What the Old Sons Lacked, and the Young Sons Have

I want to set two pictures side by side, because the difference between them is the difference between a being who is full of light and a being who is empty.

The first picture is the council, before the fall. Imagine those ancient sons of God at the height of their glory — blazing, knowledgeable, powerful beyond anything you could picture, present at the founding of the world, given charge of the nations. By every measure you would think to use, they had more than you have. More years. More strength. More knowledge. They had watched four billion years of the earth's history. They had governed empires. Next to one of them you and I are a single breath, a flicker, a thing made yesterday out of dust.

And they fell. With all of it — all the power, all the knowledge, all the ancient glory — they fell, because the one thing they would not do was let the love of God pour through them to the weak and the poor and the helpless they had been given to care for. They had everything but the one thing that matters, and so the psalm could say of them, you shall die like men. Power without love dies. Knowledge without love dies. The grandest being in the cosmos, if the love of God does not flow through it, is — and Paul used exactly this word — nothing.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing." — 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 (NET)

The tongues of angels. All knowledge. All mysteries. Mountain-moving faith. And without love — nothing. That is the verdict on the fallen council, written into a letter to a quarreling church, true of the highest spirit and the lowest of us alike. Whatever you have, if the love does not flow through it, you have nothing.

Now the second picture. A frightened, ordinary person — let us be honest and say a person like you, like me — who has nothing the council had. No ancient power. No vast knowledge. No glory of their own. But the Spirit of God has been poured into them, and the love that the council would not carry is moving through them, in small and unspectacular ways. They forgive someone at a kitchen table. They sit with a friend in a grief they cannot fix. They tell the truth when a lie would have been easier and cheaper. They are kind to someone who can do nothing for them in return. Nobody is watching. There is no throne in sight. And yet — do you see it? — that is the council's work, finally being done. That is the lifting of the low and the defending of the weak and the loving of the unlovely that the ancient sons were given and refused. Being done now, in a kitchen, by a child of dust, because the love of God is pouring through.

Here is the whole astonishment of the gospel in one line: the beings who had everything but love were sentenced to die like men, and the beings who are nothing but dust, once love is poured into them, are raised to do the very work the great ones failed at. The last shall be first. The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. The children of dust the proud spirits looked down on become the ones through whom the love of God finally floods back into a starving world.

And not because of anything in us. Never that. Only because of what was poured in. The iron does not glow because iron is special. It glows because it has been held in the forge. Stay in the forge, child. That is nearly the whole of it.