the God of immeasurable sweetness

That Easter day when I came to ha'Mashiach I wrote a song. “There’s a party going on in my soul. It’s a celebration I have dearly craved. The angel band is playing and rejoicing in the day, sing, ‘I am saved, Hallelujah, I am saved!’” These words may seem to be a playful metaphor, but to me they are a literal rendering of what I was experiencing at that moment. A choir of divine beings was overjoyed to finally be welcomed into my heart. They had been waiting for a long time.

After Messiah entered my life, the three-legged stool transformed into a brilliant throne. I understood that my place in life is to bow at the foot of that throne and spend my moments in worship. From the experience of throwing paint around Adam and God with you, I lost my taste for pleasing myself with painting. Artistic endeavors that are not undertaken in service to the Almighty are unrewarding. Songs that are not songs of praise have lost their luster. I am not so impressed with myself as to think that my work has any value unless it magnifies God. I must make art and do all things as one who loves the Lord my God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength.

the phenomenon of salvation

When I accepted Y’shua ha’Mashiach, Jesus the Messiah, an undeniable presence began to work inside of me, transforming me in ways I could feel physically throughout my body, as well as in my thinking and perception of the world and my role in it. The first thing I had to acknowledge was that salvation was not a belief, but a phenomenon. Immediately I began to feel something like an irreversible chemical reaction inside. An undeniable power was at work, making itself at home in my heart and soul. My life walk no longer took me in familiar circles, but after a sharp left I had been given access to a path on another dimension. My identity began to reveal itself as an essence in a timeless whole. At last I had a way of understanding what heaven and eternal life meant. I had entered God's time, which is beyond time.

I seemed to have tapped into a vast well of dynamic activity, like a collective consciousness in that it is shared by believers everywhere and speaks to all of us. I compare it to electricity. When you plug in, you get power from an unseen source. The power is available to those who choose to plug in. It would be easy to say that it doesn’t exist, since it is invisible and implausible, but we see evidence of it all around us in the lights shining everywhere. We have been given ways of negotiating with the power so that it can work in our lives. Look at the tragic lives transformed by the power of the Messiah. The other day I watched a TV interview with a former pimp and drug dealer who was shot in the head, died and came back to life on the autopsy table. He gave his life to Christ and is now helping others to leave lives of drug addiction and prostitution and live for the Lord. That is one of a million amazing stories of transformation.

We have books that describe how electricity works. In them you find pictures of wave formations. These books bring us to a deeper understanding of abstract concepts. Similarly, the bible illustrates the phenomenon of salvation with parables, prophecies and poetry, with history, geography and archeology. The bible is the roadmap, the recipe book, the owner's manual, the agenda.

But more than illustrating the salvation phenomenon, the bible is part of the phenomenon. When you read a relevent piece of scripture, God's power comes charging through the word as a living force and smacks you in the head. I have read many wonderful books that gave me pleasure and insight. But the written word of God cannot be measured on the same scale as even the most brilliant work of art. It possesses an all-encompassing power that reaches into the very structure of my being, forging me into the shape of God's kingdom.

saved from exile

From the very start of human existence we have been children pushing our father away and running to him again when we make a mess of things.

Salvation starts with the lambs the Israelites used to sacrifice to God for forgiveness of the transgressions of the people, and ends with the sacrifice of the ultimate lamb, the lamb of God, Y’shua ha’Mashiach, who suffered and died on the cross as the final sacrifice so we could be cleansed and reunited with our God. Because he is God, his sacrifice makes it possible for us to approach the throne of God as purified children returning home to their father creator. Salvation is a gift offered freely by the grace of God. It is the once and for all price paid for our errors, past and future. Salvation continues with the resurrection of Y'shua on the third day after he died. His triumph over death paves the way for our eternal life.

What are we being saved from? We are being saved from ourselves, from lives lived for ourselves, from paintings painted to please ourselves, from songs sung to glorify ourselves, from money earned to magnify ourselves, from relationships cultivated to validate ourselves. We are being saved from the worst exile of the Jewish people, exile from the Lord.