Unreality.
17 Deal bountifully with Your servant,
That I may live and keep Your word.
18 Open my eyes, that I may behold
Wonderful things from Your law.
19 I am a stranger in the earth;
Do not hide Your commandments from me.
20 My soul is crushed with longing
After Your ordinances at all times.
21 You rebuke the arrogant, the cursed,
Who wander from Your commandments.
22 Take away reproach and contempt from me,
For I observe Your testimonies.
23 Even though princes sit and talk against me,
Your servant meditates on Your statutes.
24 Your testimonies also are my delight;
They are my counselors. –Psalm 119:17–24
Unreality. As Christians, sojourners in this world system, we are ensconced in the world of unreality, of Barth’s Das Nichtige. We inhabit a world that lives into the reprobateness of the surliness of their unChristified souls. We live in a world system, a Babylonian fortress, that finds infrastructure by its ongoing covenant with death. This system is infused with the Angel of Light’s light, with the result of gleaming with a serpentine sheen. It appears, to the based eye, to be life, when the staurologic of the cross of Christ exposes it for what it actually is: i.e., death. Even so, the world moves onward and downward into the regress that the covenant of death seemingly offers free of charge. All it asks is that a person be their “authentic” self; a self shackled to this fallen decreation it has been born into unawares.
As Christians we are ambassadors in the above world. Nevertheless, we move and breath among its ghostly like, nearly evaporated souls. We have the same fallen bodies as these near dissolved people, but by the grace of God in Christ we have come to participate in all that is truly life: God’s triune life of perichoretic interpenetrating subject-in-being onto-relating love. As Christians we must constantly press into His life, which is our life by God’s grace of adoption in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. We must seek Him first, as if not a vain thing, but as our very life. This is how we show this world system that it is only a vapor in the eternal economy of God’s life. That this aeon of old time has a sunset built into it. That, in fact, its sun has already gone down, as the Son of God has arisen unto new creation, in new time, wherein life eternal is His life for us. As Christians we need to bear witness to this new time over against the old time that the world has come to think as the only time they have.
Like David, we are strangers in the earth; God, don’t hide your Word from us, but let us bathe in it that we might daily experience the substance of life eternal afresh anew through the constantly renewing work of the Holy Spirit as He vivifies us, moment-by-moment, in the risen humanity of the eternal Son of the living God, Jesus Christ.