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Thursday, 09 July 2009
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Childlike Self-forgetfulness
This is great from Justin Taylor's blog. Ponder it slowly. You might need to read it twice or more:Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (HarperCollins, 2005), xxii-xxiii:In most children but in relatively few adults, at least in our time, we may see this willingness to be delighted to the point of self-abandonment. This free and full gift of oneself to a story is what produces the state of enchantment. But why do we lose the desire--or if not the desire, the ability--to give ourselves in this way? Adolescence introduces the fear of being deceived, the fear of being caught believing what others have ceased believing in. To be naive, to be gullible--these are the humilitations of adolescence. Lewis seems never to have beenfully possessed by this fear. . . .
One could say, then, that Lewis remained in this particular sense childlike--that is, able always to receive pleasure from the kinds of stories that tend to give pleasure to children. . . . Surely Lewis himself would have said that when we can no longer be "wide open to the glory"--risking whatever immaturity thereby--we have not lost just our childlikeness but something near the core of our humanity. Those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without self-forgetfulness there can be no delight, and this is a great and grievous loss.
Friday, 03 July 2009
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Currently
Journey from Texts to Translations, The: The Origin and Development of the Bible
By Paul D. Wegner
see relatedLilac and Aster
Our laughter echoed into the evanescent beauty of twilight. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder of this dainty creature. Who can fathom this humble servant of Yahweh? This little elf of lilac and aster. Almost intolerably adorable. Not quite maddening, but with a face that ripples by turns with an exquisite, dignified serenity, and blossoming with gardens of childish thoughts and hopes and happiness. Oh, what little whims of loveliness lurk in every curve of her countenance....
For it is He who fashioned her
As heav’n’s unlikely overture—
A child made of rain and rose,
Of sunrise and ebullient prose,
Of sparkling seas and silver streams,
Of bridal flush and youthful dreams,
Of Mystery’s magic silences,
Of twilight’s fleeting fragrances,
Of pensive meadows golden-green,
Of misty rainbows opaline,
Of moonlight-dappled virgin snow,
Of floating laughter’s afterglow,
Of crystal fountains kissed by life,
Of realms untouched by sin and strife,
Of deathless, blooming asphodel,
Of rushing beauty nonpareil,
Of sweet perfume on summer breeze,
Of winter’s crisp, delightful freeze.
Wednesday, 01 July 2009
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Free Will Song
Only once in a while does one come across a song bleeding with such despicable theology as this one. That said, I am very grateful that God doesn't choose us based on our theology, for I would never have been saved.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
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A Life-changing Book
I don't use that phrase flippantly. It is reserved for books that far outshine others in their profundity and beauty. Anthropology of the Old Testament by Hans Walter Wolff is one such book. I would have to say that it is one of the most important books I have read, and that you might read as well, for understanding the Bible with clearer eyes and a more humble heart. It may be slightly difficult to follow in some places if you don't know Hebrew, but it will be well worth the struggle. Don't be put off by the author's references to the JEDP theory, since it doesn't affect the value of his propositions or conclusions at all. Whether you are a seminary student or a video-game inclined teen or a hardworking mom, if you want to understand the Bible better—specifically how Scripture perceives you as a human being—this book is an essential one to read and re-read. It is a book of the same caliber as Dominion and Dynasty by Stephen Dempster, which I plan to re-read every year. Pure gold. Here are some quotes to wet your appetite:
Everything that is said about breath and blood in the anthropology of the Old Testament is instruction in an ultimate reverence for life. But this reference is not derived from the manifestations of life itself; it is based on the fact that the breath and the blood belong to Yahweh, and therefore life without a steady bond with him and an ultimate tending towards him is not really life at all (62).
Here we see a relationship to time that is different from the one familiar to us. It emerges even more clearly in a common Old Testament turn of speech. The Israelite sees former times as a reality before him, whereas we think that we have them behind us, as the past. Ps. 143.5:
I remember the days before me (miqqedem),
I meditate on all thy works.
The future, on the other hand, does not for the Israelite lie before him, but ‘at his back’ (’ahar). According to Jer. 29.11 Yahweh says:
I know the plans I have for you,
Plans of peace and not of evil,
That I may give you ’aharit and a hope.
’aharit means the future as that which is behind and which follows me. One detail of German usage is based on a similar attitude of mind, when it speaks of Vorfahren (those that go before), for forefathers, and Nachfaren (those that go after), as descendents. According to this viewpoint man proceeds through time like a rower who moves into the future backwards: he reaches his goal by taking his bearings from what is visibly in front of him; it is in this revealed history that for him the Lord of the future is attested (88).
New Testament witnesses took up the small number of texts about death which were interpreted as promise (such as Ps. 22 and Isa. 53), using them as types, in order to grasp more acutely the meaning of Jesus’ death. For man today, the complete demythologizing of death, through which the Old Testament stripped away every trace of halo from it, is important. Jesus died a death in which horror swallowed up the praise of God and the proclamation of his acts down to the last note. It was from this barren vacuum—a vacuum which today gapes more widely than ever—that he took away the power (118).
On Rest:
Surfeit takes away rest just like excessive zeal (Ecles. 2.23). Good sleep becomes the mark of the man who lives in the rhythm of Yahweh’s giving and calling. Rest manifests the art of living, that is to say the wisdom whose crowning characteristic is the fear of Yahweh. It knows that the ‘all for nothing’ which answers the fruitless efforts of the fanatically industrious man is finally replaced by the ‘all for nothing’ of Yahweh’s gift which he gives in sleep (Ps. 127.1f.) (134).
On Rest:
These concrete admonitions do not derive their force from the fear of punishment but from the desire for joy. The prophetic words resist all the inclination of the natural man to secure, or even to intensify, life through unceasing labour (140).
The late book of Ecclesiastes brings us a corresponding reflection on the human subject (3.11): ‘Also he has put remotest time into man’s mind. The Preacher teaches, therefore, that to ponder over the future is man’s inescapable fate, although he cannot survey and comprehend God’s work in its totality from beginning to end. Because the component parts of the future are also endangered, hope is, generally speaking, accompanied by fear. ‘Only who is joined with all the living has hope.’ says Eccles. 9.4. That is why man awaits the future with strained expectation (149).
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on his head, and Yahweh will reward you [Prov 25:21].
Here the enemy’s emergency becomes the chance to overcome enmity. It emerges from Egyptian texts that fiery coals really were heaped on a man’s head in an atonement ritual, as a sign of shame and remorse on the part of someone who has been guilty of an offence (190).
It is the glory of God to conceal things (Prov 25:2).
Anyone who is not aware of the dark borders of reality and the impenetrable veil covering the total pattern of things has exchanged the actual world for a self-made illusion (212).
The fear of God is the crown of wisdom, because wisdom is first and last God’s wisdom, in which man participates on the basis of the few whispered words he perceives. Next to Job, Ecclesiastes is most aware of the limits set for the wise: the future is closed to him (8.7), he cannot discover the total coherence of all events from their beginnings to their end (3.11), and he is not capable of finding out what the work of God is in everything that is under the sun (8.16f.). Thus the truly wise man is burdened by the divine incognito, yet is at the same time a ‘hymnist of the divine mysteries’ (Prov. 30.1-4) (212).
Pride is the twin of foolishness. For arrogance which abandons the fear of God also robs man of his future. Only the humble remains truly man, for wisdom sets him on the true path of the fear of Yahweh (213).
Where the praise of God is absent, man has misunderstood the discord between his neediness and his capabilities. Here too inhuman man is not far away. The Psalter—passed down to us as ‘the Book of Praises’—has with its hymns grasped that man’s final destiny is to praise God. Here we can only remind ourselves of the multiplicity of the calls to praise that meet man when, with his experiences drawn from history and from creation, he turns into the sanctuary, there to pay homage to the only Merciful One, even in the complaints that he unfolds before God (228).
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Cherishing the Sovereignty of GOD
This is one of the many reasons I am ever grateful to God that my church uses the curriculum of Children Desiring God. I receive email updates from Desiring God's Philippian Fellowship, and this was one of them:
A couple of weeks ago we received a moving testimony about a boy named Jonathan from a Sunday School teacher. Jonathan’s mother gave permission for us to use the testimony in this prayer letter.
Dear Children Desiring God,
For the past year we have been teaching My Purpose Will Stand - a Study for Children on the Providence of God to the 5th and 6th graders of our church. As a matter of fact, we taught the last lesson two days ago...The last four lessons of the year were an excellent wrap-up and we truly began to see fruit in the thinking of our children. On Sunday night, the father of one of our students, Jonathan, suffered a sudden and massive heart attack and died. It was completely unexpected. The next morning, Jonathan told his mom that he was so thankful he had been learning about God's loving providence all year because he knew that his dad's heart attack was not a surprise to God and that he could take comfort in knowing that God has good purposes in this. This, from a 5th grade boy, just hours after his father had passed into glory!
This is why we are passionate about children's ministry and why we stand in your debt for writing a curriculum that takes such pains to give children good, biblical categories in which to think.
Our passion at CDG is for the next generation to know and cherish the infinite value of God. Knowledge or cherishing by themselves is nothing, but knowing and cherishing God is our hope, our mission, and what we want to be true for the next generations.
divinedelight
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- Name: Andrew
- Birthday: 7/25/1982
- Gender: Male
- Member Since: 11/7/2005
