The Old Has Passed Away; All Things Are Made New!
Our friend, Max.
“All forms of idolatry (sin) involve us deeply in folly. All idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile. Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy.
If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but undernourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being.
In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God.
Our church communities ought to be cities of refuge for sinners, busy with the traffic of forgiveness, busy with people learning the ‘craft’ of forgiveness–ordinarily by getting apprenticed to a master forgiver or two. The idea is that saints ought to teach forgiveness to saints-in-training. In the holy catholic church (the communion of saints), we should be rehearsing the forgiveness of sins like pianists, practicing the hard parts over and over till we get them right. Forgiveness of others, forgiveness of ourselves. Where we are in a place of function in freedom from bitterness, envy, self-loathing...
The prophets dreamed of a new age in which human crookedness would be straightened out; All humans would be knit together in brotherhood and sisterhood; and all nature and all humans would look to God, walk with God, lean toward God, and delight in God. The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call
shalom."
~ Plantinga
Shalom, Max. Shalom.
You are untied, intertwined, with the God. Just "The Way it is Supposed to Be".
