Today’s Scripture Reading (April 6, 2018): Hebrews 7
Rex Tillerson in his exiting remarks from the
State Department on March 22, 2018, made
this comment. “This can be a very mean-spirited town (Washington,
D.C.). But you don’t have to choose to participate in that (mean spirit). Each of us gets to choose the person
we want to be, the way we want to be treated,
and the way we want to treat others.” You can choose the type of
person that you decide to be. I was recently
reminded that not all people feel that way. There is an increasing number of people that reject
this idea of free will. For this group of people, we are nothing more than the
sum of both our genetic make-up and the environmental forces that have acted on
us throughout our lives. Free will is a
myth. You will never be truly free to act independently. Washington D.C. is mean-spirited because it attracts people with a
drive to get ahead at any cost. Those who are
not bent in that way usually choose to not work in Washington, D.C.
I disagree with the critics of free will. I believe
that we all make a myriad of choices every day, ranging from the mundane to the
extremely important. And I am not sure that at the time we recognize the
importance of our decision. I hope that
we can make the choice that Tillerson invites us to make, both in and out of
Washington. I never want my behavior to be mean-spirited or to cause others
pain. I do believe that we both need each other and that we are commanded to
love each other, even when loving each other is inconvenient.
I do not believe that either of these
conditions is a grand change from the guidelines of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible).
We were always supposed to exist in community
and love each other. The reality is that it is a lot easier to love each other
without community because love is always
easier without having to put up with annoying people ( I love you, now just get
out of my house), but that option has never been up to us. The problem in the
Tanakh is that we were never able to live up to that standard. I story of Jonah
illustrates this principle. Even though God evidently loved all people, Jonah
didn’t. And Jonah did not want to take part in any plan of redemption for the
Ninevites. In the Hebrew covenant, Moses stood as the mediator between God and
man, but no one could help us with our
behavior; no one that could remind us that we truly have a choice to be the
kind of people that we are called to be.
Enter Jesus as our high priest. Jesus is not
just our mediator, although he does fulfill that role. As a priest, he gets to walk with us and remind us
of our commitments. The presence of his Spirit inside the church guarantees
that the new covenant will be more effective than the old. Jesus, who is both priest and sacrifice, has dealt
decisively with our sin. And now, in the absence of guilt, we get to make our
choices. We can, if we want, live the same life that we have always lived. And
if we do, the voice of our priest will slowly disappear from our lives because
of the choices that we have made. But if we choose to walk with our priest, to
listen to his softly spoken words directed into our lives, I believe that we
can make this world a better place, with more peace and more love. And I
believe that Rex Tillerson is right. The choice of how we respond to this
world, whether we move to make it better or worse, mean-spirited or not, is
really up to us. And the guarantee is that Jesus has promised to walk with us
to make this world better if we will let
him.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Hebrews 8
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