The Bottomless Pit

It started with a small pimple that then became a blackhead on my sister’s back. Every couple weeks or so, she would have me check to see if it had disappeared, and if not I’d squeeze the blackhead to try to get out all of the collected subcutaneous material (sebum and dead skin). This went on for weeks and months, as it was always still there, always more to squeeze out, never ending. We began calling it “The Bottomless Pit.”
 
This went on until I moved away, until she got married, at which point The Bottomless Pit became her husband’s responsibility. Whenever I returned home to visit, I’d ask about The Bottomless Pit – and over time it did disappear…but not disappear as in we found no trace of it, but disappear as in The Bottomless Pit gave in to a new identity, evolving from a small pinprick of a blackhead to a larger nodule, and eventually a cyst.
 
The cyst grew to walnut-size and became fibroidal and hard. No longer could anyone extract anything from it. Lodged between her shoulder blades, it couldn’t be ignored, and she sought a dermatologist who referred her to a surgeon to have it surgically excised.
 
The Bottomless Pit had taken on a life of its own, morphing from something small and, we thought, manageable to a problem requiring a specialist. The surgeon’s concern now was not just the cyst but that the fibroids had sprouted root-like threads attaching themselves to surrounding muscles…and growing in the direction of the spine. The longer he waited to remove the cyst, the greater the probability that he might cut too close to the spinal cord and cause even greater irreparable damage.
 
Such is the nature of sin. It starts as a simple pimple (acne [http://ad.vu/p3sk]), a pore or hair follicle irritated by bacteria. Unattended, the pore settles into a blackhead made of sebaceous material and dead skin that we then pick and prod with unclean hands. When it becomes noticeable, we try to squeeze it out, time and time again, but it is a bottomless pit. No matter how many times we go back and try to extract all the dirt that has become an oily, infected mess, there’s still more.
 
It’s easy enough to know where I’m going. Yeah, yeah, “and that blackhead will become a cyst that grows to infect the larger body which can only be surgically removed by the Great Physician, God.” 10 points for you.
 
But my main point is not about the cure, it’s about the pit, The Bottomless Pit—acknowledging, understanding, grasping in the depths of our being the helplessness of sin: That it’s bottomless, And that it is a pit in the worse sense of the word, pit being the biblical metaphor for hell, punishment, death. The psalmist cries out in Psalm 88:1-4
 
1 O LORD, the God who saves me,
       day and night I cry out before you.
 2 May my prayer come before you;
       turn your ear to my cry.
 3 For my soul is full of trouble
       and my life draws near the grave.
 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
       I am like a man without strength.
 
This understanding about sin and distance from God is not Christianity 101, not mere definition of terms. This understanding is not academic head knowledge to check off our list and move on. Coming to grips with what sin is in or lives is a lifetime experience that shadows every person, a condition that we cannot shake. It does not go away because we are human.
 
How do I know that sin is a lifetime condition and affliction? I know because Paul the apostle writes about it. Paul, whose thoughts became the foundation for Christian theology because they reflected the experience of all believers, wrote about it in Romans 7:
 
14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
 
Paul’s voice echoes our own that no matter how hard we try, sin lives in us. We are infected with the bacteria of sin and we cannot wash it off. Our nature is that we are not God, and as I reflected in an earlier journal entry (The S-Word http://40dayfast.posterous.com/day-31-the-s-word <http://40dayfast.posterous.com/day-31-the-s-word> ), sin is anything and everything that is not God.
 
Paul concludes his thoughts in Romans 7:24-25 with “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

What a wretched man, woman, being am I! The longer we live with Jesus, the more we realize this. The more we see how good and holy, righteous, loving, and just God is, the more we see that we are not.
 
We cannot fool ourselves at any time that we have “arrived,” that we have come to a special place of spiritual maturity that lifts us out of our human condition and sets us apart from others. That is the most dangerous place of all. When we believe that—and all of us at recurring moments do fall prey to that illusion and lie—we have deconstructed the bottomless pit, degraded it into a self-contained cyst that grows on its own, resistant to change, redemption, and new life.
 
The best place—the bottomless pit
Anyone who has gone through Alcoholics Anonymous or a similar recovery program will tell you that you have to hit bottom, and until you do no one can help you. What happens when we hit bottom is that we feel powerless to change and finally admit that we need a higher power.
 
That is what scripture tells us in Psalm 40:
1 I waited patiently for the LORD;
       he turned to me and heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
       out of the mud and mire;
       he set my feet on a rock
       and gave me a firm place to stand.

And in Psalm 103:
1 Praise the LORD, O my soul;
       all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
 2 Praise the LORD, O my soul,
       and forget not all his benefits-
 3 who forgives all your sins
       and heals all your diseases,
 4 who redeems your life from the pit
       and crowns you with love and compassion,

And what Jonah cried out from the belly of the whale:
To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
     the earth beneath barred me in forever.
     But you brought my life up from the pit,
     O LORD my God.  [Jonah 2:6]

The mystery of a life in Jesus Christ is that we can hold in tension the dual realities of the pit and the heights, sin and sanctification, heaven and hell. That mystery is encapsulated in one word: faith.
 
Faith is what Hebrews 11:1 says— “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” More than the “suspension of disbelief,” a term coined by the 19th Century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to explain why we can temporarily accept implausible works of fiction and art, faith dismantles disbelief.
 
Faith does not ignore the pit, it suspends us over the pit. It holds us safe even though we are close the fire, in the lions’ den, standing among accusers, and when we lose traction in life. Faith is remembering how good God is, not just relying on our honest attempts to be good.
 
And, yes, faith is knowing that God through the unparalleled act of Jesus Christ excises our sin, removes it completely when he covers over our sin with his own body. Jesus is the cover over the bottomless pit. We just have to acknowledge that it’s there.

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