Two Psalms; Two Ways

 

Over the past several weeks, as I have dealt with my own fatigue regarding the chaos surrounding us; from the pandemic, to the suffering of the world and the people in my own country, to a failure of political leadership which fiddles while its citizens suffer and its national security rots, to much of the white “Evangelical” church trading the Lamb of Revelation Chapter 14 for the political and economic beast of Revelation Chapter 13, I have faced the temptation to just “go fishing.”

 

What I mean by “go fishing” is to hang a sign on the shop door which says, “Closed, gone fishing,” meaning that I’ll shut down for a while and come back in a few weeks or months and see how the world and church are doing. But, life is a marathon and when we hit our heartbreak hills the importance of patient endurance becomes more apparent than ever – we continue in faithfulness to Christ and others, we continue in intercessory prayer and living, we continue in desiring to serve people in Jesus Christ; we remain on the course no matter how painful it is to put one foot in front of another. We do this because we love Jesus Christ and we love people – we do not do this primarily for ourselves; this is not about me (or you), it is about Christ and others (Hebrews 12:1-3; 1 John 3:16; 2 Timothy 2:10).

 

I’m reminded of a book that Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote, The Priest Is Not His Own, in which Sheen’s central thrust is that the priest is both priest and sacrifice, which of course speaks to us of our Lord Jesus. If we are indeed a priesthood in Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:9; Revelation 1:6), then our calling to be priest and sacrifice is clear – no matter what “Christian” self-centered heresies may teach.  

 

No doubt there have been times when you’ve seen photos or video of the aftermath of earthquakes in nations with shoddy and unscrupulous building practices. Multistory apartment buildings lie in rubble, beneath which are lifeless bodies whose lives were snatched from them in what they thought was a secure home. The morning of the tragedy it is unlikely that any of the deceased wondered, “Will my home crumble today, will it fail to withstand the shock of an earthquake?”

 

When watching such scenes have you ever thought, “That would never happen in the United States because our building codes are better than other most nations and they are enforced”?

 

Paul writes that we, as God’s People, are to grow up in the unity of the faith, becoming a mature corporate Man, “to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ. So that we will no longer be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming…” (Ephesians 4:13b – 14).

 

One of the things that the present chaos has revealed, to those who care to “see”, is that the professing church in the United States is childish, and that our insatiable desire to be entertained, to have our egos stroked, to be fascinated by talking heads and political events, to be excited by eschatological fancies that require nothing of us but imagination and gullibility; has led to us being buried beneath piles of rubble. In our drunkenness we cannot see the rubble, we cannot feel it, for we are blinded and desensitized.

 

I do not think it hyperbole to consider that we are seeing a great apostasy in the professing church (2 Thess. 2:3) in which we would rather have Barabbas than Jesus, in which we would rather be imprinted with the mark of the beast than of the Lamb (Rev. chapters 13 and 14). I am not saying that this is “the” “falling away/apostasy” of 2 Thessalonians, but whatever it is, we see the working of the “man of lawlessness” when we see professing Christians abandon fidelity to Christ for fidelity to political, national, cultural, and economic agendas. There is a reason the Apostle John discusses the world and the antichrist in the same breath (1 John 2:15 – 17).

 

There are no better passages with which to begin the new year than Psalms 1 and 2. In Psalm 1 we have two ways, sinful man’s way and God’s Way. In Psalm 2 we have two kingdoms, the kingdom of this present age and the Kingdom of God; we can either align ourselves with the rulers of this world (Ephesians 6:12) or we can live under the dominion of the King of kings and Lord of lords, Jesus Christ.

 

Every day of this new year we will either be living in the “way of the wicked” or the “Way of the Righteous” (Psalm 1:6).

 

Every day of this new year we will either be living as citizens and subjects of the nations and rulers of this age, or as citizens of the Kingdom of God and subjects of the King of that kingdom, the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Which shall it be in my life?

 

What about your life?

 

Perhaps you might consider making these two psalms a focus of meditation for January?