“Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen
Jonah 1:3 (ESV): But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
Psalm 139:7 (CSV): Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
One of the elements of songwriting that makes a good composition a great composition is a term called prosody. In short, prosody is nothing more than making the music match the lyrical content. In other words, the music combines elements of tone, melody, composition, phrasing, etc. to support the mood and overall message the lyrics or song’s story is trying to convey. There are several ways to go about doing it, but for the Bruce Springsteen song, “Born to Run” it appears they used a very layered approach often referred to as a “wall of sound.” The effect? Intense, movement, busy, hurried and excited. Perfect adjectives to accompany the tale of young blue-collar working-class heroes making their escape from the routine of the daily inner-city grind. Add the honest delivery of a young Springsteen vocal and you have the perfect mixture to capture the feeling of a feverish run to escape.
We’ve been running since we ushered sin into the world in the Garden of Eden. We’ve been running from God With since the first bite of the forbidden fruit and realization we messed up on an epic level. Adam and Eve’s first inclination after disobedience was to run and hide. The Bible is packed with stories of those running from God and the consequences of their sin. Adam and Eve, Jonah, Gideon, Moses, and David are some of the more well known. Even Jesus’ closest followers scattered and ran away in his time of greatest need. Ironically, many of those running went on to be foundational in establishing God’s kingdom here on Earth. They went on to do many great things to glorify God, but only after they quit running, only after they realized there was no place left to hide. Like the Psalmist in 139:7 points out, they came to realize God is with us no matter where we run. We simply cannot outrun his presence.
Maybe you have been here. Most have. Maybe you are running right now. Running from our sins might look a lot like avoidance or withdrawal. Maybe it’s isolation or like Adam and Eve, simply hiding from our past mistakes. In simple terms, we run to avoid facing God and the consequences of our sin. But God is right there with us and sooner or later we realize we cannot outrun Him or the consequences of our sinful actions. Fortunately, our heavenly Father, is a good parent who can and will use our mistakes, our sin, to help us grow. He loves us and wants us to become better children, so we avoid repeating the same sinful behaviors in the future or even help someone else avoid the mistakes we made. He loves us enough to let us live with the consequences of our sinful actions too, but He does so while holding and comforting us in the process. Most importantly, He forgives us. He proved it by sending His son to earth to die for our sins, so punishment doesn’t have to be eternal.
God knows we are sinners. You can’t surprise Him. He knows all too well the consequence of sin left unchecked and its impact on us as humans. However, He can and does use our sin for greater purpose if invited to do so. He will use us and our sin to shed light on the love He has for all of humanity if we are only bold enough to ask Him to use our sinful past to glorify His name. He doesn’t need us to seek forgiveness. He desires it because of what it does for us, not Him. We cannot ever repay Him and He knows on this side of Heaven we will continue to find new ways to sin and break the covenants He’s established. But when we do and the urge to run comes, and it will, He asks that we run TO Him and not AWAY from Him. We gave birth to sin and when we did, we opened the door to death and maybe that’s what we are truly running from. Death is a fearful thing, but it doesn’t have to be. Death was defeated 2000 years ago. Maybe we were born to run but have just chosen to run in the wrong direction. If we were born to run, let us run toward life and stop running away from our sin and the path it leads us toward death.