Fit for Fire

"...the god that answereth by fire, let Him be God." I Kings 18:24

The god who reveals himself, let Him be God. This is the answer to the "black box" puzzle: if you have a black box that is completely sealed and utterly impenetrable, how do you know what is inside? You can know what is inside if the thing inside it (1) is there, and (2) is not silent. If the thing inside reaches out to communicate somehow, then we can know what is inside. Our God is the same: our belief in Him is not based in blindness and good feelings but rather His revelations. He has answered by fire, and thus He is God.
"Is not my word like a fire?" (Jer. 23:29) The word of God is full of dynamic life and strength ("quick and powerful," Heb. 4:12) like a fire. It has burned the world for thousands of years, sending up smoke and incense alike into the eyes and nose of many. God has written to us, has set down in words and language His ways and His works. There are many holy books of men, but only one word of God, only one that burns like a flaming coal in the night, rekindling any ash it touches, and setting ablaze the deadwood of the wilderness; for the world is indeed a wilderness in need of fire.
"I am come to send fire on the earth" (Luke 12:49). Was not our Lord a fire as well? Was He not (and is He is still) a burning light to the world? Did He not (as Ms. Sayers put it) pass through this world "like a flame"? Read the Gospels, and you will see people, when confronted with Jesus, acting as though they were handling a fire. Herein is God's second answer: He has come to us and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Morning Star has touched the dust of the earth, and the fire that He started can never be quenched. The works that He did bare witness to who He is (John 10:24-25), so that we are without excuse.
"The day of the Lord will come..., and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat..." (II Pet. 3:10). There is one last answer that God will give, one that is yet to come. The Second Coming of Christ, the day of God's judgment, will be the final word to all doubters and skeptics. There will come a day, as in Elijah's, when fire will once again fall from heaven before the eyes of the world, and all people will once again fall on their faces and say, "The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!" (I Kings 18:39)
"...our God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:29). Our God can and will only answer by fire because He is fire. To know Him is to take fire into your bosom, a flaming coal to your lips. His burning is holiness: to kiss Him is to be purged of all damage and defects; to know Him is to be one with a furnace. Once, being sinners filthy and frail, we would have melted into ash in the presence of such a flame. However, through the blood of Christ, we are reconciled back to God (Rom. 5:1, 8-11; II Cor. 5:17-19; Eph. 1:7), back to the fire; and like the three young men in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, we walk unharmed because we do not walk alone. He has made us fit for fire, and for that we worship Him.

-Jon Vowell

Love and Righteousness

"Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy name; and deliver us and purge away our sins, for Thy name's sake...and render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached Thee, O Lord." Ps. 79:9, 12

Redemption and damnation, salvation and judgment, love and righteousness; whichever way that you put it, these are the two arms of God's government, two of the most essential qualities of His character. It is these two qualities that are the most sorely attacked today by the religious and secular alike.
We hate the love of God as Scripture presents it, i.e., a holy love that desires to make lovable and lovely the hateful and ugly beloved. It is less like Romeo and Juliet and more like The Taming of the Shrew. It is a love that will not tolerate any stain or blemish, not matter how much we tolerate or even cherish it. We despise such a heavy-handed and true love, so we boil God's love down into either a fluffy sentimentalism that means absolutely nothing or a cruel toleration that winks at the damnation of a soul out of fear of being labelled "mean," "insensitive," or other useless buzz words of contemporary society. The love of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
Likewise, we hate the righteousness of God because it directly conflicts with our damnable version of the love of God. If our supreme deity is to be sentimental and tolerant, then He must necessarily not be moral. The sentimental and tolerant man suffuses all things into an incomprehensible whole; the moral man sets everything in rigid distinctions, distinctions like right and wrong, good and evil. Such distinctions are inherent in true righteousness, and thus righteousness is an insufferable eye-sore to the modern world (esp. Modern Christendom). Consequently, they choose not to talk about it; it is too much of a landmine. The righteousness of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
If we are to remain loyal to God and His revelations of Himself, then we must maintain the reality of His holy character, i.e., the fullness and harmony of His qualities, viz., love and righteousness. The world does not need sentimental toleration, a fluffy cruelty that "loves" it by amassing it into a pile of indistinguishable nothingness that it can safely ignore; what the world needs is a holy and true love and righteousness that burns away our impurities and makes us fit for itself.

-Jon Vowell

A Different Kind of Empiricism

"I was envious at the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked [...] until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end." Ps. 73:3, 17

"Then Jesus said unto him, 'Except ye see..., ye will not believe.' The nobleman said unto Him, 'Sir, come down before my child dies.' Jesus said unto him, 'Go thy way; thy son liveth.' And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way." John 4:48-50

Faith is a different kind of empiricism: it is about trusting a person rather than observing things. We trust the testimony of the biblical writers because it is the testimony of God (II Peter 1:20-21), His declaration and revelation of Himself. It is often true that our sight experiences will openly conflict with what God says is true. "I was envious of the foolish...until I went into the sanctuary of God," i.e., only when we take our focus off of the temporal and subjective circumstances around us and place it on the eternal and objective God who is there, only then do we know that what He says is true. Only then do we understand because our hearts and minds are centered on a person and not things.
"Except ye see...ye will not believe" echoes the stance of Thomas (John 20:25) and it echoes most of us today. God does not expect us to see and then believe His word; he expects us to believe His word and no more, to trust that He is who He says He is and that He will do what He said He would do. In addition, if we take the book of Job into account, it seems that God actually favors stacking the deck against Himself. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" (Job 13:15), i.e., though my outward circumstances tell me something different, I will trust the word of the Lord. That is the essence of faith.

-Jon Vowell

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

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

Biblical Christianity

"Your iniquities have separated you from your God...and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgment; and He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore His arm brought salvation for Him, and His righteousness sustained Him...the Redeemer shall come to Zion..." Isaiah 59:2, 15, 16, 20

Much that passes for 'gospel' these days does not fit the biblical criteria, and it is a biblical criteria. Orthodox teaching on salvation is not a New Testament anomaly; it is a foundational theme of the whole of Scripture. Even in this ancient prophecy, which we today like to think says 'nothing about nothing,' even it contains the familiar formula. We are sinners (vs. 3-8), and our Sin has separated us from God (vs. 2). We cannot save ourselves and get back to God (vs. 9-16a), so God brought salvation to us (vs. 16b-20). That is not a New Testament thing; it is a Bible thing.

We must beware of those who claim disharmony in the Bible. We must be stiffly embattled against those whose 'gospel' comes under the guise of Christianity, yet carries none of the marks of Scripture upon it. Those who undermine or discount Scripture in any way are our enemies, no matter who they are or their intentions. Anything that tampers with man's true condition and man's only hope must not be tolerated. We must call anything that takes away from the firm, biblical teachings of man as a great sinner and Christ as a great Savior by its proper name, i.e., heresy. It is absolutely astounding how amiable we are towards things which will damn men's souls, and anything that undercuts Scripture by preaching another gospel (whether it be prosperity, social, love, or liberation) damns men's souls by leading them away from eternal life. Scripture alone is good news; all else is the smoke and mirrors of Hell.

"We gather together

And claim two things:

That Christ, the Mighty Maker died

For man the creature's sin..."

-Jon Vowell

Hand in Hand

"Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows...He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed...[The] Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all...for the transgressions of my people was He stricken...[God] shall make [the Servant's] soul an offering for sin...[God] shall see the travail of [the Servant's] soul, and be satisfied.... My righteous Servant [shall] justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.... He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." Isaiah 53:4-12

The concept of the Atonement was not a New Testament fantasy but an Old Testament reality. The disciples did not invent a new thing when they proclaimed Christ as the Lamb of God that takes away the Sin of the world. A core part of Israel's temple worship was the sin offering, and the prophet Isaiah made it very clear that the long awaited Messiah would be a sin offering. The disciples were reminded of, and went around reminding others, what the Jews already knew: God shall make the Messiah's soul and offering for Sin.

The Old Testament is not irrelevant to the Christian; it is the very foundation of the New Testament teachings. Without the O.T., the N.T. would make no sense and have no strength. All key Christian doctrines--the Atonement, the Trinity, the Incarnation--all of them can be found within the O.T. We would be wise as Christians to instruct and be instructed by the Spirit in the continuity of Scripture. It is God's complete, verbalized, propositional special revelation to man. Every part is vital; no part is excluded. To think otherwise is to cripple yourself spiritually; you will never know the strength of your beliefs, nor the glory of God's wisdom and workings.

"Your entire word

Is lamp and light.

Old and New

Lead us unto You..."

-Jon Vowell