Giving and Taking Away

“Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’” – Job 1:20-21

Material things are harder to come by these days. When I can’t just drive ten minutes to a store to buy something, I have to ask myself whether it’s essential (well, not truly), whether I still want it (yes), and then whether I’m willing to wait a month to get it after ordering online (okay, fine). During the wait, I find myself pondering the nature of my attachment to my things. How do I react or feel when I can’t have them right away? What or who do I truly value and think upon?

Perhaps a greater question is, how do I feel when things have been taken away from me? Not only access to material goods, but experiences and routines and plans? Job here has just lost an incomprehensible number of things: all of his livestock, children, servants. He has lost his wealth, his standing and identity in the community, his family, all at once. And yet without suppressing his pain, in the very place of his sorrow, he worships. How can this be?

Job makes a simple statement: his life is entirely founded on grace, not on meritocracy or entitlement. Just as he did not receive things because he deserved them, he cannot fault God for taking them away. As John the Baptist said, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27). Not even one. Job believes this. He believes it so thoroughly that in the absence of all things he can bless God.

Thomas Merton writes, “if we love God for something less than himself, we cherish a desire that can fail us. We run the risk of hating Him if we do not get what we hope for.” Do I love God for himself, or for what He gives me? Do I grasp how deeply his grace runs in my life? Is the reality of who God is greater than the material things surrounding me? May we be people who can bless God in abundance and in loss.

Waiting Is Open-Ended

“The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when he delights in his way.” – Psalm 37:23

“I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and start hoping.” – Henri Nouwen

We live in a culture where the goal of life is self-actualization and self-fulfillment, where the ultimate source of authority is self. When that is cloaked with Christianity, what comes out is something like, “I say I believe in God but I still want what I want, how and when I want it.” Moreover, our little resource-steeped pocket of the country promotes to a unique degree the belief that any outcome can be achieved through optimization. All of it leads to a sense of control that becomes habitual, instinctive without our even realizing it. Our universe revolves mostly around ourselves and our abilities.

Nouwen says there are two ways to wait. One is to wait as a way of controlling the future. When we do this, we wait for something concrete, something we wish to have. Much of our waiting, he writes, is filled with these wishes: “I wish the weather would be better” (he obviously didn’t live here). “I wish the pain would go.” When things don’t go in the specific directions we desire, we slip into anxiety, disappointment, or despair.

The other way to wait is to wait open-endedly. When we do this, we give up control over our future. We let God define our life, trusting in His love over our fear, trusting that new things may come that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. When we wait in this way, we have hope. Nouwen writes that “Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.”

This reminded me of something he wrote in his book Discernment: “In retrospect, many of the good and important things that have happened to me in life were completely unexpected. And many things that I thought would happen to me did not occur. As I reflect on this reality, it is clear that God is present in the events of my life, yet I act and speak as if I am in control. But if the future is not in my hands, then I have all the more reason to stay in the present and give honor and glory to God from where I am.” 

How am I waiting? With anxiety, or with hope? Is my trust actually in myself, in my plans, or in God? Who do I believe ultimately establishes every step of my life: myself, my efforts, my machinations, or Yahweh-Lord? God doesn’t want me to wait with a grudging kind of open-endedness. He wants me to release control so I can step into delight and true hope. He wants my waiting to be a new kind of experience of His love, His character, and His goodness in my life. May it be so.

Waiting Is Presence

“Wait for the Lord and keep his way.” – Psalm 37:34

The interesting thing about having most of my planner become obsolete is realizing how much stock I put in it. It’s good to plan, but it’s easy to expend a great deal of mental and emotional energy upon a fictitious future that doesn’t even exist. We worry about things that haven’t actually come to pass. We hope in circumstantial possibilities more than we hope in God himself. The truth is, the only reality that I live in is now; my plans and the future in which they exist is not real. And nothing has shown us that more than this pandemic, which has ripped from us the future that all of us planned for.

It’s easy to think of waiting as passive. We are at the mercy of the virus; all we can do is wait. But Nouwen points out that nearly always in Scripture, those who are waiting do so actively. We see that here in Psalm 37, which is full of active injunctions: “delight,” “commit,” “be still,” “trust,” “turn away,” “do good.” Because we have God’s promises, because we know the seed has already been planted, we can wait actively. Nouwen writes, “Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening. A waiting person is a patient person. The word ‘patience’ means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.”

Waiting means being actively present to the moment we’re in, the people around us, the opportunity before us. It means learning to discern the presence and movement of God right where we are. It means untangling ourselves from living in the future so we don’t miss what God has for us now. C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

God does not promise me grace for tomorrow, or for next month or next year. He promises it for the reality I live in right now. To wait is to be attentive with patient expectation. To keep our ways, in faith that God is present and working right where we are. 

Waiting Is Movement

“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself…” – Psalm 37:7

My calendar looks really weird these days. It’s a cross between a memorial and an actual planner. There are the actual planned events, mostly zoom’s, but there are also the formerly-planned events that I’ve crossed out but can’t bear to white-out from the space, because I want to remember what we lost: a trip, a graduation, a competition, a meal out. There are far more things crossed out than filled in. There is nothing planned out farther than a month. 

I would like to know how things will play out. What will school for my kids look like in the fall? How much can I expect to be able to work? Will we be sheltering in place again later? Can we travel? Can my parents still come to visit us? But none of us know. The only way the answers can be found is through the passage of time. We are all in a holding pattern. We are all waiting.

And waiting, at least on this colossal of a scale, is not something we as a culture are particularly good at. We like to be doing. We like to be in control. We like to achieve visible results. Waiting for most of us is closely linked with fear. We are afraid of our inner feelings, of other people, of outcomes, of the future: and fearful people have a hard time waiting. Waiting becomes an experience in anxiety. But we must learn to wait, for all of the spiritual life is in a sense about waiting. David says, be still before God and wait without fretfulness—and for most of us, that has to be learned. Learning to wait in an outward sense, as all of us are having to do now, can expose and teach us things that help us to be people who learn to wait in a spiritual sense as well.

I came upon a transcript of a talk that Henri Nouwen gave once called “A Spirituality Of Waiting.” What is the nature of our waiting for God? We wait, he says, as people who have received promises. In each of the three verses before this one is a promise: “he will… he will… he will…” We have received promises that allow us to wait, that are at work in us, as Nouwen writes, “like a seed that has started to grow. This is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.”

In other words, the waiting is not wasted. It has a point. It is producing something. We may know these things, but they are empty words without a promise. When Amazon promises my package will come on a certain date, even if it’s now in two weeks instead of two days, I’m willing to wait, at least to the degree that I trust Amazon and want what I ordered. We have promises from God, and what he promises are the desires of our heart, true justice, abundant peace, a great inheritance (verses 4, 6, 11)—do I trust him? Do I long for what he promises? Do I believe that his work has already begun in me? Waiting is never still. It is always a movement, from something to something more.

Hear Me Quickly, Lord

by Ted Loder

Hear me quickly, Lord,

for my mind soon wanders to other things

     I am more familiar with

          and more concerned about

               than I am with you.

O Timeless God, for whom I do not have time,

catch me with a sudden stab of beauty

     or pain

          or regret

that will catch me up short for a moment

to look hard enough at myself—

     the unutterable terror

          and hope within me

and, so, to be caught by you.

Anger

“After these things, when the anger of King Ahasuerus had abated, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her.” – Esther 2:1

The events in the early part of the book of Esther seem driven by angry men. In chapter one, we’re told that “the king became enraged [qatsaph, to break forth in wrath], and his anger [chemah] burned within him.” In chapter three, we read that “Haman was filled with fury [chemah].” This word chemah means literally “heat, poison that burns the bowels”—it is indeed something which both burns and fills.

Anger, I often tell the kids, is not a sin, but it is very dangerous. God has perfect anger. Jesus was angry and acted out in anger. But while their anger is righteous, when we are angry, we are often angry to a wrong degree, or over a wrong cause. Anger is indeed like fire or poison: it destroys outwardly when we lash out in ways we later regret. It consumes inwardly when we bury it inside. Anger can be a helpful tool, just like small fires help us cook, or small doses of poisons can cure: it can reveal our heart idols or areas we need to work on in our relationships, it can energize us in productive ways. But it must always be handled carefully. So we talk about techniques like how to recognize early on when we’re becoming angry, or various risk factors (hunger, fatigue) to be aware of. How to express it in okay ways if we need to. Things that escalate and de-escalate a fight. Lines we never cross: words we’re never allowed to say, things we’re never allowed to do.

Willard Harley puts it this way: “When you’re angry, you are not simply upset—you’re insane. You are not reasoning correctly because your brain is flooded with adrenaline. You think the way paranoid people think—that your spouse is your worst enemy and is deliberately trying to hurt you… Anger is deceitful: it lets you forget what really happened and offers you a distortion of the truth… When couples have tape-recorded their fights, the one having the outburst is usually surprised at what he or she said.” Angry outbursts, he says, are a form of temporary insanity: one acts irrationally, and the details are often forgotten or remembered falsely afterwards.

He may be putting it strongly, but there are traces of that here. There is this moment when King Ahasuerus remembered what he had done. Haman acts out his anger against one man by proposing genocide. In both cases, anger destroyed to the point of death: the death of a relationship, the threat of death for an entire people group. But, as we’ll see, God will work through these events to yet achieve his good purposes. That’s the amazing thing about this book: though God is never mentioned in it, His fingerprints are all over it. Even through moral ambiguity and outright sin, God is sovereign and very much present. 

Bad Endings

“Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites… Remember me, O my God, for good.” – Nehemiah 13:29, 31b

“Well-constructed plots, therefore, should neither begin nor end at an arbitrary point.” - Aristotle

We have come in Nehemiah 13 to the end, chronologically speaking, of the historical events of the Old Testament, and it’s a real downer. This is evident on even a superficial read: there is a glorious climax with the temple and wall of Jerusalem rebuilt, the law rediscovered and covenant restored—the story of Ezra-Nehemiah (which were intended to be read as a single book and presented as such in the oldest manuscripts) should really have ended there. But in the final chapter, we learn that Nehemiah returns from a work trip to find that the people have already broken the covenant. They have desecrated and forsaken the temple and the Levites, profaned the Sabbath and intermarried. Worst yet, Nehemiah appears to lose it, cursing the people, beating them and tearing out their hair.

But the disappointment runs deeper. To see this, we have to go back to the beginning. Ezra 1:1 tells us it all began “that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled.” When you place Ezra-Nehemiah against the backdrop of Jeremiah 25-33, you realize there is an overarching theme against which the story is told. It is seen in this phrase that occurs over and over in Jeremiah, translated “reverse the plight” or “restore the fortunes” (30:3, 18; 31:23; 32:44; 33:7, 11)—the prophecy and promise that God will bring everything bad back to how it was supposed to be. How he will truly restore his people. And in Ezra-Nehemiah, we see this in the restoration of place, building, wall, worship. But Jeremiah also promises that God will make a new covenant that includes writing his law on the hearts of his people who can then truly know and obey him (31:31-34), and it is here that the story in Ezra-Nehemiah falls short. The people remain addicted to covenant-breaking. In fact, the words “remember them” in judgement and “remember me” in mercy echoes the prayers of the exiles in captivity. They may be back in Jerusalem, but they are still captives.

The devotional I happened to read with the kids this morning was entitled “Already… But Not Yet!” Sally Lloyd-Jones writes, “We are living in between Already and Not Yet. Jesus has already rescued us from the punishment of sin. We are forgiven and free! But the world is still broken. We still sin. We still die. Things still aren’t the way they are meant to be. One day—but not yet—Jesus is coming back again. Not as a baby this time, but as a King of the whole world. And then he will mend his broken world.”

Why does the historical story of the Old Testament end on such an abysmal note? Because the answer is not Ezra, or Nehemiah, just as it was not Moses or David or Josiah. It was not the inherent will or self-control of the people. They all fell short; we all fall short. The answer is Jesus. And even now, knowing so much more than the Israelites did then, we still live like them in a not-yet, in a place that requires faith and a wait of unknown duration. In this place, we cling to the promise we know to be true, that one day Jesus will return and all will be restored as it was meant to be.

Temptation

“Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” – 1 Corinthians 10:12-13

These two verses have an interesting interplay. On the one hand, we have an amazing promise, but on the other, an inescapable warning. Look at the past, Paul writes. The Israelites, who had the very cloud of God’s presence, who walked through the sea, who ate food and drank water from God’s very hand—they yet were idolatrous, sexually immoral, put God to the test, and grumbled. You must never think that you can’t fall.

Take heed, he says. What does this mean? In the Greek, the word used is blepo, which means literally “to see.” There are over a dozen words for “seeing” in Greek—a common one is horao, and Vine’s dictionary compares and contrasts the two in this way: “Horao and blepo both denote the physical act: horao, in general, blepo, the single look; horao gives prominence to the discerning mind, blepo to the particular mood or point. When the physical side recedes, horao denotes perception in general... Blepo, on the other hand, when its physical side recedes, gets a purely outward sense, look (open, incline) towards [as of a situation] (Schmidt, Grimm-Thayer).”

Blepo is not seeing in a generalized way marked by deep inward understanding. It is seeing in a singularly intent, pointed, outwardly-oriented manner. It is not the vision of meandering meditation, but of a relentless and practical vigilance. I imagine Paul saying here, “look sharp about you!” As Eugene Peterson rewrites these verses, “These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don’t repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were. Don’t be so naive and self-confident. You’re not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else.”

We do carry the responsibility of jettisoning hubris and over-confidence, of being watchful and not careless in what we do. But temptation will surely come, and ultimately our vigilance is walked out in step with the promise that we can endure it when it does. There’s a part of me, or maybe it’s our culture, that says that I can’t hold out. That I will end up giving in. But that is simply not true. God promises that there will always be a way of escape, not to free myself from temptation necessarily but to find from Him the ability to endure it. Enduring temptation without giving in is painful; the author of Hebrews calls it suffering. But in this way we identify with and find encouragement from Christ, “for because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).

The Value of Daily

“And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God.” – Nehemiah 8:18

Why read the Bible daily? Why, for example, ration out Proverbs verse-by-verse over the course of a year, as our plan does, when we could sit down and read the entire book in a matter of hours? Why not just read it in occasional chunks?

Put simply, this is a case where efficiency and productivity are not the same thing. There is a kind of growth that can only happen when we read the Bible inefficiently, one day at a time, every single day, and it’s as mysterious and mundane as our need to eat every day. There’s nothing wrong with occasional special meals, but the fact remains that our bodies are created to require food daily—if we go too long without that, we become weak and sick. The same thing is inescapably true of our spiritual lives. As Dean said in the sermon last September that launched this reading plan, “We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, but here we are—it sustains us.” It fills our tanks, and “when the storm hits, all that you’ve got is already in the tank.” You cannot grow as a Christian, he said, without regular Bible reading—it just doesn’t happen.

The truth is, most of us have consumeristic tendencies when it comes to reading the Bible. We want to be fed by someone else. We want it to be easy and convenient, tailored to our needs, like a fast-food drive-through. But reading the Bible daily on our own teaches us to self-feed. It allows us to encounter God on our own and not through the spiritual lives of others, and this over time produces a slow but sure growth that cannot escape notice. “When you miss your devotions one day,” James Cordeiro writes, “you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.”

The point of my life when I was challenged to take this seriously was when I started learning about the lives of Christians like Hudson Taylor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jonathan Edwards, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, William Tyndale, George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, William Wilberforce, John Bunyan, Martin Luther, William Cowper, David Brainerd: the one thing all of these people had in common was daily time with God, both in Scripture and in prayer, often extensively. “I have so much to do today,” said Martin Luther, “that I must spend at least three hours in prayer.” Do I take my spiritual growth seriously? Then I must read God’s word, day by day, from the first day to the last. 

Love and Knowledge

“If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” – 1 Corinthians 8:2

My residency director was fond of speaking of the four stages of learning. The first is “unconscious incompetence”: you don’t know what you don’t know. The second is “conscious incompetence”: you know what you don’t know. The third is “conscious competence”: you know what you know. The fourth is “unconscious competence”: you don’t know what you know.

He liked to talk about this as it applies to learning cataract surgery, the bread-and-butter of ophthalmic procedures. You start off perhaps having seen one of these surgeries before, but without any real idea of all that is involved. Then you practice on a pig eye and begin to grasp what it takes to maneuver in a small, fluidic space, with hands and feet doing different things all at once. Then you operate on real people and get to a point where you feel like you know what you’re doing. Eventually you do it all without having to think over every tiny movement or step. He would draw these stages as a cycle, with the last leading back to the first, either as you break down what you know to teach others, or as you grow further in skill or knowledge. 

In this passage, Paul describes the tension between two of these stages: the people who know what they know, that idols aren’t real and thus eating food offered to idols is fine, and the people who don’t know what they don’t know, who from their past still view idols as real in some way and thus avoid such food. Interestingly, Paul doesn’t correct the folks in the first stage of learning here. He doesn’t begin lecturing on idols. He speaks to the group in that third stage. Be very careful, he says, when you know what you know. Because as soon as you think you know something, you really don’t know it at all.

For one thing, the fact that these stages of learning exist means that, even if you know what you know, there are probably a lot more things you don’t even know that you don’t know. But Paul’s bigger point is that love trumps knowledge. In that third stage, we can get stuck in our knowledge and forget this important fact. As we say to the kids often, “sometimes it’s more important to be kind than to be right.” Paul puts it so well when he says, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (8:1)—to swell is to appear large and significant while remaining insubstantial in substance, while to build up is to achieve true and solid growth that will last. While “knowledge” leads to judgment and pride that ultimately destroys ourselves and others (8:11), love is what leads to life. Love is, ironically, what leads to the ability to be truly known and to truly know: “But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:3). True knowledge starts with love, with loving God, and we must never forget this, wherever we are in our journeys of learning.

Quarrelsome

“It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.” – Proverbs 21:9

Whenever Dave and I go through permutations of work-life balance, we have to make adjustments, not just in logistics, but in what it means to inhabit differing proportions of differing worlds. Where we spend our work day affects how we experience the space and dynamics of home; it affects what our minds dwell on and what it takes to communicate well and feel together in it all.

One example of this is how, with homeschooling, our (entire) house has become a kind of personal workspace. Just as one would organize their office desk, the order and cleanliness of things at home have acquired a new meaning that I forget may seem foreign to Dave, who unlike me still leaves the house for work every day. It’s easy to become microcosmically critical about things he does in our space that I never explicitly communicated about. And now that I don’t have the commute home to decompress, or really any line between work and home, it’s easy for the day’s frustration to leak out upon the only adult I ever see, even just in small ways.

The word “quarrelsome” here can also be translated “contentious.” The best analogy we have is that of continually dripping rain (Proverbs 19:13, 27:15). Dripping rain doesn’t kill you; one drop here or there is not remarkable at all. But the overall effect, if it keeps on going, is just enough to annoy and impair, isn’t it? Everyone who has dealt with a dripping faucet knows how the sound can drive you crazy. Even when it’s only drizzling, you can’t go out and do very much. Eventually anything you leave outside long enough gets soaked through.

That is what being quarrelsome is like: never a notable outburst, nothing that gets it all out in the open, just small squabbles that build up over time, inevitably altering the atmosphere of the home until it becomes a terrible place to live. Proverbs says it’s better to be in a small corner of the roof than in a wide house, better to be in a desert (21:19)! This is a good reminder that the small things we do or say, our facial expressions and tones of voice, matter. Being kind to those closest to us, demonstrating affection, being intentional about communication, is important, more than we realize. And it’s important now more than ever.

Gather Me To Be With You

by Ted Loder

O God, gather me now

to be with you

as you are with me.

Soothe my tiredness;

quiet my fretfulness;

curb my aimlessness;

relieve my compulsiveness;

let me be easy for a moment.

O Lord, release me

from the fears and guilts

which grip me so tightly;

from the expectations and opinions

which I so tightly grip,

that I may be open

to receiving what you give,

to risking something genuinely new,

to learning something refreshingly different.

O God, gather me

to be with you

as you are with me.

Amen.

The Way of the Request

“Then the king said to me, ‘What are you requesting?’” – Nehemiah 2:4

When Nehemiah hears the news that an attempt to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem had failed (Ezra 4:23), he responds with weeping, fasting and prayer. As a cupbearer, he was the chief financial officer, bore the signet ring, and likely served as the wine taster. He had ready access to the king, yet it was nearly four months before he made his ask. When the king finally noticed his sadness, Nehemiah felt “very much afraid” (2:2), perhaps because the king was known to punish those who were sorrowful in his presence (Esther 4:2). Nevertheless, after hearing the reason for Nehemiah’s sadness, the king puts this question to him: what are you asking for?

When was the last time you asked for something? Not used a question as a veiled command (“can you take out the trash?”) or request for information (“why did you do that?”), but as a genuine request? It’s hard to ask. It’s easier to take and demand, or deny and ignore. True asking requires I give attention to what I truly need or truly want. It requires that I share that vulnerably. It puts the power of granting entirely in the other’s hands. It leaves me only able to receive. To ask is to approach in humility. Dallas Willard writes, “We try to ‘manage’ or control those closest to us by blaming and condemning them and by forcing upon them our ‘wonderful solutions’ for their problems. [God] then shows us a truly effective and gracious way of caring for and helping the people we live… It is the way of the request, of asking.”

Nehemiah makes his asks of the king. But the king was not the first one he asked. Months before this (4:11) and even during it (2:4), he had been asking God. Jesus says, “ask, and it will be given to you” (Matthew 5:7). Asking exposes the nature of our relationship with someone, and Jesus says there is something about our relationship with God the Father that we can only experience when we ask. What are you asking for today?

The Theology of Sex

“The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body… he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality.” – 1 Corinthians 6:13, 17-18

It is nearly impossible not to internalize some views of sex from the world around us. In our culture, sex is consumeristic: it is about self-gratification, feeling good physically or emotionally, or being used as a tool to get what we want. In our culture, sex is solely physical; it is an appetite to be met, and can be divorced from the mental, emotional, spiritual and relational. Pornography has made it even more about performance and objectification. Lastly, sex in our culture is idolatrous; it is portrayed as the ultimate source of fulfillment in and of itself.

But the Bible tells an altogether different story. God invented sex, as a good thing without shame. Have you thought much about why? Paul says that our body is meant for the Lord. Sex is a signpost that points us to God. J. I. Packer writes, “A signpost only helps those who will head the way it directs, and if you insisted on camping for life beside a lovely signpost, you would be daft; you would never get anywhere.” Sex points to the triune nature of a God who exists in a state of mutual, self-giving love and joy, a kind of constant union of which sex perhaps gives us a glimpse. It points to the wholeness of union we will have with God one day in eternity (Ephesians 5:32). And it points to the gospel itself, by acting out the creation of new life through the giving of self within a covenant. 

Rather than consumerism, sex is literally and symbolically about relationship, with God and with our spouse. Rather than being merely physical, sex is portrayed as a union of all levels of our being. Rather than implying that sex is essential for happiness, the Bible tells us about people like Paul (1 Corinthians 7:7) and Jesus who never had sex, and that there won’t be sex in heaven (Luke 20:35). Ultimately, sex is not all about us: there is something mysterious and wonderful here, something in the roots of our longings and the way our bodies are made that testifies to God himself. Don’t you know, Paul says, that your body is meant for God, that you are one with him, that the Holy Spirit lives inside you, that you are not your own? We aren’t to flee sexual immorality because of a low or fearful view of sex, but because of a high view of it, because we don’t want to do anything that would obscure what it is truly meant for. 

Confession

“O my God, I am ashamed and blush to life my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads... what shall we say after this?... shall we break your commandments again?... Behold, we are before you in our guilt.” – Ezra 9:6, 10, 14-15

Ruth Haley Barton writes, “Our culture promotes a profound sense of denial about the presence of sin in our lives and the ways our sins and negative patterns wound others.” Perhaps that is why I am struck by Ezra’s genuine grief and open confession. When was the last time you told someone you felt ashamed about something? The tone of this part of the book seems far more personal than anything we have read thus far. 

There are three general kinds of confession: personal (between God and us), interpersonal (with a trusted friend or the person we have offended), and corporate (as a community or congregation). We see all three kinds here in Ezra 9-10: the personal confession of all who had taken foreign wives (10:14), interpersonal confession of Shecaniah to Ezra (10:2), and confession as an assembled congregation (9:10, 10:1, 10:9). 

For some reason, interpersonal confession seems hardest to do. It’s much easier to confess in private or in the anonymity of a large group, but much harder to look someone in the eye and admit your wrong. For one thing, most of us have seen few examples of this done well: it is rare to grow up with parents who model confession to each other or their kids, for others to personally apologize for their wrongs, for friends to be vulnerably and deeply committed to accountability. If anything, sheltering in place has given me plenty of chances to model confession to my kids: “I’m sorry I hurt you with my tone of voice.” “I’m sorry I turned my frustration about your brother onto you.” “I want you to know I said sorry to your Daddy after we fought.”

For another thing, interpersonal confession can reveal whether or not we are really confessing at all. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution... Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.” Whenever I feel the urge to brush off confessing my sin to someone, I at least try to examine that impulse. Am I really sorry, or am I just trying to make myself feel better and move on? 

“Confession,” writes Barton, “is good for the soul… because it opens us to the experience of being forgiven and the freedom that comes on the other side.” Confession leads not to shame but to release, because we have this promise: “If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Stages Of Life

“The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.” – Proverbs 20:29

The Bible Study Fellowship I attended in Virginia was composed mostly of women with, well, gray hair. They would look at me, sleep-deprived, nursing, pregnant, hauling toddlers and diaper bags, or all of the above, and say fondly, “the days are long but the years are short.” I’ll never forget how excited the women in my group were for each new baby I had, how special they made me feel. I was able to emerge from my life of surviving from one nap to the next long enough to hear their wisdom: value the stage that you’re in because it won’t last forever and one day you will miss it.

Our society values youth, almost to the point of being pathological about it, but Proverbs recognizes the strengths of every stage of life. The Hebrew words used here for “glory” and “splendor” both essentially mean beauty. If you look them up in a lexicon, they define each other: the word for glory can also mean splendor; the word for splendor can also mean glory. Yet they are different words. There is a unique kind of beauty to be admired and valued in each stage of life. As Tim Keller writes, “The young have a strength and an unwearied ambition that older people cannot muster. The old have a perspective, wisdom and dignity that younger people have yet to acquire. These are all distinct goods that should be enjoyed in their time.”

We should enjoy these goods. We should look for the beauty in our stage of life. Today I hugged Emmy, the only one who still has some baby fat, a little harder. I noticed Ellie’s goofy theatrics, Eric’s irrepressible energy, and Elijah’s quiet curiosity. They will probably not be so open and unfiltered about sharing these things with me forever. And we should spend time with people in other stages of life, for the wisdom, energy and perspective they can offer. 

We do tend, though, to long for the stages of life we’re not in. No stage is perfect, but one day, our bodies will be resurrected and redeemed. There will be revealed a kind of glory, beauty and splendor that leaves no room for longing (Romans 8:18-23). J. R. R. Tolkien captures a bit of this in his description of the death of Aragorn: “Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him with wonder; for they saw the grace of his youth, and the valor of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were all blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendor of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

Spring

“So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” – 1 Corinthians 3:7

The arrival of spring has seemed more poignant this year than ever: a reminder that there is a whole world of flora and fauna out there unaffected by recent events. And with nowhere to go but the local outdoors, we have all been present a bit more, I think, to the nature right around us. Our kids have become familiar by now with their favorite fuzzy leaves in the neighborhood, we notice bees and hummingbirds around our orange tree, and appreciate how the golden poppies unfurl so cheerfully every morning.

I have no doubt that part of the lesson during this time is exactly what Paul talks about here. We tend to think we run our lives. That we make things happen. That everything can be optimized to achieve desired outcomes. And while there does need to be a planter and a waterer, which one of us can understand the mystery of a root breaking open the seed? Or the movement from bud to flower to fruit? Do we ultimately make any of these things happen? Can we hurry any of it along? Can we create the life we want to see? Ultimately, no. Paul’s language is unequivocal: we are not anything. It is only God that gives the growth. And slowly, watching the world come to life around us, we are being taught to let go of our hold on our lives. We are being compelled to loosen our grip just a bit from our efforts to control and achieve and produce. “You are God’s field,” Paul says (3:9). It is God who gives the growth.

Ups and Downs

“And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping.” – Ezra 3:11-13

When people ask me how I am doing these days, the phrase I keep going back to is “up and down.” Some days I parent so well I wish I could tell someone about it; other days I struggle constantly with losing it at the kids. Some days it seems like the kids are growing closer; others like they won’t stop fighting. Some days I’m able to reflect on what the isolation and monotony are revealing; other days I give in to the temptation to escape in whatever way I can. Some days I appreciate those I live with; other days everything they do seems to annoy me. Some days I’m able to maintain perspective; other days the anger and sadness are overwhelming.

I struggle with berating myself for all this lability. But here in Ezra we see an experience full of ups and downs, starts and stops. After fifty years of exile in Babylon, the Israelites return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, only to have to pause for fifteen years before being allowed to continue. And even at this first laying down of the foundation, there is both joyful shouting and loud weeping. Irrepressible happiness, and deep sorrow, mingled together until one sound could not be distinguished from the other. To some, this was victory, return and restoration; to others, a reminder of what was lost and of the difficult days since.

The sorrow is as rightful as the joy. There are ups and downs, at times coexisting such that they cannot be separated into tidy categories or logical flowcharts. The spiritual life was never meant to be as linear as I think we’d all like it to be. Our struggles with temptation and sin, our sharing of the gospel, our wrestling with idols, our experience of trials come with both shouts of joy and wails of sorrow, with both triumph and regret. 

The first stone that is laid in a foundation is the cornerstone. It did two things: it was load-bearing, providing stability, and it was line-determining, providing direction. Lloyd writes that the cornerstone is the “stone at the angle of the structure by which the architect fixes a standard for the bearings of the walls and cross-walls throughout.” Christ Jesus is our cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). He bears the load of all our experiences, and he is the immovable compass through all our ups and downs. Before him, we can shout our shouts and sob our sobs; he can bear it all, and he can show us the way through.

Easter

Third stanza, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Beauty now for ashes wear,

Perfumes for the garb of woe,

Chaplets for disheveled hair,

Dances for sad footsteps slow;

Open wide your hearts that they

Let in joy this Easter Day.

Waiting For The Dawn

“… as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end… God is faithful.” – 1 Corinthians 1:7-9

Many have remarked that living in this pandemic has made lent particularly meaningful as we’ve been forced to give so much up, but I think this year Holy Saturday encapsulates how I feel. There is great mystery in the fact that God did not raise Christ directly from the cross. There was a day in between. The day Jesus stayed dead. As the Westminster Larger Catechism states in its answer to question 50, “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day.” As a reading for Holy Saturday inThe Liturgy of the Hours goes, “Something strange is happening on earth today—a great silence, and stillness.”

Holy Saturday was a Sabbath: a day Jesus’ followers grappled with confusion and grief while pinioned into inaction, unable to do anything but sit in inconsolable despair. Holy Saturday is a day of epic disappointment, of the bursting of grand hopes. We are held there in that despair, all our illusions and indulgences emptied. That is how the harder moments of this time have felt: held in place, unable to do anything to retrieve what is lost, unable to speed anything up, contending with monotony and grief and the strange still silence of the world. 

What happens when you are there in that place? We learn to hear words like the ones Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians: God is faithful. And so, we can wait, and even be present to the wait. In a way, Holy Saturday is symbolic of this pandemic which is symbolic of the entirety of my life: living in brokenness while waiting for the resurrection that will surely come. I am waiting for something. God sustains me in the waiting. And I have hope in what I wait for.

This is the first Easter I’ve had since reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which I highly recommend. “What are we waiting for?” Wright asks in the preface. “And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? Most Christians don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is… the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond is not so much disbelieved as simply not known.” He describes in chapter 12 how salvation is not about the death of the body and the escape of the soul, not about “going to heaven when we die”—salvation is “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.” The present bodily life is not valueless because God will raise it to new life. What we do in the present will last into God’s future.

As Simone Weil wrote, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Our Holy Saturday is different from that first terrible one, because we know so much more about what we’re waiting for. All the same, part of the work that Jesus did somehow was in staying dead for this day in between, and as his followers there is meaning to us being in that space as well. There is value that will last. May God sustain us to the end.

Mystery Unveiled

“Not to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed…” – Romans 16:25-26

I was out this morning in the fog that so often blankets this part of the world that time of day, out in a mountain forest. There was a moment when the fog lifted, and crystal-clear I could see the redwoods looming around me. “The redwoods,” wrote Steinbeck, “once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

The fog lifted to show me what had been there all along: what I had sensed but not been able to trace in detail, and it was something entirely beyond myself and my time. When Paul talks about mystery and revelation, it reminds me of N.T. Wright’s description of what the temple meant to a first-century Jew: “The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a big church building at one corner of the city; in Jewish cosmology it was the place where heaven and earth actually overlapped and interlocked… This is not about something ‘up in the sky’ – it is like a curtain being pulled back in the room where you sit.”

For some reason, we do tend to think of God as up in the sky somewhere, but Paul speaks to a first-century Jew who would have been looking for Him here on earth. The concept of God showing up like the unveiling of a secret right here in our space is a bit radical and unsettling. He is not unobtainable or ethereal; he is not an invention. He existed before my ability to see him, he is right here next to me and now within me, and he is as solid as the trees rising slow and strong around me, whose trunks I can touch, even if I can’t quite put the feeling they give me into words. “I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers,” writes Paul (Romans 11:25). Let us open our eyes to it, to this God who is “very near you… in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

The Shadow Of Death

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” – Psalm 23:4

I am struck today by the phrase “the shadow of death,” which in Hebrew is one word, tsalmaveth, a compound word created from tacking together tsel (shadow) and maveth (death). Death-shadow. Not death itself, but the threat of death, the certainty of death, the darkness and grip of death. In reality we all live with the certainty of physical death, though the vast majority of us don’t think much about it at all, at least until we were forced to by this pandemic. It would be funny if it weren’t so morbid, the way death can be seen looming these days in every cough and on every doorknob. 

But there are all kinds of other deaths too, from sin and its addictions, from spiritual attack or situational threats, and the pandemic, like any trial, exposes these too. David says living in the shadow is like a journey through a valley, a narrow gorge with walls looming high. Not much light gets in those kinds of places. If there’s a bend in the path, you can’t see far ahead. If you’re in a battle, you’re exposed and vulnerable. The horizon is lost.

The natural response is fear. But David says, I won’t be afraid. Not, I am not afraid. It’s as if he’s willing himself into the truth, speaking it over himself: not that the valley will end. But that God is with him in it. A shepherd’s rod and staff were used to defend and protect, to retrieve, to manage and direct. They carried personal authority and significance. The comfort David has is not paltry; it is as real and reliable as the rod and staff he held in his own hands all those days in his youth.

And we have an even greater comfort. Isaiah 9 says, “The people who have walked in darkness (chosek) have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness (tsalmaveth), on them has light shone.” A light shines in the death-shadow! This light is Jesus, of whom John writes, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” This God-with-us Jesus came to resurrect us to new life and free us forever from death.

If Psalm 22 is a song of affliction, and Psalm 24 the tale of a victorious monarch, then Psalm 23 is the bridge between them, the path we walk between suffering and triumph. Much of it may be unclear. But the sovereign God, who taught a young shepherd boy lessons he would later carry into the dark valleys of his life, is as actively present with us here as he ever was before. 

Living Sacrifice

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” – Romans 12:1-2

If you think about it, Paul speaks in oxymoron here: by all Old Testament standards, a living thing only becomes a sacrifice once it stops living. We just read in 2 Chronicles about Hezekiah supplying 1,000 bulls and 7,000 sheep for the Passover offering: sacrifices were a big deal, and Paul knew his readers were intimately familiar with the concept. The animals used were of economic value and practical use. They were cared for with feed, pasture lands, and physical labor. To take something like that, and kill it without receiving any personal gain, was a sacrifice. It was an active decision that cost you something.

Jesus is our sacrifice, once and for all. But Paul makes an appeal here. He says, do you want to know what worship means? Do you want to know how we respond to such a gift of mercy and grace? We look at what it took to make an animal sacrifice, and we live that out with our bodies instead. We feed and rest our bodies, souls and minds as caring for something that belongs to God. We use our bodies to think and act, to do and create, in a way that is set apart for God and acceptable to him. The Old Testament sacrifices were teaching us all along, not only that we need Christ for atonement, but about how it is we are called and enabled to live ever after. 

In a way, this type of sacrifice is infinitely harder than a one-time act. As someone once said, “the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps climbing off the altar.” That’s how I feel sometimes, like I’m dragging myself back up, again, up and down. That’s how these days feel in general. As home dynamics, work demands, school phases, and personal routines fluctuate in this strange new world we’re ever-settling into, there’s a lot of up and down. Some days I do better than others, but I figure that’s why Paul uses the present tense here. It’s an ongoing thing, our worship. It takes time, our transformation. Sometimes it happens too slowly to be perceived, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, even, or even especially, in the world we now find ourselves.

Uzziah's Pride

“But when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction.” – 2 Chronicles 26:16

Uzziah starts off sounding like a hero in some young adult novel. Crowned king at sixteen, he becomes a victorious warrior, demolishing enemy walls, garnering tribute, leading an impressively large, well-equipped, and fit army. He becomes a master builder, erecting numerous towers and outfitting them with innovative machines. He is hailed a lover of the soil, cutting cisterns and cultivating herds and vines. He seeks good spiritual mentors and sets himself to fear God. And he gains fame, which the author points out repeatedly: “and his fame spread even to the border of Egypt, for he became very strong… And his fame spread far…” This guy is a Judean rock star. 

But in the end all this detail, far more than we got in the parallel account in 2 Kings 15 (in which Uzziah goes by his other name, Azariah), is a warning. The source of Uzziah’s success is God (verse 5, “God made him prosper”; verse 15, “for he was marvelously helped”). But Uzziah eventually becomes proud, insisting on burning incense in the temple himself, despite knowing only the Levites are ordained to do so. When the priests dare to oppose him, rather than repenting, he becomes angry, and in that moment is touched with leprosy, remaining a leper until his death. Archaeologists have since found his tombstone, upon which is written in Hebrew, “The bones of Uzziah, king of Judah. Open not.”

This was a man who from a young age had everything going for him. But something about success made him forget who he was in the temple of God, made him overestimate his authority and reject criticism. His life became an encapsulation of Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Do I forget that the source of any success I may have is God? Do I care too much about position or influence? How do I react to criticism? Strength is a blessing but also a danger, for it so easily leads to pride, and there is no clearer warning of that than the life of Uzziah.

Making Provision

“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” – Romans 13:14

These days, we have to make provisions. Given lines at grocery stores, longer amazon delivery times, and the scarcity of certain goods (as David Haley said on last Sunday’s stream, “the whole circle of life at Costco—gone”), we can’t live moment-to-moment in quite the same way. We have to think ahead more about what we need, and people are stocking up. Paul writes here, “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” This word for “desires” refers not to good desires, but specifically to wanting what is unlawful. The previous verse names four examples: desires for drunkenness, sexual immorality, quarreling, and jealousy. Paul says, starve those desires to death! Don’t supply them with anything they need to live! Deprive them of paper products! Make not less provision, but no provision.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes a wonderful (albeit long) commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, including several chapters on the beatitude, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Part of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, he writes, is avoiding anything that is opposed to such righteousness. This means avoiding things we know to be patently bad or sinful. He uses a timely analogy: “I say that to hunger and thirst after righteousness means avoiding such things just as we would avoid the very plague itself. If we know there is an infection in a house, we avoid that house. We segregate the patient who has a fever, because it is infectious, and obviously we avoid such persons. The same is equally true in the spiritual realm.” 

But, he says, it doesn’t stop there. “We shall even avoid things that tend to dull or take the edge off our spiritual appetites. There are so many things like that, things that are quite harmless in themselves and which are perfectly legitimate. Yet if you find that you are spending much of your time with them, and that you desire the things of God less, you must avoid them.” There is something to this, I think. Every parent knows that a child’s appetite for food is a valuable, and not inexhaustible, commodity. Spoil dinner with a snack right beforehand, and suddenly food they would have otherwise devoured becomes completely unappealing. The same is true for all of our appetites: fill up on mental, spiritual or emotional junk food, and we have no taste for what truly satisfies. 

Making no provision for the flesh means avoiding anything we would admit feeds sinful desires, even if they aren’t obviously sinful themselves. What falls into that category is a question only we can answer. But the point is that appetites are malleable. They can be fed or starved; stoked or smothered. And the more we starve our sinful desires, the more we open up space to hunger and thirst for what truly satisfies. The more we can put on Jesus and live into the reality of his Lordship over every area of our lives, over even our desires.

Resting On God

Part of a puritan prayer:

I come to thee as a sinner with cares and sorrows,

   to leave every concern entirely to thee,

   every sin calling for Christ’s precious blood;

Revive deep spirituality in my heart;

Let me live near to the great Shepherd,

   hear his voice, know its tones, follow its calls.

Keep me from deception by causing me to abide in the truth,

   from harm by helping me to walk in the power of the Spirit.

Give me intenser faith in the eternal verities,

   burning into me by experience the things I know…

Let the weeds that grow in my soul be cut at their roots;

Grant me to know that I truly live only when I live to thee,

that all else is trifling.

Thy presence alone can make me holy, devout, strong and happy.

Abide in me, gracious God.

Time Traveling

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Psalm 22:1

I’m a bit of a sucker for a good time-traveling novel. Sometimes, during a walk around the neighborhood, I imagine that I’ve stepped into another time, into some dystopian world where everything is the same and yet strikingly different. Those are the same neighbors, but now we cross into the road to avoid each other; those are the same roads, but now they are bare of cars. There is a blanket of post-apocalyptic stillness upon the world, the silencing of all regular markers of life, and in some ways time has lost its meaning.

Psalm 22 is a time-traveling psalm. Within the text itself, David takes himself from present (verses 1-2), to past (verses 3-5), to present (verses 6-8), back to past (verses 9-10), to present (verses 11-21), then to the future (verses 22-31)—as if it is only be revisiting the past in the context of his present affliction that he can be driven to a glimmer of future hope. It is only by stepping outside of his present moment that he can reconcile himself to it.

But the psalm also reappears hundreds of years later when Jesus speaks its first line on the cross. There is no way David could have known how closely he was describing the passion of Jesus as he wrote these words, and yet they could not have been more eerily accurate if Jesus himself had traveled back in time to write them. Matthew goes to particular trouble to show this in chapter 27 of his gospel: “All those who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads” (Psalm 22:7) parallels “And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads” (Matthew 27:39); “ ‘He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him’” (Psalm 22:8) parallels “ ‘He trusts in God; let God deliver him now’” (Matthew 27:43); “they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (Psalm 22:18) parallels “they divided his garments among them by casting lots” (Matthew 27:35). Jesus’ hands and feet were pierced (Psalm 22:16) and he thirsted (Psalm 22:15, John 19:28). It is not difficult to imagine that Jesus had this entire psalm in mind when he spoke on the cross. 

Spurgeon wrote: “For plaintive expressions uprising from unutterable depths of woe we may say of this Psalm, there is none like it. It is the photograph of our Lord's saddest hours, the record of his dying words, the lachrymatory of his last tears, the memorial of his expiring joys… We should read reverently, putting off our shoes from off our feet, as Moses did at the burning bush, for if there be holy ground anywhere in Scripture, it is in this Psalm.” That is how I find myself wanting to read it, this Good Friday season. Sometimes dystopian experiences provide valuable perspective; new times lend fresh meaning to old words. I have here a picture of the heart of my beloved Jesus as he hung on the cross for me, and it is as real for me now, in my time, as it ever was before.

The Valley Of Blessing

“We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” – 2 Chronicles 20:12

During our first Sunday streaming service, we sang “God, I look to you / I won’t be overwhelmed,” and I can’t help but think that song could have come straight out of 2 Chronicles 20. In this chapter, Jehoshaphat receives ill tidings of destruction coming from over the sea: the Moabites, Ammonites, and Meunites are advancing in battle. Jehoshaphat is afraid. He gathers the people and prays: he speaks of God’s power, his past deeds, and his promises. He lays out their trouble, asks God to help, admits their own powerlessness, and ends with this line: “we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

How terrible, how fearful, to be brought as a leader, a person of relative wealth and resources, to the point where one would say those words. Yet here we are, facing an invisible foe capable of murdering thousands and pulverizing dreams all in the span of a season, and none of us really know what to do. None of us know how long this will last. There is no clear end-point, and we are only beginning to comprehend the fall-out. But like Jehoshaphat, the basic response of our hearts can be this simple. And God answers. He speaks through Jahaziel to say, don’t be afraid; this is my battle. Go down to the valley. Find your enemies, stand firm and see God’s salvation.

And so they head towards the valley, but they go in an interesting way. Jehoshaphat and the people decide together to send before their army people singing worship songs, and we even have recorded the lyrics of their song: “Give thanks to the Lord, for his steadfast love endures forever.” The moment they begin to sing, God begins to destroy their enemies (verse 22). By the time they actually arrive at the valley, all they see are enemies already dead, and so much spoil that it took them three days to carry it all away. On the fourth day, they assemble in that valley and name it The Valley of Blessing. I imagine what it would have felt like, standing in that place where destruction had been replaced with provision, slaughter with blessing, fear with joy. For that is how they left, “returning to Jerusalem with joy,” and the awe of God came upon all nearby kingdoms such that no more war was made. “The realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet, for his God gave him rest all around.” 

The ending seems almost too good to be true, but these stories are not hopeless fairy tales. They are real things that happened, and the God that Jehoshaphat prayed to is the very same God that we speak to now. May Jehoshaphat's words be ours, and may our battles of fear turn into valleys of joy.

Rescue

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” – Romans 7:24-25

Something amazing happened today. During a family meeting to debrief a fight, I was describing what one of the kids had done wrong when the child in question started crying. Typically the kids, particularly this one, aren’t very verbal when they get that emotional, but suddenly words started coming out in between the sobs, about how they knew they were wrong but just couldn’t stop, in this torrent of self-incrimination and anger and sadness. It was a very real glimpse into the interior struggle all of us have but few of us admit to ourselves or allow others to see. It’s the struggle Paul admits to in Romans 7: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

When I was younger, I got so frustrated at the end of Romans 7, because I wanted a more concrete answer to how to fix this problem, how to stop doing what I know I shouldn’t do. I felt like Paul builds up to a cliffhanger, then just goes on to say, “Thanks be to God!” Thanks for what? What was the twelve-step process? What was the solution? –try harder? avoid triggers? make a fresh resolution? 

I asked one of our pastors last year, if you could memorize any chapter in the entire Bible, which would you choose? His response was immediate: “Romans chapter 8.” So I did it, and it’s now, amazingly, that I see that the entire chapter is Paul’s answer. I should I have seen it in the way he phrases the question in Romans 7:24: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Who, not what. Deliver, not advise. We cannot save ourselves. We are in need, not of advice or therapy, but of rescue. The question is not, “what can I do?” but, “who can rescue me?” The answer is not a technique but a person, and our response is simply, thank you, Jesus. He spells this out all through the next chapter: Jesus has put to death this thing in you that does the wrong thing, and because of that, live according to the spirit. There are action steps, but it only comes after the rescue, for the rescue itself is a deliverance not only from the consequences of sin but its power in our lives.

I’ve been asking God lately to show me what purpose he has for me during this time, and part of the answer came today. Normally, it’s rare to have such a collectively vulnerable moment, and part of what all the recent friction and grief has done is laid bare our very real need for rescue. I pulled this child into my lap and said, I have really good news! When you feel like this, you can do a few things. You can conclude you’re a shameful, bad person; you can hate yourself and do things to make up for that shame. You can ignore it, convince yourself you’re still good most of the time, and tell yourself you’ll try harder. Or you can admit you need rescue. Jesus has given that to you, and you can ask him for help! Even when you hate yourself the most, he looks at you and sees someone worthy of love, someone he loves so much. In that moment, I thought to myself, thank you God, for this time that brings us to the gospel. I don’t have all the answers, but I can still thank you, and receive moments like these that you give me.