----------------------------------------------------------
That comment moved me as well...
I so like the drama of it all...
In the sense of Dirty Harry.... "WELL do you Punk?"
Posted on 01/06/2015 5:13:00 AM PST by metmom
The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kindgom of heaven. - Matt. 5:3
Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are called simply "things." They were made for man's uses, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and "things" were allowed to enter. Within the human heart "things" have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets "things" with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns "my" and "mine" look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
Our Lord referred to this tyranny of things when He said to His disciples, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it."
Breaking this truth into fragments for our better understanding, it would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we tolerate at our peril. Jesus called it "life" and "self," or as we would say, the selflife. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness: the words "gain" and "profit" suggest this. To allow this enemy to live is in the end to lose everything. To repudiate it and give up all for Christ's sake is to lose nothing at last, but to preserve everything unto life eternal. And possibly also a hint is given here as to the only effective way to destroy this foe: it is by the Cross. "Let him take up his cross and follow me."
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in spirit." They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word "poor" as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Let me exhort you to take this seriously. It is not to be understood as mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an inert mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures, a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not try to by-pass it if we would follow on in this holy pursuit. We must ascend a step at a time. If we refuse one step we bring our progress to an end.
As is frequently true, this New Testament principle of spiritual life finds its best illustration in the Old Testament. In the story of Abraham and Isaac we have a dramatic picture of the surrendered life as well as an excellent commentary on the first Beatitude.
Abraham was old when Isaac was born, old enough indeed to have been his grandfather, and the child became at once the delight and idol of his heart. From that moment when he first stooped to take the tiny form awkwardly in his arms he was an eager love slave of his son. God went out of His way to comment on the strength of this affection. And it is not hard to understand. The baby represented everything sacred to his father's heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the years and the long messianic dream. As he watched him grow from babyhood to young manhood the heart of the old man was knit closer and closer with the life of his son, till at last the relationship bordered upon the perilous. It was then that God stepped in to save both father and son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.
"Take now thy son," said God to Abraham, "thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of." The sacred writer spares us a close-up of the agony that night on the slopes near Beersheba when the aged man had it out with his God, but respectful imagination may view in awe the bent form and convulsive wrestling alone under the stars. Possibly not again until a Greater than Abraham wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane did such mortal pain visit a human soul. If only the man himself might have been allowed to die. That would have been easier a thousand times, for he was old now, and to die would have been no great ordeal for one who had walked so long with God. Besides, it would have been a last sweet pleasure to let his dimming vision rest upon the figure of his stalwart son who would live to carry on the Abrahamic line and fulfill in himself the promises of God made long before in Ur of the Chaldees.
How should he slay the lad! Even if he could get the consent of his wounded and protesting heart, how could he reconcile the act with the promise, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called"? This was Abraham's trial by fire, and he did not fail in the crucible. While the stars still shone like sharp white points above the tent where the sleeping Isaac lay, and long before the gray dawn had begun to lighten the east, the old saint had made up his mind. He would offer his son as God had directed him to do, and then trust God to raise him from the dead. This, says the writer to the Hebrews, was the solution his aching heart found sometime in the dark night, and he rose "early in the morning" to carry out the plan. It is beautiful to see that, while he erred as to God's method, he had correctly sensed the secret of His great heart. And the solution accords well with the New Testament Scripture, "Whosoever will lose for my sake shall find."
God let the suffering old man go through with it up to the point where He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade him to lay a hand upon the boy. To the wondering patriarch He now says in effect, "It's all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the lad. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your love. Now you may have the boy, sound and well. Take him and go back to your tent. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou bast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me."
Then heaven opened and a voice was heard saying to him, "By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou bast done this thing, and bast not withheld thy son, thine only son: that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is `upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou bast obeyed my voice.
The old man of God lifted his head to respond to the Voice, and stood there on the mount strong and pure and grand, a man marked out by the Lord for special treatment, a friend and favorite of the Most High. Now he was a man wholly surrendered, a man utterly obedient, a man who possessed nothing. He had concentrated his all in the person of his dear son, and God had taken it from him. God could have begun out on the margin of Abraham's life and worked inward to the center; He chose rather to cut quickly to the heart and have it over in one sharp act of separation. In dealing thus He practiced an economy of means and time. It hurt cruelly, but it was effective.
I have said that Abraham possessed nothing. Yet was not this poor man rich? Everything he had owned before was his still to enjoy: sheep, camels, herds, and goods of every sort. He had also his wife and his friends, and best of all he had his son Isaac safe by his side. He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation. The books on systematic theology overlook this, but the wise will understand.
After that bitter and blessed experience I think the words "my" and "mine" never had again the same meaning for Abraham. The sense of possession which they connote was gone from his heart. Things had been cast out forever. They had now become external to the man. His inner heart was free from them. The world said, "Abraham is rich," but the aged patriarch only smiled. He could not explain it to them, but he knew that he owned nothing, that his real treasures were inward and eternal.
There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is; but its outworkings are tragic.
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are, God's loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit for special abilities than for blue eyes or strong muscles. "For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what bast thou that thou didst not receive?"
The Christian who is alive enough to know himself even slightly will recognize the symptoms of this possession malady, and will grieve to find them in his own heart. If the longing after God is strong enough within him he will want to do something about the matter. Now, what should he do?
First of all he should put away all defense and make no attempt to excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other; but let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself. Let the inquiring Christian trample under foot every slippery trick of his deceitful heart and insist upon frank and open relations with the Lord.
Then he should remember that this is holy business. No careless or casual dealings will suffice. Let him come to God in full determination to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take E things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be he will need to become specific, to name things and people by their names one by one. If he will become drastic enough he can shorten the time of his travail from years to minutes and enter the good land long before his slower brethren who coddle their feelings and insist upon caution in their dealings with God.
Let us never forget that such a truth as this cannot be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them. We must in our hearts live through Abraham's harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the blessedness which follows them. The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough old miser within us will not lie down and die obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence as Christ expelled the money changers from the temple. And we shall need to steel ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognize it as springing out of self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins of the human heart.
If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God He will sooner or later bring us to this test. Abraham's testing was, at the time, not known to him as such, yet if he had taken some course other than the one he did, the whole history of the Old Testament would have been different. God would have found His man, no doubt, but the loss to Abraham would have been tragic beyond the telling. So we will be brought one by one to the testing place, and we may never know when we are there. At that testing place there will be no dozen possible choices for us; just one and an alternative, but our whole future will be conditioned by the choice we make.
Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but 1 do come. Please root from my heart all those things which 1 have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter avid dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus' Name, Amen.
HUGGS!
I imagine likewise, dear brother in Christ.
To "these people," good and evil are merely superstitious holdovers from a lesser-evolved human past premised on a moral law issuing from a totally fictitious being; i.e., God.
But they loudly proclaim that "God is dead, and we have killed him." So much for the foundation of moral law. All that is left is moral relativism: There is no "objective" good or evil, there is only opinion; and one man's opinion is just as good as the next man's.
Unless one man's power is greater than another's. In which case, not justice, but force, will carry the day.
Somehow, these folks regard this sort of mental masturbation as "liberating." Yet, liberating — for what? To what end?
These folks are fools within the classical meaning of that word. In the Hebrew scriptures (Psalms 14, 53), the fool is the nabal, "the man who says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" Plato diagnosed the situation of the person saying such as self-confessing a state of pneumopathological disorder (nosos). Cicero called a person in this spiritual condition insipiens, on grounds that such a position ineluctably entails "contempt for reason."
Yet as Jacob Holsinger Sherman points out [in Partakers of the Divine, 2014], WRT the proselytizers of the "God is dead" school:
This antagonist is not an atheist in the modern sense, but something more twisted and actively corrupt. In biblical wisdom literature, the Fool ... not only denies God in his heart, but aggressively seeks to oppress and devour the upright.... [Eric] Voegelin complements the Psalmist's description of the Fool with other characterizations in Isaiah and Jeremiah (e.g., Isa. 32:6: "For fools speak folly, and their minds plot iniquity; to practice ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord, to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied, and to deprive the thirsty of drink"), and so concludes:Sherman adds: "The key to understanding the Fool's role ... is to realize that his denial of God is not merely the withholding of assent to a theological proposition, but a dynamic state of personal corruption." [op. cit Sherman, p. 103]
The fool of the psalm is certainly not a man wanting in intellectual acumen or worldly judgment.... In these Israelite contexts, the contempt, the nebala, does not necessarily denote so differentiated a phenomenon as dogmatic atheism, but rather a state of spiritual dullness that will permit the indulgence of greed, sex, and power without fear of divine judgment. [Volume 12, the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Published Essays, p. 385]
Notwithstanding, "we" are to understand that there is no such thing as God; no such thing as Good and Evil. Beauty, love, divine mercy and justice are all fictions, too.
There is also no such thing as Satan. For as the Father of Lies himself boasts, "The greatest lie I ever told was that I do not exist." [And these Fools believed me! So they are mine!]
Must close, with one last thought: The resolution of the culture war that is destroying America — thanks to the politics of division so ably orchestrated and promulgated by the sitting POTUS — boils down to the question: Do you believe in God, or not?
Thank you so much for writing, dear xzins!
That comment moved me as well...
I so like the drama of it all...
In the sense of Dirty Harry.... "WELL do you Punk?"
Indeed, dearest sister in Christ, I found P. S. Wesson's Time as an Illusion an extraordinarily insightful and thought-provocative article — especially his hypothesis of physical death as "phase change." What could he possibly have meant by this?
So, facing this puzzling question, I can only go back to what I already know; in this case, first to Plato.
In Timaeus, Plato baldly states that "death is but the separation of body and soul, nothing more." What could he possibly have meant by this declaration?
It helps to know that, for Plato, the soul is immortal; the body mortal. That is to say, the living person persists in time as the manifestation of the intense, abiding cooperation of spiritual and physical principles. Plato suggests that, at death, the physical principle dissolves. That is to say, the body aspect becomes wholly subject to the second law of thermodynamics when the soul, understood as the "form" of the physical body, "withdraws." This is the meaning of what we humans call "death."
Plato's main insight here is that the soul does not perish along with the physical body, but persists eternally. The "crisis" of death is much feared — even though according to Wesson, it may be only a "phase change" WRT the eternal life of the soul.
Similarly, it occurs to me that birth is also a "crisis" — but one which no man living has ever been able to describe. But Christians — and classical Greeks — describe this "crisis" as the mortalization — the physical incarnation — of an immortal soul. That is to say, an "intangible entity" attracts and organizes its own physical expression in time, for a time....
Death is but the reverse of this process of Birth. But the soul persists inviolate regardless of whichever transaction — birth or death — is taking place.
I believe this insight was what drew Justin Martyr to the conclusion that the Incarnation of Christ was the very fulfillment, not only of the patriarchs and the prophets, but of classical (Platonic/Aristotelian) philosophy as well.
I find I stand in Justin Martyr's camp in this regard.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!
Well, isn't that a perfectly understandable statement coming from a person who refuses to be judged? As if that "call" were his to make....
There is a Satan; be he(she) be called malefactor, fool, conniver, anarchist or boss....
The urge to be served and NOT serve, is pregnant with malefaction..
the original problem of the so-called good angels and the fallen angels..
AND the problem as well, with humans..
I found P. S. Wesson’s Time as an Illusion an extraordinarily insightful and thought-provocative article — especially his hypothesis of physical death as “phase change.” What could he possibly have meant by this?
mee too!..
One word... “BUTTERFLY”.. can there be a more perfect metaphor.. object lesson.. in your face teaching.
there are others but this one even a child can understand..
You nail it right there, dearest 'pipe, my beloved brother in Christ!
Perfect, dear hosepipe! Thank you!
Truly, I believe a strong sense of awareness and not 'belonging' in a mortal body happened often among humans over millennia. I suspect Justin Martyr sensed the same and was seeking understanding which he found in Christ and, as you say, saw Christ also fulfilling classical philosophy.
SO very true.
Lovely... bees, termites, ants, hummingbirds, eagles, spiders etc..
Indeed. One might almost say that this sense of "not belonging in a mortal body" is probably more the rule than the exception in human historical experience. It is, however, just not the common sense nowadays; i.e., in "modernity," or the "post-modern world."
The first documentary evidence on this question of which I am aware dates back to ~2,000 B.C. Egypt, to an anonymous text known as "Dispute of a Man, Who Contemplates Suicide, with His Soul." In this "dialogue," the Man is disgusted, and in despair, because he finds himself living in a society so corrupt, so disordered, so oppressive to his own moral and cosmological understandings, that he can't bear to live in it anymore. Hence the contemplation of suicide — a solution that he thinks will spare him from the general corruption of society, and of the prospect of his further contributing to it. He sees his existential position in terms of a stark choice: either of "going along to get along" with the evil of his age, or self-annihilation. The Man thinks the latter may be the better choice.
But his Soul counsels him: You must not take your own life; for it is a precious gift of the gods.
In his brilliant essay "Immortality: Experience and Symbol," Eric Voegelin delineates the problem:
The Man is driven to despair by the troubles of a disordered age and wants to cast off a life that has become senseless; the Soul is introduced as the speaker who militates against the decision.... [T]he struggle between Man and his Soul is concerned with the idea of life as a gift of the gods. Since life is not a man's property to be thrown away when it becomes burdensome but an endowment to be treated as a trust under all conditions, the Soul can point to the command of the gods and the wisdom of the sages which both prohibit the shortening of the alloted span. But Man knows how to plead: the disintegration of order, both personal and public, in the surrounding society deprives life of any conceivable meaning, so that exceptional circumstances will justify a violation of the rule before the gods....Notwithstanding the Man's arguments — who is "pitted against the disorder of society" — his Soul counsels that "he can emerge as victor from the struggle because he carries in himself the full reality of order...."
There is much more to the "Dispute" than this; but I'll leave it there for now. I just cite it here to show that problems of body and soul and of human existence and immortality have been in the forefront of the most consuming, vital questions that human beings have universally asked from as far back as the historical records go.
Obviously, the "Dispute" is pre-Christian by date. But that is not to say that it undermines the greatest truths about Man as part and participant in the Great Hierarchy of Being as revealed — and fulfilled — in Judeo-Christian theology.
I so agree with you: "...Justin Martyr sensed the same and was seeking understanding which he found in Christ and, as you say, saw Christ also fulfilling classical philosophy." To which I would add: And also Christ Who fulfills the main insights of an anonymous work dating from the Egypt of the First Intermediate Period.
The Logos — God's Word of Creation — has been "in the world" ( so to speak) from the very Beginning....
Just some thoughts FWTW. Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!
Been riding this donkey for 72 years.. i.e. good donkey..
a few more years and expect different transportation..
maybe an upgrade..
I’m only a couple of years behind you. I suspect your phase shift will be glorious indeed.
It is not only fascinating that they were contemplating such things but that they did it in a dialogue and attributed life as a divine gift. And for such an ancient document to have survived all those years, issues of life and death, body and soul must have been very important to them.
Definitely an upgrade, dear hosepipe!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.