September 07, 2011
Amputation - part two
After being forced to amputate his toes because of an accident, Jon
Hutt had the wherewithal to recover the detached body parts and take them with
him as he raced to the hospital. Unfortunately the doctors found that the
crushed toes were not viable and couldn’t be salvaged. I think many of us do
something similar on a spiritual level. We might heroically and stoically cut
off the body part that causes us to sin, but then we turn right around and take
it with us trying to figure out how we can get it reattached. Jesus said, “And if your eye
causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to
enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of
hell.” (Matt 18:9 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Jesus spoke perspicuously. But He didn’t say everything in one sentence like I try to do. He wanted only the students of truth and the honest of heart to know what He meant. So He said a little here and a little there, and if you honestly wanted to know it, you would put it together. In the Sermon on the Mount He clarified righteousness as not a matter of doing things alone. Oh, for sure! It involves the getting of righteous things done! And not just because righteous things should be done, but rather because your heart is made of desires for the righteous effects doing things produces. That is, because your heart is full of love. Your heart is where God’s discerning eye looks for your rightful judgment. “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man.” (Matt 15:17-18)
-----Hands and feet and eyes cause us to sin as much as wrenches cause us to unfasten bolts, spoons cause us to eat, or guns cause us to kill. They are all just tools. Even the brain is just a tool. Of course, it is more basic and connected to all the other tools of the body, but it is the tool for your spirit to use in expressing itself into the physical world through your body. So, what good does it do to blame tools for the temptations to use them? And Jesus knew this. He had already related the secondary involvement of the hands and stomach to the heart (again, figuratively speaking) as the primary source. The life that happens inside us is such a complex interaction of chemistry, cells, and body parts that no one, even in these highly technical times, can explain life or describe the basics of what it is or how it happens.
-----What Mr. Hutt did paid no regard to the question of how life happens. He did it because, as far as he could see at the time, it was what needed to happen for life to continue. This is kind of what wraps up into plucking your eye out if it causes you to sin. Certainly there is no address in the action of how something causes you to sin, and especially of how a body part, a mere tool, could cause you to sin. But the plain fact of the matter addressed is that whatever it takes to avoid the sin which keeps you from heaven is worth doing to get to heaven. There is no more direly real expression of that necessity than digging out your own eye.
-----It is a dire reality to lay yourself down, to die before you actually die. It's maybe even more dire than digging out an eye. Though it causes no physical pain comparable to a bloody eyeball reaching the end of a snapping nerve bundle, it causes an emotional pain far broader. But the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual existence entered through that laid down self is enough a foretaste of its consequential eternal bliss so as to to backwash the soul with a present and joyful peace.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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