The Password that Never Changes
Pat Conroy laments in Beach Music, "You think your childhood teaches you all the traps you need to worry about. But that's not how it works. Pain doesn't travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes back to you. It's the circles that kill you."
Thus, centuries before Conroy's justifiable wariness, the biblical believer gets a contrary heritage, a dueling nature that is more than a match for every reminder of our ancestral and present brokenness. Isaiah 54:17 voices this hereditary resilience, proclaiming, "No weapon formed against you still prosper and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This," he says to Conroy's awareness of perpetual vulnerability, "is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. Their righteousness," he veritably trumpets to the ages, "is in me, says the Lord."
In his exquisite sermon on the verse, Charles Spurgeon calls this confession of reliance on the righteousness of Christ alone our watchword. He likens it to a secret password shared only among the members of an army. Where this is the shibboleth on our lips, we are one, and we are safe. Where we accustom ourselves to the confessions of each age, our parents' pain circles back to confront and condemn us. The wages of sin, indeed, is death, Conroy and Paul's epistle to the Romans agree. But the free gift of God is eternal life. Confronted with the weapons of this world on every side, we remind each other of our ancestral and yet palpably present hope in Christ alone.
When we forget, and anxiety momentarily wins, we take steady recourse in the reminder that it is the Lord Who proclaims this hope to and through Isaiah, and to and through us. What, comparatively, are the bitter fruits of any family tree, or the distracting flash of any intimidating weapons stop?
Thus, centuries before Conroy's justifiable wariness, the biblical believer gets a contrary heritage, a dueling nature that is more than a match for every reminder of our ancestral and present brokenness. Isaiah 54:17 voices this hereditary resilience, proclaiming, "No weapon formed against you still prosper and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This," he says to Conroy's awareness of perpetual vulnerability, "is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. Their righteousness," he veritably trumpets to the ages, "is in me, says the Lord."
In his exquisite sermon on the verse, Charles Spurgeon calls this confession of reliance on the righteousness of Christ alone our watchword. He likens it to a secret password shared only among the members of an army. Where this is the shibboleth on our lips, we are one, and we are safe. Where we accustom ourselves to the confessions of each age, our parents' pain circles back to confront and condemn us. The wages of sin, indeed, is death, Conroy and Paul's epistle to the Romans agree. But the free gift of God is eternal life. Confronted with the weapons of this world on every side, we remind each other of our ancestral and yet palpably present hope in Christ alone.
When we forget, and anxiety momentarily wins, we take steady recourse in the reminder that it is the Lord Who proclaims this hope to and through Isaiah, and to and through us. What, comparatively, are the bitter fruits of any family tree, or the distracting flash of any intimidating weapons stop?
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