Rape and Redemption

A year or two into my marriage, I was invited to attend a wedding shower for a young woman. As part of the entertainment, our hostess asked if each of the married women would share how she had come to know her husband. The woman beside me, who was just a few years older than I, had introduced herself to me as Dawne. When her turn came, she told her story. She said that a nice young man had asked her out, and that as they were driving along, he reached out to put his arm around her shoulders. Her response was to recoil violently and cry out, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” because, she explained to us ladies, she had had a bad experience with men just a few months earlier. The young man, however, met her fears with gentleness and kindness and compassion, and he soon won her over.

A little later, as we were left to our tea and conversation, Dawne quietly told me some more of her story. When she was nineteen years old, she said, she was working in Edmonton in a department store and living in a basement suite with a girlfriend. One day at work she ran into a fellow whom she had known four years earlier at her church youth group. He told her that he was married now and had a little girl. He chatted with her only briefly and then moved on. A few days later, as she left work and walked toward her bus stop, she saw this young man again, stopped at the curb in a car with two other fellows. They offered her a ride home. She accepted.

She soon found herself being driven, not toward her place, but out of town, north of the city. She became understandably anxious. They stopped in a small town for gas, and as they did, Dawne heard a clear voice speaking in her head: “Get out of the car. Go to the ladies’ washroom, and stay there.” She had never heard of God speaking to people today in an audible voice, so she wasn’t sure it was He. Again the voice came, speaking the same words. But she was paralyzed by the fear that had come over her and she stayed where she was. The men threw some of their empty beer bottles at a stone memorial on main street as they sped out of the small town and into open country. They pulled off into a field, and they all raped her.

At one point she managed to break away, and she ran as fast as she could through the light covering of snow, the coarse, frozen stubble from the harvest slashing at her bare feet. They soon caught her again, and they treated her even more roughly after that.

She cried out to the one she knew, asking, “Why are you doing this?” He reminded her of something he had said to her four years earlier. This young man, 18 years old, had sexually propositioned this 15-year-old girl. When she turned him down, he had said, “If I can’t have you, I’m going to make it so that no one else will ever want you either.” So this was his revenge.

That was the part of the story I heard over our tea cups that afternoon, this, and the fact that the rape had left her pregnant, that she had given the baby up for adoption, and that now she was just counting the years until her boy would turn 18 and she would be able to track him down. I did the math: he must be 14 or 15 by now. Not too much longer.

I didn’t talk to Dawne much over the next many years, although we attended the same church part of that time and I would see her across the way in the congregation. And we would always smile and say hello when we saw each other here and there around town. I never stopped wondering how the rest of the story had unfolded.

More than thirty years have passed now, since that wedding shower where I met Dawne. I contacted her a few weeks ago and told her I would like to hear all that has transpired, and that I would like to write about it, if she was comfortable with the idea. She was eager to glorify God with this testimony of His faithfulness, so we got together and talked. Her voice still trembles and her eyes still tear up when she speaks of what happened to her 48 years ago, although she is quick to say that the tears are more for gratitude of all that God has done since. Her story picks up right after the assault.

As the three men dropped her off at her place, Dawne had the presence of mind to cross behind the vehicle and memorize the licence plate as she walked past. Once inside, distraught and in shock, she received the help of her friend while a young man from upstairs phoned the police.

When the officers arrived, they insisted that they needed to take her to the hospital. Dawne flatly refused to go with them alone: they had to let her girlfriend come along.

The hospital staff confirmed that she had indeed been assaulted by three different men, and then the police put the girls back in the squad car and proceeded to have Dawne retrace the route with them. She had given them the licence plate number (the car turned out to be stolen), and when they gathered up broken beer bottle glass from the cenotaph in the small town, they were able to retrieve fingerprints.

In due course, all three men were apprehended. Meanwhile, as a month and then two crept by, Dawne realized that she was pregnant. Her girlfriend had moved out, heading back to school, and Dawne could not afford the basement suite alone. She was so ill from the pregnancy that she couldn’t keep her job, so she found herself on welfare, living in a small apartment, alone and lonely and depressed. The church she was attending, because of her pregnancy, declared her to be “a member in bad standing”—even though the circumstances had been made known. (It’s all I can do to refrain from breaking in with some angry editorial comments here.) Not surprisingly, she never went back to that church. For quite some time, she quit going to church at all.

Someone told her that they knew of a person who would take care of the unwanted pregnancy for her. This was before the time when abortions were readily available: she paid $300 up front for what used to be referred to as a back-street butcher. The day came, and she travelled by bus to the address she’d been given. But she found she couldn’t go through with it: she stayed on the bus until it took her back home.

The horror of the violation was on her mind continually. She was so filled with hatred and bitterness that she found herself fantasizing about committing mayhem on the three men. She told her mom, and her pastor, that she imagined seeing them on the street, running them through with a large knife, and walking coldly over their corpses. Knowing that the attacker with whom she’d been acquainted had a little girl of his own, she even imagined arranging for something terrible to happen to her when she got to be Dawne’s age.

Strangely similar to the offer of help in arranging an abortion at the three-month point, now at six months a relative told her he knew someone who, for $300, would look after these men for her. In the end she told her uncle no and held on to her money. (She always assumed the proposal was to see that they all got a thorough beating; now she wonders if the offer was perhaps to have them “terminated,” and she shudders at the thought.)

She became more depressed as the months went slowly by. She found herself thinking that both she and the baby would be better off dead. One evening when she was over seven months pregnant, she opened her medicine chest and took out a large bottle of aspirin. Before she could even take the lid off, her buzzer rang. Who could that be? She never had any visitors. She pushed the button and asked, “Who’s there?”

“It’s a blast from your past,” shouted a raucous voice, which she immediately recognized as belonging to a girlfriend from back in her school years. This friend had moved out of province four or five years earlier. The young woman took the apartment by storm. Spying the aspirin, she demanded, “What are you doing with those?” She grabbed them from Dawne’s hand and stuffed them into her purse. “You’re a mess,” she declared. “Go have a shower and get cleaned up. And do something with your hair!”

Meekly Dawne complied. When she had freshened up and even curled her hair, they sat on the couch and had a visit. The friend placed a call from Dawne’s phone, apparently to her new husband. “I won’t be home tonight,” she announced into the receiver. “Dawne’s sick. I’m spending the night.”

The two of them then pulled out the sofa bed and made it up, and they both retired. When Dawne woke up in the morning, the hide-a-bed was hidden again, the bedding was neatly folded on the couch, and her friend was gone. She didn’t hear from her or see her again for another 20 years. She has always thought of the events of that evening as more of an angelic visitation than a random visit from an old friend.

The events of that night prevented her suicide, but her dark thoughts, her hatred and bitterness, were consuming her. She came to the place where she couldn’t carry it anymore. She got down on her knees beside her bed and asked God to take it all away, to change her heart, to change her thinking. She stayed on her knees until she felt in her soul that the power of the darkness had been broken.

When the time came for her baby to be born, she determined to keep her eyes shut the entire time. She knew that if she ever laid eyes on that child, she would not be able to give it away. The doctor laid the baby across her chest and told her she had a little boy. Dawne lay there praying in her heart for him, entrusting him to the Lord, and dedicating him to the plans and purposes of God. Then she spoke to the newborn infant: “I know you won’t be able to understand this, little one; I know you didn’t ask for this, but I have to give you up because I cannot look after you. I am giving you the best gift I can give you: a mom and dad who will love you. And I hope I will see you again someday.” When she signed the adoption papers, her hands shook so badly that she could hardly get her name on the documents.

Two months after the birth of her son, she married the nice young man that she had been dating since a couple of months after the assault. Another month or two later, she faced her attackers in court. The three of them had hired a lawyer; she was appointed one by the court. He knew nothing about her, didn’t seem to want to, neither did he even seem to be on her side. The wife of her antagonist was put on the stand, and she testified under oath that her husband had been at home with her during the hours in question. The proceedings became so distressing to Dawne that she stood up and walked out, with the judge shouting after her and threatening to hold her in contempt of the court. But then he followed her out and spoke with her quietly, and on hearing her misgivings on the “justice” she saw shaping up, he agreed to put her on the stand and question her himself.

The judge led her through the telling of her story and the identifying of her attackers, and then he said, “I understand you had a baby as a result of this encounter.” At her affirmative, she saw her antagonist lift his head for the first time, startled. He began to cry.

Now the judge addressed the defendants. “Is this young lady telling the truth?” All three slowly nodded their heads. Turning back to Dawne, the judge said, “The police have charged these men with rape. Do you wish to charge them as well?”

“No,” Dawne responded. Then turning toward the men, she told them, “I forgive you.” She didn’t want any more hurt from the situation, not for herself, not for anyone. She just wanted to move on and leave it all in God’s hands.

The judge spoke again: “The young lady may forgive you, but this court does not.” Each man was sentenced to repaying to Social Services the full amount that it had cost to look after Dawne during her pregnancy.

Once again, I’m biting my tongue here. But I suppose in Dawne choosing not to charge the men, she forfeited any right to compensation. Regardless, there is no way that any amount of money could have undone the harm that was done to her. In forgiving the men and trusting God, she did the most powerful thing she could do for her own restoration.

As I write Dawne’s story, I am reading a book on a present-day martyr, a Turkish man who was murdered for his devotion to Christ. When it talks about his widow choosing to forgive, it says something that helps clarify the dynamic of releasing someone who has hurt us.

People who do not believe on Jesus cannot understand that this sort of forgiveness is a supernatural gift of God. Forgiveness does not include the wish that these murderers should be spared earthly punishment. Forgiveness means to forgo one’s own feelings of vengeance and to bless the murderers in the name of Jesus. (Faithful Until Death, Wolfgang Haede, P. 118)

On the second anniversary of the rape, a son was born to Dawne and her husband. Dawne felt that it was part of God’s redemption, blotting out the darkness associated with that date by infusing it with new joy. Four years later they had another son. Theirs was a happy, godly family. But Dawne’s heart still ached with a lonely love for her first-born son. She prayed for him continually and yearned for the day, still many years away, when perhaps she might be allowed to meet him. She began to have a recurring dream, that she would awaken in the middle of the night to a knock on the front door. She would make her way down the hall, open the door, and there would be a young man saying, “I’m your son Allan.”

The dream came so regularly and for so many years that she finally went and told her current pastor about it. “Do you think this is God promising me that I will get to meet him some day?”

“Where are you in the dream?” the pastor asked. “What house?”

She didn’t know.

He prayed and asked God that the next time she had the dream, she would be able to recognize her surroundings. He also pointed out that it was important that she and husband tell their two sons that they had another brother and that their mom was hoping to meet him some day. After that, the boys began to pray for their other brother on a regular basis.

The next time Dawne had the dream, it happened as the pastor had asked: she was able to look around and notice the layout of the house, the position of the closets and so on, and she realized that it was the same house they were living in. The only difference was that when she opened the front door and looked across the street behind her son, there was a house opposite, whereas in actuality there was just a farmer’s field, because they lived on the very edge of town.

 Finally the day of her first son’s eighteenth birthday came and went. Dawne began her search, but immediately found a closed door. In rape cases, she was told, the records are sealed.

More than ten additional years drifted by. Then in 1999, Dawne received a notice that the laws had changed and all adoption records were now open. She placed a phone call to Social Services in Edmonton. The woman who answered the phone was rather negative, and she discouraged Dawne from proceeding: after all, would her son really want to find out that he was a product of rape? Dawne began to second-guess herself: perhaps the woman was right.

But after just a couple more weeks, she decided to try again. This time she would phone Calgary instead. And this time, from the moment the woman on the other end picked up and identified herself, Dawne was sure that God was now working actively on her behalf. The woman was full of compassion, first for Dawne’s awful experience, and second for her burning desire to find her son. She promised to check into it.

It was only a day later that the woman phoned back to say she had located the young man, living about four hours away. “Allan has been looking for you too,” she said. “He will phone you tomorrow when he’s off work.” She also told Dawne the names of the couple who had adopted her son. Dawne was rendered speechless: her son’s adoptive father was a first cousin to her husband.

That first phone call was anxious and exhilarating. Dawne was a little taken aback when her son asked right off, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes,” she answered, wondering where this was going.

“That explains it!” he exclaimed. He went on to say that his adoptive parents were nominal church-goers, attending not much more than Christmas and Easter. “But,” he said, “from the time I was six or seven, I always wanted to be in Sunday School. There was a bus from one of the churches that went around Sunday mornings and picked up kids, and I always made sure I was on that bus.”

Before they ended the call, Allan asked if he could come for a visit in two weeks’ time, once he was on days-off again. Dawne was so excited that she forgot to give him her address. And she didn’t even have his phone number. Perhaps he’ll phone back, she thought. But he didn’t.

Two weeks later, with her husband out of town working, Dawne found herself waking up in the wee hours of the morning, right about the same time that the dream always used to come. She lay there thinking. He finished work last night. He could just about be here by now. How will he ever find me?

Then she heard a knock on the front door. She got up and made her way down the hall. She opened the door, and there stood her son, now 29 years old. Across the road was the same house she had always seen in the dream: over the years the town had grown and what used to be the farmer’s field was now all residential.

They embraced, and Dawne invited him in. “How on earth did you find me?” she asked.

“I stopped at a gas station on the edge of town and got a map,” he said. “Then I asked the woman behind the counter if she knew of anyone in town with this last name. ‘There’s only one family in town that I know of with that name,’ she said. I told her I was looking for Dawne, and she said, ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’ Then she took my map and drew on it the route to your house.”

Dawne couldn’t recall any friend of hers who worked in a local gas station.

The next morning, still amazed that Allan had found his way to her house, she drove to the gas station he had mentioned to find out who had been behind the counter. There she found her friend Sue. “I didn’t know you were working here,” she said.

“Nope,” answered Sue, “I’m not. Just filling in. Just last night and today.”

Back at the house, she noticed that Allan kept going over to the patio door and staring out into the neighbour’s yard. Then as Dawne was taking something out of a drawer in the buffet, he glanced inside and saw a photo, which he then picked up. He did a bit of a double-take. “You know Chris So-and-So?” he asked, pointing to a boy in the picture.

“Yes,” she said, more surprised than he was, “he used to live next door. He and his family moved away a few years ago. But how do you know him?”

Allan hardly seemed to hear her question. “I knew I’d been here before,” he said. “I knew it!”

She stared at him. “When were you ever here?”

“Do you remember one time about 13 years ago when Chris’s grandma came to visit, and she brought along another grandson, Allan, and he brought his friend, who was also named Allan, and they called us Little Allan and Big Allan? I am Big Allan. I stayed there for two days, and I played football on the lawn with your other two sons.”

Dawne was incredulous, and she was actually quite angry with God at what seemed to her at the time a cruel joke. But it would seem that God in His wisdom ordained that that was not the right time to reveal mother and son to one another. He makes everything beautiful—in His time. And in the meantime, He was composing and orchestrating a fantastic story.

Dawne’s healing was a gradual process over many years, with several significant milestones along the journey. The first was God’s touching her in the area of her hatred and bitterness and helping her to extend forgiveness to the rapists, within the first year of the assault. Then she also had to deal with the way other people sometimes made her feel. There was the policeman who, the night of the rape, when he asked for her soiled clothes, held up her dress and said, “Well, no wonder. Look what you were wearing.” It was a dress with a modest neckline and a hem that fell below the knee. Seriously! This was in 1969, the era of the mini-skirt. I remember how short I and my friends all wore our dresses back then. Dawne never wore anything like that, but however unjustified the officer’s comment and the judgement it implied, one can imagine the shame that fell on her.

And over the years that followed, there were enough little remarks from people along the way to keep throwing her off balance emotionally, innuendos that questioned her character and lay the fault of the crime at her feet. When she was pregnant with her third son, her mother-in-law said to her, “How can your husband be sure this baby is his? After all, the first one wasn’t.”

These comments caused her to question her own integrity. She searched her heart in vain for something that might have brought the assault upon her. She finally brought it all to God, like the psalmist who prayed, “See if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139:24). She simply asked Him that if she had ever done or said anything to incite this man against her that He would forgive her.

Still the depression persisted. In 1984, on the fourteenth birthday of her lost son, she found herself desperately low. Sitting down, she printed the date on the inside cover of her Bible and then wrote a prayer:

Lord Jesus, I am hurting deep inside. The memories are too painful for me. I cannot bear them. I believe Your Word, which tells me that You bore our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4-5). I ask You, Jesus, to heal me completely, not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon my being. I rest in Your Healing. I accept it in Your Name. Thank You, Jesus.

Three months went by. Dawne had just been released from a second stint in the hospital for depression. Six older women in the church, “spiritual mothers” to Dawne, invited her to go with them to a retreat in Calgary. A woman would be speaking there, they said, on deep emotional wounds. When Dawne said she couldn’t afford to go, these dear and determined ladies pitched in and paid her way. At the retreat, she was able to talk with the guest speaker shortly before a session.

“God is going to reveal to me the root of your depression,” the woman told her. “He will show me while I am speaking, and I’ll say your name so that you’ll know the next part refers specifically to you.”

In the middle of the session, the woman suddenly said, “Dawne. Now I’m going to talk about grief. Grief is the loss of anything that was precious to you.” She went on to speak on the subject, but Dawne had already heard what she needed to hear. She had never grieved, never really affirmed and validated the pain she carried, for two very great losses: first, her virginity, stolen in such a violent, heartless, and ungodly way, and second, her first-born son, whom she loved with all her heart in spite of the terrible way he’d been conceived. She came home from the retreat knowing that she needed to somehow let God help her grieve.

It was the following Sunday in church. She went up for prayer, which was nothing unusual for her. Two of these “spiritual mothers” came to stand with her. The first woman just reached out her hand and touched Dawne lightly on the forehead. The power of God hit her so hard that she fell to the floor. A consuming grief was released in her; she said later that it felt like someone had just died. Sobs wracked her body and tears coursed down her temples as she lay flat on her back. The first woman knelt beside her and prayed: “And now, Lord, I ask you to heal Dawne completely, not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon her being.” She used the exact words that Dawne had written secretly in her Bible three months earlier.

Meanwhile, the church service stood still and waited for God to do His work.

When the grief finally abated, the other woman knelt down, laid her hand over Dawne’s heart, and asked the Lord to fill her with an overflowing joy. And then Dawne began to laugh. She laughed until she cried; she rolled from side to side; she laughed until her sides ached. She laughed a crazy, contagious laugh until the entire congregation was laughing along with her.

When it was over, Dawne knew that she was finally free.

When I think about Dawne’s healing, it brings to mind something the Apostle Paul said in explaining what really was accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV). The enemy of our souls, whose continual intent it is to rob, kill, and destroy (John 10:10), tries to keep us in bondage all our lifetime through fear—ultimately the fear of death and the grave (Hebrews 2:15). Jesus triumphed over all the power of death, the grave, and the devices of the enemy. Sexual abuse is one of the most painful ways the enemy stings us with the venom of wickedness, but Christ won an absolute and all-time victory over this and every other evil.

Some experts (Fred and Florence Littauer) estimate that three of every four women have been victims of some sort of sexual abuse, though often the painful memories are necessarily repressed, and one in four boys also has been a victim. This puts the numbers at a staggering fifty percent. Some of this abuse may be “minor,” and some major, but even the so-called mildest cases generate trauma that can last a lifetime. The walking wounded are all around us.

Recently I was talking with a young woman, a believer, who suffered abuse in her childhood. “God tells us that His grace is sufficient,” I said, “and that Christ took every pain, sorrow, grief, and wound to the Cross. In doing so, He broke their power over us. If His provision is not fully sufficient for this scourge also, then Christ’s sacrifice falls short for half of humanity.” My point was rhetorical: anyone who walks with Jesus comes to know increasingly that His provision is not only sufficient but exceeding abundant above all that we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20, KJV). Dawne would certainly agree.

There have been several opportunities lately for Dawne to share her story with local youth groups. Some might wonder how she could talk publicly about such a thing. But the power of an evil deed, though it flourishes in darkness, is exposed and stripped of its influence by bringing it out into the light. And where we’ve been badly wounded, once we receive God’s healing, He gives us authority and power to impact others with the overcoming truth of God.

She tells her story in the context of the power of forgiveness. She talks about scars; she shows the young people one that she has on her hand and tells them how she got it. “When the wound was fresh,” she tells them, “it was very painful, but it finally healed and only left a scar. The scar reminds us of what happened, but there is no longer any pain.”

It is forgiveness and faith that bring God’s healing into our emotional wounds.

As I finished writing her story, I phoned Dawne to check a few of the facts. She was just putting up her Christmas tree. “I’ve found this ornament in the decorations that has something written on it,” she said, “and I’ve just been sitting here looking at it. It says, ‘Without faith, miracles can’t happen.’”

Ashes, Beauty, and Rabbit Trails

Currently I’m reading #YouAreaPrizetobeWon by #WendyGriffith. Although it is written for single women, I, a happily married one, am enjoying it very much. I just read this sentence: "Jesus promises to turn our ashes that seem to have no value into something so beautiful that we won't believe our eyes." Suddenly my thoughts are piqued and I find myself racing down a glorious rabbit trail.

Here's where the Holy Spirit immediately took my thoughts: Ashes. No value? Not really. But in the old days they were used for making soap. How? With just the addition of water to hardwood ash, lye was produced (it is extremely caustic), which when added to oil (or fat) caused a chemical reaction called saponification.

The process produces just two components: soap and glycerine, the first, obviously, a cleanser and the second, a humectant—a substance that attracts moisture from our surroundings and prevents dryness. A natural, healthy soap has the glycerine still in it, like the gentle soap I use, which contains only saponified olive oil, water, and sea salt. Yes, lye is nasty on its own, but when the correct proportions of lye and oil are used, there is no lye left after saponification.

We know that the Lord has promised to give us "beauty for ashes," and this of course is what the author is referring to in the quote above. But not all ashes turn to beauty; only those that are submitted to God. The ashes of our lives, watered only with our self-pitying tears, leave us with a caustic, damaging mess. But when the Holy Spirit is invited to pour His oil into our mess, a spiritual saponification occurs and we find ourselves both cleansed and softened. I speculate that there is a “glycerine factor” here as well that protects us from future spiritual dryness.

Reading here and there online about ashes and oil, I stumble across something interesting: 

The ritual of applying a mark to the forehead of palm ash and oil on Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent for many Christian faiths. The mark is an outward sign of the believer's repentance and commitment to renewal of their faith.

Ahh. Ash Wednesday. Always wondered why they called it that.

In Numbers 19:17-18, we find a ceremonial use for ashes: 

To remove the defilement, put some of the ashes from the burnt purification offering in a jar, and pour fresh water over them. [They’re making lye here!] Then someone who is ceremonially clean must take a hyssop branch and dip it into the water. That person must sprinkle the water on the tent, on all the furnishings in the tent, and on the people ….” [I hope they kept it well diluted!] 

I wonder if this use of hyssop is what King David was referring to in Psalm 51, “regarding the time Nathan the prophet came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba”:

Have mercy upon me, O God.… Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin…. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 

Bringing it into the New Testament, Hebrews 9:13 asks a rhetorical question: “If the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer could cleanse the body from ceremonial impurity, how much more can the blood of Christ cleanse the conscience?”

It was the prophet Isaiah who foretold that the Christ, when He came, would give us “beauty for ashes” (Isaiah 61). The fulfillment of this prophecy was declared in Luke 4 on an occasion when Jesus was visiting Nazareth, his boyhood home. 

He went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book [or scroll] of the prophet Esaias [Isaiah]. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. [Imagine the expectant silence that hung there. No one moved a muscle, and every eye was on Jesus.]

And he [said] unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Make no mistake. Even though he stopped—mid-sentence—after little more than a verse of Isaiah 61, and even though He didn’t actually quote the “beauty for ashes” bit, that part was also fulfilled. [In the Gospels and the Book of Acts alone, there are over 40 references to Jesus fulfilling what was written about Him in the scriptures, the law, and the prophets.]

So the Spirit of the Lord was also upon Jesus to deliver the promises from Isaiah 61:2c-3:

To comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.

The only thing that prevents the fulfilling of these grand promises in our own lives is our failure to simply reach out with our faith and receive them. Go ahead. Give Him all your ashes. Bring Him your mourning and expect Him to pour out His oil of joy on you. Throw off the heavy spirit of discouragement, and by an act of your will, sing praise to Him. Lay hold of His Holy Spirit, and you, too, will ultimately become like a solid and beautiful tree, standing for what is right, planted by God Himself and bringing glory to Him.

And the only thing I’m left wondering is, after hiking so far down this rabbit trail, why do I still feel like I need to get up and get some exercise? 

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The Chapter I Didn’t Want to Read

Recently I was watching a Joyce Meyer sermon on YouTube and was reminded of how much she loves the Amplified Bible. For the span of many years, it was my favourite as well, as my broken-down old copy attests. Now with this woman of God highlighting the richness and scope of the text, I told myself that I would begin reading that version again. Because at this time I am plowing slowly through the Old Testament in The Message, I determined that I would start the Amplified at the beginning of the New.

The next time I sat down for some quiet time with God, I opened the tattered old red volume to the first chapter of Matthew. Oh right, I groaned inwardly with a certain amount of disappointment, the genealogy. I really did not feel like starting my reading this morning with the long list of names outlining Jesus’ human ancestry from Abraham all the way to His birth. Oh God, this is so boring. Sorry, but I’m just going to skip it. Besides, I spent all that time a year ago poring over these lists and learning things from it in that study I was leading. I really don’t think there’s anything here for me this morning.

God seemed to nudge me to just glance over the names. Hmm.  ^“Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar…” Now there is a man of rather questionable character for God to have allowed him a place in Christ’s bloodline.

In spite of the precedent set against intermarriage by his great-grandfather Abraham, who determined that his son Isaac, “the son of the promise,” would marry within the family (Genesis 24:1-4), Judah married a Canaanite woman. (The Canaanites were descendants of Ham, whose entire lineage God had cursed.) Judah and his wife had three sons. When the oldest, Er, was of age, Judah gave him in marriage to Tamar, a Shechemite, but somehow Er ticked off God so severely that “He slew him.” Yikes.

Then Judah said to Er’s brother Onan, “Go and marry Tamar, as our law requires of the brother of a man who has died. You must produce an heir for your brother” (Genesis 38:8, NLT). Onan had his jollies with Tamar, but he defied God in the matter of raising up an heir for his dead brother: he “spilled his seed on the ground.” So God killed him too. Yikes again. This is serious business.

With all the violent acts that had already been committed by man, beginning with Cain murdering Abel—yet still without God’s direct intervention, I couldn’t help but wonder what was so over-the-top wicked in the hearts and lives of these two brothers that God Himself cut their lives short.

Judah had one more son, but he was terrified of losing him as well, so he kept stalling on the third marriage. Years went by; Tamar finally realized it wasn’t going to happen. Determined to produce an heir, she disguised herself as a prostitute, covering her face with a veil, and lured in her father-in-law. She demanded that he leave her with his staff and seal until he sent payment. Then she disappeared.

Another random thought occurred to me: It’s quite amazing that Tamar, who produced no child in her first marriage, conceived not only an heir but twins in a one-night stand with her father-in-law. She certainly had no problem with fertility. It makes me wonder if perhaps her first husband also withheld his seed from her. Maybe God killed both brothers for the same transgression.

When word gets around that Tamar has been “playing the harlot” and is pregnant, Judah is furious and demands that she be burned. But she produces his staff and seal, exposes his hypocrisy, and he admits, “She is more righteous than I.”

Continuing on the same theme of less-than-stellar characters in the lineage of Christ, my attention is drawn down the list of names in the chapter to Rahab. Most of us know that she was a Canaanite prostitute, living in Jericho when Joshua sent two spies ahead to check out the lay of the land. Suddenly I found myself wondering, with a wry smile, how it happened that the two spies ended up in the house of a prostitute. Probably for the usual reason. Not checking out the city so much as checking out the women. However, their encounter with Rahab did establish one very important thing: she told them that the fear of the Israelites’ God had fallen on the whole community. God’s reputation had preceded them, and the hearts of the Jerichoans had melted in fear. Rahab confessed that she believed the Israelites’ God was the one true God, and she made a pact with the spies: their safety for hers and that of her family.

So Rahab and her family joined the Israelites after the city was destroyed, the only survivors. She went on to marry Salmon and gave birth to Boaz. That she continued to embrace faith in God is evidenced by the character of the son she raised, as compared to those other half-breed Canaanites Er and Onan. In the book of Ruth we see how Boaz treated his workers. When he first arrives on the scene, returned from a trip to Bethlehem, he calls out to the reapers, “The Lord be with you!” And they answer him, “The Lord bless you!” Obviously a loving and well-loved employer. And his concern for Ruth’s safety and well-being, this displaced Moabite who has come to glean leftover grain from his fields, shows his charity and compassion. The rest of that short book affirms Boaz’s respect for God’s law and his reflection of God’s character.

Eventually he marries Ruth, bringing another foreigner into the bloodline, but a foreigner who has embraced Israel and their God: “Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God” (Ruth 1:16). As always, it’s faith that counts with God, not where we’ve come from or what we’ve done.

It was faith—and humility—in David that garnered him such favour with God. In spite of his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and then his murder of her husband, when he is confronted with his transgression he exhibits a broken and contrite heart. This is of great worth in the sight of God.

Something else that strikes me as I look at David’s name in the genealogy, he is called “King David” here. The next fourteen descendants in Christ’s line were all kings, but none of them is called that in this list: only David. He really was very special to God. Interesting, too, that God chose for the lineage to go through Bathsheba, which shows to me the irrevocable grace and redemption that God extends to the penitent heart. This marriage, entered into so unrighteously, still by repentance and faith received God’s abiding blessing.

These are the thoughts that flit through my mind in the first few moments of glancing at the onerous list of names in the chapter that I didn’t want to read. It encourages me that none of us is disqualified from our destiny with God by seasons of bad behaviour. He didn’t hesitate to include these characters in the ancestry of Christ. Even Jesus Himself (as Hebrews 2:11 tells us) “is not ashamed to call us his brothers.”

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Hidden Treasure

God drew me to something really amazing in His Word on Saturday. Even how He got me there gave evidence of His precise timing: a few seconds difference and I would have missed it. I was busy with garden produce in the kitchen. At the same time, I was feeling a deep need to be edified in my spirit and to be in an attitude of worship before God. I rarely listen to music, but I suddenly decided to go to Google and type in “YouTube hymns.” I would listen to some of the old-time hymns and allow them to carry me into a deeper awareness of God’s continual presence.

Soon I was back at my work, now with my kitchen full of grand choir music. I’d probably been back at my work an hour when the phone rang. I hurried into my office and hit “pause” so that I could hear whoever was calling. I can’t even remember who called, whether it was a telemarketer or my own dear husband—what followed so carried me away that everything else was forgotten.

I returned to my desk intending to click “play” again. The particular link I had selected had a playing time of two hours. There were various graphics streaming with the music, changing every minute or so. Not yet having turned it back on, my attention was caught by what was frozen on the screen. It looked like the back of a CD cover, about that size and those dimensions. It was green and just had some plain text on it. The word “genealogy” jumped out at me. This was interesting: God and I have had a private joke lately about genealogies, because I told Him one morning a while back as my Bible reading brought me upon the long list of “begats” at the beginning of Matthew that it was boring and I didn’t really feel like plowing through it this time. He immediately began to show me very much the contrary. Ever since, it seems He has taken every opportunity to give me a little good-humoured dig about the riches that are buried in such unlikely places.

The title read, “The Gospel in Genesis 5 – Genealogy.” The text read as follows: 

Did you know that the gospel message is contained in the genealogy from Adam to Noah that we find in Genesis Chapter 5? In the list below, I have included the Hebrew names from the genealogy along with their English meanings. This is incredible…
Adam (Man)Seth (Appointed)Enosh (Mortal)Kenan (Sorrow)Mahalalel (The Blessed God)Jared (Shall come down)Enoch (Teaching)Methuselah (His death shall bring)Lamech (The despairing)Noah (Rest or Comfort)       If you put it all together, you get a sentence that reads something like this: “Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the Blessed God shall come down teaching, and his death shall bring the despairing rest.”

Wow. I was so astounded, so moved, all I could do for the first few minutes was sit there and worship God, tell Him how amazing He is. How I wished that there was a reference on the graphic so I could check out the source. I wanted to know who had discovered this, and certainly to give credit where it was due.

Then, my vegetables completely abandoned, I grabbed my big old Strong’s Concordance and started double-checking the meanings of these names. The first three names checked out, but I ran into a glitch with Kenan (or Cainan). Strong’s said it meant “fixed”; also “an antediluvian,” meaning “before the Flood.” Now that in itself would be crazy: this was still six generations before the Flood. Nobody knew that it was going to happen, except God. So back then if someone named their kid “Before the Flood,” it was directly inspired by God, like all the other names in this list seem to be.

But it troubled me that this meaning for Kenan didn’t match. I hoped that someone hadn’t just tried too hard to see what they hoped to see in this passage. Was there possibly another source I could find, for the meanings of Biblical names, that would give me a second opinion? I googled “Bible: Kenan means sorrow,” and bingo, I found myself at the site of the man who had written the original article, over 20 years ago, from which this except had been taken. His name is Chuck Missler, and I found him at http://www.khouse.org/articles/1996/44/. He explained, to my satisfaction, some things about finding the meanings of these old names, passed down orally for centuries before they were ever written down by Moses.

In his summary, he also made this general comment: “The Bible is an integrated message system, the product of supernatural engineering. Every number, every place name, every detail, every jot and tittle is there for our learning, our discovery, and our amazement. Truly, our God is an awesome God.”

Truly He is.

What were the chances of the phone ringing and causing me to pause the video on that particular screen shot, smack in the middle of more that two hours of streaming? I went back to the YouTube hymns to discover exactly how long that image was on my screen. Just 45 seconds. 

You Must Be Born Again

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews (John 3:1, KJV).

As I climbed out of bed early this morning, I thought of Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the dead of night. He’d been curious to have a face-to-face discussion with Jesus, but as a respectable Pharisee, he couldn’t be seen seriously engaging with the controversial figure in the light of day. “Master,” he says, “everyone knows that you are a teacher sent from God.” (“What you speak is profound. I’m all ears. Lay some truth on me!”)

To which Jesus replies, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus asks him what exactly he means by being born again: “Can a man go back into his mother’s womb and make a new entrance into the world—make a fresh start in that way?”

Jesus just repeats Himself, expanding on His theme a little by saying that there are two different kinds of birth: one of the flesh and one of the spirit, and that a person must go through both before being able to enter the kingdom of God.

Way back when I was a new Christian (forty years ago now!), I thought this referred exclusively to what happens when we die: If we’ve experienced the second birth by receiving Christ into our lives, then we’ll be assured of going to heaven when this life is over. However, I now see most of the talk about the afterlife as an afterthought: it’s not the main deal, at least not at this point in time. What Jesus is really focussing on in this passage is the here and now: If a person is born again by the Spirit of God, he is able to see, perceive, appreciate, understand, and benefit from the reach and reign and resources of God’s kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, from this moment forward, all the way through death and beyond.

These musings about seeing and perceiving the things of the Spirit now take my thoughts to one of my favourite scriptures, found in 1 Corinthians 2. Verse 14 says, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (KJV). In other words, the natural man, the one who has only experienced the first, physical birth, the one who has not yet been regenerated by the Spirit of Christ, cannot understand the things of God. He simply doesn’t have the necessary software. Or translated into another metaphor, you hear people around you talking about Netflix and the wealth of entertainment and education available through it, but until you subscribe to it yourself, pay for your membership (oh, wait a minute: Jesus has already paid all the membership fees), and accept the terms and conditions (submitting your heart to Christ and making Him the boss of your life), you’re not going to be able to get all that good stuff streaming into your living room.

To the one who is not born again, the things of God are out of reach and beyond the understanding. He may even mock them, because “they are foolishness unto him.”

Many people have a basic belief in God and they turn to him in times of trouble. But it's one thing to reach out to God for help and comfort when we are in a tight spot; it's quite another to yield oneself to His dominion, to bow our knee and our heart to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This is where a changed life begins.

No one can change his own life. God asks, “Can the leopard change his spots?” No. What we were born into and what we grew up in has moulded us indelibly. We can make superficial changes, we can set our will to behave differently, but there are deep influences that keep seeping through, like an old, oily stain into a fresh new coat of paint. Trying to change yourself has been called pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Picture that for a moment. You can pull as hard as you like on those tabs on the sides of your cowboy boots; you can strain until you’re exhausted, but you won’t elevate yourself one centimetre, physically or spiritually, off the earthly plane you were born and raised on. It will take someone separate from you to lift you up. This is what God offers. “Humble yourself in the presence of the Lord, and He will lift you up and make your life significant” (James 4:10, see AMP).

Another verse in that Corinthians passage tells us that just as only a person’s own spirit can really perceive and know the things that are deep in that person’s heart and mind, so only God’s Spirit can know the things that are in the mind and heart of God (1 Corinthians 2:11). Read that again and think about it. Yes, we would have to agree that this is true. But the next verse brings in a revolutionary new thought: We have been given God’s Spirit! We have the software to perceive the very things that are in the mind and heart of God! Those of us who have yielded to the Lordship of Christ and are consequently born again, “we have received God’s Spirit …, so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us” (v. 12, NLT).

This is what Jesus was offering to Nicodemus: “Be born again, and then you will be able to see (know, be acquainted with, and experience—AMPC) the kingdom of God.”

But to as many as did receive and welcome Him, He gave the authority (power, privilege, right) to become the children of God, that is, to those who believe in (adhere to, trust in, and rely on) His name (John 1:12, AMPC).

Consider Yourself (Not!)

For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit (Romans 8:5, KJV).

As I came down the stairs early this morning, I found myself thinking about something that happened 35 years ago. I was working with Youth for Christ, and for our weekly staff meeting that Monday morning, I had been asked to bring the devotional.

I spoke on the subject of sin, some thoughts originally inspired by a reading from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest. Although I cannot find that reading now, I recall that it directed me to Matthew 16, where Peter has the glorious revelation, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus calls him blessed, saying that flesh and blood—his human capacities—have not revealed this to him, but that it is a realization directly imparted by God.

However, moments later, Jesus explains to His disciples how he must suffer and die, and Peter reacts strongly: “Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall never be!” I remember that the margin notes of the King James Bible I had back then translated “Be it far from thee!” as “Pity thyself!” Oswald Chambers brought out the same meaning, and he described this response as the epitome of sin. (The 1599 Geneva Bible translates it this way, and as well, many scholars agree that these words, “pity thyself,” well express the original meaning.)

So I delivered my devotional based on these thoughts along with some of my own experiences and conclusions, and when I finished, there was silence in this serious group of Bible college graduates. The Executive Director was staring intently at me, the baby Christian; then he said, “That’s the best definition of sin I’ve ever heard.”

Even this morning, I remembered the flush of pleasure I felt back then at his praise. But more than that, the recollection caused me to consider the subject of that devotional, the continual human preoccupation with self, self-interest, self-preservation.

I put my porridge on to cook and sat down to some quiet time with God. I have been reading a book by Ellen G. White, an important figure in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Her writings are controversial, but I allow them to inspire me, whilst continually weighing them in the light of God’s word. I would describe them as part scripture, part extrapolation, part commentary, and part historic fiction based on a solid knowledge of the Bible.

Picking up where I’d left off in her book, Desire of Ages, I found myself reading on the subject of John the Baptist and how his disciples became jealous of Jesus as His ministry began to grow. “Rabbi, He that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou bearest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to Him.” Ellen White points out that Satan was taking opportunity to tempt John with protecting his own ministry. It certainly would have been an understandable, human response. But John set his will hard against the temptation: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

She goes on to say this: “If he [John] had sympathized with himself, and expressed grief or disappointment at being superseded, he would have sown the seeds of dissension, would have encouraged envy and jealousy, and would seriously have impeded the progress of the gospel.”

“If he had sympathized with himself ….” Amazing! Here was the same subject that I’d been perusing a few minutes earlier as I came down the stairs: “Pity thyself!”

Whenever we are tempted to look out for our own interests instead of cleaving to God and resting in Him, it might be time to command, “Get behind me, Satan!” After rebuking the devil, Jesus told Peter (according to various versions), “You are an offence to me, a stumbling block. You are tempting me to sin. You are not helping me; you are in my way. You are a hindrance and a snare to me. You stand right in my path, Peter, when you look at things from man’s point of view and not from God’s.”

Ouch! Moments earlier, the Master had praised him for his God-given revelation. Now He is as much as saying, “Dear Peter, you are totally in the flesh.”

Something else occurs to me here: I think that when Jesus praised him for his discernment, Peter got a little bit puffed up. He felt like he was the man of the hour, the guy with a word in season; and in the rush of pride, he became presumptuous.

We’re like that too. It’s another manifestation of our self-centredness. And so our most exalted moments can degrade quickly into some of our most humiliating.

Pride goes … before a fall (Proverbs 16:18, NKJV).