There's Bad News and There's Good News

[HKHaugan]

There’s Bad News and There's Good News

A saddened and frustrated architect looks at a collapsed building he had designed, goes back to his drawing board, surveys every detail of his blueprints and, in anger, sweeps his arm across the tables scattering the blueprints across the floor. What went wrong? Where are the flaws? Was it his design? No one is perfect but he had checked every drawing and had his subordinates recheck them. He begins to survey every step of the construction from the engineering to the laborers hired. After two months he finds the reason, a sub-contractor’s changing the concrete quality thus weakening the entire foundation, all for the promise of making an extra buck. A few moments of temptation to cut corners, greedily change the consistency of the material and cover the condition with a few dollars to a building inspector. Fortunately there was no one in the building but the time and loss plus the rippling effect on the community caused considerable damage economically and socially.

But there’s more to the story. Some of the concrete workers noting the number of rebars and a questionable concrete mix saw what was going on but, fearing the loss of their job, said nothing. Another group of workers who were watching the pouring of the concrete thought that it looked different but also said nothing. A couple of labor supervisors were busy reprimanding some of the workers when they should have been present at the pouring, a disciplinary thing that could have been done at another time. A young assistant engineer, brand new on the job, just learning the process, was asked to take the place of the supervising engineer who took the day off. The architect himself trusted that the job would be done to his specifications and was present at the initial few days of construction assuming that the good work he saw would continue. But he never visited the site after that. To cap it all off the contractor had not vetted the sub contractors, opting instead to take the lowest bids on the job.

Translate this story into the spiritual dimension and we have a parallel to Paul’s assessment of sinful humanity in Romans 3:10-12 based on Ps.14:1-3, plus others, “As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."

So that’s the bad news. However, here's the good news, “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (Ro.3:21-26).”

The good news is also about an architect. His name is I AM, the One who created a perfect physical environment, the universe. He is Spirit. He designed the environment with two dimensions, the spiritual and physical. His Son was the contractor through whom it all came into reality by the power of His Spirit. In it He created two people to be like him, to live in it spiritually directed. They would be images of Him with a creative mind, a relational heart and a motivating spirit. There they would spiritually follow their Architect-Contractor-Spirit to work together in it, enjoy it together, be creative in its use together and then to reproduce increasing more and more to be like their Creator. The whole project was spiritually perfect in its inception, its functioning and its purpose, to last into eternity. His enjoyment and His pleasure in it was all for His Son through His Spirit. It was a perfectly conceived spiritually relational enterprise.

Then came the great 'however.' However, the original couple decided they didn't need their Creator to show them how to live in what they had been given. They listened to another voice, a deceptive tempter who lured them into doubting the Creator's Word, purpose and intention by thinking and acting on their own without depending on Him for direction. Then, like a punctured balloon, the spiritual connection between the couple and their Creator collapsed. What took the place of the Spirit of God guiding them was the self-destructive force called sin, a spiritual disease that brought death into the picture. The balance between the spiritual unseen and the physical seen was disrupted and from that point on people lived only for them selves. Their physical enjoyment ended in pain, fear, guilt and frustrating aloneness. Relationships on every level were broken as each individual was born into the world. They used to look up and see God. Now they could only look across and guess, speculate and suspect.

When you lose the vertical dimension there is no way to be right in the horizontal, no matter what your intentions or how hard you try. You want to be right, feel right and do right but you can't. Right is no longer in you. The desire to be right is there but the ability is gone. The real problem is you know it. You mind knows it, you heart feels it and your spirit can't act except in fear.

But the Architect refuses to let go. He has a plan to restore the whole process. His Son, the Contractor, will become a man in a physical body to show the spiritual way to think, feel and act out what humanity was intended to be and look like. This will all be done by the Spirit directing the will of the Architect in the Contractor Son whose name is Jesus. All the perfection of the Architect Father, the Contractor Son and the Spirit' Labor will be seen in the Man named Jesus. The world will reject His perfection and pay His daring confrontation with the world by death on the Cross.

Now look at the Cross of Jesus. The vertical beam and the horizontal beam intersect to form the Cross with Him at the center. What the physical image depicts is God's heart in Jesus' spiritual willingness to die by faith to bring each human heart to that same Cross to die to self centered sin so that faith in Him brings back spiritual eternal life. The visible reality points to the invisible reality behind it. Jesus' faithful heart is at the center of the visible intersection of the vertical and horizontal. This is why the Cross of Jesus brings humanity to face the truth that unless we live first in spiritual reality we are lost in horizontal aloneness.

Put another way, if we don’t live by the Spirit of God whom we can’t see who can we trust in the world we can see since all motivation is driven invisibly by imperfect people? Anything less than God's motivation is an immoral free-for-all. If there was ever a time in history to make that truth come alive, it’s now.

God’s recovery plan is simple: faith in His Son Jesus who brings order to the mind, stability for the heart and direction for our spirit when it comes to living out our every next moment. All our decisions are moral decisions. All moral decisions are spiritual decisions. All spiritual decisions are invisible and they determine everything in the visible world in which we live. Through trusting Jesus with every next moment our heart is transformed and motivated to bring the invisible relational dimension to bear on each and every physical thought, feeling and behavior for and in each and every next moment.

God the Architect Father sent His Contractor Son Jesus to be a human being living vertically by Holy Spirit Labor Force in faith, perfect faith, in the horizontal human context of time, place and society. The vertical in the horizontal is living the Cross in every next moment. This is when we are right, perfectly right, right within, right without and right with God. Faith justifies us which is faith making us right.

The question for us then is what defines perfection? Simple,---anything that doesn't die. Jesus embraced sin so the power and fear of death would die on the Cross. Jesus rose from the dead, from sin, from evil and the devil's grip which runs the world. In the horizontal, the self-centered heart is the altar on which the world worships. Self-centeredness is the world wide religion of human beings who don't know God. Self-centeredness is the decapitation of the image of God in each of us.

Jesus chose to show His Father, Himself and the Holy Spirit as the One God who brings eternal life personally to each and every heart willing to believe in Jesus the Son. Having faith in Him gives us stability in an unstable world. He gives us meaning in a meaningless society. He gives us eternal purpose in a world where only temporary satisfaction is the purpose. He gives us life that lasts in a world that won't. The world is the bad news.

Here's the good news. Being made in the image of God each of us has the ability be an architect in designing creative ways to reach others, to be a contractor to carry out the design right where we are and to be actively faithful in doing what we design. That's why Jesus came so personally for each of us. That's the plan in a nutshell.

What a time to be a partner in His plan.