Pingo-1 Fleas-0

Pingo was scratching his back and hind quarters something fierce. He bit and gnawed at his flesh and was leaving it raw. I saw the beginning of a rash that would never go away on its own, especially since he so continuously jumped into digging at it.

A year ago he had a serious problem with sand flees. They are horrible around here in southern coastal Georgia. I was trying to fix the problem with flea shampoo and bathing him often. But my doctoring was only making things worse. Eventually Pingo was constantly in agony and scratching all over his body, so we took him to the veterinarian who set us straight and the flea problem slowly went away, to his great relief and mine.

But Pingo doesn’t understand anything about fleas. His little doggy mind doesn’t comprehend where they come from, what they are, or how I got rid of them. All he knows is, from now on if his skin ever crawls, his reaction is to throw himself into whatever contortion is necessary and “Get the little bugger!” He remembers the fury of itchiness he experienced in the past and now anything that causes an itch drives him to the same, previous heated scratching he learned to do because of the fleas in the past.

Now when I give him a bath, as the water evaporates and his pores close, there is an itchy feeling—and he’s back to using his incisors again to find that “pesky flea!” Whenever skin dies from just natural causes like we experience and there is an itch, Pingo doesn’t just scratch it a few times, he dives in and pulverizes it!

But now the sores, which he had created because of his flea problem, became the cause for perpetuating those very sores. They were trying to heal, but due to the healing process, itchiness would come and go, forcing Pingo to get those “fleas,” thus irritating the sores and frustrating the healing. I couldn’t afford another visit to the vet, but an idea came to mind. I would buy a tall jar of Olive Oil to rub into Pingo’s fur and put a shirt on him so he couldn’t bite and dig at his skin anymore. And the oil would soothe the sores also while it was healing the skin.

The idea worked and now Pingo is free from fleas and their phantom counterparts.

Animals to humans is like we are to God. We are stuck in a bad sin problem. We really don’t understand sin or how it works, and we don’t know how to get to sin’s root to remove it. “Ye are not your own.” 1Cor. 6:19. It takes time and the infinite wisdom of our Creator and Redeemer, who alone can remove our rebellion from us.

But even after Jesus takes away bad habits and practices, the mind is so complex that there are still the memories that play tricks on us. There’s the guilt that quietly nags; there’s the empty hole that hasn’t yet been filled with good things; there’s the secondary habits that aren’t destructive of themselves but were associated with the sins that tore at us and our loved ones, that call us to resume all the evil that we had connected with those secondary things; and often there may be the worry that God doesn't accept us if we still feel the pull of sin.

But the Spirit teaches us through our day-to-day experiences that God sees our distresses and, like my work to save Pingo from his misery and self-destruction, Christ infinitely more so brings the forces of Heaven and Earth to save us from the pit whence we have been dug, not just initially but continuously. We can’t be trusted to stay out of sin once we are brought out of it at the first. “Once saved, always saved” just doesn’t work when it is taken in the practical sense. We need God’s continuous help, His training, His discipline and mercy; all that He has to offer.

If we don’t have Christ’s saving help and conversion on a daily, continuing basis, all that sin has worked into us will consume us. We don’t stand a moment without the sustaining power of Christ. We all, as some have mourned, were “born on the wrong planet.” We have spent our life choosing the prince of this world and he has worked his rebellious spirit into the very fibers of our being. So for the rest of our life, we will never be safely “on the wagon” enough to say, “I am free from the influence of sin and temptation,” unless it is while we are fully under the influence of Jesus, and the power of His grace has made us “free from the law of sin and death.” And even then, it is only “so long as.” The moment we lose His empowering grace, we fall right back under the power of Satan like Peter into the stormy waters, or like Moses, and David, and Solomon, and, Elijah, who after years of walking enviously close to God lost their hold on him and immediately sank into the depths of sin.

So, like Pingo’s fleas and subsequent sores, Jesus vanquishes our old sins, but then comes the work of removing their effects. He must heal the pains and the deterioration of our lives and souls that the leprosy of sin plagued us with. If we refuse the second phase of God’s help, we will fall victim to the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores that resulted from our life of open sin. We aren’t out of the woods just because Jesus saved us from our past. After that comes the washing and the medicating oil and ointments and salves.

Then over the medication He lays a protective cloth, to keep our sores clean, to enhance the life that is in the blood, to allow it to do its work. And that cloth stifles the old temptation to resume our own remedy and help fix our sin problem. Then as long as we submit to His methods, we eventually return to health. It is God’s glory to love us and to restore us body, soul, and mind.

“And they shall be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” Is. 61:3.