Completely Bankrupt

Outside of Jesus we are all completely and utterly bankrupt, and it is not until we come to the place of embracing this that we can fully receive him.

The Bible affirms this point of theology. The book of Joel starts out by talking about locusts. There is a formula to Joel’s oracles that goes something like this:

God will send the X locusts to destroy the crops.
And what the X locusts left, he will send the Y locusts to destroy…
what the Y locusts left behind, the Z locusts will destroy….

The formula continues until there in nothing left to be destroyed. The devastation is complete.

The point is that God doesn’t just get rid of some of the junk in our lives, he removes all of it until all that’s left is our relationship with him, precisely because have must learn the lesson that life can be found in Him and Him alone. All the other stuff that we put our faith in to give us life will fall short.

After the locusts have destroyed everything, all that’s left is desert. God’s judgment brings Israel back to the place of Sinai and the wilderness wandering, the place where they relied completely on God and nothing else because there was nothing else. The desert is bankrupt, so all they have is God. This is what God’s judgment does in our lives.

This all sounds quite dismal until we realize this important reality: that life in God is richer and more fulfilling and satisfying than anything in this broken and corrupt human existence can offer. 

He doesn’t ask us to give it all up for the sake of humble piety and suffering, he asks us to give it up because he has something better. 

The challenge in all of this is faith. You see, the life that God is offering in place of this corrupt human existence is so good that we really have nothing to compare it with so we have to go on faith that is will be, in fact, better.

God’s life is so “other than” what we know through our human experience that we have to trust in something that we’ve never seen or find and very hard to understand. When our faith runs deep, we’re able to sacrifice it all, all the junk, for something better.

This is the sort of faith that drove Jesus to the cross. Jesus knew that there was something better, so he took up his cross, bore the burden of the world, and rose again. He had a faith in the life of God that was strong enough, solid enough, and steadfast enough to enable him to look upon his suffering as…well…worth it.

Another place in the scriptures that affirms this point is in John the Baptist. The Gospel itself doesn’t start with Jesus, it starts with John. John’s voice is the one that cries out in the wilderness. Why the wilderness? Because it is the place of recognizing our bankruptcy that God’s saving presence enters into our lives.