Re (2): Degrees of Knowledge

It seems to me that there is really only one thing that dams off that running dialog with our Lord "in the cool of the garden" and causes us to hide ourselves: it is disobedience—sin—and the resultant guilt and shame that causes us to turn away in self-loathing. If there is any simple fact that we can empirically test in the laboratory of our own spiritual lives, it is this one: our sin separates us from God and keeps us from enjoying fellowship with Him, just as adultery separates two lovers. In time, if the sin goes unchecked and the guilt continues to build, despair hardens us over and we began to become callous, returning again and again to our adulterous relations as a dog returns to its vomit. We become unloving and unlovable. So then, we either run from God or are unable to find Him in large part due to guilty consciences, our fingers stained in blood.


There is, of course, nothing to be done. When we are guilty, we are guilty, and though we wash our hands and wash our hands and wash our hands yet again, the blood can never be unspilt. That is where our Redeemer and Messiah must come in, the Husband coming to reclaim His adulterous Bride, buying her back from her indecorous bondage and slavery, her utter shame and perversity, her heartrending infidelity.


Christ is our glorious Kinsman Redeemer, our Lord, our Master—it is His red blood that washes our sins white—and He has been given the keys to heaven, hell, life, and death.


Who is this King of Kings and Lord of Lords and why does He ride on His horse of white? Could He, might He, be enacting the final cleansing of something the man of the formerly unclean lips had once suggested about His character and His expectations?


The hardness of the human heart is the result of sin. Sin separates us from God: initially, because our consciences are guilty, the blood on our fingers a constant reminder; later because we despair, becoming hardened and calloused, pride and self-sufficiency setting in, shoring ourselves up to live in this unremitting state of guiltiness. Thus, we have the empirical proof in the Modern existentialist whose virtues are a stiff upper lip and a face set like flint to live in the Godless universe of his own soul. "Where is God? He is dead; His blood is on our own hands." Perhaps the prophet Nietzsche did not realize the depth of his revelation. God is dead, severed in our psyches, layered over with many layers of sin and shame and guilt—there is nothing we can do but confess but in order to confess we must confess the name that causes us to feel our guilt so acutely—that we simply have grown a stiff upper lip to combat, trying to go on living in spite of already dying inside, unforgiven and unforgiving. But while we can see the letter writ large in a nihilistic philosophy, we fail at times to see that in our own lives, the running dialog generally only ceases when we too are tempted, sin, stumble, and then run and hide from God. That has been the story of man for thousands of years and we bear it out nearly every day in a constant struggle—though we have a distinct advantage over Jacob: the Angel with whom we wrestle, wrestles with us, for He was, and is, the Angel of the Lord, the Christophany, the Second Person of the Immortal Trinity. Nietzsche was right to consider it perverse that it is His blood we have on our fingers, but Nietzsche was blinded to the beauty of such awful grace. One must stoop low to enter that door: it is narrow and one's pride trips over it every time. Thus Nietzsche could see far better than many who claim the name, but he was nonetheless blind: he stopped just short of the door, for his reprobate pride would not let him stoop low enough to enter. That thought of the Murdered One pardoning his own murderer—the though of murder ushering in such awful grace—was too much to bear: it was an offense to Nietzsche's pride, thus seeing he could not see, hearing he could not hear.

God bless,
Eric

• Re(3): Degrees of Knowledge - By Linda March 10, 2005 at 11:35:07 AM
  • Re(4): Degrees of Knowledge - By karen March 11, 2005 at 07:57:11 AM
    • Re(5): Degrees of Knowledge - By Bill March 11, 2005 at 11:18:00 AM
      • Re(6): Degrees of Knowledge - By Eric March 11, 2005 at 12:58:19 PM
        • Re(7): Degrees of Knowledge - By karen March 12, 2005 at 08:09:34 PM