An Earth crammed with Heaven
Extravagant: “exceeding the limits of reason or necessity, lacking in moderation, balance, and restraint.” (Merriam-Webster).
It was C S Lewis who famously said; “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Sooner or later we each discover that we have within us an extravagant thirst, a thirst for life that nothing in this world can satisfy, a thirst ‘exceeding the limits of reason or necessity, lacking in moderation, balance, and restraint’, for we were created for the most extravagant life; Christ.
Where should I go in scripture to begin to point to the extravagance of God, for when words are inadequate, pointing will have to suffice! One common place to begin is in the garden of Eden, with God giving man the whole world to be his domain. But to glimpse the extravagance of God’s generosity, we can do better than beginning with God giving man the earth, for as the first Adam showed us, indeed a man can gain the whole world and still lose his true life.
Let me point you to another garden, the garden of Gethsemane, where we see God not just giving us His world but giving us His life. Look at our God kneeling to submit to the darkness of our death encroaching on Him, like a black sun rising whose chilling shadow draws a sweat of blood. Look at love entering into our despair, exceeding the limits of reason or necessity, lacking in moderation, balance, and restraint. Look on the extravagance of such love and let compassion rise for a world that can only come up with gods who remain in their heaven, waiting to see who can work their way there by the sweat of their religious brows.
Beware reducing our God to one that men can manage, lest they set up their counting tables and call it His temple. It is not our repentance that makes God’s generosity extravagant. It is the revelation of His extravagant generosity that causes us to repent, to find our beliefs utterly changed and the extravagant thirst of our hearts quenched. Only a love that is greater than my death can undo my death. Only a love that is not measured to me on the basis of my behaviour, is powerful enough to change my behaviour. A god who only gives according to what I first give him, is too much like me to save me. Don’t give me a god who is just another counter of my sins against me. Let me have the One who turned over the tables of the counters.
You see apart from God’s extravagant Spirit, our earthly minds are too frugal and miserly to think or imagine a God so loving, that His way of loving us is not to stand back from us, but to fall on our dirty lives and embrace us into Himself, embrace our lonely life and our lonely death, who will go down with our ship, so that the way could be made for us to rise up in His; the fellow-ship of the Father and the Son, in the Spirit.
Lately, when I have thought of that garden and God there entering into the loneliness of our condition, I see Jesus rebuking Peter, James and John for falling asleep. When those same disciples had previously felt overwhelmed in their souls with the thought of death approaching, He had chided them on their lack of faith. In the boat during the storm, it was He who slept while His disciples stood over Him crying, “How can you sleep, don’t you care?” Now in the garden of Gethsemane, we have in Jesus a God extravagant enough in His love to enter into the darkness of our living death, our perishing condition, our storm of death, our sinking ship. Now it is Jesus who finds Himself saying to the disciples in effect; “Why do you sleep? Don’t you care?” In those words, I hear God’s extravagance towards mankind; for they are the words of One fully entering into our darkness, willing to give Himself to us even unto death, that He may rescue us from the pit we have fallen into.
This world is full of gods who offer us the world, even offer us heaven. But where in this world can we find a god extravagant enough to offer us Himself? Only in Christ do we see a god of such extravagance; exceeding the limits of reason or necessity, lacking in moderation, balance, and restraint, for to lay down your life for the ones you love, is not an act of moderation, balance or restraint.
The earth is covered with the glory of God’s extravagance, but not yet the knowledge of that glory. In the words of 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning; “Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Can you hear in those verses the great contrast, between a life lived in awe of the extravagance of God and a life lived focused on grasping for the next trinket. The truth of His extravagance is all around us, from the stars in the sky to the sands on the shore. The whole earth is full of the glory of God, but men have been blinded by the god of this age, the spirit of the world, whose gospel is “Here is what you need to do to save yourself.” It sounds like great advice, but the effect of believing that I am the author of my salvation, is to fall. We fall from living in the wide-open spaces of God’s extravagance, to the small prison cell that is a life consumed with saving itself. But as Paul and Silas discovered, even prison cells can be crammed with heaven by an extravagant God!
Believer, whatever the dark situation of your life right now, that appears to have you imprisoned in a confined place, look up, all of heaven is crammed into your cell! In that cell with you is a God so extravagant, so exceeding the limits of reason or necessity, so lacking in moderation, balance, and restraint, that He has made His home in your pit of darkness. Listen again to the sound of His extravagance, the gospel of His grace, the news that there is a God who entered our darkness so that the sun of His righteousness would rise in our hearts. Listen again and let the sound of such extravagance, the sound of music and dancing in the Father’s house, rise up from His spirit into your soul. Let that sound lead you out into the full light of day; the life of the Son of the extravagant Father, a life that cannot be restrained, even by the storm of death.
Phelim Doherty