Stone to Flesh

A teacher friend pulled a rock out of her purse the other day, and – with the exuberance characteristic of an educator – delighted to explain the composition of jade and serpentine. For both its heart shape and luminescent color, she was proud to boast it her favorite stone.

Yet all I was taken with was the difference in what I saw before me: the smooth, unyielding material to which she clung, and the soft palm in which it was cradled. And it struck me how incredulous it is that our Maker transforms ‘stone to flesh’ (Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26). The same God who can “heal” the dead (Luke 7:12-15), and create something tangible from a void (Genesis 1:2), is the One who replaces a sterile, cold substance with what is yielding and warm – by a power which refuses to be explained.

The probability doesn’t bother me; I know I serve a God for whom there is nothing impossible [Genesis 18:14; Jeremiah 32:17; Jeremiah 32:27; Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 1:37]. What astounds me is the more trivial wonderment over the disparity… for the two materials are nothing alike. And when God is pleased to replace the former entirely, it becomes apparent that only the latter is acceptable to Him; that there is nothing about the rock that He sees fit to preserve.

While there is the sheer fact that ‘flesh’ is nothing we could generate, and that life pulses only from Him, there is also the implication that the ‘hardness’ we exhibit constitutes nothing He’d desire. It isn’t as though we could pass off our foul heart as anything pure before God, or justify our sinful efforts as able to near His righteousness, any more than we could suppose that jade actually resembled human flesh. There is no reconciling the two.

And yet, I know (both personally and second-hand) all of those painfully futile efforts; the doomed striving to at least “try” to offer God something pleasing, as though we weren’t saved according to His mercy alone (Titus 3:5). What vile thinking it is to purport that God simply wants within us something approaching “good,” when in fact there is nothing that can; what lunacy to decry the only Blood which heals us, and denote our ‘filthy rags’ (Isaiah 64:6) as some pre-emptive measure to at least be heading on the ‘right path.’

Perhaps what our Lord wants us to discover is not simply that His all-pervasive power supplants our destitution by satisfying our need, but more, that only what is given by Him brings life. He would draw us to willingly avow that “a man is not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 2:16); and then to be mindful never to muddle the two, as though ‘stone’ could ever substitute for the ‘flesh’ which He lovingly places within the hollow cavity of our chest.

Most Ravaged

Hannah has always been my favorite. The woman who prayed so fervently she appeared drunk. The one who was willing to give up all that she’d asked for – to be met by the God who always gives more than we petition (see 1 Samuel 2:1-10; 21).

Yet perhaps what I love most about her is that she typifies how God desires to bring us the greatest level of honor and comfort where there had once been the most profound level of shame and distress; how He longs to bless us with the pronouncement: “Instead of your shame you will have a double portion, and instead of humiliation they will shout for joy over their portion” (Isaiah 61:7).

Haggai brought her story to mind the other day with the verses of strife and instability, and then the concluding promise, ‘and in this place I will give peace’ (2:9). Why is God always so emphatic that healing and rest come precisely where the heartache has been greatest? Why is it so crucial to Him for us to understand that - like with that yearning, barren woman, like with His people Israel - He’s specifically ordained the height of restoration and joy to come on that plane which was most ravaged and hopeless?

It intrigues me that He doesn’t simply “start over;” that He refuses to abandon an area of our lives to the despair which seeks to infuse it, but would instead undertake, with great effort, to renew the ‘old’ with an unexpected ‘new.’ This God - who was so intentional about marking the valley of Achor, once a place of judgment and death (Joshua 7:24-26), as a ‘door of hope’ (Hosea 2:15) and a ‘resting place’ (Isaiah 65:10) - is the same who desires to reconcile in our lives those lifeless and decimated realms with His original purpose of health and wholeness.

And so He zeroes in on the exact location where the sorrow is rooted, then works healing out to the periphery. It's as though He most delights to spend the time meticulously working on that which all others have discounted and deemed “lost,” then quietly present us with the reality that He is the only One who has tenderly devoted Himself to mend what was completely shattered.

Perhaps His favorite areas of operation are those most devastated, not because of how their hopelessness directs our cries to Him, nor even because of the way He can exhibit His power before others, but because He cares too passionately about us to ignore the core of our grief. Instead, He re-works life within that same paradigm, that we would know Him, not as the God who lamely removes us from a path which couldn’t be redeemed, but as the One who personally meets us in that very location where He can prove Himself to be the God who ‘makes all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).