Simple “Only God”
A Dream to Expound
In the dream I was working with a team to solve a simple legal case, the complexities of the law, imaged by countless filing cabinets, meant it had to be. The context of the dream is indispensable to its application. Earlier that evening I’d attended a small meeting in the board room of a local and sophisticated megachurch. The stories and slides we viewed showed rallies of tens of thousands of lost people turning to the Lord in nations previously closed to the gospel. Nations long Islamised and defiant to Jesus, Sudan, Egypt, and Lebanon. The repeated humble heartfelt refrain was that “only God” could have opened such firmly closed doors. As prophesied about Jesus, “I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.” (Isa 22:22; Rev 3:8). There is a “back story” to all this.
Trauma
As the Church in China began to explode only after the victory of communism in 1948, as the Argentinian revival came after the generals admitted defeat in the Falklands War (1982), as the Church in Iran multiplied subsequent to the Islamic Revolution (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/meet-the-worlds-fastest-growing-evangelical-movement/), those hungry for the gospel in Sudan, Egypt and Lebanon have first been traumatised by poverty, war and civil strife. They have witnessed the utter failure of man-made “religion” and statecraft. Multitudes of impoverished kids, refugees, and utterly broken people without any semblance of power are receiving the gift of basic trust in God. These, “poor…enslaved…blind” (Luke 4:16-17) have been “appointed to eternal life” (Acts 13:48). As believers in advanced technological and educated societies we find it near impossible to think like marginalised humans. As such we are vastly out of touch with the humble “mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16; Phil 2:5). We desperately need to petition the Lord need for his simplicity.
The Simplicity of God
Whilst Western theologians have turned the divine simplicity into a barely comprehensible attribute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_simplicity), the Bible’s message is easy to follow. If in Job and Proverbs the simple man is spiritually ignorant (Job 5:2; Prov 1:22, 32; 7:7; 8:5 etc.), in Psalms (19:7; 116:6; 119:130) to be “simple” is a precondition for divine revelation. “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.” This is the simplicity our Westernised Church culture grossly lacks. As a man broken before the Lord, Paul testifies with confidence, “For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you.” (2 Cor 1:12). How does God grace the Church with his own simplicity as an indispensable key for victory in the supernatural realm?
The Meek Inherit the Earth
We know that in the End the humbled saints will share in Jesus’ global rule of the earth (Ps 37:11; Dan 7:27; Matt 5:5; Rev 20:4). However, in their zeal for this conclusion, many contemporary teachers exalt in the Church’s “divine power to destroy strongholds” but fail to ground such authority in “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Cor 10:1ff.). David, who never lost a battle, testified to the secret of his success, “your gentleness made me great” (Ps 18:35). Paul echoes, “power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9). Few of us are so reduced in mind to be grasped by this wisdom! Below is a poetic key to receiving Jesus’ simplicity (https://thetruthrenaissance.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/poetry-when-god-wants-to-drill-a-man/)
When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!
How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!
How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses,
And which every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him
To try His splendor out-
God knows what He’s about (In Oswald Chambers “Spiritual Leadership”)
Thes words instinctively ring true to those who know the Father’s ways, first with his Son, then with us his holy children (Heb 2:9-11; 5:7-8; 12:5-11). We are lacking faith, humility, lowliness, prayer as prerequisites for a major move of God, but each of these is a fruit of a preceding work of God.
Trauma under Christ
The global Church is being led in God’s ways by the lowly, traumatised, orphans, refugees, and the poor. It is not their natural powerlessness that attracts the Spirit of grace (Zech 12:10), but that the all-merciful Father sees their sufferings “in” the disinheritance of the crucified Lord (Mark 15:34), who explained, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” Matt 25:40). Paul views natural “wisdom…power…nobility” as disqualifications for receiving extravagant grace; for “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Cor 1:26-28). The Father has always chosen those being formed in the likeness of his rejected and debased Son (Deut 7:7; Judges 7; Isa 52:13-53:12; Rev 13:8).
Conclusion
The Lord’s Spirit desires to downsize our minds, and if we need debasing trauma to reach such spiritual heights of simplicity, may he give such grace. In an age when “what works” is a major idol, so that our Church is run by “middle class smarts” (D. Boan), “only God” can deliver us from our cleverness. Let us simply pray, “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.”