The more we want of the things of this world, the more
compromised we are. The Lord says that
the nation has gotten rich but that the cost is too great, their wealth has
accumulated at the expense of the poor laborer.
We live in a time of great income inequality and the economic system the
Lord set up for His people would never have allowed such inequality to exist
for a long period of time. If they had
observed the Sabbath and Jubilee years there would never have been a permanent
aristocracy and a permanent underclass. The
Lord’s plan had a reset button as well as a means of throttling the
economy. To give up production every
seven years would allow the land to rest and it would have the effect of
minimizing the disparity in wealth. Can you
imagine our modern worldwide economy, particularly the stock exchanges and
currency exchanges if a country said, every seven years our businesses will
shut down? As I have said many times,
the biggest snare to God’s people is always prosperity.
How did He go from their wanting to make Him king to, “Is
not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” He made a claim to be the bread from heaven
and the gig was up. They had seen the
signs and now Jesus denied them the sign they proposed and it was over. They were thinking like materialists, they wanted
more of earth when He was offering them more of heaven. We default to earthly things because we think
of spiritual things as less substantial or important, certainly less
immediate. Jesus makes it clear that
such is the state of all humanity unless the Father draws us. We are unable to rise above the physical and
immediate without the Holy Spirit working in us to want the higher and
spiritual things. It is a paradox that “the
bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The mystery of the Word made flesh is in that
paradox. What does that paradox have to
say about our flesh when we are in Christ Jesus?
The work of much of the first half of the book of Romans is
to solve the question I just posed. We are
debtors to the Spirit and therefore we are to live by the Spirit and not the flesh. Gratification of the desires of the flesh
when they oppose the Spirit is to denigrate the value of what Jesus has done
and it is to grieve the Holy Spirit, to devalue the gift He has given to
us. How much of our sinfulness is due to
fear as Paul says here? Our fears of
belonging cause us to act in ways that make us acceptable to men. Our fears of the future cause us to
compromise in the present and they cause us to attend to and seek after not the
kingdom of God but the kingdom of man, cause us to become lovers of money. Our fears are our weaknesses and Paul says
the Spirit helps us in our weaknesses. Let
us today set our hearts and minds on the things of the Spirit that we may be
the revelation the world has been waiting for, the children, true children, of
God.
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