26. Riding with God on the Cherubs of Heaven

I am inside the God who rides upon the cherubs, and He is inside of me. And oh, there is a ride just before us.

 

I feel such a burning need to draw together, somehow, this mighty strand of seeing that we have no life but Christ with understanding the great cataclysm that God Himself is staging upon the earth, the climax of His great Story.

The two go hand in hand. It is not possible to come into the full understanding of the gospel without sparking the final clash of the age. But please do not think that understanding that clash in any way darkens the wondrous revelation of Christ as our life.

The problem we have is that we desperately want a God who is safe.

But, as CS Lewis pointed out, God is good, but He is anything but safe. He is the most dangerous and scary Being in the universe. He risks everything on a knife’s point – and He is our Father. He is gentle and kind, certainly, but to see Him in action just read Psalm 18. This is the One with whom we ride.

Jesus said: In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you.

We ride in Him.

In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried out to my God; He heard my voice from His temple, and my cry came before Him, even to His ears.

Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of the hills also quaked and were shaken, because He was angry. Smoke went up from His nostrils, and devouring fire from His mouth; coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down, with darkness under His feet.

And He rode upon a cherub, and flew; He flew upon the wings of the wind.

He made darkness His secret place; His canopy around Him was dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. From the brightness before Him, His thick clouds passed with hailstones and coals of fire.

The LORD thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered His voice, hailstones and coals of fire. He sent out His arrows and scattered the foe, lightnings in abundance, and He vanquished them.

Then the channels of the sea were seen, the foundations of the world were uncovered at Your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of Your nostrils. He sent from above, He took me; He drew me out of many waters.

The “I” and the “me” in this passage is David, and in a certain way it has been you and me – but not any more.  Oh no.  You and I are no longer the “me” that God comes to rescue. We are in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father. Do you see Him there? Do you see you there?

I am inside the God who rides upon the cherubs, and He is inside of me. And oh, there is a ride just before us.

If you want to know why it is that darkness is engulfing America and the world you have no further to look than at yourself. You and I are the cause of it.

To insist with all of our hearts, with all the intensity of our beings, “Christ is my life; I have no other life,” is to cast the accuser out of the heavens. He prefers to stay hidden and unseen. Becoming visible is not his choice. But this is the showdown, and he is ready for it. All of his pieces are in place; God has made them ready. Here is a truth, standing at the center of the gospel, that we must understand. Acts 2: 22-24 and Romans 9:16-24

Jesus of Nazareth… being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.

So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.’ Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens… What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called…

We see God in all things. That does not make everything in the world “good.” Quite the contrary. What we see is that God has set the stage for the demonstration of the glory of His Son.

Most of Christianity wants God to end this thing with a whimper and a sigh, a “rapture” that takes them away to “heaven.” He has no intention of stooping to their timidity. I have no interest in “going to” heaven; I am already there.

To ride with God upon the cherubs of fire with the winds of the universe blowing through my hair is a hidden desire in my heart, no different than my little boy’s need to race down the street on his bike.

It is to know that when 10,000 people drop dead all around me, I ride in God. It is to know that when the US government turns openly vicious and cruel as the beast that it is, I ride in God.

It is to know that as war and pestilence and death sweep the earth, I ride in God. It is to know that as roving bands of cannibals, desperately searching for food go down my street, I ride in God.

It is to know that as radio-controlled, genetically-engineered transhumans multiply upon the earth, I ride in God. It is to know that as Satan and his demons materialize upon this planet, God and I have caused it, and I ride in God.

There is inside of you and me a Word that created the universe, a Word that faced death and defeated it, a Word that triumphs over all of its enemies – all who cry: “Did God indeed say?”

But look at me. Here I am, fragile and weak, sitting here in my chair with my feet resting on a cushion, typing words onto my computer screen at eleven o’clock in the morning. Are they just words? And why do I say this?

I suspect that most of you who read this letter are not all that different from me. We are weak, each in the way God has made us weak.

And here is the incredible dichotomy. If we were strong, we would not know Him. But being weak, and knowing Him, He commands us to say, “I am strong.”

Let’s burn the bridges behind us, casting aside the need to be humanly “sane.”

He has spoken as a whisper in our hearts. Yet that Word is the same Word that raised Jesus from the dead. Let that Word come out of our mouths as the mightiest shout the universe has ever heard.

“Grace!” “Grace!”

And her child was caught up to God and to His throne.

~~~

After reading some of the things I have shared about this world, you might feel what a dear sister in the Lord shared with me. She wrote:

There were a few things you shared that kind of jolted me; that’s when I realized how much fear was really churning in me.  I’ve asked the Lord to ground me in His love in His security because I haven’t felt safe. 

I understand exactly what she is saying. I have faced the same thing myself.

That’s the problem with seeing the “goal” as it is presented to us in the New Testament. We then become anxious about “achieving” that goal and find ourselves drifting away from that peace and rest that we are complete in Him and He is all there is in us. For a while I went back and forth. I know there is a goal, a task, a fulfillment that is yet ahead simply because God says there is over and over, but I also know that none of that can be known except out of His life in us.

But I am no longer moved from that place of rest in all that He is in me because of that goal that He Himself places before us. This is a very personal and intimate place we find in the Lord. It is well possible to believe God for the “goal” without leaving complete rest in Him.

“Perfect Peace and Safety Inside a God Who Can Be Frightening.”

It’s a mistake to paint Him as tame; He is not. And every time I read of someone who enters into His presence in the heavens, He scares the tar out of them, at first, and then says, “Do not be afraid.” In fact, Jesus says that more often than anything except, “Watch out.”

But consider what He did. He took the disciples into the worst storm they had ever seen and then went to sleep – deliberately. He took the children of Israel to a trap between the Egyptian armies and the Red Sea. He is always doing these sorts of things. We cry, “God, You want me to trust You, why on earth do You do this to me?” And still, He persists.

To ride with God requires knowing utter peace in the midst of absolute turbulence. I suspect it’s a question of how far we are willing to ride with Him. Yet it is He who is willing in us.

But there it is again. “How far we are willing to ride with Him,” and immediately, we are caught in the question of “Can I make it?” and we lose the peace we thought we had.

Some seek for peace by denying the reality of war and destruction and the scariness of an uncontrollable God. I can certainly understand why they would. Yet, I have never been able to do that, because always, it felt dishonest to me and not in keeping with the reality of the Bible or human history upon this planet or what is happening upon the earth today.

So I seek for peace in the midst of the storm, for knowing Him utterly in me and I in Him in the midst of chaos and calamity and loss. Don’t get me wrong; I am a man of habit and comfort. Yet I have to grapple with the way things are, not the way I want them to be.

The Lord Jesus Christ, filling my heart with all of Himself, and carrying every part of me inside of Himself, is all the world to me. He is my life.

Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourself, as it were, for a little moment, until the indignation is past. Isaiah 26:20

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust.” Moses, in Psalm 91:1-2

Let’s not look for refuge in the denial of reality, in imagining things about this world that cannot be true. Rather, let us give ourselves to believing with all our hearts that Christ is our life; we have no other life. Let us believe that Christ is every word God speaks fulfilled in us.