For Christmas, a friend of mine gave me a book on a band that I've been a fan of for over 30 years, and in it I read some pop trivia that I had not yet heard. Funny how you can be paying attention to somebody's career for 30 years and still miss something as significant as their heroin addiction. Not funny at all, actually.
The other day I was talking with someone else about her journey out of a nicotine addiction. She had begun smoking again when her marriage broke down, and was now striving to break the hold of it for the second time. Her experience was interesting to me in that her smoking habit had begun again in secret as a coping thing. She had worked very hard to keep the truth of her tobacco use from her friends and her children because she feared their disapproval, and had seen the addiction progress much quicker than it originally had when she had been smoking to fit in with her friends as a teenager.
Thing is, addictions are private matters at first- they begin with dabbling in something, progress through regular involvement to dependency and ultimately slavery. The privacy factor is part of what makes it possible for a person to become addicted to something, I think. The dabbling and regular involvements are well-kept secrets, so that long before the time when a person's dependency has begun to interfere with his or her relationships, work, and other involvements/ responsibilities, there is a definite problem. Part of the problem- part of the slavery- has to do with the need to keep the story from going public. The grip of the disease tightens as the victim struggles to keep the problem hidden.
There are groups that exist to offer support and accountability to those who identify the hold that this or that addiction has upon their own lives. 12-Step programs afford the recovering addict with a structured, highly organized approach to systematically to break the hold of the addiction and cope with life outside its grip.
In one sense of the word, churches could be seen as support groups for recovering 'sin addicts.'
Redemption is a word often used to refer to the freeing of slaves. In the biblical sense, it denotes a transfer of ownership from a mighty master to the incomparable God. Jeremiah, a prophet of Israel commonly referred to as the weeping prophet, speaks of the Lord redeeming his people from the hand of those stronger than they. It's important to note that whereas the slave master is, indeed, mighty, this might does not compare with that of one called Lord. Whether we are talking politics and economics or applying homiletics, one called Lord is on an entirely different level than one who simply masters slaves.
Lest we forget this, the Apostle Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with an exciting exploration into the incomparableness of God. This past Sunday I rambled through this massive passage allowing very little room to explore any one theme in depth. In truth, this passage probably contains the conceptual outline for six sunday morning talks. For what it's worth, here's the executive summary...
1.3 Blessing: The blessings promised are largely Spiritual in nature and in context. There is no promise here of health or riches. We are not to think of God, his Kingdom, nor his Lordship in purely natural terms. Spiritual blessings are incomparable to natural ones.
1.4-6 God's will and our destiny: Can destiny be contingent upon our will? Definitely. Destiny is a deal requiring two consenting parties. God has made provision for all to both participate in his work and enter into his rest, but the full realization of God’s dream for our lives requires our willing involvement. God will not take us where we don’t want to go. His desire for the world is too great for us to envision, but whereas his will is incomparable with ours, it is essentially compatible. God desires partnership, but it is incomparable to any partnership that we might experience with other human beings.
1.7, 14 Redemption: is a buying back- purchasing one’s freedom to choose a life. This is accomplished in Jesus’ sacrifice. He is hope. In him is the hope of being able to truly accept God's offer of Lordship/ partnership in his work. Otherwise our sin addiction keeps getting in the way. God's intervention in Jesus Christ can only be provided by him since his holiness and worth are incomparable to that of any human being.
1.9-11 Mystery of God: What does God want? Relationship with us. “To know and to be known” by his crowned of Creation: Us. Knowing the Creator of the Universe and being known by him is incomparable to any other natural human relationship.
1.12-13 Belief and Trust: The engagement of our will with the will of God. Up until this point, all of the work has been God's. However, the believing and the trusting requires faith and it is only by faith that we have hope of accepting ‘the demand imposed upon the believer that he shall realize in this life that of the world to come.‘ (H. Chadwick) God requires that of us which no one else has the right to require.
1.14 The Guarantee: The greek word translated here as guarantee also has, in its nuance, the promise of an engagement ring... The Holy Spirit’s presence in our life (that deep spiritual connection that we simplify for the theology of our children as ‘having Jesus come live in your heart’) is a right-now taste of the mind-blowing intimacy we will enjoy with God in fullness later...
All of this is just some of what makes God incomparable and relationship with God worth proclaiming.
Redeemed how I love to proclaim it. Redeemed by the blood of the lamb.
(Fanny Crosby)
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