The Tame Jesus

“In the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.” – Revelation 1:13-15

“‘Do you think I keep him in my wallet, fools?’ said Tirian. ‘Who am I that I could make Aslan appear at my bidding? He's not a tame lion.’” – The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis

One of the things I love about the book of Revelation are its depictions of Jesus. We see God the Father come in thunder and smoke, the Holy Spirit in wind and fire, but Jesus we tend to see in his humanity. And rightly so: but Revelation reminds us that he is as much God as Man. 

The vision John has of Jesus here is fearsome enough to rival Mt. Sinai and Pentecost. Have you ever heard the roar of many waters? We once visited a huge waterfall: the sound was deafening, thrilling and fearful not only because of its volume, but because it was a testament to the sheer force and power of the falling water. When was the last time you looked into a flame of fire? In a dark room, even one lit candle is piercing, riveting, hard to look away from.

This is no tame Jesus. The long robe and golden sash are symbolic of the elevated position of royalty or a high priest. The snow-white hair indicates holiness or long age. The eyes of flame are ones that pierce through all impurity and deception. Bronze, the metal of weapons, symbolize feet of judgment. This is a fearsome Jesus, a God far beyond our ability to control. John writes, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead” (1:17).

And yet, this same Jesus lays his hand on us, as he does on John. He speaks words of comfort as he does to John; he reminds us that he died for us (1:17-18). The God of all power laid that power down for us. Yet he is God. He is not one to be pushed, reduced, or ignored. May we not forget to tremble.

Deception and Desire

“Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” – James 1:16-17

For the first time, I noticed this short sentence that could be applied to either of the two well-known verses which sandwich it: do not be deceived, beloved. Don’t think that you can nurture some hidden sinful thought without it getting the better of you eventually. There is an element of deception at work here: by definition you will think you can manage it, you will think it harmless, when all the time it is leading you on a path straight to death. And we know how this works, right? Roots of bitterness that lead to hatred, annoyances that lead to anger or contempt, sexual fantasies which lead to infidelity. Sin is never static. It gestates.

But the deception applies to the following verse as well: the root of the problem is not really believing that we have a Father who gives us every good and perfect gift. There is a tendency for us to feel that God is holding out on us, that he is in some way parsimonious or fickle, but that is a lie. God is completely unchanging in his intent for our good. Rather than allowing our desires to lure us to sin, it is possible to let them lead us to a deeper experience of God. 

How does this happen? Sometimes living with the pain of a desire deferred allows us to more sharply or deeply express and live into faith in God. Sometimes the desire itself is a testimony to a longing which only God can meet, if only we learn how to receive it. We read earlier in Psalm 107, “For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” Do you believe this? Have you experienced it? C.S. Lewis writes, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Infinite joy is offered us, and it is found, not in an event or circumstance or possession or other person, but in God. Our desires ultimately all point to this, as long as we don’t become deceived otherwise.

The Leaves Are Rustling

“But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” – Hebrews 11:16

I stood the other day at the top of a massive canyon, white cliff walls streaked with pale pinks and browns and topped with pine trees, the river a pale blue frothing ribbon down below. After months of being in the same indoors, the sense of open grandeur was difficult to describe. The canyon itself was too big to be viewed at once from any given point; the dozen or so different lookouts could only give a sense of a part of the whole. The place where I was standing gave perhaps the best sense of scale, gazing down as I could straight into the dizzying depths.

Even then my experience was limited. I saw a bird soaring down through the canyon, and thought, that little creature is part of a space that I can only peer down into briefly before I leave. I can soak the beauty in as best I can to take with me, but I can’t really become a part of it. I thought of what C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory:

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it… At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”

These verses in Hebrews rustle with the rumor that here on earth, we can only see the things we truly long for at a distance. We are still on the other side, and if we’re honest, we feel it. But the place where we belong, the better country, will surely yet come. Part of this journey on earth is to embrace our longings with faith, to see that all the beauties here on earth are but a foretaste of what God has prepared for us. Some day we shall get in. 

The Struggle for Holiness

“Hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Often at the heart of our grittiest struggles with temptation are the same lies. You’ll feel better if you do this. God is withholding something from you. You aren’t getting what you deserve. So go ahead.

C. S. Lewis writes in one of his letters: “I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something else than God—some other country… into which He forbids us to trespass—some kind of delight which He ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but which would be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing just isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give us—a false picture which would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing.”

My own struggle for holiness, to not nurture temptation in any form, is a struggle to believe this truth: that there is no such thing as real goodness apart from God. There is truly no good thing which he withholds from me. That idea is a mirage, an illusion, which far from offering real happiness or freedom merely entraps or entangles me, spiraling down to a place of increasing self-pity, bitterness, anger, and addiction. 

It does no good to try to talk oneself out of these lies: the only way to begin to extract oneself, to begin to see the lie for what it is, is to fix on the truth. And the truth is not an idea: he is a Person. In the end, temptation is not a matter of self-control, but of relationship. Only love for Jesus, willingness to suffer for him, and trust in the love he has for me, can turn me from temptation. And the promise God offers is this: he himself will sanctify me completely. No matter my feelings, no matter my mess-ups. He who has called me is faithful. He will surely do it.

The Unnamed Burden

“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” – Psalm 56:8

David Brooks writes, “We have entered the endurance phase of this pandemic.” When people ask now how we’re doing, I find myself rather at a loss. Nothing has changed, logistically. Yet there are constant ups and downs. In his book A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis writes, “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.”

We are not meeting a Pandemic. We are meeting each hour or moment that comes as we press on in a world of monotony and future uncertainty, and I’ve found many of those hours and moments unpredictable. Some days are good, some days are bad, and I’m at a loss to explain exactly why, since all days are circumstantially identical. I sometimes feel more depleted by the end of the day than I used to feel. Is it that my work is harder? Perhaps. But it’s also the weight of simply doing what we’re doing, enduring.

Lewis writes in the same book: “I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

That’s the unnamed burden of this time: not just the unknown, but thinking about the unknown. Not just the monotony, but our awareness of the monotony. Not just the ups and downs, but wondering about the ups and downs. This burden runs like an invisible undercurrent through our day; it eats into our emotions, messes with our attention spans, can cause subconscious anxiety or dread. But this is a burden we don’t have to suppress, or deaden ourselves to, or drug ourselves from—this too is a burden we can cast upon God. We have a God who counts our tossings at night, who sees and keeps and remembers not only every sorrow, but every thought about the sorrow. 

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. 

Balaam And His Donkey

“Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times? And Balaam said to the donkey, ‘Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.’” – Numbers 22:28-29

Other than the snake in the Garden of Eden, this is the only time in the Bible when an animal speaks in a human language. It seems almost humorously out of place, like something you’d read about in Narnia, not Numbers. Yet, curiously, here it is. There is an almost intentionally comical contrast between this utterly ordinary animal, who nevertheless saw spiritual reality in the situation, and the internationally-renowned and sought-after diviner, who nevertheless was blind to what was going on.

The Hebrew word used here for a domesticated female donkey, aton, literally means “be patient” (apparently they weren’t known for their speed), and ironically, we find that is exactly what Balaam is not doing. He is on the wrong path, but when God blocks his way, he responds with a version of road rage. He is absolutely closed to the idea that God may be in this, and in fact becomes so angry he doesn’t even marvel when his donkey speaks! He responds instead with self-centered rage (I can’t help contrasting Shasta’s reaction to hearing Bree talk in The Horse And His Boy: “Shasta stared into its great eyes and his own grew almost as big, with astonishment. ‘How ever did you learn to talk?’ he asked”).

I actually feel a bit convicted about road rage, reading this. It’s easy to get upset at other drivers because we’re not accountable face-to-face for our actions, just like Balaam thought he was alone with only servants and animals. It’s easy to dehumanize the other driver. For some reason, we tend to become disproportionately rule- and/or goal-oriented when driving, rather than willing to give grace or be open to any part our own fault has played. We can end up acting irrationally and dangerously in our anger.

Whether on the road or in life, when things perturb our plans, when we’re blocked from going where we want to be, as fast as we want to get there, how open are we to what God is trying to show us? Does our impatience or anger prevent us from seeing a lesson to learn, a word to receive, or feedback to consider? Are we not open to spiritual truths because we judge too harshly the messenger? As Keller writes, “Even a laughable messenger might be delivering a true message.” Even an unskilled preacher may speak a life-changing truth, like in Surgeon’s conversion story. Even someone you don’t respect or expect may reveal an aspect of your character or personality worth attending to. If what we care about, what we look for, is God and what He may be saying, we listen with much more openness and humility.

In the end, the biggest difference perhaps between Balaam and his donkey was his pride and her humility. His pride gave rise to violent anger; her humility moved her to mercy. The angel was the one with the sword in his hand after all, not Balaam, and seeing this, the donkey acts to save his life, three times. She is struck, so that he is not. So many years later, Jesus rides into the city on a donkey, to do the same for us, so we too can have the chance to confess and turn back, so that we too can love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

Pondering Our Paths

“Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on.” – Proverbs 4:14-15

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.”

- Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’

I like what Keller writes about this verse in Proverbs: “Life is likened to a path because every action takes you somewhere.” We like to think we are completely in charge of every choice we make, but on some level, each action changes us in a way that affects the next action we take, and the one after that, and eventually the direction in which we go. It’s like that saying about how thoughts lead to actions, which lead to habits, which lead to character.

This plays out in lots of ways. Our actions place us in environments where subconscious cues and cultural mores affect how we act and think, what we buy and do, more than we realize. It’s no accident that, after moving to the Bay Area, I’ve started working out, wearing joggers, and buying organic (sometimes, like at Costco, I feel like I don’t have a choice). The culture and value system at our workplaces, sports teams, schools, local neighborhoods all affect us more than we think, not to mention advertisements, phone notifications, and more. 

Our actions inform our feelings. In our Disneyfied, be-true-to-your-heart culture, we like to think that our feelings should drive what we do, but the Bible commands us often to do things, not feel up to them first. I always thought that part of the reason I loved our kids as newborns, even though they basically only cried, pooped, and slept at that stage, was because I sacrificed so profusely to care for them. C.S. Lewis writes, “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” The same could be said of acting in dislike towards someone.

Our actions inform our thoughts. Romans 8:5 says, “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” Wouldn’t we tend to write that the other way around? If you set your mind on the flesh, then you live according to the flesh—that seems more logical. But that’s not how the sequence goes here. Our actions determine what we set our minds upon.

The wisdom here is simple. Realize that you tread a path in life. And “knowing how way leads on to way,” be careful with each step. The tone of this section is one of extreme vigilance: keep hold, don’t let go, avoid, turn away, let them not escape, look directly forward, do not swerve. Obviously this does not come effortlessly: it is much easier to discount our actions, to tell ourselves they don’t matter, or that we can always go back. But the truth is, every action takes you one step farther in one direction or another. “Ponder the path of your feet” (Proverbs 4:26).

Homesickness

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

… I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

- Psalm 23: 1, 6

“Men are homesick in their homes.” – G.K. Chesterton

Last night we were driving home when the particular way a man got out of his pick-up truck made me think of Virginia. In the first eighteen months after our move, this kind of thing happened all the time. Some small, unexpected thing—the time of week we usually visited my mom’s house, something my old friend would have liked—would trigger thoughts of rolling green hills, how it felt to be around my friends, how I felt being there, with a kind of nostalgic longing that was difficult to define. Once, a raindrop fell on our windshield after a dry California summer, and it made me cry, and I realized I was missing thunderstorms.

Part of the reason this is hard to share is because I realize it’s ridiculous. I hated thunderstorms in Virginia; they always kept the kids up, and once the winds tore down a tree on our lawn. My mom’s house, and my friends, weren’t always a perfect as they are in my imagination. With those rolling green hills came mosquitos and mugginess so terrible we rarely went out of doors. And while I liked how unique I felt there, I also felt misunderstood and lonely in many ways.

It’s a strange thing, to find you’re feeling homesick for a home that doesn’t really exist. Our reading from Psalm 23 came to my mind and I thought for the first time: this is talking about home. A place with no more longing, no more missing something you can’t even put really into words. The first and last lines say it all: I will not want, I will be home forever.

C.S. Lewis writes a great piece about this in The Weight Of Glory:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” 

Gratitude Is For Adoration

“For who is God, but the Lord?” – Psalm 18:31

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly: 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says, 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” – C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly On Prayer

One could view Psalm 18 as David’s gratitude log: God delivered him his enemy, Saul. Pretty good thing to log for the day. But he goes well beyond thanksgiving, well beyond a kind of self-interested gratitude, doesn’t he? This is a song of adoration, not only about what he is thankful for, but what it reveals to him about God. Reminds me of a story C.S. Lewis tells in one of his letters:

“I was standing in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are two very different experiences.”

Psalm 18 is David standing in the sunbeam, looking 90 million miles away, seeing a God before whom the earth reels, who breathes smoke, who rides on the wind, who speaks like thunder, who also lifts him up with gentleness, who makes his feet like the deer. What seems like hyperbole to us dust-viewers is merely the difference between looking at the beam and looking into it. 

Moving from entitlement or habitual inattentiveness to gratitude is only the first step: the next is moving from gratitude to adoration. From “what am I thankful for?” to “what does this show me about God that I admire?” It is to take a step into the sunbeam and gaze up into it. To recognize the divine source of all pleasure. To see that they speak of some far country we long for: that they are not only the hope of that place, but an exposition of it. “This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew,” Lewis writes. “This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.”

Eventually, yes, we learn to experience the pleasure and the adoration it evokes as a single event, just as we cannot hear a bird’s song without thinking of the bird, or see the marks of letters on a page without thinking of the word they make. It is good to begin with small, ordinary pleasures: to adore not from high, cerebral theology, but from the everyday things we feel and see. A child’s soft cheek, the refreshing chill in the air as fall arrives, the smell of a new journal. For who is God, but you, O Lord?

Sexual Sin

“How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” – Genesis 39:9b

It is a common fallacy to think as singles that our struggles with sexual sin—pornography, masturbation, erotic literature, mental fantasies—will evaporate once we get married and actually have sex. For one thing, those inescapably addictive and progressive things train us to desire and expect something completely different from what the realities of sex in marriage is like. Whether we realize it or not, we are internalizing a cultural view of sex that is about self-gratification, performance, objectification, and idealized as being the ultimate source of fulfillment and an end unto itself (Keller uses the term “apocalyptic sex” in his book Counterfeit Gods). Whereas sex as God created it to be in marriage is about giving of yourself, being vulnerable in an unconditional atmosphere of trust, and ultimately points back to God. Sex in our culture is about consumerism; sex in marriage is about relating, and takes work and time to grow in.

For another thing, I am increasingly convinced that our ultimate struggle in this area is a spiritual one. It is not a matter of biology, or willpower, or understanding how much it hurts your spouse, hurts every area of your life—though those things are a part of it, as we see in Joseph’s story. In the “day after day” struggle, Joseph “would not listen to her… He left… and fled” (verses 10, 13): there is an element of willpower, choice and preparation as we safeguard against the ways and times we are prone to listen, as we find others to help, as we flee. 

But if we go back before those verbs and look at what Joseph says during the only time he speaks in this entire episode, we find something unexpected. In verse 8, he responds to an invitation to sexual sin by talking about his master. One would expect him to conclude, “how then can I sin against my master?” That would be logical. Instead, he makes a total pivot. He says, “How then can I… sin against God?”—and this in a place where no one, least of all the person he was addressing, believed in God. It’s almost as if he was speaking to himself, revealing the inner workings of his own heart.

Ultimately, we must look at God, grow in seeing his face, until in the moment of temptation this too rises up in us: how can I do this, this sin against God? Too often, we confess to ourselves rather than God; we don’t see the degree and depth of wickedness as God sees it; we don’t truly repent or plead for the Holy Spirit to help us. We don’t flee but we linger. We listen just a little bit. But when we encounter the holiness of God, and our love for Him, we become truly willing to fight the battles, whatever it takes. 

It is a battle, and there is suffering. Despite it all, Joseph ends up in prison for years. Hebrews 2:18 speaks of Jesus this way: “For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” Have you thought of temptation as suffering? Those who give in the least suffer the most. C.S. Lewis writes: “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

Jesus is able to help. He intercedes for us (Romans 8:34), as does the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:27). God can reveal himself to us in this area. We are not alone. We can identify with and become like Jesus even in the very midst of the struggle.