The Beauty of His Story: Hope & Despair

If you're perfect, raise your hand.

I'd be willing to bet that none of you are raising your hands right now.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that most of you are listing all the things that keep you from being perfect. There's a voice in your head reminding you of every mistake, every failure, every wrong turn. It's a voice you hear quite often, maybe even every day. Let me assure you: you aren't the only one this voice speaks to.

Despair

As I've stated a number of times already in this series, we have an adversary: Satan. He lives and works in total opposition to God. Where God creates, Satan destroys. Where God brings light, Satan seeks to bring darkness. When God brings us back to life, Satan tries to keep us from being fully alive.

Through a constant whispering in our ears, Satan uses his voice to remind us of who we used to be. The voice speaks through many channels--society, the people of influence in our lives (family, friends, teachers, etc), our own hearts--but the message is always the same: You haven't changed. You're still the same person. Look what you just did! How can you be a Christian and still be doing that?

Quickly the joy of being made alive again begins to drown in despair as we realize our own weakness and imperfection. The Bible calls us to perfection and holiness because of God's perfection and holiness. Satan delights in showing us just how far we are from achieving it. He points out sin after sin, heaping up shame and cackling with delight as we collapse under the weight of it. Despair begins to rule and we cry out with Paul, "Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?" (Romans 7:24, NLT)

Hope

Fortunately that question has an answer. His name is Jesus. And He is our hope.

Jesus died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did what we couldn't do. And it worked. The cross = mission accomplished! If you have placed your faith in Jesus, you stand forgiven in this moment, no matter what you did last night or this morning or five minutes ago. You ARE forgiven. You were forgiven in the moment you first asked Jesus to save you from sin. And each time you have sinned since then, all you've had to do was go back to Him so He could remind you that you are forgiven. And that holds true for every time you will sin in the future.

We don't have to despair because we have Jesus.

But we also have the Holy Spirit.

God gives the Holy Spirit to every believer (Ephesians 1:13) and the Holy Spirit gives us victory in the battle against sin: You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world (1 John 4:4, NLT). The battle will be long and hard and you will often feel exhausted, but you already have the victory! There is HOPE: I have written this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know you have eternal life (1 John 5:13, NLT). And with that hope, that assured confidence in your status before God, you can overcome the despair.

What does that look like practically?

It looks like remembering the Gospel every day: because Jesus died, you are forgiven.

It looks like confessing your sin: bring it into the light so the Spirit can help you deal with it.

It looks like choosing to believe the truth: though you feel broken and dirty, God sees you as clean and whole.

There will be a new heaven and a new earth where we no longer have to fight sin, but in the meantime, you are already new (2 Corinthians 5:17). Choose to live in the truth of that, to be the new person God created you to be. And when you sin, don't despair. You are already forgiven. Let that build in you a hope that leads to victory over your sin.

The Beauty of His Story: The Creator

What does it mean to create?

According to the dictionary, creating can involve any of these things:

• causing something to come into being
• evolving something from ones thoughts
• causing something to happen; to bring it about; to arrange it, as by intention or design

Any way you define it, creation is the opposite of destruction. And while Satan is bent on destroying us and the world around us, we can have hope because God is constantly at work to create.

God Created

At the beginning of time, God created. He made the heavens and the earth out of a formless, dark, empty nothing. He added sky, land, plants, the sun and moon, stars, and animals. He spoke things into being. He created and He was creative. I mean, have you seen some of the creatures who live on this planet? Who else but God would have thought to create the duck-billed platypus? He took the time to bring into being from His own thoughts an entire world full of stuff we could never imagine.

Want to know something amazing?

He created it all for us! He created it for us to enjoy. He created it for us to look at and wonder at the One who created it all.

“The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

The skies display his craftsmanship.

Day after day they continue to speak;

night after night they make him known.

They speak without a sound or word;

their voice is never heard.

Yet their message has gone throughout the earth,

and their words to all the world.”

Psalm 19:1-4 (NLT)

And then He created us... well, humans. After all the magnificent trees and plants and birds and animals, He stopped and created human beings with His own hands. He formed Adam and breathed into Him. He created something that had His image, that would carry His characteristics in human form. He gave us creativity and a will and knowledge. He brought us into being.

God Is Creating

In Psalm 139, David praises God for creating him, for knitting him together in his mother’s womb. Every new human who comes into this world is a reminder that God is continuing to create.

Aside from creating physically, though, God is also creating spiritually. This is where He stands in direct opposition to Satan. When we choose faith in Christ, we become a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). After his most famous sins (adultery and murder), David cries out to God saying, “Create in me a clean heart” (Psalm 51:10). The Hebrew word we translate to ‘create’ (bara) can mean both bringing something new into existence or recreating into something new. This process of creating is also called restoring, and it seems to be God’s favorite thing to do. 

He doesn’t just make our hearts pretty and clean. He actually recreates them so they’re entirely new. This is His promise to anyone who chooses Him (Ezekiel 36:26). He will take the crushed and broken pieces of the life that Satan has destroyed and make them into something new and glorious. Despite everything, God still wants a relationship with us. And the only way that can happen is by creating. How amazing to realize that in Christ, you ARE brand new, no longer defined by Satan and his attempts to destroy you.

God Will Create

Remember all the things I listed in the last post about Satan being a destroyer? I noted that we have disease, war, greed, power, divorce, abortion, death because Satan will use them all to destroy us.

BUT we can have hope despite all of that. And we can have it because God has created, is creating, and (best of all) will create.

“Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth,

and no one will even think about the old ones anymore.

Be glad; rejoice forever in my creation!

And look! I will create Jerusalem as a place of happiness.

Her people will be a source of joy.

I will rejoice over Jerusalem and delight in my people.

And the sound of weeping and crying will be heard no more.”

Isaiah 65:17-19 (NLT, emphasis added)

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city of Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. I heard a loud shout from the throne saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!”

Revelation 21:1-5a (NLT, emphasis added)

A new heaven and a new earth are coming where God will dwell with us and Satan’s destruction will end. That stuff I listed before? “All these things are gone forever”!!!! I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait for that day to come. I’m so thankful that in the story God is writing, creation will win out over destruction in the end.

Where do you see God creating in your own life? How about in the lives of others?

The Beauty of His Story: Light & Dark

On the very first day of creation, God creates light. In this moment, we have opposites—light & dark—and the opposing forces (God and Satan) choose which they will utilize for the rest of the story.

Satan is all about darkness. In Romans, Paul explains that when we know God and choose not to worship Him, our minds become dark (1:21). It would seem logical that the same happened to Satan considering he was the first to make that choice. His heart became dark and that became his goal in life: to darken the hearts of others.

The dictionary defines darkness as an absence or deficiency of light. But it also uses phrases like obscurity, concealment, lack of knowledge, and lack of sight.

Satan likes darkness for two reasons:

1.       He can hide in it- In the darkness, it’s difficult (or even impossible) to see anything for what it really is. All you can make out are meaningless shapes. In the light, you’d be able to see Satan for what he really is. In the darkness, he can make you think he’s something else.

2.       He can use the dark to hide God- Just as it’s hard to see Satan in the dark, it’s hard to see God, too. We are blinded by the darkness Satan seeks to keep us in (2 Corinthians 4:4). We can’t see God for who He really is. We can’t comprehend the message of the Gospel, and so we remain in the darkness with Satan.

There’s no light apart from God, so when we walk in opposition to Him, we walk in darkness (1 John 1:5-6). We can’t see anything. We can’t find the path. We can’t tell who is leading us. We can’t tell what’s good for us and what will lead us to death.

We need a good, strong, steady light.

My senior year of college I was a Resident Advisor. The RA who lived in my room two years before me was deaf, so they installed one of those fire alarm strobe lights in the room to ensure she’d be aware of when the alarm went off. I did not realize the strobe light was in there. One morning at about 3:00, I was startled from sleep by the sound of the fire alarm. I opened my eyes to discover my room was filled with a flashing light. I don’t know if you realize this, but one of those lights flashing in total darkness wreaks havoc on your depth perception. You should also know that my bed was about 3 feet off the ground in order to accommodate my mini fridge. Needless to say, I pretty much fell out of bed and stumbled to the door. Moral of the story: a flashing light in complete darkness is not at all helpful.

Fortunately we have a good, strong, steady light in God.

“No longer will you need the sun to shine by day,
    nor the moon to give its light by night,
for the Lord your God will be your everlasting light,
    and your God will be your glory.

Your sun will never set;
    your moon will not go down.
For the Lord will be your everlasting light.
    Your days of mourning will come to an end.”

(Isaiah 60: 19-20, NLT)

He is light Himself, and He gives us His Word as light: Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path (Psalm 119:105, NLT). We don’t have to walk in the darkness. Jesus’ death and resurrection make it possible for us to be transferred from the darkness to the light (1 Peter 2:9). God calls us to walk in the light because of what He has done for us. There we will find the path with ease (though the path itself might be difficult). We can see who is leading us, and that He is trustworthy. We can see what is good for us and what is bad for us.

Light and darkness seem to be the most basic of opposites in God’s story, and yet they are also the most important. Without light breaking through the darkness, we are stuck with minds blinded to the truth. In the darkness, we can’t see God or Satan for who they really are. Satan tries to keep us there so he can remain in control. But “God, who said ‘Let there be light in the darkness,’ has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6, NLT) God uses a light which the darkness cannot overcome in order to reveal truth, to reveal himself. The darkness doesn’t have to win. 

Where do you want to be?



Read the Introduction to this series here.