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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