Though vastness is, and grandeur its
appeal,
Smallness is a greater is,
Or so it is I feel.
The highest peak of pride is lower
than the lowliest form of worship:
Prostration at His feet.
The word inversion
is a multi-definitional word, but the way in which I am using it is as follows:
“A CHANGE IN THE POSITION, ORDER, OR RELATIONSHIP OF THINGS SO THAT THEY ARE
THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY HAD BEEN” (Merriam-Webster dictionary online,
emphasis mine). We see this law all
throughout Scripture and His creative works.
Because we are so enamored with largeness we often fail to realize the
grander grandeur in smallness, in those things more humbly sized. As great as a mature and mighty oak is, how
much more extraordinary is the idea that that great tree came from the small and supposedly insignificant acorn?
Though God no doubt designs, desires, and
accomplishes with us our adult
version of ourselves, the potentiality inherently born into our infant person
is the foundation of, and the greater part of, that which eventually matures
and grows large. Indeed, “You (God) formed my inward parts; you wove me in my mother’s
womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made; WONDERFUL ARE YOUR WORKS” (Psalm 139:13-14). “I know everything God does endures forever; nothing
can be added to it, and nothing can be taken from it, for God so acts that
humans might stand in awe before him” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).
Perhaps
the best example of this inversion law—that God uses always to instruct man—was made when the Almighty God expressed
Himself as a powerless and puny infant human, when the omnipresent God was
found wholly present in but a few pounds of human flesh.
Another
example: “He (Jesus) said to them (in response to His
disciples asking Him why they could not drive a demon out of someone), because
of the littleness of your faith [that is, your lack of firmly relying trust].
For truly I say to you, if you have faith [that is living] like a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, move from here to yonder
place, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matthew
17:20). Also, “And He said, with
what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use to
illustrate and explain it? It is like a grain of
mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all seeds
upon the earth; yet after it is sown, it grows up and becomes the greatest of
all garden herbs” (Mark 4:30-32).
Throughout the
years I have heard much preaching on faith, and most talk about increasing faith,
but I don’t think that is what Jesus is saying here. Perhaps the translation or the wording is
misleading. The phrase Jesus uses,
“littleness of your faith,” cannot possibly mean the size or quantity of faith because
He follows up that statement immediately with statements about how only a
mustard seed quantity of faith is needed to move mountains. It is not the size as concerning quantity,
but the size as concerning quality. Creator God made the mustard seed both the
smallest and the largest; smallest in inception-al size but largest in exceptional potential.
The Example of Paul’s Life and
Ministry
“Who hath despised the day of small things?”—Zechariah 4:10
It is not
coincidental that the name Paul means small,
and that from a name, Saul (which means desiring)
of Tarsus (which was a city of great consequence, a place of high education),
and from which I infer the lofty idea of AMBITION, he fell to a humble and
often maligned-as-insignificant apostle of Jesus Christ. It is he, above all other apostles, who
glories in his weaknesses. That great
religious zeal, that mighty ambition to know God and to purge the whole world
of heretics and false arguments and vain imaginations, is more personified in
him than perhaps anyone else.
His very press, the strain of his life, was
always there; before he knew God really, as he pressed so hard as to curse, as he zeroed in on Damascus to
eradicate the Christian sect there, he instead encountered the utter and
inverted truth, the Lord Himself as Jesus
Christ in effulgent glory. Damascus,
which represents material completeness, the furthest extent of the human mind
and eye, also represented the goal of Paul’s ambition. But the intervening reality, the pin-prick
effect of God as Jesus Christ, popped his delusional bubble. The height of Paul’s pride, which could never
have elevated him to the place his ambition drew for him in his imagination,
was now being accomplished in him, but
in its inverted form.
I would suggest to
you that Jesus Christ was always what Paul wanted, as many do, BUT they, like
him, go about it in the throes of their own ambition and in the pride of their
own separate elevation; they try to become all they can be in way that will really diminish them, a way that will,
if accomplished along that track, snuff them out completely. The intervening Christ is the inverted truth,
and always, humility comes before
honor.
