The First Prophet: Abel - Part 3

God's experience of Time is unique among all beings. It is not that He created Time and set it in motion, nor that Time exists within Him - it is none of these global concerns. It was in God's wisdom to reduce Himself to Time, to bind Himself to it, to live it, for it to affect His Being, and for Him to be submerged in time in the flesh of Jesus the Christ. The Most High has made Himself the Most Low: He took the very nature of a creature and a servant and limited Himself whilst being Eternal and Omnipresent. Through this impossible possibility we glimpse the heart of God.

He is Everywhere in Time, at once. A thousand years is a day for Him, and what seems distant in human history for Him is still keen and fresh - as if it happened yesterday. For Him, History is Now; it ever impinges upon the present. He sees the blow that fells Abel, the blood that drips into the soil, the stain it leaves, feels Abel's cold cheek and looks over the flocks that no longer have a shepherd. The instrument that wrought this cruel act lies in the dirt: the implement Abel used to slaughter the lambs for his sacrifice, the very sacrifice that sowed the discord that produced this fratricide. His blood still "speaks"; it cries for justice. Our Lord never forgets.

The pronouncements of Woe against the Pharisees in Luke 11 and Matthew 23 clearly show the pain Our Lord experienced over the murder of Abel: the trauma, the hurt, the suffering, the delight in Abel's humble offering. He was privy to Abel and Cain's last conversation. The greatest hurt party of all was the Lord. This is no parable or allegory for Our Lord; it is a tragedy that grieves His heart to this day. The sufferings of God started well before His earthly life. Unless we dwell here, unless our heart be like that soil that absorbed Abel's blood and soak in the unresolved issues and indictments and griefs of God's own heart, how will we see as God sees? How will we feel as God feels? How could we intercede for our own families, for warring nations and tribes, and for divided communities? Unless we call Abel our brother, how could we ever mourn with God and share in the fellowship of His sufferings? How could we ever stay our own hand when it wants to rise up against our righteous little brother? We must recoil in horror at the thought; if only we could hit 'rewind' and take the Lord's rebuke to heart before we hurt our brother; we could write a different story that would gladden the heart of God, and maybe make the sacrifice of Abel more sweet. Lead little Abel into the field and ask his advice about how his sacrifice was acceptable to God and ours was not. For indeed, the sacrifices of God are a humble and contrite spirit, and Abel was that meek and lowly fellow; Cain was not. You see, we are Cain before we can become Abel; and Abel before we can become anything like God.

'Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,' Part 3

"What are you , O mighty mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become level ground."
Zechariah 4:7

What is the dirt that has to be dug through? First to go is the life that grows out of that dirt: that which has a semblance of life and fruitfulness, that which seems to be benefitting you, that which has been with you most probably from the beginning - olive groves that have been here longer than the mountain - that which simulates the life of God and in some way it is unthinkable to lay the axe at its root: but I have been blessed by it! we declare. These things are the closest to our heart, that which we have yearned for and prayed for and God has allowed us to have and yet it comes between us and God. Will you lay it down? These are simply the extremities, the levers God uses to prize open our heart. The real work has not yet begun. Others will wonder: why have you done that? It will make no sense to them. Why would anyone cut down such beautiful olive trees? Even then you may be tempted to replant them.
Next will come the dirt out of which this purported life grew. Soil is a mixture: weathered rock, rotten life, water and air. In short, death. But it's fertile! It gives life! Life only comes by one death: the death of Him, not you! The death of your 'death' - the death of your sacrifice on your terms is the real death; it's not about your sacrifice, it is about His in you. But this is what I've achieved; I've spent years and decades on this! The death of your self-appointed and self-conscious sacrifice, where we whitewash our tombs, must come. We cobble together from the remnants of our life something that approximates to life, but supplants the real life. We stitch it together and rationalise it. The life of God needs no such explanation; it is self-evident.
The dirt is cleared to reveal what the Lord really wants to get at, and this is where the real work is done by the hands of God. Something which sticks up vertical needs to be laid down. At its core it is the rock-like obstinacy and stubbornness and self-will that will not bend or yield in certain or any circumstance. It will not allow the circumstance to dictate to it but wrestles with it. It bucks beneath the circumstance - not accepting that this is God's will. We wanted the victory and the triumph but He must conquer our hearts first. On first contact it must be broken and then peeled back and excavated to reveal the strata of the rock, its secret and hidden ways of how it was originally made. We protest and complain that its uprightness was for God. It's hardness and strata will be put to more glorious uses than it was otherwise intended for: an indefatigability for God, a defiance for God in the face of the world's onslaught, a strength that will take the whole weight of the House of God because it has been laid in a tomb of rock and not of earth.