Thoughts that drag me to Jesus, and to the Cross:

10 The LORD said, “Sing for joy, people of Jerusalem! I am coming to live among you!”
11 At that time many nations will come to the LORD and become his people. He will live among you, and you will know that he has sent me to you. 12Once again Judah will be the special possession of the LORD in his sacred land, and Jerusalem will be the city he loves most of all.  Zec. 2:10-12 GNT

And the deep darkness and alienation of our times is shown in the fact that we have powers and abilities but do not know what they are for; we have so much knowledge that we are no longer able to believe and see truth; we are no longer able to embrace the totality. Our philosophy is that of Pilate: What is truth? This only looks like a question: in fact it is a statement, to the effect that there is no truth, and only idiots and fanatics imagine they have it or argue about it. But if this is how things are, if man has no truth, only abilities, he is fundamentally alienated, and “participation” is only an empty playacting in the dark, deluding man with the notion of freedom and hurting him deeply. There is nothing fortuitous about the strident protests against such empty freedom: man, deprived of truth, has been dishonored.

Following that, the Genesis record becomes a narrative of human failure against the abiding backdrop of God’s faithfulness.
God Himself, through the Holy Spirit, points out a universal problem: the natural brotherhood of human beings is a sinful brotherhood. It is the brotherhood of all who are spiritually lost.

I can count an amazingly scary amount of conflicts in the world, from wars in many countries, to divisions in our country, in our cities, in our denominations and churches, and even in our homes. Some make the news, some are known, others are invisible, yet those do as much damage as any global conflict.

People want me to take sides, where as my heart wants to go out to the victims–and there are victims on both sides of of most conflicts–even as I know I should want mercy to be show to those who abuse others in the conflicts, I should desire their repentance, I should pray for the Holy Spirit’s intercession for all….

Tozer poins out this morning that we are all sinners, the Russians and the Ukrainians, the Palestinian and the Israeli, those on both aisles of Congress, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Rare is it it those who will remove their own beams before attempting to remove specks.

That sin alienates us from God, and from each other, driving us to a narcissism that focus all its energy and all its power on justifying

Joseph Ratzinger, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 126.
A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Mornings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008).