Dispatches from the Asylum

     "For therefore we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe." I Timothy 4:10

     Lewis once called the world "enemy occupied territory." Such a term greatly resonated with his then World War II weary audience. Perhaps a term for the world that would greatly resonate with our current generation is an asylum, and the inmates are running it. The mind of the majority of mankind is gripped in the dumbing and numbing dark of the Devil; their eyes are blind and their hearts veiled. They are the ones bound in the cave, making substance out of shadows, and those of us who try to tell them of the sun will suffer shame and pain; but tell them we must.

     It would help our efforts if we remembered this insanity afflicted upon men by the god of this world. They are indeed the blind men groping at the elephant, mistaking its parts for various wholes. The Man of Galilee has not yet put the mud to their eyes that, when once washed off, allows them to see the elephant in the room. To them, God is indeed trapped in an impenetrable black box: His presence, purpose, and nature are unknown and unknowable. They have not grasped (or do not wish to grasp) the knowledge of His communication and visitation amongst us, that He is there and He is not silent. We who have heard him are not the special keepers of secret knowledge. We are merely the men and women who once were blind, but now we see; we were mad, but now we are sane. All we want is to spread the sanity around.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2009

The Mysterious and the Good

"Clouds and darkness are round about Him.... Light is sown for the righteous...." Ps. 97:2a, 11a

"Course He isn't safe. But He is good." -C.S. Lewis

There are two things that we must never forget about God: His mysteriousness and His goodness. We are most forgetful of and frustrated by the former. We gladly seek the comforts of God only to find that resting in His secret place means dwelling in a shadow (Ps.91:1) and darkness (Ps. 18:11). God is light, and in Him dwells no darkness (I John 1:5), but darkness is where He dwells; not it in Him, but rather He in it. Thus, His ways are mysterious (Is. 55:8, 9; Rom. 11:33) and His light inaccessible (I Tim. 6:16). We often flounder at this: we would much rather have a God that we could easily categorize and thus easily predict. However, one of God's favorite past times is frustrating our assumptions, and He will continue to do so until we trust in His mystery.
God's goodness is more palatable than His mystery, but only after we water it down to the point of banality. We do acknowledge the light that He graciously sows for us, whether it be His word for guidance (Ps.119:105) or His Son for salvation (John 1:4); yet we do not seem to connect that we are given light because the world is dark, a darkness filled with terrors and terrified people. The light we are given is for our survival and the salvation of others. We are not on a sun-drenched vacation; we are pilgrims in an unholy land. God's goodness (which He freely gives because He is good) is not to be bottled up and horded, but broken and spilled out unto all. God is good, and good to us; but if we are to be like Him (I Peter 1:16), then we cannot keep that goodness, that light, to ourselves. Like our Father in Heaven has done for us, we too must spread the light as far as we can fling it.

-Jon Vowell

The Return of the King

"Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad...for [the Lord] cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth; He shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with His truth." Ps. 96:11, 13

There is an old story that has been told and retold again and again (in some form or another) throughout human history. It is a story about a land of some kind being bereft of its rightful leader for some reason, and now the land sits in long anticipation for the return of its headship. In the meantime, the land is overrun with evil forces, or ruled over by incompetent and inadequate rulers, or both. Waiting long for the leader's return can make the heart grow cold eventually, and it seems that those who even remember their master or his return are the minority. That minority continues, however, to stoke the flames of anticipation in those who will listen as they pass on their stories again and again. Meanwhile, the land lies dark and dormant, possibly in the hands of an enemy, waiting watching less and less for its good and rightful leader.
As much as we like the relegate such idealism to childish tales (and thus degrade childish tales), the truth is that such a story lies at the heart of our ever-present reality. The whole world lies in darkness, bereft of its rightful leader and lordship (ironically by our own devices), and its current prince is a usurper and monster, whose intentions towards us are malicious at best. In the midst of that dark reign, however, there are those strange messengers and magicians, those light-casters, who sow shimmering pearls of light like white sparks, and each shard of light kindles a fire whose flames crackle forth a declaration of the presence of our rightful ruler, His past works, and His imminent return. As Christians, we are the strange folk who proclaim (amongst other things) the anticipation of the return of our rightful ruler, the one who's headship and judgments will final put an end to all evil and bring peace at last.
This concept of the returning king, of the coming again of the rightful ruler to claim his throne and right all wrongs, is etched into the human heart for a reason, because we long for it dearly. From Homer to Tolkien, the fearless leader returns and brings with him wrath upon his enemies and salvation to his house. Such a thing is a deep yearning of the human heart that burns like an ember inside: the King is coming; He must come; He shall come; and all shall be well. The good news of Christianity is not just salvation but also this blessed hope: the return of the King. We must spread this news far and wide.

-Jon Vowell

Jesus: Light of the Dark World

"In Him was life, and that life was the light of men; and the light shineth in the darkness, and darkness cannot lay hold of it." John 1:4-5

"Everyone that does evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds shoould be exposed." John 3:20

"The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it that the works thereof are evil." John 7:7

"To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." John 18:37

"For this purpose the Son of God was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the devil." I John 3:8b

The destruction of the enemy and his works begins and ends with the proclamation and revelation of the truth. Jesus was not hated because He lead military uprisings (which He didn't), nor because He merely taught us to love each other (which He also didn't); rather, He was hated because He spoke the truth to those in and of the darkness. The result was like fire and deadwood, or vampires and the sun, or sodium and water: it was not a pleasant mixture.
Jesus, however, was not here to mix pleasantly with all things: he was here to start a fire (Luke 12:49), to break a spell, both in word (His teachings) and in deed (the Cross). Jesus was the Light not just because He is and came from God, who dwells in Light inaccessible, but also because He was the truth and spoke the truth, and the darkness hated Him for it.
We too are called to be such a witness; not a witness to our own ideas or notions, but to the truth: the truth that God has revealed in His word and in Christ. As Christ was the light of the world (John 8:12) so too are we (Matt. 5:14-16). We are called to pierce the darkness with a hated yet unquenchable light, and thus we can expect the same ire but also the same victory. The world loves two things: (1) convenient lies that are easy to forget while they support our congenial apathy towards and complacency in Sin, and (2) uncertainty and doubt as an appropriate hiding place for our pet preferences and opinions. They love these things because they fear what truth and certainty will reveal about themselves and their preferences, viz., that they are weighed and found wanting before the holiness of God.
We are told to sow the word like seeds; what an image to think of the seeds as sparks of flaming light that illuminate the night and burn up the dead and rotting things! We are the light-casters: we bear witness to the truth, and in doing so cast shards of Heaven's light like fire round about. This is the fire that Christ has started and that we continue, until perhaps all the elements of the earth will melt by its fervent heat.

-Jon Vowell

Always Successful

"For as the rain and the snow cometh down from heaven, and returneth no thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." Isaiah 55:10, 11

The preaching of God's word is always a success story whether we see the results or not. The joy of preaching God's word is that its results are actual, though not obvious. No matter what our eyes tell us or circumstances inform to the contrary, the preaching of God's word is a successful enterprise every time. The only failure is to not preach; the only guaranteed lack of harvest is to not sow.

Preaching is the only true successful art because it is the only art that has the absolute power of God in it. It is His word, not ours, and His word enriches and enlivens all things. We err if we start with ourselves in preaching: "I must sound well, speak well, be clear, be simple." Rhetorical excellence is a virtue, but the success inherent in the word of God is contingent upon God and not us. If preaching succeeds, it is always in spite of the preacher.

"Your Word knows not

The limitations of man.

It knows only the

Power of God..."

-Jon Vowell

Christ the Offender II: What This World Needs

"...He hath no form or comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from Him. He was despised, and we esteemed Him not." Isaiah 53:2b, 3

The Jesus we are presented with today is nothing like the Jesus of the Scriptures. These days Jesus is God's happy helper, out to bring many sons to glorious health and wealth. Meanwhile, the Jesus of the Scriptures was offensive and hated because He came as a sword to annihilate the peace and stability of the content and comfortable. The Jesus of the Scriptures was God walking amongst fallen men, revealing at every turn that He was nothing they wanted and yet all that they needed.

The lost and lonely people of this fallen world do not need another happy guru bringing great tidings of great self-help books; what they need is God, and the knowledge of His scandalous and glorious Gospel. Fallen man does not need to be made more amiable; they need to be shocked to their sense. Shock and shake them out of dark apathy with the offensive knowledge that they are sinners, separated from God, damned to Hell, and that Immanuel has come to accept their unconditional surrender and crush them so that they can be made whole, kill them so that they can be reborn. Do not give men scratchings for their itching ears; tell them something a man would be glad to believe.

"Keep me clear from

Anti-Christs

Who steal the glorious power of

The Gospel.

Deliver us from their evil..."

-Jon Vowell

The Beautiful Work

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good news, that proclaims peace, that brings good news of good things, that proclaims salvation; that saith unto Zion, 'Thy God reigns!'" Isaiah 52:7

I dare say that we do not see evangelism as a beautiful work; a chore or a duty, perhaps, or merely work, but not beautiful. Perhaps if we grasped the nihilistic terror of modern man, grasped the horror of existence in an accident caused, empty, vacuous universe that spreads ever on and on into further nothingness, perhaps if we grasped the despair of coming from nothing and moving towards nothing, maybe then we would see why evangelism is a beautiful work. We are proclaiming good news to dying men, not boring them to tears with our own opinions. What would happen if we truly believed that we had, not a chore or a duty, but good news, and that its proclamation was a beautiful thing? We desire hearts aflame to share the gospel, and beauty inflames all souls; yet we treat the sharing of the gospel, which is a beauty, as an annoyance both to ourselves and the people we share it with. This should not be so.

Please note that by 'beautiful,' we do not mean mere sentimentality or fanciful thoughts and feelings. The beauty in evangelism is real beauty, deep and heavy beauty, that which conforms to absolute Beauty (i.e., God Himself). There is real beauty in the proclamation of peace between God and man, between the King and the rebels. Let all the lost and lonely people know that man can indeed lay down his arms and find rest in the terrible Almighty, Who has reached out to them in love and holiness.

"How beautiful is Your Presence,
How beautiful is Your Work,
How beautiful is Your Body,
Broken and spilled out..."
-Jon Vowell

The Tale That We Tell

"I have declared, and have saved, and I have proclaimed, when there was no strange god among you. Therefore, ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God." Isaiah 43:12
"...ye are witnesses of these things." Luke 24:48

I believe that it is safe to say that we have lost a true understanding of the meaning of the term "witnessing." More often than not, we take it to mean that we are memorizing a cue card, spouting out the "ABC's" of salvation in order to score points with God. There is nothing real anymore, nothing pertinent, nothing driving, nothing that says, "I have seen these things, and know that they are." Neither Israel nor the disciples where to pay lip services; they were to be speaking facts: God's presence really did abide in the temple, and God really did become flesh and die on a cross for our sins. These were not fancy phrases and beautiful speeches to Israel or the disciples: they were actualities; deep, abiding truths.
"Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet believe." (John 20:29b) We who believe now are still witnesses, though of the unseen. We have not seen the inauguration of salvation at Golgotha, but we have seen its effects in ourselves: we who were once dead have been raised to life. Therefore, we can witness that the things that God has said happened really did happen. Our witness is not a matter of duty; it is a natural outgrowth of our believing in an unseen reality, i.e., redemption, Immanuel, God with us. How would our witness increase if we took God at face value that redemption is an abiding reality and not an abstract principle?
We are the storytellers, and the tale that we tell is true. We do not merely speak of traditions handed down to us, but of a reality that we have not seen but have known. We are the bards who do not tell of knights and dragons because the story is nice to hear but because we, upon hearing and believing it, felt the burns of battle. Likewise, we do not tell of the death and resurrection of God and the redemption of man because the story is nice to hear but because we, upon hearing and believing it, had redemption wrought in us. The tale that we tell, the reality that we witness to is not mere words; it is an overwhelming presence, an all-consuming fire, and those touched by it are not left unchanged.
"Ye are witnesses," witnesses to what is real; not what is possible, not what is fanciful, not what is dreamy, but what is, has been, and ever shall be. Now live like it.

"Why do we escape to dreams
When we have been bound to the Real?
We are not slaves to lies;
We are servants of the Truth..."
-Jon Vowell