Plagues, Imaginations and the Freedom of Salvation

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pg. 162-3)

Each of the ten plagues were an elaborate exorcism, a casting out of the demons, that freed the imaginations of the Hebrews from domination by evil so that they were free to hear and follow their Savior and worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). When Moses began his work with his Hebrew brothers and sisters, their spirits were “broken” (Exod. 6:9) and the only “truth” they had access to was this huge Egyptian lie. But Egypt and Pharaoh were not the “real world.” They were the real world defaced, desecrated, demonized. . . . The exorcising drama of the ten plagues freed the Hebrews from this Egyptian way of understanding reality, clearing the mind to accept God’s revelation reality, energizing their spirits to live in the world of salvation. The intent was that by the time they left Egypt, they would not only be physically free from evil oppression but mentally free of the evil imagination that had crushed the life out of them for so long. The ten plagues would cleanse the “doors of perception” so that Israel could see life in a totally different way—the unreality of Egypt exposed; the untruth of Egypt laid bare—and would set them free to live in a different life when they got out of Egypt, free to live the freedom of salvation.

The Gift of Place

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

These [Genesis 1-2] are grounding texts for forming us and leading us into living well, playing well, to the glory of God in the great gift of creation. Genesis 1 is formational for receiving and living in to the creation gift of time; Genesis 2 for the creation gift of place (65).

The place is defined as a garden. It is not a limitless “everywhere” or “anywhere”; it is local: “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (Gen. 2:8).

Everything that the Creator God does in forming us humans is done in place. It follows from this that since we are his creatures and can hardly escape the conditions of our making, for us everything that has to do with God is also in place. All living is local: this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, this people.

This may seem so obvious that it doesn’t need saying. But I have spent an adult lifetime with the assigned task of guiding men and women in living out the Christian faith in the place where they raise their children and work for a living, go fishing and play gold, go to bed and eat their meals, and I know that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is mighty difficult (72-73).

What we often consider to be concerns of the spiritual life – ideas, truths, prayers, promises, beliefs – are never in the Christian gospel permitted to have a life of their own apart from particular persons and actual places. Biblical spirituality/religion has a low tolerance for “great ideas” or “sublime truths” or “inspiration thoughts” apart from the people and places in which they occur. God’s great love and purposes for us are worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be to think we should be. God deals with us where we are and not where we would like to be.

People who want God as an escape from reality and the often hard conditions of this life don’t find much to their liking in this aspect of our Scriptures, our text for living. But there it is. There is no getting around it.

But to the man and woman wanting more reality, not less, this insistence that all genuine life, life that is embraced in God’s work of salvation, is grounded, placed, is good news indeed.

“Eden, in the east” is the first place named in the Bible. It comes with the unqualified affirmation that place is good, essential, and foundational for providing the only possible creation conditions for living out our human existence truly.

A. Orendorff

What seems “so obvious” is in fact “mighty difficult.” Part of our difficulty with place – the mundane grounding our lives, loves and theology – arises from the grandiosity of Scripture itself. When Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17), we choke to think what this could possibly mean for our lives as commuters and stay at home moms. As participants in and agents of God’s coming future – the (re)creation and resurrection of all things – unspiritual normalities like mortgages, term papers, dirty diapers, wallpaper, pouring concrete and waiting in line seem out of place. What has resurrection to do with rental cars?

For Paul, however, the staggering reality that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you” (1 Cor. 6:19) leads immediately to the ultra-mundane injunction, “Therefore, do not pay people for sex.” What have temples to do with prostitutes? Everything. The spiritual and the natural are not mutually exclusive, they are coterminous – parts one of another. All geography is sacred, from kitchens to brothels to waterfalls. As Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote in 1918:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Dynamics of Spiritual Life - Justification

Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal (pg. 101-2)

Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent of the guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification, in the Augustinian manner, drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

In order for a pure and lasing work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. This means that they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God’s holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God, not just at the outset of their Christian lives but in every succeeding day.

Dynamics of Spiritual Life - Sin

Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal (pg. 88-9)

The structure of sin in the human personality is something far more complicated than the isolated acts and thoughts of deliberate disobedience commonly designated by the word. In its biblical definition, sin cannot be limited to isolated instances or patters of wrong doing; it is something much more akin to the psychological term complex: an organic network of compulsive attitudes, beliefs and behavior deeply rooted in our alienation from God. Sin originated in the darkening of the human mind and heart as man turned from the truth about God to embrace a lie about him and consequently a whole universe of lies about his creation. Sinful thoughts, words and deeds flow forth from this darkened heart automatically and compulsively, as water from a polluted fountain.

Augustine divided the trunk of the flesh into two main branches, pride (self-aggrandizement) and sensuality (self-indulgence), which in their interaction together might be held to generate most other forms of sin. Luther, however, perceived that the main root of the flesh behind pride and sensuality was unbelief; and his analysis takes in some forms of sin which are apparently ‘selfless’ and altruistic, like ethical behavior of atheistic humans. In any case, the characteristic bent of the flesh is toward independence from God, his truth and his will, as if man himself were God. Therefore the flesh might be called a ‘God complex.’ Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr and Tillich are not wrong, however, in suggesting that anxiety is at the root of much sinful behavior, since the unconscious awareness of our independence from God and an unrelieved consciousness of guilt creates a profound insecurity in the unbeliever or the Christian who is not walking in light. This insecurity generates a kind of compensatory egoism, self-oriented but somewhat different from serious pride. Thus much of what is called pride is actually not godlike self-admiration, but masked inferiority, insecurity and deep self-loathing.

Luther was right: the root behind all other manifestations of sin is compulsive unbelief – our voluntary darkness concerning God, ourselves, his relationship to the fallen world and his redemptive purposes. For this reason the entrance and growth of new spiritual life involves the shattering of our sphere of darkness by repentant faith in redemptive truth. If the Fall occurred through the embracing of lies, the recovery process of salvation must center on faith in truth, reversing this condition…The truth used by the Holy Spirit to bring about this deliverance is the biblical teaching which reveals to us our need, God’s character and the elements of redemptive truth concerning Jesus Christ. This truth is the central core of the dynamics of continuous renewal.