On THAT Day

🙏 Heavenly Father – We come to You today, with humble hearts and honest meditation, as we assess our Christian life. Sometimes it is a struggle; sometimes You seem silent. But we know that You’ve promised to help us, to guide us, and to see us through to the end of this earthly life. You have promised to keep us until we’ve been ushered into Your Kingdom.  As we examine ourselves today, breathe new life into us. In the name of The One, with whom You are well-pleased – Your Son and Our King, Jesus – we pray.  Amen.

In John 14:6 Jesus answers His disciples… “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me… 

Before becoming a Christian my response to this verse, like many others, was to take offense, thinking… How rude!  How intolerant!  Doesn’t sound like a loving God to me, sounds a little arrogant.

I could have been better prepared to read that verse. It was not Jesus’ first moment of tough teaching. In  both Luke 12:51 and Matthew 10:34-39, Jesus is teaching His followers and asks, ‘Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.’

Our response is often… Ok! Go Jesus!… separate the good from the evil.  But then we read the rest of the section… about division in the families… and we stop…  WAIT! Ummm, WHAT?

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These verses are meant to stop us in our tracks.  Remember the prophet Isaiah warned Israel that they would forever be hearing but never understanding (Isaiah 6:9-10), which Jesus alludes to in the Parable of the Sower. (Matthew 13:1-17)

When we read a passage in scripture and we sense that we’ve just been smacked by a spiritual 2×4, we have just encountered a moment with God, a testing of what we believe. God does this, in His timing, because He knows we are ready to grow. We may have read that same passage a hundred times before… but this time…  We are hearing and we are understanding… and then we are questioning our understanding. 😊 Henry Blackaby calls these moments, crisis-of-faith moments, engineered by God for our good, for our growth, and for His glory.

With these two verses God asks me… Do you trust Me? And I realize, He’s given me His Word and is now inviting me to join Him in His work by taking the next step.  How I respond to His revelation is up to me.  What I choose matters.

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Choices… decisions… can often feel crippling. These moments bring a new awareness and our spirits are sensing a new revelation. We ALWAYS choose what we trust. In these moments, we are asked to trust what God reveals to us instead of what we believe is right. Even if what we believe are the words that we’ve rehearsed in our minds, that somehow got distorted from what God has actually said.  

As Christians, we are born-again into new abundant life – but like newborn infants, we are not meant to stay immature children. We are meant to grow. So I examine these two controversial scriptures today.  I want to tackle the issue of division and I want the truth revealed in that scripture… so I must reflect on John 14:6 first, where Jesus claims to be The Truth. To do this, I look at the cross.  ✝

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What do you see when you look at the cross?  ✝

If you don’t see ‘THE WAY’, you might be religious but you are not yet a Christian.  The cross represents the ultimate act of submission to The Father’s will. As we were taught to pray… ‘Our Father… Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…’ The former way of meeting the Father had been through the priests. And only the priest could enter the Holy of Holies in the temple. At the cross, the temple curtain that separated God’s presence from man was torn in two. (Matthew 27:51) We enter into God’s presence by following Jesus – who opened The Way for us.

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If you don’t see ‘THE TRUTH’, then you don’t yet realize that God Himself presented the only sacrifice acceptable for the redemption of sinful humanity – your sin, my sin, everyone’s sin.  Again, you may be religious, but you are not yet accepting the Christian ‘good news.’

Perhaps you feel you must earn your own way to heaven – that you can do enough of your own good, righteous acts to offset your bad to bypass what was done at the cross. You are confident that you can stand before God in heaven and justify yourself without any submission to Jesus.

Or worse, perhaps you feel that you are so damaged by the sin in your life that the hope found in the cross couldn’t possibly apply to you.  You live in a state of despair and hopelessness.

What’s wild is that both of these conditions reflect the same sin – pride.  Both viewpoints are self-focused; both viewpoints reject the clear teachings of Jesus. – He did not come to save the righteous, but sinners. (Luke 5:32) Both viewpoints reveal that you’ve placed your faith in yourself over God.  The TRUTH is that we all need the forgiveness offered at the cross.

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And the greatest mystery of all – if you don’t see the cross as ‘THE LIFE’ – you’ve missed the heart of Christianity.  Human logic and reason won’t reveal this to you – after all, how can crucifixion, i.e. death on a cross, ever lead to life?  If we try to make sense of this, by itself, we are forgetting the empty tomb!  We’re forgetting that ALL of our sins have been paid for, by God, Himself, in order to fill His House for the greatest banquet ever.  (Matthew 22:3) We’re forgetting His promise to fill us with His Spirit to guide us in each of our remaining days to fight the evil around us so that He may work through us to lead others to that great banquet in His eternal Kingdom.

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There are many references in Scripture to ‘THAT DAY’.  Some were specific to the tribes of Judah, some pointed forward to Jesus’ first-coming to earth as our Savior and many point to Jesus’ second-coming when He returns as our King.  The combination of the cross and the empty tomb is powerful – we are reminded to examine ourselves asking, in whom do we trust?  And then to examine how we live – do our lives reflect that Our King is returning for us?

In our natural lives we are distracted by lies… ‘that day’ may look like: when I get married… a job… out of school… a house… when I have a child… when I’m released from prison… addiction… when I lose 50 pounds… stop smoking… maybe ‘that day’ is November 5^th 2024, when the next political election is decided…

These lies convince you that there is a day when ‘someone’ will do something specific and on ‘that day’, you believe and you trust, that you will have new life. 

💖Friend, someone has done something already.💖

That someone is God Himself and that something is your redemption when you place your trust in His work that was already done.  It is finished. (John 19:30)

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So… God is good and Jesus came to bring division… In what possible way is division good? Division is painful. We desire peace and reconciliation, but each experience of division brings a measure of pain. It is meant to. These difficult moments remind us that we now live in a broken world where poverty, illness, and violence will always be a reality. (Remember why God brought The Flood? Genesis 6:5)  We experience these painful moments and are asked to make a choice. A choice that affects our eternal state.

It is natural to have a fight-or-flight response to difficult times in our lives.  Naturally, we tend to protect ourselves and often we avoid reconciliation and instead, seek isolation. These choices reveal that we trust in ourselves and in our own ways and those choices breed more division and pain – in ourselves and those around us.  On both the individual and group levels, we see this in racism, sexism, elitism, antisemitism… we see this in sexual abuse, bullying, narcissism… bitterness, laziness, greed, apathy… abortion, divorce, adultery, addiction… each being a perversion of the truth; each exalting ourselves and our ways over other people and over God.

It is supernatural to surrender ourselves and our ways at the cross so we can learn to trust God.  (Isaiah 55:7-8, Matthew 11:29-30, Luke 9:23)  Only God can change a human heart – as Christians we can speak the truth, gently – pray for our loved ones, encourage each other through difficulties, and most importantly, we can walk with integrity to demonstrate to a watching world, what a difference Jesus can do to a surrendered, humble heart.

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Division is a clear reminder that Jesus calls the Christian to set themselves apart from the world… even in our own families. We cannot live both a natural and a supernatural life. Yes, we will stumble on occasion, but His Spirit will call us back to The Way and we must yield to the call. His Spirit will remind us to look at the cross… look at the tomb… and to remember that on That Day our King returns for us.  This has been the message of the whole Bible. For example, a prophet in the Old Testament writes in Zephaniah 1:2-7:

Judgment on the Whole Earth in the Day of the Lord

² “I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord.
³ “I will sweep away both man and beast;
    I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea—
    and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble.”

“When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord,
⁴ “I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all who live in Jerusalem.
I will destroy every remnant of Baal worship in this place,
    the very names of the idolatrous priests—
⁵ those who bow down on the roofs to worship the starry host,
those who bow down and swear by the Lord and who also swear by Molek,
⁶ those who turn back from following the Lord and neither seek the Lord nor inquire of him.”

⁷ Be silent before the Sovereign Lord, for the day of the Lord is near.
The Lord has prepared a sacrifice; he has consecrated those he has invited.

The judgment of God prophecies are never comfortable to read, even when the last verse tells us that God is preparing a sacrifice for us (Jesus) – for those redeemed sinners that He has set apart and invited to be with Him forever.

In contrast, let’s finish with the ‘love’ of God message from Revelation 21:1-4

A New Heaven and a New Earth

21 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

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🙏 Heavenly Father – we thank You for the revelations You have given us in Your Word. And we thank You for showing us how much of our ‘own understanding’ we lean on. Your tenacious grasp on us is kind as you call us to return to the cross, remember our King, and repent of our pride. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

Strengthen us God to stand strong on Your truth and to be gentle in the divisions we experience. Let us live lives that demonstrate that Christianity is not narrow-minded but the greatest open invitation that was ever presented to humanity.  Humble us so that we too remember that we are all sinners and Jesus came to save sinners. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

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