by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

The branches are covered with ice down here in Mississippi, which is unusual, so most people I know are hunkered down indoors. We made a big pot of chicken soup a few days ago that’s been keeping us warm as the temperatures have dropped.  

Speaking of dropping temperatures, a verse that has come to mind over and over again the last handful of years has been a line spoken by Jesus after his disciples got him talking about the destruction of the Temple, and the hard times to come as the world’s end approaches. Jesus says that because of the increase of wickedness in those days, the love of most will grow cold. You can find that whole conversation in Matthew, chapter 24.  

I have felt it in myself. I have felt the creeping coldness. When I see how wickedness seems to flourish in the world, climbing and climbing to the top of the heap again and again, when I see how selfishness and scarcity have chilled the air in the habitat of my soul, I know Jesus was right. He was, as usual, deeply realistic about things, not to mention insightful of the human heart, meaning he always sees into it clearly. 

And, yet, his own heart did not freeze up, somehow. Jesus remained, incredibly, both clear-eyed about the wickedness of the world and the tendencies of the human heart, and he remained warm-hearted about the future. He wasn’t blindly optimistic, it’s worth noting. I mean, he didn’t pretend like everything was going to be fine. In fact, Jesus’ realism can be pretty uncomfortable. He sees the cross coming, he sees the eventual destruction of the temple and all the misery to come. But, he also sees something else up ahead. Something so bright, beautiful, and substantial that it thaws the ice. Or, if it doesn’t thaw it, allows him to somehow skate on top of it to his destination. He, as Hebrews 12 says, sees joy up ahead. And the writer of Hebrews says that if we can get a glimpse of that joy Jesus came to make available to us, it will fortify our hearts against the creeping chill of evil in this world.  

It won’t remove it, of course. That joy didn’t remove the experience of evil even for Jesus himself. He was still murdered all the same. Joy doesn’t spare us heartache. Doesn’t spare us suffering—even unjust suffering. But it does give us something to contrast against evil, and joy gives us a promise of God’s loving accompaniment in the midst of suffering, since joy is a fundamentally relational reality. Joy means someone good is glad to be with us. That good presence clarifies the difference between the works of God and the works of the Enemy.  

The story the Bible tells is, in large part, that of a God who suffers unjustly at the hands of cold-hearted humanity. A God, who through a long, complicated process of relationship over time, continues to move with warmth towards those very people who treat him with such coldness. It’s the story of a God, who against all odds and a world of opposition, holds onto the hope of saving the world from drowning in the waters of chaos because the surface of the lake had become an impenetrable layer of ice. He is always working to melt that barrier and call us up and out of those waters, making our passage through chaos a baptism into new life, rather than a permanent prison.  

And so, Jesus laments the wickedness of the world that is always threatening to freeze our hearts, steal, kill, and destroy our joy, and drown us in despair.  

This week, I’ve been watching the news. It is chilling. I am praying for my friends in Minnesota. And this morning, I was reading the end of Deuteronomy, where I found something that surprised me. Let me back up for a little context… in the history of God’s relationship with his beloved (and broken) world so far, he’s reached out to a man named Abraham, whose family is going to become a sort of custom-made people-group. In order to save the whole wide world, God is going to make his focus really tight, and work with one family. This family, over the next few generations, is going to get bigger and bigger while they’re enslaved in Egypt, then God will rescue them in Exodus, and at Sinai, he’ll begin shaping them into a nation with a totally different cultural form from everyone around them. They’re going to be weirdos, honestly, because the God who actually made the world, has become strange to the world. So Israel will be a custom-made nation whose culture God will shape in such a way that it will provide all the contextual structures for later on, when Jesus comes, so the things he says and does will actually be intelligible to the people he’s trying to talk to. It’s a long play on God’s part.  

When we get to Deuteronomy, this is the second time God has brought his people to the very edge of the land he’s been preparing for them. This is where, once they’ve settled here, God can continue the work of shaping them culturally as a curated context to support the salvation he’s planning to pull off when Jesus comes. That context is necessary, for instance, without it, John the baptist calling Jesus “the lamb of God” is meaningless gibberish. With it, all kinds of meaning clicks into place.  

But I mentioned something that surprised me about the end of Deuteronomy, right? Yes, at the end of the book, Moses is preparing to die, even as he is preparing the people to enter the promised land. And God is realistic about how this is going to go. Like Jesus in Matthew 24, he is clear-eyed about human hearts, and he’s very honest with Moses about it. He knows these people’s hearts are going to grow cold and wicked, even in the promised land. In fact, the promised land may just be the place where they get cozy enough to take the old warmth for granted, allowing the fire to die.  

But the thing that surprised me was God’s tactic for addressing the coldness. After chapter upon chapter of listing all the laws he knows the people will eventually forget, God says something like, “Moses, things are going to go badly just so you know, but I’ve got this great idea: let’s write a song for them to sing.” What? A song? Yep. God commands Moses to teach the people a song for when they’re love grows cold and they begin to slip away from the warmth of God’s ways. Embed this bit of sung poetry into the culture, so the people have something like an “axe for the frozen sea” to quote the title of a Ben Palpant book.  

As a songwriter that caught my attention. This song is God’s protest song against the coldness of his people’s hearts toward him and toward one another. It’s a song that lays a picture of joy in contrast to evil, it’s a song that wafts like smelling salts under the nose of a numbed out brain, it’s a song that’s brutally honest about the terrifying consequences of giving in to the chill of wickedness, as well as, beautifully hopeful about the God who never stops inviting his frigid lovers to sit by his hearth and learn the ways that lead to life. And it is a song that promises God will meet anyone that is ice-bound along the way, to break them free of death’s overwhelming grasp.  

God sings a protest song against our enemies, and even against us, when we have taken up the battle banner of rebellion against God’s ways. He invites us to listen, because if we do, this song will, “descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.” Can you hear the warm rain fall, like ice melting, caught up in the cupped hands of the crucified God? The God of perfect justice and abounding mercy?

The post S6:E4 – We’re going to need a new song, Moses appeared first on Matthew Clark.