Week 32—Tuesday Jude 19-21
Jude 19-21
DAMNING OTHERS INSTEAD
OF RESCUING THE DAMNED
We continue to look at the persons and systems which bypass the Incarnation. Any movement which suggests guidance from God without reference to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is bypassing the Incarnation. Apart from Jesus we know little about God and what we know is wrong. You see the Father in the son, or you don’t see God. You substitute your ideas of God for Gods’ revelation, and thus make yourself and your ideas the mediator. “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). You don’t go directly to God if you bypass Jesus; you substitute yourself and your ideas as the mediator. That, says John, is antichrist.
Perhaps the most serious tendency, because it is the most widespread, is the tendency of the emphasis of finding guidance from God within. If you do not have the corrective of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, you are liable to listen to the voice of the subconscious and call it God’s guidance. One man said, “I heard God say, ‘Your relationships with S. (his wife) are dissolved, and I am giving you new ones.’” On the strength of that he got a divorce and has become a spiritual wreck.
Existentialism would seem to be an ally with the Word became flesh since it demands that life be faced as it exists. But existentialism seems to be now becoming a cult which shocks by verbal paradoxes. Instead of shocking people into change by loving examples, it seems bent on shocking by verbal invective. In other words, it is the word of shock become word, not the word of shock become flesh.
And often evangelicalism itself, instead of propagating itself by evangelism and producing changed lives, makes its stock in trade, criticism, not conversion; damning others instead of rescuing the damned. It is all a species of the Word become word. It is bypassing the Word become flesh.
O Jesus, Savior and Revealer, open my eyes that I may be saved from substituting words for the Word become flesh. For words are so easy, so cheap, but, oh, so deadly. Save me from them. For they become dry river beds—no water. I thirst for you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am committed to the Word become flesh; let me be an illustration of my committal.