A book which has had an outsized influence on my thinking has been Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It is a thin book, and there are really only two primary ideas from it which have embedded themselves in my thinking, one of which Frankl quotes from Nietzsche. So to be entirely honest, I would have to say that there are two quotes from a short book written by Viktor Frankl which have had an outsized influence on me, and one of the quotes is not even his own. But nonetheless, I thought I might enjoy trying to lay out just how his work has affected me.

The Nietzsche quote which appears multiple times in Frankl’s book, is “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”1 To Frankl, the “how” that he had to “bear with” was not merely hypothetical, or the monotony of working a nine-to-five, or some other first world hardship. The “how” that he bore with was much more visceral: imprisonment, starvation, and overwork in a Nazi concentration camp. Not rush hour traffic but torture, frostbite, and ever-present death.

The why for which Frankl lived, was love. In an environment where many gave up on life, Frankl and a precious few others of his fellow inmates, discovered that

“a man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how”.”2

For Frankl, the human who affectionately waited for him, was his wife. He thought often and vividly of her.

Even though Frankl did not know if his wife was alive, he writes,

“there was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying.”3

He learned well that love extends “far beyond the physical person of the beloved” and finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being.4 For the first time in his life he saw the truth proclaimed by so many thinkers – “that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.”5

It is the quote from Nietzsche, brought by Frankl into sharp relief against the backdrop of life in concentration camp, that underlies the thinking in my essay, Because He First Loved Us, though I did not realize this at the time. My basic intuition is that we are inundated with good advice—we all know a multitude of things we ought to do—but are woefully under-instructed in the reasons we have for doing those things. I suspect that this contributes to why we go to bed overwhelmed and burnt out, instead of tired but fulfilled.

Since reading Frankl, discovering the ‘why’ of Christian life has become a major driver for much of my reading. I am not particularly scholarly – I am mostly an embodied assemblage of fierce emotions and happen to like playing with words. But I have managed to read scholarly books in an effort to puzzle out the ‘why’ of Christianity; because I reached the very simple conclusion, that the ‘why’ of Christianity is the greatest one of all, and I wanted more of it.

In fact, I think it is the ‘why’ of Christianity that sets it apart from what other religions and wisdom traditions have concluded about things like virtue, and living life well. Living virtuously, as Christians aspire to do, is not so different than the virtuous life envisioned by other wisdom traditions. There are many ‘goods’ upon which Christians and non-Christians can agree, and like I have heard from Stephen Meyer, very few people will argue that it is ‘good’ to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure. Of course, there are important ways in which Christian virtue is different, but by far the surpassing difference between Christianity and the rest of the field, is our reason for living virtuously—our why.

At its best, Christianity rolls up its sleeves and gets its hands dirty. Christians of old would rescue unwanted babies from where they were discarded, and raise them as if they were their own; leaving us with appallingly big shoes to fill. But behind their actions was an unwavering faith in an unshakeable ‘why’; the reason for their actions was nothing other than the love they had received from God through Christ, love that found expression in their commitment to loving others.

So I have dived into exploring this ‘why’ with abandon. That this abandon is intermittent, oft-distracted, and beset with bouts of procrastination does not disqualify it; it is definitely abandon. And at least some of what triggered the whole endeavor is found in Frankl’s repeating and then illustrating this one line from Nietzsche. I am convinced that Christians have the very best why – we love because he first loved – and I am determined to never cease exploring what that is to the limit of my ability.

Hope, and the cost of discipleship

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”6

The way in which this quote from Frankl has impacted me, may be more difficult to parse out than the previous one. But I think what it has come to mean to me, or at least remind me of, is that no matter what my particular hardship might be, the primary battle that I am in is with myself.

What I mean, or think I mean, is that the circumstances which seem to present obstacles in my life, often are not where the real danger lies. My failures primarily occur in the way that I choose to respond to these obstacles. And in my failure, I am reminded that my responsibility, my possibility was something more. The way I react to circumstances and the attitude that I choose to adopt is not the only option available to me. There was something else I could have done; something better. To me, Frankl could very well be saying exactly this.

But what Frankl actually does say, is that he witnessed sufficient evidence that the ability to choose the correct attitude cannot be taken away from us, even if deprived of every other freedom. In this, what he calls “the last of the human freedoms”, we cannot avoid the responsibility to choose well.

However, I do not think that Frankl begrudges those in concentration camp who failed to choose well. The reason only a few managed to do so, is because many of us are slow learners, and the lesson that a few inmates picked up quickly, the rest of us may only learn in the course of an entire lifetime. We must not conclude that, when faced by life’s harshest test, we are required to pass it with flying colors.

It is more reasonable to conclude that my cross must be taken up and carried, by me. Jesus commands me to carry my cross. There are hardships that are mine to endure. It pains him when I fall while carrying it, but to truly fail, I would have to stop getting back up. To carry my cross, stumble, stagger, and carry on; that is not failure. The failure is in denying that the cross is mine, and denying that to carry it is a real possibility.

On the flip side of this searing responsibility is inscribed a message of hope. While there is a responsibility that belongs solely to me, there is also a promise which nothing can wrest away from me; found in Paul’s letter to the Romans,

“— I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor heavenly rulers, nor things that are present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”7

So while on one hand there is this brutal simplicity; that even in the worst of circumstances my primary responsibility cannot be outsourced to someone else. But on the other hand, there is this glorious hope; no matter how tumultuous my situation, nothing can prevent me from resting in Christ.

Frankl’s conclusion about “the last of human freedoms” evokes an echo of Jesus’ words concerning the cost of discipleship.

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”8

and

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”9

When Jesus places this price upon the cost of discipleship, any illusion about what he is really asking of his disciples is stripped away: if I am forced to choose between Jesus and the people closest to me, I must choose Jesus or I am unworthy of him. We do not often consider, I think, that this possibility may become reality.

Even if it does not become a reality, we can still know that the thing which is between God and me must not become disordered. My family, dear as they are, cannot be allowed to displace him. And if my family cannot, then nothing can; I have nothing on earth dearer than family. My allegiance to God boils down to something personal, something absolutely between me and him alone.

The similarity I see, is between this aloneness, and the kind faced by Frankl in concentration camp. All that he endured, the sleep deprivation, starvation, and the death that was all around, was all distilled down into one question: how am I going to respond, how am I required to respond in the face of this horrendous adversity? When deprived of every freedom but the freedom to choose my attitude, how will I spend this freedom?

Most people in Frankl’s circumstances did not choose what he would call “honorably”. Frankl himself does not claim to be the most honorable; the best of his campmates walked to their own execution with their shoulders straight and a prayer on their lips. But even though his concentration camp experience serves to illustrate what to me have been impactful truths, concentration camp is by no means the correct lens through which I must analyze the vitality of my commitment to Christ. I do not want to give the impression that, unless we too could have faced Auschwitz nobly, we somehow are falling off the mark.

It is folly (and one I am guilty of) to require of others that they endure the peculiar kind of suffering that I endured to get to the place that I have gotten too. If I get somewhere the hard way, I tend to begrudge anyone who gets there more easily. I do not get the sense that Frankl does this. He preferred people to learn the lessons he learned, from the insights he offered in his therapy practice.

I am less successful than Frankl at avoiding this folly. Whether consciously or not, I think that by absorbing and promoting Frankl’s ideas, I can tend to idealize suffering; as though more of it is better, and as if we require it in order to legitimize our discipleship. But the level of hardship in which Frankl made his observations literally took people’s lives. Some dosages of hardship are fatal and we learn nothing at all. Most likely for us, the hardship that each of us is currently facing is exactly the hardship in which Frankl’s observations will be applicable.

And so, while each believer is committed to pay the cost of discipleship; I do not think that Jesus had in mind, a crossroads, where each disciple must make a final, hard decision between their family and discipleship to him. He did not envision that each of us would make our choice under the worst circumstances imaginable. What we must do is accept the cost, and allow it to redefine our relationships. Yes, this may mean losing some of them, but the best of them only become better and new ones will be formed unexpectedly.

Still, some people will pay a higher price than others. For them and for the rest of us, I think it is of utmost, urgent, importance to remember that nothing can interfere with the relationship and identity that I have in Christ, unless I allow it to, and nothing can bind me to him except my own faith—that something which I have with him alone.

“So then, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, continue working out your salvation with awe and reverence.” 10

Note: I wrote this essay for a CE (Christian Endeavor) program that was themed “Looking to Jesus”. I allowed myself some minor edits from what I read in front of church, mostly because I ran out of time on Sunday and did not finish editing my concluding statements until they matched the predictions I made in the opening, but also to better match subheadings to the content.

Background

In these verses Jesus is predicting his own execution. By comparing himself to "the serpent in the wilderness", he is not only predicting the manner of his death, but also signaling the importance of this event to his audience, and also to us now as readers.

The event to which Jesus refers is a familiar one, but I will do a quick recap. The children of Israel had already been on the cusp of entering the promised land, but failed to possess it because of unbelief. For their sin of unbelief, the Israelites were sentenced to forty years of wilderness wandering. With forty years stretching out before them in which they could have expressed contrition, they chose instead to express their displeasure with God – again. They accused him of merely bringing them into the wilderness to die. Also, they disliked the food (Nu 21:4 - 5).

In response, God sent venomous serpents into the Israelite camp. As death and suffering consumed them, the Israelites recognized the error of their ways and entreated Moses to ask God for relief. When Moses prayed for the people, God did not simply end the plague as he surely could have. He instructed Moses to build a snake out of bronze and raise it on a pole, then required the people to look at it if they wanted to live.

We often hear terms like "looking to Jesus" or "going to the cross", but obviously these terms are not meant to be understood literally. We are two thousand years and five thousand miles removed from the time and place in which the cross was featured on that hill outside Jerusalem. Jesus is not raised up where we can actually see him, like the bronze serpent was for the healing of the Israelites. In the rest of this essay, we will examine what it means to look to Jesus in our modern context.

I will start by exploring who Christ is, taken primarily from Hebrews and the gospel of John. I will then look at what “looking to Jesus” means in the context of how it is used in the Bible. Before concluding, I will examine what Christ accomplished for us, and explore how what he did is universally relevant even though the story is very old.

Where do we look for Jesus?

To understand where to look for Jesus, it is important to understand who Jesus is. He was a person in a time and place, born thousands of years ago as the apparent son of a carpenter from Nazareth. He travelled around Samaria and Judea with a group that included fishermen, zealots, and tax collectors. He socialized with the dregs of society, argued with the religious elite, and died a criminal's death. But as remarkable as he was while a man on earth, it is because of who Jesus has always been and still is today that we continue to speak in the present tense about looking to him.

Jesus is God incarnated - or God who became man - the creator of the universe, and the radiance of the glory of God (Col 1:15-20, Phil 2:6-7, Joh 1:3, Heb 1:1-3). While a man on earth, he died to wash away sins, then rose in triumph from the dead and ascended to sit at the right hand of God, the only man worthy of that honor, where he lives eternally as our high priest (Heb 9 & 10). Perhaps the most important thing to understand when asking where we ought to look for him is that Jesus is the living Word, or Word made flesh (Joh 1:14-18). In simple terms, this means that Jesus can be sought and found in the Bible.

On one occasion when Jesus is speaking to the Jewish leaders, he faults them for how they study the Scriptures. He recognizes that they are diligent and studious, thinking that in the Scriptures they possess eternal life. Jesus tells the Jewish leaders that their mistake is in failing to acknowledge that the Scriptures testify about him. They were devoted to a book, while at the same time rejecting the book's main character who stood right in front of them (Joh 5:39-47).

It is important not to repeat the mistake of these Jewish leaders. The Bible is God's revelation, a testimony and witness of Christ; but the person of Christ is something more. While our search for Jesus must include searching the Bible, and while knowledge of Scripture is advantageous; the purpose of Bible study must be motivated by more than merely trying to know the Scriptures better. We should look into the Scripture to know our Savior better (Mt 11:29).

What does it mean to look to Jesus?

The concept of "looking to Jesus" appears in Scripture a number of times. In John 6:40, Jesus makes a connection between "looking on" him and "believing in" him. Jesus' comparison between himself and the snake that was raised in the Israelite camp makes the same connection - the Israelites looked at the serpent if they wanted to live; Jesus states that the purpose of his own lifting up is that whoever believes in him would live eternally. From this, we can conclude that if we believe in Jesus then we are also looking to Jesus.

Hebrews 12:2 reads: Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. In this passage, looking to Jesus is used as part of a larger exhortation to faithfulness and is a continuation of the faith chapter which precedes it. In the faith chapter, we read of Old Testament heroes who faithfully ran their race to win the prize at the end. Hebrews 12:2 identifies Jesus as both the prize for which the heroes of faith were running, and the ultimate example in how to run the race.

While the verses from John make the connection between looking on and believing in Christ, “looking to Jesus” the way it is used in Hebrews, is a reminder to persevere in this belief and to be faithful as Christ was faithful. He disregarded the shame of the cross and endured it for the joy that was before him. The Hebrews were to do the same in their turn, and fix their eyes on Christ who by his faithfulness became their joy.

When they were told to fix their eyes on Jesus, and to think of him who endured the cross, they were being told to focus their hearts and minds upon Christ. They were reminded to retain a firm grasp in their innermost and highest affection, for what Christ had done on their behalf that made all their suffering worthwhile. Christ is the reason and reward for perseverance.

What did Jesus accomplish exactly?

What did Jesus do for the Hebrew audience, and for us? Jesus, in obedience to God, willingly made an offering of his body on the cross in order to make us holy. By this offering, all whom he makes holy are perfected for all time (Heb 10:14). He does this for those who acknowledge their sin and its accompanying destiny of death and – like the snake-bitten Israelites – trust in the remedy that God provides for health and life (Lu 5:31, Mt 9:12, Mk 2:17).

I find myself questioning whether holiness has any meaning or attraction to humanity in the twenty-first century, and I believe it can. I think that the human conscience is in part an instinctive desire for holiness with which every human is born. It is our conscience that first gives us the inner conviction that morality exists. It is too underdeveloped to know what it is doing, but is initially felt as inner condemnation when we do something wrong, and the conviction that something about us is lacking - that we are not quite complete. While the concept of biblical holiness is foreign to most modern people, I think that anyone who is honest with themselves is familiar with some version of this inner experience.

An anguished conscience can be a great motivator. Hundreds of years ago, seeking relief for the torments of conscience, men like John Bunyan and Martin Luther went on spiritual quests whose outcomes still affect us today. But when we journey into God looking for the relief of a stricken conscience, we do not just find relief. While God is delighted to provide us the relief that we seek, he wants to give us so much more than we even know how to look for. That is why he gives us holiness.

When Christ gifts us the perfection of holiness through his atoning blood, we put on the holiness of Christ in the same way that parents might dress their children in clothes which are too big but which they are expected to grow into. We are given Christ's holiness, Christ who is himself the radiance of God's glory. As far as God is concerned, we now possess all the merits of his Son.

To use a borrowed example,1 imagine that a man has committed a traffic offense. For some of you, this will be easier than it is for others. This offense requires that he appear in court to pay the fine that he owes. Acknowledging his guilt, he shows up in court on the specified day. When it is his turn to face the judge, the judge surprises him by taking out his wallet, paying the fine, and ripping up the ticket. At this point, his guilt is paid for, his offense forgiven and struck from the record. This forgiveness grants wonder and relief to his troubled conscience.

But the judge is not done yet. He next takes this man, already grateful and in his debt, to family court, where he informs the court that he is adopting the man. But not only adopting him, he is immediately written into the judge's will, recipient of a full measure of his vast inheritance with his eldest and favorite son, and looked on as possessing all the favored son's attributes. Because the favorite son is the exact image of his father, the adopted man knows the differences between them are actually stark, but he can tell by the way this judge treats him, that he truly does esteem him just as highly as he does his eldest son. The attributes for which the adopted man is loved by his father, are those of perfect holiness; the righteousness of which Paul writes, that is imputed to those who believe (Ro 3-5).

This kind of holiness far exceeds anything toward which mere conscience could spur us on its own. Conscience makes us contrite, and eager for relief. An appetite for holiness can only be given to us by God, when we look toward him for this relief. And it is Jesus' blood by which the gift of perfect holiness is made possible.

The holiness that is gifted to us is of the same kind that we read about in Scripture. It is radiant and pure, a consuming fire; and while on one hand it paints our shortcomings into stark relief in a more devastating manner than our conscience ever could, on the other hand it is the portrayal of the very holiness which God has given to us. We now belong to his holiness, it is part of us, and we partake in him.

Growing into holiness

When we look to Christ who authored and finished our faith, when we appeal to him and pin all our hopes on him; then we in one sense finally become a complete creation. While the ant, lily, and sparrow – all of whom merit recognition in Scripture – are all doing what God created them for; and while the mountains and night sky testify of God by simply being; we humans become fully who we were meant to be when we take on new life in Christ.

But there's more! God is not done with us the minute we confess Christ as lord. The Christian who puts on Christ, who is clad in the outsized holiness of Christ, has room to grow, and is expected to. We are counted on to grow more Christ-like. Not in a way where we have to pressure ourselves to grow, but in that he gives us an appetite for his goodness of which we cannot get our fill. This appetite can become blunted - the people who first received the book of Hebrews were suffering and it dulled their appetite. But when this happens, be reminded as they were, to look to Jesus. Search him out in Scripture which is his revealed Word, and in nature where we are told that his divine attributes can be understood through that which he has made (Ps 19:1, 104:24, Ro 1:20).

Finally, being made holy is required to be accepted in the sight of a holy God. Not in an austere, arms length, condescending tolerance like we can sometimes feel from each other. But in the way a parent welcomes a toddler into their arms or the way we picture Jesus taking a child on his lap (Eph 3:12, Heb 4:16, 7:25). The desire for this kind of acceptance is interwoven, I think, into the ache of conscience for relief from guilt, or the sense of yearning that accompanies the joy we take in beauty.2 Only a God this holy and loving and complete can fulfill these desires for us. We do not have the capacity to receive this entirely while in this life, but in part enough that we can acquire a taste for going farther in, seeking him wherever he can be found. And so—look to Jesus. It is through him alone that we find access to all encompassing fulfillment.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. —Rumi1

This is a deviation from my planned posting schedule, but I thought perhaps I could put this together quickly enough to get away with it.

My inspiration for writing is an excerpt from another Substack publication called The Upheaval which I quote and link below. I am not sure the connection between my essay and the quote which inspired it will be evident, so I will explain further.

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes about an artist whose purpose for painting has become idolatrous. At first this painter caught glimpses of Heaven, and by capturing them in his paintings, enabled others to catch these glimpses as well. His first love used to be light itself and he only loved painting as a means of telling others about the light. But the painter’s affections are pulled away from this purpose, and he falls in love with the paints themselves.2

My inspiration is something like: We have a beautiful message to share, but it is not our message. We cannot show it to each other; we can at best only enable each other to see it properly through what we say and do. Truth is not a flower that we can press between the pages of a book, but is the entire cosmos in which it is possible for such a flower to bloom. Truth is not words on a page or paint on a canvas, but that which such things enable us to see. And now for the quote which kicked this all off.

I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, by people who in their genius showed the Truth rather than told it. And, even more than that, by witnessing people I knew and admired who, even when the world was falling apart, even in the face of personal trial and persecution, remained unbowed and undaunted from speaking truth with courage and doing right with love. Invariably I discovered they were people of faith—a quiet, happy, steel faith. Theirs was an evangelism that didn’t need words. —N.S Lyons

Over breakfast some months ago, I observed to a friend that my Christian experience does not merit much telling. There is a kind of dramatic, breakthrough conversion that people love to hear, like that of a violent substance abuser whose life is upended and repurposed for Christ. That experience is not mine. Mine is messy and convoluted in a rather boring way, and anyway, I cannot really get into specifics in a public way because of the other parties involved. It is far from being the narrative equivalent of photogenic.

I am not talking about the time at which I chose to become a Christian, but more recently, when the gospel became more real, and precious, and beautiful to me. I think of it as a breakthrough, perhaps similar to what we read in Job—I went from a “hearing of” God to “seeing him” with my own eyes.3

The realization I was harboring as I talked to my friend over breakfast, was that as instrumental as the last number of years have been, as much impact as these events have had in my life; I cannot say with absolute certainty that I did the right thing at any point along the way. The gospel, which frees me from needing to earn my own righteousness, also deprives me of any claim to having done anything right. It severs me from my body of work.

It is not difficult to understand that our sins have been forgiven. My kids grasp the concept of saying “sorry” and “that’s okay”. Their grievances are quickly forgiven and forgotten. But it is more difficult to understand that it is not only our misdeeds which the gospel removes from us, but our good deeds as well.

This is the cost of the gospel. In order to move beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, I have to relinquish my grip on what I have done right as well as wrong. All deeds that I have done—right, wrong, good, or bad—are my body of work. They are not me.

I am redeemed. The body of work by which I AM measured is gifted to me, namely, the work of Jesus Christ. I have to let go of my body of work, to where my deeds no longer show up in the “debit” or “credit” columns on the ledger.

But this is hard to do. In the messy events of my journey, I made choices and took action in ways that I still believe were correctly motivated. But no matter what I did, no matter how good my motivations, there were always people who looked on in disapproval. This grated on me. If only they understood then surely they would approve.

However, the truth is that these people had every right to disapprove, because how people score my performance is not the score that matters. The gospel frees me from the most demanding scoring method of all, the law; with Christ’s sacrifice placing me beyond where any score can be ascribed to me. In this place, I am free to look at what I have done and concede that my actions were a tad rash or mean; and that better alternatives almost certainly existed.

The delineation between me and my body of work seems important to understand and easy to forget. I am quite fond of some of the things I have done and would like to take all the credit to myself. Also, I can rationalize the things I am not so fond of until they are really not so bad. But I can only truly be free of my sins if I also give my goodness (so-called) over to Christ. That is the cost of true freedom, but it is the freedom most worth having.

If I cannot recognize the difference between me and my body of work, then I am defined by it. It will be part of my identity, blending me and my body of work into one entity. My flesh is quite comfortable with slipping into this well-worn groove, because there I place myself in control. I can craft a persona. I can build an image which people recognize as particularly mine. He’s the guy that pours concrete, or he’s good with money, or he’s a Ford guy. These sorts of things are somewhat inescapable, but when we embrace and internalize them, then they limit and ensnare us.

But if I identify as a “good guy”, then I am really trapped. Identity is about perception, and if I need others to perceive me as good, then my work is really cut out for me. If I do something that does not fit the image I would like to portray, something I consider to be out of character, then I need to retrace my steps and set the record straight. Maybe I find out after the fact that I said something untrue, and being someone who covets the reputation of being honest, I am now compelled to apologize to the other participants in the conversation to re-establish their perception of me. I need to maintain my image as being honest.

Knowing the difference between me and my body of work, and especially knowing that Christ substituted his work for mine, sets me free from needing to maintain my track record. I am not saying that my body of work can be excused in any way. Not at all. But instead of being held captive by the need to set the record straight, I can just be accountable for it. I can admit wrongdoing out of a place of freedom. I can confess my sins and apologize for how they hurt others instead of in protecting my image. After all, my redemption is secure in One whose work cannot be undone and his image is unassailable.

I have been savoring this realization for some time. It seems to me that the freedom which can be found here is at the heart of the gospel’s beauty and appeal. I also find this to be where the cost is the steepest, a cost which I have to confront often.

To me the beauty of the gospel can certainly be found in a conversion that is dramatic and unique, but the beauty that sustains has to be found in the mundane. When I look back on my own timeline—a panorama of experiences that most would find entirely unremarkable—I see a lot of ugliness. It’s enough to make me wince, even now. But alongside that, a sort of beauty emerges. I see evidence that all things can work together for good.4 Where I am at today is not the sum result of my past actions but so much more. Stuff happened, and it was not all good stuff, but the result is something not to be traded away at any cost.

In closing, let me say that this is indeed a testimony, but also an aspiration. I want to be the grounded in the way I describe, but the realization is maybe not always so real, and its memory has to fill in. That is to say, I am not always victorious but I do remember where my victory comes from. I believe though, that some form of this realization is necessary to prepare us for the most important works of our lives—those that Christ wants to do through us.

Beauty will save the world. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky5

Scriptural basis for this post is found primarily in Romans 7:20-25

A certain amount of credit must also be given to this piece by Cameron Combs

Some six months ago, I committed to a bi-monthly schedule of posting to Substack. I believe credit for this idea goes to a publication called Pen2Profit, but cannot confirm this because older posts there are paywalled.

I wanted to get into some sort of rhythm with my writing, and imposing deadlines on one’s self was pitched as a way to get things finished—I was writing thousands of words but completing nothing. So I now have an event in my calendar that reads, “publish to Substack” and one of these events is on the fifteenth of May.

Obviously, this did not get published on the fifteenth of May, but I am consoled by the knowledge that real writers also overrun their deadlines. When trying to produce real writing, it is important to use every tool in the box, so I am pleased that I managed to incorporate the tool of tardiness.

Anyway, I did not get my May post completed in time to publish. I got close, but I now have an actual writing assignment to complete, with an actual deadline, and nothing ready to post here. In order to adhere (loosely) to my publishing schedule, I decided to link some posts below which I read and enjoyed in the last few months.

To Sow a Seed

No, You Don't Got This

"There are a lot of people who give you the message that maybe you are not good enough, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to block out all of that noise."— Rachel Platten…

Read more

a year ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Heather @ To Sow a Seed

My wife sent me this post from To Sow a Seed, and it speaks to something that I have felt on occasion. There is something about trying to convince ourselves that we are good enough that seems counter productive. There seems to be a consensus from somewhere that our self esteem needs to be healthy. I obviously do not have room or time to elaborate here, but my suspicion is that this leads us to look for consolation in the wrong place. Inside ourselves perhaps. Anyway, I think this post raises a good point.

Patient Kingdom

Partnership Over Compromise

Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided…

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a year ago · 125 likes · 38 comments · Ross Byrd

I like what Ross Byrd has to say about marriage.

He includes this C.S. Lewis quote,

Equality is a quantitative term, and therefore love often knows nothing of it;

which I find insightful. Striving for equality seems to me like an endless game of comparing ourselves among ourselves, something that we encourage our kids to avoid. Trading good deeds and trying to exactly split the work load in pursuit of equality seems like a rather dull sort of relationship, one that gets all caught up in weights and measures rather than any sort of genuine good will.

The quote that I find the most memorable though, is this one:

Religious skeptics complain about the absurdity of having a relationship with a God you cannot see. But the truth is that every human relationship is like this. Every human being is a spiritual being. We are mostly invisible to one another until we learn, over time, often by means of promissory love, to see each other rightly.

I may not understand what it means precisely, but it reminds me of something Ron Nash said in a lecture, which goes more or less as follows: “There are things that I cannot know about you unless you, and only you, reveal them to me.”1

I think these ideas do a good job of explaining the role of God’s revealed Word in our relationship with him. We cannot know him without it. But also, just because someone’s visage is familiar to us does not necessarily mean we know them. There is a something more that is significant, and this part of knowing each other is very similar to how we participate in a relationship with God.

Reality Theology with Griffin Gooch

Grace Might Have Strings Attached (and Why That’s Not a Bad Thing)

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a year ago · 157 likes · 84 comments · Griffin Gooch

And finally, Griffin Gooch, which he assures us is his real name. He’s also a real scholar with a real sense of humor who writes serious theology with a light touch. I cannot fathom how academics maintain momentum when digging through what has to be some incredibly boring material on their way to producing work this informative, but I am happy to benefit from it. This is my favorite of his posts to date.

That’s it! Enough yammering from me. Go read what these folks have to say.

This essay originally appeared on Anabaptist Perspectives on February 28, 2025 under the title God’s Pursuit of Affectionate Relationship.

God’s Pursuit of Affectionate Relationship

The Bible as a whole, with its many books and their different genres, gives us a record of a relationship—the relationship between God and man. As the biblical narrative unfolds, this relationship cycles through periods of prosperity and closeness, then cools and becomes strained. God remains constant throughout, but man tests this relationship by becoming distracted, perverted, and forgetful. Because the Bible is timeless, its narrative typifies how we still relate to God today.

There are two definitions of “relationship” that will be present in this essay. One is the relationship we have to God; the other is the relationship we can have with God. Our relationship to God is our position relative to his position, as if we were the planets and he the sun of our solar system. Instead of being separated by millions of miles, we are separated from him by our sin.

God wants a relationship with us that overcomes this separation. Because this separation is made out of man’s sin, this sin needs to be taken away. David and Abraham are two Old Testament characters who enjoyed this kind of relationship with God.1We are told that Abraham was a friend of God,2 and that David was a man after God’s heart.3 These terms express affection; showing us what is possible and what God desires in relationship with man.

God’s desire for this kind of relationship begins in Eden. We can see this in how he went looking for Adam and Eve after they sinned, and in his surprise at not finding them. Adam and Eve were no longer fit to reside in Eden, in the place where God walked in the cool of the day. Neither are we fit to reside there. But that doesn’t stop God from pursuing a relationship with us. So, while separation from God remains our default relationship, pursuit of relationship with man, is the default state of God.

The awakening of conscience and the loss of innocence

The sin of Adam and Eve at Eden is not only the origin story of man’s fallen state, it is something that happens in the heart of every individual. It plays out in the awakening of our conscience and the loss of our childhood innocence.

When we are very young, we are ignorant of what it means to be human. While our will is evident very early, we ourselves cannot recognize it. We don’t view life as the actions we take by virtue of having free will. We also don’t connect these actions to consequences, and we lack the ability to take full responsibility for our own actions.

This changes as we mature and develop a conscience. As conscience asserts itself, we begin to suffer consequences for our actions that are entirely internal. We can see this in the actions of Adam and Eve after they eat the forbidden fruit. Their nakedness bothers them, and they try to cover it with leaves, then they try to hide from God himself. They suffered the inner torments of their conscience before they endured the external consequence—banishment from Eden.

The same thing happens to us. When I told a lie, or was mean to a sibling, my conscience afflicted me before any punishment was meted out by my parents. This meant that even if I escaped outright punishment, there was something inside that did not let me go free. The weight of being human settles on our shoulders as we connect our wrongdoing to the inner condemnation of our conscience.

Adam and Eve suffered twinges of their awakened conscience before they were banished from the garden. Our own experience follows the same order. Our conscience asserts itself before we realize our separation from God.

For us, an awakened conscience is what makes it possible to realize that we are separate from God. The subjective but undeniable working of our conscience means our inner reality aligns with the verdict found in Scripture. Our conscience tells us there is something wrong with us; God’s Word tells us what is wrong with us.

Just as Adam and Eve lost Eden, an awakened conscience signals the loss of childhood innocence. In both cases, what was possessed is only realized once it is lost. Perhaps we recognize the tragedy of the fall because the yearning for paradise that was lost parallels the nostalgia we have for our own childhoods.

I’ll address the proper object of our desire in the conclusion. The point I want to make now is that we are incapable of being drawn to God without this yearning. This yearning depends on the development of conscience. In short, our consciences play a vital role in priming us to respond to God and to enter into the relationship he is pursuing with us.

The constancy of God

The fall of Adam and Eve and its parallel in each of our lives is, from our perspective, marked by dramatic change. But God’s perspective remains constant. Because he knows all things, everything remains the same to him. God always knew that Adam and Eve were naked, and he knew that they would eventually find out as well. God knew that Adam and Eve were absolutely dependent on his care in Eden and would continue to depend on him after Eden. God shows his care when he acknowledges their shame and clothes them in animal skins after their banishment from Eden.

Nakedness in the Bible is associated with helplessness. It is symbolic of the problem that man cannot solve for himself, and descriptive of man’s default relationship to God. This is the nakedness written of when Jesus tells the lukewarm Laodiceans,

“For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”4

Before the fall, Adam and Eve were subject to the same illusion as the Laodiceans. They were blind to their nakedness. Only after their eyes were opened did God clothe them. Perhaps then they realized that God was extending his care to them; care which they had always depended on but until now had not seen.

Ezekiel 16 also uses language about nakedness. Here it is in the context of God’s romance of Jerusalem. She started out as a naked infant, abandoned in a field, and wallowing in her blood. God provides her with life. Then, when she is of marriageable age, God makes her his bride, dresses her in the best garments, and gives her the best food. After doing all this for his bride, verse 14 reads,

“And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God.”

From imagery like this we can see how God wants to provide for those he loves and how helpless we are to provide for ourselves. The best we can do is patch together some leaves like Adam and Eve. But the nakedness that is beyond our power to solve, is outdone by God’s commitment to clothe us. These two things will never change, except in how we perceive them. God has seen this all along, but we get to learn it over and over.

The language of affection

God clothed Adam and Eve with animal skins, and he figuratively clothed Jerusalem with garments befitting a queen. Jesus, after his rebuke of the Laodiceans, counseled them to buy white garments from him to cover their nakedness—to enter relationship with him and accept his solution to their unsolvable problem.5

Jesus offers us this same solution, and what a solution it is! It extends up to heaven where Jesus is in God’s presence on our behalf,6 and it reaches all the way back to the beginning of time,7 when God set the plan in motion. This means that Eden was not a failure, but a part of the plan. God knew man would fall, because it is a consequence of the free will he created us with—so he made a plan that was a perfect fit for humanity.

God always intended for us to have a place in his family.8 Jesus pays for our adoption into the family with his death on the cross. By believing on Christ, we are taken from helpless nakedness to wearing the finest clothes, just like the depiction of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16.

In New Testament terms, this dramatic transformation is illustrated differently. Paul writes that we begin as enemies of God,9 and become fellow heirs with Jesus.10 We read in Hebrews,

“For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.””11

Jesus’s work on the cross is so powerful, so transformative, that he is not ashamed to call us his brethren. Think about it! This is the same Jesus who is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”.12 His divine attributes—his perfection—made him the only worthy sacrifice for our sin. And because of his sacrifice, God counts us worthy of sonship, as worthy as Jesus himself. Because his son makes us worthy, God can say of us as he did about Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”13

God’s language about his children continues to showcase his desire for a close, loving relationship with us. Old Testament heroes such as Abraham and David filled their place in God’s plan. We can do the same by choosing the adoption of sonship. God’s affection for us will be as complete as it was for them. And by becoming God’s sons and brothers of Jesus, we become part of the heroic tradition of the faith of Abraham.

The answer to our yearning

Jesus Christ is the correct focus of our yearning for Eden. He reverses our banishment by making our hearts a fit dwelling place for God. Our hearts become a sort of Eden, the place on earth where God can dwell with man. While we look forward to a fuller experience with God in the next life, Jesus’s work on our behalf gives us much to do in this one.

Jesus expresses his love by paying a massive price so that we can experience the same relationship that he has with his father. This is the message of the gospel; the crescendo that the biblical narrative is building towards. With all the Bible’s vivid imagery, nothing is so dramatic as God’s solution for sin in the person of his son.

John writes about love, “We love because he first loved us.”14 God’s love came first, before we were even able to return it. All the actions that God took to bring us into his family, are expressions of this love. Just like God spared Noah in the ark, we are spared in Christ. God freed Israel from the bondage of Egypt with many miracles; he frees us from the bondage of sin by a greater miracle—Christ’s resurrection. These are all acts of love from God to his people.

Anabaptism has always emphasized living a pious life and being an example to those around us. When the Anabaptist vision falters, we seem to retain the emphasis on a pious lifestyle but lose sight of salvation’s glory. We know we need to bring forth good works, like our fathers and grandfathers, but we forget why.

But when we remember what Jesus did for us on the cross, when it truly sinks in, then we know why. In light of what Jesus did for us, the only reasonable question we can ask is, what do I do now? I’ve received a great salvation, and I am overflowing with joy—what am I supposed to do with it?

And the answer to that question is be obedient to Christ. He loved us and proved it by his actions. We do the same by being obedient to him. It is not the enforced obedience of a taskmaster, but a willing obedience that delights in following Christ’s example.

Because Jesus is not ashamed to call us his brethren, we should think of him as an older brother. I have older brothers, and I watched them constantly. If they liked Chevy trucks so did I. If I wanted to learn to shoot a rifle, or throw a football, I wanted to do it like them. With Jesus, we have his example in the gospels and his instructions in the entire Bible.

Obedience is not production or performance driven; it is attentively modeling ourselves after the author of our salvation. Jesus is the only person who truly practiced what he preached, and his example is a perfect one. The Bible tells us that wanting to be just like him is the appropriate response to the gift of salvation. And in the context of this great gift, the Anabaptist teachings of pious living become delightfully fitting.

Introduction

We love because he first loved us, 1 John 4:19.1

Very early in my religious education, I was taught that Christ’s arrival on earth was the central event in all of biblical history. I do not know how universal this teaching is, but it’s a simple concept. Christians look back on the time of Christ, from his birth to ascension, as the most important happening in our history; while Old Testament believers could only anticipate this most important event. They were looking forward while we are looking back.

This concept implies that Christ’s arrival held the same significance to pre-Christian believers as it does to us. More recently however, I learned that this is not the whole picture. The children of Israel were looking forward to the promised messiah, but they had a historical event of their own which was at the heart of their religious identity. For them it was the exodus.

Until the time of Christ, Israel’s exodus from Egypt was the biggest thing that ever happened to the people of God. The exodus event and the work of Christ contain many parallels.

1. They are both deliverance events.

   1. The exodus delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt.

   2. Christ’s work on the cross delivers us from the bonds of sin.

2. They both contain signs and wonders.

   1. God tormented Egypt with ten miraculous plagues, staffs became serpents, and the water of the Red Sea was rolled back.

   2. Christ healed lepers, blind men, and raised the dead, etc.

3. Both events demonstrate the supremacy of God.

   1. In Egypt, many of the plagues were phenomena of nature. The water became blood, they were overrun with frogs, hit with a hailstorm, etc.

   2. Jesus calmed a storm using only his words.

4. And both deliverance events involve death and bloodshed.

   1. In Egypt, the Passover event involved killing lambs and painting their blood on the sides and top of doorways. This spared the firstborn of Israel, while the firstborn of the Egyptians all perished, leading Pharoah to capitulate and let Israel go free.

   2. Jesus is the new Passover lamb. He died and shed his blood to free us from sin and give us eternal life.

The exodus event and Jesus’ work through his ministry and his cross, mark the points in history when God’s love for us is most demonstrative. We have the familiar passage;

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,2

—that relates God’s love to Christ’s mission here. In the Old Testament we have verses like this one;

But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt,3

—which makes the same connection, but between God’s love and the exodus.

These two events are the benchmark for the love that is referred to by the verse in the heading. They are the first love of God toward his people, and this first love is pivotal for us. God’s love makes it possible for us to love and gives us reason to love all at once.

Love in action

Somewhere in my reading, perhaps in a blog post or a self help book, I came across the idea of “active love”, which focuses on love as a verb rather than love as an emotion. We can express love through our actions even in the absence of any strong feelings of love. For example, I can buy my wife flowers or bring in supper from town because I know those things will mean something to her. I am not required to feel especially loving in order for these things to be an expression of love.

This reverses the order of how we might think about love. The spontaneous affection that I think is necessary for me to buy my wife flowers, can instead be brought on by buying the flowers first.

I’ve liked part of this idea ever since I heard it, because it helped me think through how I felt about God. I knew from the Bible that God loved me and that I was supposed to love God, but found this problematic as a young Christian because I would compare how I felt toward God with how I felt about my friends or family. I didn’t feel toward God the way I felt toward my parents. Could I then honestly say I loved God?

The concept of active love helped resolve this question. It was no longer so important how I felt toward God in the moment, so long as I acted as if I loved him. On this point, the Bible is quite clear—if we love God, we will keep his commandments. This resolution got me part of the way to where I hope to go in the rest of this essay.

The missing element

And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. 2 John 6.

We can rightfully say that true love is active love, and that love is obedience. These are biblical truths. But unless our obedience acknowledges and contains the first love of God, our love will be incomplete. Without God’s love, active love is just a life hack and obedience is mere obligation.

One weakness in the concept of active love is that it implies that we can produce love by sheer willpower. This can also happen when we interpret too narrowly verses that equate love with obedience. But, while active love may prove effective as a tool for strengthening someone’s marriage, God does not require us to produce love in this manner. Jesus did not say, if you keep my commandments you will love me; he said if you love me you will keep my commandments.

When God demonstrates what I refer to as his first love, he is giving us reason to love him. This is what is missing from a simple construct like active love or an isolated statement like “love equals obedience.” When trying to understand why we should do something, people sometimes say, “because the Bible says so.” But God does not set it up this way. He commands obedience because he views relationship as a two way street and he has already done his part. We can see the part he played in the many examples of his love in the Bible, most markedly in the two events that I have highlighted.

God’s primary aim is not to turn us into obedient followers. He does not want mere obedience—he wants to become the reason for our obedience. He wants us to yearn for him, to have affection for him, and to direct all the force of our will and motivation toward him. If obedience was the only objective, he would use the other tools at his disposal, such as coercion. But God left us with the power to choose, and by sending Jesus to die for us he gave us reason to choose him.

So when the recorder of Deuteronomy or the apostle John write that obedience and love are synonymous, it is because love needs to have an active form. It needs to possess the same qualities that God’s love does. For this reason, when we live obediently, we are modelling the love of God. Obedience is the means he gave us by which we can align ourselves with him. It is not a merit based hierarchy that we can climb by good performance, it is a sign of our allegiance to Christ. We are throwing our lot in with his. By doing the work God gives us to do, we are paying tribute to the work of Christ on the cross.

Dead works

The essence and importance of obedience are perverted when we take our focus off of Christ. We have the example of Peter, who successfully walked on water, but started sinking when he took his eyes off of Jesus and looked at the storm driven waves. We could compare these waves to the drama in our human relationships and some of the other things that flare up to distract us. But I think that for myself and many of us, the main reason our focus strays from Christ is more subtle.

This can happen a number of ways and they are all self centered. I do not mean to say that these are selfish ambitions. Many times we are doing the best we know how. The example I used earlier of my doubt concerning my love for God is one instance of this self centeredness. I was focusing on my inner experience to see if I could find some evidence that I loved God. By doing this, I was inadvertently focusing on myself.

There are other examples of self-centeredness that are more pertinent to the topic of obedience. Two of these might be reading the Bible as an instruction manual, or going to church to hear some good life advice. When we do this, and I certainly have, we can end up thinking that we are going to find something that we can do that will be critical to our success. Here again, the focus can easily become what we are doing and what we should do.

It is natural to get caught up in what we are doing. Guys can get tunnel vision about work or hobbies and we spend a lot of time thinking about them, calculating how we are going to clear certain hurdles and prevent others from cropping up at all. As parents, we can spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing what we are going to do about our children’s anger issues or their school grades.

In these kinds of thought patterns, we spend a lot of time asking the question “what are we to do?” about a variety of issues. It is precisely because of how naturally this occurs, that I think it is important we go to church and read our Bibles for a different primary reason. We are already hyper aware of what we need to do; hyper conscious of the many items on our plates. No matter how much good advice we hear, there is a limit to how much we can put to use.

Living like this does not feel very victorious. We are too aware of our failures—failures to perform to our own standard and failures of omission. We should’ve done this and shouldn’t have done that. While this can be a pressure we put on ourselves to appear righteous before men, it can also be done out of a sincere desire to the right thing. But no matter the motive, it will not be ultimately effective.

Instead of being concerned for what we should be doing, our worship and devotion time should be spent remembering what Christ did on the cross. (Here I unavoidably gave a piece of advice.) Christian life has never been about what I am doing or will do or should have done. It is about what Christ did, for you and me. We seldom lack for good ideas of things to do, but what we are often missing is the reason for doing them. This reason, is Christ; and without it we are just performing dead works.

Conclusion

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13.

The Bible tells us in a number of ways that our actions are important. Jesus calls them our fruit, warning that every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire. James calls our actions our works, and tells us that without works our faith is dead. The apostle John writes in his letters, and also in his gospel when quoting Christ, that love equals obedience — and love, we know, is the greatest.

I drew a parallel between the exodus and the cross at the beginning of this essay, to show God’s faithfulness in demonstrating love toward his people. I think it is important to recognize that God always establishes his love before asking any in return. As modern people who are insulated from the visceral reality that ancient people faced, we tend to look at God’s behavior in the Old Testament as being on the harsh side. But I think familiarity has calloused us to the main event in the Old Testament, which is the magnitude of God’s good favor toward the children of Israel in bringing them out of Egypt.

Mostly, Israel also became calloused to God’s great demonstration of love, which is why they strayed from God and were displaced or conquered when Jesus did arrive. But while we sometimes portray Old Testament believers as living in a darker time with fewer joys and less to live for, they were not merely hanging on by their finger nails until the messiah would arrive. They had a cultural memory of their God, who actively participated in their deliverance and could do so again. There was a historical backdrop to their faithfulness because of what God had already done for them. They had hope because their God had a track record of coming through, and they remembered this.

In order to bring forth good fruit and loving obedience, we will also need to cultivate our own memory of God’s goodness to us through Christ. We will need to seek out who God really is, and let him go to work in our hearts. We will not become fruitful by putting forth superhuman effort, but by planting the joy of the gospel deep within our hearts.

Obedience is supposed to be an expression of this joy. Doing the Lord’s will is not supposed to be an insurmountable task. Jesus already conquered the insurmountable task. Being obedient is entirely possible, and because of Jesus’ victory over death, doing the possible will be enough.

Introduction

I began my Christian life on feelings. From what I understand, this is pretty common. I felt condemned, ashamed, and guilty; and because I grew up in a Christian culture I knew this was a cue to appeal to God.

After making this appeal to God, my feelings changed. I felt peace and love and joy. But with time these good feelings faded and so did my confidence that I was truly Christian. I felt that if good feelings accompanied my decision to follow Christ then they should remain with me. So I alternated between chasing those feelings and wallowing in doubt. The feelings did return on occasion, often enough that I continued to believe in their necessity and in my own deficiency when they were missing. Years later I realized that what I was actually missing, was faith.

Christians all know that faith is of vital importance. You can tell by the way we talk about it. We express concern when our faith is weak. We say we need to “go in faith” when we are uncertain.  And many of us know the passage of Scripture by heart which tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God.1

In spite of its importance, it seems that faith is seldom spelled out. This might be because everyone else already knows the definition and is just waiting for me to catch up. In any case, what follows is my attempt to define what faith is and explain how I understand it so far.

Defining faith

In the simplest terms I can conceive, (Christian) faith is:

1. the belief that what the Bible says is true and;2

2. —upon believing what it says in the Bible, we exhibit behaviors that uphold this belief.

These two things combine for a biblical definition of living faith. James and Hebrews use different terms to describe this, but their definitions agree.3

Faith contains both a visible and invisible element, like an iceberg. When you see an iceberg, you know that a large percentage of it lies unseen below the surface. The same can be said for a person’s faith. You cannot see what he believes in his heart, but you can see his actions; and by them you can draw some conclusions about what lies beneath the surface.

We (kind of) act in faith in many small ways in the course of an ordinary day. For example, I believe that if I walk through a puddle that is deeper than about an inch and a half, water will soak through my shoes and get my feet wet. I may therefore deviate from the direct route to my destination to go around puddles. (Invert this example for 8-year-olds.) My belief leads me to behave in this way; my behavior is evidence of my belief . (and my aversion to wet socks)

Christian beliefs are not incoherent or disconnected, but form a coherent belief system that we refer to as the faith. Belief systems orient and motivate their adherents. There are other belief systems in the world which play much the same role that faith does for us, but cannot be referred to as real faith because they are not strictly true. At some point they break down and become incoherent. These beliefs are philosophical in nature and try to answer the same questions that faith does for us. What is the meaning of life? why am I here? Like my aversion to wet socks, how we answer these questions will impact the way we navigate life.

I might conclude, for example, that life is all about the pursuit of pleasure; so I will do things that are entertaining, tasty, or sensual. Or perhaps I am convinced life is all about power, so I might try to gain influence and wield it over others; or blame my sorry circumstances on the influential. When these beliefs form the nucleus of my belief system, they are the primary motivation behind my actions.

Pursuing power or pleasure are natural desires of man. If I decide that one of these is the central purpose of human existence, I am merely rationalizing my base desires. Christians oppose these desires and instead seek to align themselves with the will of God. We commit to wanting what God wants, over and above what we want. This makes Christian faith a counter-intuitive belief system that is not immediately gratifying like the others I mentioned.

Following Abraham’s example

Abraham is the father of faith for a reason, and exemplified this counter-intuitive belief in God. After promising Abraham an inheritance, God told him to leave his father’s country. And, Abraham obeyed; leaving home without even knowing his destination.4

God does not communicate with us in the same way he did with Abraham. We have his Word mediated to us in the form of a book while God spoke to Abraham directly. But God’s Word is God’s Word and contains the same elements today that were present in his communication with Abraham—promises and commandments.

Our response to God’s Word should imitate Abraham’s. First by believing God’s promises and then obeying his commands. Our obedience is the works which follows our belief and together they become a living faith.

James writes that when works do not follow our faith, then it is a dead faith.5 If your brother is cold and hungry, he tells us, then give him clothes and food. Don't just say, 'I hope you find clothes and food.' Make sure you do your part to get him some.6 It is meaningless to extend well-wishes to a brother if your actions do not follow suit.

Because we are human, our actions do not always follow our good intentions. We can identify what is good and aim at it, but we fall short. Through human weakness our faith will never be perfectly coherent. But this disconnect between our intentions and our actions is different from the incoherence of alternate belief systems.

People who claim to live in pursuit of power or pleasure deviate from their beliefs, because some decidedly human things—such as falling in love—cannot be explained by these motivations. One man told me that his reason for going to work was to make as much money as possible. Sometime later, even though the money remained good, he threatened to quit his job because his ego was wounded. By my observation, his actions rendered his belief incoherent. When this happens, it is evident that humans are more complex than they admit and their own stated beliefs fail to explain this complexity. That is why not all beliefs can be called faiths. They break down at some point and are revealed as untrue.

James exhorts a coherent faith like Abraham’s, where belief is testified by action. We seek this coherence when we “measure all (our) thoughts, words and actions by the rule of the divine Word.”7 In spite of our frequent failures, the Bible is the true measure of coherence.

Two kinds of reasoning

The reason man can presume to measure himself by God’s Word is because Scripture carries a certain logic. I think this is something that is crucial to understand. The secular world wants us to believe that faith and religion are backwards, illogical, and outdated; and too often we concede them this point because we look at it through their eyes. We can see that faith in God is counter-intuitive.

But the secular world uses human reasoning and we do not. Human reasoning is what I wrote earlier, about rationalizing our base desires. If I want to live a sensual life, (who doesn’t) I can decide that the pursuit of pleasure should be my life’s purpose. I go to work to earn money to spend on leisure, recreation, and good food. Because I see everyone around me going through basically the same motions, I generalize my motivations to include everyone around me. I can then use this as justification to continue doing just as I please.

Children are great at human reasoning. If they see a new lunch kit that they want, they will say they “need” it, and provide all kinds of whimsical reasons why. Con men justify their cons by saying their targets were asking for it by being so gullible. One man I talked to enjoys fighting, so he works as a bouncer and justifies it as “helping” or “protecting” people.

The above examples of human reasoning are essentially self serving and self centered. They focus on the gratification of my desires even if it negatively impacts someone else. Christian faith rejects this kind of reasoning. We reason using the Word of God and a crucified Christ. The cross is a symbol of personal sacrifice for the greater good. It takes the focus off of me. It is an inversion of human reasoning, where everyone can become an object in service of my desires; and turns it into a service of submitting my desires for the good of all.

The fact that human reasoning comes naturally to us does not mean we are incapable of understanding the reasoning of the Bible. Nor does it mean that using our minds to understand Scripture is automatically human reasoning. Without discounting the mystery in the things of God, I want to establish that there is a logic to his Word that makes it possible for the human mind to understand and believe.8

How we can understand Abraham’s biggest test

Abraham’s primary test occurred when God told him to leave home again, this time to sacrifice his son Isaac.9 Isaac was Abraham’s promised heir, miraculously born to him in his old age when his wife was well past child bearing years. Through Isaac, God had promised to raise up a mighty nation of Abraham’s descendants.10 They would be like sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.11 But now, illogically, God was telling Abraham to make an offering out of him.

Of course, we know that God doesn’t require Abraham to follow through. He stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram for the sacrifice instead. The story has a happy ending and Isaac returns home at Abraham’s side. But where is the logic in it?

The Scriptures tell us that Abraham continued to believe that God would fulfill his promise through Isaac, even if it meant raising Isaac from the dead. In fact, Hebrews tells us that by being returned to his father, Isaac was figuratively raised from the dead.12

The logic in this story is found in its parallel to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.13 It is the story of a father who sacrifices his son and a son who submits to his father. The offering of Isaac is a foreshadowing, or type, of Christ. That is how we understand it and is the reason why we can understand it.

So we can see that even a most illogical story has enough coherence to be understood by us. Without taking too many creative liberties, we can draw some more comparisons between the sacrifice of Isaac and the sacrifice of Christ. Jesus walked with his own father to his own sacrificial death, not without some angst. God the Father was surely not immune to the type of grief that Abraham carried as he accompanied Isaac to his death on Mount Moriah. This imagery adds depth to our understanding of what God the Father and God the Son endured to bring about our salvation.

Believing the contexts of the Bible

I have heard the Bible called the “best instruction manual for life.” This statement is true, but before the Bible becomes an instruction manual I think it needs to be placed in context.

Real Bible scholars talk about a number of contexts of the Bible. One of these is the Ancient Near East, which is the geographic and historic context that most of the Old Testament was written in. Understanding the thinking of the ancient Israelites and their neighbors and contemporaries can be helpful in understanding what the Scriptures mean. Especially if one is studious and interested in this type of thing.

In pointing out the coherence of Abraham’s faith, I relied on the context of Scripture itself. I used verses in from the New Testament books of Hebrews and James to examine what happened in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Some might think that this requires a certain amount of scholarship, but it’s not much when compared to the previous example. I would say it’s pretty attainable.

But there is another context of the Bible that must be accepted by both scholars and non-scholars in order to understand and believe the gospel. This is the context of the human condition; the belief that there is something deeply wrong with us. If we do not believe that we are flawed, then we have no reason to believe that we need the redemption that Christ offers.

Like I said in the introduction, for me this belief began in my feeling of condemnation. These feelings were uncomfortable and I wanted them to go away forever. Unfortunately, this is not realistic. I think that discomfort about our flaws can prevent us from coming to a healthier understanding of what it means to be a sinner. After all, I acknowledged my sin when I repented and became a Christian. Why would I want to spend more time dwelling on that miserable topic? But I believe that a better understanding of our sinfulness can give us added freedom, so I am going to dwell on it a little.

Defining the human condition

Being a sinner does not only mean that I am bad, but that I am incapable of being good.14 The relationship between goodness and badness is the same as that of light and darkness. Light is something which exists while darkness is the absence of light. I think it is permissible to say that we all have a spark within us that is waiting to be fanned to life. But in order to be acceptable to God, his goodness has to flood to every corner of our heart.

This was not my initial understanding of sin. A mentor of mine once told me that it is our natural inclination to live by the Law. I think that this same nature inclines us to misunderstand our sinfulness by thinking of it as injustice. Children quickly develop the ability to recognize injustice when it occurs. They instinctively grasp “eye for an eye” retaliation—if you hit, me, I’ll hit you back.

These childish quarrels can escalate quickly when the victim of the first attack responds too harshly. If you hit me, what often happens is that I will hit you back, but harder. Which means that the initial aggressor becomes the new victim who now has a grievance to settle.

A child has the ability to discern different levels of injustice that are only incrementally different from each other. They may not be right, but they can tell the difference between a punch and a retaliatory punch plus interest (“he hit me way harder than I hit him.”).

The ability to distinguish between different levels of injustice exemplifies our natural tendency to assess sin as “relative badness”. For example, I would say that theft is worse than lying, adultery is worse than theft, and murder is worse than adultery. So because the worst thing I’ve done is tell lies, then I might claim to be a better person than a thief or murderer; and certainly better than a mass murderer.

But being a sinner is not determined by my badness, relative or otherwise. It is determined by my lack of goodness relative to God.15 This understanding of sin is important because it puts us on an equal plane with all humanity. The lies I have told do not separate me from God any further than the criminal offenses of someone else. We both need God’s forgiveness in equal measure.

Although clarifying our relationship to other sinners can hopefully remove a barrier to outreach, it can also be a tough pill to swallow. There will always be someone whom we struggle to see as our equal, just like the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men.16 We would like to think it possible to move ourselves closer to God by performing good deeds. It is difficult for us to accept that good deeds do not move us closer to God. It is perhaps just as difficult as believing that Christ’s blood washes away our bad deeds.

If we can believe the Bible’s portrayal of our sinfulness, then understanding the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice becomes more settled. Whether we feel bad or good, we know that the only goodness that benefits us is that of Jesus Christ. By his death and resurrection, he serves as a conduit for God’s righteousness to flow into us, washing away the sin and flooding out the darkness that separates us from our heavenly Father. We only need to believe in Christ and he will cleanse our hearts as the sanctified dwelling place of God.

It is against the backdrop of God’s magnificent grace for sinners that the Bible becomes the best instruction manual for life. Jesus became one of us in order to overcome the gulf of sin that separates us from God. This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to humanity. It is in recognition of this that we can keep the commandments and not find them grievous. By being obedient to God’s commands we imitate Christ’s perfect example and testify where our allegiance lies. This is a living faith.

Conclusion

I said in the introduction that faith was the missing ingredient in my early Christian experience. The version of faith I outlined might seem dry or boring or too austere. Anyone who knows me, knows that I fall far from measuring up to what I wrote here. (Or else you’re just thinking I’m even weirder than you first realized.) But thinking about faith in this manner has really helped me out. It has lent stability to my life and given me confidence that my redemption is secure, regardless of how I might feel about it in the moment.

Life is full of uncertainties, but when I can depend with certainty on the promises found in the Word, I am properly equipped to face them. The things I know about God from the Bible are just the ballast I need to sail safely through the storm of unknowns.

When I lived my life by seeking a certain emotional state, I seldom found it. I was looking for a Christian experience that returned a very narrow set of positive emotions. But when I am looking to grow in faith, then I am free to experience whatever emotions come my way. The misery and shame still catches me at times, but when I am struck again by the magnitude of what Christ has done for me, everything else pales in comparison. In the end, my Christian life is richer in emotional experience than when I pursued the good feelings themselves.

I hastily corralled some thoughts about Easter, and share them with you here. I’m trying to cultivate some appreciation for what “Good Friday” means, besides a day off from work.

In Jewish practice, the Sabbath began Friday evening. It would have been on a Friday that Jesus was taken down from the cross, before the the Sabbath officially kicked off. The Jews didn't want the bodies hanging on the cross during the Sabbath, and asked Pilate that the legs of the crucified be broken to expedite their deaths. When the soldiers went to carry this out, they found Jesus was already dead.

Jesus was spared having his legs broken, but a soldier did pierce his side. The blood that poured out was the last that was shed by our savior. His death reconciled all mankind to God, and ended a covenant that was tied to continuous bloodshed.

Blood was spilled often under the old covenant. Animals were slaughtered in great abundance by priests who acted as glorified butchers. By law, blood was shed twice daily at a minimum, with more to be spilled on special occasions. As an extreme example, 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep were slaughtered at the dedication of Solomon's temple.

Besides the amount of sacrificial blood, there was the blood shed in battle. The physical kingdom of Israel was hewn out in the midst of numerous enemies and idolatrous nations in Canaan. After crossing into the promised land, Israel carved their way into possession of their new kingdom. At the carving, yet more blood was shed.

Then there were the bloody, civil conflicts. Tens of thousands died at the punishment of Gibeah, when most of the tribe of Benjamin was wiped out. After the division of the kingdom, Israel and Judah faced off in more than a couple of wars.

All the spilled blood pointed to Christ. The sacrifices of the Old Testament were symbolic of Christ's eventual bloodshed in payment for all sin. The lives lost in the many battles were an inevitable consequence of being a physical nation, and were often necessary for it to survive until the promised Messiah would be born.

While blood shed in battle was the necessary consequence of being a physical nation, it was more than that. There is a symbolism there as well. There continues to be a battles between good and evil in our time. These battles are fought over possession of our hearts rather than possession of Canaan.

Israel shouldered its way in where it wasn't wanted, and elbowed out enough breathing room to prosper, for a time. Before and after their prosperity, they were enslaved and oppressed. They fought each other. They fell into sin. They rolled around like a tumbleweed, carted away to captivity or ruled over by invaders.

While battles still need to be fought, the war between good and evil was won at Calvary. When Jesus rose from the grave, good triumphed over evil once and for all. Blood no longer needed to be shed in warfare for the kingdom of God. Victory forever belongs to good. The score has been finalized.

The battles we fight today are against our flesh. Just like Israel entered a land promised to them by God, we enter into the promise of God by believing on Christ. And just like the Amorites, Jebusites, and other native Canaanites; our flesh is opposed to this.

Our flesh will forever have a desire for sin that will need to be warred against. It will continue to rear up and we will have to fight for what we know is good and right. And while we do fall, we also stand. And when we stand, we do so under the power of Christ's resurrection in us. Being in Christ and having him dwell in us is the prosperity restored to a new Israel under the new covenant.

Happy Easter!

The word ‘essay’ is used in a variety of ways. The way I’ve often used it was as a noun, meaning “composition”. The person largely responsible for my foray into writing, a certain Dr. Peterson, is fond of another definition: to try; attempt. This definition is a verb. Another verb definition, “to put to the test; make trial of”, characterizes what all my writing tries to be. I’m putting my ideas on trial.

As a writer of what is most likely theology, I’m often looking for scriptural ways to engage with contemporary and cultural misunderstandings. One that I purport to have identified, is the role of the Law the gospel. The understanding that Menno Simons or apostle Paul had of the Law is not an obvious ingredient of the waters I swim in.

Is this a problem? I believe so. A friend of mine pointed to gratitude as an antidote or solution to depression. I will essay to illustrate that the right understanding of the Law is the root—deepest source—of gratitude. If that doesn’t make it important and applicable in today’s climate, I don’t know what will.

David loved to meditate on the Law, and promised great peace to those that loved it.^[1] I am intent on making his testimony mine, and wish that even the beginnings of this testimony could be gifted to all. If this essay accomplished anything, I’d want it to be that.

Menno Simons and apostle Paul do a great job of demonstrating the Law’s role in salvation. I am not writing to plug any holes in their explanations. However, I do believe that it is incumbent upon modern Christians to take ownership of what we were given. Menno’s understanding will not suffice for my salvation. I must possess understanding of my own. We each have salvation to work out with “fear and trembling”.^[2]

The way I chose to narrate my understanding of the Law is through one of the narratives given in Scripture: Christ as older brother. Like many biblical narratives, it is not handily compiled in one place. Our inheritance with Christ, or sibling-ship, does not get its own book. Instead, it is a recurring theme. This leaves the door open for me to get creative in lifting out this theme and compiling it here. 

Remember, this is not authoritative. It’s an attempt. Remember also, that this writing contains my opinions. Opinions are beliefs held as fact, but may be wrong. For someone who holds truth as an ultimate priority, wrong opinions are to be engaged with and corrected.

People can confuse opinions with preferences, but preferences are tastes. They have no morality and are never wrong. I don’t like to eat fish. That is my preference. My opinion about fish is distinct from my taste for it. In my opinion, it’s a healthy food choice. You can present data to discredit my opinion, but not my preference.

Upon this distinction, note that the opinions recorded here were not naturally or easily developed. That would make them preferences. Many natural desires and tendencies have to be changed and re-purposed in order to build rigorous beliefs. If my presentation makes you uncomfortable, it may have at some point done the same to me. This is no reason to back away. Please, correct me if I’m wrong. Prove the spirit or spirits you find here. It may be uncomfortable for all parties, but it’s the right thing to do.

On brothers

 I have two of them, seven and nine years my senior. For the first twelve years of my life, we lived under the same roof. Looking back on these twelve years, I would say this is not an ideal age difference for having shared interests and close, brotherly bonds. Or to state this more precisely, I was too young to act on any of our shared interests, and they were too proud to admit we had them.

While our age difference may have inhibited our sense of brotherhood, it made my brothers easy to worship. They were significantly better than me at everything. It is not hard for a fourteen- or sixteen-year-old to vastly outperform a pudgy seven-year-old on the hockey rink.

Obviously, these metrics for heroism were not very rigorous. Time was not kind to the status my brothers reached in my mind and imagination. At some point, I realized that being the most talented member of my family did not make my brother the best teen-aged forward to ever lace up skates. I was eventually convinced he wasn’t the best goaltender, even though he brought home the goalie gear a couple times. Then to complete his debasement, I found out he played not forward, but defense!

But these beliefs were not all toppled at once, and the heroic illusion lasted for most of my preteen years. In this era, I did everything I could to spend time with my brothers. I’d try and be close by when they had friends over, so I could listen in to their conversations. Anytime they tried to leave the yard for an evening drive, I’d scramble to accompany them. The time I spent around my brothers and their friends was useful for the calibration and advancement of my sense of humor. With a bit of luck, this could get me status of my own with my friends.

They weren’t always fond of my desperation to be with them. I don’t think this will surprise anyone. The annoyance older siblings feel at having tag-alongs is well documented. Adding to the annoyance, my father would sometimes compel them to take me along, or otherwise spend time together. Their annoyance at him could overflow its banks and easily affect me. The truck cab wasn’t always a sea of calm as we rolled out of the driveway.

Tension from this or other factors often tainted the time I got to spend with my brothers. Common sense would have questioned why a seven-year-old would put himself through that. The seven-year-old I remember being would not have been able to answer that question. From my current vantage point, I think I can get a lot closer.

Desire

Many memories of my childhood are distasteful. The most outstanding ones are not positive. I remember being punished for not eating scrambled eggs, punished for mistreating my younger sister; and desperate—but powerless—to do better after being punished. I would drive my mom crazy asking her when dad would be home from work; then question my motives once he was home because I was still vaguely miserable.

The common thread through all this misery, was desire. I yearned for things I couldn’t have, or disappointed me when I got them. I think it was healthy. The worship I had for my brothers was perfectly natural, but misplaced. My desire to perform was natural, but uneducated. And the relationship I wanted to have with my dad could only be truly satisfied in God the Father. In short, I had spiritual desires that needed to mature in order to find the satisfaction they were designed to seek.

My brothers and I now live a thousand odd miles apart, and most of our interaction is done by phone. I spend little time thinking about them, or wishing to be with them. Yes, certain events and experiences will prompt me to call them, because they provide the right kind of audience for the right kind of story. But my life is lived largely independent from theirs. And yet, I noticed that I seldom decline a phone call from one of them. Seldom enough that I don’t recall it happening.

What I have written about myself to this point is an attempt to illustrate where this behavior began. There’s something childish about it still, like my own toddler’s instinct for games. If I make eye contact with her, then duck my head out of sight, she knows exactly what’s happening. Dad’s playing a game, and she wants in. She’s programmed to recognize the signs. I still seem to have an in-built system that identifies and responds to similar signs from my brothers.

I was sharing this realization with a friend, (not the same one from the introduction. I have more than one friend) and it was from this that the idea for this essay was born. I thought about how Jesus is portrayed as the begotten son of God, and we as adopted.^[3] He is portrayed as the eldest of many sons, and as not being ashamed to have us called his brethren^[4]. The narrative seemed a rich ground for parallels and contrasts to be drawn.

Childhood heroes get less heroic as we age and young eyes can grow cynical as this reality sinks in. Our dads, who used to be the smartest and strongest, will gradually diminish into mere human beings. Their stock will usually fall dramatically when we are teenagers. It bottoms out somewhere below everyone else before it climbs back to something realistic when we become adults. But at some point, reality will be undeniable. There will be a more talented athlete or singer or thinker or speaker that will usurp our heroes from their place of superiority in our minds.

But Christ is not subject to the fallibility of our mortal, childhood heroes. For one, we do not measure his athletic prowess. The domains important to God, and us as his children, are spiritual and not earthly.^[5]  Jesus measures up better as time and reality reveal him more fully to us. There is no moment where we see him humiliated by someone more qualified. He faced off with Satan, and triumphed.^[6] Christ is the only role model whose light never dims. We cannot go wrong in trying to be just like him.

A worthy hero

Who is this older brother of ours and how well do we know him? How can we know his attributes, and what we are to imitate? We call him a carpenter, but is this important? The Bible doesn’t tell us he was a skilled craftsman or athlete. We aren’t told that he built the best coffee tables or won all his childhood contests.

All we know about his adolescence is one story from when he was a twelve-year-old.^[7] His parents left him behind when they were returning home from a celebration in Jerusalem. At the end of a day’s travel, they realized he was not in their company. After much searching, they found him sitting with teachers in the temple. Not only was he asking them questions, he was amazing them with his answers. Does this sound like any twelve-year-old that you know?

His response to his parents’ worry was,

“How is it that ye sought me? knew ye not that I must be in my Father's house?^[8]”

It is clear that from an early age, his interests were not limited to the typical or even the visible. Jesus was keenly aware of God’s plan and his role in it. This gives us a good starting point for our imitation of him, doesn’t it? Are we at all times aware of God’s plan and our role in it? Or do we forget that he is its author, and we the beneficiaries? Do we remember that this plan is timeless, refreshing, and can always be found in Scripture?

Jesus came to fulfill a plan that was older than time, and promised only three chapters into the Bible.^[9] The Old Testament contain books of Law, prophesy, poetry, and the history of God’s people. All of them hinge on this promise and its fulfillment. There are a number of ways the Old Testament centers on Christ. I have neither time or space to delve into all of them. I’ll say just enough to make the point.

Jesus fulfilled prophecy by coming to earth in the manner foretold by God’s messengers. The books of history trace the lineage and physical connection from the Adam to Christ. And Jesus fulfilled the Law by keeping it entirely and perfectly. Christ’s fulfillment of Law is where I want to elaborate.

The Law of God is the standard by which Christ is measured. Not his skill as a carpenter. Not his athletic prowess. Not his looks, or sense of humor. The important attributes that came down to us through scripture are spiritual ones.

Often, thinking and talking about the Law can be done with negative connotation. It will make us think of Pharisees, hypocrisy, and bondage. And this is all for good reason. Jesus did not spare the hypocritical Pharisees in his denouncement of the bondage they induced.

But there was an aspect of the Law that went missing from the Jewish nation’s psyche between Moses and Christ. It was the element of faith. Abraham’s belief—faith—pleased God. Out of God’s pleasure, the covenant of circumcision was introduced. Circumcision didn’t please God; it was Abraham’s belief and obedience that pleased God. When God told Abraham to leave his father’s house, he left. When God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, he saddled his donkey and headed out. When God told Abraham his descendants would be like the stars for number, he believed that too. It was by this belief that Abraham was deemed righteous and therefore pleasing to God.

The Law was an added layer to the covenant. It was comprised of 613 laws categorized as civil, ceremonial, and moral. The civil law was for government of the promised land. The ceremonial consisted of sacrifices and rituals that were a shadow of Christ’s eventual sacrifice. These two branches were done away with in Christ.

Moral law, if kept, would amount to righteousness. The Pharisees seemed to think they had this in the bag. What Jesus did was change the whole paradigm. He restored to the Law what I want to call ‘the Mount Sinai effect’.

It was at Mount Sinai that Moses received the Law, and it was no small feat. There was thunder, lightning, smoke, and a voice of a trumpet. If you’ll remember, the twelve tribes were more than happy for God to speak with Moses on their behalf. They told him,

“Speak thou with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.^[10]”

Keeping the Law, as they knew it, was a way to interact with a terrible God and live. The Law represented an aspect of God’s glory that was survivable.

The terror Israel felt at Mount Sinai faded with time. The Law lost its place in their lives and they repeatedly lost their place in God’s will. The faith of Abraham that so endeared him to God dwindled almost to nothing, with John the Baptist rebuking the Jews for mistakenly putting their confidence in their bloodline.^[11]

By the time Jesus arrived, authorities used the Law for their own purposes. It had become bondage. It was a bedraggled remnant of its original form and was no longer balanced by Abraham-like faith or the fear of Mount Sinai. They forgot the novelty of Abraham’s answer to God’s call. The relief of having Moses at hand to retrieve the Law—so they didn’t have to face a terrible God in person—had long since disappeared. The Law’s proper place had been corrupted.

Through his ministry, Jesus re-established the Law in its rightful position. He restored a level of out there-ness that had gone missing; what I call the Mount Sinai effect. He did this in the Sermon on the Mount, when talking about the commandments. He redefined several of them, but I’ll use the ones against murder and adultery as examples.

“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.^[12]”

“Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.^[13]”

By these statements, Jesus elevated the standard of the Law from the seen to the unseen. He took laws that were understood as literal, and pointed out a scope of meaning that had not been ascribed to them before. In doing so, he made it impossible to stand innocent before the Law.

The Law describes righteousness. God is righteous.  Falling short of the Law and falling short before God are one and the same. None of us can claim innocence before such a standard, just as the Israelites could not stand before God’s glory at Mount Sinai.

Nobody listening that day can have been confident of their own innocence. I would guess all honest men in the audience that day knew in their hearts—or at least suspected—that they were guilty of adultery. Under the tension of Roman occupation and the bondage of the Jewish rulers, it seems reasonable that they knew what it was like to be angry with their brethren.^[14]

Jesus did something similar to the Law-abiding ruler who came to him seeking eternal life.^[15] Jesus started by telling the young ruler if he wanted to enter into life, he should keep the commandments. When the man testified to having kept the commandments since his youth, Jesus pressed him further, saying:

“If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.^[16]”

Jesus has perfect discernment. The message we should get from his invitation to this man is not, “get rid of all earthly possessions.” Rather, Jesus put his finger on the thing this man was most attached to and told him to exchange it for treasure in heaven.

 Just like in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus started with something that was familiar to his audience. He tells the crowd “Ye have heard”. To the young ruler he says “thou knowest the commandments”. The young ruler confirms his familiarity with the Law by his testimony of keeping it.

But just like in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to move the goalposts. This time he doesn’t redefine the commandments. He just asks the young ruler to do something that he knew was improbable. At Mount Sinai, Israel trembled before God’s glory. At the Sermon on the Mount, the crowd had all hope of righteousness stripped away. The young ruler simply walked away.

The message in Jesus’s invitation is multifaceted. The Law and prophets were fulfilled in him, and for the young ruler to follow him would be the true keeping of the commandments. To my knowledge, the Greek word translated as “perfect” implies completeness. If you want to be perfect—complete—follow me. I am here to fulfill—complete—the Law.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also encourages perfection^[17] When talking to the young ruler, he states that perfection lies in following him. This is the kind of role model our big brother is. A perfect one.

Hope

Jesus took the old paradigm and re-calibrated it. He told the Jews that their literal understanding of righteousness was inadequate.

There’s way more to this than what you think. The Law condemns you at every level, not just for your actions.

But then he offered hope.

You can have perfection, if you have it in me.

The whole gospel rests on this transition. I don’t claim that it happens in the Scriptures I’ve referred to, but rather that some understanding of this thing is how all of us come to Christ. To be fully in Christ, we first need to understand our need and hopelessness without him. Only then can we trust ourselves to the hope he offers.

When Jesus offers a more complete understanding of the commandments, he revealed hopelessness and hope at the same time. Hopelessness in the high standard that was set; hope in the invitation to meet it by following him. Only because of this hope, was a fuller revelation merited. The people of that time and place were already in bondage to their current understanding of the Law. But by revealing the true nature of the Law’s demand, he could also reveal a fuller extension of hope.

Accepting Jesus’s invitation is how we measure up. When we are in Christ, we can stand in God’s presence. We no longer send Moses up the mountain on our behalf. We have access to the glory of God in a fuller revelation of the Law, and we need not tremble in fear. Our Moses is Christ who rightfully rules alongside God, and is our representative.^[18] The hope he offers us is so powerful we don’t need a veil over Moses’s face, or in the temple, to shield us from the glory of God.^[19]

Jesus didn’t only set high standards. He lived them as well. As a man who was subject to all of man’s temptations, he knew the cost of denying the desires of the flesh. He withstood all temptations without sinning. He walked a perfect walk with his God. This perfect walk culminated in his death on our behalf.

All who sin need to be justified in order to stand before God. In order to be justified, it had to be paid for by death. Many lives were lost through the Old Testament and many sacrifices were offered. Yet the price for sin remained unpaid. The simple fact was that no sacrifice was good enough. In order for me to pay for my own sin, I would have to offer myself as a perfect sacrifice. But I am a badly corrupted human, especially once I have sinned and have a debt to pay. The price that needs to be paid once I have sinned is too high for me to pay. This is another part of the same impossible problem that Jesus came to solve.

It is after we’ve accepted Christ’s death for our sin that he becomes our elder brother. Until we repent, the high standard he highlights in the Sermon on the Mount would only crush us. If we were at Mount Sinai, we’d be trembling with the rest of them. In the final analysis, Jesus would stand over us as judge and not brother.

But if you’re reading this, that likely isn’t you. You are the grafted in, adopted children of a Father God. You are his child, and it is because Jesus walked a walk you and I could not. He measured up to a standard that would crush us. And then, as the only innocent and perfect man to ever live, paid a price for you and I that we could not afford. And he did it as the only one who did not owe a single penny.

Jesus did all the work for our salvation. When we repent and believe, we are credited with his work. His walk, his Law, and his sacrifice become ours. We’re finally enough. We’ve made it onto the way of life. But what do we do now?

The walk of the redeemed

Yes, Jesus did all the heavy lifting, but somehow, we’re still left with something to do. We’re not like the believing malefactor who joined Jesus in paradise the day he believed. We have life to live. If Jesus did all the work, how do we refer to the things that are left for us to do?

How about we call it emulation of a worthy hero, motivated by gratitude. Jesus did everything just right. He practiced what he preached. He showed us an excellent example. He showed us what good was, and how to go about doing it. He warned us of what evil was, the clothes it wore, and to watch out for it.

If my brothers were easy to worship by virtue of a few insignificant metrics, how much easier should it be to worship one who is perfect by every important metric? Where my father occasionally compelled my brothers to accommodate me, our heavenly Father does not. Jesus will appreciate our efforts to be just like him, if they are done in freedom of spirit. His desire to spend time with us is no less than ours to be with him. When that is our chief desire, our interests will be his. And in this he is a perfect older brother as well. 

We are left with a limitless array of good things to do. We are given a light yoke and commandments that are not grievous. There is no upper limit to how many we can keep. We are free to do so, because Jesus already kept them on our behalf. He earned our salvation. We simply try and emulate him to show our gratitude and point others to him.

Jesus lifts the old yoke of bondage off our shoulders and replaces it with a new one. Where the old one was heavy, the new one is easy and light. The old yoke was too much to be carried, the new one is not grievous. What is our yoke, and how does it differ from the old, heavy one?

The old yoke is referred to as a “yoke of bondage”, and, “a yoke—which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear”.^[20] Often it is referring to some aspect of the Law, or old covenant, such as circumcision. Circumcision was a ritual begun by Abraham that recognized his covenant with God. But that was for the old covenant and we live under the new. The Law was the highest order then, but grace is the highest order now. Our new covenant is in Christ, not in circumcision.

We can be tempted to do away with all Law when any part of it is referred to as bondage. While civil and ceremonial laws are not practiced by Christians, the commandments Jesus exhorts us to keep are mostly the same as the ten given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Only now, they are part of a light yoke that is not grievous.

So how are they different? In a way they’re the same. We still keep them for our good for instance.^[21] The main reason the yoke is now light is that Jesus fulfilled all the demands of the Law on our behalf. There is no righteousness that eludes us if we believe in him. In light of this, our Christian virtue can be the equal of the Jews’ former devotion; but done entirely out of gratitude and free from any yoke of bondage.

It’s reasonable

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.^[22]”

Jesus presented his body as a sacrifice, which necessarily resulted in his death. We are not all called to offer our lives in death, though some were and are. But the above verse calls us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices.

Sacrifices offered to God under the old covenant followed a specific order. One of these orders, was that they were to be taken from the first-fruits. This would be the first and best of the harvest, flocks, and herds. There are examples of when this was not followed, and God makes it clear that this displeases him.^[23]

To present our bodies as living sacrifices would not mean giving God our cooling leftovers. We don’t give him the things that have become useless to us. We give him the best we have. Things we do and the items we possess will be yielded to God’s purposes. If he were to say “sell your goods and give to the poor,” we wouldn’t walk away. We would know that our stuff already belonged to God, not to us, and the letting go would have already happened. Abraham must have known that Isaac already belonged to God when he saddled his donkey and left home to fulfill God’s command.

The young ruler who sought eternal life was invited to exchange all his earthly possessions for treasure in heaven. Like I’ve already claimed, this is not the literal transaction we are all asked to make. It is our allegiance that needs to change. Our affections need to be on higher things.

This might mean we do the exact same things, just with different motives. When we see things from a spiritual perspective, we see a bigger picture. In this picture, everything we have is a gift. We own nothing, and all belongs to God. Our motivations will not be the acquiring of more for its own sake. Instead, we can be motivated by gratitude at the opportunities we have been given.

When we are of this mindset, we do not glory in the sweat and toil of our ancestors who started the family farm. We will glory in God’s graciousness that we have an arena in which we can return glory to him. When the crop fails, we can thank God that we had the soil to plant in.

There is no end to the things we can be grateful for. People who experience the worst things that life could offer testify to this. They have everything imaginable taken from them, are locked in prison, and forced to work through inhumane measures. Yet they have something to fall back on. They still have the ability to choose gratitude.

We can be grateful even to endure suffering. The apostles rejoiced at suffering done in the name of Christ.^[24] If we submit ourselves to being living sacrifices, we are always in Christ. All suffering endured can be endured gratefully. No matter what we endure, it is better than we deserved; because we have an older brother who was treated worse than he deserved—he was treated as we deserve to be treated in our place.

Gratitude

I claimed in the introduction, that understanding the Law was critical to gratitude, which is in turn critical to mental health. Perhaps I’ve communicated clearly enough that more commentary is unnecessary, but I’m not that confident in my skill as a writer. Just a few more thoughts, and we’re done. I promise.

Never in history have people had it so good as we do. The better we have it, the less we deserve it. But a strange thing has happened. The more people have, the less satisfied with it they are. Instead of increased gratitude, it seems to be diminished. This is testified to by an ongoing concern about “entitlement”. People think they deserve better, no matter how good they have it.

We can hardly help that the things we see around us have a certain influence on us. It’s only natural. We’re social creatures, and with that come senses that are attuned to what other people are doing. Partly this is good. If we can’t identify with the humanity around us, we can’t empathize with them. Empathy is necessary for sincere outreach.

But comparing ourselves to others and others to us, does something to our ability to express gratitude. There will always be people who justify certain purchases and lifestyle choices by saying they are affordable. If we pay too much attention to these people, our expectations get ratcheted up. Expectations that are higher than can be met, will leave us ungrateful.

In a world full of physical reality and many kinds of distractions, something needs to keep us grounded. What if true Christian religion can do that? What if we can dig down to a gratitude that nothing in the world can shake? Wouldn’t that align rather well with the peace that Jesus says we can have in spite of the tribulation of the world?

Obviously, I think so. And I think that to have absolutely unshakable and realistic expectations, we need to understand not just grace and mercy, but law and judgment. If we would allow the Law of God to reveal our true natures to us, we would be able to see ourselves for who we are. We could see what it is that we actually deserve. Not fully, of course, but enough. I believe that’s what the Law is for. And if we could only realize a fraction of that debt, and how much it truly cost for Jesus to settle it on our behalf, we can surely have gratitude in spades.

I’ll end with this. The Law cannot help but condemn absolutely. But we have a savior who is excepted from this by having kept it perfectly. Now, he continually extends his perfection to us for our redemption. By accepting his extended invitation, we become his family. Just like that.

^[1] Psalm 1:2, 119:165

^[2] Philippians 2:12

^[3] Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:5, Ephesians 1:5

^[4] Romans 8:29, Hebrews 2:11

^[5] 1 Samuel 16:7

^[6] Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-13

^[7] Luke 2:41-49

^[8] Luke 2:49b, ASV

^[9] 2 Timothy 1:9, 1 Peter 1:20, Genesis 3:15

^[10] Exodus 20:19, ASV

^[11] 2 Chronicles 20:7, Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23, Matthew 3:9, Luke 3:8

^[12] Matthew 5:21-22a, ASV

^[13] Matthew 5:27-28, ASV

^[14] Look no further than the recent “pandemic” if you doubt that brother could be angry with brother.

^[15] Matthew 19:16, Mark 10:17, Luke 18:18

^[16] Matthew 19:21, ASV

^[17] Matthew 5:48.

^[18] Romans 8:34, Hebrews 9:24

^[19] 2 Corinthians 3:15-16, Matthew 27:51

^[20] Galatians 5:1, Acts 15:10, ASV

^[21] Deuteronomy 10:13

^[22] Romans 12:1, KJV

Note: KJV chosen here because it calls our service “reasonable”. The ASV used “spiritual” in its place. From my quick reading of the Greek, “reasonable” is—a reasonable translation. Several Bible versions use it. KJV is one of them.

^[23] Malachi 1:8,14

^[24] Acts 5:41

He installed man in paradise. Everything was flawless, with lush foliage and rich fruits. Best of all, we might think, there were no rules, save one: Don't eat the fruit of that one tree, which of course no sane person would even consider. There was plenty else to do, creatures to name; all the ordinary things that go with creating worlds. We know the drill.

Eve, then, was ill prepared to resist when the serpent approached her and said some things about the forbidden tree and casually twisted God's words. Apparently she didn't find this so alarming that she ran screaming, like first encounters with snakes might induce today.

Instead, she heard him out, thought to herself; "hmm, doesn't seem like such a bad idea," and ate the apple. (If it was an apple.) Then she brought Adam some to try, they got found out by God, they played the worlds first round of the blame game, and they got ejected from the garden.

At this point, perfection was ruined forever and God went back to the drawing board. Man blew it, and he had to scramble for a plan B. Since then, we've been living out second best, with the yearning for what could have been, while our Creator can't get over a vague sense of disappointment in mans' fallibility.

Does this represent a familiar sentiment? It was mine, but I'm happy to report that it's actually a "sounding brass", a fallacy. God didn't go to his easel and frantically begin sketching a new world order. Nor did he say "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel (Ge 3:15)"; then proceed to adapt to whatever fallible man threw his way to try and make that come true.

Far from it. We can read in Ephesians 1:4 as follows: According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.

Before the foundations of the world?

Yes, before the foundations of the world.

What about the drama in Eden then, with the serpent?

Just God's plan. Not "A" or "B", his original perfect plan. 

Because the thing of it is this. God made an estimated 8.7 million species. From flora and fauna of remarkable visage to all manner of things not even visible to the naked eye. Every single one of these things functions as designed. It was coded to perform after a particular fashion and play a role in a balanced and infinitely complex ecosystem. 8.7 million species, all doing exactly what the Creator had in mind. Can it be possible that one, and only one, the crown jewel of creation, would go off the rails?

Hardly! As much glory as each of these things brings to the Creator, God wanted a creature present to enjoy these things, as he did. He therefore created us, in his own image, so we could look at what he made with an appreciation for beauty and complexity that was patterned after his own. Someone who would also create, and know the challenge and reward of creation.

This could not be a happenstance sort of being who was born, bloomed, and then faded, not realizing it's own existence, as is the cycle of the rest of God's creatures. No, this creature needed to have free will. Man needed to have the ability to choose to dwell with him, to honor him. Yes, flowers are glorious things that point to the Creator, but would they do so if human eyes weren't there to perceive them, and were human minds not able to verbalize their beauty as a reflection of God?

God wanted a conscious creature, someone capable of seeing itself as separate from its surroundings. The rest of creation functions on cycles of instinct, we were created to rise above that. We are different, able to resist desires and delay gratification. This is all important, if we are to authentically worship our Creator. Further, to be completely capable of free will, there needed to be an alternative choice to God and his goodness.

That is why there was a forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. Obedience would have been meaningless without its opposing alternative. If Adam and Eve had not chosen disobedience, how would we know it was truly an option?

The freedom to choose is the greatest power and responsibility we have been given. Choosing God is what his deepest desire is for us. The manner by which we come to God is by way of the cross of Christ. This too was set in motion before the fall.

What kind of Creator possesses ingenuity enough to create 8.7 million species? The same kind that possesses a righteousness beyond comprehension. 8.7 million uniquely functioning species will keep gifted observers busy studying them for the rest of time, yet they will still be unable to replicate the design from nothing.

God's righteousness is beyond ours by a similar magnitude to all 8.7 million species multiplied by all their idiosyncrasies. It is an incalculable equation. A void between us that seems hopelessly un-bridgeable. And yet by choosing to believe on the plan to bridge this gap, we can be united to God through Christ.

We think there are big sins and small, horrifying and banal; but to God all sin is sin. All sin separates us from him as completely as any other. The only distinction he makes is whether we sin ignorantly or presumptuously. Ignorant sin, we are taught, is covered by grace.

Presumptuous sin, though, expresses a contempt for God and a disregard for the length to which he has gone to extend to us all the power our choice is endued with. We can, by choosing to believe, complete the bridge God built to span this void made up of our unrighteousness, our brokenness.

This bridge is Jesus Christ, the spotless lamb, sacrificed for our sin. The bridge is the cornerstone of God's plan. Not plan A, not plan B, just the plan. God's perfection is extended to us through this perfect plan. We can access the pre-fall paradise of Adam and Eve's Eden by following this plan.

How are we to follow this plan? Build a turret, or pillar, or install some beams? Or perhaps erect a guardrail or two? Not even! We just need to reach out a foot and traverse this bridge with confidence. We need only to believe. The plan is complete, we just need to unlock it's power in us by participating.

And this belief will be acted out, if it is a true belief, by continuing to step out. At times a mist may drift across the bridge, but the bridge is still there. Darkness may fall, or floods rise or winds blow, but the bridge remains. And we will continue to walk, knowing that the bridge remains.

But as we learn to know God and his unrelenting faithfulness to us, we will learn where to look so that our attention will not as often be drawn away by the fog and the flood and the wind. We will fix our eyes on the place where we know the light to be, and we will see it. God's direction will by our constant, our benchmark, our consolation.

The tribulation, we are told, will always be there. But access to God by faith in his Son will also be there. The elements will attempt to rob us of warmth and light, but we can still have that deep abiding joy and peace.

And this, all this, is God's plan for us since before the beginning of time. Did you know that this was the belief you embraced, when you first said "I believe"? I didn't, but I'm trying to know it now, and I can scarcely believe my good fortune.

There are also ways our perspectives let us down. By design, our minds have to form a view of the world that becomes the lens through which everything is interpreted. This lens may give us 20:20 vision towards some of the events that happen around us, maybe even 20:15 or 20:10; but can only give us 20:50 resolution in others. Quite simply, we have blind spots.

Like everything in our design, our deficiencies have a purpose. Our limitations make us dependent. We are dependent on God for his perfect perspective, and on our spiritual brothers and sisters to help us see what that is. Yes, we have access to God's revealed Word, which is an aspect of God's perfect perspective, but here too, our limitations encroach on our ability to understand.

The beginnings of our world view are formed emotionally in the home where we grew up. Things our parents do are interpreted by us when we are still infants, before we can talk. This is a very basic world view, and is centered on ourselves. From there it morphs into being centered on the home we live in, and we see things almost entirely through the eyes of our parents.

When we become adolescents, we become susceptible to peer pressure; and begin an experimental phase. From the teen years to perhaps the middle of our twenties, we pit the example of our parents against the behaviors that earn us the favor of our peers. All of this is done to establish our individual identity and figure out where and how it relates to the rest of the mob.

This whole process should continue through the rest of life. The way we see the world is never going to be perfect, and for this reason should never become completely settled. A world view too easily settled on and not continuously updated will eventually turn on us.

This is not to say that it should ever be completely swapped out. The goal of updating ones perspective is to peel back all the layers of bias and distraction until things can be seen clearly in the sometimes harsh light of truth. This is exactly the same as a life of daily repentance. We want the light of God's Word to reveal us for who we are, sins and all; and we want God's truth to be at the heart of our perspective.

True Christians invite the discernment of God's Law into their lives to reveal the fruits for what they are. We invite judgement, for without judgement there is no reason to repent, and without a need for repentance, what reason do we have to approach God?

Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound (Ro 5:20). Being receptive and even vulnerable to the light of God's Word through Bible reading and the input of spiritual brothers and sisters; means we can be sanctified in the day of grace. Those who do not choose judgment and repentance while grace abounds, will not fare well in the final judgement.

Having a world view is absolutely necessary. Our minds cannot function without one. But there is no safety in one that is inflexible. A healthy perspective will fluctuate through the different phases of life, sometimes too emotional, sometimes too rational.

The outlook we utilize as adolescents may be dramatically un-settled when we marry. Then kids come along and we have to pick our way through different child rearing approaches. In the context of objective truth and with God at the center of such a collision of perspectives, the Christian home becomes a living thing, constantly rising to face the challenges of life.

Pursue other outlooks than your own. Having the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes is a good way build a more balanced outlook. At the same time, be careful when you read anything, especially this, because likely as not, you will be influenced. It is not a trivial thing, yielding to the influence of others. Compare everything to what you know to be true, and reject what is not; while at the same time being on guard for too easily rejecting truths that are uncomfortable.

Credit to this post of Bob Goodnough's, for being a stimulus for this writing. Go read that if you want to salvage the time you expended here.

Here's the thing. When a child is born it needs a grand total of about four things; (we'll say, for sake of argument) food, sleep, plus diaper changes, baths, whatever. Quite tangible things. Obviously, there's the things like nurturing human contact, but these are provided in the course of supplying the basic needs. If parents failed to provide these four things, the newborn infant would die. I'm proud to say we went four for four. Perfect parenting exemplified.

It is in the nature of children that they don't stay in infanthood very long. Eventually these miniature humans have the ability to communicate and move autonomously. They move around, then in and out of, the house. They disagree on the rules about playing with the neighbors, express distaste for the supper menu, and resist bath and bed times; things that are a part of developing their own identity and personality.

What is the definition of good parenting now? How do you discipline a kid without making him feel like he's evil, especially when his behavior seems evil? How do you demonstrate love when every conversation is an argument; and it starts to seem like the the whole day is one long argument, and that arguing is the whole point, just with periodic subject changes?

We're genuinely curious about what good parenting is, so when we get told that we need to connect with our kids, delight in our kids, feel for our kids, and that we're not compelled to join every argument we're invited to; we pay attention. But that's a tall order to put into practice. If you extrapolate that over eighteen years and look at those eighteen years all at once, it seems impossible. On a daily basis, it's certainly more complex than changing diapers or giving the baby a bottle.

As parents of young school and preschool age kids, we now get to the end of every day with less assurance that we've checked all the boxes. There'll often be an interaction that will stick out, an exchange we wish we could do over. We're just not as good at parenting as we used to was.

If I were to chart our personal growth as parents, it would be a line that started from the bottom left corner and extended at an upward angle toward the right side of the page. There would be another line that would start at the same place and extend toward the right at a steeper, upward trajectory. This line would represent the ideal parents, the ones we aim to be. It is made up of all the knowledge we accumulate that informs how we parent, but that we never measure up to.

This ideal is the overarching principal. It is the parent we aim to be in order to provide a balanced home and a nurturing environment. Throw life into the mix, and the decisions we make on the fly don't always measure up. Examine our performance at a given moment of the day, and what our aim actually appears as could look more like the needle on a magnetic compass, dancing around as we try and hold it level. It seems unstable, but because the compass is calibrated toward magnetic north—our identified ideal—it occasionally settles on that heading.

The human rationale is often geared to lower the standard or undermine the ideal. People who feel bad for their performance don't like the judgy-ness that idealism exerts over them, so they redefine the objective a little. We tell ourselves that compromise is okay, carbs are a good energy source, and technology a suitable way to entertain our kids. This does a good job of making our lives easier in the short term.

But the key to happiness is not ease. Being free to pursue happiness isn't what makes people happy, in spite of what the American Constitution would infer. Happiness is a byproduct of meaningful lives. To live meaningfully, one has to identify things that have real value, and work towards them.

Science tells us that measurable progress toward a goal, not goal achievement, is what gives us positive emotion. It is how God designed us. This is why lowering the standard we've set for ourselves is never going to be the long term answer. Yes, expectations have to be tempered in the moment, but the overarching principle needs to be a high bar.

The more valuable the objective, the more meaningful it will be to move towards it. This reminds me of where Jesus says, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Mt 5:48). God's perfection is surely a high bar for us to aim toward, and one we will never attain. But the pursuit of godliness can never be compromised. At the end of the day, we are still exhorted to be perfect from the lips of Christ Himself. 

Don't make the ideal, or idealism, the scapegoat of your happiness. Become intimately familiar with it. Whether this is God—the highest Standard of all—or the kind of parents we would really like to be; knowing what should be is not the enemy of our success. Viktor Frankl says that for us to realize our full potential, we have to aim at what is better than our full potential. He compares it to flying a plane in a cross wind, and having to aim upwind of our destination in order to end up where we want to be. Having a healthy understanding of, and relationship with the ideal is the key to meaningful, happy living. 

The hope of heaven and the fear of hell are justifiable human sentiments. We want to go to heaven and we want to avoid hell. Both outcomes are possible. But realistically, what role can they have in our daily thought life and motivations? They seem rather vague and distant, especially for those of us closer to the beginning than end of life.

We are told often of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven in the New Testament. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit (Mt 5:3), and whoever eats Jesus's flesh and drinks His blood hath eternal life (Joh 6:54). 

The statements are made in the present tense. These are not merely mysterious predictions—although there is plenty of mystery—they are the current reality. In my opinion, both these verses contain far better motivations for living a sanctified life than the desire to gain heaven or avoid hell at life's end. Allow me to extract some truths from these verses that explain what I mean. (Try and stop me!)

I'll start by trying to define what it means to be poor in spirit. King David referred to himself as a dead dog, a flea, and a worm. We are supposed to esteem each other as better than ourselves (Php 2:3). David's self abasement and our estimation of others superiority is part of a poor spirit.

On the occasions when David called himself a dead dog and a flea, it was a self assessment done during his flight from king Saul. He questioned why Saul would waste his time hunting down something of so little value. I do not think that David's belittlement of himself was an arbitrary thing to curry favor with the king, but rather that he recognized that Saul was the anointed of the Lord.

When we esteem others as better than us, this is not done on a skill by skill basis, although few possess talents that are not surpassed by someone else. Instead, it is done in the same spirit that David esteemed Saul.

This writing contains my perspective and I believe what I'm saying to be true, but that does not mean I will ever cover all the bases. As Christians with the infilling of the Holy Spirit, you will have the truth in you too. You will read this and accept it, but that does not mean you don't have the vision to add to it or correct me.

The truth is not the domain of anyone but God. We all are grounded in this truth, but just as we have our individual gifts, we have individual limitations. What I can see, I say. When you speak up, I have to give way with the realization that I don't see perfectly; and need to not only accommodate, but seek out and buttress your vision on the matter.

God chose Saul to be king, and David abased himself before him because of Saul's status with God. God also chose you and I, and we need to humble ourselves before each other because of the working of the Holy Spirit in each of us. It is not in the fear of man that we humble ourselves, but an acknowledgment of God's working in man.

Beyond the esteem that we hold each other in as brethren in Christ, there is a more general truth that should be acknowledged. Even in the absence of the Holy Spirit, mankind bears God's image and embodies God's truth. Every fiber of our being is His specific design and points toward His magnificence and perfection. In every encounter with humanity, we are encountering an aspect of God through His creation.

Being poor in spirit means we will be receptive to all. We can learn something from anyone, whether Christian or not. If I can be poor in spirit, I will be a sponge for God's truth wherever I can find it. I will never be knowledgeable enough to simply coast, but will acknowledge that God possesses all knowledge and I am incapable of telling by what method or vehicle He will deliver to me what He needs to communicate.

The poor in spirit possess the kingdom of heaven because they are constantly ready to receive. They are those who truly realize their status in the face of a magnificent God. As they grow and receive more of these gifts, they see more and more of God. The more they come to know God, the more they realize they are in His kingdom right here, right now.

Next up, some commentary on John 6:54, which reads: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. Jesus told this to the crowd a short time after He miraculously fed thousands of them with a bit of bread and fish. He recognized that they followed Him because their bellies had been filled, and wanted to draw their attention to the real reason He was there.

Partaking in the body and blood of Christ is something we can only get a taste of. We are not perfect enough to be a sacrifice on our own behalf, and need Christ to be that for us. The symbolic eating of His flesh and drinking His blood is the faith by which we believe in His purchase of our salvation, and in the blood which covers our sin.

This concept is to the Jews a stumbling block (1 Cor 1:23). They never realized the law would culminate in Christ's sacrifice on their behalf, but thought they justified themselves by keeping the commandments. They didn't grasp that the rituals and sacrifices were only a type, a foreshadowing of what was to happen in Christ's death; and that these things only served to justify them before God because of what Jesus would eventually do.

For us to eat Jesus's flesh and drink His blood is also a type. The cup of which he partook—which He pled would pass from Him—cannot be partaken of by us except through Him. The best we can do is to crucify the deeds of our flesh in acknowledgment of Christ's crucifixion. There is no good we can do in the eyes of God except the goodness of Christ on our behalf.

Just as the sacrifices prepared under Mosaic law pointed ahead to Christ, presenting our bodies a living sacrifice points back to Him. Giving up our selfish desires, lust, and pride; are battles against the flesh that we fight in order to make the sacrifice holy and acceptable. We cannot attain goodness, only fight our own desire for sin.

As hard a pill as it can be to swallow, when we accept that Christ bought our righteousness and that we are just to be recipients and prepare our vessels to receive, we are in possession of eternal life. We are on the path to heaven. The only thing we can really do by our actions is sabotage that walk by inviting sin into our vessel. Salvation is ours to lose.

While living so that we can one day be home in heaven is the desired outcome, inviting the Lord to help us win the battle against the flesh on a daily basis will bring a piece of heaven to earth. As we hold our life up to the light and refining fire, and as we make a daily sacrifice of our own flesh; things will happen in our lives that have no earthly explanation. This is a lifestyle that will plant us firmly in possession of God's kingdom and life that is eternal. Eternity is now, and the blessings of it cannot be overstated.

I know I can't point with confidence to many specific scriptures that fall into one category or the other. This is likely due to an ignorance of scripture, but it makes me wonder if the milk and the meat are the same scriptures just understood at different levels.

My thoughts go there because I've been reading through my Bible for maybe the third time, the same Bible I've had for fourteen years, and I'm struck by the types of verses the younger version of myself though prudent to highlight. What I was thinking at that time thankfully eludes me, but what I can figure out strikes me as shallow. In my opinion, this younger self lacked the breadth of knowledge about the gospel to even begin to make informed conclusions about what specific scriptures meant. When I read scripture as a young Christian, I was only capable of absorbing the easy parts—the milk—of the verse.

When we are young in Christ, we need our elders to provide the context for sound scriptural interpretation. Secular knowledge will pit the truths of the gospel against each other, and until our overall knowledge of the gospel is established, this will be our tendency by default.

Adult birds regurgitate food for their young, and, before the advent of food processors, the mothers of human infants pre chewed food for their young as well. In effect, this is what our elders our doing as they break down the Word of God for us. We are perhaps too young and not well enough keeled to accurately absorb the gospel and apply it with maturity. In our youth, we especially need the wisdom of others to put things into proper perspective.

As we grow in Christ and learn His Word, we grow into perfection; an adjective used by Paul to denote maturity or completeness. With a daily Bible habit, we will continue to discover more aspects and truths of God. As our knowledge and understanding are applied with the help of the Holy Spirit, our foundation will become deeper. We will be able to go to the Word and be fed by something that better fills us, becoming less dependent on others and more directly accountable to God.

Okay then, having gotten that out of the way, there is a passage of scripture that strikes me very much as being meat. The words of Christ in John 6 elicited these responses:

Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? (v. 60) and;

From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. (v. 66)

Read this passage (John 6), as it is a singular event and runs counter to the smarmy picture some use to portray Christ. Jesus uses strong words to thin the ranks, though I doubt anyone present knew what was really meant by them. The Lord knew some were unbelievers, and knew what the outcome of His words would be. Too many were following Him only in body, to see supernatural events and eat the free food.

The Word of God thins the ranks by design, just like the tests Gideon presented to his men before defeating the Midianites. There is no room in God's plan for life of the flesh. If we aren't willing to repent daily and continually battle our selfish desires; but instead choose to pursue our desires for sin and pleasure, our entire being will be cut off from God. Christian life is fleshly death, and if we aren't faithful separate ourselves from the desires of the flesh, God will separate Himself from us.