CHARLO, New Brunswick, July 30, 2023 – We have so little time, and we use what little time we do have fussin’ and fightin’, which is just what the devil wants us to do. He sets up the conflicts – the traps – and then sits back and waits for us to walk into them….

And we nearly always do.

Meanwhile, God is over there waving at us, trying to get our attention and hold it long enough for us to make some kind of a commitment to him, any kind of a commitment, and follow through.

But I gotta be honest – it’s mostly a losing battle for him. He’s left with only a remnant, though it could have been worse, I guess, if Moses hadn’t intervened, if Joshua hadn’t intervened, if Joseph hadn’t intervened, if Elijah and Samuel and David and Jeremiah – if all those righteous men all down through the ages hadn’t intervened on our behalf, culminating in Jesus.

But ever since Jesus it’s just been us, a rag-tag group of mostly unknown followers that Paul rightly described as not very impressive, not much to look at. But God got our attention. We saw him waving and waving and waving and we finally waved back, moving closer to see what all the fuss was about.

So he got our attention and now he’s holding it. We’re the followers now. We’re the interveners. We’re up there with Moses and David and all the rest. We’re part of that team. Jesus called his Cousin John “Elijah” and knew how bizarre and downright dubious that sounded to his disciples. They were expecting something different, some grand gesture or sign that would confer a holy haze around the expected anointed, but it was only Cousin John, slightly oddball Cousin John who’d lived out in the desert most of his life and had now gotten himself landed in jail for speaking his piece.

Jesus himself was decidedly underwhelming, considering what people had in mind when they thought of Moses’ prophesied “Prophet”. They’d pictured David come back to life in a body the size of Goliath’s with the wealth of Solomon and the supernatural reach of a dozen Elijahs. They’d pictured something, well, anything other than this low-keyed soft-spoken son of a carpenter from Nazareth. And yet there Jesus was, the prophesied messiah, just as there John was, the prophesied Elijah, just as here we are now, the prophesied remnant, the saints of the Kingdom of Zion.

The more times you say it, the more real it becomes. When Jesus rose from the dead and appeared in a body that was on its way to becoming glorified, the disciples could finally see that what they’d suspected was real all along. Paul says we see God through a glass darkly, but if we make it Home, we’ll see him face to face; and that we know now only in part, but if we make it Home, we’ll know in full. Yet even here now we’re given flashes of facetime with God and flashes of full knowledge of him, courtesy of his Holy Spirit. So we know what we see is real and is becoming more real by the minute.

They never accepted Jesus because they were expecting something more, something maybe like what the devil was trying to entice Jesus with when he tempted him in the wilderness. They were looking for the devil’s grandiose notion of what a messiah should look like and so completely rejected the actual flesh and blood Messiah standing in front of them. People are still rejecting and dismissing God’s handiwork as inconsequential and not the real deal. The problem isn’t that God isn’t performing miracles like he used to; the problem is that people aren’t recognizing the miracles when they see them.

I’m a miracle, for instance. Everyone born of the Spirit is a walking, talking manifestation of God intervening in time and space. That’s a miracle. If I weren’t a miracle, these words wouldn’t be coming out of my fingertips and I wouldn’t be loving my enemies and praying for those who hate me. I can guarantee you that loving my enemies is the last thing I’d be doing if God weren’t working a miracle through me. You can’t love your enemies unless God’s working through you. Humans don’t love their enemies on their own steam.

Jesus says the Kingdom is within us. People are expecting some grand revelation on the scale of Ezekiel’s vision of God’s throne, but the Kingdom is within us. It will never be set up on Earth. That’s a job for the anti-Christ, who’ll be only too happy to answer to the name of Messiah and King and even God, when his time comes. The same kind of people who rejected Jesus for being too… well… carpenterish are now rejecting the Kingdom for being too invisible. They’re waiting for something more tangible, something they can stick their fingers into and bow down to. They wouldn’t be caught dead bowing down to a carpenter.

So here’s how I see it: it’s either that John was just Jesus’ crazy cousin, Jesus was just a poor carpenter from Nazareth, and I’m just a nobody from nowhere, or it’s that John was the prophesied Elijah, Jesus is the prophesied Messiah, and I’m part of the prophesied remnant, a saint living in God’s Kingdom.

It’s all how you look at it. God wants us to look at him, to fix our gaze on him so that we can see through his eyes. The devil wants to distract us, divert us, mislead and misinform us. He wants to blind us with false expectations, like he blinded nearly all of God’s people all those years ago.

Ultimately it’s up to you where you look. You can look at God or you can look the other way.

But I recommend you look at God and hold your gaze steady there.