Rescue, Longing, and Relief

Rescue

This account in Mark 5:1-20 always moves me. Jesus heals a man possessed by many demons. The whole town is afraid when they see him in his right mind, and they beg Jesus to leave. As he leaves, the man begs to go with Him. And that’s where I fall apart. Can you imagine spending years being ravaged by demons, and then being rescued? He wanted to cling to His rescuer. To spend more time with Him. 

This is us. We’ve been rescued. We want to be with our rescuer. And we will. But first, we have a job to do. “And he did not permit him but said to him, ‘Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.’ And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.” 

We’ve been rescued. We know our citizenship is in heaven. This is not our country. We are not home yet. There are days, months, years when we feel that longing more deeply than ever. To be with our rescuer. The only One Who gives rest to our soul. Our Rock, our Fortress, our Deliverer. Don’t you feel that way? Can you put yourself in this man’s shoes and imagine watching Him go, and pleading with Him to take you with Him? To meet the Savior, face to face, to know that what was so thoroughly broken has been fully remade and restored, to see the love in His eyes as He chooses to see you when no one else could, and take the time to undo the very curse of sin in your own life, granting new life, making all things new? The very thought is breathtaking. 

And yet that IS our story. Our very own story of redemption. We have been rescued, just as he was. And He has given us a job to do. All we want to do is abide with Him. But, in the abiding, we are given work to do, by His own hand. He said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. For this reason, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

He didn’t say, “Hang around waiting for me, loving me in the meantime, but make sure you do it quietly, privately, and especially without bothering anyone around you with these truths, and good luck til I get back—hope it goes well.” He said, “Here’s the deal. All authority is mine. So here’s your job. Go tell others, teach them, show them Me. And while you do this, I am with you.” 

Longing

I know people have said it before, and it’s been true every time, because depravity is real and history repeats itself:  there has never been a time when the message of hope in Jesus Christ has been more needed. Nor has there ever been a time where this message will be found insufficient. The reality of heaven, the victory of the resurrection, the sure hope that is found in Christ alone was enough to anchor the martyrs lighting Nero’s gardens at night. It was enough to anchor Corrie ten Boom and countless others during the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust. It continues to anchor Christians in the Middle East and other countries where persecution today reaches genocide levels, and it will anchor us right here today, wherever we are.

C. S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that we were made for another world.” Here’s a bit of clarity on that sentiment that we can all relate to, a fuller explanation, from one of my favorites among his works, The Weight of Glory:

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Relief

We long for our home, perhaps now more than ever, and that longing will grow with each year that we live. Lewis had such a gift in the way he painted word pictures of the deepest longings of our soul. We find Aslan bigger every year that we grow. We see God’s faithfulness all over again with fresh eyes, and it anchors us for the next challenge. Call me a naïve optimist, but even as we look at all that 2020 has held so far and ask ourselves real questions about what the near future holds, all of this is one huge opportunity for God to show Himself powerful and faithful again. His love speaks the loudest. And He’s just getting started. 

Christian, don’t forget that the ending is already written. He has already won. It’s not up to us to hold things together, remember? He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). It’s not up to us to fix things. We are not the ones actually redeeming the broken things. We are engaging with Him, and we get to participate with Him, doing His work, walking with Him, making a difference. But the actual redeeming? The actual fixing? That’s a job that only the Creator could accomplish, an outcome that He purchased with His own blood. He’s done it and He’s doing it now. All will be made right in the end. 

Meanwhile, we’re here in this sin-cursed world, where death reigns, and the enemy prowls, and so many things seem hopeless, but in the end, He will unite all things to Himself. The waiting is hard. We must not be idle. We are to walk in the good works that He’s already prepared for us. The world will know that we belong to Him by our love for one another, so we’d better be walking in love. He chose today for us and us for today. And He has equipped and will continue to equip us. He has given us his Holy Spirit to comfort, guide, convict, and remind us of Christ’s words. He intercedes for us. We can keep on keeping on because the victory is already won, and it’s not up to us to procure it. For this, I am thankful. The battles we face are not our own but God’s, and He is not afraid of any giant. He is greater than all.

This is why Mark 5 stops me in my tracks. Like the man who was healed, I look into the Savior’s face, hear His command, and head out to obey, having the same confidence that this man had. He’d been rescued. It was real. His life had been permanently, irrevocably, mercifully, and completely CHANGED. Just as he did, I will press on. I will look into the Savior’s face and then turn and head back to my town, knowing that there is more to come. I’ll close with more Lewis, since his words say what my heart longs to say. He ends the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, with these precious words:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now a last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.