olive leaves

A good friend of mine, a soldier I served with, often said, “Don’t wish your life away.” He said this whenever someone wanted it to be tomorrow, or just couldn’t wait for Christmas, or was really ready for spring. Often that person was me. 

I can be that way because sometimes the day I’m living doesn’t seem very exciting. Often it seems bleak. At any rate, it doesn’t look nearly as good as, say, my upcoming vacation. 

This morning I read about Noah, the man who endured decades of mockery as he built the ark, and then floated inside it through the destruction of the world. Floated inside it, he and his family and the last vestiges of life on the entire planet. For forty days, rocking and pitching with the waves, no control over direction, no idea what was coming next. 

God was there, though, and after weeks afloat he gave Noah the promise of an olive leaf. 

Genesis 8:6-12 says, “After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.” 

A chapter or two later God gives the promise that he’ll never again destroy the world, and with it he gives the sign of the rainbow, but for me the olive leaf is more powerful. It comes at the height of the flood, at that point when that ark full of people and critters was blindly dependent on God. At that point, the mute message of the olive leaf seems to me to have been, “Hang on. There’s more out there than you can see.”

Thank God my life is full of olive leaves, little moments when life here on earth seems like it might be in heaven. Moments free of snark, full of kindness, brimming with beauty. Sunsets and migrating geese and a cup of hot coffee made un-requested by someone who loves me. A little promise, each one, that God is still working good in this dark world. Even in January, with the temperatures in single digits and a foot of snow on the ground.

God is faithful, no matter what our eyes tell us. That’s the promise of the olive leaf.

life from a stump

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Isaiah 11:1.

It intrigues me to think that in the prophesies of the Messiah, the stump of Jesse refers to one of the best men who ever lived - David, the man after God’s own heart.

I think about the fact that David was the man God anointed to replace Saul, who failed as Israel’s first king. David himself, although one of the godliest men in all history, proved in the end to be an adulterous murderer and disastrous father. Only a couple of generations after David his earthly dynasty fell apart.

But from the stump of this once-promising but now dead tree will grow a legacy that comes not from David’s efforts but by God’s grace. All those failed kings, all the faithlessness of God’s people, still could not derail God’s great plan of redemption.

I realize two things, in the end. First, even the best of human effort can’t bring about what God desires. And second, God in his mercy will save us anyway.

It’s why we who believe look so longingly for Christmas, and why we don’t really care about the parties and presents. And why we say, looking to His second coming, “Quickly, Lord Jesus.”

waiting

"'The days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when I will fulfill the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.” Jer 33:14

It’s been a long wait. Hundreds of years since God told Adam he would send someone to crush the serpent’s head. Dozens of decades since He made covenant with Abraham. And yet, the people would wait another 500 years or so before Jesus would be born.

In this culture of instant gratification, where we would rather have debt than wait to own something, we’d rather have surgery than lose weight, we want to be managers right out of college instead of climbing the ladder, the idea of waiting half a millennium is appalling. 

But God’s timing is different than ours, and His timing is perfect. I need to remember that as life makes me wait. My house is taking way too long to build. We just got snow, and the months of winter loom like a tiresome chore. If I could, I’d fast forward through half of my life.

Jeremiah reminds me today that what I’m really called to is living faithfully in the not yet. Even my new home and the coming spring, once they get here, are part of not yet - not yet sanctified, not yet glorified. Not yet who and what I will be once I pass through the transition of death.

Like the Israelites of old, like my grandkids hefting the Christmas presents, I live in anticipation. My whole life will be lived in anticipation. There is a much better place than this, and I have a reservation. It seems a long way off.

But, God promises, the day is coming.

gloom and darkness

This advent season, it feels like even more than usual our world is full of anxiety. In Europe, Africa and Asia normal people fear the next terror attack. From Syria, thousands upon thousands move on foot, by train, boat, truck, whatever they can find, to escape the bombs. ISIS continues its madness.

Here in America, there have been well over 300 mass shootings this year. PTSD has ruined thousands of the most promising young lives. Some groups feel targeted by our police; others feel victimized by our government. We can't even find civil ways to discuss our differences anymore.

It's a time of gloom and darkness, a time of distress. A timely time to remember the promise God made to his people through the prophet many centuries ago (Isa 9:1-2) "Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress . . . . The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned."

What a promise for our times! "No more gloom for those who were in distress."

As I begin to anticipate Christmas, I think again as I so often do that this world desperately needs Jesus. I desperately need Jesus.

For the Syrian refugees, the young inner-city men dying by gunfire, the rancorous liberals and conservatives with their strident accusations and name-calling, and for my own poor soul, I pray, "Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly."

"For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace
there will be no end." Isaiah 9:6

Therefore . . .

“Therefore” is one of my favorite words.

Admittedly, I don’t use it much, or hear it much, but I read it a lot, especially in the New Testament. And, in scripture, when I read “Therefore,” I know things, if you’ll pardon a badly over-used buzz-phrase, are about to get real.
Hebrews 10:19 is a great example. The authors have spend nine and a half chapters explaining in detail everything Jesus did to fulfill God’s promises, especially the promist to save us. And then we get that wonderful word, “Therefore . . . “ and some practical words about how this applies to my life. That’s what I love about that word: It can mean either “Here’s why you care” or “Here’s what you do.”

In Hebrews 10, if we noodle through it, we end up with a nice little list of three to-dos:
1. Draw near to God with a sincere heart and the full assurance that faith brings. Whatever direction you’re heading, turn to face God and walk that way. Or run, depending on your need.
2. Hold unswervingly to the hope we profess. That hope, remember, is guaranteed by God himself, it’s a sure thing. It’s the anchor for our souls, so if we let go, we could drift anywhere.
3. Consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Living for Jesus is hard. Most of the world wants us to fail, and every day people drag us down. We need to encourage each other to be like Jesus, full of love and always doing good things.

The Why for all this came in all those earlier chapters; now, I have this three-part instruction on how to show my thanks for the wonder of my salvation. And, by the way, to start living the benefits immediately.

The best guarantee ever

The guy building my house just told me, “That’ll be done in three weeks. I guarantee it.” I hope he’s right.

I read about hope in Hebrews this morning. A lot of Hebrews 6 is about hope, including a passage (v7 and following) that says, “Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that . . . we who . . . take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” Later verses discuss how Jesus guarantees this new hope.

Here’s what hit me: the hope that anchors our souls is a sure thing because it comes with a God-given triple-warranty. First, the Father swore on his own name that his promises to us would be true, in the Old Testament. Second, Jesus sealed the truth of those promises with his blood. And third, Jesus, the great high priest, is working now to make our hope reality.

The Father guaranteed our hope with his covenant. Jesus guaranteed it with his death and resurrection. So this future we hope for, the promise of peace, the end to pain and sorrow, the glory of eternal, heavenly life, will happen. It. Will. Happen. It can’t not happen.

That’s how this hope is way different than me hoping my builder comes through - nothing can prevent it from being fulfilled. I can’t stop it, Satan can’t stop it, all the endless bickering and backbiting of a bitter, lost world can’t stop it. Every promise of God, especially his covenantal promise to take care of us and bring us home, is a sure thing. It’s already done.

Think about that when life gets too much.

Hope

"Hope is not a course of action." That's a military axiom, one my Tac Officers drilled into my head at both the Infantry Officers Basic and Advanced Courses. It means that you need to have a plan, you need to know what you're going to do instead of just hope things bounce your way.

But in a spiritual sense, hope is the only effective course of action we have.

Romans 15:8-13 describes the basis of all hope for me. It points out that the only way a non-Jew like me came to be part of God's family is through the sacrifice of Jesus, and God's mercy in extending that sacrifice to cover my crimes.

That hope is different than the hope my Tacs were talking about, though. Worldly hope is a very iffy thing; it rests on something vague and unknown, something chancy. It's basically reliance on luck.

But the hope we have in Jesus isn't at all chancy. This is the most definite, most knowable thing in the universe. All the work has already been done, by God in orchestrating the master plan and by Jesus in making the sacrifice. Our spiritual hope is looking forward to the concrete fact of our own glorification. We have hope for every hard circumstance because we know, with absolute certainty, that having put our hope in Christ, in the end we win.

That's why verse 13 is one of my favorite blessings: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope."

The source: the God of hope. The blessing: joy and peace, if I believe. The power core: the Holy Spirit Himself. And the outcome? I will abound in hope.

Not just have hope - abound. That means a whole bunch of hope, that means all the hope I can use with some left over to share. There is no day so bad, no night so dark, no storm so violent, no desert so dry that I can't walk through it with shoulders squared and head up, completely confident. Because the one leading me is no less than the King of all of time and space.