Month: May 2012

Living out the Christian life requires dying to self. This is a recurring and primary theme in the New Testament. For many earnest believers it is also a theme which causes some puzzlement. Just how, exactly, do we die to self? What part of ourselves are we dying to? Does this mean that we are to somehow annihilate any consciousness of our own existence, as some Eastern religions appear to teach? Should we hate ourselves in order to die to ourselves? The entire concept seems a bit strange to our natural eyes and can even be interpreted in such a way as to inspire great fear, fear of what this “dying” means and fear of what may happen to us if we can’t accomplish it. It is, after all, a divine mandate. Without dying to self the Scriptures indicate we cannot truly follow Christ.

At least part of the answer to this problem can perhaps be found in something C.S. Lewis once wrote. He said that our best spiritual moments came when we forgot about ourselves in the contemplation of God. In other words Lewis did not so much counsel annihilating oneself as losing oneself in gazing at Something, Some One infinitely greater than us. Whenever our spiritual eyes are fixed on God we lose our natural self-centeredness in the process. It was, for Lewis, a matter of focus. Inwardness is displaced by an “outwardness” that comes with focusing on our Lord.

I would submit that this profound forgetting is, at the very least, the beginning of the dying that the Bible speaks of. As we become more and more drawn to the glory of God in Christ our Adamic self-obsession begins to fade. Our self-centeredness becomes God-centeredness.

Of course the Christian life must be something other than a continuous rapturous gazing at the divine. In this world, at best, we seem able to have only limited experiences of “the Beatific Vision”. A constant knowing of God in this way will have to wait for Heaven for even the most contemplative saint. No one can spend all their waking hours in such a state of meditation, nor should they, for our mission as sons and daughters of God on Earth requires that we live out a good deal of our lives here in loving action towards others in the name of our Lord and Savior. In other words, dying to ourselves in times of “Godward” contemplation should result in a further dying to ourselves through the act of loving others. When the Bible speaks of this process it is often in the context of learning to love others in very practical and sometimes very sacrificial ways.

However the proverbial baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. An old Christian cliché concerns the benighted believer who is “so heavenly-minded that he/she is no earthly good.” The implication is that some Christians are so obsessed with spiritual visions that they have forgotten that God primarily wants them to be about the business of good works. An assumption is made here that these two things are somehow mutually exclusive. This is, I think, rarely if ever true. Many of us try to love through sheer self-effort, accent on the self. Consciously or unconsciously relying on our flesh to provide the power to love is a tragic error. In trying to love others in this way we find ourselves doing so for the wrong reason and under the wrong power. Such “love” ends up being much more about us than about the supposed object of our love and the act of “loving” ends up based on the very self we are called to die to. As such it becomes narcissistic and compulsive. True love is neither of these things.

It is only through being filled with the love of Christ that we can “overflow” that love to others and an indispensable part of this happening is making the decision to spend substantial periods of time centering our consciousness on our Lord and on our Lord alone. Whether this comes through worship or biblically-congruent forms of meditation it is absolutely necessary to becoming more genuinely loving. Again it is largely in forgetting ourselves through focusing on the divine that we die to ourselves. In focusing on God we open up a primary means of both loving Him and being filled with his love for others. While we will not always (or even often) be caught up into utter spiritual rapture through such focusing, with time we can come to almost always connect with God in a profound way. This contemplative connection serves the purpose of enabling us to better love our Creator and Redeemer because we end up experiencing His love for us in a very real sense and, as Scripture tells us, “we love because he first loved us”. Beyond that this experience can more than fill us leading to that overflowing love for others.

Through the help we receive from God in spending time with Him in this way we can further our self-forgetfulness and truly “die to self” in a way that does not cause fear as much as a joyful sense of expectation. It is the expectation that knowing and loving God will set us free to know and love others….and in doing so find a deeper, more blessed union with Christ, the One who loves us more than we can know in our wildest imaginations….that is until we meet Him face to face.

Living in the midst of the moral decay that sometimes seems to define the 21st Century West it is easy, even for the most earnest Christian, to sometimes feel overwhelmed by the apparently irreversible catastrophe that was and is the fall of man. It seems increasingly difficult to perceive the final triumph of righteousness as we read the news of the day and witness the not so slow death of Western Christendom. This is made all the more difficult when we look at the Church herself and, for that matter, ourselves and see how we have often individually become more complicit than resistant to the degradation of the Judeo-Christian worldview in the wider culture.

We can lose heart at this moment in history if we are not careful; finding that trust in the transcendent truth of the redemption becomes harder every time another previously “given” moral assumption in our culture is rejected in favor of manifest ungodliness. It is not easy living in these last days, when the birth pangs heralding our Lord’s return are mixed in our consciousness with the prideful declarations of those who more and more revel in calling good, evil and evil, good. It is further appalling when we witness what Revelation prophesies about the apostasy of the end becoming more and more obvious in the decay of basic biblical values in the Church today.

How, we may wonder, will things ever be made right?

The fact of the matter is that things will not be “made right” in the sense of a comprehensive reclamation of our society in this dispensation. Certainly some kind of wide-spread revival in places like Europe and America remains possible even if it feels unlikely. It must remain possible as long as the God of the impossible tarries in bringing down the curtain on human history. But the kind of profound and permanent societal redemption that we long for in our best moments is one that can only come with the Second Advent of the Son of God….and it is time that those of us who claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover accept that. It is also time we realize that while God will never abandon His bride, the Church, it seems likely to be in the form of a remnant as far as those who profess to belong to the Lamb of God in our era. When Jesus Christ asked the question “Will I find faith when I return?” it is hard not to sense that he was referring to this generation, or one of its immediate successors.

You might think this unduly pessimistic, and the author must admit that a recent legal decision about what constitutes marriage in a U.S. state bordering his own hasn’t helped his attitude, but I think it not unbiblical to look at the signs of the times and come to sobering conclusions. Things are getting worse, much worse (in the Western world anyway) and it does us no good to hold to a sort of Pollyanna naiveté about this fact.

That said it must always be remembered that the sovereign God of the Universe will have His way in the end. It is also important to realize that, while our world today is anything but Heaven, our Lord is still here and still working His redemptive will even now. Despite the heretical teachings of a recent notorious American “Christian” media personality God has not abandoned his Church nor closed the books on human redemption. That book will not be closed until the truly biblical Day of Judgment comes visibly for all humankind.

In the meantime there is yet grace for those who Jesus Christ died for. There is still time to respond to his call to redemption from the sin that has left the human race spiritually dead. The time may indeed be growing short for what Hal Lindsey once called “The Late, Great Planet Earth”, but the pierced hands of the Son of Man remain open to all who call on His Name in sincerity of heart.

For both the Christian who feels the influence of the decay of his or her society, and the non-Christian who embodies it, hope remains, even as time grows short. Now is the time for the former to cry out to God for renewed trust, and the latter to cry out for salvation.

We so need God to be more and different from anyone we have ever known, including ourselves. Every human being that we have been appointed to know in this life sooner or later turns out to have feet made very much of clay. Based on our experiences with parents, leaders, mentors, “significant others” and friends most of us seem to be forever having to relearn the dual lessons that no one on Earth is perfect and that someone who is perfect is exactly what we most require.

We can be eternally thankful that some of the very definitions of our God describe a Being who is absolutely perfect, absolutely able and absolutely loving. More than that, we can be equally thankful that this God is made fully manifest in Jesus Christ.

One thing that is clear from a careful reading of the New Testament is that, whatever the 12 apostle’s experiences were of the Son of Man during the three years they were physically with Him He never left these men disappointed. Were they perplexed at times? Yes. But disappointed? No. It is not in God’s nature to disappoint those who seek him through His Son. It is impossible for a perfect and perfectly loving Deity to do so.

It is so easy for us not to viscerally appropriate this truth. The abandoning earthly father, the rejecting pastor, the betraying spouse-our experiences with all these, and many more, flawed, fallen human beings condition us to expect the same from God. So does the realization of our own inability to live up to the standards of our accusing consciences. Everyone, including ourselves, disappoint us in some way in the end. Without the Lord it is a lonely and despairing end indeed.

But then Jesus comes into our lives in the unique way He does for each unique person. When He does one of the first things He reveals to us (if we let Him) is that He will never leave or forsake us. As we go on in Christ through the years we come to realize that we do not want to ever leave or forsake Him either. Perhaps the best and simplest reason we don’t leave Him is that we now know that He won’t leave us.

I believe Homo Sapiens were created by God with an innate desire to find a perfectly whole answer to the need for completion. We cannot rest until and unless we find that answer in Christ. Pascal’s “God-shaped hole” really does exist in the hearts of each and every one of us. It cannot be filled except by the One who is “more and different” than anyone we have ever known, or ever will know, among our fellow human beings.

We simply need more than other people, even other children of God, can give us. That is no more and no less than God can give us, if we are open to receiving it from Him and Him alone.

There appears to be much moral ambiguity in this world; what we in the Church often call “grey areas”. These are the ethical circumstances that, at least from our perspective, are not clearly identifiable as black or white. Even when we consult our Bibles we are not left with an unshakable sense that we can judge the circumstance with complete accuracy. These are the questions that tend to mark out many of the battle lines of debate between sincere believers. Some of these issues today might include the amount of wealth that any individual Christian should hold, the place of contemporary styles of musical expression in worship, the acceptability of divorce and remarriage among believers, etc. Some of these grey areas are ones that have challenged the Church since its inception and some are more the result of questions linked to how the surrounding culture has uniquely influenced the Church in any given era. Either way they are vexing for a people who claim to believe passionately in the reality and unchanging nature of absolute truth.

Some Christians deal with such troubling ambiguities of principle by simply claiming they do not exist. These are the brethren who have an answer for every moral question anyone could ever possibly bring before them. In their view the Bible leaves no room for debate on anything. The most difficult problem brought to them has a “thus sayeth the Lord” answer somewhere in the chapter and verse of Scripture. For them there is black and there is white. Grey is a non-existent color.

Other believers leave so much room for varying interpretations of the Word of God that black and white seems to be grey all over. They are uncomfortable with the absolutes that the Bible obviously endorses and so they either try to minimize the discussion of them or claim that what seems absolute really isn’t. They often argue that cultural context is far more important a determinant in understanding Scripture than what they would consider a wrongheaded (and wronghearted) approach based on a supposedly dogmatic and unsophisticated literalism.

Both these extremes are dangerous. Both assume too much human competence. The “thus sayeth the Lord” advocates often take for granted that they somehow have humanly acquired the moral omniscience that belongs only to God. Meanwhile the “cultural context” champions too often believe that they are qualified to discount what appear to be biblical non-negotiables according to largely human interpretive wisdom. The question can and should be asked whether either approach takes into consideration the idea that there are some types of knowledge that may only be granted by the Holy Spirit.

But even with the Spirit operative a child of God is not infallible in all ethical decision making. He or she certainly has an advantage over the non-believer, but not an absolute advantage. That kind of advantage is held by our Lord and Him alone. The best any unperfected Christian can do, and that is all of us, is to pray for the will and strength to obey the command of Micah 6:8, that tells us all to “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

The fact of the matter is that none of us is capable of either shrinking or expanding any given grey area with the perfect precision of the Divine. A certain degree of moral ambiguity is part and parcel of being a finite, fallen being who sees “through a glass darkly”. The only One who can perfectly dispel the fog of the grey areas is God Himself and that clearing of the air will only come on the Day of His final Judgement. In the meantime we who call ourselves by the name of Christ must find the humility of spirit to refrain from deifying any human viewpoint on moral issues. We can only read our Bibles and pray for Holy Spirit-aided discernment and the grace to do the best we can to accurately divide truth from error. Any other approach to our own moral decision making, and that of others, has more to do with human pride than the things of God.

Christianity is, of all religions, the most paradoxical. Its truths often seem to be at tension with each other. This is one of the primary reasons why those who do not read the Bible in context (and who do not yet have the eyes of the Spirit to help them apprehend it) sometimes dismiss scripture as self-contradictory. What they do not realize is that it is impossible for flawed and limited beings such as we to ever completely grasp the nature of the God of Israel. Because of this some of what may at first seem contradictory is only understandable, to the degree it can be understood at all, as divine paradox and then only to the point needful for our salvation and sanctification. Whether the subject is free will vs. pre-destination, mercy vs. justice, or any number of other conundrums posed by the Word of God, the acceptance of paradox is the only way to get past certain things we simply cannot get our human intellect around.

Of all these paradoxes perhaps the most difficult one to accept and apply to our own lives is the concept of being saved by grace through faith. In a “can’t get something for nothing” world populated by self-seeking human beings the idea of our sins being paid for by Someone other than ourselves is nearly impossible to believe. In fact it is only by the grace of God that any of us are put into the position to believe at all.

But however difficult it is to grasp the paradox of our Lord’s unconditional love making our incredibly costly salvation absolutely free to us; this paradox is the sweetest we will ever know. It really is at the Heart of Christianity, the Heart found hanging on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago.

The ironic thing is that, when it comes right down to it, all true love is gift-love. Real love is, by definition, giving. This is recognized even by people who are otherwise still caught up in the marketplace mentality of fallen human life. Further, beyond real love is perfect love. This is the kind that only God has and it is perfectly giving. Not needing anything or anyone God’s love is self-caused, infinite and free. As such it must be a love that, again by definition, we do not have to earn, that in fact we cannot earn.

Yet as free as this divine love is it still was, again in some paradoxical way, an incredibly costly love in the case of our redemption. It did cost God something to send His Son to the cross. In fact the cost to Him to make His Son, to make Himself, the payment for our sins is beyond our comprehension. For at the moment the world’s sin was put upon Christ the up to that point unbroken fellowship within the Trinity was somehow broken, if only for a ghastly moment in time. The God who loved His only begotten Son beyond what we can ever know was forced to turn away from Him. This was the incomprehensible cost to God to restore the human race to Himself. As it has often been said, in many words, our salvation was unfathomably expensive to Him, yet totally free to us.

Whenever we meditate on what happened on Good Friday we must grapple with this riddle of divine love. Hopefully we will come away unspeakably thankful to the God of paradox for the greatest paradox of all time, the gift of our eternal redemption.

In a society marked by more personal wealth, more personal power and more options for self-expression then any other in human history we have almost forgotten that the possession of all three of these things does not solve the basic human dilemma. In the 21st Century West the mantra of our entire culture is “if you can dream it, you can do it”. We have collectively bought into the lie that we are somehow largely masters of our own destiny. The guru’s of self-esteem and self-actualization have deified “human potential”. We have made idols of the prerogatives we have as members of a materially rich, socially mobile and personally “empowered” society. In doing so most of us in North America and Europe have collectively forgotten what so many previous generations deeply understood, that human life is precarious, short and anything but inherently independent. We have forgotten our mortality, our inborn limitations and our status as a fallen race alienated from the only One who can save us from ourselves. We have also forgotten that our very lives, both physical and spiritual depend on the moment to moment mercy of a transcendent and holy God.

The general exceptions to this thoroughly human-centered worldview amongst the denizens of the First World are those who have either acquired everything this world has to offer and then lost it or those who have acquired everything this world has to offer and found it meaningless. These are the people who have hit rock bottom and come to realize that we are not the masters of the universe. Rather they are what Martin Luther told us we all are six hundred years ago when he commented that, when it comes to fallen humanity, “We are beggars, this is true”.

The problem today is the illusion of self-empowerment. We’ve gotten so used to our age’s technical mastery of much of nature that we have begun to think that mastery extends to ourselves and our individual destinies in some kind of personally omnipotent way. Apparently the reality that the grave awaits us all has become something to deny rather than reckon with (one of the few places that I see an exception to this are those bumper stickers that remind us that no matter how much we exercise we still die.) We also deny that our very power to keep ourselves alive, much less “self-actualize” ourselves, comes not from us, or our will, or our ability, or anything else intrinsic to us. We are entirely without personal power that is not borrowed, through common grace, from the Lord of the Universe and we do not deserve even that. When it comes to facing the Provider of all good things, a Provider that we are all born in collective rebellion against, we truly are the beggars Luther speaks of.

It is just that most of us don’t know it and don’t care to know it. That is why all the goal-oriented, self-possessed, positive thinking achievers in this culture are, apart from eventual surrender to God’s program of redemption, on their way to the utter loss and futility of a Christ-less eternity.

I suspect the only way this would reverse itself on a societal scale would be some kind of economic and political catastrophe, the kind of catastrophe that would remove from us all the things in life that we for some reason believe are our birthrights as rich Westerners. Take away all the structures of wealth and political stability that give us the illusion of personal power and we’ll see how long the “if we can dream it, we can do it” philosophy of life continues. Not for long, I’d wager.

The chimera of the self-made man or woman is just that, a chimera, a fantasy, a self-delusion. Yet this idea permeates the Post-Modern culture of our day and is constantly being pounded home to us by the popular media. It is in a sense the majority religion of our age but it is a bad religion and one that will not survive the ongoing moral decline (to be followed, quite likely, by the economic and political decline) of the Western world. If the Lord’s return isn’t immanent, and civilization of any kind endures, future historians will look back on our contemporary idea of “personal empowerment” and “human potential” as one of the greater follies of history.

What an immense gift it is to be able to see God’s world with the faculties of a being made in His image. As human beings we have, of course, been given the gift of the senses but this has also been given to the animals. What we have in addition is self-awareness and a mind, soul and spirit that are able to enjoyably partake of the beauty of creation and comprehend it on multiple levels.

This truth was brought home to me recently as I lay in a hammock on the back patio of my home here amidst the woods of Northern New Jersey pondering the sublimity of nature and it’s God. I watched hummingbirds at our feeder and dragonflies darting over head. I drank in the gorgeous combination of clouds and blue sky contrasting with the branches of trees that towered above me. As I gazed up I had a small epiphany. I could see God in the fecundity of His creation. I could apprehend the beauty before me and be moved by it because He gave me the ability to do so, and not just because He gave me eyes.

We have no evidence that the beasts recognize such beauty. Even the angels may not see the material world as we material human beings do. It is a distinct possibility that, apart from God, only humankind has been gifted with a heart that can appreciate nature. This is part of the fruit of common grace, of being made in the image of God. Beyond this the Christian, in the greater state of saving grace, can sense the presence of Christ in nature while simultaneously knowing that He is beyond nature.

Some might ask what this means on a purely practical level for the believer. How does having a consciousness that allows us to appreciate both the creation and the Divine in creation make us, for instance, better disciples? I cannot give a definitive answer but I will say this: part of knowing and loving God is somehow bound up in knowing and loving the inestimable grandeur of the natural world (even though it remains for now, like us, fallen.) To be fully alive in Christ includes receiving the aspect of His abundance that comes simply from experiencing the works of His hands. When we joyfully use the unique faculties to appreciate the natural world that God has given us, faculties that may have only been granted to our species, I believe we can come, to know, love and obey him better through that appreciation.

We are told in the Scriptures to “think on” a number of good things, assumedly because doing so will make us better people. One of these things is “whatever is lovely”. Nature is one of the loveliest things we can know in this life and we have been given the ability to uniquely experience it by way of our unique status as the only creatures made in God’s image. To realize this is true is an occasion of rejoicing for the sons and daughters of men. It certainly was for me that day as I lay in my hammock, gazed at the rich pageant of things; animate and inanimate, arrayed before me ….and drank of it deeply.

In doing so I felt closer to my Lord.

Our problem isn’t being near God. Our problem is found in what He sometimes chooses to illuminate in us as a result of that nearness. When we seek and find God in such a way as to truly become closer to Him we find that whatever He does make known about our hearts we can no longer deny. This can be a painful thing for the yet unperfected Christian, and that means all of us.

When you open the creaking door to an old shed or basement you might not like what the light makes visible. You may see scurrying or slithering things, cobwebs, grime and dirt that has accumulated over the years. You might even find the bones of creatures that long ago died in captivity in that dark place. You may be tempted to close that door and leave it that way.

I suspect this may be a good spiritual metaphor for what our Lord makes visible to us when we open up the deep recesses of our hearts to his light, a light that grows more brilliant as we voluntarily approach Him. We claim we want to bask in the light of God’s glory but will that desire continue if that light makes our remaining darkness visible? Are we ready to experience the pain that comes with a greater recognition of the sin that still dwells within us?

It is never easy to find out that we still have a seemingly endless way to go in ridding ourselves of all within us that isn’t fit for Heaven. This is especially true if we have spent years striving not only to do the right thing but also to be “the right thing”, to truly attain to personal holiness. It can be a shock to find that we have made less progress in that direction than we had hoped. Perhaps this is the real reason why so many of us do not really seek that closely after God. Being near Him makes it almost impossible not to at some point be confronted with our own continuing wickedness, at least in the sense of what dwells in our, hopefully dying, flesh.

This is, indeed, one of the risks we take in presuming to draw closer to our all-seeing God. We may experience “the mountaintop” in such close encounters, but soon after that we may also enter the valley of struggling with some newly known transgression in our lives. When this happens our temptation may be to deny what the light of God has made visible to us. We may not be willing to face our own scurrying and slithering sins. It may seem easier to draw away from that divine illumination and try to keep such things in the dark, even to deny that we ever saw them.

But maybe, just maybe, we will find ourselves not wanting to deny this new truth, no matter how painful it may be. Maybe we will instead find ourselves only wanting, desperately wanting, to give it to the One Person who can not only “make light of it” but remove it from us and remove it forever. That means keeping our sin before the piercing light of our Lord, asking in deep sincerity for Him to remove it and being willing to bear the discomfort of whatever spiritual cleansing may be required for that to happen. If we do these things then God’s unmasking of what dwells in our darkness by His brilliant light may be something we end up deeply thankful for. We may know the unfathomable blessing of being far more deeply transfigured into the image of Jesus Christ, and if this truly comes about we will never regret the pain that we felt when we first drew nearer to God. Knowing the furthering of our sanctification in real time will be more, much more, than worth it.

In the end we need not ever fear the light of God if we are willing to let it do its ultimate work in us.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Genesis 50:20

In these words spoken by Joseph, the cast-off boy, later made virtual prince over Egypt, is the essence of the grace of God. Out of what man intends for evil the God of Israel brings good. The Light of the World co-opts even the darkness that opposes Him to serve His redemptive ends.

Grace is defined as unmerited favor. Perhaps never was grace more unmerited than in the case of the brothers of Joseph, who sold him into slavery out of envy and, for all intents and purposes, wrote him off as dead. From our human perspective such an act would seem to make them prime candidates for a divine “smiting.” Instead they and their families are saved from famine by the gracious hand of a deeply wronged man who was, like David, a man after God’s own heart. It is stories like these in the Bible that reveal the character of a Deity none of us would have ever created for ourselves. We are a vengeful race. When people do something we consider wrong often our first inclination is to condemn them. This temptation towards angry judgment is not limited to those who do not know the Lord. We Christians are just as likely to have that initial impulse as anyone else.

Sometimes the Scriptures do seem to back up “an eye for an eye” as the only divine answer to wrongdoing. From the 20,000 Israelites swallowed up by the earth in Exodus to the swift punishment visited upon Ananias and Sapphira in Acts we are sobered by the manifest vengeance of God and its ramifications for our own lives. Yet this same Bible speaks of a God who forgave His erring people over and over again, who forgave the adulterer and murderer who was once their king and who, in the likeness of a man, bled and died on a cross to redeem we who were complicit in his murder. He is a God of judgment, yes, but also One of mercy.

In Joseph we see a type of Christ, an early scriptural figure representing God’s unmerited favor towards guilty human beings. Joseph suffers at the hands of elder brothers who had reason to be angry because of Joseph’s unusual position of favor with their father, yet who ought to have restrained that anger from birthing the sin that made their youngest brother a slave in a far country. But in captivity Joseph proves to be a righteous man and even in the years of hardship springing from what his brothers did to him God prospers everything he touches. Ultimately he is put in a position where he can easily exact revenge against his brothers. Instead he forgives them in tears. Not only does this bring healing to him and his immediate family but also is used to save and prosper the infant people of God and prepare them for the latter miracle of the Exodus. Ultimately Joseph’s act of forgiveness becomes a great link in the chain of destiny of a people who would bless the entire world though Jesus Christ.

We do well to learn from his example.

Elsewhere the Bible tells us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He is a God of justice but never a God of sadism. The whole counsel of Scripture and, above all, the witness of the cross are testimony to His first desire being the repentance and restoration of human beings to Himself. We are also told that it is His kindness that leads us towards that restoration and repentance. We love only because our Lord first loved us.

Yes, God’s ways are mysterious. We cannot completely comprehend the reasons why He appears to be unbelievably merciful in some situations and sternly punishing in others. But if we take a long, hard honest look at ourselves in the light of what people just like us did outside the walls of Jerusalem 2000 years ago we may come to realize this; that we are always deserving of worse than what God gives us, not better. It is only once we arrive at this place of conviction and humbly cry out to Him for mercy that it becomes possible for His loving grace to turn our own evil, like that of those long ago brothers, into good. As with them we have only to trust the God of Joseph, now revealed to us in Jesus Christ, for the redemption we so desperately need. Then we will know, like Joseph, that for those who truly trust Him, mercy forever triumphs over justice.