Have you ever wondered why God did not continue to proclaim his gospel by means of angels, as He did on the night of Jesus' birth? We are given an answer here: "We have this treasure (the gospel message) in earthen vessels (common clay pots), that the excellence of the power may be of God, not of us." If not angels, why is there not an elite corps of men---powerful, invincible, a "Gospel Green Beret," to command the world's attention? Instead, God used men like Paul, evidently short of stature, with poor eyesight, whose "bodily presence" was described as "weak," and whose speech was described as "contemptible." He was "hardpressed," "perplexed," "persecuted," and "struck down." He was, in himself, nothing more than a weak clay pot. But he did not lose heart, because he knew that his "light affliction," which was "but for a moment, was working for him "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." He ends the chapter with the remarkable statement: "...the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." In other words, the reality is just the reverse of what most of us think! We think the real world is the world of steel and brick and coal and oil, the world of trucks and cars and trees and oceans---but in fact, that is the temporary world---the transitory world. The real world, the PERMANENT world, is the one we can't see. But to paraphrase the demon Screwtape from C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, thanks to processes we set in place long ago, humans find it impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. |
