The Age To Come

Recently I was musing on the prayer of Jabez, which I then followed up with another post.  As I promised in that post, here is the word/vision given to me earlier this year. 

The snake and the Church
16th February 2006

I saw a giant snake, long and thick, coiled around a reclined human figure.  The figure was pasty white and bloated, obviously unhealthy.  The figure seemed oblivious to his position (the figure seemed masculine, but the sex was not important), and was stuffing his face with cake.

It’s as if I was seeing this with the Lord.  I perceived the snake as satan / the world, and the reclining figure as representative of the Church.  I saw the grip that the world had on the Church, and the oblivious nature of Church to the entwining coils.  Indeed, for me the relined posture and the cake represented an active complicity in the whole picture.

I guess I expected the Lord to be angry.  But instead I became aware of his great compassion and unbounded love for the whole Church.  Even a Church that was willingly complicit in its own enslavement.  It often seems that way, either I get a sense of profound judgment, or of unlooked for and undeserved compassion and love.  This time it was most definitely the latter, and I had the sense that I was given some understanding of how the Lord views our (western) Church.

As I was looking at this, I became aware that the Lord was totally in charge of this situation, and that He was biding His time.  “When I’m ready……..”.  I saw an axe in place to lop off the snakes’ head.  The impression I had was that it would be an immediate and cathartic action – an overnight judgement.  For the man, the human figure representing the Church, it would be to his ultimate salvation and healing.  I saw that if this was not done, the Church would undergo a slow death through engorgement.  The Lord made me aware of this, and that His judgement on the snake was to be to the Church’s salvation.

However, it would be far from easy, not comfortable in any way.  For the man, it would be deeply painful, just like a drug addict forced to kick his habit. For a Church entwined by the world, and deeply complicit in that entwinement, this would be a most painful salvation; indeed to the Church it would seem nothing like being saved, at least to begin with.  

The Lords’ ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts (Is 55 v8).

Following on from my post on the prayer of Jabez, I have a prophetic word from earlier this year that I’ll post over the weekend.  In the meantime, allow me to indulge in a little ‘what if?’ 

What if our whole western economy was a hollow pack of cards, only waiting for the right moment to crash?  What if the insane idolatry of unbounded growth and unbridled debt came to a screeching halt?  What if this mountain of debt we use to feed our insatiable greed and dull our spiritual pain was to crush us?  What would happen if these debts were all called in – personal, corporate and governmental?  What if we suddenly discovered that our savings and money were based on nothing more than electronic 1s and 0s – or in the best case pieces of paper and discs of metal?  What if we discovered that these things are not edible?

What would happen if this house of cards suddenly – for it would be sudden – crashed around our ears? Disorientation? Despair? Our gods……no more than paper tigers……..

Then, what would rise to take power in the vacuum?  I’d lay odds it would be totalitarian.  I’d also lay odds it would not be Christian friendly.

Strangely enough, if these things come to pass, I think it will be a blessing to us.  No, certainly not an immediately apparent blessing.  A drug addict in rehab does not see the blessing of rehab. 

I think we might end up stronger for it though.  And able to bring the gospel to a world shorn of its ridiculous pretensions.

Currently I am studying 1 Chronicles, and am at the beginning – reading (OK, flitting) through the list of names and families.  Anyway, on Saturday I came to 1 Chronicles 4:10 which reads:

Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” And God granted his request.

Quite an innocuous prayer, albeit a little self-oriented?  However, it rang bells for me because I have seen lots of attention given to this – more than one would expect.

This, according to some, is a prayer to be said daily, and God will grant your request.  Well, we could put aside for a while the presumption and manipulation of a ‘prayer’ that seeks to use God to get the desired-for outcome.

No, I want to reflect just a little on the mindset of a culture that makes this prayer a kind of idol.  I guess we shouldn’t be overly surprised that it would become a kind of craze in our over-fed, over-comfortable culture.  Enlarge my territory….keep me from harm….and whatever you do keep me from pain.

What I’d suggest to you is that pain is not always a bad thing.  Pain tells you that you are alive, pain tells you if there is something wrong.  If I understand it rightly, lepers hurt themselves because they feel no pain – they may have a hand on a lit stove and not know it. 

I would suggest further to you that many in the west are infected with a spiritual leprosy brought on by an acute case of affluenza.  Things are wrong with us, very very wrong.  But we don’t want to feel the pain, don’t want to feel the curse that worshipping our crushing wealth has brought upon us.

So for us, my prayer would be that God in His mercy would not grant us Jabez request, but would show His love and kindness, and wake us – by whatever means necessary – to our spiritual apathy and blindness.

I don’t welcome pain, and the Jabez prayer sounds most comforting, but I think it is the very last thing in the world that we in the west need right now. 

Perhaps we might like to try the Lords prayer daily, instead.