Finality as defined by Merriam-Webster:
a: the character or condition of being final, settled, irrevocable, or complete
b: the condition of being at an ultimate point especially of development or authority
For the past week or so I’ve been inundated with article notifications popping up on my phone such as the top team of the decade, the top stories of the decade, the top songs, etc. I kept on swiping the vast majority of them away thinking “what’s the big deal?” And then a few days ago it hit me – we ended a decade this year. Fin. End. Over. Nothing more to be added to the 2010’s but the nickname of the decade.
The fifties were the fabulous fifties followed by the swingin’ or psychedelic sixties, followed by the disco era of the seventies, etc etc. Interestingly enough, the 2000’s were called the Decade from Hell according to Time Magazine. All of these decades shaped our country’s history for better or for worse and like those decades – the 2010’s shaped my history and transcended the course for the rest of my life, but not only my life, my family’s as well.
Let’s travel back to the spring semester of 2011 when I was in college in Albany, NY. I was in my fourth year of college and like all the other years before it, it was really – and I mean really – not going well. The long and short of it was the year before I was put on academic probation because of the fact that I failed two courses in one semester. I subsequently was dismissed from the school only to have it overturned and let back in provided I take summer classes. Now, I’m about to fail out – again but there was a glimmer of hope because I realized that somehow I was going to pass molecular biology. I remember feeling like “okay, I can do this…somehow the God who I haven’t served, haven’t wanted to know, is going to make a way for me; just a few more weeks and no more F’s.”
Years later I realized what an idiot I was for this.
As I sat in my chair and opened the webpage, I remember saying “I’m going to be alright, God is with me and He’s not going to let me down.” I navigated to my grades, and saw it.
One big, fat, deserving F. Bold print F. Finality-esque F.
The F you don’t come back from.
I had failed the exam so badly that there was no way I could pass the module and I would subsequently fail out at the end of the semester, again. I remember being filled with anxiety and fear because being an only child, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to explain this to my parents. I had already been meeting regularly with a professor – his name was Dr. Cosler and he was one of the only earthly reasons I am where I am today professionally speaking. Cos, if you’re reading this – thank you again. After failing the module though I needed to go to someone above his pay-grade. I had to go and talk to a man who was one of the heads of the Academic Review Committee. Ironically enough, he was also one of the professors for the class that I just bombed.
During my meeting with him we were going over my options and he asked me a question that stuck with me for so long: if the academic review committee judges favorably on your behalf and gives you one last chance at this, what will be different? I had little to no words for a response, because the truth was, I had no idea. I tell students I take on apprenticeships to this day, my issue with school was not a scholastic or didactic issue – it was a heart issue. I had no idea what the point of my life was.
This was when I was first truly introduced to the prosperity gospel. I had grown up in church but nothing ever took root in my heart. I knew about God but didn’t KNOW Him, and unfortunately this was the first time I tried to know Him – but it was wrong. Over the summer I started listening to things that were all about ME as I waited to hear what would happen next. These preachers didn’t treat God like the God He is. These messages made it seem that God is NOT sovereign and that there was something that I could do to obtain favor or blessings from God. These preachers did not speak of how God is sovereign, majestic, all-knowing, all-powerful, a God we should bow in reverence before. I spent the summer just saying “God, you didn’t take me all the way here to let me fail. You didn’t take me through this just to make me look like an idiot.”
The long and short of it is they did in fact judge favorably on my behalf and grant me another shot at finishing school provided I repeat a year. When the time came for graduation, Cos let me know that there was an extremely high ranking administration member who said I was worse than a cat who had nine lives; I just wouldn’t die.
Truth is, I was dying. The problem of the prosperity gospel is that there is no peace. When you fall on hard times, it’s because you’re not doing enough. As they did judge favorably on my behalf, nothing took root in my heart in terms of God. He was just the means to me staying in school. But let’s fast forward to the next spring semester where I lost my internship because of my own doing. I subsequently went to San Francisco a few weeks afterwards for a conference and found myself doing exactly what I did before and what so many people do in hard times; reading the bible and seeking God as a means to fixing your situation – not our wicked hearts. I was just reading the book of Job every day. I was supposed to be in meetings and I even skipped a few because I was just sitting in this park across the street from the convention center reading the Bible. The problem is, I was not seeking God. I was seeking MY restoration.
I couldn’t understand HOW God could let this happen to me. I mean, this was definitely not my best life now. I kept on seeing how Job was stripped down to nothing; how he suffered and I kept asking why me? I had no understanding that one of the truest marks of a Christian is suffering. After the conference I returned home and actually started attending church again shortly thereafter. I started undergoing a heart-transplant.
I want to leave this clip right here. Two preachers, two theologies, one’s absurd (even though I subscribed to this for too long) and one’s absolutely correct.
This is where the decade would change course and the 2010’s would forever shape me, my now wife, and my now kids. I handed my life over to the Lord. I started hearing preaching that did not portray God as a genie, but a King who gives and takes away because all things good and bad were made to give glory to Him. I stopped hearing ME in the message and starting hearing Him. I recognized I was dying. My theology was poison. My life was poison. I surrendered it all.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Ephesians 2:1-3 ESV
WAIT FOR IT
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:4-10 ESV
The BUT GOD moment. How many of us have one?
It’s so easy to think that we can do something to better ourselves or even add to verse 4 where it states BUT GOD. We, in our feeble human minds, want to say BUT GOD and MY efforts, but God and MY prayers, but God and MY attendance record, but God and my works. All of that is absolutely wrong. There is only one statement to be made and that is BUT GOD.
When I looked at the definitions of finality listed at the beginning there was just something about those words that really played on my heart: settled, irrevocable, complete.
At face value it is so easy to look at some of the events that happened and point in some way towards decisions I may or may not have made. You could look at face value and see oh, he finally graduated, he turned his life around and wow he was blessed! He got married, he bought a house, he had two kids and now has a third on the way. But the real truth is that it’s about God. To say all those things is selling the situation short and we rob God of his marvelous work. We then miss the intricate details, the divinely woven details of how He took a life and turned it around for His glory and His alone.
There is nothing about this decade or life that I attribute to my own doing. I barely graduated. I barely passed my board exams. That’s not to say that I’m dumb, it’s to say that God is greater. He took a life that was heading nowhere and turned it to go further than I ever thought it would. He took a life that was full of pain and sorrow and replaced it with beauty and joy – FOR HIS GLORY. TO THE PRAISE OF HIS NAME. Not Benjamin Tubert. Not that I would boast in anything I’ve done.
He was the one that chose my life before the foundation of the world and that in love I would be adopted to Him through His only sons death. For all of us to praise Him for the grace that we don’t deserve through the shed blood and the blood alone that paid for our sins. This grace which was lavished upon us, not poured out in a manner that would save some for later, but dumped out and emptied, according to the plan He set in motion before the foundation of the world to reconcile all things to Him and in Him.
That is what makes this decade settled, irrevocable, and complete.
God bless you,
BMT
The Fire & The Flood 