It’s a common recognition that hiding cards up your sleeve is cheating. The casinos in town watch for certain behaviors like hawks on the floor to make sure not only the House isn’t cheated but also other players. The casinos want those patrons to return, win or lose. However, sometimes we shove extra copies of two trump cards up our sleeves in an attempt to cheat the system.
Freedom and Choice are cards that, once put into play, must remain in play until the game ends. Sometimes we can get them dealt back to us when a round ends, but it seems like lots of people try to play them as well as hold them back for the ultimate trump. Sort of like the way children create new terms for games like in paper-rock-scissors (Nuclear Bomb beats them all!), this is a way by which they hope to manipulate things so that they always get their way.
While waiting to go into Sunday School yesterday, a member of my congregation tried to pull both of these cards. What he has decided to ignore however is the notion that agency is not a continual thing. We actually play the agency card when we decide to be baptized as a sign and token that we will obey the law of God and keep His commandments. Baptism is, like marriage, a covenant we make with God. At that time, we have cashed in the card. Then some among us try to pull it out again, only to find out this divine gift card has a zero balance; we already cashed in on God’s grace when we decided to repent and turn to His way for our lives. In the movie, “Chariots of Fire”, clergyman and future Olympian Eric Liddel, with whose story I have previously dealt, broaches this subject. One Sunday after a sermon, his handler talks about how Liddel’s religion isn’t very free. He sees faith the same way as my fellow member saw it- that God is forcing us to do things, when we have already made the choice to do it when we were baptized. Liddel says prophetically, “You don’t have to follow him.” The choice is made when we choose to follow God. The rest of the moments of choice aren’t really choices at all. They are opportunities to prove that we really mean it.
We are no longer free to choose when we made a choice. There are sections of freeway where, once you get on, you cannot get off, turn around, or change direction for a significant section. The choice is made, and once done, it cannot be unmade any more than you can become a virgin, a fetus, or ignorant again once you choose to enter the world as it were. Once the choice is made, many people who do not like the consequence insist they can choose anew every time, but we have made a contract with God, and when we insist on that, we insist on a “living and breathing contract”, a notion which is expressly repugnant in the eyes of God. He set the terms. We accept them. If you wish forgiveness, these are the terms. Yet sometimes we insist on trying to bargain with God saying such asinine things like “If you preserve my life, I promise I’ll stop drinking” when He has already commanded us to be temperate. We ask God to bless us by offering something we have already promised to give.
The House cannot be cheated. God is not fooled by our attempts to trump Him. He is not fooled by our attempts to bargain with or bribe Him. I admit that in the past before I knew better I also tried this. Part of the reason I live the way I do is because I realize that I am eternally indebted to Him for all that I have and am, and that when I obey, I remain in His debt because even when He doesn’t bless me immediately I recognize that sometimes He has fronted me the blessings by giving me breath, a raise, or a functional car far beyond the rules of physics or mathematical propensity.
Some of the best ways by which the Adversary deceives us is by virtue of the little things. Far too many people get wrapped up in the major things, because they are sensational, because they are penetrating, but the closer we get to God, the more clear it becomes to us just how far away from Him we are. We realize that our sins of omission far outnumber in frequency the sins of commission, and we learn we need Christ even more. In his foundational Screwtape Letters, Lewis writes: “It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Sometimes the adversary cheats our souls by putting a silken cord around our necks and telling us that God will justify a little sin, that it’s ok to cheat a little, that everyone’s doing it. Even if that’s true, it’s irrelevant. What we ought to be asking is what ought to be.
The paradox of this entire cheating scheme is that God really wants to give us a win. His way is supposedly our own, that we are free from sin and blessed with lasting peace and happiness. We do not understand what a ‘win’ in the game of life really means, that submission is the ultimate way to get where we claim we intend to arrive. We are trying to always have it our way; if we submit to God, we will be able to always have it our way, because we will only desire what is really, truthfully, and lastingly good for us, which will be good for the universe, which always does useful work.
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