BitterSweetLife

A Post of Substance

“…The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord,
as the waters cover the sea.” Isaiah 11:9

The days of the angels are behind us and the long afternoons when Christ’s sandals kicked up dust in Galilee have passed. But greater days lie ahead. A new kind of knowing will engulf earth. Glory no longer veiled, Christ will reappear.

How do waters “cover” the sea? Simply, they don’t. They make up the sea. They “cover” the sea like air and sunlight “cover” the sky. Likewise the coming revelation of God’s character will fill the earth, saturate it like ozone. But this will be no propaganda campaign; no blimps, no pamphlets no shiny mailers. God will no longer advertise.

This time it will be Christ himself, tangible and true, all-knowing still, invincible as always, invisible no longer. Never again will we listen for the quiet word, search for a glimmer or trace of his spirit. The days of crying after Christ in wilderness, searching him out in solitude, stumbling across him in an ancient book…those days will be gone. In their place comes a cataclysmic inundation, a cloud of knowing, a flood of God. These will be different days.

I snatch at the picture like we catch at fading dreams. There was that moment, I think…

Like that glimpse of coming dawn, when the sky is still dark, but the dark moves, shudders, then shifts aside, unraveling in moments before an inexorable displacer…

Or that summer day when joy was immanent, divinity breezing on the wind, a Christ I could almost touch, near-tangible like a spun-gold sunbeam, elusive blessing caressing my skin—only a glimpse:

Cottonwoods wave, wind streams,
world turns with no lever,
clouds slide on sunbeams,
today I could live forever.

Or so it seems. It seems that way for an instant, an hour, even a day…because there was a glimpse…a glimpse of something impending, a presence nearby but unrevealed.

I’ve heard such moments grow rarer as we grow older and I hope to prove this false. Hopkins penned,

Ah! as the heart grows older, it will come to such sights colder

and no doubt he is often right.

Sometimes spiritual impulses are like physical reflexes, losing strength and resiliency with age, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Cynicism does not have to set in. Spiritual blindness is not a necessary phase. Heart weariness is not par for the course. When we’re talking about Christward impulses, why couldn’t the opposite be true?

Why not go on seeing the invisible, touching the intangible, knowing the unknowable—as much as I can here—until the day when the present limitations on Jesus’ nearness are shattered? This is, shall I say, the plan. I’ve seen enough glory to keep on waiting, to gradually apprehend more and more until the final illumination. Most of us have.

We’ve all caught glimpses of glory; if only we’ll trace them to their source. Beauty wracking an ugly word, Glory asserts itself. And glory will take root, if permitted. When the day of "filling" comes...

Such glory seeds, so long concealed, so long stunted by dull eyesight, burned by dry winds of cynicism, washed in saline waters, will no longer be under stricture. Conditions will be altered. As it did once, two millennia ago, the equation of life will undergo a sudden, irrevocable change.

Syllogisms change when truth is revealed, and the old formula of life will be obliterated. The axis of life will be recharted. Suddenly, no more factoring in of pain. No more allowing for failure. No longer will life be a mixed bag, thorns and fragrance, some happiness, some heartache. At last, [_____]Sweet. Sweeping all before it will come the wave of God, “filling the earth.” Pure, unadulterated Christ.

Freed souls, like swallows at dawn, will flock to him. It will be the first day of liberation—like the first day of a new year, an auspicious hour of promises, made now with the will and power to keep them, a soul-resolve that may not be trifled with any longer—the first day of eternal springtime.

My pictures fail, matches compared to stars. Really, no one can imagine this filling. Instead, I simply ask…

Are we ready for the glory days; am I ready? Only seeds of glory will endure, towering at last to full height in the final, shocking God-light. What's built with glory will last. All else will be washed away.

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