tightrope

I’m sitting here listening to Dan Fogelberg’s live set: Greetings from the West for the first time. It’s just one more example of how big an idiot I was in my younger days. I loved Dan Fogelberg’s music when I was a kid. I made it through 4 albums before he became famous. When he became popular I gave up listening because I didn’t want to listen to a sellout. I have yet to have listened to all of his albums but so far except for his posthumous album I haven’t heard anything that isn’t superb.

I missed out on a lot of good music because I was too good to listen to it. Dumb ideas, faulty ideas are easy to get caught up in and extremely difficult to stop believing in. snobbery is one of those ideas. I will spend the rest of my life getting over the lie of cool, hip, in: whatever you want to call it.

It’s cool right now to want to strip the gospel down to its bare essentials. That’s nothing new. It was stripped down early in the last century as well. The results were not the beauty of the bare form of the gospel but a gutting of the gospel until it became just another idea among impotent ideas.

The problem with stripping is that it takes away the context, the foundation upon which the gospel stands. You see the entire word of God is the context of the gospel. That’s why I hate the fact that it is so popular to print New Testaments by themselves; the gospel has already been stripped before a person opens the cover. The old testament is the context of the new; any other context makes the new testament a lie.

We have been pursuing the gospel out of context since at least the birth of dispensationalism in the late 1800’s and the seeds of that were probably sown many years before. I’ve been reading F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom this afternoon and in between the tears I’ve been shedding while reading the introduction and the first chapter I’ve come across some gems that apply in the context of the church. Here’s one: “There are few signs yet that we have the intellectual courage to admit to ourselves that we may have been wrong.”

I would insert “spiritual courage.” Instead of looking at the consequence of our ideas in the church we have simply shoved the “truth” of the gospel out of context even harder down the next gullible generation’s throat. They had no choice but to swallow because any alternatives have been presented with such vehemence and hatred that they assumed that they couldn’t be the good news.

Here we are then stuck between the horns of a dilemma. Maybe it should be stuck between the whores of a dilemma because that is really what a gutted gospel is. On one hand we’ve gutted the truth from the gospel leaving only a semblance of real love and a compassion for everyone and no hope except friendship with an imaginary Jesus. On the other hand we’ve gutted the Spirit from the gospel leaving only limited truthful words without power while being full of pride and arrogance that can’t abide those that don’t agree.

To quote Jesus’ half-brother: My brothers (and sisters) these things ought not to be this way.

I should probably just quit there and walk away, but of course I won’t. See, I’ve played both sides of the fence in this game. I gutted the truth with modern ideas. It was all of grace, grace that didn’t give a damn about what you did; it was always there to forgive which sounds great but it was also a grace that made you feel guilty about everything you had, everything you didn’t do, and horrible thing that happened to other people. I was free to do anything as long as I asked for forgiveness but the things I couldn’t do got heavier and heavier with each passing day. I was free from the law but not from the opinions of men. God’s word no longer mattered but the words of men took its place. Contrary to popular opinion that only increased my bondage. I loved Jesus with all my heart and soul but it wasn’t the sweet little baby Jesus, or the bearded Jesus it was the Jesus made in my own image or rather the image of the age.

Eventually, that Jesus nearly cost me my life. I found the truth, the absolute truth of the whole word of God but I found with each passing year that I was just getting angrier and angrier. I had all these good ideas, these truths but no power to implement them. I also found that there was no room for thought once I got there. The reformation had come. We were reformed in the past tense. The answers had all been found so you had better not ask any questions or you will feel the flames of the inquisition.

The result of these swings of the pendulum have forced me to attempt to walk the high wire between the two places. It is a balancing act and I am only just a beginner. I must keep one foot on absolute truth or life has no real meaning. I must walk with a heart for the poor and down trodden and thus learn to do truth in the real world, there must be power in the words I speak or it is not the gospel. The good news transforms people to look like Jesus – Jesus who had compassion on the broken. And Jesus who will throw hell and death and all its occupants into the lake of fire after the judgment.

Go ahead and play word games if you want to. Go ahead and be smarter than God and throw out the parts of scripture you don’t like or that your god would never speak. Everything is permitted. Do what you want to do. But don’t be surprised in twenty or thirty years when you see the outcome of your ideas come crashing down around you and those you love; because not all things are profitable. Man does not live by bread alone but by EVERY word that comes from the mouth of God.

The words of Stevie Ray Vaughn come to mind:

Lookin' back in front of me in the mirror's a grin,
Through eyes of love I see I'm really lookin' at a friend
We've all had our problems that's the way life is,
My heart goes out to others who are there to make amends

We've been walkin' the tightrope tryin' to make it right
Walkin' the tightrope every day and every night
Walkin' the tightrope bring it all around
Walkin' the tightrope from the lost to found

Grace and Peace my friends from the tight rope of life,

Brad

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