DIVINE COUNSEL
By John Gavazzoni

"......having made known to us the mystery concerning His will, according to His good intention, which He proposed to Himself within Himself..." (Translation of Eph. 1:9 by Eddie Browne).

The heart of a man is his final counsellor for he is created according to God's likeness, the likeness of the God who counsels Himself within Himself in accordance with His (determinative) good intention. It is with man, as it is with God, that the heart is where all knowledge and emotion come together to determine what will become the acted-out person - - garbage in, garbage out.

The heart is that "place" in a man where intuition, cognitive thought and emotions come together to form a complex of self-creation. The result can range from utter vacuity of persona, all the way to the fullness of eternal personhood lived out in the aeons. The situation there in the heart amounts to a committee sort of thing - - I'm reminded of my dear friend, Ding Teuling's, definition of, and joke about a committee as: "A group of the incompetent, chosen by the unwilling, to do the unnecessary."

That's a picture of what often goes on in the human heart. A committee of all kinds of internal and external input forms within the heart with each member possessed of its own unique confusion, which together builds to a critical mass of misinformation, disinformation and mixed feelings creating a cacophony of opinions out from which emerges the dysfunctional existential self which is in a state of desperate insecurity regarding its worth.

The human heart is the seminal spiritual Babylon the Great. One cannot be fully delivered from spiritual Babylon without dealing with its seed in one's own heart. With God, no such confusion exists. Peace reigns in the heart of divinity, for there all knowing and feeling are counselled by the divine passion. The divine passion is the all-wise and ultimately influential advisory board member.

What shall God do? How shall God act? According to the Divine Nature's passion, that's how. God's passion is that we shall have all of Him, and He shall have all of us. That passion allows for no disagreement in the Godhead. It is agreed that God shall have us all in the depths of our humanness and in the universality of our humanity.

How does the Lord make our hearts to be like His? How does He quiet the maddening bedlam at our existential core? Upon our hearts descends the shadow of a cross, an awful, terrible cross that breaks through all our alienation, and persuades us as only it can, that God is FOR us.

After all is said and done, there, and only there, under the shadow of the cross am I convicted that God is really, yes really for me. There I know I am loved and I discover the all-determining passion of God. Jesus hushes the storm of internal voices that mix promise with disqualification to keep me in bondage to the useless effort of self-determination.