I think most of us take most things for granted.
Right now, thousands of things are happening in your body that you are totally unaware of. Trillions of
chemical reactions are taking place in every cell every second.
Electrical impulses are shooting across synapses.
Hormones are surging through your bloodstream.
Your body is breathing, thinking, metabolizing, calibrating, repairing, purifying, digesting, and circulating all time. And here is the amazing thing:
you don't give it a second thought. As important and as integral as those processes are to our survival, most of us are totally unaware of what our bodies are doing most of the time.
We take the miracle for granted.
The
retina conducts close to
ten billion calculations every second. And that is before an image even gets to the brain. The
Reticular Activating System is filtering millions of stimuli every second and determined what you pay attention to and what gets ignored. Your
ear drums are picking up sound waves and they are being translated into intelligible language.
Just to touch your nose with your finger takes approximately
400 separate chemical reactions. The ability to
pick your nose is an amazing act of neurological coordination. It's gross. I'm not advocating for it. But it's miraculous.
We take the
sunrise for granted. Why? Because there isn't a day that the sun hasn't come up. I don't know anybody who consistently thanks God for
keeping the planets in orbit day in and day out. But it's miraculous.
If we thanked God for every
heart beat we'd owe God 100,000 thank yous per day. Throw in every
breath and we'd owe him another 23,000 thank yous.
We take so much for granted.
And
Christmas falls in that category. It's hard to imagine no Christmas because it's been in existence for 2,000 years. But what if December 25 was just a day on the calendar like any other day? What if it was
never Christmas?
That was the situation in Narnia when Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy stumbled through a wardrobe into Narnia. Narnia was under a curse. The White Witch worked her evil magic so it was
always winter and never Christmas. But Aslan comes to
reverse the curse. And he does it through his death and resurrection.
If you've read the book or seen the movie you know that Aslan sacrifices his life to save Edmund. Edmund was a traitor. And Narnia law called
Deep Magic demanded his blood. But Aslan offers his life for Edmund's life. It seems like all is lost when Aslan is sacrificed on the stone table, but there is
"a magic deeper still" that the White Witch didn't know about.
The book says, "Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read a different
incantation there. She would have known that
when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Stone Table could crack and
Death itself would start working backward."
That's exactly what happened at the cross. Christ was crucified and death started working backward.
The Chronicles of Narnia give us a glimpse of what that is like.
Liberated StatuesI love the way Lewis symbolized death working backwards in the book. The White Witch has the power to
turn living creatures into stone statues. Her Castle courtyard is filled with stone statues. So after his resurrection, Aslan goes there and he starts
breathing on the stone statues.
Aslan starts with a stone lion. I love the description in the book. Try to picture this in your mind's eye.
A tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back-then it spread-then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper-then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened his great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn.
Aslan went from statue to statue breathing on them.
Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo.
And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, brakings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs, and laughter.
What does that have to do with us?
Genesis 2:7 says, "The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth and
breathed into him the breath of life."
God
inspires the dust and it becomes a living being.
Jewish mystics call it the
"cosmic kiss." They referred to the process as
memalleh or
"filling the void." The breath of God is what animates us and sustains us. In fact, Job 34:14 says, "If God were to
withdraw his breath, all mankind would perish and
return to dust."
I'm not sure what kind of
emotional or relational or spiritual voids exist in your life, but I know that God wants to fill them with His Spirit.
For what it's worth, the word Sabbath literally means
"to catch one's breath." During the week we are emotionally, physically, and spiritually
deflated like a tire with a slow leak. The Sabbath is intended to
reinflate our spirits. God blows up our balloons!
Fast forward to Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel has a vision of a valley full of dry bones. In verse 3 it says,
"Can these bones become living beings again?" And the Lord says,
"I am going to breathe into you and make you live again!" Then verse 9 says, "Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so that they may live again."
Now fast forward to John 20. Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead. He shows them his hands and side. Then he does something that is fascinating to me. It says,
"He breathed on them." And they received the Holy Spirit.
The reason I love the scene where Aslan breathes on the stone statues is because it gives me
a glimpse of what God has been doing since the dawn of creation. God breathes into the dust in Genesis 2. God breathes on the dry bones in Ezekiel 37. And Jesus breathes on his disciples in John 20.
Liberated statuesC.S. Lewis called the stone statues that Aslan breathed on
"liberated statues."
From 1501 to 1504, Michelangelo chipped and chiseled
a block of rock that was destined to become
history's most famous sculpture. When Michelangelo finished sculpting David, he was asked how he could create such a masterpiece from a slab of stone.
Michelangelo claimed
the masterpiece was already in the rock, he simply
removed the excess stone so David could escape. Michelangelo had a phrase for it. As he sculpted David he envisioned what he called the
immagine del cour or
heart's image. Michelangelo didn't see a slab of stone. In his mind's eye he saw David-
the finished product.
All great artists have the same ability. They don't see an
empty canvass or
slab of stone or
blank page. They see the
immagine del cour-the finished product. And they
work backwards.
In the same sense, God works backwards. He knows what he wants us to look like and He's working backwards to help us become who He wants us to be.
Ephesians 2:10 says, "You are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works
prepared for you in advance."
Kleenex
I read an interesting editorial on the
Chronicles of Narnia last week. The author is a self-professing atheist so she doesn't believe in God. And she came down pretty hard on the
Chronicles of Narnia because of its
Christian undertones. That's her prerogative. She doesn't have to like the movie. But what I found interesting is why she didn't like it.
She wrote,
"Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?"
We didn't ask him to. And that simple fact makes the sacrifice even more meaningful to me.
The editorialist said, "Adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a
sickbag handy from the most religiose scenes."
I needed a
Kleenex.
I had a conversation with an acquaintance last week who is
unchurched. They don't attend church and they have no religious framework. He came right out and told me he
cried when Aslan died. Then he said,
"But I don't know why."
Let me take a stab at it. I think there is
a yearning in the human heart that needs to know we're valuable. And that's where the cross comes into play. In a
free market economy, the value of an item is established by
what someone is willing to pay for it.Jesus established our value at the cross. He was basically saying,
"Your life is worth my death." If the cross means anything it means this:
God thinks you're worth dying for.
We have a core value:
everyone is invaluable and irreplaceable. The reason is simple: God loves each of us enough to die for us.
Christmas
Every December 25 we celebrate Christmas. So what is it all about? There are
a ton of traditions-everything from hanging mistletoe to Christmas trees to eggnog. I love all of those traditions. Especially eggnog! But if you strip away all the traditions, it all traces back to an event that happened 2,000 years ago. A baby was born in Bethlehem. At face value,
the birth should have come and gone without notice. There is no earthly reason why anyone living in the 21st century should know Jesus of Nazareth.
But this was no ordinary baby. Sure the baby cried like other babies. The baby wet his diapers like other babies. The baby learned to walk and talk like any other baby. But this baby was unique because he claimed to be the Son of God and
everything he said and did substantiated that claim.
Scripture says and I believe he
lived a sinless life, died a substitutionary death, and was raised from the dead on the third day.
And
death started working backwards!
So here is what we celebrate at Christmas.
We celebrate a God has offered each of us a gift called eternal life. The gift wasn't one of those
clearance rack gifts. It cost him everything! I Peter 1:18 says, "God paid a ransom to save you from the
empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And the ransom he paid was
not mere gold or silver. He paid for you with the
precious lifeblood of Christ, the sinless, spotless, Lamb of God."
The gift cost him his life. But it's
free to you and me. All we have to do is unwrap it and receive it.
Merry Christmas!
