Only a God who is alive can do anything new

           In the ancient Near East, there were many civilizations all worshipping different gods. But when they prayed to their gods, they usually prayed for the same thing. They prayed that seasons would come again so that crops could grow again so that life could continue its monotonous course. They prayed that the sun and moon would keep rising and setting so that they could do what they had always done--survive.

Those are fine prayers and all. But that's not how the Hebrews prayed.

When the Hebrews came onto the scene and starting talking about the one God they served, you see something entirely different.

The Hebrew God, the God of this Great Story, the God who called Abram...

 

did new things.

Evidently, he didn’t much care for the status quo. Or maybe, it was not that he did not appreciate the status quo, but rather he knew we were not appreciating life nearly as much as we should!

 

The fact that there was even such a thing as a sun or a moon and that they obeyed certain predisposed rhythms was absolutely miraculous to God, but not to us. And the Hebrew God, the child-like one, loves that feeling of wonder, of adventure, of exhilaration. Every moment should be permeated by that feeling—that feeling called life.

 

Therefore, he was always looking to upset the “status quo” (which simply meant the dull perception humans had in their lives) in order to bring something better about, a genuine appreciation of what it means to actually live in the simple moments called friendship and love, food and sleep.

Other gods in the near east were represented through images, like a man’s body with an eagle’s head. But the Hebrews had no icons or pictures of their God. They said it was God’s command that they make no image of him like the other gods of the land. The Hebrew’s God said that he was irreproducible by human hands. He said that you could not put an eagle’s head on a man’s body because he was not the eagle, and only a little like the man. This God created the eagle and the man. He was something wholly different than anything found on the earth.

Why were the Hebrews so remarkably different than the rest of the people in the ancient near east?

Where did this people get these completely new and culturally impossible ideas if a living God truly hadn’t given them to this people!

The Hebrews said—that their God, the one true God, told them—you could not actually craft his likeness, so do not try. That was his basic request to the Hebrew people. And you were not to pray for just the status quo because those were safe prayers to gods who were really no gods at all. And he was the real God, the living God, because he did new things, even when people had not prayed for them.

Remember earlier: God would much rather speak to you through a bird in flight. But we will not recognize anymore a bird flying as the mercy of our beautiful God, so he has to speak to us in another way, a way so that there is no question in our treacherous minds that this is the God who created the universe speaking.

To our child-like Father, a bird in flight is astonishing! Because everything is astonishing to a child.

But not to us.

We grow dull and tired.

To God, the status quo is remarkable. He does not call it the status quo.

We do, because we are bored.

To God, the fact that the rains come each season is mind-blowing because before he said so there was no such thing as rain!

But we do not see it that way anymore. The ancient near east could not see it either.

So our Father adapted. He is not too proud to alter his methods. He just wants us to watch the sunrise with him and weep beside him, to enjoy, with him, the wonders he has made…for is there anything more beautiful than a sunrise?

He wants us to have that youthful soul again; he wants us to be a pure family once more.

So he has to restore our corroding soul first.

So we have to die first.

So he has to shock us first.

And all so that we may know that it is the living King of the universe who is speaking…

‘I love you.’

Thus, he upsets the status quo because he is trying to get it clear in people’s heads that he is the only God. He is real and living and everything spawns from his spontaneous, unlimited, colorful mind. Everything is his and has its origin in him. So he does new things on the earth for his people to see and marvel at, just so it would be without question that he is the true Creator and not some wooden idol that was actually nothing but a figment of our God-breathed imagination.

The wooden gods of the other nations never showed up out of the blue and asked their people to go to a brand new land that they would show them. In fact the gods of the other nations never really asked their people to do anything at all, much less anything uncomfortable. They were confined to a fixed and safe imagination in that sense.

But yet curiously, the other nations still felt a need to worship something, someone. They harbored that insuppressible suspicion, same as the Hebrews, that they were not alone on this earth, that they did not create themselves. Perhaps all souls are similar here, that something is not right, that the pinnacle of existence cannot be just us. We are not good enough to be the end of it all. We are too broken and we know that. Apparently, we have always known that.

‘You can pray that I will bring the next rainy season for your crops and I promise I will. But I am also doing something else. I am doing something you know nothing about. I am doing something new because I am working a plan that you cannot see. You cannot see it because you do not have eyes to see it yet. I am bringing the dead back to life. I am restoring you into my family because you are my children and we will be one again. You don’t remember when we were a family, but you will know it once more. You do not know you are dead, but you are. But my love for you is stronger than Death. I will prove that to you. I will live with you because I have bound myself to you. You are mine and I am yours and you will live; this I promise by my own name, the name you know nothing about...yet.’

When the Hebrews started talking about their God, he was something totally distinct from every other god of every other nation. He was beyond comprehension. He was beyond human description. He was a God unseen, working out a plan unknown and he did things that the Hebrews never asked him to do! He was an unpredictable God, but a God you could depend on. He was an exciting God. He was a God you could not explain but only shrug your shoulders at and say, ‘I trust him. I have faith that he’s good. My soul tells me he’s real, he’s true, he’s working. My soul says to go into the unknown with this invisible, adventurous God. Because he says he is my Father. He says he loves me. He says he is for all women and men…I believe him.’

             He did not tell the Hebrews the full plan, but just that he was for them, that he was on their side and that they were chosen for the sake of the all the earth. His requests have always been radical taking us to the very heart of the matter. And it is the same today when he comes to your soul and asks you to arise and follow him.

‘Come die with me!’ he says. ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. Then and only then, will I give him a new life, real life. Then, and only then, will he understand what to live really means.’

God has not changed his methods. As it was with Abram, so it is today. In the Old or the New and even in the meadow of the now, his first word to us is always the same: Arise! Come die with me! So that you may truly live.

But he is not a tyrant. For a tyrant uses seductive words commanding his followers to die and he alone benefits. Not so with our God. For Jesus uses blunt, unattractive words telling us to follow him only if we desire true life…and then he goes and dies first…but does not stay dead.