Your Name is Faithful
Ever since I began following the Lord, I have been drawn to the vivid imagery in the words of Israel’s prophets of old. I am fascinated by the ways in which God spoke through them to call his people to repent and remember their Redeemer. My pastor growing up always preached in a cyclical manner, reviewing the previous week’s message for the first half of the sermon, and then building on it for the second half. Often, he frequented the passages about Israel’s chronic spiritual adultery, so they were often before my eyes and upon my mind. Add to that some of the Christian music I listened to at the time, and I thought it was quite edgy and very spiritual of me to think of myself as a “whore” that had been rescued and wed to Christ.
All of Scripture is profitable, and all of it tells of Christ. The prophets were the mouthpieces of the Lord, so what they spoke to wandering Israel was needed and true. We surely do need all of Scripture, but we also need to make sure we are reading each part of it with the rest of it. So what do we do with those hard-hitting, sometimes shocking passages portraying the sins of God’s people in the Old Testament?
Sin really is deadlier than we can describe and more hideous than we can imagine. So when a person (or a nation) is embracing what will destroy them, what grieves the heart of God, what mangles the image of God, then the ugly truth needs to be clearly revealed. Catholic author Flannery O’Connor made this a point in her works, using the theme of the “grotesque” in order to startle her readers into seeing truth: “…you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” (from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)
Old Testament Israel, in her frequent departures from God, would have certainly been in this category of “hard of hearing” and “almost-blind.” The prophets pleaded for God’s people to awake and come back, often using surprising and gruesome images. For us today, these passages are likewise useful. If we have become indifferent to sin, or prone to covering our ears when we are confronted with it, passages like these are a sobering wake-up call. They remind us of sin’s deadly cost, and of our helplessness to rescue ourselves from it.
Ezekiel 16 weaves a story of the Lord redeeming Israel from her birth, describing her as an unwanted baby tossed away and left in her blood to die. What could be a more helpless, heartbreaking picture than that? And then the Lord says, “I passed by and saw you… and I said to you as you lay in your blood, ‘Live!’” (v. 6) He goes on to describe his nurturing care and protection over her as she grew, his covenant with her, and then her appalling evil in despising the Lord by prostituting herself to many other lovers. There is great benefit to the act of remembering what we once were, of never moving past the wonders that God has done for us. This is why I love these passages. The mercy of the Lord upon me, his movement toward me, his power to save me to the uttermost—none of it would be so sweet if I never acknowledged the bitterness and the blood in which I lay before he came.
As redeemed children filled with the Holy Spirit, we are (more than ever) aware of the ways in which we still fail the Lord, so grieved by the way our heart inclines back to Egypt (the idols we used to serve.) We feel the heat of wanting to do what is right but evil lying close at hand. (Romans 7) All of this is part of the Christian life, of the pilgrim path spanning from earth to heaven. We might think it is a very godly thing to identify ourselves as “great sinner,” “spiritually adulterous,” “unclean” or our righteousness as “filthy rags.” (Isaiah 64:6) We may still see ourselves as the one lying in her blood.
But are we? Just because that is the picture of what we were outside of Christ does not mean that is the reality of us now. The Lord did see us in our blood, but he spoke to us “Live!” He put his breath into our dry bones and covered us in flesh. (Ezekiel 37) Nothing can undo the word of the Lord once spoken. He has full command of life and death and has given life unto us. Why should we continue to wrap ourselves in the names of death? Why should we parade our badges of sin as if we need to outdo one another in proclaiming how rotten we are? We are “all children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or the darkness.” (1 Thessalonians 5:5) So let us put away the names we wore in those places.
The Lord is not a stranger to how hard our struggle is before glory. The sin that remains is real and it is serious. But it has also been fully dealt with, even as we continue to deal with it in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are clean and being cleansed. We are declared saints and also becoming saints. This is our main identity now, and it will be our identity forever. It is far more true of us that we are saints than that we are sinners. As Melissa Kruger so helpfully delineates in the book Identity Theft, we aresaints who still struggle with sin. We are not sinners who are struggling to become saints. (I recommend reading her entire chapter in that book, it is a breath of sweet relief.)
And because Christ has taken upon himself our spiritual adultery and given us his record of full fidelity, we can face the sin that remains in full confidence of our forgiveness and belonging. We can look square at our faithlessness of today, carry it into the light and call it what it is. Then we bring it to the Lord, who sees our godly grief and is familiar with our every weakness. We can weep over what remains and boldly take hold of full pardon, full joy, and full peace. It is ours, and he is glad to give it.
God looks at all those who hide in his Son and all he sees are his faithful children. In him, your name is Faithful. The faithfulness of Christ is enough for you, do you believe it?
these are a shadow 