Loneliness

Ten years ago I wrote this piece on loneliness (2005). Now I am reflecting on this again, and noticing what has changed. This article below is the revision. I am not sure I ever posted the original.

Loneliness

Loneliness. I can’t imagine any human being who has not experienced the pain and discomfort that it brings. In the last few days, I have felt it growing in my soul like a tumor. At first I thought I’d just get a little more active. Cut the grass. Work on the house. Maybe write something inspirational. Read. See a movie. Actually, they were all distractions. Perhaps harmless ones, but distractions just the same. The tumor grew until I could not really ignore it or pretend it would go away. I started on the pathway of melancholy, that sort of out-of-place feeling when you know that you need some companionship but the world just speeds by, unnoticing.

I realized that we had been attending a new church for two months but no one called us to see how we were. No one visited us. We got the calendar of events in the mail but the members were just too busy to stop by. “Come and join us” was the message on the paper. In other words, we are very busy people and we don’t have time to come to you so you make the effort to come to us and then you can be too busy with us.

I asked my wife to stay in bed with me this morning. Do you know the difference between condescending and enthusiastic? The antidote for loneliness is not stooping to provide a favor. She was too busy. I knew it as soon as her head touched the pillow. “What are you thinking about”? She stared up at the ceiling while I tried to snuggle closer.

“Oh, nothing. I just have so many things to do today”. I was a lost cause. After an acceptable few minutes, she got up. Loneliness grows with even unintended disinterest.   In an hour she was gone, off to the job, the home supply, the bank and a hundred other places that occupied her daily calendar.

I tried to write. That’s what I do these days. My work is converting the mental conversation I have with myself into tiny letters on a page so that someone else can feel what I feel. But trying to write about the great things of God, even if they are cleverly hidden in tiny words like “in” and “through” (I will finish that article some day soon and you can read my thoughts about prepositions), just made me feel all the more isolated. Not because God decided He had a full calendar today but because I was experiencing something that the Greeks called pathos. For us, it means passions. We get the word pathetic from this Greek root. The Greeks believed that passions are the kind of things that overwhelm you. You don’t control them, they control you. You can’t turn them off and on like work or play or music or sports. You are the passive (same word) victim of these monstrous emotions that wash over your life with the force of a tsunami (that’s a Japanese word) leaving a trail of devastation behind.

Anger is a pathos. When it becomes a tsunami, it turns into rage. Hatred, jealousy, envy, depression, despondency, fear, grief and loneliness – they are all pathos. But according to the Greeks, so are mercy, love, joy, jubilation and awe. You don’t see many of us complaining about the positive passions. We would like to keep them around all the time. But the Greeks knew that every pathos was temporary. They all tipped the balance scale off center and for the Greeks, being center-balanced was the goal of life.

I know that loneliness is only a transitory emotional state. It will pass. But that doesn’t do a lot for me right now. There is a gnawing emptiness inside that won’t leave me alone (no pun intended). It is a dis-ease, an uncomfortable nausea of the soul. When everyone is too busy for me, when I begin to feel as though I am not top on anyone’s priority list, I need more than two Aristotlean aspirins and Plato’s advice to come and see him in the morning. What I find is that the longer I go without relief, the deeper the pain becomes. Wait until morning isn’t always an option.

Loneliness is really a much more significant concept than simply a pathos wave of emotion. The Bible tells us that loneliness is a mark of my finitude. That’s a little too theological, so let’s break it down into simpler terms. We are created beings.   We are not God and never will be. We won’t even be some kind of lesser god. According to the Bible, our original created makeup, the way that God intended us to be, has been marred by sin. We are not the perfect creation that God wanted. We are messed up. And one of the results of being messed up is that we are at the mercy of pressures that can lead us to loneliness and a host of other debilitating emotional diseases. It’s just part of the “yuck” of humanity.

Loneliness is one of the unavoidable characteristics of being what I am – a human being who experiences the disease of life infected by sin. But loneliness runs even deeper than that. Loneliness is both a disease and a symptom. It is the dis-ease of being messed up and it is a symptom of my essential isolation. Loneliness is a symptom of my separation from my fellow travelers, my God and myself. I know that it is a disease of the soul because no amount of medication can fix me. As Delbert McClinton said “no pill’s gonna’ cure my ills”.

But this disease really points to another part of my humanity: the part that keeps me inside the walls of myself. No one really knows us, right? Haven’t you said to yourself sometime in your life, “Well, if they really knew what I was like inside, they wouldn’t love me”. That’s really the problem, isn’t it? Letting someone else really know all about you. The more we allow someone in on all our secrets, the more we fear that we will reach the place where we suddenly know that they don’t really want to know. Of course, you never know where that place is until you are there, and then it’s just too late. So, we put up a few barriers – protection of self. And that starts the vicious cycle of loneliness. When I protect myself from the pain of rejection, I isolate the part of me that needs acceptance. The isolation causes loneliness. Loneliness wants relief so I am pressed to reveal myself in order to find acceptance. But then I fear rejection, so I keep something hidden. Around and around we go.

I wrote a poem about this once.

Inside, outside

They’re never quite the same

What you see isn’t what you get

There’s only me to blame

Inside, outside

Illusion is the game

I must pretend I’m someone else

You wouldn’t like my name

Outside, inside

The fear from which I flee

Is that some day the one I’ll face

Will have a face like me

Heroes from the Bible felt lonely. David makes it very clear in the Psalms that he was well acquainted with loneliness. Elijah complained to God that he felt like he was the only one who was still faithful (God corrected him, but he still felt that way). Isaiah knew loneliness when the people he tried to warn turned against him. Even Paul, writing to Timothy from the cold Roman dungeons, said how much he longed to have some company now that everyone had abandoned him. It seems that loneliness is something that we can’t escape. We all get our share.

There is a spiritual reason for this. As much as we would like to avoid the experience, it is woven into the fabric of being broken human beings. Loneliness is a symptom of a deeper illness – an illness of the soul separated from itself.

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. We all know that being alone is not emotionally damaging. In fact, it can often be a time of great healing. Loneliness is more than just being by myself. It is being apart from myself. When I am lonely, I am confronted with the feeling that I don’t matter to anyone. I just don’t count. I want to be validated. I need someone to tell me that I am OK, that I am loved. Loneliness is the symptom of an attack on my self-worth. Usually we don’t interpret it this way. We mistakenly think that loneliness comes from missing someone. We try to overcome our experience of insignificance by searching for the transplanted significance from another. Eric Clapton said it: “If my baby would just come back again, I’d feel much better and at least I’d have a friend”. We want and need someone else to provide what we think we are missing – human affirmation.

Sometimes having your baby come back isn’t enough. Filling in the soul space created by loneliness with the affirmation of other people is like taking aspirin for heart disease. It helps, but it doesn’t cure. Loneliness is more than a temporary absence of companionship. At the core, it is an absence from ourselves. The phrase, “no man is an island” is correct, but not simply because human beings are communal creatures. We are not islands because we were made for relationship and the real relationship we were made to enjoy is the deepest one – the relationship with God. The truth is this: my loneliness is just a foretaste of a much more serious disease.   Loneliness is a symptom of death.

I do not mean that loneliness is a symptom of dying. Everyone will die. But not everyone will see death. We use the terms interchangeably but they are not the same. Dying is just the event of transition from this world of physical reality to another world of some other sort of reality. The best picture of dying is to think about the action of Russell Crowe in Gladiator. As he lies on the dirt of the Coliseum, fatally wounded, his mind leaps toward a door in a wall. His hand moves forward, opening the door. In dying, he passes through the door from this world to the next.   Relationships continue in another dimension.

Death is something entirely different. C. S. Lewis once described hell as the place where God allows those people who spent all their lives trying to get their own way to have what they want. Total and complete separation from every relationship. A world made up of only my constantly unsatisfied me. Death is separation from God, others and myself.

The reason that loneliness is so uncomfortable for each of us is that it is a little taste of what death will be. It’s very disturbing. Not because it pushes me toward fixing the problem but because it validates that that probem is something I can’t fix.

As a believer in the sovereignty of God, I must come to terms with my own self-helplessness. God asks me to agree with Him that I am not the maker of my world, that the world belongs to God and I am His humble servant. Until I agree with this statement of fact, I will remain outside of His will. When I agree with this statement of fact, I will see that God must rescue me from my loneliness because I don’t have the power within me to do so.

My Sunday school version of “Jesus” wasn’t right. Jesus wasn’t some sort of fake person, a god with a shell of flesh. His name was really Yeshua and he was a man, just like me. That means he was also subject to those pressures of finitude that could lead to loneliness. Yeshua certainly was not a top priority on most people’s lists. His followers left in droves once they discovered he was not going to be their king. His disciples ran in fear when the soldiers showed up to arrest them. The religious majority considered him a priority – one that they wanted to get rid of permanently. His Roman judge dismissed him as insignificant. His friends completely misunderstood him. Even his own family thought he was deranged. From a human point of view, Yeshua would certainly have been a prime candidate for loneliness.   But all of this doesn’t seem to have had that affect on him. There must be a reason.

The answer is simple and difficult. Yeshua was lonely – once. The rest of the time, he did not experience the pathos of loneliness because he was completely connected to the one person who mattered most in his life – his Father. No matter how the world of men treated him, he never lost communion with the lover of his soul. Except once. But that one time made up for all the rest. That one time was more than you or I will ever experience, more than we can ever imagine. It was almost enough to break the world in two.  Oh, and it wasn’t on the cross.

Because we experience various degrees of loneliness throughout our lives, we build up a kind of spiritual immunity to the real trauma of this pathos. That does not mean that loneliness cannot become a very serious matter for us. Suicide is the ultimate expression of human loneliness and that is a very serious matter indeed. But for those of us who have somehow avoided suicide, loneliness is more like the fever associated with an illness. Our loneliness temperature rises and falls as the disease works its way through our identity. Sometimes critical, often distressing, it usually lurks in the background like one of those summer colds that just won’t go away. It is a disease of the soul. We spend a great deal of time, effort and resources avoiding loneliness. In fact, many addictive behaviors are nothing more than anesthetized loneliness. We are afraid that if we ever really felt the power of our loneliness it would overwhelm us. So we medicate.

Yeshua did not have this sort of chronic malady. His spiritual health was vibrant, alive and focused. He knew who he was and who his Father was. Loneliness was not possible as long as communication between the two of them continued. But there was a moment when this most precious communication seemed strained to the limit. We need to understand as much as possible what this moment was like so that we have something to measure our illness against. Otherwise, we may begin to feel that no one really knows us. Once we see what loneliness meant for Yeshua, we gain a perspective that allows us to fully appreciate his promise to never abandon us.

Yeshua volunteered for a mission of loneliness. He knew when his ministry started that death on the cross was going to be the end of his road. The Gospels constantly emphasize his complete control of the circumstances of his life. Nothing dissuades him from achieving his mission. There was a terrible price to pay, but it was not the agony of Roman torture by crucifixion.

Two thousand years ago a man in the midst of a great spiritual and emotional struggle fell to the earth in the middle of the night. His legs did not collapse under him from bodily fatigue. He was used to walking many miles in rough terrain. His arms and shoulders did not give way from lack of sleep. He often stayed awake until the early morning hours in desolate places meditating and praying. His heart did not feel the race of adrenaline because he was surprised by the circumstances. He had known for many years that the goal of his life was to come to this place. He fell to the ground in agony he was about to experience something that had never been a factor in his life. He was about the experience what it means to be faced with the ultimate choice of submission—not with the end of life, but with reckless abandon to the promise of the Father after his death.

When Yeshua entered the Garden of Gethsemane, he needed to find reassurance. He knew that within a few hours the greatest physical struggle of his life would begin. He knew that he was facing his own death. He did what he had always done. He went to be alone with God, to draw from his spiritual connection the energy and passion that had kept him going for three long years of misunderstanding, ridicule, rejection and frustration.

Certainly there had been victories. He saw the downtrodden of the world made whole. He experienced the touch of God’s hand in miraculous ways. He knew that his Father’s kingdom was breaking into the old order. But it was a mixed bag. While he proclaimed the Kingdom, those closest to him misunderstood it as a political agenda. While he brought a message of freedom, contemporary religious teachers questioned his authority and proclamation. While he dedicated himself to the outcasts of the world, his compatriots often turned a deaf ear to God’s love. Even his closest friends were plagued with internal competition, fear, self-protection and doubt. No matter what he did or where he went, there was always controversy. So he came often to the Father for consolation, direction, affirmation and renewal.

The goal was in sight. The great enemy of God, the last vestige of defilement, was about to be confronted. Now he needed more than ever to know the security of having his Father’s arms wrapped around him. Now he needed more than ever to hear his Father’s voice whisper love and care. Now he needed more than ever to have his Father’s lips kiss him gently on the forehead.

Facing what he knew was about to happen was so traumatic Yehsua fell to the ground.

This was not the fear of a Hollywood version of the crucifixion. The Gospel narratives clearly show that he understood that he would die at the hands of sinners. These same records also show Yeshua resolute before his accusers and executioners. Not only did he show no sign concern about his outcome, he endured the physical pain of scourging, torture and crucifixion without faltering.

We do not need to look far into the story of the dying Messiah to see that the physical pain inflicted upon him must have been intense. We know that the Romans devised crucifixion precisely because it was the most painfully slow method of killing they could concoct. Yeshua was not subjected to the usual Jewish execution of stoning for his alleged offense of blasphemy. He was executed in the Roman way, under excruciating circumstances., for the crime of sedition. Yet he did not complain, agonize or collapse. It was not the fear of painful physical dying that caused his turmoil in the garden. It was something else, something far more awful than the coming agony of his crucifixion.

If Yeshua was prepared to face his own dying, even a dying at the hands of the Roman torture machine, then what could it have been that was so traumatic that he literally could not stand when it confronted him? For this answer, we must go back to that moment in the middle of the night when our own children call to us to protect them. We must think about our response, our instantaneous heart felt compassion, reaching out to this small child who is an extension of our own being. We must put ourselves in that place of parental love, knowing that even though the fears of the child are unfounded, the child still needs our reassuring presence.

Concentrate for just a moment and let this experience overwhelm your senses. Remember what it is like to have that little body cling to yours for safety. Translate this experience to the Garden of Gethsemane on a cold Spring night two thousand years ago.

Yeshua lived his life as an extension of the Father. That does not mean that he wasn’t just as human as you or me. What it means is that he was totally alive to the presence of God as the central focus of his very being. He was the only human being who was not a broken image. His connection to his Father was the fundamental ingredient of his self-identity. In other words, when Yeshua said that knowing him meant knowing the Father, he was at the same time saying that his identity as a human being (his ego, if you will) was so in tune with the Father that they were inseparably linked. In Yeshua’s mind, he was YHVH’s fully and uniquely authorized emmisary on earth. While all of the rest of us live lives of brokenness, Yeshua had never experienced a disconnection between God and himself.

You and I are anesthetized to the pain of a broken connection between ourselves and the persons God intended us to be. Sin not only separates us from the Father, it also deadens our sensitivity to this separation. Even though our feelings of separation are numbed, we still reap the consequences of this separation. We suffer, we cry, we hurt, we agonize, we feel despair, we get lonely.

But we do so on a limited scale. We have never really known what it is like to be one hundred percent in line with God’s heavenly touch. When we break through this vale of tears and find that God welcomes us with open arms, we experience tremendous joy. But the battering that we have chosen to give ourselves by maintaining the patterns of separation in the first place dulls even that joy.

Yeshua comes to us from the another side of this woeful equation. He moves toward us from the perspective of one who is truly human as God intended, who felt and continues to feel the complete active presence of the Father. All of this inner glorious union was true of Yehsua’s daily experience until he came to the Garden. In those moments in the Garden, Yeshua experiences the enormity of dissolving this identifying relaationship. He could choose not to obey. He could choose to separate. We are so afraid to face the truth of our existing separation that we run. But he didn’t. He let the awful consequences of this final moment of submission, a moment that would cost him his life, stay with him. He let it wash over him. He felt it as if it were present reality. He had the conviction that the promise of the Father would raise him from the dead, but now, at this moment, that promise is reduced to simply words. The reality of death stares at him. Words don’t seem like weapons anymore.

The trauma that struck was the specter of loneliness – the realization of the possibility of being abandoned by God in the choice he would make. For Yeshua, this was not the result of sinful neglect or willful disobedience. It was not a separation brought about by the exercise of the yetzer ha’ra. Yeshua did not live his life in self-sufficiency. He knew that he was totally and absolutely dependent on his Father and that his Father wanted it that way. Consequently, for Yeshua, the man who was truly and finally human, separation from the Father meant nothing less than the destruction of his very identity. It was no Greek pathos. It was the deliberate act of his will to allow this separation and therefore, to experience the potential cataclysmic tsunami of God’s absence.

Does a man feel comforted when he is dead? Even the Psalmist tells us that no one can lift voices of praise from the grave. In our numbed experience, we hold out hope of resurrection, but we do so because another has gone before us. How would you feel if you were the first? You know the moment is coming when you will cease to exist. Life will be returned to the Father who gave it. Your body will deteriorate as it should. What real guarantees do you have of resurrection? A promise. That’s all.

That night, Yeshua came to the Garden to seek the face of his loving Father. But when he opened his eyes, he looked at the chasm of separation, the real and final possibility that now, at this last moment, what he was being asked to do might just be too much. There might be another way. But the other way meant walking away. He realized, with complete finality, that he was facing the possibility of extinction. He was being asked to choose between obedience and certain death or disobedience and voluntary psychological identity suicide. This meant being completely aware of everything that brokenness means. There were no filters between him and the hell of separation. He had not practiced blunting the shock or agony of being removed from God’s presence by years of medicating behavior. He had no addictive coping mechanisms. He experienced the real possibility of complete, total absence of God’s love. Death, not dying. It nearly killed him on the spot.

It might have been different if God had asked us to drink that cup of judgment. To our great misfortune, we know what it means to be separated. We know because that is the way we live—separated from God. Even in this miserable state, God’s grace protects us. We rarely live with the true pain of that separation. Loneliness is only a taste of the real separation that exists within us. God is willing to let us see glimpses of our real condition in order that we might realize just what kind of wretched state really exists. But even then He provides us with filters that screen the instant paralysis an unprotected visage would bring.

We already live in a kind of hell. We just don’t admit it. For us, the ones with dampers and blinders, a step away from the presence of the Father might not seem too terrible. Certainly not as terrible as the punishing agony of the cross. But Yeshua knew better. Yeshua knew the sublime glory of the Father’s love. He knew the majesty of the Father’s care. He knew the serenity of the Father’s concern. He knew the peace of the Father’s will. Yeshua knew what being human really was because he was the true child of the Father. So when he came to the Garden, he looked from the vantage point of true humanity into the foulness of the pit. Physical torture meant nothing in this context. Losing his life was an oxymoron in the material world. He was attuned to the spiritual dimension. In that context, the real battlefield stretched before him.

It is significant that the temptations in the wilderness were not psycho-emotional appeals. The three temptations dealt with issues of power—power over the inanimate world, power over the individual’s world and power over the social world. On these three scores, Satan failed to trap Yeshua in behavior motivated by selfish gain. Luke’s gospel foreshadows the temptation in the Garden when it says that Satan departed from him “until an opportune time.”

After the temptations in the wilderness, Yeshua invaded the power realm of this world with a vengeance. He restored the Father’s conception of wholeness to those who were sick, both in body and in spirit. He threw out the henchmen of the evil one. He disrupted old order thinking wherever he found its curse on God’s children. Until Yeshua reached the Garden, the Gospel stories are recollections of real battles of might.

Yeshua removed the film from our eyes and revealed the presence of God’s spiritual dimension. In that dimension, the cosmic battle between God’s holiness and the ego of the evil one, still rages. Yeshua’s invasion brought into focus the true issues of life and death. He showed us that the world revealed by our five senses is not the whole picture. What we saw through him was a glimpse into the much bigger world.

That does not mean that our world doesn’t count. In fact, Yeshua’s activity right here in our midst says just the opposite—that the events of this world count more than we ever could have imagined. Consequently, what happens here, what we choose or do not choose to do, is much more frightening than we could have ever believed. Yeshua said it himself.

“Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).

But the power struggle was over when Yeshua arrived at the Garden. God’s man had defeated the enemy stronghold from within. The kingdom of this world was finished. It was only a matter of time.

When Yeshua came to the Garden in the middle of that night, the devil found his opportune time. He whispered into Yeshua’s ear with that thin, scratchy voice that runs chills down the spine. He murmured one single word: alone . It was enough to bring Yeshua to the ground. For a man who acknowledged only one identity, only one God, only one Father, only one self, this single word was a panorama of hell.

In Dante’s description of hell, the tenth level, the worst position, consists of solid ice. Human beings who sink to this level are frozen forever in isolation. We can only begin to imagine what it would be like to be completely separated from others. In our own history, actual cases of this sort of separation have led to insanity. But hell is not only separation from other human beings, it is separation from God. It is separation from God’s grace—a grace that is responsible for the world of sensory stimulation showering itself upon us.

Even when we are alone, we are in the midst of relatedness. We experience the earth and its beauty. We relate to our environment, the give and take of sensations, the complex interconnectedness of our very living. Imagine, if you can, separation from God’s grace. Imagine unconnectedness. No bodily sensations. No environmental interactions. No sight. No sound. Nothing except the workings of your now-understanding mind. And no escape, ever!

Yeshua looked into the night and saw the end of Being. It was not physical dying that turned his stomach. It was confrontation with true separation. And it was hideous. It wasn’t the grave. It wasn’t the cross. It was death, the defiant fist in God’s face shouting rebellion to the very last second. Death, the last vestage of a fallen creation. Death, the captor of all God’s love. He looked straight into everything now fallen. Everything the Messiah came to redeem.

You and I live in hell, separated from God until we choose to repent. We spend our lives covering up those fearful feelings so that we can cope with the gnaw inside. We do everything and anything to pretend that life depends on us. We hide, we run, we mask, we ignore. If we had stood next to Yeshua in the Garden, we would have fallen asleep just like his companions. We would have never seen what was really happening right in front of us. The film on our spiritual eyes is too thick, too wrinkled.

But once in awhile, the scratchy voice whispers in our ears. It creeps up to us from behind. It puts a bony finger on the back of our neck and suddenly we know that we are vulnerable. We get a small sample of what it means to be alone, separated. We get just a flicker of the reality of death. Even this tiny dose is enough to make us sick. For we are already broken. Running through every fiber of our being is the conviction of loneliness. Running through every relationship, every circumstance in this whole panorama of existence is the fear of isolation. Within our world, we can never be sure of anything. The power of the evil one still holds sway. As long as this power has one single ounce of fight left, it will go on turning us toward fear.

Fear paralyzes. It is a self-fulfilling condition, for as soon as I become fearful, I can no longer act. And when I cannot act, I perceive myself as afraid. Our present living hell is nothing more than the slightest whiff of a soon-to-be overwhelming odor. It is the stench of abandonment coming to meet each of us from the other side of the grave.

We have good reason to be afraid. Our trust in this world has been dashed on the rocks of unfaithfulness. Our wishes for security have been shattered. Our lives are full of experiences of separation, anxiety and disappointment. But most importantly, we have learned not to trust ourselves. We know better than anyone how much we have cheated, broken promises, told white lies, kept quiet when we should have been counted, run when we should have stood the ground. No one has to tell us about the untrustworthiness of this world. We are living examples of the fact. We condition ourselves to be afraid of separation precisely because we expect to separate. Every time we abandon another we reinforce the probability of being abandoned ourselves.

This is why we are so susceptible to loneliness. We know that if we have to be absolutely counted on, we might fail. We might leave others; abandon them. And if we would do it, we reason, so would they. The smell hangs like sulphur dust in our own air.

I can imainge that Yeshua’s nostrils were filled with this stench. He found himself suffocating, his chest tight with pain, his head reeling. Death, real abandonment, came calling. The real battle of the crucifixion was being fought in the quiet of this garden. Yeshua learned instantly what we have pretended not to know all of our lives. There is something here that wishes to destroy us while we are still alive. Something very evil, totally unrepentant, completely hideous. It lies waiting for us.

Yeshua was shaken. The trauma was so great that an angel was sent to minister to him so that he would not die there in the garden. But just at the point of being overwhelmed, he showed us all why the fear of abandonment is impotent. Fear forgets God!

Yeshua spent thirty-three years dealing with the attachments that cause human beings to place idols in their psychic environments. He remained faithful to his calling because he learned to be utterly dependent on God the Father. Now the most important event of God’s cosmic plan was about to be accomplished. With it came something so hideous that even Yeshua staggered. At this moment, in his greatest vulnerability, the evil one presented the subtlest temptation that any human being can ever face—to make an idol of the relationship to God. Yeshua was being asked to be obedient and yield his very identity with the Father—for the sake of those who were about to torture him to death.

At this precise moment, the evil one smiled. He crept up behind the struggling, agonizing man in prayer and whispered in his ear,

“YHVH doesn’t care about you. He only wants His own way. If He really cared, He would recongize how much you have already suffered. If He really cared, He would protect you from this. He would love you enough not to want you to go through this pain. You’ve done enough. Look at all you’ve accomplished. Look how obedient you’ve been.   And now He wants you to go into the pit? How can you do this and still be who you are? If that’s God’s way, you don’t need Him.”

When Yeshua staggered under the specter of the hideous consequences of loss of identity, he found his strength in his relationship with the Father. Yeshua knew, just like you and I now know, that God is faithful. Everything and everyone else could, and sometimes does, fail us. But not our heavenly Father. His constancy is written into the very Being that He is. He will not be other than faithful. When He says that He loves us, He means that He loves us NO MATTER WHAT. There is no ‘if,” ‘but,” “unless” or “because” with God. He loves us, full stop! Our fearfulness is not a reflection of God’s attitude toward us. Fear resides on our side of the equation.

Yeshua knew that God, his Father, was faithful without qualification. He knew it because years before he made a commitment to believe what God said no matter how he felt. Therefore, his response to the temptaiton to fear was re-commitment of his trust in the Father’s character based entirely on God’s word. In spite of the fact that this child opened his eyes in the dark and saw the face of Evil staring at him, he chose to remember that his Father always loved him, even now, even in this moment of fear. He chose to remember that his Father’s footsteps were coming down the hall even though he could not see Him. He chose to remember that his Father’s words of affection were being spoken even though he could not hear them. He chose to remember that his Father’s loving arms were being wrapped around him even though he could not feel them.

And as soon as he chose to trust what he knew to be true of the Father, in spite of the absence of its present verification, the fear left him. He could complete his mission because he renewed his mind with the understanding of who God is. Even though the task in front of him would be no less painful, no less demanding, no less difficult, he could face it knowing that God could be trusted no matter what.

When we face our small samples of separation fear, we now have someone just like us who knows exactly what we are afraid of. In fact, we now know that not only does Yeshua identify with our fear, he went beyond any degree of intensity that we will ever face. He faced the real spectre of death from the height of total harmony.

We will never have to face that magnitude of loss. We will always move from one state of brokenness toward another state of brokenness or, through God’s grace, toward true humanity and spiritual childhood. We never need to be alone in our fear again. The mind field that whispers in our ears has been forever destroyed, if we will only open our spiritual eyes to see its grave.

For all eternity, this fact has been established. God is faithful. The paradigm case has been given. If God loves us so much that He remains faithful to us even when we stand in the presence of the hell of separation from Him, then we have the answer we seek. When Yeshua said that he had overcome death, he did not mean that he had only put aside physical termination. He meant that the chains of hell itself were broken. He meant that you and I have been given freedom from the inner disease that saps our lives. Our Father has thrown out the demon and lifted us from the fearful night of separation.

We fail each other. We fail God. But He will never fail us. The trap of fear is finished. Our Father loves. Yeshua chose to believe this. As a result, you and I have been rescued from ourselves. The time of loneliness is over.

“Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Hebrews 2:14-15, NASB).

It is so important to see that the Greek word used here is “death” not “dying.” This is the real enemy—separation. Dying is just a passage. Death is the end of the road. And Yeshua destroyed the hold that death has over us. It was not dying that he overcame. It was death. If death is gone, the disease of separation must also depart.

What is left to say about the specter of loneliness? This is left! Death will no longer separate us from life. Celebrate God’s faithfulness! Drink in His mercy! Ponder His majesty! In the end, it is God, only God, Who is faithful when we are not, Who loves when we do not, Who forgives when we do not, Who stands by us when we do not. He has made every provision for us to be rescued from our own night in the garden of good and evil. Separation is finished. Loneliness is done. Have you submitted your life so completely to Him that you see yourself from the other side of the grave?   The man who is our first-fruits shows us what that view looks like. Now we can see it too.

John 14:18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

Matthew 28:20 “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Hebrews 13:5 “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forske you.”