Prisoner in the Third Cell (DCLC – July ’86, Part 3)

Do you know that? You know what a Christian is? It’s really simple. He’s a believer. You know what a believer is? He’s somebody who believes. I watched a lot of people meet the God that they did not understand and the God that was not living up to their expectations, and they just simply said, “God, let me down. I’m really glad God let you down because it’s high time you find out whether or not you’re following Him because you think He’s Santa Claus or because you follow Him because He’s God. And no man has ever understood His ways nor known His mind, and you’ll never guess what He’s really up to nor what He’s totally like. And that hurts you, doesn’t it? Say amen. Do you know something else? It hurts Him, too. He’s not without pain in this matter. He knows that when He stands there, saying nothing to you when you’re in such desperate need of an explanation, when absolutely nothing you thought would be is, and everything you thought would not be has become reality. And you ache and cry out, and you say what I’ve heard so many Christians say, “I could bear it. If only I understood.” Yes, sister. Yes, brother. If you could understand, it’d cease to be a cross. The secret of the power of the cross is in its inexplicability.

I see Him standing with the armies of Nebuchadnezzar surrounding Jerusalem and the very city of God being destroyed, and the people of God crying out, “God, why?” And He does not answer. I see the day when in Egypt, He finally answers their prayers after nearly 400 long years of crying out to them generation after generation. And as soon as He begins to answer their prayers, a whole generation of mothers lose their oldest child. All except one, who hid her son in a basket and let it float in the river. And they looked into His face and cried out, “Why?” And He did not tell them that it was part of their deliverance from Pharaoh. And they lived and died without an oldest child, wondering why. They were not there when God took vengeance on the death of those children in Pharaoh’s own house; they died without knowing. They died not knowing. They met a God they didn’t understand.

And the heartache grows in Him. You only live 70 years with this heartache, and you die. But the Lord has to live in this state, this state that is a gap between His creation and Himself, generation after generation, and hear the cries of His people; one and ten and a hundred and a thousand and a million and tens of millions. And never can He give an answer to any of them. And then one day, it has to get even closer to home. He has wanted so often to tell; He has wanted so often to explain. But He made a covenant with Himself. My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are not your thoughts. And as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above yours. He made a covenant with Himself that He would remain silent in the greatest hour of need.

A good man sat on top of a pile of dung and cried out to God, argued with God, pleaded with God, and finally, finally, after so much crying and weeping and bawling, God appeared to Him in a whirlwind. And Job looked up and said, “Well, at last, I’m going to get something out of this God who won’t talk. He’s going to explain to me why this has happened.” Job is caught in time and space; he doesn’t know what happened in the heavens. God knows what happened in the heavens. Satan knew what happened in the heavens. Something happened in the heavens that affected Job, but He died never knowing. When the whirlwind came, when God finally appeared to this dear brother, and He was miles ahead of us, at least God came by. And Job said, “All right, report in and explain.” God said, “I’ve got a question to ask you, Job. When I made the crocodile, when I created the crocodile, did I come to consult you?” Lord, not that I recall, and He disappeared.

Job sitting there trying to contemplate a crocodile with festers and sores, and a family destroyed, pestilence, and three friends that nobody ought to be cursed with. And Job lived and Job died, and he never knew why He lost his family. You think, “Yeah, but he got restored in the end.” No, he didn’t. God didn’t raise kids from the dead. He lived knowing his children had died for reasons he could not understand. A new child does not take the place of one that has been lost.

It’s a heavy-hearted God who’s had to live in the state of silence before you and me, before those who’ve come before us, and all ages past. It’s a heavy-hearted God who does not like this role He plays, who is now born of a woman. And He’s got to come down here where we are and live where we live. And boy, if He cared about that dear woman whose child was taken from her and put in slavery in Egypt, if He cared about Job, whom He knew and had dealt with Satan over, if He cared about Jeremiah, thrown in a pit where He left him without explanation, if He cared about God’s people surrounded by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar when that town was destroyed, taken off into slavery and prayed to Him for 70 years with no deliverance, if He cared for Daniel who turned His face toward God three times a day, was it, three times at Jerusalem and prayed that He could go home and He never went home?

Now He’s got to have this God that comes into time and space who has all this recollection of eternity past, and time past, is now in a place where He has to deal with the fact He’s got a mother and He’s got a brother and He’s got sisters and He’s got kin folks whom He loves, who are going to get caught up in this drama lived out by Him on this earth. People who have the same blood coursing through their veins that courses through His, and these innocent bystanders are going to get caught up in the drama of the Son of Man, God incarnated, come to earth, and are going to have to pay a penalty for having just been kin to Him. And He’s going to want so much. He’s grown now. He’s grown now, and He can remember Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel, Job, and He remembers the covenant He made with Himself before He created time and space and before He created us. And He’s got to stand there with all the knowledge and all the information and all the explanation at His fingertips and remain silent in the presence of the need of His own kin.

He remembers, when He has grown, something He did, was one of the most difficult things He ever required of a human being. Spoke to a young boy about 8, 10, or 12, said to that young boy, “You’ve been set apart by me as your mother has told you, and you’re to never cut your hair. You’re never to marry. You’ll never know a woman. And now you’re to leave and go out into that hot desert, where you’ll live and spend your life fasting and praying. You are going to prepare the way for the one anointed.” And a young boy hears the voice of God, and he says, “Yes, Lord.” And that young boy walks out into a hot oven desert, a kid, and he begins an arduous life of prayer, long periods of fasting, time alone, hours, days, weeks. He eats the scraps of the desert. He clothed himself in the scraps of the desert. He probably lives with the Essenes, people who live a dour, strict life. The boy grows into manhood. His life is filled with prayer and fasting. He’s lived in a desert with temperatures that often reach 140, 150, 160 degrees.

His skin is like leather. He’s about 30 years old; he looks 60. His whole life has been lived utterly for God, and he is faithful as few men who have ever lived are faithful. Rarely, if ever, has any man lived a life more austere and free of any pleasures as did this young boy. Now a man, one day he begins to preach. He doesn’t even get the privilege of preaching in the marketplaces where people can hear him and have the satisfaction of knowing that he’s some prophet. He has to go and preach in the desert where no one is. And a caravan comes by, and he thunders at them, and they go into the villages and say there’s a madman out there. Another caravan comes by, and he thunders at them, and they tell another village, “There’s a madman out there.” Another caravan comes by, and he thunders at them, and one of them repents. He goes into the village and says, “There’s a madman out there. You ought to go hear him.” And the people in the villages go out and hear him. And there is a madman out there, and they hear him and repent. The other villages come, and if you come, if you’re going to hear this man preach, he won’t come to you. You have to come to him, and it’s in a horrible place that you have to go. And now it’s not villages, it’s towns. And it’s not towns, it’s cities. And it’s not cities, it’s nations. And people are walking over a hundred miles to hear this half-crazed, leather-skinned, leather-lunged, wild-eyed, emaciated creature with hair down to his knees, living in camel skin, and he’s eating unclean locusts, who won’t give one inch in anything He says. And people terrified, repent by the hundreds, by the thousands, and by the tens of thousands. And he has a few disciples, and boy, they are just as austere and grave as he is. Serious unsmiling.

The young man knows on the very day because something of His Father within Him says, and He hears it. He hears His Father speak to that wild prophet out in the desert. If you’re ever preaching and you see something white and bright hovering over someone in the audience, that’s the Messiah. That’s the Son of God. That’s the lamb of God. That’s the One for whom you have given up everything. And he’s out there preaching one day in this blistering hot sun, and he can’t tell if it was the sun or what it was he saw. Perhaps his eyes had played tricks on him, and he knows that he thought he saw something, and he stops and he moves, and there’s someone moving through the crowd, and he sees that light again. He can’t tell who it is, but everybody is watching him stare at someone back there. And everyone turns around, and a path opens. And he is astonished beyond words. It’s his second cousin. And he thunders, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

And by the next day, this young man, who has paid such a price, has lost half his disciples. Before the week is out, he’s lost three-fourths of them. Before the months are out, he’s lost 90% of them. Before the years came out, almost everybody stopped going to hear him. All he’s got is 12 emaciated, faithful disciples following him around, wondering what in the world is going on. He’s still thundering at caravans and little groups. He’s still calling for repentance, but he is hearing about his cousin. And he just knew his cousin would be a certain kind of person. He had envisioned for 30 long years, maybe 20 years, he had envisioned what his Messiah would be like. He knew what the anointed One would be, and he had rejoiced at His coming, and he was waiting to see the kingdom brought in with power and glory, but he knew it was all going to be worth it.

One day, he raged against Herod. And he woke up the next day with his hands in chains. Now I want you to know where they took him. Out in the desert wastelands, there is a high hill that looks like it was once an active volcano. A crest here, and comes down like this, and then interestingly, it has a little cone inside of it that comes up like that. This is a gigantic mountain. Herod has honed that all flat and built one of the most beautiful palaces the world has ever known: Herod’s summer home. And along the side of it are dungeons. Smelly, stinky, fungusy, slimy, wet, rat-infested dungeons. And John the Baptist finds himself in chains in the worst of all the dungeons.