Lyrics
The Lord . . .
eternal and unchanging
and He reigns over all
Caring Love . . .
He is the fount of
wisdom, goodness and the Truth
and Holy . . .
He preserves the good
but evil provokes His wrath
and receives His righteous Judgment
Holy, He is so holy . . .
Oh which man can stand in His presence?
He is the Lord of Hosts,
the whole world is filled with His glory
Perfection in All He is
No spot or wrinkle
The Source and Standard
and the Measure and the Righteous Judge
.......
O caring Love seeks for others . . .
Others to love, to care for and to share with
And let us understand His love
in light of the cost that He did bear . . .
only did flesh ever tremble . . .
.......
He desires a people for Himself
Children who will bear and shine forth His image
but to be real they’ll have a will
.......
If they walk in evil
Will He curb His wrath?
And if they repent of their evil
Can He justly forgive?
.......
Christ the Lord
On that day will He know you?
Do you know what He requires of you?
.......
Beware of cheap grace and wooden horses
And golden cups filled with unclean things
All along the Way is danger
So more than ever, more than ever
we need the Truth
.......
Oh we were made to cling to Him
To trust and to rely on Him
To love Him more than anything
To receive our life from Him
To live lives that shine forth His qualities
so all the lost can see and have hope
and glorify Him in all Creation . . .
Yet we are born under judgment
and blind to Him and enslaved to this world,
its things, our passions and desires
and selfish cravings
O Lord, forgive!
.......
He offers forgiveness and freedom
and sight and strength and guidance
to show you the Way
and family to love and be loved
to comfort and encourage and insist
and help each other grow
.......
Composer's notes
We left the story portrayed in Garden Lost with mankind in quite a predicament: memory of the past is largely gone; blind to the spiritual, only aware of and barely surviving by our physical facilities, eking out a living and attempting to give meaning and spiritual direction to their lives but going in a variety of conflicting directions to do so, a sense of what’s good but no ability to follow it.
Thankfully God has not abandoned mankind and has made a way for restoration. But why and how? What does He require of us? We desperately want to understand Him, know Him better. This desire is only amplified as we begin to think about the fact that Who He is will greatly affect what He wants and how He will go about doing it. In the first movement of this second piece [Restoration] we explore certain of God’s qualities.
Sections A-C of the first movement are intended to evoke a mood of serious prayerfulness, to evoke a sense of the immense power and authority, mystery, and holiness of God. To create this mood, this part of the score calls for the singer, the male baritone voice, to sing “freely” and “recitativo,” and uses more of a Hebraic chant while the lyrics try to describe certain significant attributes of the Creator. But then in Sections D-F come new lines and lyrics to draw the listener into an exploration of some almost paradoxical points, points that suggest certain dynamics that may surprise us as we encounter them immediately after connecting with the unchanging, immense power and Person described in the earlier sections.
Returning to the earliest sections:
The Lord . . .
eternal and unchanging
and He reigns over all
Caring Love . . .
He is the fount of
wisdom, goodness and the Truth
and Holy . . .
He preserves the good
but evil provokes His wrath
and receives His righteous Judgment
Holy, He is so holy . . .
O which man can stand in His presence?
He is the Lord of Hosts,
the whole world is filled with His glory
Perfection in All He is
No spot or wrinkle
The Source and standard
and the measure and the righteous Judge
***
It’s been my observation that we often admire His qualities one at a time, which I think leaves plenty of room for mischief. Instead, this first movement takes the view that trying to grasp a bigger picture of Him is beneficial to our appreciation of Him and what it means for us and creation in general! Some of the attributes explored include:
1. eternal and unchanging: His qualities are not variable or fickle – He can be depended upon! Physical creation is passing away but His standards and qualities (and thus His requirements) are not variable or fickle. We can trust and depend, and can have certainty about what He requires and the consequences that will follow...
2. He is caring love and the fount of all that is good. Living in a culture that constantly impresses self-determination on us many of us can’t immediately grasp the upshot of this first statement. But the point is this: He is the only fount of goodness; no human is good in and of themselves. We may think our natural state is to be individual islands but that is a fiction that has grown out of our spiritual separation and death. The reality is that while we have the capacity to express a range of motivations and attitudes, the source of those better ones only comes from the Source. We were designed to be connected to Him, to draw goodness from Him and then to express it in our lives to the world, to those who in their blindness cannot see Him or His Kingdom. Dead to God, they can’t see anything from God’s Kingdom, but they can see our behavior and can tell when they are seeing unhumanely good motivations being lived out.
Even in our fallen state, we have a need to find meaning, purpose and direction, to find the good. But you can chase all over this world and have a difficult time finding anything satisfactory. In that state, if you think you may have found it you will seek it out! A pearl of great price, discovered, will cause many to sell all things to acquire it!
3. He is Holy, meaning that He is without any sin – there is no sin in Him. What is "sin"? For a practical description I offer “selfish craving,” meaning the excessive desires and motivations that are part of things like: greediness, jealousy, quarreling, fighting, manipulation, lying, deceiving, stealing, hurting others, and on and on. In technical terms, sin is even broader than these but let us use them to give us a working understanding of sin and what it does to us and a world filled with people who are in bondage to this corruption. For further color consider it by contrast to its opposite: caring love. If you have a caring love for others that matches all the self-interest that is affecting your treatment of others it would be a very different world. Yes, natural man has natural instincts and tendencies that can be developed in respect of sympathy and empathy for others, but obviously these do not dent the cruelly selfish behavior driving this world and its ordinary course. By caring love we are speaking of a love that is very uncommon and unnatural to fallen mankind.
In any event, when we say that God is Holy we are saying He has no such selfish craving in Him or in His motivations. In fact, He is the opposite: the Bible says He is (caring) love.
This holiness and love are both pure: absolute holiness (no selfish craving) and absolute caring love. This should be reassuring in terms of how He would choose or what He would do. But it has further implications for us to when we also understand the next characteristic…
4. He is the Standard, the Measure, the Judge, the Ruler. I don’t think we should imagine reality operating on some algorithms, some artificial rules that may bear little or no relationship to the nature of God. To the contrary, the mere existence of sin provokes His wrath, even though He loves the world and would offer salvation, the very state of sin provokes wrath from Him – a wrath which He holds at bay while He offers a way to be saved from … His own wrath! Romans 5:9. The reality is that the inherent character, the essence of the flesh nature, what it craves, what it is, is contrary to the inherent character, essence, nature of God’s Spirit. The flesh nature and the Spirit are opposed to each other. And His wrath would eradicate sin if not for His forbearance…not a “forever” forbearance but one He institutes so He can accomplish His purposes. Who He is, His very character, sets the frame for the moral quality required to exist in this creation. All the more reason to strive to know Him, to understand Him, so that we might know what reality requires of us.
And let us not think that moral character is ultimately a small matter as it seems to be in this world. Our very attitudes, motivations, desires are perceived by Him, as John says [1 John] He literally knows everything. The matters of our hearts which constitute selfish craving defile us provoke His wrath. And our moral choices have consequences, as we sow so shall we reap.
***
O caring Love seeks for others . . .
Others to love, to care for and to share with
And let us understand His love
in light of the cost that He did bear . . .
only did flesh ever tremble . . .
***
He desires a people for Himself
Children who will bear and shine forth His image
but to be real they’ll have a will
***
But these qualities and how they seemingly may affect each other raise other questions that deserve consideration. For instance, imagine God before creation, a Being Who is, literally, caring love and yet there aren’t yet beings to love? [I know there were other beings He had created yet this same question could be rolled back to the first created of them too!] It seems almost a compelled result that He would create, act as the First Mover. In any event it would seem that He would very much want a people with whom to be their God. But…if He wanted a people for Himself, people to care for and to have a real relationship, wouldn’t they need to have free wills? Without free will would they be more than puppets or pet rocks? I suppose that they could have the mentality and will of the animals we keep as pets, yet would this be enough for Him? But if they had free will and sufficient mentality, wouldn’t one expect that there would eventually be a decision that was sinful, a choice that conflicts with His nature? [Of course in His foreknowledge in fact He knew the fall would occur. The question here is whether He viewed this as a rescue mission or part of the process to choose those who would respond in a way that would lead to restoration and life in the Kingdom with Him.] Confronting that situation, sin by one He created, how would He respond? Here, given the fact that He wanted a people for Himself, that He is caring love, He would want to try to forgive, save and restore them. But could or would He just wave it off as a sort of do-over or “never mind”? What would this mean for righteousness as a standard in the universe? But if He did not compromise righteousness, how would He accommodate or be true to His mercy and love? In other words, would righteousness demand what mercy and love could not take -- if righteousness demanded the punishment of death, would it be consistent with mercy to impose such a punishment?
Of course this should lead our thinking to Christ:
***
Christ the Lord
On that day will He know you?
Do you know what He requires of you?
***
We know that God gave us His only begotten Son to die on the cross to pay the price of our sins, to provide the basis for forgiveness, redemption, justification, and sanctification. But what does this amazing grace really mean for us who believe? If Christ paid the price, may we do as Paul rhetorically asks in Romans 6:1 and keep on sinning so that this grace may abound? Paul says emphatically no. We can not earn our own salvation. It is totally unearned favor from God. But does that mean that in paying that price, Christ provides a license to sin – what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”? The answer is clearly no. We must be following Him. Christ said that anyone who wanted to come after Him: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. (Matthew 16:24). And Paul said in Romans 8:12-14:
12 So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— 13 for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
***
Beware of cheap grace and wooden horses
And golden cups filled with unclean things
All along the Way is danger
So more than ever, more than ever
we need the Truth
***
But in this period of history, there is so much confusion about this grace, about the saved person’s participation in a continuing walk and the consequences of not doing so. And this confusion, this environment of many conflicting voices and messages, impedes our walk. In the parable of the Sower, we see many who started as seed that began to grow but were overcome by tribulation, pressures, temptations and so on. Is it possible that in the confrontation of these events, the decisions to resist or err were negatively affected by any erroneous messages?
In the events to come, we know that Christ has given and will give us apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:11-13). Thus we should fully believe that He will bring this about. Nonetheless we are also told that it will be the case that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons (1 Timothy 4:1), and that difficult times will come in which people will hold to a form of godliness though they deny its power, oppose the truth, will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived (2 Timothy 3:1-5, 13). We must be careful who we listen to and the words we follow!
***
(1)
Oh we were made to cling to Him
To trust and to rely on Him
To Love Him more than anything
To Receive our life from Him
To live from pure hearts that are of His nature
so all the lost can see and have hope and
Glory to Him in all Creation . . .
(2)
Yet we are born under judgment and blind to Him
and enslaved to this world, its things,
Our passions and desire and selfish cravings
O Lord, forgive!
***
(3)
He offers forgiveness and freedom
and sight and strength and guidance
to show you the Way
and family to love and be loved
to comfort and encourage and insist
and help each other grow
***
I’ve labelled this last portion of the lyrics as (1), (2) and (3) to help you follow my discussion below.
In the lyrics labelled (1), I’ve described an orientation that Christianity would say is how it should be – yet would be foreign to most people in our culture. But it isn’t just our culture, it is our natural state that causes us to see ourselves as self- or group- reliant, but certainly not living our lives walking with God. In John 15, which describes Jesus speaking about Nicodemus about the need to be born again, i.e., having a vital connection with God (which we will discuss more in the Third Movement), Nicodemus couldn’t understand it at all.
On the other hand, in his then state, Nicodemus would probably have understood section (2) and the forgiveness element of section (3), maybe even the idea of freedom from bondage but he would not understand the reality of the promise or how it was to be brought about. Also, he would not have understood the elements relating to the church which at that time was still a mystery not yet revealed.
I think modern, natural man is even more out of touch with his situation, the bondage that binds him and the selfish craving which is just the ordinary course the world. This lack of awareness doesn’t typically disappear when God’s grace first awakens us. When we are brought to a conviction of our sinful state, many of us are not much aware of anything around us but for the evil in us and the need for forgiveness from the Great Judge. We see our fallen state, we are coming to believe that it provokes His wrath but also His willingness to forgive us on the basis of the Cross, not on our own merits (which also is the only way we get the ability to do anything of what He wants from us as through the Cross the old man has been crucified). We must typically grow and develop spiritually before we really understand section 3, let alone section 1. No wonder when we look at one attribute of God we tend not to see how it fits with His other attributes. We often first see His holiness and righteousness; then we see His mercy and to that extent His love; yet we take much longer to see Him as the source of life and all that is good and then what that means for how we were meant to exist – in relationship with Him which can only be maintained if we are by His grace putting off the world and loving Him first in all things.
But it’s at the juncture where the person first believes and is converted and begins being led by the Spirit but is still in the world and being confronted by pressures and temptations, that the Second Movement picks up.