Brothers and sisters in Christ, I am no less afflicted by the struggles with my flesh than anyone else. I am no more perfect or elevated. My own failures in this life haunt my heart, even though I have taken them to our Lord and know they are forgiven. I suffer from the knowledge that they have caused the greatest love of my life to suffer and I remain humbled before Him by His grace and mercy to forgive me. Jeff Holmes the man is imperfect. But what I am about to tell you here is strongly worded and I am strongly convicted that it is not affected by my imperfection. The reason I can say this is because I am convicted to firm belief that the perspective that is presented here is His. I'm beginning to understand that I may have lived this whole life, nearly 50 years for this one purpose: to get this one message out and to speak it with urgency. Because it's urgent in God's own heart. I don't believe in physical zombies, but I do believe that spiritual zombies exist in great number. I'm fearful that there are many people, physically alive, even among some that consider themselves to be Christians, that are the walking dead spiritually. Please take the words that follow to heart and weigh them against His Word. To some, they may come as a spiritual bomb of holy revelation that I pray will wake them up to His perspective, while others may choose to let it pass. But I urge you, please - sift them through the sieve of His Word and allow yourself to be changed by what passes through...
Jesus spoke to the physically living about having "life". But the life that He spoke of had nothing to do with what we call the physical. What He was talking about is far greater than the physical, which is only momentary and of far less value in the reality of eternity. But to "live" requires a perspective beyond this life. A holy point of view that includes the whole truth of what really exists. This life is an opportunity to gain God's perspective and make a choice to become "alive" eternally or to make a shallow choice to accept the opportunity to live this life to satisfy our flesh. This life presents an opportunity to grasp the key to the real life that our God designed and purposed for us before He even created us. But in order to grasp this vision of "life", we have to see what really exists, through His eyes.
From His perspective, so very far above our own, what does our God see? What does He feel? I won't suggest that I can speak for Him. But, He has spoken. He's spoken volumes over the ages of man. He's watched generation after generation rise and fall. He's watched with great loving interest and concern for man to heed what He's spoken with a hope that men will choose to accept and live according to "the truth".
Let's start with what we know about Him. He existed before He created man and He created the heavens and the earth and gave life to everything in it - for us. Everything that we can see, hear, touch, etc., began with Him. By His Word, we know that our Lord God is the origin of every good and righteous thing that we can know. We know that God is love, that He is good, kind, patient, righteous and that He loves justice and truth. He is Holy and pure. His heart is grieved for the afflicted and the downtrodden. He exalts the humble and despises the proud. By His word, we know that He sees everything and knows every thought and every motive. We know that He hears everything, even every silent whisper and that nothing escapes His notice. By His word, we know that He will judge men according to what He has spoken on the day of judgment and that He will never deny His character or what He has spoken. So don't allow yourself to be deceived. We will suffer the reward of our choice by His judgment. The reward that we will suffer on that day, whether it be good or bad, will not be determined by God's choice. It will be determined by what we chose and demonstrated by our lives and the judgment that will be passed will be according to His word which was given before we were made to choose. He laid the ground rules, "the truth" by which our choice will be determined before we were created and born. So none of us will be able to say that God is unfair in His judgment. It won't be the future of His choice that will be rendered by His holy judgment on that day if we perish, but ours. The choice was given to us and our response is being determined by what we are doing today, now, this very moment and each moment after. He gave each of us an unknown number of moments to live - to demonstrate our choice and then He judges our choice. Our future, our eternity, is ours to determine by how we live and demonstrate our obedience to "the truth". Not just by what we say. "Faith without works is dead". We are all given a choice by our God, and with it comes the irrevocable and inescapable responsibility of bearing the consequences of that choice. We can make it consciously or unconsciously. We can choose to actively make that choice, or we will have it made by default. But it will be made... and we will bear the burden of it's consequences.
If we've studied His Word very much at all, we can know something very important and very critical to our relationship with our God. Something that I think some of us tend to forget or are blinded to, as we live out our existence in the little bubbles that we tend to see as our own little worlds. That is that the all-powerful, omnipotent God of all creation that we look to when we are in need, have struggles or desires, has emotions. That the one that we cry out to to deliver us, the one that we look to to provide for us, the one that we call on in our desperate hour has emotions of His own! He loves, He grieves, He can become angry, etc... He can feel and has felt the pain of rejection. He can know the joy of true and heartfelt love. He has the ability to feel everything we feel, but with at least one very important difference - His emotions are as holy, righteous and pure as He is. His ability to have emotions is not at all surprising. Our ability to have emotions would be more surprising given that He chose to allow it when He created us in His own image. I say this because emotions are powerful and that by allowing us to have them similar to His own, He gives us the ability to abuse His heart with them.
You might ask, how we could possibly abuse the great and powerful God over all that exists? The Lord God, with all of His greatness, sovereignty, majesty and limitless power over all that is, chose to make His heart vulnerable to ours when He chose to love us. He chose to care about us. He chose to hold us dear and close to His own heart... He chose to favor us over everything else that He's created, and then, He chose to expose His tender heart to us! His heart is revealed to us in His Word and in everything He has done. He's offered His heart to us. Oh, children of the Most High God, I sincerely hope that the astounding, amazing, and incredible humility and tenderness of our all-powerful God is not lost on you in this! I hope that you have the revelation to see what He has done on behalf of each and every one of us - He could obliterate all of us and everything we know, including even His memory of us, with just a word. But instead, even though we have abused Him, He continues to allows us access to touch His tender heart... Oh, the depth of His love for us and His patience with us!!! And for what does He suffer and offer all that He offers us? What does this Great God Over All That Is desire from the unworthy dust of the earth that He gave life to? From us, that which was created by His hand, He desires our love, our fellowship and our loyalty demonstrated by our obedience to "the truth".
So, when He looks down from His vantage point far above ours, what does He see? What does He feel about what He sees? Knowing something of His character and who He is by His word, I think I can be bold enough to suggest what He may see and feel. For a moment, put everything else aside and try to put yourself into a position to imagine what He experiences from His perspective:
We know that our God authored everything in the beginning and therefore we know, that He alone authored and established "the truth". No one else, certainly no man, has the authority to define "the truth" but God. The truth is His alone and can only be determined by The One who created everything else. It existed before us, and it will exist for all eternity - unaffected by anything that we might conjure up on our own. We know that our God is unchangeable and constant. So if you think about it, you will realize that the truth that He authored is as unchangeable as He who authored it. But from His perspective, I can imagine that He watches with a combination of deep sadness and righteous indignation as men choose to try to alter the truth and what they believe in order to justify actions and attitudes that are not acceptable to "the truth". What do you suppose He feels when we choose to accept something other than what He's told us as the truth, or have chosen to ignore even parts of what He's told us that we must do in order to live? Despite what we may attempt to add to it, or the ways we may choose to attempt to modify the truth, "the truth" stands alone and remains as unchanged as God is. The truth is the raw Word of God - what God has spoken. End of story! No "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s. So imagine what righteous anger and indignation He must feel, if we in our pride of "knowledge", determine to try to change or add to the sacred, God given truth. And how those feelings must be amplified when we try to share this perversion with someone else and cause them to stray from "the truth". When men cause or just simply allow another life which He holds to be so precious and so dear to be taken from Him... Men do this!!! "Professing the be wise, they became fools".
Being created in His image and having emotions also, imagine how you would feel while you watch someone that you have given everything to, and have sacrifice everything for, commit suicide. It's a pretty sobering and painful thought, but it's what He's forced to witness over and over and He feels that same heart rending pain every time. It's a scenario that speaks of a future lost, of hopelessness and a precious life that once held great promise wasted. Before anyone thinks I've lost my mind, I would ask them to consider this: God has told us how to LIVE ("the truth") and what to expect if we don't. He never has, and never will go back on His word, so what He's told us will come to pass no matter how we choose to color it to make ourselves feel better about what we're doing, or allowing to exist in our lives (or the lives of others). He's lovingly invested so much into every one of us that He's created - even sacrificed the life of His own Son for us. Every time He gives life to one of us, it's with the great hope that we'll choose to share our lives with Him in fellowship and communion with Him. IT'S WHY HE CREATED US! It's His hope and desire that we'll follow the path that He's laid out before us to grow into the person that He can see in His own heart that we could become. If you pause to think about it for a moment, you'll realize that this is the same hope and promise of the future that every good parent feels when holding their newborn child. We are nothing less than His babies (and men of God, if you have a problem with that thought, then you need to check your worthless pride). He is, after all our Father! Every single human being that He created, no matter what their status or situation in this life, ... is His baby. From the one that holds the greatest position of power in this world, to the most destitute, burned out vagrant - He holds the same hope and tremendous love for each one. So who are we to value them any differently than He does? Ask yourself how it must make Him feel when we snub or mistreat Father God's own precious babies. His hope and love extends to the most despicable, broken person that you can imagine in your own life, just the same as it does to you. He may not love the things that we/they do, but He loves us/them (whoever "them" may be).
Accepting the fact that He is our Father (it's referenced more than once in His Word), may cause some to ask questions. To find the answer, it may be necessary to see things from his perspective. For example, If God is my loving Father, then why doesn't He answer my prayers or give me what I ask Him for? Well, one possible answer is this: What good father, especially Father God, would reward his child while the child is acting in disobedience and thereby possibly send a message that he condones the disobedience? I think we tie His loving, but righteous hands and keep Him unable to bless us more often than we would care to admit. Or another possible answer: what good father, especially Father God, would over protect and deny his child the opportunity to suffer difficulties and trials that bring growth of character and wisdom necessary to "live" and thereby leave them incapable of "living"? He said that He would never give us more than we can bear. He knows what we can bear, and though our vision of what we can bear may not be the same as His, His goal is to give us the ability to "live" eternally and He's not limited by our perspective. I have to admit, that in the past, I've lamented over the trials and struggles I've encountered in life. But through His mercy, I've come to have the perspective, the realization that He's allowed these things to mold and shape me to have "life". James 1:2-4 “Dear brothers and sisters, whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for joy. For when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything.” Dear ones, before you ever attempt to assume why our Father does anything, make sure that you are seeing from His perspective. Hold first what He has told us, "the truth" in every thing, then ask Him for His perspective knowing that He has only good intentions toward you.
His perspective is everything. From His perspective, He can see beyond this life to the eternal life that He's promised. But if we don't have His perspective, as human beings with our limited perspective, we're not seeing the whole picture. We may be deceived, missing the boat entirely and be bobbing head down, drowning in meaningless details of this life that will perish with it. We may tend to get wrapped up in this momentary existence and all of it's details that rob us of our true identity and leave us powerless. We may be standing by, watching what God values most, perish while we do nothing, not seeing what's really important to our loving Father - and that's all part of satan's plan.
The generations living today are perhaps more than any, without excuse because of the easy access we have to His word and the freedom we've had to live as we choose. From His perspective, He's watching so many people that He loves desperately, literally committing eternal suicide by choosing to ignore the only way He's given to live and condemning themselves to eternal death by their own choice or by ignorance. If the thought of someone committing suicide is horrific, then consider it in terms of eternity. Then, to add to His horror and sadness, consider that He may be watching some of us, content in our own salvation, stand by and let it happen when we could have made a difference. If we are guilty of this, do we think that we will not be held accountable? Do we think that He won't notice or ask us about it on the final day of this life? This life is certainly not the end. It's merely the beginning of something much larger than our current reality. We as Christians know this, but I think the importance and reality of it sometimes gets lost or is blurred by what we of limited perspective call "life".
Further from His holy perspective, perhaps by watching some of us, He may see His loving devotion go unrequited (requite: to make repayment, or return for). I think that He may, with a broken heart aching with desire, watch some of us take everything that He gives us and does for us and never really consider the awesome love and devotion behind them. Some of us never even noticing or even bothering to look back. Our God is the original lover and the first romantic - the greatest of both that has ever been or will be... and the object of His desire is YOU!!! Imagine the greatest love you have ever known in your limited human capacity and what you have done or would be willing to do for that love. Now imagine what you could do for that love if you had the unlimited power of God. Need an example of what our God has done out of His love for us? Let's take God's own words in response to Job in Job chapters 38-41 to reveal some of the responsibilities that God assumes on our behalf to give us continued life on this earth as we know it (most of which we take for granted and rarely, if ever, give thought to) to demonstrate what He has done. I'm including only a part of this scripture, 38:4-21 here because of the volume of it. But it serves the purpose of describing some of the powerful and awesome acts of our God and the responsibilities that He continues to maintain in creation. But in order to better remember who He is, and what he does every day, please read the rest of this passage. Then to make it more meaningful to this conversation, let's take God's questions to Job and turn them into statements (I feel confident to do this because we know by His Word that these things are true of Him):
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I laid the foundations of the earth. I determined it's dimensions and did the surveying. I know what supports it's foundations, and laid the cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy. I defined the boundaries of the sea as it burst from the womb, and I clothed it with clouds and thick darkness. I locked it behind barred gates, limiting it's shores. I said 'thus far and no farther will you come. Here your proud waves must stop!
I command the morning to appear and cause the dawn to rise in the east. I tell the daylight to spread to the ends of the earth, to bring an end to the nights wickedness. The features of the earth take shape as the light approaches and the dawn is robed in red. The light disturbs the haunt of the wicked, and it stops the arm that is raised in violence."
I have explored the springs from which the seas come. I have walked about and explored their depths. I know where the gates of death are located. I have seen the gates of utter gloom. I know the extent of the earth.
I know where the light comes from, and to where the darkness goes. I can take it to it's home. I know how to get there. I know all of this!
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All of this with the purpose to give life to us. But this demonstrates only a mere fraction of who He is and what He does for us. You can look around you at what He's created and maintains in all of nature for our survival and our pleasure and see His heart for us. He created the earth solely to provide us with a place to exist and everything in it to provide for that existence and our pleasure in it. He cares for us daily in every last detail of our lives. Without His provision or even His patience, we would cease to exist, no matter what we in our perception of our selves might will otherwise. In comparison to even the mere shadow of His greatness - we are non existent! We don't even touch the scale! We can't even see the scale! We exist solely by His pleasure. Whatever we may think of ourselves and by whatever measure we choose determine our value, or our purpose, our only real worth is the value He places on us. But His Word, His efforts and His sacrifices tell us what He values. All that He has done and does on our behalf tells us what He values. He calls out to His beloved every day in every detail of His creation and demonstrates how He cares for us. He courts us throughout our lives as our greatest lover and the greatest romantic of all time with Holy, but simple purpose: the great hope that we'll choose to share our lives and our love with Him in fellowship and communion with Him. That's the reward that He seeks from all that He has done and continues to do. That's why you live this life for a moment. No other reason, despite what causes the world shrouded in satan's deception may offer. So what is your response to the true and greatest lover of your soul?
You can say to Him whatever you will, but remember always that the the proof of your convictions is lived out in your actions in this moment of decision. We show what we value in every thought and every deed. We act on what we hold dearest and value most, we don't just talk about it. "Faith without works is dead". So what do you bring to Him as offering on the alter of your life? If you don't feel any urgency in your heart regarding the issues I have mentioned in this writing, then I lovingly and humbly beg you to consider from what perspective you are viewing this life. Because they are urgent in His heart. If you're not sure that you have His perspective, then ask Him for it. It's the revelation of His Holy Spirit that gives life to the spirits of men. It's by His revelation that we gain His perspective and by His perspective that we "live".
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