Repentance

From John Stott:

“Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed and habit which is known to be wrong. It is not sufficient to feel pangs of remorse or to make some kind of apology to God. Fundamentally, repentance is a matter neither of emotion nor of speech. It is an inward change of mind and attitude towards sin which leads to a change of behavior. There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we ever could renounce; but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what [is] wrong, what must go and what may be retained, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit.”

Consolation

“When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.” – Psalm 94:18-19

When I went back to work after Eric was born, he refused to take the bottle. He would go on hunger strikes for days. At one point, my dad drove him into work so I could rush out between patients to nurse him. Eventually we got him to take the bottle (by filling it with orange juice), but I still remember him wailing inconsolably in the back seat of the car each time I ran out. 

There are two Hebrew words in this verse that are rarely used in the Old Testament, but that both occur again in succession in a passage in Isaiah 66. Tanchuwm, or “consolation,” is used as well in Isaiah 66:11: “Rejoice with Jerusalem… that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious abundance.” Sha’a’, or “cheer,” literally means “to stroke” or caress in comfort, and is used again in Isaiah 66:12, where it is translated “bounce”: “and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip, and bounced upon her knees.”

When you are that crying infant, what you long for is something specific that only one person can provide. That’s how I feel when I’m sad sometimes: what I want is not just distraction or sympathy or even mere comfort. I want consolation. I want something that holds both grief and comfort in full view, together. I want a comfort that speaks to my grief, that tells me my grief is not meaningless and shows me my grief is understood. And that’s the beautiful picture these words create: there is an answer, that goes beyond comfort, in fact, to deep delight. That nourishes, gives life and satisfaction. That speaks without words, in exactly the way we cry for. The nature of my sadness is meant to point me to the Consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25), upon whom I can cast the cares of my heart (1 Peter 5:7), who will one day wipe away every tear from my eyes (Revelation 21:4).

Consolation that glorious seems too good to be true, and some days, too hard to reach for. It’s easier to be drowned in or drained by feeling down. But that’s why it’s good to hear the testimony of this Psalmist. He wrote these words in the midst of terribly crushing events (verses 5-7). His truth can be the same for us.

Optimization And Obedience

“And the Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.” – Judges 1:19

In the book of Joshua, we saw God’s faithfulness in bringing his people into the promised land, defeating their enemies, and giving them rest. But at the time of Joshua’s death, there was still much to be done in settling the remainder of the land and pushing out its inhabitants. Joshua leaves them with exhortations to trust and obey God: and here, in the book of Judges, which covers the period from Joshua’s death until the first kings, we see how they do. 

Judah is the first tribe God tells to go and claim their portion of the land: “Judah shall go up” (1:2). Then something curious happens. Judah does go up, but instead of trusting completely in God, he asks the Simeonites to go with him as well: “Come up with me” (1:3). He obeys, but not completely. God still gives Judah victory, but we see later that Judah does not completely drive out some of the Canaanites, “because they had chariots of iron.” From there, it’s a cascade of similar behavior from all the tribes: that of Joseph, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, who allowed the Canaanites to live with them. Even worse were the Asherites and Naphtalites, who went to go live among the Canaanites. By the end of the chapter, there’s a sad kind of contrast: the language is now not about the boundaries of God’s promised land, but “the border of the Amorites” (1:36).

The Israelites’ obedience to God was diluted by their own human calculations, by what seemed to make more military or economic sense. And on first reading, it all works. On first reading, this is a chapter of great conquest: the Israelites were living in the land, living a life their enslaved predecessors would never have dreamed of. But in reality—and the previous book of Joshua makes this unmistakably clear—they have not fully obeyed God. They trusted in their own assessments more than they trusted God.

This is a constant temptation for us, particularly living in an age where we rely so much on data, data that we can optimize for and with. As Virginia Heffernan from The New York Times writes, “In the last few years, The Huffington Post has doled out advice on how to ‘optimize’ your three-day weekend, your taxes, your Twitter profile, your year-end ritual, your sex drive, your website, your wallet, your joy, your workouts, your Social Security benefits, your testosterone, your investor pitch, your news release, your to-do list, and the world itself.” Optimization, she points out, is back-formation. It worships efficiency or performance. It flattens values: “there’s optimal at one end and the dread of suboptimal at the other.”

Optimization is like a functional crutch here in the Bay Area. When faced with a goal, we simply look at the data, research from experts or figure out what everyone else is doing, and back-engineer to increase our odds of achieving the outcome. It tends to lead to anxiety and FOBO (Fear Of Better Options). But that is not how God calls me to live. My mission is dependent on Him, not on data. He values faithfulness over outcomes and obedience over optimization. At the heart of it all is this question: who do I believe has true power and control, God, or me? God, or the data? God, or my chariots? God, or my ability to make things happen? My answers to these questions may not be outwardly obvious, but they change everything. The book of Judges ends with horrific levels of disobedience, but it is here too, however early and small. 

Discipline

“Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.” – Proverbs 13:24

The question I get asked most frequently as a parent is: how do you discipline your children? Most people seem to be looking for technique, several kinds of which we’ve used. This verse is quoted with some controversy in the context of spanking: some claim the word for “rod,” shebet, refers to the kind of wooden stick used for physical punishment; others point out that it is the same word used in Psalm 23:4 of the comforting shepherd’s rod. Regardless, the main point is that disciplining our children is such an important part of how we love them that to avoid it is akin to an act of hatred. And most of the time, when discipline fails, it’s not a matter of improper technique as much as how we use them.

The word for “love” here, ahab, is the same word that describes how God loves us (Deuteronomy 6:5). We must always exercise discipline in a way that represents God: in the life of our children, we are the look of God’s face, we are the touch of His hand, we are the tone of His voice. Think for a moment about the glory of God’s utter faithfulness in how he reveals his authority and law to his children: that is how we are to discipline our children. Never inconsistently or affected by our own emotion or mood. Never selfishly or affected by how they make us feel or look. Never impatiently. Never with demeaning or condemning words.

In other words, before we discipline our children, we must discipline ourselves. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, “When you are disciplining a child, you should have first controlled yourself… What right have you to say to your child that he needs discipline when you obviously need it yourself? Self-control, the control of temper, is an essential prerequisite in the control of others.” It does no good to have the perfect technique down if you use it sometimes but not others, or if you use it in anger. As we ask God to bring us into greater submission before Him, to help us overcome our own anger and frustration, we allow Him to reveal in us any sinful or selfish ways we view our children. The more we open ourselves to receiving His correction in our lives, the more we can rightly love our children through the correction we offer them. 

The word for “diligent” here is shachar, which means “to break forth as light, as the dawn,” which one lexicon describes as “a word altogether poetic.” It reminds me of when Zechariah speaks of “the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high” (Luke 1:78). We are to earnestly seek the dawning of the good news of Jesus into our lives. To look for the breaking in of God’s mercy. To diligently orient all our discipline so that it points to the gospel.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of discipline as opportunities God gives me to allow the Holy Spirit to work His conviction and grace in my children’s lives. God has given me authority over my children, but He has not given me the power to change them. I can’t fix them; it’s not up to me. Only the gospel has that power. If I operate on the assumption that I can change my children, then I see every misbehavior as failure, and I become over-focused on the behavior itself. But if I realize that only God can change my children, I look diligently for every opportunity to open their hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit: and discipline moments are exactly those kinds of opportunities. Nothing reveals the heart condition of my children like their misbehavior does, and if I modify their behavior but miss their hearts, I don’t really change them for the long-term, anyway. 

Orienting discipline towards the gospel means coupling any discipline technique with instruction, typically a brief conversation that helps them understand the heart struggle behind their behavior, presents the gospel in some form, and opens space for confession and grace. Most of the time, nothing seems to happen, and that’s normal. But sometimes His grace really does break through. It was during a discipline moment that Eric accepted Jesus as his savior. He has been our most difficult child to discipline, and it was an episode like any other, but somehow that day, when I explained that Jesus died not only to free him from the consequence of his sin but the power it held in his life, something clicked. I don’t know how many conversations after difficult discipline moments I’d had with him before that day—very many—and I’ve never had an experience quite like that with the other children—but I thank God I can look back now and see that it is always worth it. Being diligent in our discipline is one of the most important ways we love our children, even though it’s one of the hardest things we do. 

Being Careful With Our Loves

“Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.” – Joshua 23:11

“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” – Augustine, Confessions

In this chapter, Joshua speaks his last words to the leaders of Israel: he looks back and he looks forward, much as we do this time of year. Not one word has failed of all the good promises God made to us, he says of the past. And do you want to know the single most important factor in determining whether your future will be good or bad? How careful you are to love God.

This verse has six different words in the Hebrew: m’od shamar shamar nephesh ahab Yehovah Elohim. Shamar means to keep watch or guard, and is repeated twice for emphasis. What do we guard? Our nephesh, our souls, our whole selves, a word which doesn’t explicitly make it into the ESV translation. Ahab is a comprehensive word for love, though it literally means “to desire, breathe after,” getting at a sense of longing, delight, and affection. Yehovah elohim are personal and universal names for God. 

But the word that strikes me most is m’od. It is an intensifier which means “exceedingly, diligently” and comes from a root word that refers to a wooden poker, the kind used to rake embers and stir a fire. What an interesting word picture: that there is, within my soul, the embers of love. The need to desire after something. As James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” And that desire is powerful, like a conflagration that grows easily out of control, that drives and consumes us: because we are what we love; we become what we worship. We are defined not by what we know, but by what we desire. It is what we desire that drives how we live.

The person who realizes this, who realizes the importance and power of his or her desires, is the one who holds the fire poker, the one who tends the embers. Because love is not, as popular culture likes to think, something we are seized by, or fall into, or stumble upon. It is a choice, but I think this picture goes beyond choice: it introduces a sense of diligence and habit. The point of the fire poker is to adjust the wood so that the flow of oxygen, availability of fuel, and proximity of nearby embers either make the fire grow or force it to die out. It takes constant attention and some amount of practice. The same is true of our desires: they grow, or die out, depending on the kind of attention and practice we give them. Love as it is lived out in our lives is, in this sense, not so much a conscious choice as a baseline orientation. And we reorient our desires not by acquiring information, but through practices that inform the habits of how and what we love, through rituals, routines, rhythms, done over and over again.

Learning to love God takes practice. It takes understanding the pyrotechnics of the soul, the workings of desire. It takes choosing to suffocate unhealthy appetites or idolatries in our lives by ruthlessly cutting off whatever habits tend to feed them. It takes repetitive, daily exposure to God in his Word. It takes various spiritual practices that nurse our loves, and there are many very good ones, many worth exploring until we find a good rule of life for the season we are in. This new year, this new decade, what are the loves that are being lived out in your life? What habits do you have in place to train your dispositions, to form, teach and affect your desires?

The Geography Of Promise

“Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and they settled there. And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.” – Joshua 21:43-45

Slogging my way through these last few chapters in Joshua feels a bit—laborious, to say the least. It’s like reading a map without a map, as someone who isn’t all that interested in maps to begin with (unlike Dave, who looks at maps for fun). But then these golden verses tucked away at the end of chapter twenty-one tell us what the last nine chapters were about: they were God spelling out in exacting detail the fulfillment of every word of his promise.

Boundaries matter a lot when it’s your land it involves. When we were remodeling our house in Palo Alto, there came a point late in the pre-construction phase when we realized there was an issue with one of the setback lines: the entire thing had to be scratched, which set us back quite some time and endangered our ability to move in before the school year started. Imagine if the land didn’t just affect your house or school year: imagine if it was the actual embodiment of all God’s promises to you. All you had hoped for as a wandering pilgrim without a true home. Imagine if it was the rest you longed for after suffering, labor, and war. Every single word of these chapters would matter.

But that is what it means to us. We are wandering pilgrims on this earth, sojourners looking to our true home. God is not going to remove us from this earth, but remake it and give us an inheritance in it one day. Jesus will lead us to the true rest that Joshua could not make last (Hebrews 4). There are so many promises of God I live by, that are sometimes the only things helping me put one foot in front of the other, and all these chapters of Joshua are saying, in the language of geography, through the detail of nomenclature, that God keeps all his promises. He does not miss a single one.

When God Commands Destruction

“So Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” – Joshua 10:40

We can’t really read through Joshua and Judges without addressing the elephant in the room: how could God give his people the promised land by commanding the destruction of all who were already living in it? This is far too large a topic to be addressed in one post, but here are at least some points worth considering. 

The mission of Israel to occupy Canaan was unlike any military operation, before or since, in several important ways. It was not carried out on the basis of race and cannot be a warrant for ethnic cleansing: in fact, God later judges the Israelites themselves through military defeat and exile. It was not carried out on the basis of imperialistic expansion, to expand Israel’s power or wealth: unlike most military invasions at that time, the Israelites were commanded not to plunder or enslave anyone. It was not carried out because the Israelites were intrinsically superior to the Canaanites: in fact, the need to evict the Canaanites only testifies to the Israelites’ spiritual weakness in the face of temptation.

The war is carried out as God’s judgement upon the Canaanites, through direct verbal revelation (Joshua 1:1-9, 23:1-16; Judges 1:1), for the purpose of breaking down idols and evicting pagan worship. This was a specific category of warfare that, in Deuteronomy 20, God makes clear is different from war conducted outside the promised land, where total destruction is not commanded. This was a specific act of judgment that occurs after God had given the Canaanites four generations for their sin to reach “its full measure” (Genesis 15), upon an unrepentant people who persisted in practices like child sacrifice, temple prostitution, incest and adultery. Despite the commands, there are provisions for salvation as we see with Rahab and the Gibeonites, again making it clear that the point of judgment was not ethnicity but rebellious unbelief. The war protected Israel’s theocracy: a union of religion and government unique to that time.

One theologian, Meredith Kline, calls this an “intrusion ethic”: a time when future judgment “intrudes” on the present. God, who alone knows who will be condemned on Judgment Day when Jesus returns, is in these instances bringing down judgment upon those people early, the same way the blessings of the gospel are also intrusions of the future grace into the present.

And that brings me back to this question: why should God’s intrusions of judgment bother me more than his intrusions of grace? One interesting thing I’ve noticed about our children is that two of them tend to be justice-oriented: they need to hear, “you can’t do whatever you want to get whatever you want.” The other two tend to be grace-oriented: they need to hear, “sometimes being kind is more important than being right.” The point is, however our inherent personality, personal experiences, or cultural milieu may make us lean, God is a God of both justice and mercy. Jesus came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Both. Not one without the other. In fact, without judgment, grace would be meaningless. The disturbing parts of the Bible arrest our attention for good reason. They point to gaps between how we like to think of God, and who He really is. How we like to think of sin, and what sin really means. How we like to think of grace, and how costly that grace really was to Him. 

God Moves In A Mysterious Way

By William Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill

He treasures up His bright designs

And works His sov’reign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flow’r.

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan His work in vain;

God is His own interpreter,

And He will make it plain.

Naming Our Longings

“And when he came near, he asked him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ He said, ‘Lord, let me recover my sight.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Recover your sight; your faith has made you well.’” – Luke 18:40-42

Jesus’ question to the blind roadside beggar seems obvious. Why in the world does he ask it?

In our consumeristic society, we think about what we want people to do for us all the time on a superficial level: customize our coffee a certain way, give a certain gift or bonus, provide a particular service at a particular time. But that is not what Jesus is asking. The blind man did not make a public disturbance for a trivial reason. This is in some ways the most important question of all. It is the same one Jesus asks us when we are brought into his presence, because it forces us to confront our true desires, the ones so easily masked by superficial attainments. It invites us to peel back layers of pretense to expose what is truest about us, to face our vulnerability and need. It invites spiritual hunger and honest reflection. It legitimizes desire. God asks us this, and it’s okay to answer it. 

“Jesus doesn’t grant requests like a genie in a bottle,” writes Ruth Haley Barton. “He works with people allowing their desires to draw him into the core conversations of life… Why did Jesus ask such pointed and personal questions? Perhaps because he knew that such questions open up a world of possibility—the possibility of actually making choices that are congruent with what we say we really want.  He seemed to understand that being in touch with our true desire can be catalytic for one’s spiritual life because it is the most powerful motivator for a life lived consistently with intentionality and focus.”

Psalm 86 was also on our reading list for the same day, and it struck me that the entire Psalm is an answer to this very question. The entire Psalm presupposes this question was asked, and is itself a litany of expressed desires and longings that pierce through to the deepest longings of the Psalmist’s heart. “Incline your ear to me, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy,” he begins. Preserve my life. Be gracious to me. Gladden the soul of your servant. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer. Teach me your way. Turn to me. Be gracious to me. Show me a sign of your favor. But mingled in are descriptions of God himself. There is none like you. All shall worship you. You do wondrous things. You alone are God. Great is your steadfast love toward me. You have delivered my soul. You are merciful and gracious. You abound in faithfulness. You have helped me and comforted me. Within the very answering of this question, he encounters God. That’s the difference between asking this question of ourselves without God’s presence, and hearing God ask it to us within his presence. It’s the difference between self-help and true healing.

In the end, I think our longings are what motivates us on our spiritual journey, far more than duty or obligation. And our encounters with God are what heals and changes us in those very places of longing. What do you want Jesus to do for you?

Rash Words And Healing Words

“There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” – Proverbs 12:18

Atul Gawande shares a story he heard from a fellow surgeon about a young guy who came into the emergency room with a stab wound after getting into an altercation at a Halloween party. He was stable, breathing normally, not in pain. After cutting off his clothes and looking him all over, the only thing they could find was a small, pouting two-inch red slit in his belly. A thin strip of omental fat protruded out of it: they’d need to take him to the operating room to make sure his bowel wasn’t injured and sew up the gap. No big deal. They left him on a stretcher while getting things ready. Then a nurse noticed he’d stopped talking. His heart rate had skyrocketed, his eyes were rolling back in his head, he stopped responding when she shook him. The trauma team rushed back to find his blood pressure barely detectable. They intubated his airway, poured fluid into his veins, and still couldn’t get his pressure up. They raced him to the operating room. The surgeon sliced down into the abdominal cavity and an ocean of blood burst out of the patient. The knife had gone more than a foot through the man’s skin, through fat and muscle, past the intestine, and right into the aorta. Apparently the guy he got in a fight with was dressed as a soldier, with a bayonet, a detail in the history no one had managed to obtain.

In fencing, a thrust is defined as a quick attack wherein the sword moves parallel to its length and lands with the point touching the opponent. Medically-speaking, these are worst kinds of knife wounds, worse than larger lacerations because the extent of internal injury can be much greater than it appears. The Hebrew word for “rash” here is an onomatopoeia: bata. Bata bata bata—it almost sounds like the sword thrust it is being compared to. It means “to babble, to talk idly, to speak rashly or inconsiderately.”

Bata is only used three times in the Old Testament: here, in Psalm 106:33 when describing the words Moses spoke at the waters of Meribah after which he could not enter the promised land, and in Leviticus 5:4 when describing rash oaths leading to unintentional sin for which specific sacrifices should be made. In both these instances, words were spoken unintentionally, without premeditation. In both cases, they resulted in serious consequences.

I think of this verse as many of us spend time with family this holiday season, because somehow rash words happen most easily with those closest to us. We may be the ones deeply hurt by careless words spoken by parents or relatives. We may be tempted to gossip with words that wound reputations, or to speak rashly in frustration ourselves. Contrast this with the wise tongue that brings healing: these aren’t just nice words. This isn’t placation or flattery. This is to speak in a way that recognizes there is a wound, or a culture or habit of unhealthiness, and seeks to heal it. Sometimes healing comes through observation and time, and this may mean speaking less and listening more than you naturally would. Sometimes healing means supportive treatment for symptoms, and this may mean words that comfort, encourage or build up. Sometimes healing involves pain, like the draining of an abscess or suturing of a wound, and your words may be ones to rebuke or set boundaries. Regardless, there is forethought and intention, with the purpose of restoring health and life. May our words be wise words, wherever we go and whomever we see.

Wealth In Poverty

“One pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.” – Proverbs 13:7

I kind of laughed when I came across this in our reading, because it seems so Bay Area. It’s like that scene from “Always Be My Maybe,” when Marcus says, “I thought this was a high-end restaurant. Why am I the only one wearing a tux?” and Sasha replies, “Oh, sorry, I should have told you. Rich people are done with fancy clothes. Now it’s all $4,000 T-shirts that look like they were stolen off the homeless.”

There is some debate regarding the translation of this verse; some suggest it reads closer to “one makes himself rich, yet has nothing; another makes himself poor, yet has great wealth.” Regardless, the point is that true poverty, and true wealth, does not always meet the eye. We ought to be wary of judging anyone based on how wealthy they appear. We ought to be wary of judging our own conditions based on how propitious or inauspicious they may seem. Jesus says the poor in spirit will have the kingdom of heaven, and the meek the earth: nothing is what it seems, or perhaps we need to learn how to look anew.

This is part of the hope Christmas offers us: the most wonderful thing in the history of the world happened in an insignificant stable in an insignificant village.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well in a letter he wrote his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer, from prison on December 13, 1943:

“Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours—why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand… And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”