It doesn’t matter to me anymore how much of the Bible a person can coordinate and recite in order to support their theological position; if what they are saying causes fear and despair instead of faith and hope, then it is bad. Poison is poison, no matter how dressed up in truth it may be. I have come to accept the simple fact that the enemy of all that is good knows the Word way better than I ever could. He is a much better lawyer than anyone else I could ever know.
Religious deception is the most dangerous kind, because it uses a formula containing a high percentage of nominal truth, but then reduces that truth to a terrible lie by distilling the love of God clean out of it, and presenting it as a cold, sterilized abomination…an utter mockery of all it was ever meant to be in the first place. I have almost been killed by that exact thing, and I hate it. My life’s mission is to see it rooted out of humanity to as great an extent as I possibly can.
Here in the midst of the debris, I hold onto this one thing: The pure and unadulterated conviction that Jesus is all about rescuing, saving, helping, healing, repairing, restoring…leading, guiding, fulfilling… Those angry-seeming words of heaviness, those are not what Jesus is about. The Bible, presented as a cohesive whole, contains a story arc that speaks of one thing: the glory of God culminating in the redemption of mankind.
No matter how much scripture a person can line up in support of the idea of a heavy, austere, condescending Jesus, it does not alter reality. The reality of the overall situation is that God is Love, and the reality of the Bible is that it is his love letter to humanity.
Jesus said, “Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.”
He also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” and when asked by the disciples to show them the Father, he replied, “Dude, you guys. If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. Straight up. Dead serious.” (That last bit is paraphrased by me.)
So Jesus is God. And God is love. And Jesus is the straight and narrow way that leads to life. Thus it can be mathematically demonstrated that love is the straight and narrow way.
It is straight because it never changes. It is always compassionate and self-sacrificing. It is always patient. It is always kind. It is narrow because we must shed everything that we are carrying, in order to pass through it. Personal agendas must go. Ulterior motives must go. Everything of this world we attempt to bring with us on this road will be burnt up through the fiery trials along the way. They will be consumed in the flames that refine us like silver, and only that love will survive. This love lives in us by the faith of Jesus, who loved us perfectly, and gave each of us absolutely all of himself – in a way that goes far beyond our normal limits of comprehension – in order that we could be reunited with our Papa, our Daddy, and our ultimate Source, in whose mind we were created before material existence began.
He pines after us with unrelenting fervor. He loves us with an everlasting love. He never ceases to hope against hope for us to wake up to the realization that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us uniquely fitted vessels for the expression of his indescribably awesome blessing.
Everything that does not line up with this, everything that discourages, and deters, and frustrates, and disappoints…all of those dark, heavy things are counterfeits and lies, whether they be obvious golden calves and altars of flesh worship, or seemingly holy ideals and modes of Biblical truth. The form that they take is irrelevant. You shall know a tree by its fruit. Period.
“…whatever is not prompted by faith is reduced to flesh, if faith does not inspire you; you miss the point.” ~ Romans 14:23b
