I can hear the music of many wars. On battlefields littered with mangled frame of our sons and daughters, on our streets where we are assaulted with pollution – not only from the exhaust of cars, but the smog and smoke of pride and arrogance, from the smoldering flames of bitterness and the noxious fumes of strife.
I can hear the music of the wars of this age. I wonder how did this song steal into our lives unnoticed or did we seek it out and find it, stirring up the hornet’s nest in our ignorance?
We are consumed by the shadowy wraith, swallowed whole and crushed on every side. The arrows that fly in the noon day now ride the crest of the morning breeze. Diseases race through the boulevards and streets like mares of the night tearing away all hope for safety. Pestilence is now a tenacious tenant in our tents. The stench of corruption is paraded as the agreeable attar of the modern day Homo sapiens.
Our altars are bankrupts, as our prophets’ profit off the throbbing of our poor feet, peddling lies as truth and vending vices instead of virtues. We sigh for we remember that Jesus remarked that the end would be marked by wars and rumors of wars.
But they are no longer rumors; they are real. The cruelty and hatred that pervades like freckles on a growing teen’s face. I can hear the music that slips through the cracks. In the heartbeats racing fiercely into the darkness as nation rises against nation.
I can hear the agony in Cain’s voice as he raises the blade carved from a donkey’s jawbone. I still hear Abel’s cry as it mingles with the silence of sorrow and the sickly medley of discord.
I see the flowers wilt in the distance, mountains weep; their icy cold eyes laced with death – the earth convulses, the night sky once pregnant with stars is ruby red with the blood of Eve’s sons.
We are blind to the superficiality of it all. We neither see past our hunger for pleasure nor our greed for the gory gold of hades. We marinate in a pool of our own ignorance. Instead of feasting fat on the freedoms in Christ we choose instead to dance to the medley of mayhem. We make our nests in the den of death and feed lustily on the decadent delicacies of debauchery.
Indeed the god of this plain has blinded us. He has cast a blanket of sleep and distracted our eyes with images that leave us drooling after inane ideals.
When will we just as the Ethiopian Eunuch snap out of the reverie and delusion and venture on a quest for the Truth? Will we ever depart this false utopia and ask as the Ethiopian, as the Jailer, as the three thousand asked – WHAT MUST WE DO TO BE SAVED?
Jesus, who in his own right is one of the most controversial beings to have walked the earth, tells us to seek first the Kingdom of God. He adjures us to turn our appetites towards the Majestic Monarchy of God. Magnanimously God has transplanted us from the scorched soil of sin to the verdant vista of Love.
Understand this: we are not peering in through a window, we are IN THE FATHER. We are invited to partake of His nature, to see ourselves as He sees us. We are planted in the courts of the Creator and led to the babbling brook of blessing.
Yet we do not see. Yet we act like paupers. Is this not why Paul prays that our eyes be enlightened? He prays that like pupils, the cornea of our eyes are enlarged with the revelation of Righteousness. It is this righteousness that causes us to rule and reign in life.
Paul writes, as one drunk with insight, of the ‘kainos’ creation. The man born of God! Fashioned and forged in the fiery furnace of faith. He speaks boldly from his dank and damp cell, despite the propensity of such a location to induce depression, he speaks of rejoicing. This is the power of the Revelation of Christ.
We are no mere dummies domiciled in domain of death. We are the Children of Christ. We are the ascended ones, who have climbed the hill of the Lord. We are the ones in whose hands the sceptre of dominion reside. Do you understand that darkness does not comprehend you? It has no answer for your existence. You are an anomaly to the devil, a conundrum that he cannot wrap his claws about. He is perplexed, startled and this is why he seeks to blind you.
I ask. Why is it then that we run roughshod over friend and family in pursuit of happiness? Our puerile proclivity for the paltry trinkets of this cursed earth cause us to drive stakes through the hearts of those who love us. Governments lead their populace with guile, carousing beneath eroded causes like a madman making his shade from the storms beneath a ‘kwashiorkored’ umbrella.
We are like the prodigal son whose tongue itches for the butter of hell. But hell has no salve for our aching soles. The merchant of mayhem with his glib speech hoodwinks us till we barter our souls for soup, till we trade our birthright for a few bucks.
But man can discover fire all over again. Like the cave men eons ago, he can glimpse into the Largesse of God and see the Love, Life and Light in Christ. For Christ is the very vault and treasure of heaven. He is the beauty that can neither be exaggerated nor embellished.
It is this fire that will lead us out of this Dark Age. For the whole of creation awaits the manifestation, the unveiling of the sons of God.
So this is my question to you, as the Spirit asked me – will you allow me (the Holy Spirit) lead you through the cavern of chaos into the chamber of the king where you enjoy sweet fellowship with the Father?