My Heart Revealed

If you read my last post you know that this week has been hard for me and that I've been trying to dig through some personal wounds without resorting to fleshly comforts.  In an effort to seek spiritual comfort, I turned to Genesis 15.  This is the story of God promising Abram that his descendants would be too numerous to count.  I have always drawn comfort from this story because of the way that God makes His covenant with Abram.

Abram has some responsibility in preparing for the covenant.  He acquires the correct animals and obeys God's instructions by splitting them in half and setting them out with a path between the halves as was the custom for making a covenant with someone in that culture.  The idea was, so should it be done to me if I don't honor this covenant.  Serious stuff.  Also, in verse eleven, Abram is waiting for God and has to fight off the birds of prey that come to try to eat the carcasses.  Once the sun goes down, in verse twelve, Abram falls into a deep sleep.

While he is asleep, in verse seventeen, God comes down in the form of a smoking oven and a burning torch.  It seems like God uses that imagery of himself in the desert as well.  Anyway, the important part that has always been comforting to me is that God walks through the animals by Himself.  (Maybe twice, once as the oven and once as the torch?)  God hereby takes sole responsibility for fulfilling this covenant.  Now Abram knows that it is completely on Him to bring it about.  What a blessing!

In between these two things though something very odd happens in the end of verse twelve through verse sixteen.  When Abram falls asleep he is filled with terror and dread.  This was to underscore the seriousness of what God was about to tell him.  God reveals to Abram that his descendants would be slaves for four hundred years before possessing the land that God had promised to Abram and the nation that God could make from him.  It's put in there almost like an aside.  It kinda breaks the flow of the story a bit so it got my attention.

At first, I filtered this through my understanding of theology and just accepted it as God doing whatever He wants for His own glory.  This is still a fairly new concept for my personal theology (a year or two).  I'm still working out some of the implications.  We also see this idea in other scripture, most notably in the gospels when Jesus heals the man blind from birth.  When asked whose sin it was that caused his blindness, Jesus answers, "He was born blind so that I could heal him in this moment and be glorified."  (my paraphrase)

Recently I have grabbed on with both hands and sometimes my teeth to this idea of God's glory being the end all be all.  It's the only thing that makes any sense to me, but when you mix in some personal experience you get a different matter altogether.  As I thought through my childhood, particularly my abandonment by my father, I had to admit that I had a good deal of anger toward God.  How could He let me be alone for so long?  I know He was with me all along, but I sure felt alone and worthless all those years.

I realized that at the heart of this anger was a feeling of being deprived of something.  Several somethings.  A father, an example, someone to balance out and support my mother, love, a sense of being normal, stability.  The list goes on.  So of course I'm pissed.  Every person deserves to be taken care of.

Bingo!  There it is!  Entitlement.

At the core of all this anger was the belief that I was robbed of something that I deserved.  A pain free childhood was never promised to me.  God never said that life would be comfortable.  In fact I'm pretty sure He promised me trouble, fiery trials, persecution and possibly death just for siding with Him.  He did promise me though that He would never leave me or forsake me.  He will never abandon me, ever!

I recalled my comments to a friend recently that Jesus did not spare Himself these pains.  He grew up a physical bastard.  More importantly, as His kenosis became complete on the cross, He was actually cut off from His Father.  The only truly pure being became sin for us.  For me.  

Father forgive me for my grumbling and please don't let me die in the desert.  Help me to be patient as you restore me to the promised land little by little.  You are everything!  If Jesus can empty Himself for us all for Your glory, so can I since His Spirit fills me.  If it glorifies You, then being abandoned as a child was a small price to pay to inherit You.