when i let him

incarnate my dying flesh

with the vileness that

he is

it makes me meaty again

and wanting more

and more

and more

till like him

i am

writhing, restless, flesh

spirit dying,

dying,

gone?

o

LORD,

DELIVER

me,

As lustful thoughts that thrill my mind

Stay captive, bound, but still alive

Seduce and then their captor bind.
__________________________

O God give to me Samuel's steel

To face my Saul, his sin decry,

Make cherished thoughts before thee kneel

And wield Thy power to sanctify.

Reading the Old Testament can be at times difficult reading if we our honest with ourselves. We struggle to reconcile the images of seemingly excessive violence commanded by One we identify as a God of love. Did God change, we ask, between the two testaments? Admittedly the difficulties are great, but they arise largely out of an improper and incomplete understanding of God's character. We forget that God is also holy as well as loving. The Old Testament reiterates with alarming clarity that God is a holy and jealous God. And lest we think that he has changed with the advent of Christ, we need only to read the passages concerning the coming judgment at the end of time. And, conversely, if we think that suddenly God adds love to His character under the new covenant, we need to go back and read passages in the Old Testament to hear of his patient wooing of His wayward people Israel and His expressed desire that all people come to know Him.

God doesn't call us today to utterly destroy entire tribes of people to preserve the purity of His own people, but the call to personal holiness is in stated just as startling language. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount stressed the importance of removing sinful influences in our lives, starkly stating that if our eye or hand cause us to sin that we should remove such parts from our bodies. The language again is harsh, but serves to make a point. We like Saul cannot cherish Agags in our hearts that God has commanded to be destroyed, even when those Agags are so intimately related to us that to remove them seems as painful as hewing off a part of very own bodies. Whatever it may be: a sinful habit, a grudge we have been nursing, or a wrongful attitude, it must go. If we cannot do it we must bring it to Him to destroy. We will resist this with any number of rationalizations and procrastinations, but if we are to go on in our walk with God the cancer must be destroyed.