The Brick in the Wall

"Give us help from trouble, for vain is the help of man. Through God we shall do valiantly, for it is He that shall tread down our enemies." Ps. 108:12-13

Oft times the mountain that we must assail seems utterly impassable, insurmountable. I have had that feeling most noticeably in bookstores. The "Classics" section offers me some reprieve (and thus often becomes my hiding spot), but I invariably must walk past and wade through a bombardment of contemporary literature whose covers alone assault my senses and sensibilities like waves pounding a beach. Despite varied subject matters, all are essentially the same book: this or that person of various respectability and/or prestige (or lack thereof) is espousing this or that doctrine or idea or opinion that sounds really good to them and their close friends (and maybe even a few amiable strangers), but ultimately is a heaping pile of absurdities and hubris, an adamant yet unintentional demonstration of Romans 1:22.
Now, it is not that these trivial treatises, in and of themselves, pose an actual threat to Christian truth. With time, even a small child of the faith could answer their nonsense. The colorful myriad (like spewed vomit) of contemporary thought looks good only on paper. With some careful thought (a rarity these days), however, their internal and external consistencies (the validity of its logic and the practicality of its application) being to unravel quite humorously (and pathetically); for the only true test of any worldview is to test its internal/external consistencies, and many fail on one or both counts.
It is not, therefore, any truth on their part that can cause one to despair; rather, it is the sheer volume of them that can. Some would dare curse the invention of the printing press: if only Gutenberg knew the number of lunacies that we would be inundated with! Our shelves seem crammed to bursting with a variety of opinions on "what's wrong," "who's wrong," "why its/their wrong," "why I'm right," and (their favorite subject) "how to fix it". With so many subjective preferences, devoid of (and yet masquerading as) objective fact, floating about us like sharks, it is easy to see how a non-intellectual life behind a picket fence would be a preferable life. When filled with such a deluge of counter-claims (many of them foolish), the task of being a light in the world very quickly seems impossible; we do not even know where to beginning.
Yet, we are told where to beginning quite explicitly, and it is summed up in one prepositional phrase: "Through God" (vs. 13). Herein is our comfort, our weapon against despair: it is God, the infinite and almighty one, and not us, who shall answer to lunacies, correct the foolishness, and check the absurdities. Here is our hope: we are not the ones to assail the mountain; God is. It is God's power, God's light, God Himself that is given to us in Christ. He fights His war through us; we have our small part to play, but the actual triumph is all on His shoulders, and they are strong shoulders, thick and broad. They bore the Sin of the world; they can bare its nonsense as well.
Our situation before this mountain, therefore, is like Nehemiah rebuilding the wall; each man had their own task: some repaired this part, others this part, and others that part, and others still stood guard rather than build. God rebuilt the wall because each individual put their brick in the wall; a myriad of small task united together into one glorious success. That is the reality of our situation: we have not a mountain to assail; we have our brick to put in the wall, our one small yet invaluable piece in the mosaic of God's ultimate victory. The darkness is thick due to its great number, but through God we shall do valiantly, for He who is with us and in us is greater than all our enemies and their perilous yet innocuous noise (I John 4:4).

-Jon Vowell

God and Evil (or, A Rose Out of the Mud)

"Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men! For He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness; souls that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron.
"Because they rebelled against the words of God, and despised the counsel of the Most High, therefore He brought down their heart with labor; they fell down, and there was none to help.
"Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their bands in pieces. Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men." Ps. 107:8-15

This passage's series of events is a fascinating spectacle. It starts by exclaiming that only the goodness of God can satisfy the longing and hungry soul, souls that sit in darkness without the goodness of God. To ask how they got into such darkness is to ask how they lost God's goodness (for apparently the two cannot coexist: you have either one or the other, never both). They lost the goodness by their rebellion against God's "word" and "counsel," i.e., His authority as God. In response, God let the consequences of their rebellion fall: a horror of great darkness fell upon them, and when all had abandoned them ("there was none to help"), then and only then did they look to God for satisfaction.
That last part is the most interesting part. Here is revealed a deeper application of Joseph's oft used (to ad nauseum) phrase that God works evil for good (Gen. 50:20). Rebellion against God (in any sense) is the proper understanding of Sin, and the natural consequence of Sin is Death (Rom. 5:12; 6:23). Now, it seems that the Psalm is explicitly saying that God's immediate response to Sin is to not shield people from its consequences. He actually lets the death and darkness fall, the disease and destruction wreak and rage, the evil and the wicked pollute and corrupt. The honest man asking sincerely (and the skeptic asking sneeringly) will ask, "Why?"
The answer is startling: "Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble" (emphasis added). It seems that God actually lets us go astray so that we will learn (1) what the right way is and (2) to stay on it when we get there. Think of it like this: God alone is the satisfaction of the soul. Thus, every time we head to something else other than Him, He will let us go and starve on its hollowness until we finally (like the prodigal son) "come to our sense" and cry out for what is truly satisfying, which is only found in God.
Only a moral coward would call such a set-up "cruel". Many today whine for God to shield us from every possible ill, but such a recommendation (however sincere) is intolerable for two very good reasons: (1) The issue of free-will. True free-will is contingent upon the possibility of true evil. Thus, to actually "shield" us from all ill would mean doing away with free-will, reducing us to mere machines, beasts, or other subhuman and inhuman entities. Therefore, to ask for Him to shield us is to not know what we are asking; we have requested that God spare us from one cruelty by inflicting us with another, i.e., the loss of our humanity. (2) The necessity of "the hard way." It is just plain old practical truth that sometimes the most merciful course of action is to allow one to learn things the "hard" way. If a truly free-will agent utterly refuses to heed your sound and truthful warnings and advice, then sometimes their refusal and subsequent disastrous consequences are the only way that they will finally heed. Such a fact is common sense, and to deny it is to accept blatant ignorance for the sake of argument.
This is not to say that God never shields us. Indeed, there is much that He shields us from (e.g., Ps. 105), and much more that we will probably never know. The point here is that God's modus operandi with people is not mere shielding anymore than it is mere allowance of the consequences. The point is that if your stubborn rebellion (whether you are an unbeliever or one of His children) leads you into the deathly consequences of Sin, their is a gracious miracle at work: the very consequences that seem so horrid are the very things that will lead you back to God. The sovereign will of God has decreed that out of every evil work, redemption will bud like rose out of the mud.

-Jon Vowell

Great Is Thy faithfulness

"And the water covered their enemies; there was not one of them left. Then they believed His words; they sang His praises. Soon they forgot His works; they waited not for His counsel, but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in the desert. [...] Many times did He deliver them; but they provoked Him with their counsel, and were brought low for their iniquity. Nevertheless, He regarded their affliction when He heard their cry...." Ps. 106:11-14, 43-44

"If we are faithless, He abideth faithful...." II Tim. 2:13

It is a refreshing thing to know that God's faithfulness is not contingent upon our faithfulness. God's faithfulness is contingent upon no one but Himself, His own holy character. The author of Hebrews said of His promises, "Because He could swear by no greater, He swore by Himself" (Heb. 6:13), which is precisely what He did (Gen. 15).
When our Lord was here, He did not make the loyalty of the people the foundational motive force of His mission (John 2:23-25); rather, it was the immutable will of His Father (John 6:38-40) and His obedience to that will (John 5:30; Phil. 2:5-8) that moved Him.
It is to our great shame that we are ever faithless, and to God's great glory that He is ever faithful, and that He gives us the power to be faithful (Phil. 1:6; 2:13; 4:13). If there is anything that we should learn from the history of Israel, it is this: our vileness and His goodness, our weakness and His strength, our faithlessness and His faithfulness. "We have sinned.... Nevertheless, He saved..." (Ps. 106:6, 8).

-Jon Vowell

God-Seeker

"...let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Seek the Lord and His strength; seek His face evermore." Ps. 105:3b-4

The rest of the Psalm gives the grounds for "why" we should seek Him. Like Ps. 78, we are given a mini-history of Israel. Its purpose is stated at the beginning: "Remember the the marvelous works that He hath done." Know this God: see His activities, that they are good; know His character, that He is holy; and then seek Him out, for it is who He is that drives us to Him. The heart of the God-seeker rejoices because this God is worthy to be sought, the only thing worth seeking. He has proven Himself to be the one and only hope, the one and only God, the highest and the greatest, the beginning and the end, the First Cause and the Ultimate Purpose. Taste and see that the Lord is good, and you will desire Him like wine for the soul.
It must be stated, however, that God is to be sought for Himself and not for the mere sake of seeking. Many people (through time and esp. today) are seekers for seeking's sake, and many others additionally believe that they can somehow properly seek God without any established concepts of Him. They stress subjective experience above objective truth(s).
God is a person, and therefore is to be known in an experiential subjective dynamic. However, God is not a person like we are a person. He is holy, i.e., absolutely perfect and complete, and thus has no changes. Therefore, there are definite and certain things about God, things that without knowledge of we will never truly seek Him: we will fall into every ditch and lurch into every side eddy imaginable. God is a person about which there are definite and certain things, things that He has graciously revealed to us through His word, things that He is to be sought for. The true God-seeker understands this: their subjective experience(s) must necessarily be bound to an objective reality or else it will wander aimlessly in the dark.

-Jon Vowell

The Loss of the Sacred: Holy Places, Dark Places

"And Jacob awoke out of his sleep, and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.' And he was afraid, and said, 'How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.'" Gen. 28:16-17

For the Hebrews, "house of God" was not a mere term; it was a truth about reality. It was no mere sign divorced from concept; it was the concrete declaration of a meta-physical actuality. For them, the "house of God" (the tabernacle/temple) was the intersection of Heaven and earth. There, the presence of God literally dwelt in the Holy of holies, meeting every year with the High Priest to atone for the sins of the people. It was a sacred place, and thus still dreadful and awesome.
Now, however, the house of God is merely a building for social gatherings, buildings that litter our countryside with all the frequency (and presence) of fast food joints or coffee shops, or any other trapping of American consumerism. Going to church is like going to a rally (or the mall, or a concert, or a press conference, or work), and picking a church is like picking shoes: whatever fits me best. The dread, the mystery, the wonder, the sacred, is gone. We go to church to meet and make friends (or a spouse), increase in head knowledge, receive encouragement, maintain our social status; anything except to meet with God, a thought that probably never even crosses our minds. A "den of thieves" indeed (Matt. 21:13).
In the old days of Christendom, churches were not littered everywhere, and thus they were still considered special and sacred things. Worship was a set and established affair, the same in almost every church, because its purpose was to praise God and prepare you to meet with Him, not to please your emotional needs and aesthetic preferences. The Eucharist was (and is) about meeting with God, face to face, and (from a Roman Catholic view) in the flesh. Views on salvic purposes aside, the common idea was that the whole of believers, by the right of the atonement, could now step into the Holy of holies and stand in the presence of God. Think of that! Even the Hebrews did not have such a privilege, but now we do by the blood of Christ. Yet now even the "Lord's Supper" is reduced to a mere event, one of many, of the social gathering. Who knows what varied reasons we have for partaking of the bread and wine; I doubt they have anything to do with stepping before the presence of the Living and Holy God Almighty.
It used to be that holy places were "dark places" (as Mr. Lewis put it), places of mystery and wonder, of holiness and dread, where God met with man face to face as friend does to friend. Now it is not so: we have thrown open the windows and aired out the rooms, cleaned up the blood and put out the fires, and have consequently suffered a loss of the sacred. We sing songs to our emotional gratification, eat the crackers and grape juice without flinching, have sorry feelings for our sins, and head back into the light of day as though we had done no more than taken a trip to the grocers rather than having just left alive, by the blood of Christ alone, the dreadful place, the gate of heaven, the house of God.

Lord, have mercy on us.

-Jon Vowell

Alone Amongst Other gods

"...the people which are to come shall praise the Lord; for He hath looked down from the height of His sanctuary, from Heaven did the Lord behold the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner [and] to loose those that are appointed to death...." Ps. 102:18b-20

Christianity does not worship God because He is a supernatural being, viz., a spirit. As Mr. Lewis put it, there's nothing special about being a spirit; the Devil is a spirit after all. So God is not worshipped simply because He is a spirit.
Neither is He worshipped (or found worthy of worship) because He is powerful, even more so than all the other gods of men. Power per se is nothing; it is the action that stems from the power that matters. A powerful God is not as important as whether or not He is good.
God, however, isn't even worshipped for His goodness. Like power, goodness per se is meaningless without action. Goodness that is static and still is useless; admirable and noble, perhaps, but still useless.
The God of Christianity is worshipped because of incarnation, i.e., His power and goodness, and all that he is (i.e., His holiness), has lead to practical, benevolent consequences in the woop and warf of space and time. Along amongst other gods, the God of the Christian is Immanuel--God with us. Not created by us, projected by us, realized by us or in us; not anything by us. He is "God with us." Our God has come down to us and has brought salvation with Him (Is. 59:15-16), for salvation is the goal of incarnation (I John 3:8b). We had fallen into a deep and miry pit, but He did not leave us there. He reached down to us; or rather, He jumped down to us and lifted us up. He came to us and saved us; and for that we worship Him.
Of course, God can be worshipped for His power and goodness and other things for what they are. However, the foundation of all worship towards God begins and ends with Jesus Christ, who is the demonstration and revelation of God and His holy character. Without Christ, God's goodness and power (and other things) is meaningless to us, without purpose or plan. God without Christ is just another deity; more powerful and benevolent than most, but still just one more in the mix. Christ, however, reveals the reality of the God who is there, a God beyond the invention and intention of man, a God actually "mindful" of man (Ps. 8:4), a God that comes and saves man. Only such a God is worthy of worship and obedience.

-Jon Vowell

Holy Life, Holy War

"I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt Thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes. I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me." Ps. 101:2-3

"Ye that love the Lord, hate evil...." Ps. 97:10a

"Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good." Rom. 12:9b

The "holy life" (as some call it) is simple on paper but difficult in practice. On paper, we are to love and cleave to the good, while we are to hate and reject the bad. In practice, however, this simple formula is always a war. Of course, before salvation, the struggle was impossible to win thanks to the inward law of sin and death (Rom.7:18-25); after salvation, the Spirit of God sets us free from that law (Rom. 8:1-2): Sin still has its pull, but we no longer have to obey it.
It is that continual and ever-present "pull," however, that drives us insane. Though set free from necessary sinfulness, we still find ourselves fighting against a lingering deadness of the body (Rom. 8:10), i.e., the appetites*. Fortunately, such a fight is ours for the winning in the moment because of Christ (Rom. 8:11) and God (Phil. 2:13). Whereas once our mind agreed with God (Rom. 7:25) but our spirit was dead and therefore could not enforce the mind's desire upon the appetites (i.e., the flesh), now we have (through Christ's atonement) the Spirit of God, who quickens our bodies (Rom. 8:10-11) and enables us to be holy as He is holy (I Peter 1:16).
There is a reason Christ described salvation as a new birth (John 3:3): it is not mere forgiveness only, but also a re-creation (II Cor. 5:17). A new life has been born in us (I Cor. 6:19), a life that can live the life of God (for it is the life of God), the only life worthy of Heaven. Our meriting eternal life and communion with God is based upon the work, life, power, and presence of someone other than ourselves. That is the key distinction between Christianity and the religions of the world: complete and utter dependence on the divine. We cannot save ourselves; only God can.

-Jon Vowell

*I say "appetites" for two reasons: (1) So as to avoid any hint of Gnosticism. I do not believe that the physical body is evil because it is physical. I believe that the physical body is fallen, and thus subject to the corruption of Sin and Death. When that corruption is removed, the body will remain: glorified, yet still physical. (2) So as to explain the "pull" of Sin. This has been a troublesome spot for me. If the "old man" and "the flesh" (which I take to be the same thing) are removed by Christ (Rom. 6:6; 8:1, 9), what then within me is drawn by Sin's "pull"? If I am free from the old life and its corruptions, what then is the motive power in me to sin? I take Rom. 8:10-11 to signify that there is still a part of us that is dead, i.e., the body. Since the mind already agreed with God (Rom. 7:25) and our spirit is now the Spirit of God, "the body" cannot be our mind or spirit. Therefore, it must be the physical body with its fallen appetites. This is what I take it to mean until a smarter head than I corrects me.

Damnable Ignorance

"Know ye that the Lord, He is God; it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture." Ps. 100:3

"But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly after this sort? For all things come of Thee, and of Thine own hand have we given Thee." I Chr. 29:14

Humility, joy, love, and every other aspect of Christ-likeness comes from a resolute focusing of our heart and mind on the fact of our necessary dependence. "The Son can do nothing of Himself," Jesus said to the Jews, "except what He seeth the Father do" (John 5:19). Such is the nature of true Christ-likeness: a state of utter acknowledgment and living in the reality of one's dependence on God.
What person can truly claim to have "arrived" by their own strengths? Many do make such a claim, but it is all noisome hubris. Their strengths are God's strengths, for He is their Creator and thus has given them those strengths. Likewise, which of His children can truly claim to be their own man/woman? Sadly, many do, and they boast of their strengths "as if [they] had not received it" (I Cor. 4:7). It is God, and not ourselves, who "makes" us in every way; we are His and not our own. To claim otherwise is nothing but pride and Sin, the parents of such damnable ignorance, for many are cast into Hell thinking that they can live and move and have their being apart from God.

-Jon Vowell

Life and Death: Death-Casters

"Thou answered them, O Lord our God; Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou took vengence on their evil deeds." Ps. 99:8

There are two things that we must remember about Sin: (1) in Christ, we are set free from the ultimate condemnation of Sin (Rom. 8:1-2); and (2) the consequence of Sin is still death (Rom. 5:12; 6:23), and that death will be meted out. If we expect otherwise, then we understand neither God and Sin, nor the holiness of the one and the deathliness of the other.
Being forgiven in Christ, His blood continually cleanses us (I John 1:7), and thus no Sin can be laid to our account anymore. However, as free-agents, we can choose to yield to the Holy Spirit or not (Rom. 6:12-13), and thus we retain the power to unleash the effects of Sin (and Holiness). We can be conduits of Death as well as Life. Perhaps if we saw our sinful choices as death-casting, we would take it more seriously. We do not make "mistakes" or "fopahs"; we spread death like a cancer, like a plague, spewing its corruption from our hands, our mouths, our eyes. In addition, perhaps we could also understand God's holiness (and our calling) better: to purge out the darkness, not spread it around.

-Jon Vowell

The Return of the King II: Earnest Expectation of the Creation

"Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the earth. With righteousness shall He judge the world, and the people with uprightness." Ps. 98:7-9

"The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God...because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." Romans 8:19-21

The return of the King and subsequent redemption thereof is not a private event for man but a universal event of all creation. Sin has unleashed the consequences of Death and its corruption into the furthest extents of the universe, even the parts to which we have never been nor ever will; yet even those parts ring with the "earnest expectation" of the restoration of the rightful order.
Do we function on the level where we consciously consider that the universe is not even half of what it used to be or could be? That neither are me? "The whole creation groans and travails in pain" (Rom. 8:22), for the Fall has corrupted its glory, our glory, and nothing is as it ought to be. The universe is smarter than us, however; it continues on in earnest expectation. We, on the other hand, are forgetful creatures, and our expectation dulls into a kind of apathetic resignation and contentment. We are lulled to sleep by the dull and static hum of the fallen world, and it is high time that we wake up.

-Jon Vowell