Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today – evidence can transform thinking but the heart.
Mark 15:31-32 TPT
Even the ruling priests and the religious scholars joined in the mockery and kept laughing among themselves, saying, “He saved others, but he can’t even save himself! Israel’s king, is he? [32] Let the ‘Messiah,’ the ‘king of Israel,’ pull out the nails and come down from the cross right now. We’ll believe it when we see it!”
Observation
Show me the evidence! Prove it to me! “We’ll believe it when we see it!” The trouble with standing on sight, on evidence, is we need to see it again constantly, show me again, remind me. And if I see something that challenges what I once saw and believed, I so easily change my belief. Show me so I can see it because I feel safer standing on the evidence of sight and seeing proven knowledge.
Love isn’t a proven sighted belief, it is an experienced personal encounter that is deeper than intellect. Demanded love based on the evidence shown is not love. Love cannot demand a response based on sighted evidence, love invites a response based on personal encounters. “We’ll believe it when we see it,” cannot establish a love relationship, for it is evidence that demands a verdict, not a personal encounter that is more powerful than evidence and has such a depth of meaning that it is transformative.
Had Jesus “pulled the nails out” then those who despised him to the cross would have been forced against their will to bow down based on the evidence. But it would have been the next day when they would have been devising a way of dismissing the nail removal as a trick of deception. Evidence does not transform us, love is the only transformative force great enough to establish a new humanity, the very reason for the cross in the first place. Evidence of Jesus’ miraculous ‘nail-removing’ power would not make us follow him into peaceful lives where we love our enemies. Lives lived in self-giving, self-sacrificial love. Lives lived forgiving and not judging others. The new humanity formed in the image of God would not be birthed in evidence-based coercion, it would require a force much more transformative and powerful.
This is why doctrines and beliefs, attendance in sacred places, and membership in the right tribe, don’t transform people – only lives lived in the presence and personal experience of love, of God herself, become reflective of the humanity God always intended to tend the world. You can’t nail down my love by removing your nails in front of me, evidence doesn’t move the heart, it can lead to an encounter, but it is not the encounter that transforms. Love is way too intimate to be experienced at the distance of sight.
Application
I will never live from the posture of demanded evidence. I will live at the intimacy of the table and from shared experience. I will not say “I saw love remove the nails,” instead I will say “I know love.” I will not seek evidence but create the rhythms of encounters in my life. I will stay in the posture of contemplative experience, then be still and know My God life posture.
Response
Thank you for not establishing life and relationship on the fragile foundation of evidence. The evidence demands a dispute, you invite a life that is much deeper, more beautiful, and more intense, than evidence can ever induce. I love this life lived in love’s embrace.
Meditation
Meditate – love leaves the nails in.
Consider:
“We’ll believe it when we see it!” How much of your life is lived in questions looking for answers and evidence?
Would you have preferred that Jesus “removed the nails?”
JOURNEY DEEPER
