You Were Made for This

Before there were mountains there was a council.

God had not made the earth yet. He had made beings of fire and light — ancient, magnificent, older than stone — and some of them He had made to carry a particular trust. The book of Job lets us hear God remembering the morning the earth was laid:

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you possess understanding! ... when the morning stars sang in chorus, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

— Job 38:4, 7 (NET)

Picture it. The first morning of a physical world and a whole choir of ancient beings singing because they could not help it, because what they were seeing was so beautiful that song was the only possible answer. And to some of these beings God gave a trust: govern the nations as I would govern them. Defend the weak. Lift the poor. Rescue the helpless. Be, to these people, something like Me.

They did not.

Psalm 82 preserves the moment God stood up in that council and brought the charge against them:

"God stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he renders judgment."

— Psalm 82:1 (NET)

The indictment is not of ignorance. It is of refusal. They had been given the most God-like work there is — the lifting of the low, the defending of the helpless, the care of those who had no one else — and they had used their power for themselves instead. And then the sentence:

"I thought, 'You are gods; all of you are sons of the Most High.' Nevertheless, you will die like mortals; you will fall like all the other rulers."

— Psalm 82:6-7 (NET)

You are gods. You will die like men.

Hear what that leaves behind. Thrones with no one on them. A trust betrayed. The work of God in the world — the lifting, the defending, the loving of the unlovely — left undone by the ones who were supposed to do it.

The seats were empty.

And when God went looking for who would fill them, He did not commission new spirits. He did not promote the ones who had stayed faithful. He bent down into the mud of a small planet and made something new:

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness...'"

— Genesis 1:26 (NET)

In His image. He never said that about the angels. He said it about the thing He was making out of clay.

He chose us.

Not because of what we were. Because of what He was going to make us, and Who He was going to put inside us. The calling that came with that choosing is not a small calling dressed in modest language. Scripture says the people of God will one day judge the world — and more than the world, that we will judge angels, the very beings who were old when the earth was young. We are being prepared for a governance higher than the ancient sons ever held, a seat at the side of the Son of God on His own throne.

That is not a metaphor. That is the destination.

But here is the thing that must be held alongside the height of it, or the height itself will bring us down the way the proud ones fell: we are only just beginning. The ancient sons had everything — power, knowledge, glory older than the stars — and failed the one lesson that mattered. We have almost nothing, and we have only just enrolled. We are first-day students in the highest school there is. The calling is impossibly high and we are impossibly new at it, and holding both of those at once — the throne and the beginner's empty hands — is the whole secret of walking this path without losing it the way they lost it.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them."

— Matthew 5:3 (NET)

The Sermon on the Mount begins here. So does the Christian life. And — this is the thing the church most needs to hear and most often forgets — it does not end here. Poverty of spirit is not the entry condition for new believers who will eventually graduate into something more confident. It is the permanent governing posture of the creature before the Creator, the daily, moment-by-moment recognition that we bring nothing to this except the need. Every disciple who ever walked this road well walked it from that posture start to finish. The empty thrones were emptied by beings who stopped being poor in spirit before God and started being rich in themselves. The children of light rise precisely because they have learned, slowly and not without cost, what it is to stay on their knees before the One who fills them.