Jared Longshore's Blog, page 18

The Sign Giver

Legalism can take on many forms. There’s the easily identifiable form of adding to God’s commands. Then, there is the legalism of holding to God’s actual commands in an attempt at self-justification. But, you might avoid both of those forms and still fall into the legalism of stripping God’s law from His hand. This frame of mind says, “Well, I just do what is right because it is right. Isn’t that enough?” Well, no, it is not enough. We love God’s law because it is good and because we love the law-giver.

The same principle holds true at this table. We love this sign because we love the Sign-Giver. And you must be sure to look through the sign to the Sign-Giver. The life you now live you live by faith and you will have no life at all apart from faith. The bread is not enough. The wine is not enough. The command to come indeed is potent and it is a command that converts the soul. But it must do that. It must convert the soul. The word, like the seed from the parable of the Sower, must find good soil. Only then will it yield a crop.

There is a way to go through life oblivious to the signs. You can allow that one way your wife has fallen short to take center stage, forgetting how many meals she has cooked you. You can focus on that one thing your husband didn’t do, while failing to see all of the sacrifices he has made for your family. And you can do the same here at this supper. Read the signs. This bread is the body of Christ broken for you. This wine is His blood shed for your sin. So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ.

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No Empty Promise

One of the kindnesses of God is that He has not left us without His Word. He testifies through creation, through the Scriptures, and through His Son. He has also delivered His Word through the sacrament of baptism. In baptism God announces that the old has gone and the new has come. He declares that we are buried with Christ in baptism and raised in Him to walk in newness of life. This Word from God is not an empty promise for the Father announces it by the Spirit, and it is confirmed in the Lord Jesus Christ in whom all the promises of God are yes and amen.

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Form and Freedom

Any good leader will tell you that you want both form and freedom in an organization. The form without freedom approach sucks all of the life out of the room. Yes, the table is set perfectly. But the spirit of this dinner is such that all you can hear is the clinking of forks on plates amid those deafening silences. Everything is indeed in its place. But you should have seen the lash employed to make it so. In the face of this error, the libertine in us wags a finger and insists that freedom will be championed and all of that crusty form forsaken. But the freedom without form approach results in mom cooking no dinner, dad bringing home no bacon, and little Johnny throwing the steak knives at his sister’s door.

So form and freedom together is the target. But hitting that target is not simply a matter of balance. The goal is not 50% form and 50% freedom, as if you were cooking some soup putting in a dash of one or the other. After all, if you only have 50% form, then you’re left with 50% disorder, and only 50% freedom means 50% slavery. Yes, form and freedom must go together but in a way that you are entirely free and entirely formed. You’re looking for 100% form and 100% freedom. Our LORD said, “if the Son sets you free you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). And the same God said, “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

This is not easy, of course, and we might want to echo the disciples who once said to our Lord, “This is a hard saying, who can hear it?” His reply to them at that time is fitting to this teaching as well. He said, “It is the spirit that quickens; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63).

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No Warrior Scolds

“And peace, Eustace. Do not scold, like a kitchen-girl. No warrior scolds. Courteous words or else hard knocks are his only language.”

C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle

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Harmony at the Table

Proverbs tells us that a dinner of herbs with love is better than a steak dinner with strife (Proverbs 15:17). And you have surely experienced this first hand. You have made all of the preparations for a lovely sabbath dinner, but then when coming to tuck in at the table all parties forgot to bring kindness with them. Or, you are out to a fine restaurant to celebrate an anniversary and it is as if the legions which went into the swine seemed to ruin your candle lit meal around that expensive piece of Wagyu beef.

The same holds true around this table. There is no greater feast in the world. But that does not change the fact that, if you come with something against your brother, then the whole thing becomes unsavory. If you come in unbelief, then what is sweet will be bitter to you.

Paul’s instruction is that we would be of one accord, which is to be harmonious. Harmony does not consist in everyone singing the same note. But the notes do have to get along. The notes must appreciate each other. They must recognize each other.

You may not struggle with the sins that beset the sopranos, and you may not always understand why the tenors do what they do. But you must at least appreciate that the sopranos are finite creatures like yourself and the LORD loves them as He loves you. Yes, you may not know what the tenors are up to but you can be grateful that they are up to it.

What you cannot do is be bent out of shape by those other voices, be that envy for their graces or strife when they’ve gone off key. The key to the freedom and harmony of any organism is our Prince of Peace who died to put an end to all of our fussing. So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ.

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Magnanimity Against the Void

Lewis really cracked the riddle when he said, “In battle it is not the syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.”[1] And amongst the logic teachers there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

In that same work, Lewis said that the head rules the belly through the chest. He was relying on the likes of Plato and Alan of Lille for the observation. Alan, a bit lesser known than Plato, was quite the thunderer in his day. Surrounded by homosexual practice back in 12th century France, he wrote—

“I see that the essential decrees of Nature are denied a hearing, while large numbers are shipwrecked and lost because of a Venus turned monster, when Venus wars with Venus and changes “hes” into “shes” and with her witchcraft unmans man. The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex. The witchcraft of Venus turns him into a hermaphrodite. He is subject and predicate.”

A little bit later, he made essentially the same points we find in Plato and Lewis, namely that man’s reason can only control his baser passions through the chest, that seat of the emotions which should be trained by habit into stable sentiments. This chest is depicted by Bunyan’s Great-Heart in Pilgrim’s Progress. It is also the vital thing missing in That Hideous Strength as a mere head plays its part in everything coming apart due to unchecked bellies.

Most of the problems we will hand to the next generation will not be a result of our lack of skill. It won’t be due to pedagogical ignorance or an absence of data. It will be due to our lack of character. To state the matter positively, most of the advantages we will pass on will not be because we have obtained the latest model for success. It will be due to our magnanimity. Magnanimity is contagious, as is vanity. We march from glory to glory, from weight to weight, from substance to substance. Or, we march from hollow to hollow, shallow to shallow, void to void, We are either going farther up and farther in or farther down and farther out.

So the battle we are in as one between men with chests and men without chests, and between chest builders and chest diminishers. 

The War We’re Really In

We’re in a war between substance and the void. Fruit and famine. It is not ultimately an intellectual battle or even a moral battle. Call it an ontological battle between true things, good things, beautiful things and the abyss without a bottom. That really is something isn’t it? This abyss without a bottom. One would think that the for an abyss to indeed be an abyss, it must have a bottom. But, alas, there is a hole without a floor, into which one falls without ever going thwack (Revelation 9:1).

Augustine helps get the point across. He spoke of sin as a privation, a lack, a void. There was, after all, no day upon which God made the goo of sin. Everything that He made was good. Evil, then, is the lack of such good things, or the twisting of them. We can mark several instances of our society falling into the void.

How do you feel after your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram scroll? Empty, that’s how you feel. The ladies have the same sense when they finish that hallmark movie around the holidays, you know that one called, “Mistletoe Mishap: Love’s Christmas Miracle.” The dollar is being hollowed out. Grades are being hollowed out. Consider this whopper, which details how GPAs have been climbing every decade since 1960 while students have simultaneously spent less and less time actually studying. Wombs are being hollowed out, too, with the birth rate dropping below “replacement rate.” We’re down around 1.7 children per woman. Last week’s presidential debate was a cringeworthy testimony that our politics is as empty as a desert’s rain gauge.

Supply Chain Issues 

How did we end up void of substance? Supply chain issues.

Man has been cut off from the heavens: We have bought into what Francis Schaeffer called the great dichotomy. We have left saving faith, and for that matter the Christian faith, in the upper story. Man resolves to live in the lower story by reason alone, the only instrument to be employed when considering matters of earth. But, this is a recipe for going mad, as Chesterton has well documented—”The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason . . . If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air.”[2]

Modern man is also cut off from others. The rise and triumph of the modern self has resulted in lonely man. He was so focused on who he really was on the inside he has lost touch with the people around him. He has also lost touch with the good things of creation. Robert Capon once said, “Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are.” But trouble comes when man merely diagrams: “Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make themunimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.”

Severed from the heavens, others, and the good things of creation, man also finds himself cut off from history. He has lost any notion of heritage and tradition, opting to tear down the statues of our fathers. You may think Alexis went to far, but he has a point when he writes, “Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”[3]

As things fall apart in our modern day Belbury, the magnanimous must labor to keep those supply chains functioning. For more on keeping the heavens supply chain open, read Escape from Reason. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self will aid the “others” supply chain. Capon’s Supper of the Lamb will remind you about the goodness of God’s created world. And Why Liberalism Failed can aid the history angle.

Keys to Magnanimity

We do, however, need to recover more fundamental principles, without which there will be no rebuilding the chest. Two brief leads for now:

First, pursue enlarged hearts. David prayed, “I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O LORD, put me not to shame. I will run they way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart” (Psalm 119:31-32). It is one thing to think about God’s commands and another thing to stick to them. David sounds like he’s out on a limb and could easily look like a fool, which is precisely where we end up when we actually stick to God’s commands. How much blood do you suppose the central organ was pumping through the body when the Son of Jesse walked in the valley of Elah with those five stones? And how about Abraham when he was halfway to that land he knew not, venturing out on God’s word alone? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? Daniel in the lions’ den? Moses pinned between the sea called red and Pharaoh’s chariots? There’s a reason men stay home and watch Netflix.

Second, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This faith is a key virtue, as you cannot develop any others apart from it. It is also radically misunderstood, in part due to a poor translation which calls faith the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen. It is one thing to be convicted of something and another thing to give evidence of it. You can be convicted that there are wheat fields in Idaho. But what good does that do for others? Now, if you provide evidence to others that there are wheat fields in Idaho, then they can come and harvest some of the grain. Faith is not simply a conviction. It is the evidence of unseen things. Wherever faith goes, unseen things will be seen. Likewise, it is one thing to have assurance that you will obtain a large piece of real estate in the mountains of Colorado. And it is another thing to have the substance of that real estate. Many Christians have reduced faith to mere assurance about what they will one day have, and with such a notion, it is not surprising that our civilization has come to rot. It is another thing entirely to see faith as the substance of those unseen things. 

After all, the kingdom of God was not in Canaan’s land before Abraham arrived there. The man of faith had not entered the land and the substance of the hoped for things was in him. But then the man of faith walked into that land of the giants and the substance of the kingdom with him.

[1] Lewis, Abolition of Man

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy

[3] Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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Baptistm: The Word of the Prophet

Christ is often called the King of Kings and He is likewise the Prophet of Prophets. He reveals truth to us and God’s will for our salvation. He speaks to us in baptism for He instituted this sacrament in which He signs and seals His covenant children in the Father’s love and salvation. That salvation is received by faith. And who are we to doubt it? Christ is the One who has promised. And He who has begun a good work in us will surely bring it to completion.

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The Unmanning of Man

As our society continues to stumble head over heels into the sexual abyss, we must be aware of the central play being run on us. It is not merely a cultural revolution. It is not merely an attempt to send our legal order base over apex. It is ultimately an attempt to unman man. We face an ontological anarchy that would erase the imago dei, if it could. Alan of Lille, the twelfth century French theologian, once said, “Large numbers are shipwrecked and lost because of a Venus turned monster, when Venus wars with Venus and changes “hes” into “shes” and with her witchcraft unmans man.” Alan was not referring to transgender surgeries, but homosexual practice. Such practice is itself a transgender activity as the active sex degenerates into the passive sex and man is turned woman.

Sodomy is fruitless, resulting in hollow wombs. It attempts to abolish man. By removing woman from the equation, man is stripped of his glory. His glory is discarded as entirely irrelevant. Men who engage in homosexual practice, then, are both misogynists, hating their glory, and effeminate, trying to be man’s glory.

Our answer to the work of this monstrous Venus is to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Christ came to deliver us from sexual corruption and constitute a new humanity. This involves men acting like men, leading, providing, sweating, protecting, and bearing the glory of God as they sacrifice themselves for their wives. And this involves women bounding around like that woman from Proverbs with more fruit than she has baskets, and more children than she has rooms, as her husband comes home to discover, not only has she purchased a field, but she has vines from the Rhone valley coming in on Tuesday, oh, and for dinner she’s turned the leftovers into Turkey Tetrazzini.

This new humanity is a pleasing aroma, and the prophets of Baal had a better chance of calling down fire on Carmel than the rainbow revolution does of snuffing it out.

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There’s Always Laughter

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,

There’s always laughter and good red wine.

At least I’ve always found it so.

Benedicamus Domino!

Hilaire Belloc, “The Catholic Sun”

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Like Tomatoes on the Vine

Children are like tomatoes on the vine. Tomatoes ripen when the sun shines upon them, and children ripen when their father’s face shines upon them. If you are looking for the central thing, it is this: Children go to slay giants when they know their father’s pleasure. Our Father in heaven not only knows this truth but has ordained it. So He assembles us one day in seven to reassure us of His love through bread and wine. Children, of course, get the sulks on occasion. They give ear to the snake’s hissing about “Did your Father really say?” And “How could He hold out you?” But it is remarkably hard to hold onto those lies when the Father is feeding you with a veritable feast.

While Lewis was right to get to mere Christianity, there is nothing mere about this meal. No matter how many times you come to partake, and no matter how may meditations you hear about this table, it remains a supper that cannot be captured with words or the human mind. It contains the uncontainable. It is food too large for your belly. The bread of which you eat is larger than the world itself and the wine sweeter than any you will find in an earthly vineyard. You come to a person now. But you can only come to Him now because He has first come to you. The Father is pleased with Him. And the Father is greatly pleased with you in Him. 

This truth liberates people from the shackles of fear, shame, and guilt that keep them keep them in immaturity. You indeed are free, as recipients of God’s pleasure, to carry that pleasure around with you wherever you go. It is the aroma of your Lord which is the savour of death to those who are perishing, and the savour of life to those who are being saved.

So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ.

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