I’ve noted before that popular posts tend to be ones that incite. There’s a place for pushing people’s buttons if you want to encourage them to change their thinking or behavior, but I don’t think muckraking or demagoguery is healthy for either the writer or the reader, and there’s no shortage of bloggers these days eager to do that sort of thing for the clicks. That’s not me. 

But I’ve found the personal discipline of writing 2 posts every week to be good for me—for my thinking processes, for my communication skills, for my character, for my soul. And I’ll confess that there have been some posts along the way that were good for me, and, I hope, good for the readers. Occasionally writers have the delightful experience of writing something that seemed to turn out better than they intended, or even better than they felt capable of. 

Here are 10 of mine that I like, for various reasons, in no particular order. 

• I Was Born That Way  
• Three Days with Hilaire 
• Grateful for Grace 
• It Is. And It Does. 
• On Listening to the Designer 
• The Music of the Sphere 
• On Peace 
• Worthy
• On How You’re Remembered (Strategery) 
• One Body

Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash

Part 1: It’s True | Part 2: Jesus Included | Part 3: No Need to Grow | Part 4: No Need to Aspire  | Part 5: No Greater Force | Part 6: No Decay | Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence

Some final thoughts.

Because God never changes, he will never go away. His enemies will never be able to defeat him or even diminish his power and presence in the world.

He wins.

That’s good news. Assuming, of course, you’re on his side.

So let me muse on that a bit.

God does have enemies. Even aside from the evil supernatural powers, there are people who reject him. They disagree with how he runs the world; they refuse his word; they deny his power. I know some people who find that the Almighty falls short of their supposedly high moral standards.

They have a right to do that, of course—a right they have, ironically, because they were endowed with it by their Creator. For the life of me, though, I can’t figure out why they should think that way. Maybe it makes no sense to me because God has been unfailingly kind and gracious to me for nearly
seven decades. Or maybe because I managed to make a convoluted mess of my life in just a few months at the age of merely 17. But I’ve noticed that God has been gracious to them, too, and many of them seem not to realize it. Many of them are awash in messy lives, as I was, but they illogically and absurdly blame God for the mess, even though it’s traceable directly to decisions they
have made.

The Scripture says that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Pr 13.15). Even that fact is an act of God’s grace; he has designed the universe so that if you choose a path for which you were not designed, circumstances will tend to point you to a better one. Nature is not kind to foolishness. God is good that way, among many, many others.

Solomon, who made that comment, made another one as well:

Whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him (Ec 3.14).

The unchangeableness of God’s person and work are not good news to those who choose to oppose him. They have good reason to be afraid.

But here’s the thing.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

No one needs to be God’s enemy. No one needs to be afraid. No one needs to find himself in the vortex, the maelstrom, of his life’s being dragged down into the abyss.

God doesn’t want to be the enemy of anyone in his image. He takes no pleasure in their destruction. In fact, he has done all that is necessary for those who reject him to be delivered from their frustration, their confusion, their peril. Every person whom he has delivered was his declared enemy when the delivery was planned and then accomplished.

And it’s free—to us, at least. It’s a simple turn—a turning of the back toward sin and the face toward the Son, the Deliverer. “I don’t want that anymore; I want you instead.”

The technical terms for that change are repentance and faith. Together they constitute conversion.

And for those of us who have trusted and made that turn to the unchanging God, everything has changed. There’s no reason for fear anymore—fear of God’s wrath, fear of life circumstances, fear of the unknown. The fear has been driven out by love (1J 4.18), and the result has been joy.

God’s purposes stand (Pr 19.21). God wins. His promises are fulfilled, to the last one, and forever.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Re 1.8).

Everything in this world is unstable, shakable, unreliable.

Come rest in the almighty, unchangeable God.

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about lions. The Bible mentions lions 150 times; the poets and the prophets particularly like to use leonine imagery, and we shouldn’t be surprised by that, since Asiatic lions indisputably lived in Palestine in biblical times. (Nowadays they’re pretty much limited to India.)

Several biblical characters interacted with lions—most famously David the shepherd boy, as he related to King Saul just before dispensing with Goliath ( 1S 17.34-37). But there were others, including Samson (Jg 14.5-18), Benaiah (2S 23.20; 1Ch 11.22), an unnamed prophet from Bethel (1K 13.24-28), the neighbor of another unnamed prophet (1K 20.36), and the ancestors of the Samaritans (2K 17.25-26).

Lions are the kind of animal that would tend to make an impression. It’s no surprise, then, that they show up as decorative motifs in important places—specifically in Solomon’s Temple (1K 7.29, 36) and in his palace (1K 10.19-20; 2Ch 9.18-19), next to his throne. That’s the image you might use if you want to make an impression on foreign visitors—or, for that matter, on your own people.

It also makes sense that significant people would be compared to lions. Three of the tribes of Israel are—Judah (Gn 49.9), Gad (Dt 33.20), and Dan (Dt 33.22)—as is the whole nation of Israel (Nu 23.24; 24.9). David, mourning over King Saul and Prince Jonathan, compares them to lions (2S 1.23), and some of David’s famed “mighty men” are compared to lions as well (1Ch 12.8). Interestingly, those men are from the tribe of Gad, which has already been mentioned.

In the New Testament, the devil is compared to a lion (1P 5.8)—which might give us pause when we read later that “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” is none other than Jesus Christ (Re 5.5).

Seeing lions up close certainly enriches one’s appreciation of the metaphor. I’ve been privileged to take 7 different trips into the Serengeti, both as a treat for BJU students on my mission teams and as an opportunity for Tanzanian orphans to see their country’s rich resource. We have seen lions up close on all but one of those safaris. One of the groups had the extraordinary opportunity to see a lioness take down a wildebeest literally right in front of our vehicles, not 20 feet away. As she choked it to death, she looked unflinchingly right at us, as if to say, “You really don’t want to mess with me …”

Which brings me to the characteristic of lions that has most impressed itself on me.

They’re absolutely fearless.

They have no predators. Top of the food chain. They’re not called “the king of the jungle” for nothing.

(And, by the way, the Serengeti, like virtually all of the rest of Africa, is not jungle. It’s savannah, much like the grassland prairies of the American West.)

You drive the safari vehicle up to a pride of lions, and they just ignore you. They look away as if bored. Occasionally one will get up and sidle around the vehicle, rubbing against it as though marking its territory. But as long as you remain quiet, you’ll be ignored.

They know you can’t hurt them.

But they are not to be disrespected. On one trip, as a male lion and one of his mates were ambling around our vehicle, the well-experienced guide, Vincent, whispered, “If you want to die, get out of the car.”

We didn’t.

On another trip we saw 17 lions lounging under the shade of an acacia tree—the second-most our guide had ever seen together. They, too, ignored us.

Confidence. Pride. Seeming disinterest.

But awesome power and speed and potential for violence and destruction.

Respect the lion.

Jesus, our Savior, is not just a lion, but the lion of the royal tribe of Judah. He has no enemies that can cause him concern; he has no predators; he has no equals. He can be calm and peaceable, just as he went to his death with no resistance (Is 53.7). He is the Lamb of God (Re 5.6).

But do not take his gentleness, his mercy, for weakness. Even as a Lamb, he displays wrath that brings desperate fear to his enemies (Re 6.16).

The Lion will deliver his people.

I got Covid. It was pretty mild, but since then I’ve had some issues that have led me to decide to set aside the blog for a bit. Publishing things publicly when your brain isn’t at its best just doesn’t seem wise. 🙂

So let’s see what happens. I’ll be around.

This weekend a great man and spiritual mentor passed to glory. In tribute, I recall a past post about how he changed my life.

Rest in peace, good doctor.

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Acknowledging the Divide | Part 3: “Great Is Diana!” | Part 4: Letting Hate Drive | Part 5: Pants on Fire | Part 6: Turning Toward the Light | Part 7: Breaking Down the Walls | Part 8: Beyond Tolerance | Part 9: Love

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful (Col 3.15).

From love (Col 3.14), Paul turns his attention to peace.

We all say we want peace, but very few people actively behave in ways that make peace more likely.

There are reasons for that.

In the first place, there are people who pursue peace in all the wrong ways. They think we’ll have peace if we just refuse to fight—but because they don’t take into account the presence of evil in the world, their actions end up increasing the potential for violence rather than lowering it. “If wishes were fishes … .”

In other cases we see people who talk about peace but don’t live by their own rules. Those of us of a certain age well remember the “peace movement” of the 1960s, and the violence wrought in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention by “anti-war” protestors. And the protestations of “peace” by the leaders of the USSR, which was, as one pundit put it, “the peace of the graveyard.”

This sort of thing can lead to cynicism. An acquaintance of mine, visiting Greenville, questioned the name of our “Peace Center for the Performing Arts.” “Peace?” he said, with a hint of a sneer. I explained to him that it was named for Roger C. Peace, a Greenville newspaper publisher and philanthropist. That seemed to settle him down.

So now we have to make excuses for naming things for peace. Stinkin’ pinko commie freaks.

All of this is just distraction.

The fact is that God is a God of peace (Rom 15.33; 16.20; Php 4.9; 1Th 5.23; Heb 13.20). It’s the essence of his character. (And yes, he’s a God of war as well [Is 59.17-20]; as “The Greatest Generation” has shown us, often those who have seen combat are the most eager for and delighted in peace.)

It should be no surprise, then, that God has brought peace between himself and us (Ro 5.1) and that he brings peace to his people (Ro 1.7; 8.6; 15.13). But interestingly, he has not promised us external peace; in fact, Jesus told his disciples that they would have tribulation (Jn 16.33; cf Mt 10.34) and even persecution (Lk 21.12), and that as history progressed there would be troublous times (Mt 24.6).

So where is the peace?

It’s on the inside, not the outside. Jesus leaves his peace with us (Jn 14.27), and it rules in our hearts (Co 3.15; Ro 8.6; 15.13; Ga 5.22; Php 4.7). We’re empowered to be an oasis of peace in the midst of swirling chaos.

That means that we can “follow peace with all” (Heb 12.14). We can be de-escalators of conflict, sources of resolution in disputes.

Let me tell you something I’m ashamed of.

I was in Ghana, on a long overnight public bus trip from Accra to Wa, where my team was going to minister for 3 weeks. The driver stopped for a restroom break, and I saw that someone was trying to get a couple of my female team members to pay to use the restroom. I knew that we had never had to pay at this location before, and I jumped to the conclusion that they were trying to take advantage of “rich Westerners.” It was 2 or 3 am, and I was really tired, and I just decided to refuse to cooperate. I said we weren’t going to pay. (The girls had already used the restroom.) The man followed me back to the bus, arguing all the way, protesting that he had to collect the money. (It amounted to about 50 cents.) I steadfastly refused. The principle of the thing, you know.

A Ghanaian man, also riding on my bus, stepped between us and began to de-escalate the confrontation. He and his wife paid the fee and refused to let me reimburse them.

I was deeply, deeply ashamed.

People with peace in their hearts simply don’t act the way I had.

My brethren, let us “follow after the things which make for peace.”

Part 11: Encouragement | Part 12: Gratitude

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, ¹⁶ hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved; with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the utmost (1Th 2.15b-16).

Paul is writing here of his unconverted Jewish opponents, those who followed him around from city to city and tried to undercut his evangelistic and church-planting work. In the process of noting their doom, he uses an odd expression: “they fill up the measure of their sins.”

What does that mean? And is it unique to Paul’s Jewish opponents, or is this something that other cultures should be wary of?

I think it’s easier to answer the first question if we begin by answering the second.

Similar language appears in 3 other places in the Scripture:

• In Genesis 15.16, God tells Abram that his descendants will be exiled for 400 years, after which they will return to the Promised Land of Canaan, “for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.” Here we learn that God is showing mercy to the Canaanites, whose land God has promised to Abram and his descendants, by giving them 400 years to repent (or, as my Dad would have said, “straighten up”). God knows, as he knows all things, that they won’t repent, but rather “fill up” their sins, bringing judgment on themselves.

• In his prophecy of the coming world kingdoms, Daniel reveals (Dn 8.23) that an evil ruler (commonly interpreted to be Antiochus IV “Epiphanes”) will arise “when the transgressors have filled up.”* Again, the context is of evil cultures exceeding all moral norms and “maxxing out” their sinfulness.

• Finally, in his condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees of his day, Jesus tells them to “fill up … the measure of the guilt of your fathers … from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah … whom you murdered between the Temple and the altar” (Mt 23.32-35). He concludes the outburst by saying, “Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Mt 23.36). That is, the bowl of guilt has been filled to the brim; it’s time for judgment. And what a judgment it was—the city of Jerusalem and the cherished Temple reduced to rubble, and the Jewish people scattered to the four winds for nearly 1900 years.

The picture in all these passages is consistent. Mankind, inclined to evil, rejects God’s will and pursues his own. In kindness and grace, God withholds punishment, giving mankind ample opportunity to come to his senses and repent, righting the wrongs that he has perpetrated. But he sees the apparent lack of punishment as “getting away with it,” and he accelerates down the slope of rebellion without compunction or restraint.

But God is just as well as merciful, and his compassionate mercy does not allow for perpetual unrighted injustice. A day of reckoning will surely come. The vessel of sin will eventually be full, and the time for justice will arrive. Wrong will be righted. The offender will be held to account.

Since God does not change, this principle applies to our culture as certainly as to any in the past. We live in a society that is rapidly filling up the measure of its sins—in its arrogance against God and his people, in its rejection of his wise design for sexual behavior, in its worship of all things temporal, in its love for violence, in its denial of justice to the poor and otherwise powerless and favoritism toward the powerful and favored.

God’s people can take comfort in the surety of coming justice, from a God who can execute it in ways far more just, pervasive, and thorough than anything we can devise for ourselves.

* For the nerds among my readers, I note that the verb “filled up” in 1 Thessalonians is anapleroo, the same verb in the Septuagint (LXX) of Gn 15.16. The verb in Daniel (LXX) and Matthew is pleroo.

Photo by Santiago Lacarta on Unsplash