Legacy Archives - call me pasturescott

ziggaruts and arrows

“Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves…”

Genesis 11:4

We’ve long believed the people of Genesis 11 wanted to build a tower for themselves to scale the heavens, but that wasn’t it. The Tower of Babel was a ‘stage’ for their god to come down and visit them. Such towers, or ‘ziggurats,’ sat atop temples, providing their god(s) a ‘landing pad’ on which they could descend in grand style.

Trouble was, these were Mesopotamians; they certainly weren’t ‘YHWH’ people. The builders in the text longed for false gods with phony promises. In a similar story the prophets of Ba’al tried to upstage Elijah’s God by building theirs a runway. But guess who didn’t land? Although they wailed and hollered and chanted until they were blue in the face Ba’al never showed up (1 Kings 18:20-29).

Vanity of vanities, these worshipers of Marduk or Inanna or Anu, or whichever gods they could coerce to visit (‘build it and they will come’???), thought a skyscraper might get their attention. Alas, no.

Annnnnnd we keep building our towers. And they keep failing us. Careers, ideologies, reputations, portfolios, fantasies. Towers. Rubble. The Titanic was thought unsinkable. No less than a dozen utopian experiments have failed. Voltaire said within a hundred years of his death Bibles would be obsolete. One hundred years later, Bibles were being published in mass out of his home.

name above all names

A word about the phrase “make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4). In ancient thought it meant to create a ‘legacy.’ These ziggurat-builders wanted something lasting for their children and their children’s children. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Even us modern folk can justify our ambitions to be for the good of our children and our species. But in all our construction are we ignoring the Chief Cornerstone? Do our kids see us representing the Name above all names or is our handprint all they can see?

These Mesopotamians hoped to erect a Shining City on a Hill for their race. Trouble was, it was the WRONG CITY. There’s a reason we call it the Tower of Babel. Babel is about empire-building and man-exalting.

The gospel reverses all that. God wants to build a house, a CITY, a nation for US, for his people. We have nothing to offer him but ourselves in worship of his majesty.

Now I saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God—the All-Powerful —and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, because the glory of God lights it up, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their grandeur into it. Its gates will never be closed during the day (and there will be no night there). They will bring the grandeur and the wealth of the nations into it, but nothing ritually unclean will ever enter into it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or practices falsehood, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Revelation 21:22-27

We live for the glory of the King. We are not here to build a legacy, much less “a name” for ourselves. Rich Mullins, the prophet-minstrel reckoned himself “an arrow pointing to heaven.” He said,

“If my life is motivated by ambition to leave a legacy, what I’ll probably leave as a legacy is ambition. But if my life is motivated by the power of the Spirit in me—if I live with the awareness of the indwelling Christ, if I allow his presence to guide my actions, to guide my motives, those sorts of things. . . . That’s the only time I think we really leave a great legacy.”
— Rich Mullins

That’s our legacy, too. We are ziggurats made of clay (2 Cor 4:7), “tent-temples” groaning for our release from this world that we might enter his.

Shinar people, to their great misfortune, set their aim for earth and got nothing out of the deal. No personal deity, no lasting city, no enduring legacy.

a ‘ziggurat’ named abram

In the very next chapter, lo and behold, there was a visit from Deity! The Supreme God found a landing pad in a nobody named Abram and said I want to make your name great for My glory. God had plans to give him a people, a City, a nation, and himself!

Now that’s a legacy!

Father Abraham looked out his tent one day and saw what God was up to. He witnessed in a billion points of shimmering light a family of arrows each pointing to and worshiping the Almighty.

Like him, let us live out our days “looking forward to that City with solid foundations of which God himself is both architect and builder” (Heb 11:10). Ziggurats of Zion. Arrows until eternity.

Selah, fellow arrows. Until the Day!

GUEST POST: A Lion Named Jack

You don’t know Jack.

But you will.

Jack’s one of my “young lions” (you’ve read and met several of them on this site over the months and years): guys in their 20’s who are interested in more than just the “American Dream” for their lives. They have spotted a treasure in a field⁽¹⁾ and are spending these seminal years gathering their ‘talents and minas’ so they can buy that field. No holds barred. Nothing held back. All for King and Kingdom.

These are young men who, like Jack, are violently struggling to stand against the current tides of culture, and seeking the ancient and apostolic faith that turned the world (in their era) upside down. They are just foolish enough to believe the same can happen in their time.

Recently, Jack approached me to mentor him weekly and in one of our earlier meet-ups I asked him to compose a mission statement for his life.

The very next week he came prepared, and as he read his personal manifesto, I was admittedly moved and asked if it might be reproduced here for my readers. He graciously obliged. As you read, remember that there’s an entire ‘army’ of Jacks being called out of the earth whose passion is to live out these very things for the glory of Christ.

Does it encourage you? It certainly does me.

Mission Statement

To learn,

to observe,

to trust,

to love,

to exemplify.

To obtain knowledge but let it access my heart and not just my head.

To remain teachable, humble and vulnerable to correction by both leadership and the Holy Spirit.

To use my gifts to glorify God,

edify the body,

and speak truth speak truth myself.

To love with no expectation.

To challenge the mundane.

To show compassion to the hurting.

To keep my eyes open to serve.

To honor those in authority in every area of my life.

To embrace grace and profess truth.

To speak life into dead situations.

To be joyful,

grateful,

and show people the unreserved love that God demonstrates to me daily.

To be less, and have more of God.

To be everything God sees in his son Jack Roper.

To create a life of peace with those I encounter.

To understand those who don’t believe.

To not choose when or who I want to serve, love and show grace to.

To grow more in love with the Lover of my soul,

my Father,

Creator,

and Purpose,

my best Friend.

You’ll be hearing from Jack again pretty soon. He has a harrowing personal story that is his to tell – a story of devastation, depression, and hope leading to overcoming faith and forgiveness. You’ll want to stay tuned.

Oh, and pray for Jack this weekend. He’s been asked yet again to speak at Vida Nueva of North Georgia, a gathering of teens who have already expressed their own desire to live out the very ideals Jack expressed.

Oh for a sweet, sweeping, and lasting move of God!

⁽¹⁾Matthew 13:44

Father’s Day From A Prodigal’s Perspective

Today I propose we do a little what if-ing. Let’s “what-if?” the story that contains the prodigal son. It pretty much leaves us with some open-ended questions, I know.

Did Dad ever want to wring the son’s neck? Ever?

Where was Mom in all this?

What happened six weeks or six months later?

Did the kid suffer a relapse?

Questions.

So…let’s pretend.

Imagine if Father’s Day fell a week following the prodigal son’s return. No, check that. Let’s pretend it occurred about six or seven months later. On that morning, the father—let’s call him Chanan (Hebrew for gracious)—awakens from a dreamless sleep and rubs his eyes so as to roust them from their hours of inertia. It is still dark, but an oil lamp casts a coppery glow inside the master’s bedroom, and he looks at the pleasing, sleeping form of his wife—oh, may as well: Chana. Hannah. Grace. Continue reading Father’s Day From A Prodigal’s Perspective