September 25, 2012
Beating a Dead Horse
In videos of the unrest in Libya there are clips where militants are
attacking businesses and government offices in order to disrupt the
establishment. One video clip shows a neighborhood with three torched police cars
with flames shooting through the windows. As the vehicles burned a couple of
the rebels were aggressively beating the cars with sticks. I was laughing as I
thought, “Look, the cars are already dead…move
on.” As believers Paul reminds us that we need to have purpose when we are
running the race and fighting the good fight. “Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight
like a man beating the air.” (1 Cor 9:26 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I am enjoying a Revelation class on Wednesday mornings. The leader is a retired preacher, which of course is to say we are all there to here what Revelation really means. I try my best to be respectful and informative, but the study has been too filled up with meaning yet empty of what the book really says. The leader does not believe Revelation portrays events to come, and denies any respectful attempt to express that truth. This is problematic for one simple reason. “The Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave Him to show to His servants what must soon take place;” (Rev 1:1) is very specific in the meaning He Himself spoke. Verse one does not say, “...to show to His servants what God’s winning means.“ I fail to show honor when I strain to respect what is not respectable. I’ve too much beaten that dead horse. I bit my tongue one morning when the leader read Rev 4:1, “After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door! And the first voice which I heard speaking to me like a trumpet...” I don’t know what was his point. I was too aghast to be attentive after hearing him fail to read the point written. For the rest of that verse continues, “...said, ‘Come up hither, and I will show you what must take place after this.”
-----I don’t know what is the problem this retired preacher has with believing the Word as it is written. But I do know the Word was written for belief, not for disbelief. Disbelief dismisses your obligation to tie your imagination to what is demanding your belief. That obligation is a form of submission, which is not a normal human trait. But the Word of God calls for this conceptual submission to the ideas it speaks in terms as simple and straight forward as, “...to show to His servants what must soon take place;” and especially those repeated in other terms as simple as, “...and I will show you what must take place after this.”
-----Now I don’t like calling any brother arrogant. But I also understand none of us, including myself, is monolithically either good or bad. We are all a shake bag of the two. So I don’t call this brother arrogant by pointing out his insistence on his own meaning rather than the Word‘s meaning. I just recognize an item in his shake bag as it relates to Revelation. That same item in my shake bag relates to other things, we all know from time to time. Yet it is that dead horse of disbelief in what the Word simply states that gets beaten in his class every Wednesday morning. It is as if the arrogant beating of it might raise it to its feet to carry us away from what the Word really has to say. The same poor horse has been beaten by all mankind, in one way or another, ever since Eve took up a bit of conversation with a snake. News is that this ol' horse ain’t movin’. Yet the beatin’ its takin’ in the ol’ preacher’s Revelation class is kinda funny to watch.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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