Acceptance can sometimes be a difficult thing, whether there is something we don’t understand completely, or perhaps there is something that goes against our pre-conceived notions of how things should be, or perhaps there is something we simply never pondered carefully until someone brought it to our attention. Yet acceptance with all its secular difficulties, is exactly what God demands of us.
The people that Joshua spoke to had a choice to make, whether to fall back into old ways, or to instead follow our Lord who had led them out of Egypt and brought them to land they could call their own after further protecting them from the pagan tribes that initially inhabited it. Jesus’ followers had to choose between accepting His teaching, no matter how much they objected to His words, or to fall away. We ourselves have the same choices to make, do we follow the design that God has in store for us and behave toward one another as He intended, or do we decide that we like the ways of this world better?
No matter which one of the instances we are talking about, at the root of it, a choice has to be made as to whether we believe in our Lord and are willing to accept his teaching through faith and a knowledge that as our loving Father he would not mislead us – ever. This can be a difficult task for us, when we are so used to dealing with what we call the “solid” realities of everyday life – the tangible, the familiar concreteness of our physical existence which our bodily senses provide us with so much information about to make our belief in that realm easier. Yet this only a small fraction of our existence. We are beings of both flesh and spirit, the fleshly portion of ourselves is easily interpreted because of the comparative simplicity of physical reality, the spirit requires opening ourselves to a world that is often masked by the overwhelming sensory experience of physical life. It requires awareness and effort to unmask its existence and essence. We each have the means to achieve this, we simply need to be willing to go beyond what is easily perceived and evolve to a higher level of awareness and belief. This is actually not so different from the evolving of God’s chosen people from a childlike state that required the firm hand of God so often seen in the Old Testament, to the more attuned nature of the people that Jesus encountered and proclaimed His message to. Too be sure, there were still those who stumbled and sought physical proof, or signs, that He was who he said he was, but there were also those who innately were able to look beyond such things and risked all simply to touch him and knowing that in doing so they would be saved.
Our world today is not as different from the world that Jesus walked through in His life, even though we think our situation is oh so unique, and that many of our problems are far more complex. Not really. We still require the same basic things in life to sustain us, we still have the same basic problems throughout our lives, the only thing that has changed is the packaging. We can still gain the same fruits from our belief, that His disciples did when they chose not to fall away, by simply accepting His words as being the timeless, immutable, words of God that they are, and not being swayed by the passing whims of what this world calls “normal”. Is what this world offers really so attractive or sensible that it eclipses or relegates the words of our Lord so that they are no longer to be accepted by us? Each of us needs to ponder this, and make our choice.
The Deacons Bench 