All the Little Clickdevils

So I want to begin with an odd remembrance, an isolated lesson that got into my head for inexplicable reasons. I think our family first got a television when I was in the eighth grade or thereabouts. I believe this episode happened sometime before that because it was something I saw on somebody else’s set. It was in black and white, and I only saw a few minutes of it, and it was some Elvis movie. The gist of the clip was that whoever Elvis was being in that movie had made it big in whatever it was he was doing, and it had gone to his head, and somebody, not sure who, could have been a pretty girl and it could have been a surly uncle or it could have been somebody else, was letting him have it. How dast he forget his roots? Only they didn’t say dast.

Since that time, that small flickering image has represented for me the peculiar horror of taking God’s blessings for granted. Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. And as Cotton Mather said, faithfulness begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother. The sheer ingratitude of taking blessings for our birthright due is the perennial temptation, and I have hated the prospect of getting beyond myself since I was a boy. A brief one word prayer that I recommend highly is don’tletmescrewitupamen.

Renunciation therefore has to lie at the heart of all Christian living, in every era, for every class, in every nation. It is necessary for every man, every woman, every child. But renunciation is not a game for simpletons, and this is why we have to take care to navigate between those like Demas, who love the world, and those who think that they can rid themselves of the world by crawling into a very small corner of it. The first group says renunciation remunciation, and the second group exalts the idea of renunciation in order to renounce all the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way. The first group embraces the bling and the second group embraces the fling. Bling it on or fling it away. The first puffs out like an archbishop on parade with an umbrella drink and the second gets constant allergy panels done in search of more things to surrender to their Killjoy Zeus. With any luck we will discover our kids are all allergic to water and sunshine, and so must now spend their play times under their beds.

William James was the one who defined success as a bitch goddess, and the description, as far as it goes, is apt. But she is a persistent bitch goddess, and she will find you wherever you go. If segments from your life regularly show up at fail.com, she will be at your elbow, taunting you and provoking you to envy. Success ensnares many people who don’t have any. Mammon doesn’t have be in your wallet to have you by the throat. But if you retreat to Nepal to meditate in a cave, having renounced Facebook and all its little clickdevils, you will discover a certain smug pride in have renounced more, or sooner, or better, or more successfully, than the guy in the next cave. And if you pursue success straight up, then she becomes your deep interior decorator, lining the walls of your soul with mammon, or terminal degrees, or trophies, or trophy wives, or academic respectability, or a man cave with the full ESPN package. In short, you can run but you can’t hide.

So how is renunciation possible?

The only possible liberation from this vice vise is a bloody Jesus on a bloody cross. Propitiation is the only key that can unlock the dungeon of envy — and denials of propitiation, incidentally, whatever the theological justification might be, are always driven at root by envy. All the drivenness toward success, of whatever shape, is the regular strategy employed by the envious, trying to get out of the dungeon themselves, by their own autonomous efforts. Penal substitution is the only thing that can make envy visible to us, and that visibility is a true grace that enables us to see the Spirit of God seize our green-eyed lusts, in order to nail them, spitting and kicking, to the cross of Jesus. They never like it.

Incidentally, envy can function with a low grade fever for extended periods of time. It frequently doesn’t become openly malevolent until the object of the envy becomes aware of what is happening — or until the cross of Christ is preached with power.

In that wonderful movie, Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams is fast, largely because he is being chased by his demons. Eric Liddell is also fast — because he feels God’s pleasure. And the only way a sinner can experience such pleasure is if Jesus purchased that pleasure with His blood.

So how is renunciation possible? In biblical renunciation, the self goes on the cross. Jesus said that if anyone wanted to be His disciple, he should take up the cross daily. Paul says that “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20). Don’t you know that as many of us who were baptized were baptized into His death (Rom. 6:3)? The self dies. Who dies? Because Jesus died as my representative, I do.

In unbiblical renunciation, our various failures or alluring successes go on the cross, but the self insists on holding the nails and wielding the hammer. If the self is not mortified, if the self does not die, it does not matter how much stuff we nail up there.

And if the self does die, it does not matter how much stuff was left in our backpack, over by the soldiers.