AD CAELOS

As I’ve said before, I like Tim Keller. The guy just speaks to me.

In one of his sermons, Keller speaks of the wounded or crushed spirit — what causes it. His answer: “it’s complicated.” It can have one of four causes, or combinations of any the four.

The first cause is medical/physical. The “we’re just a body” crowd tends to focus on this one. The most obvious example of this is biochemical depression, but it could also be a bad thyroid, physical exhaustion, or whatever.

The second cause is emotional or relational. People into self esteem focus here. If you buy in to the lie that above all else you must “believe in yourself,” you’re in for some bitter disappointment: You will fail you.

The third cause is conscience/moral. Many Christians tend to focus here. God implants in every human being a moral code. Ignore that code, as we all do as broken beings, and you’ll be haunted by a guilty conscience.

The fourth is existential/philosophical. If you are honest with yourself and think — really think — you’ll come to realize (with Nietzsche and others) that there exists in this world a “ground note of sadness” that cannot be overcome. All joy ends in grief: It is a fact that if you think about the people whom you love the most, there will be one of you in that group who lives long enough to see every one else die.

So what’s one to do about all this? Well, if it’s medical, get help. If it’s emotional or relational, do not put any person in a place that only God should be. For issues of conscience, you’ll do well to understand that we’re all deeply broken, confess your trespasses to God, and ask for forgiveness and strength not to repeat what you’ve done. (Also, remember: “There, but by the grace of God, go I.”)

Regarding the fourth, the Bible speaks of the Tree of Life, which represents the fullness of life, absolute satiation. Problem is, post expulsion from Eden, we are barred from it by an angel with a flaming sword.

Now is an in-between time. The good news is that we are saved by Christ, none of our sins are held against us, the price of justice has been paid in full. Yet still we weep. We must be content for now in the knowledge that soon enough the world we be set to rights. And God will dry every tear.

Source: Tim Keller’s sermon at https://youtu.be/pkL3R27ZV1o

Christian friends, if you have no conflicts in your marriage then something is wrong. Marriage is a “great mystery” — no relationship between human beings is greater or more important. It is spiritual partnership, sealed by covenant, for mutual sanctification, making us day-on-day more like Christ. Its end is to develop mature character. It is wonderful but hard: burning joy and strength, yet blood, sweat and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.

A good marriage drives each of us to experience the gospel, the transforming love of God. You will see your spouse’s flaws to the bottom, see the other in complete nakedness. In the course of your life together, you will fail to do what you ought, want what you should, be who you should be. You will betray the other, will fail to love the other as you should.

But, with maturity, you will come to truly love your spouse more fully than you could possibly have imagined.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller

Our current concept of marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s driven by romantic feeling, that wonderful experience of being in love. If you somehow lose it, basically if you’re not Romeo and Juliet 24×7 for the rest of your life, well you have a right — nay, an obligation — to move on. It didn’t work out, he or she was not the right one, I will now go find my true soul mate. Because I deserve that kind of love. Repeat until spouse number eight.

Another choice is just to pretend that all is well in Verona, try to fool yourself and others that there’s not a deep, life-sucking disappointment at the center of your life, settle, give up your dreams, rationalize. (I’m not even going to address here those who have allowed “marriage” to devolve into a mere consumer transaction).

Look, since we’re all big boys and girls, I’m going to let you in on a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, no matter how much one is determined to be Romeo to her Juliet, or Juliet to his Romeo, the feeling of being in love will fade. It may be six months, it may be three years. But it will go. There’s no getting around it.

There is another way.

True Christian marriage starts with the understanding that we are each deeply broken individuals in need of salvation. And while it’s true that marriage is in great part about raising the next generation, it has a more fundamental purpose: sanctification, of being made day on day more like Christ. We now find ourselves far, far from the land of daisies and chardonnay. In God’s plan, your spouse is your spiritual partner, picked by Him just for you expressly for this process of making the other holy. It’s a great returning. Needless to say, the business at hand is vitally, desperately important.

Sanctification means pain and conflict, of eventually turning over to God all in you that needs to be burned away — and there’s a lot there that needs to change — of responding with love and resolve to the challenges to your very being forced upon you by your spouse’s God-given differences. It can only happen if both partners are committed to following God’s will and to sticking it out in sickness and in health, in times of plenty and times of want. In other words, of sticking by the promises you made on your wedding day.

All of this makes what Navy Seals do look like a day at the waterpark. But what results is two beautiful human beings – “little Christs” who serve the Father – who in the process find (to their great amazement) that they love each other more deeply, and in a real, completely naked, and deeply joyous way than either could ever have thought possible.

Take that, Romeo and Juliet.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, Zion National Park

Understanding the Gospel starts by understanding that God is, by his very nature, both perfectly loving and perfectly just.  Both.  

If you want the real God, you can’t have just one or the other.  It’s a package deal.

Here are the opening lines of perhaps the greatest poem ever written, Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit 

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, 

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 

Restore us, and regain the blissful 

Seat

In these thirty-eight words, Milton has summarized all of history: We were originally given everything we needed in order to live joyfully, in wholeness and love.  We traded our happy condition for a lie, with tragic, cosmic implications.  We have since lived a broken existence in a broken land east of Eden.

Justice could not let our act of disobedience stand.  Someone had to pay.  And someone did.

Enter love, which led God to take on human flesh in the form of “one greater Man,” who lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then died the death we deserve.  

Justice served.  Love wins.  In Christ, we are restored, regaining “the blissful Seat.”

That’s good news.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, 2013