Ongoing Deliverance

Genesis 32:24-31; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12; Mark 8:22-25

Jacob’s name meant, “he who grasps by the heel,” in line with the circumstances of his birth, when he came out just behind his twin Esau, grasping Esau’s heel. He could have been called “heel,” for short, because he lived fully up to his family tradition for being a trickster and a scoundrel. He took advantage of his twin’s weakness to get him to trade his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew. Then, he tricked his blind father Isaac into giving him the compensating blessing meant for his brother. In consequence, he fled for his life from his enraged brother and lived away from his homeland for many years. On the way out of his homeland, God gave him a vision of angels along with the promise that he would be brought back to his homeland.

Then, many years later--with wives, concubines, children, servants, herds, flocks, and much more--Jacob fearfully re-entered the promised land with plans to meet his brother and attempt a reconciliation. He believed that God was real, but he had not really been living like it.

The first night, on the border of the promised land, Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok River laid down to sleep and instead spent the night wrestling with a powerful stranger who toyed with him, allowing Jacob to think that he was prevailing, and then, with the lightest of touches, the stranger put Jacob’s hip out of socket. Still, Jacob held on, demanding that the mysterious stranger bless him. The stranger said, “What is your name?” Jacob answered, “Jacob.” It was practically a confession of sin. The stranger said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, which means wrestles with God, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.” From that time on, Jacob now known as Israel, walked with a limp, and, although still far from perfect, was without doubt a better man. The people of God ever since have borne the name Israel, wrestles with God. Even you and I, as Gentile believers in Jesus, are grafted into the trunk of Israel. The people of God are a people transformed by a wrestling encounter with God.

Our Gospel story today is from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, just west of the Jordan River and hence geopolitically outside official Galilee, but still basically of Galilean culture. It is referred to as the city of three of Jesus’ twelve disciples: Andrew, Simon Peter, and Philip, although by the time the gospels get in full motion, it seems that Andrew’s and Simon Peter’s family compound has been relocated to Capernaum, another fishing town on the Sea of Galilee just east of the Jordan River and hence inside official Galilee. My point is that this story, like Jacob’s wrestling, takes place on the border.

Our Gospel story also sits at a chronological borderline in the unfolding story of Jesus and his disciples. Prior to this story, Jesus has been proclaiming that the reigning power of God is available to human experience for those who repent and believe the good news. He has been demonstrating the presence of God’s reign through his teaching, preaching, prophetic knowledge, healings, exorcisms, other miracles, his redemptive love for outcasts, and sinners, and challenging ethical guidelines in the areas of money, sex, and power. Immediately following this story, he challenges his disciples to articulate their faith that he is the Christ and then begins to warn them of his coming crucifixion and resurrection, immediately throwing their new faith into confusion. Even when he takes Simon Peter, James, and John up on the Mount of Transfiguration, where they behold a confirmation of his divine glory and hear the divine voice saying, “Listen to him,” they are still not able to put crucifixion and Christ into an intelligible sentence together. They still need to experience Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit before they really understand who he is. What they have experienced to this point is only the background. The real adventure is still ahead, and they stand only on the border of it.

Our Gospel story today tells us of a blind man for whom Jesus’ first healing touch gives him a shadowy vision that does not yet match the goal of vision, but is only on the border of it. A second touch is necessary to give him the real thing. Let’s look at it:

Mark 8:22 And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him. 23 And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” 24 And he looked up and said, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” 25 Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

Our Gospel story today has symbolic value. It is designed to prepare us to see that all the changes that have taken place in the disciples lives to this point in time are not yet the goal that is still coming. I have been saying “our story,” because I believe that it is our story today, right here at First Christian Church, Berryville, Arkansas.

So long as we are in this life, there is more to be discovered about the reigning love and power of God that has been revealed to us through Jesus Christ. There is more to be discovered about the significance of the fact that we have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, daily dying with Christ to sin and daily coming alive to walk in newness of life with the living, loving, reigning God who actually lives in us and speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. We get not just a second touch, but a new touch every day. Our way of seeing and experiencing life constantly transforms as we ourselves are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next, ever more fully in likeness to Jesus who is the very likeness of God.

But we will not experience the daily newness unless we are open to it. We may prefer to control life according to our own expectations, within our own comfort zones, within the borders of our previous experience. If we are not willing to cross over into the next dimension of life that God has for us, we will stay stuck where we are. We will be diminished as the blind man would have been if he had been satisfied with seeing people that looked merely like tress walking around. But the blind man wanted more, and he got it.

The something more that he got opened up a whole new world for him. I have been told that vision suddenly acquired can be terrifying, dizzily disorienting. You are suddenly bombarded with a stunning array of stimuli that you have never had to process before. The way you had imagined things and the way that they actually appear are disconcertingly confusing. Some newly sighted blind people actually wear blindfolds for significant periods of time to reduce the new stimuli to manageable proportions.

That is what it is like to be born anew into the realm where God is immediately in control of all things. We cannot stand that much God all at once. We retreat into the familiar. We allow ourselves to experience only what we have come to expect.

Unfortunately, in the comfortable world of our familiar expectations, there is no such thing as ongoing deliverance. The fears that have sent us back to this familiar world become our dominant experience of life, and they wrap ever more tightly around us. In the end the experience becomes one of miserable stagnancy and decay.

Is there something in you crying out for a real breath of fresh air? Do you long for a river welling up from within to new life? Fresh wind. Refreshing waters. These are the scriptural images for the life-giving Holy Spirit.

Over the past months, Ken Hale has read two books by Francis Chan. Their titles tell much: “Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God,” and “Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit.” I have read only snatches of these books, but Chan’s central theme is that, if we try to tame God to live within our expectations, we will not experience God very much at all. Chan argues passionately that a person who wants to love only within boundaries that make sense to the world will never really experience and pass along the crazy love of God.

The church that wants to do only what it can do on its own strength and resources will never experience what only God can do. Some may build successful religious institutions according to their own expertise, but they will not be vibrant places where new life and ongoing deliverance are regularly experienced. If we want spiritual vitality and supernatural effectiveness, we have to make room for a God who regularly pushes us beyond our comfort zones. It is on the borders that God does his best work.

If we want to encounter that kind of God, we have to understand that we need to be constantly growing in our daily practice of our faith. God can challenge any area of our lives at any point. He may challenge us to new levels of godliness in how we handle our time, our money, our sexuality, our family life, our Bible study, our prayer life, and more. He may challenge us to reach out with godly love to people who scare us stiff. Following Jesus does not allow us to invoke our reservations clause.

But God will constantly be challenging us to the next level. And we cannot expect much good to come if we are always pulling back from the challenges.

God welcomes those who will dare enter into real and bold encounter with his holy, loving, reigning presence, who will hold on and hold out for a divine blessing, and who will walk in life as transformed people.

It is such people who experience ongoing deliverance.

Do you want to be one of them?

(I was later asked why I did not add, “Do you want a second touch?” It did not occur to me, but there is no reason why that is not still a good question now, “Do you want a second touch? Ask, seek, and knock.”)