2 posts tagged “doors of the sea”

Today at the sojourn service, the sermon spoke to me somehow better and clearer than ever. I generally have had trouble following or drawing much from the teaching there, but this morning was different. Here are some notes I made, and thoughts I had while making them:

Romans 6:15-23
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

 I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We cannot "simply" believe. I've struggled with this lately -- seeing my faith produce works. While we are saved by God's grace alone, to live the same as we did under law demonstrates nothing of the faith that grace bore. "Even the demons believe...and shudder"

Freedom in grace is freedom to follow and serve the Father -- the new creation in us seeks above all the pleasure of its Creator.

Of course, we are inclined (especially today) to think of freedom wholly in terms of arbitrary or pathetic volition, a potency made actual every time one chooses a particular course of action out from a variety of other possibilities. And obviously, for finite intellects and wills, this is the minimal form that liberty must assume; but it is also, just as obviously, a form of subordination and confinement. All possible choices are external to the will that chooses; they shape it from without, defining it even before it has chosen. Moreover, these possibilities are exclusive of one another: one makes a possible course of action real by rendering other courses of action impossible. And, as we all know, one can choose foolishly, or maliciously, or with a divided will. Freedom, so understood, would consist in no more than a certain kind of largely vacuous and limited potentiality dependent upon other limited and limiting potentialities.
A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then -- through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire -- has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice" -- as among possibilities that somehow exceed his "present" actuality -- would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil -- to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it -- would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will in his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free. (David B. Hart, from The Doors of the Sea)

As fledglings in the divine nature, imputed in us by the law of God's grace, we no longer are mastered by the law of sin. We are no longer leashed by pride, the measure of our own glory, the limitations of our intellect and our physiology, the permeation of ennui, and the lust to dominate. We are no longer bound by that which has held us fast in sludge and mire, in listlessness, and has darkened our minds by the illusion of our own grandeur. Instead, we are freed to exult in One who is greater in every measure, who relieves us of aspirations which had hitherto been whetted upon our own dull luster, and could be gaged only by the reach of our libidos. Now we are freed to acknowledge the Other, God in Christ, whose glory is all and in all.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Colossians 2:13-15

    "The natural world overwhelms us with its splendor, its beauty, its immensities and fragilities, its incalculable diversity, its endless combinations of the colossal and the delicate, sweetness and glory, minute intricacies and immeasurable grandeurs. It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of flowered meadows, the emerald light of the deep forest, the soft, immaculate blue of distant mountains, the shining volubility of the sunlit sea, the pale, cold glitter of the stars. This is a perfectly wise and even holy impulse.
    "But, at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended -- and, indeed, preserved -- by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creative and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life. Considered 'from below,' from within the system of nature, the force that drives and animates and shapes the whole of the organic world seems to achieve an almost perfectly transparent epitome of itself in those lavishly floriferous but parasitic vines that -- urges always upward by a blind, thrusting, idiotic heliotropism -- climb toward the light of the sun by constantly struggling out of the shadows in their thirst for the light, extending one tenuous tendril after another toward the sun to swell and slowly suffocate the boughs they entwine, until they burgeon forth at the last in such gorgeous and copious flowers that one might forget what had to perish to make such a triumph of beauty possible."
   
From The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart