Entry Thirty

I've been trying to read some before going to sleep at night and cutting back on the number of TV shows I end up watching.  The past two weeks my pick as been a collected works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled Meditating on the Word.  In some of it, his language loses me, being too lofty and not concrete enough with his ideas.  But other times his language speaks the truth loud and clear:

"Because of the beginning God has made with us, our life with God is a way which will proceed in his law.  Does that mean bondage for us under the law?  No, it means freedom from the killing law of ceaseless beginnings.  To wait from one day to the next for the new beginning, to think that one has found it countless times only to lose it again by evening - that amounts to total destruction of faith in the God who has established the beginning in his forgiving and renewing Word, in Jesus Christ, that is, in my baptism, my rebirth, my conversion.
God has once and for all converted me to himself; it is not that I have once and for all converted myself to God.  God has made the beginning; that is the happy certainty of faith."


Later he goes on to communicate the same idea in this way:

"If we ask how we should begin life with God, the Scripture answers that God has long since begun life with us.  If we ask what we can do for God, we hear what God has done for us.  If we ask how we can live without sin before God, the forgiveness of all sins in Jesus Christ is announced to us.  If we direct our glance forward to our future deeds, God's Word calls us back to the past and says: Remember!"


As I was reading, I was reminded of the time in college where I struggled with reformed theology and Calvinism.  Parts of it I wanted to believe, parts of it I didn't, and parts of it I just couldn't believe.  It was through that time that God grew in my heart a better faith.  My faith before had been in me (which obviously meant it was disappointed a lot).  It was in my ability to keep choosing God, to keep turning to God after the falls, to keep pressing toward the right things.  It was ceaseless, vain striving for new beginning.

But God taught me the power of the truth Bonhoeffer discusses above.  The beginning belongs to God and since he began it, it cannot be rewritten.  By anything.  No number of mistakes.  No amount of weakness.  Nothing I can do.

I got on board with reformed theology in college, but the greater point was not the finer details of my beliefs about pre-destination.  The greater point was that I trusted God for my salvation.  Not just saying it, but doing it without the self-centered part that said, "God saved me and continues to save me but only as long as I continue to choose him."  God chose ME, not the other way around.  And that's what saves me.

"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, FOR HE WHO PROMISED IS FAITHFUL."  Hebrews 10:23 (emphasis mine)