Friday, July 6, 2012

No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights


For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him... And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. John 3:17-21

The Great Scale at the End of Times that lurks in the unspoken of each soul.  ...when the dead will leave their graves at the sound of His voice... All of our deeds, like so many sacks of moldy laundry are dug out by... surely no one pictures great winged Cherubim doing the dirty work, so perhaps our collective imaginations have some sort of Santa’s helper or Gimli-like dwarf dumping the accumulation onto the balance, shaking it firmly to get every last bit, and then stepping back to see where the dial falls: being welcomed through the Pearly Gate by no less that Peter the Rock with his big long Michelangelo beard playing the role of maĆ®tre d', or if things don’t measure up, Gimli with a grimace works the big lever that opens up a trapdoor beneath our feet.  

But that isn’t what Scripture teaches.  True, those who did good will come forth to life... but their good deeds are simply the natural product of the heart issue, the fruit that is produced, the works that have been carried out in God.  

C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce seems much more accurate, true to the teaching.  The end of times is not so much Dante’stormented whirlwinds damned for their carnal sins, rather They will be fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded, drifting away from each other in bleak misery, fleeing the light because they hate it.  

Matteo wrote me the other day, asking why the unfaithful steward, the one who had buried his talents in the ground, was treated so harshly, cast into the outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth.  It’s not so much that he dug a little hole in the ground and ran.  It’s not the deeds.  The what, the big bags of stuff.  It’s the why.  Why, when offered grace, offered life, offered light, he went the other way.  

Christ the King is not our Judge.  He is our Savior.  Our works will judge us.  Our works will reveal, will prove, the hidden recesses of our hearts, what we hated and what we loved.  And Who we believed to be true.

Last night daddy spent a quiet night here with Alan and me.  And once again, this morning as we gathered around yellow bowls of Raisin Bran with a cut-up banana, he led us in the prayer: We are Yours.  May we prove faithful stewards of Your grace.
Indeed.  In deed.

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