Deliverance

I don’t think you can understand Christianity without seeing in it a cry for deliverance. The cry of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt, the cry of the righteous servant of God in the Psalms, the cry of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. And the cry of every heart in response to the cruelty of the world they find themselves in.

There’s a kind of popular piety that minimizes our suffering and sees in Jesus a kind of final deliverance that places those cries in the past, and views Christianity properly lived as a post-deliverance life of rejoicing and victory. But that doesn’t ring true to me. I am still crying out for deliverance, every day. From the wasting of sickness and disease, from despair, from the harm I do to myself and others and from the harm done to me by others. Jesus has, in a final sense offered forgiveness for all of these and removed the curse. But I feel the consequences of them every day, I need salvation not just from a final judgement but right here, right now.

You might reasonably think that you could avoid some of this by immersing yourself in a church community. But the church has really let me down in the past, in ways that I didn’t at the time think possible. And the hurt came directly from people I respected and saw as committed to holiness. It’s tempting to try to maintain my trust in Christianity’s transforming power by just redrawing my mental us/them lines and placing those people outside, as less committed than I thought they were. But the reality is much more terrifying. Good people, even abnormally good people, are capable of evil that seems totally incongruent with the good in them. All that is required for it to come out is to be prodded in a certain way or placed in a situation that activates their blind spots and they seem like totally different people.

And - more terrifying still - it’s not just the people who run churches that are like this. You are like this. The deliverance that you need, from sin, goes deeper than you know. And the safety you’re looking for can’t be bought by just finding the right community of safe individuals. Safety doesn’t come from a community, it comes from God.

It is still a comfort that God will subsume all of the crap done to us and by us into his perfect goodness, and that even now he is working in it for good. That is a cause for joy and genuine rejoicing. But right alongside it we cry, from the depths of our heart, for God to deliver us from the pain and oppression and hurt that come along with living in such a world as this.