soon as we do, like the small child who erupts because a relationship hasn't met her expectations, we erupt and react because we are lonely. Having torn down society and its benefits on a small scale, we soon seek to rebuild it. We are Cain's descendents.
Cain dealt with the pain of comparison to his brother Abel by murdering him. Then, disliking the idea of coming to terms with God in honest vulnerability and repentance, Cain built a city for protection. He laid the foundations for a society that would gratify rather than challenge his desires. For all the generations between, we haven't come so far.
Cain didn't see the cross. We have. As Christians, those freed from the cyclical curse of the Law Paul describes, we have seen just how far God came in reconciliation and recreation. Having murdered the exact likeness of the Father, and having sought intimacy and affirmation everywhere else, the Godhead STILL reaches out to the residue of Cain in us. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit offer healing we won't fully know until Heaven but which day by day is a balm offered for every wound and disappointment we discover, or inflict on ourselves.
Vertically renewed as we understand how the Partners in the Trinity relate to each other and relate to us, we can look to other humans as something besides inevitably disappointing surrogates. Men and women are made in the image of God. At their best, for fleeting moments, they will reflect Him and express His desire for us. At their worst, in what seems like a looping playlist of this section of 1 Timothy 1, they will make us long for Heaven, long to know as we are known in Christ.
Comments
Post a Comment