The hills remind me that we live in one world comprised of two realities: the physical and the spiritual. Most of us never truly get past the physical. Fewer still ever get into the spiritual far enough to know that in the story of the physical world God has spoken redemptively in Jesus Christ. We have a world inundated with religious thinking of some kind or another, but thinking that does not set us free from our sins and set love loose into the human situation.
The presence of Jesus' Church in the world ought to reflect the fact that life is more than physical and that the spiritual is more than religion and ideologies. Until physical and spiritual meet together in Jesus we are lost in our efforts (sincere and noble though they may be) and imprisoned in life mazes (as accidental as they may be) which, proclaiming to do just the opposite, actually disenfranchise people and keeps them looking to “hills” for help instead of “the glory of God in the face of Christ” (II Cor. 4:6).
Being the Church is serious business, and we dare not undertake it without a sense of full dependence upon God. We must be here so fully dependent upon God that our influence will enable people to stop looking to the hills for help and, instead, turn to the One Who created the hills. Until persons stop looking to the hills for help and turn to the One True and Living God, the sins of the fathers will continue to be passed on to the sons and daughters, and the vicious cycle will continue.
Until the One who "breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the prisoner free"[1] is discovered, the world will believe itself into destruction.
[1] . Charles Wesley. “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”, in Sing To The Lord, (Lillenas: Kansas City, Mo., 1993). 147
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