The Wall
The evening was drawing nigh, and people were scurrying home, or off to Stag Doo’s and Hen’s Parties, Engagements, Weddings, and lots of other reasons to meet up and to party, crash on the sofa or floor and then back home in the morning, back across to the other side of town, but today it is now just after midnight on the night of August 12–13, 1961, trucks with soldiers and construction workers rumbled through East Berlin. While most Berliners were sleeping, these crews began tearing up streets that entered into West Berlin, the wall was up and there was now no way to cross over, to get back home, and it stayed that way until the 9th November 1989, so it took you some 28 years to get back home if you had inadvertently been on the wrong side of the fence.
The “Wall” was up, Berlin was now divided into two sides, and this stretched for some 155km, and there was no way over it, no way under it and no way around it, but for the extremely few, you could get in at the door, well that is the Brandenburg Gate. For those who lived at that time, the “Morning News” beamed out across the world, that the “Wall” was up, the city was divided and there was now no way around this barrier, as there was now “A-Wall,” a great divide that divided and separated the city and the country from just on everything.
How often, and how so easily it is for us to whip up a wall or barrier, things that divide and separate, things that isolate, cutting people off from others, a few for very critical and valid reasons, but many are built upon perceived hurts of ego and their condemned willfulness. We so often observe others who get offended so easily when they are not controlling everything, feeling that their control is being hindered, instantly erecting walls and barriers, pushing people back and away from them, to hide from their view or impact, those that they now despise, in some vain hope that they will come crawling back and submit to the dictates that are trying to be enforced upon them, submit or the wall goes up, “I can’t see you,” so therefore you do not exist, good ole “Ostrich with head in sand,” I still can’t see you.
Others build walls, and then fence things inside that should be kept out, this should not ought to be, or worse, fence out things that should be protected and enclosed within. When one looks at the “Cities of Refuge” listed in scripture, there are a couple of critical things. Should you inadvertently kill somebody, perhaps you drive through a “Stop Sign” without noticing it, crash into another car and one of the passengers dies, then you are offered protection only if you can reach a “City of Refuge” and get inside before the “Avenger of Blood” can catch up and slay them for this crime. Court is convened, their case is reviewed, an innocent accident, and you can stay and never leave, well until the death of the High Priest. Inside the walls and you are eternally safe, but when you look at the meaning of the names of the cities you discover this, they mean; Community, Shoulder (to cry on and to comfort), Enclosed, Sanctuary, Fortress, Heights. The City Wall was snuggly wrapped around you to protect you from any danger, a good wall to have erected.
God is so willing to erect protective walls around us, but so often we hinder the work, or even worse, we are on our “High Horse,” on some silly campaign to knock down and to demolish that which God is trying to erect for our protection, “wages of sin,” wandering onto Satan’s turf, which is like a “mine field” and at some point you will land up setting off a “Mine” and then the consequences are dire and disastrous, and God is continuously pleading for us to come back to safety, come inside the protective walls of his bountiful care and love, so we have the choice of a “City of Refuge,” or a place of our own devising and construction, and much like “The Three Little Pigs” we find that what we construct is “huff and puff, and it is gone.”
The “Berlin Wall” changed so much forever, for with no way back, relationships weakened and died, so how many relationships are you and I killing off with our “Walls,” and did they even get placed in the correct places, to keep the correct disasters out? The “Wise man, and the Foolish man,” all built grand and sturdy houses, they built walls, they put a great mountain of effort into their construction, but only the walls built on the “Solid Rock – Christ Jesus” were successful, they kept the floods of evil out, stood the test, and remained. So how is your “Wall Building” progressing? Have you placed them on the solid rock, that firm foundation, or are they built upon the shifting sand of our ever changing willful desires and passions?
We have “Retaining Walls,” we have “Load Bearing Walls,” and we have “Protection Walls” to keep wild and dangerous animals from harming us, and then we turn ourselves into avid “wall builders” and erect solid or flimsy, small or grand edifices, all for our own glory, to show off our powers of control, “you can’t get me,” but where do we keep “God!” So often we get so involved in building “Walls” that we erect them in the wrong places, and they come between. Isaiah 59:1-2 “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid [his] face from you, that he will not hear.” Is God ringing the bell on the walls of your own devising, calling out for permission to come into your life? Revelation 3:20 “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” So is your wall protecting you by keeping God in, or are you in peril by keeping him out? “Where is your Wall?” Are the critical things being “Bricked In” or “Blocked Out?” So “Where’s your Wall?”
