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.
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.
posted by Purple at 9:23 PM
2 Comments:
Wow...that is brilliant! :) I'm so glad I found your blog!
so moss can take rocky ground and over time make it good fertile soil. covering it, saturating it.
pretty nifty,huh?
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