a pondering on clouds

  The infinite, tender love of God for His own struck me anew as I considered the clouds a few days ago. Recall that God led His people out of Egypt and into a wilderness wasteland. Many hardships had been and continued to be their lot, but moment by moment they had the Cloud above them as a constant reminder that though the God of their Fathers had led them from one difficulty to another, still their Father God was tenderly concerned with their well-being. A pillar of cloud by day, shading and cooling against the hot sun. A pillar of fire by night, brightening, warming and protecting in the coldness that descends at nightfall in desert places. What tender love!

  The cloudy/fiery pillar of the divine Presence was there to lead them both day and night; with such tender love on display, it is hard to imagine that the omniscient One did not accommodate the pace to the slowest and shakiest every step of the way.

  We also have continual tokens of God's abiding love; may we not become so calloused about them that we ignore them and rebel against our loving Father, even when He leads us through a dry wilderness. The clouds must press upon us the personal love of our great Father for His people. Seek the tokens of God in your lives as a church and a believer and trust that even in the wilderness God's love cannot have wavered! 

 - Exodus 13:21-22; Numbers 14:14; Nehemiah 9:12, 19; 1 Corinthians 10:1ff

Worshiping with a Gift

I came across this quote which I originally found for some research I did on the OT sacrifices a number of years ago and it is a helpful thought.

   The worshiper never comes into the presence of God empty-handed.  The sentiment expressed in the hymn ("nothing in my hand I bring") would find little echo in Leviticus.  A worshiper comes either with his gifts of with God's Gift.

(from Victor Hamilton's Handbook on the Pentateuch, 252.)

Talitha Joy

While we have carefully documented the entrance of our new daughter into our lives in other places, I thought that I should at least place a bit of acknowledgement here.  Talitha continues to grow and be a joyful presence in our lives.  She also continues to challenge us in a variety of ways.  I trust in the future I will be able to say of her as a friend said of God's work in his life through his daughter, "She has been the greatest force for sanctification in my life." 

Talitha Joy - 8 days old

"Have we taken the Great Commission and placed it above the Great Command?" - Ted Travis, speaking on Kingdom Living this past Sunday at PBC

"The Gospel is inherently and irreducibly confrontational." - Mark Dever, The Deliberate Church, pg 55.

meditations on James 2:25 and Matthew 1

Byzantine depiction of Mary and Jesus in the Ayasofia (Hagia Sofia) in Istanbul

As I consider  Rahab the prostitute, an example in Hebrews and James of faith that works, I am awed to see the grace of God.  In the perfect plan of God to rescue sinful men who had rejected Him, He placed four "defiled" women in what we would imagine as a "pure" line of ancestors for his Son Jesus. 

Tamar - the Canaanite woman whose prostitution scheme brought about incest with her unfaithful father-in-law which ended with a pair of twins, one of whom carried the Messiah's line

Rahab - the Canaanite prostitute who not only believed the LORD would give her land to Israel, but also reached out to demonstrate this belief in her treatment of the spies, becoming a mother in Israel

Ruth - the Moabite widow who abandoned her culture and gods to follow and care for her Israelite mother-in-law. God blessed her to be the great-grandmother of King David and ancestor of the Messiah.

the wife of Uriah - a girl who was raped by King David and whose husband, a foreigner, was murdered in the cover-up, yet her second son would become king and another ancestor to Messiah

Each of these women show the grace of God in a sinful world.  They demonstrate His purposes for the nations of sinners and His means of salvation in an array of beauty that Mary, the virgin Jewish mother of Jesus, could not show us by herself. 

*Thanks to Brad for the picture.

Dreams from my Father

 This evening, I started reading Dreams from My Father, the autobiographical book by the young lawyer Barack Obama.  It has been startling good so far, and I think it's the best book that I've read dealing with cross-culturedness or TCK's since Third-Culture Kids, which I also loved.  It is a book that is rather frank and very open and reminds me again why the President's story speaks to so many people, even those who disagree with his policies.

 A few brief thought-excerpts that struck me in my personal journey and the journey I see others in:
 "...the fluid state of identity- the  leaps through time, the collision of cultures- that mark our modern life." (vii)
 "... [my past] speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that- on the surface, at least- contradict the world I now occupy." (xiv)
 "I enjoyed such moments [of companionship]- but only in brief.  If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself.  I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew." (4)

The Broken Ugly

The Broken Ugly or Ugly Beauty

Have you seen the falcon soaring,
 High, majestic in its flight?
Death and pain are in its talons;
 They're rending, tearing limb and life.

Have you seen the glow of sunset?
Have you seen the moon’s bright gleam?
Have you wondered at the mountains
 Or joyed to swim the sparkling stream?

Have you seen the Grecian idols,
 Molded bodies, well-taught minds?
Has the joy of children filled you
 Or wonder at some childish ‘finds’?

Have you felt those bruising muscles?
Have you seen that mind crumbling?
Has the joy now turned to terror?
 Or does the ‘find’ now have a sting?

Have you heard of God’s Creation,
 Beauty shining perfectly?
But man’s rejecting God’s commands,
 Brought about the Broken Ugly.

Have you seen the Curse mar Blessing?
Have you seen God’s “good” shattered?
Have you seen the man and woman,
 Choosing death, deceived and flattered?

Have you heard the Gospel story,
 God forgives, life eternal?
But the cost was Jesus dying,
 Bearing wrath and sin infernal.

Have you seen the Man of Mercy?
Have you heard God on the cross?
Have you heard Him cry in anguish,
 Or welcome home a thief who’s lost?

Have you heard Him shout, “Completed”!?
Have you pondered what it means?
Have you seen His pain and triumph,
 And known for you His blood once streamed?

Have you seen the world in this way?
Has the Gospel dawned on you?
True, it shows sin, pain, and death –
 But grace and love and mercy too.

Theological perspective on immigration - with a link

"We must never deny that illegal immigrants are breaking the law. Yet these immigrants’ law-breaking is no reason for the church to remain uninvolved in North America’s largest mission field today consisting of fifteen to eighteen million people, many of whom tremble in the shadows of our society. Civil law is written on soft paper and constantly evolves. God’s law was chiseled on stone tablets and has remained unchanged." - Alejandro Mandes in "Thinking Theologically About Immigration"

   The Gospel is the only saving power in the world.  Any involvement in politics, philosophy, the arts, or education - in short, any involvement at all in this world - must be an outflow of our belief in and practice of the preaching of the Gospel of the crucified Savior, Jesus Christ.  If it is not, we are wasting our lives on seeking to save the world by our own human means.  But, if it is such a Gospel outflow, we have the opportunity to show the world the Gospel on full display in every area of life, just as God intended, for the Gospel has much to say about these areas of culture. 

   We must be careful never to transfer our trust to the transformative power of politics, the beauty of the arts, the uplifting nature of education or soaring thoughts of philosophy.  Our trust must be in the person of Jesus, the human-God who sacrificed Himself to save us and draw us into eternal fellowship with Him.   This is utterly stupid to the modern mind that values knowledge, and it smacks of impotent weakness to the pre-modern mind which values physical strength.  But, we preach Christ!

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. (I Cor 1:21)

Too Many Books?

"Since we do--to some degree-- arrange our libraries so that our friends will see our books as we want them to be seen, an easy way to clear them out is to decide which books we'd prefer to, shall we say, hide or banish altogether, so that our friends won't see them at all.  We can throw large numbers of books away just so no one will know you ever took such nonsense seriously."  

-- Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, 108.