Entangled...Again?

Dear Faith Family,   

 

"... those who indulge in the lust of defiling passions and despise authority...entice unsteady souls…’” (2 Peter 2:10-14)

In The Story of Sin, we have discovered that discontent and progressively decaying, humanity’s terminus is destruction; that is, unless God deals both justly with evil and mercifully with the evil doer. Unless God chooses not merely to spare the source and perpetuator of evil, but to remake them. It is God's intention of remaking--not destroying and starting over, but bringing back from the dead what was lost when sin separated--that is at the heart of covenant. 

Covenant. The establishment of a relationship between two partners who make binding promises to each other and work together to reach a common goal. Covenant, God's means of humanity becoming, again, who and what we are made to be. A regulating relationship that ensures restoration, an unbreaking, a rebirth. 

Covenant. The relational reality we recognize and rest within every time we gather around the table to receive the body of Jesus given for us, his cup poured out for us, which is "the new covenant in [his] blood" (Luke 22:20). If we spend our days making a life within this restorative, relational realty of life with God, then why do we still struggle, not just to be human in a corrupted existence, but to be a new kind of human in a covenantal existence?

Not, why do “they” struggle, whomever “they” are to you. But rather, how are we “who are recently escaping from those who live in wander,” who “have escaped the pollution of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," how are we "again entangled in them and overcome”? 

Peter, who was one of those with Jesus at the first communion table, gives us a clue as to why the story of sin is still our story, even for those whose iniquities are forgiven and sins remembered no more (Jer. 31:31-34). In 2 Peter 2, Peter is warning his fellow faithful that the same entanglers of Genesis 6, those led by a "lust of defiling passion," entice "unsteady souls," by the same means which led to their own corruption: 

"Arrogant, for speaking words of vanity, they entice with the passions of the flesh to sensuality those recently escaping from those in error living. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves to corruption."
(2 Peter 2:18-19)


With lies and false promises, they entice us with the "passions of the flesh," or "lustful desires." What makes our soul unsteady, able to be moved from life with God? Well, says St. Augustine, echoing Peter the apostle, 

"Not with our feet or by traversing great distances do we journey away from you or find our way back... No, to be estranged in a spirit of lust, and lost in its [lust’s] darkness, that is what it means to be far away from your face."



Lust is a word we associate primarily with improper sexual desires. Such cravings are indeed the most base or carnal manifestations of impropriety, but the idea of lust is not limited to these. Behind the word both Peter and Augustine use to describe the force that "spirits," or carries, us away from God is something like "miswanting" or disordered love. 

To want or love something wrongly, not just a wrong thing, is to lust after it. To love or want something (or someone) for what it is not, or cannot be, is to lust after it. To want or love someone (or something) selfishly, without consideration of their true good, is to lust after them. To love or want something to satisfy what it was not created to satisfy, is to lust after it. 

Certainly, we can, and do, want and love the wrong things. Yet, argues our faith for the past two thousand years, what often gets us entangled again in corruption is lust: loving things and persons wrongly. And it is this disordered love that we call lust, which we have to deal with on this leg of the Lenten journey. 

Here is how you and I can steady our souls today, and the remainder of the week: 



TODAY

  • Prayerfully and slowly, and with the idea of lust being loving things and people wrongly atop of mind, read Isaiah 58:1-12, letting the exhortation of the LORD wrestle with your soul. 



THURSDAY

For what do I lust...love disorderly?
&

Where have I recognized God's just mercy in my dissatisfaction?


FRIDAY

  • Prayerfully, slowly, and with Augustine's experienced explanation of God's just mercy* atop your mind, read Matthew 25:14-46, letting the parable & proverb of JESUS sink into your soul. 

*"You were ever present to me, mercifully angry, sprinkling very bitter disappointments over all my unlawful pleasures (lusts, or dissordered loves) so that I might seek pleasure free from all disappointment." 



SATURDAY

  • Spend ten minutes asking and letting God do what Psalm 139:23-24 encourages: 

"Search me, O God, and know my heart! 
Examine me, and know my disquieted thoughts! 
See if there be any grievous way in my living,
And lead me in the way ancient and everlasting!"


Love you, faith family. God bless.