Helpless Obedience
Psychologist will tell you helplessness is a learned behavior. The Word of God will tell you it is mankind’s original condition before salvation came to him. The early church held that all men are sinners and can only be saved through faith given to them through Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, we preach a gospel where God stands in heaven waiting for man to do something about it “If you will take one step forward, dear friend, Jesus will accept you.”
It is this idea of our making the first move that has put us into the binds we’re in as a nation and as a church–a distorted form of self-righteousness from which we cannot free ourselves.
When I use the term “helpless obedience,” it’s more a prayerful cry than a solution. I back this up with the words from the Apostle Paul. As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Romans 3:10-18
Bradley Gray writes that “Nothing good happens when you get ahead of God and take matters into our own hands.” Moses killed an Egyptian man who was harming a Hebrew. Abraham sleeps with Hagar, Saul kills Christians. David sleeps with Bathsheba. Jacob and his mother Rebekah act as activists against God. Peter cuts off Malchus’ ear.
Each presumed that they were doing God a favor, but it is very difficult to rally around anyone with blood on their hands, thinking they have done God a favor. Stephen exposes Moses. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. Acts 7:25
Moses’s activism failed and he suffered a life-time because of it. “Vengeance is a most pitiful substitute for deliverance”, Gray writes.
Those who follow the Lord must start in the wilderness, in the helplessness. The dangerous ones are those who think they have got it all figured out. But the obedience of which I speak begins in the ruins, in the ashes, the nothingness of death. We can never be delivered through vengeance.
Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. 6 “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” Acts 9:5-6
In our helplessness it is God who makes the first move.
Allan M. Harmon writes “God looked with compassion on His people, identified with them in their tribulation, and set in process the divine plan for their rescue.” In other words, God does for sinners what they can never do for themselves. Jesus’s body is stained with His own blood, becoming God’s consummate deliverer.
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. Isaiah 53:3-4
In our born helplessness we have no way what so ever to fathom what God did for mankind through His Son, Jesus Christ. We have failed to appreciate the depth and vitality of the Christian intellectual tradition as Matthew L Rubinstein writes.
What I find Rubinstein to be saying is that we have overestimated the postmodernist intelligence in which we have become engulfed. Reality is shaped by culture. Language shapes our thinking. Individual experience justifies. In the process, Rubinstein writes, “we have failed to appreciate the Christian intellectual tradition.”
An appreciation for the Christian intellectual tradition finds its roots in interpretive scholarship–in meticulous study and interpretation of sacred scripture. By Christian intellectual traditions is meant the great theological foundations. By Christian intellectual traditions Rubenstein is referring to institutions of learning that become the hubs of Christian education and learning.
The Christian intellectual tradition whittles away at the notion of God having individual plans for each individual. It is a wonderful thought which can all too easily become the fuel that flames radicalization—taking things into one’s own hands—the guilt suffered by Moses, David, and Jacob and you and me.
What God did for Israel that they could not do for themselves God has done for us through His Son, Jesus Christ for the same reason. Perhaps, tomorrow, if you find yourself in church or enjoying a beautiful late summer day, breathe this prayer in behalf of one’s self and all human kind. Kyrie eleison–a petition for God’s compassion, forgiveness, and grace, acknowledging human dependence on divine mercy in helpless obedience.
