Inevitability

I spent the weekend at the sea. It was the ocean, really (better yet, the Gulf). Light and airy (white and turquoise) compared to my other recent beach stay in Washington State, which was moist, diffused, gray and chilly. Yet both left me with the same sense of a vast and beautiful inevitability.

God is inevitable. Do I resist His love? No matter—the reality of it will not change. Do I doubt His sovereignty? Pointless—that, also, will never change. Do I deny His existence? Also laughable, for it will never change. In fact, TRUTH will eventually overtake me in every belief, thought-pattern, argument, resistance, blindness, or lie I have ever walked in. The truth is inevitable for all of us. When it overtakes us (now or at death) can be influenced by us, now. Where it places us (at the side of the King or in a pit of separation) is also determined by us, now. But the fact that it will overtake us is as inevitable as the sea.

“I will call them My people who were not My people, and her beloved, who was not beloved. And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ there they shall be called sons of the living God.” Romans 9:25-26

I have been comparing righteousness by the law and righteousness by faith. How very different they are. The second makes me feel free, the first, guilty. This Romans/Hosea adoption (see verse above) is impossible through a mechanism like law-righteousness (for, never being able to be fully righteous through the law, one is actually fully condemned). Only through the righteousness of faith (full, complete, since it is a righteousness sourced from He who is perfectly righteous) could such a complete reversal of what was reality take place. What used to be, is no longer.

That righteousness by the law/works is on the hell side of this thick, black line, and righteousness by faith in Jesus is on the heaven side, is as inevitable as the sea. Do you hate the thought? Are you so used to “getting to heaven” or “feeling God’s love” by being good, that the idea of having been wrong about it all is unthinkable—it would throw your whole past life into the red side of the accounting ledger? (Yes, you can be caught in this habit of action and belief while actually knowing the truth.) You will eventually be free from the misapprehension you now labor under, but a choice is still before you—freedom now, or freedom later. Love now, or love later. And, for some even, salvation now, or death later? Why should I shy away from pursuing the truth now? It is pursuing me, and question is not if it will overtake me, but when.