I've Been Thinking About This…

My pastor has started to read through the Gospel of Mark for the rest of the month – you can follow him here: Saving Pastor Ryan. So a few of our small group members are joining him – thought I would too, even though I’m a few days behind here. As others join the blogfest, I’ll post their links.

Of all the things I think of when I read chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel, I think that the idea of timing hits me most solidly.

First the promise of 2,000 years has suddenly come to pass, and who was ready for it? As a nation it had looked forward to this time since its infancy in Goshen, Egypt – as the patriarchs did before that – but it has been so long that expectancy had become the habit and realization just couldn’t take hold.

Then comes John the Baptist to ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ – but very few are awake to hear his song in the Jordan Valley. He must have had some impact though: God never sends someone to do pointless things.

But most of all, he is there for the Christ – to make sure that the prophecies are completed:

• Mark 1:4 “John appeared…” (to fulfill Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3-4)
• Mark 1:9 “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee” (a prophecy referenced in Matt 2:23 that seems to refer back to something Isaiah references in Isaiah 11:1)
• Mark 1:15 “and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’

Secondly I’m struck by the immediacy of response throughout the chapter. Look at all these verses:

For all that few are awake to respond to the Christ, He Himself is in the center of a whirlpool of activity. Every few minutes some new event seems to be triggered; there is a sense of intense and irresistible urgency; once the Christ has appeared, there is no stopping the forward momentum.

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I’m perfect.

Oops – that was pride slipping in there. Maybe I’m not quite perfect.

In which case, I’ve also just told a lie. (Gack!)

Oh, like you’ve never fibbed before. (Uh-oh, that wasn’t a very nice thing to say. I’m getting in deep here.)

OK, I’m not perfect. There. I’ve admitted it. (Phew! That wasn’t too hard.)

So I can’t be all that bad. (Arggh! Pride again! It just snuck up on me!)

If I had been made perfect, I’m wondering what the implications would be…

1. Being perfect, I would never sin – never hurt anybody, always do the right thing.
2. Therefore being perfect, I would have no personal understanding of what sin is.
3. Therefore being perfect, I would never have a sense of wrong-doing.
4. Therefore being perfect, I would never be aware of my separation from God.
5. Therefore being perfect, I would never understand the power of sin.
6. Therefore being perfect, I may experience sympathy, but would never experience empathy; and any compassion would be academic and patronizing.
7. Being made perfect would have removed my free will, because I would be able to do nothing but perfect things.
8. Therefore being perfect, I would never have the chance to fail. I would never have the opportunity to succeed despite myself.
9. Therefore being perfect, I would never be stretched. I would never grow.
10. Therefore (also from #8) being perfect, when God told me to do something and I did it, there would be no just reward because there was no chance I’d do the job badly or fail to do it at all.
11. Therefore being perfect, I would never experience humiliation, shame or contrition; but I would also never experience forgiveness, rebirth, reward, praise and grace.
12. Being perfect, God’s righteous perfection wouldn’t astound me, terrify me or shatter my complacency because – hey lookee! Me too!
13. In fact, being perfect, I would be self-contained, so I would have no reason to reach for God.

On the other hand:

1. Since I’m not perfect, eternal damnation is not my guaranteed end.
2. Since I’m not perfect, Perfection took compassion on me.
3. Since I’m not perfect, Perfection chose to redeem me.
4. Since I’m not perfect, Perfection perfected me.
5. Since I’m not perfect, Perfection adopted me.
6. Since I’m not perfect, Perfection uses me (yes – Because, not Despite).
7. Since I am far, far from perfection, I have a great many chances to blow it completely… Ah, but when I get it right the angels go nuts and God Himself says, “Well done!”

And that last is really where I’m headed here. Amongst other reasons, I was made imperfect in order that God could give me a piece of His action – a task that He wanted completed. And each time I fulfill a task in obedience to His design, I – Mr. Imperfect – get the pat on the back from the Everlasting King of Glory.

And that, I think, is a pretty good trade-off.

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Somewhere back around 1500BC, Moses was in the desert being amazed at a bush that wouldn’t stop burning. This Holy fire was his first sign of God’s presence. When God told Moses His name – or we could call it one of His chief characteristics, since God has so many names – Moses gained new insight. The name which we translate Jehovah combines all three tenses of the verb ‘to be’ – past present and future. “I was, I am, I will be.” ¹ The meaning behind it? God is saying that all of Moses’ past, all his present and all his future are in God’s present. Nobody is hidden from God because of darkness (Psalm 139:11); nobody is hidden from God because they’re yet to be born (Psalm 139:13); nobody is hidden from God because they’re too far away for Him to detect (Psalm 139:9); now we are told that they aren’t hidden from Him by being too far away in time, either. Time is not a barrier to Him; He doesn’t even move back and forth through it as He chooses – it is all spread out before Him.

Apart from its obvious impact to the Calvinism/Arminianism debate, this has some staggering implications, and perhaps foremost is a re-shaping of our understanding about prophecy. Consider the Old Testament prophets predicting the Messiah and the events surrounding His birth and death. There are those who have spent many hours trying to calculate the probability of those prophecies coming true – coming up with numbers such as:

• 1 in 537,000,000 for the final sufferings of Christ during the 24 hours leading up to his crucifixion ²;
• 1 in 10¹¹⁰ for 300 predictions of the Messiah in the Old Testament ³;
• 1 in 10¹⁷ in reference to 8 Messianic prophecies, and 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ in reference to 48 prophecies ⁴

… which may be a noble endeavor, but I think it completely misses the point.

We’re stuck in a one-way stream; we can’t go backwards in time; we can’t even slow it down at all. This idea of Time being a one-way flow of events is so completely ingrained in our understanding of how things work that we perceive such prophecy as being about the future. We say to ourselves, “Somehow, God has made an incredibly bold statement about an unbelievably unlikely event, before going on to fulfill that statement. What an incredible risk He took in saying that! It just shows how much He is in control of the universe.”

When we think along those lines, we impose our human limitations on God. Because it isn’t about the future – not to the Giver of the Word – it’s all in the present to Him. The point here isn’t that God should be given the glory for (1) taking a huge risk, (2) making a series of near-impossible statements, and then (3) manipulating events to make those prophecies come true. It is rather that He has made sure that the description passed along to us is so utterly impossible that we must believe that – since only Jesus can and has fulfilled them – He must be the Messiah that was prophesied!

If you believe what God told Moses about Himself in Exodus 3, then you have to accept that He is not constrained by time, and thus that He had all the details about the Messiah in front of Him as He spoke through each prophet in the Old Testament. That was the point of the prophecies – not so much to reflect on the Father’s manipulation of events, but to ensure the recognition and acceptance of the Son. Messianic prophecies are a passport – God’s proof of who Jesus really is – His ‘identity papers’, embedded unchangeably in Time.

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