Beautiful Losers

I once read a book when I was in college written by the poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, called Beautiful Losers, a title that would one day inspire the rock singer, Bob Seeger, to write a song of the same name. At the time, the title touched a place in my heart, because I thought of my counter-culture friends and myself as "beautiful losers." The novel was one of the first post-modern novels of the era and focused on the love triangle of a group of eccentrics who were obsessed with a woman who was once blessed by a band of 17th century Mohawks with the name Kateri Tekakwitha. The book is full of ambiguity and poetry, but the title becomes significant because the characters devote themselves to unique aesthetic values that have no real application in the market place, society, or even in our modern system of education. They have no real function in the world except those of complete disenfranchisement for the sake of their spiritual and aesthetic pursuits. They personify to some degree the reason Plato banned the poet from the Republic, because he lacked any real usefulness.

As a Christian, I am not recommending this book, but I mention it because I was reminded in prayer this morning that Christians are also to some degree beautiful losers. The Bible is full of them. I have four favorites from the Old Testament: Joseph, Job, Moses and David. These are men who lost everything through their mistakes as human beings and yet they became God's glorious servants to be respected and emulated. Each one of these men suffered monumental failures and God loves and esteems them anyway.

I need to be reminded on a regular basis that God loves failures. I have failed so often and so completely in my Christian walk that I have had moments where I thought that I should just snip the umbilical cord to life and call it a day. I usually reach this level of dispondency by looking at life from a worldly view of success. The fact that I have been walking with Jesus for over 23 years and still sin has at times reduced me to a sense of complete hopelessness.

The reality is that God has set us up to lose, and to lose big. If you think I am going too far, take a look at the failures of Joseph. His first real failure was the result of informing his father and brothers that they would one day bow down to him. Joseph was insecure because of the jealousy of his brothers. Joseph was highly favored by Jacob, and his brothers hated him for it. Joseph's insecurity manifested in braggadocio. Not only did Jacob favor Joseph, but so did God, and Joseph wanted his father and all of his brothers to know it. He even proclaimed to them that the sun and moon and eleven stars would bow down to him. (Genesis 37:9) Joseph's lack of humility was stirring up a bitterness in his brothers that would result in Joseph's dismissal and rejection as a member of his family.

The high view that Joseph had of himself resurfaces again when he becomes the head over Potiphar's house. Joseph works for an officer of Pharoah, which must have produced in him a validation of his greatness in spite of his brothers' rejection of him. "I am as great as the dream God gave me," he must have thought to himself. Joseph had not yet risen to the full purpose of his calling, however, and he requires further humility and refinement. God has given him wisdom, but he is not yet the mature prophet and leader God has called him to be. Potiphar's wife tries to seduce Joseph, and he once again must be thrown into a pit. As occurred among Joseph's brothers, the wife of Potiphar is jealous of the favor Joseph has with her husband and of Joseph's own level of self-assurance. She despises the obvious authority of this young Hebrew desert dweller.

By the time Joseph becomes Pharaoh's second in command, he no longer attributes to himself any real ability. He has become completely reliant on God and the dreams and visions God gives to him. He knows that his destiny has nothing to do with his own talents or abilities or even his self-worth. He realizes by then that God simply has a plan and He wants Joseph to serve him in the fulfillment of it. When he sees his brothers again, Joseph is able to forgive them and say to them,

"And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt." (Genesis 45:7-8)

Joseph has come to understand that God does not love him any more than He loves his brothers or his father. Joseph suffered for the sake of his calling because God loves Jacob and his sons. Joseph's calling did not result in merely the exaltation of Joseph. The real purpose was the salvation of Joseph's family and the role they all would accomplish in Egypt. Joseph is simply one of God's beautiful losers.

Job becomes one of God's beautiful losers when God wants to take back more of the land that Satan has robbed from Him. Job has done nothing to deserve the devastation that Satan brings to his life, and that is the subtle point of God's challenge to him. "Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?" (Job 1:8) God tempts Satan to lawlessly attack Job's family, his wealth and his health. God is able to correct some of Job's beliefs in the process, and the perceptions of Job's friends also receive correction, but the ultimate purpose of God is to bring judgment on Satan for his unjust assault on Job. God is able to expropriate the lands belonging to the sons of the evil one and give them to Job. God's judgment falls on Satan and his captives enriching Job far beyond anything he could ever have hoped or imagined. When Job's fortunes are restored, he has been so broken by the attacks of Satan that he comes to realize that his service to the Lord has earned him nothing. God simply loves Job and uses him to bind the strongman and appropriate more of his goods. Job provides Satan a prophetic warning of what is to come. God would one day send His Son, Jesus, and Satan would take one step more than he took with Job. Satan will murder the Son of God unjustly, and it will cost Satan all earthly authority. Jesus will then bind the strongman and let His bride appropriate his goods. Satan's earthly "victory" over the Son of God has purchased for him a final swan dive into the eternal lake of fire, the final destination for heaven's losers.

I love the life of Moses. He is one of God's greatest losers of all time. First he loses his family and comes to live in the house of Pharoah. Then he murders an Egyptian and loses his adopted family. He flees into the desert a wanted man. These misfortunes must all have seemed senseless and devastating to Moses. No longer a metropolitan big wig, Moses spends forty years in the desert raising sheep and learning to enjoy a simple family life among an agrarian people. By the time God calls Moses, he can no longer speak with the erudite and confident verbosity of the royal family, but has instead become slow of speech, possibly a stutterer in his extreme humility. God transformed a member of the most powerful family on earth into the most humble man on the planet. Satan, the earth's most powerful and most arrogant ruler, can only be defeated by sheer humility. Moses is God's perfect weapon. Moses knows Pharoah intimately, but has become the complete opposite of Pharoah. The authority of Moses can be found in God alone, the Creator of all things, even of Pharoah. The authority of Pharoah is that of a fallen angel, a rebel in the kingdom of God, who has established a stronghold in the earth.

After Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt, he must spend the next forty years leading a stiff-necked and rebellious people. What is Moses' reward for his long life of troubles? He is called, while he is still as full of vigor as he was when he led the people of Israel out of Egypt, to walk up Mt. Nebo to the tallest ridge called Pisgah, and die there alone, without ever setting foot in the promised land. (Deuteronomy 34:1) Moses spent eighty of his one hundred and twenty years trudging around the wilderness on behalf of the God who met with him face to face. In the annals of God's losers, I know of no human being who can surpass Moses in beauty.

David is also one of the world's great losers. Consider a partial list of David's failings. He spends his early years as the youngest member of his family and as a mere sheepherder, hardly reflecting the resume of a king. The years of his early manhood are spent fleeing from Saul while leading and learning to love the outcasts and losers of Israel, those who are defined by distresses, debts and discontentments. (1 Samuel 22:2) He puts the ark of the covenant on a cart and causes Uzzah to lose his life in the process. He commits adultery with Bathsheba and has her husband, Uriah, killed in battle. He takes a census and numbers the children of Israel without first seeking the counsel of God. His son Amnon rapes his daughter Tamar. David's son, Absalom, avenges the rape of his sister by killing his brother Amnon, and eventually leads an insurrection against his father, which ends in the death of Absalom, who manages to bed David's wives before he is killed. These are only the big failures that made it into the book. Surely there were more, but probably of less significacet. We become astounded at the idea that God would call David a man after His own heart.

When we read through the Psalms, however, we begin to see a revelation of the prayers and prophecies of the Messiah. No other man in the Old Testament communicates in song and action the character and ministry of the Messiah to the extent that David does. God is certainly not embarrassed to sit on the throne of David when He restores His kingdom. David probably thought of himself as a loser when God denied him the opportunity to build Him a house. God tells David that he has blood on his hands, which disqualifies him for the building of the temple. His disqualification, however, results in the tabernacle of David, the New Testament pattern for prayer and worship. David's perceived failure creates in fact an illustration of the prophetic worship and prayer reserved only for the church age. David is the loser who sees prophetically the beauty of holiness, and who receives the forgiveness of sins long before Jesus died on His cross for them. David is a very beautiful loser indeed.

The beautiful reality of the Christian life is that God inhabits our failures. Paul goes so far as to say that he boasts in his failures, or his weaknesses. Paul boasts in his weaknesses because he sees God's opportunity to express more of Himself in the place of Paul's failures. Paul is accused of exhorting people to sin so that grace can abound all the more, so certain is He of God's ability to turn what Satan means for evil to the good. No lover of God wants to sin. When we sin, however, we need to put that sin in it's proper perspective. We are God's beautiful losers. All glory goes to Him and to Him alone.

As great as the losers of the Old Testament are, God's loser hall of fame can be found in the New Testament. Stephen is the first of the big-time losers. He is stoned to death while another of God's losers, the Pharisee named Saul, stands in approval of the brutal and unjust execution. Stephen is made aware of the beauty of his loss when he sees Jesus standing in front of his throne, giving honor in heaven for the great sacrifice of one of his earthly losers.

All of the apostles of the New Testament are God's beautiful losers. Each of them loses livelihood, homes, property, reputation, family and ultimately their lives. Earth's losers become heaven's victors in the resurrection. Beautiful losers lay up for themselves treasure in heaven. They count the loss of all things as mere rubbish in order to gain Christ. Loss is gain. Earthly loss produces the beauty of holiness, the true essence of all that is beautiful. Failure for Christians is never ultimate failure. The only true failure is the rejection of the Holy One, which seems impossible to do when the Holy Spirit keeps beckoning us heavenward. He has promised never to leave us or forsake us, even in our unbelief. When we are unfaithful, God remains faithful. He can do nothing else for that is the nature of His being. I rejoice in being a loser, a beautiful loser who knows no other purpose in life than to watch God glorify Himself in the most beautiful losers of His amazing creation.