grace-game
I do not play many board games, but there are a few classics in which I may occasionally engage. One game I occasionally play is checkers. My grandfather taught me to play and I would rarely play anyone else. He showed me many things relating to people, thinking, and the difference between fun and all-out warfare. He taught me that for many, the game is no longer a game.
The movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer” will gives one a glimpse of intensity and extremes people will find within a little game of chess. One stares at the board and the mind plays out move after move after move, anticipating “if I do “this”, he will do “that” or “that”.” Very Aristotalian. Minds become locked into playing the game as much or more in the head than on the board. Then the opponent reaches out his hand, touching that piece, sliding it over . . . wait . . . wait . . . then he second-guesses his move, starting to lift his hand from the piece. One sits on pins and needles, breath held, eyes wide, a small smile forming on the face as he is about to seal his doom . . . waiting . . . waiting for that finger to just . . . let . . . go . . . . And as he does, he looks, sees his mistake, then, “HA”! NO BACK MOVES! The game is to your advantage, to win, to victory! You can only pray you don’t make the same, stupid mistake . . .
Thomas Huxley wrote, “The unseen opponent in the great game of life, while scrupulously fair, will allow no back moves, and makes us pay in full for every blunder.”
This has led the so-called "pessimist" to reason: “Life, as we know it, does not exist.”
Life is an entangled, compromised mess of successes and failures that, unless one is promised something of a back move, the most anyone can hope for is an incomprehensibly small, half-hearted, and insincere promise for something better.
The grandson of H.G. Wells modernized the classic “The Time Machine” with a new release of another movie version of said story. In one segment the Time Traveler looses his fiancé to death due to a park mugger. He races back to his machine and attempts to avert the situation by going back in time, only to fail. He tries again. And again. No matter what he does, she is doomed to die in one way or another.
How's that for a Groundhog Day?
How many times have we been that player who took his finger off the piece knowing our opponent would not give grace? Remember that time when a wrong decision was made and you wished for a time machine so you could go back and fix that situation so that it never happened? We have embarrassed, even shamed ourselves at some point. Have you ever been told by law enforcement to leave town never to return because of your foolishness? I have. Are you bearing some guilt and pain from the past, from something you said, someplace you went, something you did and would still give anything for a chance to go back and not say what you said or not go to that place or not do what you did?
Take a walk down a jail block and listen as people ask “is it really possible for me to begin again?” I have talked to drunks who had no doubt that God was willing and could forgive them of their sin. I have been one of those countless addicts who actually believed that God could deliver from addiction! What about the results of one’s actions? Isn’t it true that you reap what you sow? What about the families (if any), the spouse (if any), the children (if any) that have seen and been the victims of drunk, wasted tirades? What can we say, how can we minister to these talking about a new leaf, a clean sheet, a do-over, a back move? If we do not, he is lost!
When we talk to men and women, don’t we tell them that their sins can be blotted out and removed? Don’t we tell them that their sins can be erased? Don’t we tell them they can be saved, pardoned, justified and sanctified? When we share the gospel, we tell them that sin is forgiven; cast as far as the east is from the west, dropped in the sea of forgetfulness and remembered no more! We tell them that salvation itself is a great back-move! Jesus said, “Do not marvel that I said to you, “You must be born again!”
But is it all really that simple? When we minister to the thief in jail and he accepts what Christ has done for him on Calvary, what happens upon his release? He gets a job, lives in his community, is well respected, trusted and conducts life as if nothing ever happened! When we share the good news of the gospel with a sex addict, a drug addict, a sports addict, he is able to go out to flit and frolic in the same crowd as ever! Tell me who is here today that does not still face an occasional memory of our own lives that is everything horrid. Who is it that faces temptations for “just one more then no more?” What about the cravings that are still there?
A man once cried out, “The scars remain! Scars never to be eradicated, never to be removed from this life. I have been plucked like a brand from the burning; but the scar of the fire is on me!”
Once as a young man, I became quite skillful with firearms. I maintained my eye with a high-powered BB gun that I used in the back yard. But targets get boring, so the shooter gets creative. I got to where I could almost split a card turned on edge. We set up a clothespin on a wire that, when shot, it would spin—you had to keep it spinning. Have you tried to light a kitchen match with a BB? I could a time or two.
Then there were the lizards on the fence across the yard. They weren’t doing anything—just climbing, sunning and looking for food. There he would be, minding his own business, when all of a sudden, he was pinned to the fence by a brass ball, taking his last few breaths . . . you can’t get something like that out of your head. And you can’t bring them back, either.
What do you say to the boy who you once sat on and made eat grass just because you thought he needed to? Can he forgive you? What other unhappy wreckages do we have and what can we do to live a life of Victory? How can we get deliverance from our past? What do we tell the felon as he sits on the block asking about getting a back move?
Jeremiah 18:3-4. “I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.” What a back-move!
Joel lived through a very tough time as the land was literally devoured. What gnawing locusts did not eat, the swarming locust ate. What the swarming locust did not eat, the creeping locust ate. What the creeping locust did not eat the stripping locust ate. Everything was laid to waste, stripped bare, dried up. The seeds shriveled, the barn fell, the grain dried up, the beasts were groaning and fire burned all that was left. But then he had this prophecy: “Do not fear, O land, rejoice and be glad, for the LORD has done great things.” Read Joel 2:21-27.
How was this promise fulfilled? How was there a return of what the locusts took? Look at the next years, when the fields began to grow again. The people were given crops that compensated for the losses of the previous season!
Now, lets go to the jail cell with THAT message! Let us preach THAT message with fervor! Let us hear and believe THAT message for us! This is a whole barrel of back-moves! Life takes on a whole new perspective! What kind of life is it that has no sweetness and goodness that comes as a direct result of suffering?
We cannot turn back the clock—but look at what God has given us that we may press on!
"But the bird with the broken pinion
Never soared so high again."
This is our sad predicament. But, as you know, there is “the rest of the story.”
"But the bird with the broken pinion
Kept another from the snare,
And the life that sin had stricken
Raised another from despair.
Each loss has its compensations,
There is healing for every pain;
Though the bird with the broken pinion
Never soared so sigh again."
