octolilly [through the years]

Is anything too hard for God? Who’s got a problem beyond His power to solve? Are there situations He’s not the master of? Is anything too hard for God?

“Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27)

“And so Screwtape reveals the enemy’s ploy- first make humans flabby, with small passions and desires, then offer a sop to those diminished passions so that their experience is one of contentment. They know nothing of great joy or great sorrow. They are merely nice.

Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice. We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don’t offend anyone. Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether? As C.S. Lewis said, ‘We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.’

The greatest enemy of holiness is not passion; it is apathy. Look at Jesus. He was no milksop. His life was charged with passion. After he drove the crooks from the temple, ‘his disciples remembered that it was written, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’ (John 2:17). This isn’t quite the pictures we have in Sunday school, Jesus with a lamb and a child or two, looking for all the world like Mr. Rogers with a beard. The world’s nicest guy. He was something far more powerful. He was holy. G.K. Chesterton wrote,

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with His hair parted in the middle or His hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild scenery of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who acted like an angry god- and always like a god…The diction used about Christ has always been…sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurdled into the sea. (Orthodoxy)

If the way to avoid the murderous rage and deceptive allures of desire is to kill it, if deadness is next to godliness, then Jesus had to be the deadest person ever. But he is called the living God. ‘It is a fearful thing,’ the writer of Hebrews says, ‘to fall into the hands of the living God…For our God is a consuming fire’ (Heb. 10:31; 12:29). And what is this consuming fire? His jealous love (Deut. 4:24). God is a deeply, profoundly passionate person. Zeal consumes him. It is the secret of his life, the writer of Hebrews says. The ‘joy set before him’ enabled Jesus to endure the agony of the Cross (Heb. 12:2). In other words, his profound desire for something greater sustained him at the moment of his deepest trial. We cannot hope to live like him without a similar depth of passion. Many people find that the dilemma of desire is too much to live with, and so they abandon, they disown their desire. This is certainly true of a majority of Christians at present. Somehow we believe that we can get on without it. We are mistaken.”

– The Journey of Desire, John Eldredge