Saturday, November 26, 2016

O.K., I Get It Now


Our beloved brother Tim in Australia does a blog, "Onesimus Files" (https://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/). His is the only blog I read almost-daily. In the comments there of Tim and others, I frequently hear something God's saying.

But it sometimes takes me a while to get what God's saying. I tend to expect that truth is complex, and I over-think things.

When God is saying something simple, I often miss it. And truth is usually simple.

That was the case with a simple comment Tim made recently, in a discussion of America's current politics: "It's not really about politics."

It took a while for that simple truth to sink in, and open to my understanding.

I finally get it. Nothing that human beings do is really only about what humans do. Humans are spiritual beings, and the things we do are . . . not "ultimately," at the end: but FIRST and ALWAYS . . . spiritual acts.

That seems to me what Jesus is saying in Luke 12:54-6, when He tells us to "analyze" appearances. "This present time" cannot be understood by those who only look at appearances.

We have a wide choice of "commentators"...political and religious...eager to explain to us what's "really" going on. We constantly hear them analyze every event in terms of all the demographic "appearances" they (and we) believe determine people's political thoughts and actions: age, sex, race, political orientation and religion (often the same thing), by region, by educational and income levels, sexual orientation, occupation.

What Jesus is saying in this time . . . has always been saying . . . is that politics is not really about politics. Politics must be, and can ONLY be, understood in spiritual terms.