The Paradox of Man

"God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them turned aside; they are altogether become corrupt. There is none that doeth good; no, not one." Ps. 53:2-3

The scriptures give some positive views of man that we must not lose in these new dark ages. One view is that man is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27) and thus has intrinsic value (Gen. 9:6). Another is that possibility of man's future glorification (Rom. 8:18, 19). As important as these positive views are, the negative view is just as important (if not more so). Mankind is fundamentally valuable, but is also fundamentally lost. Too many modern creeds (both the religious and secular) account for only one reality or the other. Man is either a purposeless worm or a would-be god. Only the Christian doctrine captures all of the facts into one truth: man has the capacity to do good and the incapacity to be holy.
Truth is essential paradoxical, and the truth about mankind is that we are a paradox: the totally depraved image-bearer of God, an intrinsically valuable damned sinner. The modern world would rather make us a god or an animal; in either case, a dehumanization occurs, for man as man is ultimately abolished. God came to seek and to save man, because it is man who is lost and in desperate need of God's holiness and love.

-Jon Vowell

Humor for the Angels

"The righteous also shall see [the judgment of God], and fear; but they shall laugh at [the judged]: 'Lo, this is the man that made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and strengthened himself in his wickedness." Ps. 52:6, 7

Trusting in anything other than God (whether it be material possessions or our own finite wits and reason) is hysterical precisely because it is so ludicrous. We have often laughed at a child attempting to do something quite out of its league (such as moving a heavy object or handling a complex machine), and the more they refuse (as they often do) the help of an able grown-up, the funnier it gets. Their self-delusion is hilarious; they cannot see themselves for who they are: weak, unable, and in need of help. In the spiritual realm it is the same. Without God, we are all those weak, incapable children, and our every attempt to control things is a joke to those who know better.
It is a pathetic picture, but pride is pathetic. It will not embrace humility at the start, but rather puts itself higher and higher, so that their inevitable humiliation (for every knee shall bow; Phil. 2:9-11) will be far more painful than those who submitted from the start. The end of pride is humiliation, and to not trust God is to be the joke of all the angels.

-Jon Vowell

"I'm so sorry I've
Been so down, I
Started thinking things
Could never turn around,
And I begin to believe
That all we are is
Material.
It's non-sensical."
(Switchfoot)

Living Truth

"Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me to know wisdom." Ps. 51:6

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." I John 1:8

For God, truth is ultimately about the soul and not the head. Mere knowledge of the truth and the ability to give it lip service is not enough; the truth must be a part of our very being, our very person. If we have utter head knowledge, but it has not ingrained itself into our hearts, so that that which was once abstract concepts now become concrete realities in our lives, we deceive ourselves. We think because we can spout the truth that the truth is with us, but the opposite is true; in our heads, on our lips, but absent from our hearts and lives.
There is nothing wrong with head knowledge per se. Truth must start in your head before it can get to your heart; it must be comprehensible before it can be real. That being said, God is no more interested in spiritual scholars than He is spiritual simpletons. What He wants are spiritual people, those whose very lives reflect their awareness of and participation in a deeper reality, viz., the reality of God. The truth must get to your head, but it must not stay there. It is not meant for itself. It is meant to guide you to the One who is Truth. Well-meaning fools say, "Follow your heart." Your heart can only lead properly when the truth is in it, truth given by God: "In the hidden parts Thou shalt make me to know wisdom."

-Jon Vowell

The Object of Worship

"Will I [i.e., God] eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving, and pay thy vows unto the most High; and call unto Me in the day of trouble. I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. [...] Whose offereth praise glorifieth me...." Ps. 50:13-15, 23

Worship is to be centered around the actions and character of God and not our own actions and character. This is elementary, but the present state of worship makes such truth sound positively foreign. Modern worship is a self-centered affair, centered around our tastes, our feelings, our performance. Worship has become a kind-of self-actualization or self-aggrandizement, with "God" being a mere empty connotation word that serves to make us feel good about ourselves. God says that true worship is a glorifying of Him as a response to who He is and what He has done (and will do). It is not the great and fancy sacrifice(s) brought to the temple that mattered (vs. 8-12); what mattered was a spirit that recognized and focused on God and God alone. That fact has not changed, and any "worship" that takes your eyes off of God is idolatry, no matter how pious it presents itself.
In older churches (e.g., Medieval churches), the choir loft was often hidden from view so that you could not see the singers. Today, however, it is assumed that the singer (or performer, or whatever) is to be center stage, complete with a state-of-the-art sound system and lighting show. The spatial location of choir lofts is not the issue here. What is the issue is the apparent difference in spirit between these two methods: the former removes all distracts that it possibly can, while the former seems content with piling them on. How often we make worship about us! We raise our subjectivity above God's objectivity, making our subjectivity the central aspect, and thus make our praise idolatrous self-worship. Our subjectivity must be bound to His objectivity, not vice versa; let our glorying be in response to God and God alone, who He is and the great works He has done.

-Jon Vowell

The Riddles of God

"My mouth shall speak wisdom; the meditation of my heart shall be understanding. I will incline my ear to a proverb; I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre." Ps. 49:3-4

There are real riddles to be solved out there, and they contain three essential realities: (1) they are meant to be solved, (2) their solution will most likely be a paradox, and (3) man will never reach the end of them (though that is no excuse for not striving to solve them). The riddles of God are infinite, and they are to be our everlasting joy. To spend eternity knowing God through His infinite mysteries (and subsequently being known by Him) is the joy of Heaven. This joy is not an intellectual exercise; God is not an infinite algorithm to be infinitely studied. He is an infinite person to be infinitely known. The riddles of God will satisfy us even after time is no more.
Modern man hates riddles because he wants his reason to be supreme; nothing is to be outside of his comprehension. Such a sentiment is a delusional farce, but good luck getting them to believe it. The hunger to know absolutely is the ultimate arrogance and tragedy of modern man. Arrogant because they exalt fallen, finite human reason above everything (including God); tragic because so much has been lost by this hunger to absolutely know: the loss of God, the loss of meaning, the loss of love, the loss of man. There is nothing wrong with knowing, with striving for certainty; but the assertion that man's mind and reasoning can encompass the whole of all things (including God) is wrong, wrong because of its aforementioned arrogance and tragedy. We thought we had run out of mysteries, with the final answer being the dark despair of nothingness and meaninglessness. The reality, however, is that the riddles of God (i.e., Truth) springs eternal. God is still there, and He can be known; not exhaustively, but truly.

-Jon Vowell

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." -G.K. Chesterton

Legacy

"Beautiful in elevation...is mount Zion...the city of the great King. [...] Walk about Zion, and go round about her; count the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our guide even unto death." Ps. 48:2, 12-14

Mount Zion was where the temple was located, a building with far more significance than being a mere museum piece of Judaism. It represented two very important realities. The first was the spiritual legacy of the Jews. From the first tabernacle in the wilderness to the subsequent temples that were destroyed and rebuilt, the Jewish house of worship stood as a sure testimony to God's dealings in Israel's history. The second reality that the temple represented was the presence of God. God was not a mere past memory but a living fact of the present. The temple reminded the Jews not only that Heaven had touched earth, but also that it still touched earth; and those were the two things that they were to pass on to "the generation following."
We do a lousy job of passing on our spiritual legacy. Sometimes we divorce the immediate presence of God from the facts of church/Christian history and tradition, and our faith becomes cold and academic, with the scriptures becoming a mere textbook of knowledge. More often, however, we divorce the facts of history and tradition from the immediate presence, and our faith becomes hollow and weak, void of grounding and depth, and the scriptures a fluid subjectivity handbook for our own private eisegesis. We are to give to our children the richest heritage possible, teaching them the things of yesterday to enrich their own experiences today.

-Jon Vowell

The Objectivity of Worship

"God is the king of all the earth; sing ye praises with understanding." Ps. 47:7

"...they that worship [God] must worship Him in spirit and in truth." John 4:24

Worship is for the whole man, not just a part of him. It is no mere emotional experience any more than it is a mere intellectual exercise, though it seems that the intellectual side of things needs to be re-stressed today. We treat worship like a wholly subjective experience, which it is not. It is subjective, in that it is highly personal; but it is also equally objective, in that it is directed towards a definite object with definite realities. Our subjective praise of God must be bound to the objective truths of God that He has revealed to us. Binding your subjective experiences to objective realities is an essential paradox for many things, and worship is one of them.
We have very few who "praise with understanding" these days. Most worship is bound to utter subjectivity, which can cause one to wonder who it is exactly that everyone is worshipping. In order to avoid deceptive self-worship (which most modern worship is) or "God" becoming an empty connotative word with no definite substance, our spirits must be bound to the truth. We must not forget the individual man (for then or worship becomes mechanistic), but we must also not forget the God who is (for then our worship becomes a lie). Only when we account for both can we worship subjectively and objectively; only then can we have "praises with understanding."

-Jon Vowell

The Stillness of God

"Be still, and know that I am God." Ps. 46:10

"Fear ye not; stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord...." Ex. 14:13

"Peace, be still...." Mark 4:39

We often view peace as a self-conscious psychological state, whereas scripture reveals a deeper reality: true peace is a state of inward stillness caused by the knowledge of God. There is a stillness that God creates in us: not lethargy, but peace. It is the world that infects us with the chaos and noise of restlessness, while God commands us to be still and think on Him. Indeed, you cannot be still unless you think on Him who is unmoved and unmovable by the winds and waves of the world. The peace of God is the stillness of God, a stillness that He gives to us when our minds stay on Him. We would do well to capitalize on the still and quiet moments, whether or not our circumstances are in equilibrium to them.
The book of Revelation has Christ defeating His enemies with a "sharp sword" that comes "out of His mouth" (Rev. 19:15). The common understanding of this image is that His words are His weapons. The same voice that inaugurated history at the beginning will be the one to consummate it at the end. Some wonder what exactly His words will be, and I cannot help but wonder if it will not be "Be Still." The chaos of this world is stilled once and for all by the voice of God. That is a future happening, however; that same stillness can be ours in this very moment. "Where is your faith?" (Luke 8:25). The stillness is contingent upon faith, on knowing that God is God, that salvation is of the Lord, and that Jesus is in the boat with you in the midst of the storm.

-Jon Vowell

Imago Dei (or, The Artistic Conceit of Man)

"My heart is overflowing with a good matter (I speak of my works to the king); my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer." Ps. 45:1

Man's capacity for artistic creativity is the surest proof of him being the image-bearer of God. As the Creator is, so is the creation, especially those who are made to be like Him. The human ability to reflect and reveal the deeper realities of the world and themselves will always set humanity apart. There are, of course, additional capacities that make up our "mannishness" (e.g., moral motions, rationality, etc.), but the creative imagination is perhaps the most fascinating. There are some fools who try to argue that other (and lesser) creatures have an ethical code of sorts as well as reasoning capabilities, but which of the animals ever wrote a psalm for their king (or their god)? Which sparrow painted the portrait of the eagle, or which antelope wrote a poem in the night about the lion on the hunt? Let all the fools be silent before the abundant creativity of man. Whether we reflect the glories of God or the depravities of our own fallenness, we are able to see the world different from other creatures; we can (in a sense) see them like God sees them, viz., their hidden quality and character that is (at the moment of perception) beyond words and expression and yet is capable of being spoken or expressed.
I wonder if God, existing before all finite things in the eternal dance of love that is the Trinity, said to His fellow Persons concerning the coming Creation, "My heart is overflowing with a good matter; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer," and then His tongue wrote those first words on the fabric of reality: "Let there be light." God has given us (on a smaller scale) the same ability and power, an ability that reasserts the dignity of humanity in all its variety, i.e., we are the image-bearers of Almighty God.

-Jon Vowell

"Art is the signature of man." -G.K. Chesterton

Thine is the Power

"They did not possess the land by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them; but Thy right hand, and Thine arm, and the light of Thy countenance, because Thou delighted in them. [...] I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me. [...] In God we boast all the day long...." Ps. 44:3, 6, 8a

"Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen." Matt. 6:13b

Would to God that this attitude was fully ours now and forever! Alas, our lot is to fight for it, and fight by the Spirit of God. This world and the enemy will give us constant occasion to fumble for our own bow and sword, but the child of God knows no strength save that which belongs to their Father. "Thine is the...power." We dare not forget such truth. When we say the Lord's prayer, we are not willing these things to be; we are stating our acknowledgment that these things are. It is an act of submission to the reality of Almighty God.
Do you boast in God? I am not speaking of prideful self-depreciation, but rather of having a constant acknowledgment of where the power really comes from, where the light comes from, where the truth comes from. God is not teaching us to sit down and trash ourselves (as is the custom of some). He is teaching us to live within the constant awareness of Him as the abiding reality. Those who possessed the Promised Land and those who understand the Lord's prayer are those who know (and constantly live in the light of the knowledge of) the necessity of God in their lives. Of all the knowledge we can possess, let us grasp to that one with both hands.

-Jon Vowell

Soul-thirst

"As the deer longeth after the water brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?" Ps. 42:1, 2

"O send out Thy light and Thy truth; let them lead me. Let them bring me unto Thy holy hill, and to Thy tabernacle." Ps. 43:3

This is truly the cry of every soul, though only those touched by the grace of God can properly identify the object of their longing. Fallen man, separated from God by Sin, has an infinitely deep abyss in their soul that only the infinite can fill. Until they hear the gospel preached and have faith spark in their hearts, they will constantly chase every other thing under the sun. We often view some men's extravagance and folly as an occasion for scorn. It ought to be an occasion for pity: they are desperately trying to fill what only God can fill.
The child of God must not forget this desire; yet we are always in danger of leaving our first love. We are always in the hand of God, but how often we forget that hand! Can we say that the sentiment of the Psalmist is truly our sentiment? Is our life filled with creeds and service and playing church with utter apathy towards the living God, or are all things mere occasions to be drawn towards Him and away from all other things including yourself? Push it even further: do we let His "light" and "truth" lead us unto Him, or do we substitute Him for those things? Let God be our one desire, and let all else be that which transports us to Him and Him alone.

-Jon Vowell

"Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Create soul-thirst for Thee;
And hungering for the Bread of Life
O may our spirits be."
-Albert Midlane ("Revive Thy Work, O Lord")

Towards Us

"Many, O Lord my God, are thy wonderful works which Thou hast done, and Thy thoughts which are towards us; they cannot be recounted unto Thee. If I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered. [...] I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me...." Ps. 40:5, 17a

"What is man that Thou are mindful of him?" Ps. 8:4a

"...ye...are known of God...." Gal. 4:9

The God of the deist, the aloof and disconnected one, does not exist, and neither does the god of modernity, the unknowable and impersonal nothingness. The living infinite-personal triune God who is there is ever mindful of us, ever concerned, ever caring. Let this good news ring in the ears of the lost: God is there, and He is not indifferent.
Let this good news ring in the ears of the believer as well, for they can be as agnostic as their unbelieving brethren. Many of us would do well to have Heb. 11:6 engraved over every doorway: "God is, and He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." It is a mind-boggling yet joyous assertion of Christianity that the God of the universe knows us and wants us to know Him. That God desires (however He can "desire") communion with us is the scandal of Christianity. The world will gladly take any other god rather than the one that wants to be involved in their lives, and be livers can be the same. God is either the last thing on their minds, and the realization of His presence feels more like an intrusion than a "wonderful work." We must reassert to others and ourselves the wondrous fact that God's thoughts are "towards us," that He thinks of us, knows us, and wants us to know Him.

-Jon Vowell

"...how frail I am..."

"Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. [...] And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in Thee." Ps. 39: 4, 7

"I am the vine, ye are the branches...without me, ye can do nothing." John 15:5

Our dependence on God will be the great struggle of our lives. Even in the child of God, who is born of the Spirit, there is the capacity to set yourself squarely in the center of your life and circumstances, thrusting the burden of them all on your own feeble shoulders. Whether this is done out of pride or ignorance, the results are the same: we fall, we fail, and we lose control. It is a bitter reminder of our own inadequacies outside of God.
We would do well to remember our own frailty. God does (Ps. 103:13-14), and we should follow His example. This does not mean that you are to become a perpetual pity-party, going on and on about your weaknesses as though you were a martyr for the cause. Accounting for our frailty is to lead us away from ourselves (and our weaknesses) and towards God (and His strength). "I am weak, but Thou art strong," says the song, and that is to be the progression of our thoughts: the acknowledgment of our weakness should immediately turn into an acknowledgment of God's strength and our dependence on Him. If we turn our thoughts back on ourselves, we defeat the acknowledgment's purpose and find ourselves right back where we started, i.e., thinking that the whole show is all about us.

-Jon Vowell

The Life of Faith (and not Daisies or Dread)

"Forsake me not, O Lord; O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation." Ps. 38:21-2

"Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God." Is. 50:10 (NIV)

Darkness and despair can be a part of a Christian's life. If you disagree, then you have never read the scriptures. Though most of the troubles that came upon God's people were a result of their sin and rebellion, many others were merely a result of God's providence, His sovereign preference that they walk through the flood, through the fire, through the dark. Being a child of God does not mean sunshine and roses, nor does it even mean darkness and despair. The life of a Christian is one where you simply acknowledge (whether it be rain or shine) that you are in the hands of God, a fact that no external circumstances can change or affect.

In forgetting the reality of darkness in the Christian life, we forget the most vital thing: trusting God. In the overly optimistic view of life, we lose the understanding that God's ways are indeed mysterious and incomprehensible at the moment. However, in the overly pessimistic view of life, we can forget that God's proven goodness gives us grounds to trust Him. In the end, we should be preaching neither a life of daisies nor of dread; we should be preaching the life of faith, i.e., of trusting God; of acknowledging His sovereignty, His holiness, and His love in our lives.

-Jon Vowell

God: The Summation of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

"Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and shall feed on His faithfulness. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." Ps. 37:3-4

To trust God and to desire God--these are the two most difficult and yet vitally necessary lessons that a Christian must learn. It can be easily argued that our entire lives on this earth (and perhaps throughout eternity) will be and are being defined by our learning to trust and delight in God and God alone. The scriptures seem to scream such a message from cover to cover: only God can be trusted and only God is to be desired.

Those facts are not arbitrary egotism on God's part. As the omniscient observer at infinity, only He can take in and account for the whole of everything in His thinking, and thus only His word can be trusted. In addition, as a being whose nature is defined as "the beauty of holiness" (i.e., the beauty of the complete picture of His qualities and character), only He is the sum of all perfection and good things, and thus only He is to be desired (see I Chr. 16:29; II Chr. 20:21; Ps. 29:2, 96:9, 110:3).

Because God is the all-knowing observer and the summation of all good things, to trust or desire anything else is a danger for us because we are leaving the higher for the lower, the all-knowing and all-beautiful for the less knowing and less beautiful. Such a transaction does damage to our souls because we are leaving off that which our souls truly need and long for: true guidance and true beauty. That is why God asks us to trust and delight only in Him; not to satiate His ego, but for the good of our souls.

-Jon Vowell

Godless Christianity

"An oracle within my heart on the transgression of the wicked: there is no fear of God before their eyes." Ps. 36:1 (Rev. Marg.)

Herein is the key difference between a child of God and a child of the devil: to the former, God is everything; to the latter, God is nothing, not just in an abstract and conceptual sense but also in an absolute sense. To the Christian, God is the abiding reality; to the unbeliever (esp. in our time) God is non-existent, lost, and dead. The two great tragedies that have laid the foundation for the two great crises of this age are (1) the overt attempt to absolutely define and categorize a God whose thoughts are unsearchable and ways past finding out (Rom. 11:33), and (2) the subsequent "loss" of God when Human reason could no longer track Him.
Unfortunately, Christians today do very little (esp. in the western world) to remedy this "loss" of God precisely because most Christians have no fear of God either. We have become (in Mr. Chamber's words) "rationalistic infidels"; we have been infected by the modern disease of run-away rationalism, though we are unaware of its symptoms because it has so ingrained itself into our cultural thinking. We too, like unbelievers, believe that if our rational mind cannot encompass a thing, then there must be something wrong with that thing rather than our minds. What arrogance! It is indeed a loss of the fear of God, the reverence of God, when we think that our limited, feeble, childish minds can comprehend the incomprehensible.

-Jon Vowell

Another Paradox

"Let the Lord be magnified, who hath pleasure in the prosperity of His servant." Ps. 35:27b

"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." Luke 9:23

"...to die is gain." Phil. 1:21

It is common is Christianity today to not connect sacrifice with the goodness of God. Actually, I dare say that we do not connect it to God at all. We are quite certain that it merely involves us: our misery, our suffering, our loss. Thus, sacrifice today is degraded to an occasion for self-pity, which is just another term for pride. Such an outcome is a result of a lack of faith, viz., a lack of accounting for God in the midst of circumstances. If we add Him into the equation and reconcile our thinking with the fact that we "deny" all in order to gain God, then pride is ruled out as sacrifice becomes another occasion to give Him glory. Sacrifice is commanded, not so that we can lose, but so we can gain.
No one teaches this anymore, even in the truest of churches. Sacrifice comes off like some sort of caveat, a disclaimer pointing you to the fine-print that lets you know the deal is too good to be true. Conversely, Christ made sacrifice the focal point of His identity, viz., the loss of all for the will of the Father. In Christ, God suffered loss (Phil. 2:6-7) so that He may gain us (Eph. 2:14-17), and glory was found in such an act (Phil. 2:9-11). Likewise, we too are called to godliness, to God-likeness, to Christ-likeness. We are called to lay down our miserable, broken lives so that we may be made in the image of Christ (II Cor. 3:18), the very image of God. We are called to lose so that we might gain God, and all that He is.

-Jon Vowell

Christian Empiricism

"O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in Him." Ps. 34:8

Faith as blindness to the facts is a popular idiocy amongst the fashionably skeptical. It is, however, not the way that the Lord described His relationship with His people. "Prove me now," He says (Mal. 3:10); come with your eyes wide open. So Job said, "I have heard of Thee...but now my eye seeth Thee" (Job 42:5), and the Samaritan woman was told by her fellows, "Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world" (John 4:42). Our faith is not assured by the testimony of the blind and ignorant, but by those who said, "That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you" (I John 1:3a).

We do not believe because we were told to without explanation or evidence. We believe because someone said, "Come and see," and we came and saw the revelation of God as recorded by eye-witnesses. Our holy writ is not mere maxims and creeds. On a spiritual level, it is a conduit of the fiery presence and power of God (Heb. 4:12); but even on a purely physical level, it is still not a book of maxims or creeds. It is a record of those who both saw and heard that which we never did, so that we "might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that [by] believing, ye might have life through His name" (John 20:31). We do not believe in the goodness of God (or anything of God) a priori, nor does God want us to. His command is that we taste with our mouths and see with our eyes and thereby know with our minds.

-Jon Vowell

The Feast that is God

"When Thou saidst, 'Seek ye my face,' my heart said unto Thee, 'Thy face, Lord, will I seek.'" Psalm 27:8

If we come to the holy scriptures expecting to receive maxims and premises rather than God, we err on the most important step. His book is not a text of rules and regulations; it is a revelation of Himself. The pages burn with his fiery presence and life and strength (Heb. 4:12a). If you think that you can approach that fire and not be burned, please think again. Its pages are the doorway to a furnace that Hell itself is but a fading ember in comparison. You see that holy writ placed before you? There is the gateway to the consuming fire.

Remember why you read and write from that book. It is not to demonstrate your own cleverness. It is not to become smarter than your peers or enemies. You come to this ancient tome because you desire God and long to see His face. His fires are your only warmth and light, His holiness the only truth, beauty, and goodness that you long for. You are not here to fulfill a duty or oath, but rather because you desire and delight in only the Light and Life of men. God's call to man (through the mouths of His prophets, His Son, and His word) is to seek His face. If you come to this table by any other motive, then you will miss the feast that is spread before you, the feast that is God.

-Jon Vowell