Under Construction (All of the Bible . . .)

Do you remember the logic 🧩 (or riddles or analogies or challenges—not sure what to call the kind of word puzzle I mean) of childhood past where one was required to look at a grouping of words and figure out based on their arrangement what they meant together? Something like this one below:

CONSTRUCTION

soul

The correct way to solve it would be soul under construction. If you notice, construction is weighty, and the soul is small under the burden of change.

Maybe it has seemed quiet to you lately from this quarter. It is true that I have not written in a while, but it has not been because my soul has been absent of either noise or the quiet contemplation of time spent in the Word. I have been wrestling with myself, not with New Year's resolutions but with what I know about God, with the disconnect I sometimes feel between living out truth versus what my flesh wants in all its ugliness.

There is the other side of wrestling, however, when it goes on too long without action being taken, the restlessness that can ruin “fretful, discontented spirits” who “try to better themselves, whereas they might be easy and happy enough if they would but make the best of that which is” (Matthew Henry Commentary, Ez. 17). 

Contentment. A familiar battle I do not want ever to lose.

While it is ultimately a war that has already been won, without the tempered wrestling with my soul and the honest inventory of it, my time here might be wasted or maybe shortened, either option a dismal failure of the resources generously placed at my disposal by God in His wisdom. So here it is, the sentence from last year’s read-through of the Bible that has wrecked me and won’t let me go, the one that I now cannot find in print anywhere, even though I have a clear marking of where I thought I encountered it the day that I wrote it down: 

“His image is stamped on the souls of men. 

It was so in their creation; 

it is so in their renovation” 

(Matthew Henry). 

This concept of being made in God’s image is not new to me. From Genesis 1:26-27, the concept of imago deo is clearly presented. What I have come to realize more fully is that the entirety of the Bible is man’s wrestling with this concept in light of the desires of his flesh. John makes it clear in 1 John 2 that this wrestling is against the appeals the world offers us, a world passing away with its lusts, “but the one who does the will of God continues to live forever” (v. 17, NASB). To boil it down, the choices are clear as well as the consequences:

Sin and enjoy the offerings of the world freely and die.

OR

“See that what you heard from the beginning remains in you. 

If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, 

you also will remain in the Son and in the Father” (v. 24).

Lest any of you think I am contemplating a “serious” sin or entertaining something “drastic,” rest easy, but I do think we take sin far less seriously than we should considering the holiness of our God, and there is no such thing as a small sin. So I wrestle with what I want sometimes and all the time with what God would have me do. I question: Am I entertaining sin within myself, my thoughts, my desires, my actions? Have I gotten so close to sin or the world that it has become a guest and moved in the extra room? Have I gotten comfortable? To borrow a phrase from the Apostle Paul, may it never be so!

Disciples continue in truth, and the truth makes a disciple free from the guilt of sin (justification). Disciples continue in the Word, and the sanctification by the Word frees us from the “bondage of corruption,” and the very truth of the gospel itself frees us from the ceremonial burdens of the law and the legalistic traditions of man, from man’s “prejudices, mistakes, and false notions” that would further enslave and entangle the soul, from the “dominion of lust and passion,” restoring “the soul to the government of itself by reducing it into obedience to its Creator” (Matthew Henry Commentary, Jn. 8).

Isn’t that what it ultimately boils down to? Obedience to the God who made me and saved me and sanctifies me. I am thrilled that He is stronger than I. If he were not, I would be lost, left to my endless devices and wrestlings and failures in my sinful state. What a miserable state that would be.

Thank you, God, that You are and that You are a rewarder of those who seek You. Thank You, God, for helping me to know I need to seek You. To God be ALL the glory and praise and honor. Amen.