The War over Rest in a Fast-paced World
The War over Rest in a Fast-paced World
The enemy of your soul doesn't want you to pause for even a moment
Something's wrong with the world. I started feeling it all the way back in middle school, and it only rose in high school. Something’s wrong with the world we’re living in. It’s broken. It’s unnatural. It’s inhuman. Echoes of these ideas pulsed through me in my adolescent years, but I couldn’t put my finger on the source of my frustrations. I couldn’t articulate it. In youth, you’re encouraged to just go along with what everyone else is doing. Funny enough, if you want to do something different, society provides an easy pathway to rebellion as well. Ted Kaczynski picked up on this quite well in The System’s Neatest Trick. The world has a way of redirecting revolutionary, rebellious energy in favor of the powers that be, so when you feel this wrongness as a youth, it’s hard not to get sucked into the pre-planned pathway of rebellion.
If somehow, you end up avoiding both going along with society and the pre-planned pathway of rebellion, you will find that you end up in a strange place. A place where you’re unable to take seriously the society in which you live. My critiques of modernity have been mentioned by many before, but it is good to take note of the general lifelessness that pervades our society. Everything is dead. But everyone is trying to convince you that it’s alive.
Have you ever been really thirsty? Our society is one in which it’s designed so that you never get to drink. Have you ever been really hungry? Our society is such that you will never get to eat. Reductive calculations and endless prognostications have made it so the wonders of life—and it’s quite wondrous indeed—are blocked out and deliberately hidden from the individual. The system doesn’t want you to breathe. It doesn’t want you to rest.
Race and race after that next thing, that next empty experience until you fall right into your grave, never having taken a breath or a moment to think. I fell into depression at an early age, unable to cope with the fact that the only options presented to me were lifeless living in the system or lifeless rebelling against it. The only source of water came from Christ. A breath of fresh air on Sunday, a trickle of much need water, just for a moment before having to face the dry deserts of modernity. Still, my energy was sapped. It had nothing to do with the Gospel, which is pure and true and life-giving. No, it was because I didn’t understand the deception at work, and in some ways, I was still subjected to it even though I was in Christ.
The Anti-Christ Global Economic (AGE) system ages you. You are caught up in a Satanic rat race against time as you are led by your desires into subjugation to Mammon and Jezebel. You need to work harder to make more money to buy more things that make you “happy.” And you must do this as fast as possible with little to no breaks, just a vacation twice a year perhaps. Of course, you must do this until you die (or retire). As a kid, I saw right through this and fell into depression because I thought that kind of existence would be terrible, but I also saw it as inescapable. Through college and afterward in the workplace, I got caught up in playing out the programming of the rat race. I worked harder to get more money to buy myself things that I didn’t need and that I didn’t want. What I wanted was a breath of fresh air, a bit of something to eat and drink, and a moment of divine rest.
Have you ever taken a nap in the hot summer sun?
That kind of rest, laying out under the sun and on soft grass without a care in the world. Time being an ethereal thing that just slips away from you when you’re resting. In fact, one of the best ways to know if you’re resting is if you have any regard for time at all. Through prayer, God unveiled the deception that I was under and freed me from it. I recalled how to rest, like some distant memory from my youth. I remembered how to pause and just take in God’s creation, to sit, to breathe, and to know who my Father in heaven is. I began to just flow with God in a new way without the cares of time or the pressure of accomplishment or ambition. Though trials have arisen, the burden of constantly having to do has left me for the most part such that I can just be. It’s wonderful.
When Elijah flees from Jezebel in fear, God gives him moments of rest. He does this even though Elijah is not quite where he should be and not quite doing what God would like him to be doing. The Lord is merciful and abundantly pours out grace upon us.
Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.
4 But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” 5 And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.” 6 And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. 7 And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” 8 And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.
- 1 Kings 19:1-8 ESV
The key to rest is to sit and be quiet, to breathe in the magnitude of the living God without fretting about what you should be doing or how you can achieve your next goal or next desire. It’s living in the moment that you are in without obsessing about the future or the past. It is presentism in its most pronounced form. Not presentism for your own sake or for some secular notion of “self-care,” but it is instead a moment for you to be fully yourself while being fully in Christ while being fully in time and fully in place. Have you ever taken a bite of a rich dessert and just basque in the flavors coursing through your taste buds? It’s that but concerning your spiritual communion with Jesus. What if you could simply chew on or shower in the glory of God? That is what rest is for the Christ follower.
Sometimes, we can have Christ, but we fail to understand, grasp, and receive the peace and rest he has brought to us. He is called The Prince of Peace for a reason. Take a moment, without regard to time, and just sit and be quiet with the Lord. In this age, the world would like to blot out all remnants of the idea of rest. The enemy, Satan, does not want you to rest. Because if you rest, you’ll find the secret to triumphing over hell doesn’t require your exploits as much as it requires your humility and submission to the Most High God, receiving the mystery of his glory through rest.