Coming Up For Air

From Genesis 32 – 24 Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the [g]breaking of day. 25 Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He [h]touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. 26 And He said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.” But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” Charles Spurgeon insists in Morning and Evening , "The only reason why anything virtuous or lovely survives in us is this, "The Lord is there." Shall I dare accuse Spurgeon, my Reformed version of a patron saint who once said God's promises need to be applied to the broadest possible extent, of applying this principle too narrowly? I think the wrestler Jacob in Genesis 32 might tag in with me in the wrestling match. Jacob was not, in general, the contemplative sort. He maneuvered for the advantage, often to his detriment. He had seen blessings come and blessings go, eluding that grasp whi...

From James 1 – 16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. 18 Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. 19 [c]So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; 20 for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. "Had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are," focuses Spurgeon in Morning and Evening, "divine love would have put you there. You are," he insists, "placed by God in the most suitable circumstances, and if you had the choosing of your lot, you would soon cry, "Lord, choose my inheritance for me, for by my self-will I am pierced through with many sorrows." Be content with such things as you have, since the Lord has ordered all thin...

From Colossians 1 – 3 We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; 5 because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as it has also in all the world, and is bringing forth [a]fruit, as it is also among you since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth; 7 as you also learned from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, 8 who also declared to us your love in the Spirit. Preeminence of Christ 9 For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10 that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of...

From Isaiah 7 – 2 And it was told to the house of David, saying, "Syria's forces are deployed in Ephraim." So his heart and the heart of his people were moved as the trees of the woods are moved in the wind. 3 Then the Lord said to Isaiah, "Go out now to meet Ahaz…" "Society might reflect," pauses Charles Krauthammer in The Point of It All , "on its own ample appetite for apocalypse." The opening of Isaiah 7 is just such a juncture. The prophet connects the unbelief in the heart of Ahaz to the unbelief which is contagious and compounded among his people. This, as Krauthammer phrases it, is the appetite for apocalypse. We are prone to believe and to convince one another that the worst may well come. We think ourselves more prepared for it by such ruminations. But just as the sin of unbelief often enters the cultural bloodstream through one man, so God can stand for faith through one man. He testifies through the ages once and for all t...

From 1 Corinthians 2 – 1 and I, brethren, what I came to you, did not, with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. 2 for I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 3 I was with you in weakness and trembling. 4 And my speech and my preaching were not persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. In the Ken Burns Baseball documentary, longtime  Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodger Vin Scully has a confession. Some have marveled at the calm restraint he exhibited with the simple call, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.”Scully said this was an illusion. “I couldn’t have said another word without breaking down.“ Paul points to much the same root of message discipline, recognizing one's own weakness. In fact, a friend tells me the word Paul uses when he says that...

Psalm 52 –  Why do you boast in evil, O mighty man? The goodness of God endures continually. 2 Your tongue devises destruction, Like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. 3 You love evil more than good, Lying rather than speaking righteousness. Selah 4 You love all devouring words, You deceitful tongue. 5 God shall likewise destroy you forever; He shall take you away, and pluck you out of your dwelling place, And uproot you from the land of the living. Selah 6 The righteous also shall see and fear, And shall laugh at him, saying, 7 “Here is the man who did not make God his strength, But trusted in the abundance of his riches, And strengthened himself in his [b]wickedness.” 8 But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; I trust in the mercy of God forever and ever. 9 I will praise You forever, Because You have done it; And in the presence of Your saints I will wait on Your name, for it [c]is good. Reflects Rick James in Out Of The Depths , "I love to...

From Matthew 6 – 22 The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! As a cheapskate in a wheelchair, I do almost all of my travel vicariously through the writing of the New Yorker. The trip with James Lasdun to see the northern lights through his eyes in the April 29, 2019 issue was particularly illuminating. Lasdun compared the different impression the phenomenon makes in person to what pictures lead travelers to expect. Photographers can wait out clouds and still capture splendid shots. Travelers on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to the Arctic may not come with this expectation. The camera, it turns out, can capture much more light than the human eye. This means that photographic images of the northern lights, even if they aren't retouched, tend to be more vivid than anything th...

Isaiah 28:23-29 New King James Version (NKJV) 23 Give ear and hear my voice, Listen and hear my speech. 24 Does the plowman keep plowing all day to sow? Does he keep turning his soil and breaking the clods? 25 When he has leveled its surface, Does he not sow the black cummin And scatter the cummin, Plant the wheat in rows, The barley in the appointed place, And the [a]spelt in its place? 26 For He instructs him in right judgment, His God teaches him. 27 For the black cummin is not threshed with a threshing sledge, Nor is a cartwheel rolled over the cummin; But the black cummin is beaten out with a stick, And the cummin with a rod. 28 Bread flour must be ground; Therefore he does not thresh it forever, Break it with his cartwheel, Or crush it with his horsemen. 29 This also comes from the Lord of hosts, Who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in [b]guidance. In their song "On Fire," Switchfoot cleaves to Christ even in reproof, "When everything...

Thus says the LORD concerning the prophets Who make my people stray; Who chant “Peace” While they chew with their teeth, But who prepare war against him Who puts nothing into their mouths: Micah 3:5 Lance Morrow warns in 1948: The Best Year of Their Lives , on the pivotal nature of the year in the lives of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, "As president in the White House, a man becomes himself, squared – his hyperself, flaws and virtues enlarged by world attention and brought to fulfillment by the nature of the work and power, and by the inescapability of the buck that stops on the desk in the oval office." Of course, God as the only safe custodian of ultimate power warned of its impact long before there was an oval office. In Micah 3:5, the prophets are trusted with compounding cultural impact. They use it to reinforce the satisfaction in the status quo. They waste the attention their followers faithfully yield to them with a mindless mantra of "Peace." All is...

From Psalm 51 – 9 Hide Your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. E. Stanley Jones in In Search of Guidance draws an important distinction. "The voice of the subconscious argues with you," he says, "tries to convince you; but the inner voice of God does not argue, does not try to convince you. It just speaks and is self-authenticating." He, then, is the Source of the steadfast spirit David craves in Psalm 51:10. Surface solutions won't do. We can be argued toward the right, convinced of the wrong. The persuasion of the conscience is only a temporary stopgap. David himself is inspired to write of the insufficiency of merely dealing with the outgrowth or overflow of the sin nature. He can plead his way, he reasons, toward God hiding His face from iniquities. He might even convince the Almighty to exercise that might in a cleanup effort directed toward sin's consequences...

From Genesis 15 – 1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying "Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward." 2 But Abram said, "Lord God, what will You give me, seeing I go childless and the heir of my house is the Eliezer of Damascus?" Then Abram said, "Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house is my heir!" 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, "This one shall not be your air, but one who will come from your own body shall be your air." 5 then He brought him outside and said, "Look now toward Heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them." And He said to him, "so shall your descendents be." 6 And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness. 7 Then He said to him, I am the Lord, who brought you out of her of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it. 8 And he said, "Lord Go...

I have been young, and now I am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his descendents begging bread. Psalm 37:25 One of the surprises of Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, Power Broker , is that at Yale the young man who would become New York's supreme operator had a philosophical bent. Moses paused over Sophocles reflection, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." It's hard to maintain that equipoise in retrospect. In a playwright's version of a conversation between Bill and Hillary Clinton recorded in this week's New Yorker , a fictionalized Hillary is trying to settle with a world in which her husband got to be president and she did not. Turning reflective himself, the playwright's version of Bill Clinton says we don't know what kind of a world we live in until we are ready to leave it. Psalm 37:25 would lend some credence to this idea of perspective with time. David has known what it is...

From Micah 6 – 3 O my people, what have I done to you? And how have I wearied you? Testify against me. 4 For I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, I redeemed you from the house of bondage; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. 5 Oh my people, remember now what Pharaoh asked king of Moab counseled, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him, from Acacia Grove to Gilgal, that you may know the righteousness of the Lord." 6 With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? 7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8 He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? "It is the general rule of the moral universe," discerns the astute Charles Sp...

Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with...

From Psalm 48 – 9 We have thought, O God, of Your loving kindness, in the midst of Your temple. 10 According to Your name, O God, so is Your praise to the ends of the earth; Your right hand is full of righteousness. 11 Let Mount Zion rejoice, let the daughters of Judah be glad, because of Your judgments. 12 Walk about Zion, and go all around her count all her towers; 13 Mark well her bulwarks; consider her palaces, that you may tell it to the generation following. 14 For this is God, our God forever and ever, He will be our guide even to death. Dr. David Silversides makes the point that only the display of God's character gives any meaning to a string of individual lives. He contrasts this true significance with the alternative reason  men don't despair is because we create an artificial world for ourselves. Although this was not his text, Psalm 48:9-14 brings an interesting take on his point. The Psalmist considers this artificial world of impressiveness and security. He t...

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11 "Putting Willie Mays in a small ballpark," opines  Donald Honig, "would be like cutting a masterpiece to fit a frame." Even those of us born in a later generation of gotten to see Mays' mastery in the vast expanse of the Polo Grounds. Honig is right. The experience would have been truncated in a venue that gave him less opportunity to stride. When we do what by God's grace we do best and begin to abut the limits on our time to do it, we experience the opposite. We experience Willie Mays in a small ballpark, the masterpiece cut to fit the frame, the midlife crisis. We also, says the author of Ecclesiastes 3:11, experience something else if we wait beyond explosion or embittered resignation. We experience the reality that God has put eternity within the hearts...

From Psalm 46 – 1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 3 though its water roaring from and the mountains quake with their surging. 4 there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. 5 God is within her, she will not fail; God will help her at break of day. In my adult Sunday school class, we are studying the book of Romans. My friend Ryan was substituting for the regular teacher and took the opportunity to summarize. He issued an interesting caution when he said we might be better off reading the ALL, as in all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God as BOTH, as Paul's contemporary reminder that both groups, Jews and Gentiles, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I wouldn't go in for anything that would dilute responsibility before God into a vague sociological phenomen...

From Psalm 46 – 1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 3 though its water roaring from and the mountains quake with their surging. 4 there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. 5 God is within her, she will not fail; God will help her at break of day. Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus ascribes to the author in Psalm 74 that he begins to process disaster in prayer. That same capacity is evident in the opening of Psalm 46. This perspective is stubbornly evident even when worry presents disasters which are hypothetical to the point of hyperbole. Though Psalm 46:1 is declarative in its theology, that God IS our refuge, good theology doesn't become a fig leaf to cover the naked vulnerability of this author's thought life. My declaration of God's pervasive sovereignty will be true, he holds steady...

From Genesis 15 – 1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, "Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward." 2 But Abram said, "Lord God, what will You give me, seeing I go childless, and the air of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?" 3 then Abram said, "Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house is my heir!" 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, "This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir." 5 Then He brought him outside and sat, "Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them." 6 And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness. "Doubt's not a bad thing," weighs Tyler McKenzie. "It's an opportunity." So it was in Genesis 15, when we as Christians are given our prototype of faith. The chapter doesn...

Most assuredly, I say to you, When speaking what We know and testify of what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness. John 3:11 "The biggest problem with making God number one on the priority list," admits Jon Hauser, "is that we’re never really done with God. He keeps getting out of the God box, asserting a right to every area of our lives." A similar "problem" exists with assenting to Christ's omniscience on eternal things as asserted in John 3:11. Once we take direction from the First Citizen of Heaven because He has come from there and returned there, His authority won't stay put in our God box, won't limit itself to matters relating to the next life. The same inexorable logic applies elsewhere. If we admit Christ knows whereof He speaks in Heavenly matters, what of intermediate future concerns? After all, He, the same yesterday, today, and forever has inhabited our future before we arrive at it. He, to borrow the image from ...

From John 3 – 1 There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with Him." 3 Jesus answered and said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." David Garrow's biography of Pres. Barack Obama, Rising Star , contains a glimpse that transcends politics. An Illinois voter weighs a vote for the U.S. Senate and considers that if Obama's parent is from somewhere else, his perspective will be larger than just the United States. With respect, the Lord may be making much the same connection for Nicodemus in John 3. Nicodemus is a man interconnected into its contemporary culture. John says so. He is accustomed to deference, and to a lifetime of Scriptural assumptions. Jesus could have seen this as an advantageous encounter. ...

From Hebrews 12 – 22 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, 23 to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, 24 to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better than things than that of Abel. 25 see that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven. The worship leader's confession was a blunt one. God's Word is too much with us. Just because we pray or sing it often doesn't make it untrue. The author of Hebrews faced just such a quickly accustomed human tendency. He looks back on his nation's history and saw that God intervened with fearful spectacle. Led by the Holy Spirit, he pointed to the continuity in...