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Bible Readings for Friday, August 26th, 2011

– The Week of The 11th Sunday After Pentecost *Click on each bible passage to expand the text. Psalm 26:1-8 1. [Of David.] Vindicate me, O LORD, for I have walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the LORD without wavering.

2. Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and mind.

3. For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you.

4. I do not sit with the worthless, nor do I consort with hypocrites;

5. I hate the company of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked.

6. I wash my hands in innocence, and go around your altar, O LORD,

7. singing aloud a song of thanksgiving, and telling all your wondrous deeds.

8. O LORD, I love the house in which you dwell, and the place where your glory abides. Jeremiah 15:1-9 1. Then the LORD said to me: Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people. Send them out of my sight, and let them go!

2. And when they say to you, “Where shall we go?” you shall say to them: Thus says the LORD: Those destined for pestilence, to pestilence, and those destined for the sword, to the sword; those destined for famine, to famine, and those destined for captivity, to captivity.

3. And I will appoint over them four kinds of destroyers, says the LORD: the sword to kill, the dogs to drag away, and the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth to devour and destroy.

4. I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what King Manasseh son of Hezekiah of Judah did in Jerusalem.

5. Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will bemoan you? Who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?

6. You have rejected me, says the LORD, you are going backward; so I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you– I am weary of relenting.

7. I have winnowed them with a winnowing fork in the gates of the land; I have bereaved them, I have destroyed my people; they did not turn from their ways.

8. Their widows became more numerous than the sand of the seas; I have brought against the mothers of youths a destroyer at noonday; I have made anguish and terror fall upon her suddenly.

9. She who bore seven has languished; she has swooned away; her sun went down while it was yet day; she has been shamed and disgraced. And the rest of them I will give to the sword before their enemies, says the LORD. 2 Thessalonians 2:7-12 7. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed.

8. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming.

9. The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders,

10. and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

11. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false,

12. so that all who have not believed the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned.

Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and mind. – Psalm 26:2

You have rejected me, says the LORD, you are going backward; so I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you– I am weary of relenting. – Jeremiah 15:6

For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false, so that all who have not believed the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned.- 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12

The Nature of Evil and Its Destruction

My skin is crawling. I hate these kinds of passages from the bible. The Revised Common Lectionary is testing my faith-mettle today, for sure.

Lord, help me! how I detest such language of separation and violence in your Word. Give me insight with which to find even the tiniest sliver of your Good News of Grace and Forgiveness buried somewhere within all of this unrelenting threat of destruction and abandonment!

The first thing the spirit is leading me to consider is the nature of evil.

The Nature of Evil

First I must meditate and linger upon the first basis of my faith: God is in all things, all things are in God and from God.

Ephesians 4 5. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6. one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Evil, no matter how clearly the opposite of God’s nature, is not separate from God. Even the most extreme, unforgivable living-demons of men still found their original source in God, and exist within God.

Does this make God evil? No.

Evil is more like a perversion of God’s nature and will. When God wills for us to love our enemies, and instead we choose to hate our enemies, then we have become a perversion of God’s will. When God wills for us to love one another as Yeshua loved us, and instead we create lines of division and hate, we have become a perversion of God’s will.

In this sense, it might be useful to think of the Body of Christ as a human body. What do we call it when an area of tissue within the body becomes perverted, and grows outside of the bounds, or “will” of it’s purpose and DNA?

A tumor. Tumor cells are not foreign. They were once a seamless part of our own body. They are the “flesh of our flesh”, but they have become “perverted” and no longer serve their function within the body. They grow aggressively, greedily, ignoring the DNA programming delineating their function, just as evil in this world ignores the directives of God.

The Destruction of Evil

And when tumorous cells grow too much to the point that they negatively affect the health and well-being of the surrounding tissues, the body begins to attack the tumor cells. Now, this may seem like the metaphor is turning into an “us vs. them” proposition, but I assure you it is not.

When the attempts of the body’s defenses prove negligible (in our religious lives these defenses would be attempts of individuals to confront, sway, or otherwise cause the “perverted” members of the Body of Christ to turn back to the will of God), then we look to an outside solution.

In the our metaphorical example of the cessation of tumorous growths, the next steps of intervention can be radiation or chemo-therapy, or to excise the tumorous growths completely through surgery. In our lives as members of the Body of Christ, I would view these next steps of “treatment” of the “perverted tissues” of the Body of Christ as the equivalent as turning to prayer and looking to the power of God to act in the lives of our lost brethren.

But then we come to the most drastic stage of cancer treatment: the complete removal of the tumor to save the life of the body. This is where I struggle the most with these passages, and with this metaphor! When a tumor is removed, it is no longer part of the body. It is destroyed in fire, or preserved for later study, but always destroyed by fire in the end.

As a Christian Universalist, I do not believe that the “perversions of evil” among our human family will be “destroyed” in the fire. I believe they will be refined, and restored to something like the likeness and will of God.

But how can we make sense of this within the language of our metaphor? How can we illustrate that, in fact, the cancerous tumors are “refined”, “restored”, or “transformed” instead of being “destroyed” in the fire?

Nothing is Ever Destroyed… Ever

For this solution I turn to the laws of the natural world, or as I like to call it, “The Second Scripture”. You see, God gave us two sets of scripture to know God by: the scripture written with our own hands and hearts, often inspired by the Spirit, but always from our own human perspective, and the scripture written by God itself: the Cosmos itself. For within the delicate and infinitely complex movements and dances of sub-atomic particles, the epic revolutions of the stars, galaxies and planets, and the chaotic “unknowable-knowns” of quantum physics, we can see the ineffable handiwork the Great Author of the Universe.

And it is from the Scriptures of the Cosmos that I now turn for another Great Truth: nothing can ever be created or destroyed… ever.

This law of physics is called “The Conservation of Energy“:

It states that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant over time (is said to be conserved over time). A consequence of this law is that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another. The only thing that can happen to energy in a system is that it can change form.

But you say,”Trig, we’re not talking ‘energy’ here; we’re talking about ‘matter’ or ‘mass’…we’re talking about ‘us’.”

I know we are. Energy is matter. We are energy. “The Mass-Energy Equivalency” states:

Both the total mass and the total energy inside a totally closed system remain constant over time, as seen by any single observer in a given inertial frame. In other words, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and energy, in all of its forms, has mass. Mass also cannot be created nor destroyed, and in all of its forms, has energy.

All matter is energy. It cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed.

From this we can have faith that all matter and energy is God. And God cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed within God.

The Law of the Conservation of God

And there you have another example of “the stars aligning” to support the doctrine of universal salvation, and this time our support comes from the realm of science and nature.

We need to give God the breadth and scope due to God: everything. And by allowing God an infinite nature we can begin to acknowledge the truth that God can never be created or destroyed, nor anything within God.

Thank you, Lord, for granting me this insight which I so needed. Thank you for letting me see that even buried within the language of violence and destruction is still the shining truth of Universal Salvation, and the promise of inevitable transformation within the infinite Glory of God.