Jon Bloom's Blog, page 19

Forgive Us Our What? Three Ways We Say the Lord’s Prayer

Do you know the most famous prayer on the planet? The prayer the most people on the street could recite portions of if asked? The prayer hundreds of millions of Christians of every stripe pray regularly and tens of millions of non-Christians have heard enough to repeat?

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:9–13)

Forgive Us Our What?

If you recite the Lord’s Prayer by memory with a group of people outside of your local church, I imagine things usually go pretty smoothly till you get to the fourth line. Some will say “forgive us our debts,” some will say “trespasses,” and others will say “sins.”

How we recite that phrase usually depends more on what English-speaking Christian tradition influenced us than what Bible translation we use. Those raised in Presbyterian or Reformed traditions are more likely to say “debts.” Those who come from Anglican/Episcopal, Methodist, or Roman Catholic traditions are more likely to say “trespasses.” Those whose churches were influenced by ecumenical liturgical movements of the late twentieth century are probably more likely to say “sins.”

So which word is the right one? Well, nearly all of the most credible English translations over time have translated the Greek words, opheilēma/opheiletēs, as “debts/debtors.” And that’s because in the New Testament and the Septuagint, these words almost always convey the meaning of owing a financial or moral debt or obligation.

In Luke’s version of the prayer, Jesus says, “and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4). In this case, the Greek word used for “sins” is hamartia, which in general means “sins” or “guilt.” But since it’s paired with opheilonti (“indebted to us”) it’s still clear that Jesus had the sense of debt in mind when referring to sin in the prayer he taught his disciples. So, saying “forgive us our sins” is not inaccurate; it just loses the nuance Jesus apparently intended.

But why do some Christian traditions say “trespasses”?

Just Read the Next Verse

If we just read down two verses we see one answer, because Jesus says,

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14–15)

The very first thing Jesus did after reciting this prayer is expound on the importance of forgiveness. And to really drive home what he meant, he purposefully chose a different word for sin with a different nuance than the one he used in the prayer. Matthew chose the Greek word paraptōma to capture Jesus’s intention in these verses, which in the context means a kind of sin that oversteps prescribed limits or boundaries — what we call a “trespass.”

Jesus wanted his disciples (including us) to understand sin in both the sense of owing a debt and the sense of trespassing into territory that doesn’t belong to us.

But that still doesn’t explain why some English Christian traditions use the word “trespasses” when Jesus’s actual prayer used the word “debts.”

William Tyndale’s Legacy

We have William Tyndale to thank for this. Tyndale (1494–1536) was the great English reformer who first translated the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek texts. Even though both Greek and Latin New Testaments used words in Matthew 6:12 that meant “debt,” and earlier church fathers (like Augustine) and translators (like Wycliffe) used “debt” language in this verse, for some reason Tyndale preferred “trespasses” (“and forgeve us oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them which treaspas us”).

Why he preferred this translation when few before or after him did is only speculation. He published his English New Testament in 1526 against the will and law of Henry VIII, and then lived in mortal danger only ten more years till he was betrayed by a friend and executed for his translation crimes. He didn’t live long enough to make many revisions. And his preference didn’t leave its mark long in the legacy of translations — by 1611, the translators of the King James Version went back to using “debts.”

However, it certainly has left its mark in the legacy of English Christian liturgies. “Trespasses” first appeared in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and as of the 1979 edition it was still being used. It became so pervasive that English Catholic churches also adopted it and they still use it, even though when prayed in Latin, the “Pater Noster” (“Our Father”) uses “debt/debtor” language (debita/debitoribus).

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

That’s why a portion of our praying group says “trespasses” when we recite the Lord’s Prayer together. And the next time it happens, we can thank God for William Tyndale, because he gave his life that we might have our English Bibles.

And though “debts” is the more accurate translation of Matthew 6:12, God does want us to keep “trespasses” in our minds when praying, especially we twenty-first-century Westerners.

Our modern understanding of “debt” might dull the edge this word had for Jesus’s original hearers. We hear it through the filters of our experience, which is different from Jesus’s audience and most of our human ancestors. Debtors’ prisons are an archaic thing of the unenlightened past, and we don’t have kings throwing us into them (Matthew 18:23–35). We have merciful bankruptcy laws that protect us in ways inconceivable to past generations. So “debt” might not carry for us the sense of threat it did for them.

But trespassing hits us differently, especially when someone commits it against us. A trespasser occupies a realm or exercises a right that rightfully belongs to someone else. A trespasser violates another person. This can be very damaging. In fact, it can rise to the level of treason, and result in a sentence of capital punishment.

This is what happened in the garden of Eden and what we have all done since. We have not merely borrowed from God an unpayable debt for which we appeal for bankruptcy protection. We have seized a realm and exercised a right that belongs to him. We have violated God. We have committed a treasonous trespass, and we owe the debt of treason: death (Romans 6:23).

And what Jesus has done, for those of us who trust him, is pay that terrible debt completely. And what he’s requiring of us is to forgive others who have occupied a realm and exercised a right that belongs to us, who have violated us — since we have been forgiven a far worse violation.

So if “trespasses” hits closer to home for us than “debts,” it does no violence to Jesus’s meaning if we pray, Father, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lord, Revive My First Love

In 1677, twenty-seven-year-old Henry Scougal wrote this to a friend: “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love” (The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 20). It is among the most penetrating sentences in the English language (or any language).

It is a devastating sentence. It lays us bare. For, as John Piper says,

The soul is measured by its flights,

Some low and others high,

The heart is known by its delights,

And pleasures never lie. (The Pleasures of God, 4)

Pleasures never lie. We can fool ourselves and others in many ways, but pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart, because pleasure is the measure of our treasure. We know that what we truly treasure is what we truly love because Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). So it’s “not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want [that] reveals our excellence or evil” (The Pleasures of God, 4). Pleasure is the joy we experience over a treasure we love that makes us willing to sell everything else to have it (Matthew 13:44).

Henry Scougal was wonderfully, devastatingly, biblically right: the object of our love, the treasure we passionately want, measures the worth and excellency of our souls.

Search Me, O God

If we agree with Scougal, his penetrating sentence forces us to do some soul-searching. What do our pleasures really tell us about what we love? What do our loves tell us about the condition of our souls? What do we passionately want?

These are necessary questions, but the truth is, our own introspection and self-evaluation are typically not enough. We are usually poor physicians for our own souls, often failing to see the root causes or symptoms clearly. We swing from thinking far too highly of ourselves one moment to beating ourselves down with condemnation the next.

What we really need is to allow — to invite — Jesus to search our souls. We need the diagnosis and treatment of the Great Physician. We need to come to him and say with David,

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23–24)

What Jesus Asks of Us

Jesus is the master soul-searcher. It’s what he did with Peter after their post-resurrection seaside breakfast (John 21:15–19). Just days before, Peter had tragically failed to love Jesus, denying that he even knew Jesus three times. And so that morning, after lovingly serving him a meal on the beach, Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” He asked this question three times.

Jesus accomplishes so much in this brief, but life-altering conversation. We watch him beautifully restore, commission, and prophesy over Peter. But we also see him expose Peter. Peter’s denials were real and horrible failures. Jesus repeating his question three times wasn’t merely to allow Peter to affirm his love for every denial. He was also probing deep into Peter’s soul, into the painful place of shame, and calling forth a love stronger than before, one that would endure the future opportunity for Peter to fulfill his pledge to lay his life down for Jesus (John 13:37). I think Peter’s grief after the third question is evidence that Jesus was hitting home (John 21:17).

Have We Lost Our First Love?

And we, like Peter, have also failed to love Jesus. Perhaps we have denied him publicly at times. We certainly have denied him thousands of times privately, choosing to pursue other treasures because we believed they held greater pleasures. These failures are real and horrible — worse than we might realize.

The question is, how true is this now? Are we living in failure, allowing the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of sin to choke out our love for Jesus (Matthew 13:22; Hebrews 3:13)? Have we grown accustomed to talking abstractly and dutifully about loving Jesus while passionately wanting and pursuing other things? Have we given ourselves permission to consider our lack of love for Jesus to be normal because lots of other Christians seem content living this way?

If so, if our pleasures are blowing the whistle that our hearts are not enthralled with Jesus, that we don’t love him supremely, it’s time to come to him and repent and invite him to search our hearts and ask us his probing question, “Do you love me?”

Whatever It Takes, Lord

The wonderful thing is that we don’t need to be afraid, for Jesus knows exactly where we’re at, just like he knew where Peter was at. He knows our failures to love him. He knows that they are sin. But he also knows his death and resurrection purchased the full forgiveness of those sins and the power for us to be changed from lukewarm to white-hot lovers of God. And he wants this for us — he’s eager to give it to us!

Our Lord Jesus,

We confess our horrible failures to love you. Our pleasures have not lied, and they reveal how we have not pursued the triune God as our greatest treasure. We don’t want another day to pass allowing our love for you to languish in a tepid place in our hearts.

So we ask you, Great Physician, to come search our souls and know our hearts. We present them to you; address every grievous way in us. Ask your probing questions. We will hold nothing from you. Do whatever it takes to revive our love for you! We do not want to give our souls rest until you are our first love (Revelation 2:4).

We want this more than anything: to love the triune God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength (Matthew 22:37). We believe the greatest affection is love, and we believe you are the greatest object of our love (1 Corinthians 13:13). And we believe we’ll never be happier and the excellence and worth of our souls will never be greater than when we love you supremely. For you are the wellspring of all that is truly life (1 Timothy 6:19; John 14:6).

So we ask you to revive our love for you, O Lord, whatever it takes. And we ask it in your name, Jesus, and for your glory, Amen.

What the Devil Doesn’t Want You to Know

Here is a truth the devil really doesn’t want you to know: the commands of God are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). The devil wants you to believe God’s commands are torturously burdensome and the death of your happiness. The devil wants you to believe that God is withholding joy from you in the limitations he places on you.

But that is the insidious photonegative of reality. The commands of God are only liberating, especially in their limitations. What the devil knows, and we often fail to see at first, is that trespassing beyond God’s merciful limits is not the freedom of self-determination — it’s selling ourselves into bondage. Whenever we obey a command of God in faith, he sets us free or keeps us free from the blinding, oppressive, destructive slavery of sin and increases our capacity for joy. The commands of God are not burdensome; they are the narrow gate to life and true freedom (Matthew 7:13–14; John 8:32).

And the greatest of all of God’s commandments is that we love him with our whole being (Matthew 22:37–38). It’s the greatest commandment because it is the fountainhead of all the others. It is the very heart of every other joy-producing commandment, and the only way we can faithfully obey those commandments (Matthew 22:40).

Doorway to Love

Oh, but the great commandment is so much more! It opens for us a world of unparalleled and fathomless beauty. For the greatest affection we can ever experience is love (1 Corinthians 13:13), and the greatest love we can ever experience is love for God. And we can only experience this greatest love because the greatest Lover loved us with an infinitely greater love first (John 15:13; 1 John 4:19). From the wellspring of God’s love for us, and our reciprocal love for him, flows the capacity to love everyone else (1 John 4:7; Matthew 22:39).

This greatest of all commandments opens the door to the heaven of heavens — what Jonathan Edwards described as “a world of love” — where we experience the fulfillment of our deepest longings: the fullest joy and pleasures forever (Psalm 16:11). In keeping this commandment there is truly a great reward (Psalm 19:11).

It is a horrible, wicked, demonic deception if we hear in this commandment a narcissistic, insecure, tyrannical God who simply insists he be highest in our affections or to hell with us. I have no doubt this is how the devil views God. But that is the devil’s own evil heart projected onto God, and the distorted view he wishes everyone else to believe. For the pure see God as pure, but the crooked — the devil and all who follow his deception — see God as tortuous (Psalm 18:26).

Yes, hell exists. But it is not a sadistic cosmic Auschwitz created by a divine despot. It is the great and just woe reserved for those who call the greatest good the greatest evil by judging God to be tortuous and choosing the bondage of sin over “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Isaiah 5:20; Romans 8:21).

No, in commanding us to love him most, God is bidding us to enter the door of heaven. He is commanding our greatest happiness! He is commanding that we receive and treasure the most valuable Treasure, that we experience the deepest satisfaction in the most satisfying Person, that we most enjoy the most Enjoyable, that we trust most the most Trustworthy. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to obey this commandment? It is 200-proof Christian Hedonism.

Rescued from Insanity

Such is the insanity and tragedy of sin. All of us have disobeyed this commandment and refused heaven, preferring the empty, destructive deception of self-determination (Romans 3:23). And therefore, we could all be sentenced to the great and just woe of being sent away from the presence of heaven forever (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

But that was not what God wanted. God wanted mercy to triumph over justice for us (James 2:13). God wanted grace to triumph over condemnation for us (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 8:1). God wanted his love to triumph over our hate (Romans 5:8). Therefore, God showed his love for us by sending “his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” so that we “should not perish but have eternal life” (1 John 4:10; John 3:16). This is love! This is how much he loved you.

Without the cross, the greatest commandment would be the sentence of death to us. All it could produce in us is terrifying condemnation. For sinners can never love the triune God with all their being. Hell would be our destiny. But through the cross of Jesus, this commandment becomes pure gospel to us. For when we receive Christ, his perfect love for his Father is credited to us!

And that means heaven, that expansive world of love, is now open to us. We can receive foretastes of it now in increasing measure as we walk by the Spirit (Romans 8:4). And when the Lord Jesus finally sees us “safely into his heavenly kingdom,” we will receive the ability to fulfill this command and experience the full range of its soul-satisfying benefits (2 Timothy 4:18).

God Wants Your Love

It is also pure gospel to us that God’s greatest commandment does not command our performance, but our affection. Isn’t that wonderful? God is most concerned that we experience the joy of love, not that we merely jump through behavioral hoops.

The glorious secret of Christian obedience, that gracious divine conspiracy, is that the more we experience this joy of being loved by God and loving him in return, the less his behavioral commandments feel anything like hoops for us. Rather, they become our joyful means of expressing our love for God as he mercifully shepherds us through the narrow gate.

That’s why Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). These are not the manipulative words of a dysfunctional father meant to guilt his children into doing what he wants. Jesus was revealing a glorious reality: love is the only motivation for our obedience that God wants. God wants us to obey him out of love, not fear of condemnation (1 John 4:18). Because he knows that when we love him, his commands are not burdensome.

Hear God’s Love in His Commands

The devil does not want you to know or believe any of this. He wants you to hear drudgery and boredom and bondage in God’s commands, especially the greatest command.

But God wants you to hear his love in his commands, especially his greatest command. God wants you to hear life in his commands. God wants you to know that his commands, which Jesus has already kept perfectly for you, now form the faith-path for your hard trek through this valley of shadow to the narrow gate that leads to life. And this gate will open to you the most expansive world of joy you will ever know: heaven, God’s world of love.

Be True to Yourself

God delights when truth reigns in our inmost being (Psalm 51:6).

But I don’t always delight in the truth. I most certainly should, but honestly I don’t. Sometimes I feel about seeking the truth like I feel about seeking the dentist. The truth might (or perhaps I already know will) expose some decay. Decay needs to be drilled out. And who wants that?

Well, if I’m wise, I should want that. But wisdom isn’t always the most persuasive voice in my head. Sometimes pride is. And my pride is anything but wise. When my pride is speaking to me, it encourages me to seek my selfish interests above God’s. More bluntly, my pride prefers a deceptive illusion of self-advancement or self-exaltation or self-protection to God’s exposing, humbling, but ultimately merciful and liberating truth — which is utter foolishness, because that’s preferring the destruction of my greatest joy over the pursuit of my greatest joy.

So, dishonesty is almost always a form of pride. Unless our aims are things like hiding Jews from the Gestapo, victims from human traffickers, or a child from an abuser, there’s no reason for us to be dishonest except to control and manipulate someone else’s perception for our own selfish interests.

Pride prefers deception to truth, and does not realize by doing so it prefers destruction. But God desires truth in our inmost being, because he knows that his truth will set us truly free (John 8:32).

God Loves Honesty

God is truth (John 14:6), so he loves honesty. That’s why he tells us (through David), “Blessed is the man . . . in whose spirit there is no deceit” (Psalm 32:2). David knew both the blessedness of honesty and the wretchedness of dishonesty. He wrote,

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah. (Psalm 32:3–5)

When David was dishonest with God and men, it was like a wasting disease. When he came clean with God and men, it was health and refreshment to his soul.

This is what God wants us to have: health and refreshment to our souls. It is a great mercy when God rests his hand heavy upon us because we are living dishonestly. And the longer we walk with him, the more rigorously he demands we live truthfully before him. He wants truth to reign in every part of us because he wants us to enjoy full freedom — to increasingly know him. And we can never really know God until we are willing to be truthful with him and for him.

Honesty Is Just the Beginning

God loves honesty. But honesty is often just the beginning of living truthfully. Because being honest doesn’t necessarily mean we believe what is true. It merely means we speak and live consistently with what we do believe — however consistent or inconsistent what we believe is with reality.

Honesty is being true to one’s actual convictions. But one’s actual convictions might not be true. It is possible for us to be honest and wrong at the same time.

In fact, the relief of finally being honest, even if what we are being honest about is wrong, can feel emancipating. We’ve all experienced or witnessed this. When someone who has been secretly struggling with homosexuality finally comes out and embraces it, it often feels wonderful and freeing. Or when someone who has professed faith in Christ secretly stops believing the reality of Christianity, it can be a great relief to finally admit it and stop pretending. Or when a spouse has secretly been committing adultery, it can feel liberating to bring it out into the open, even if they are not repentant. What each of these people experiences is a sense of being true to themselves, even if what they actually believe isn’t true and right.

We are made to live with integrity — where our inner beings align with our outer beings. That makes honesty the beginning of the real work. God does want us to be honest, even when what we really believe is not good. It’s better to be honest than deceptive. But that’s not the honesty God is after — to honestly believe something that’s false. That kind of honesty won’t set us free. Truth is what sets us free. God’s truth. The God who is the truth.

Honest to God

God delights when truth reigns in our inmost being (Psalm 51:6). And Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). It is Jesus — not our disordered and broken psyches, desires, bodies, and pasts — that determines who we are and how we should live. He is the truth and the way. We cannot really be true to ourselves until our selves derive their identity, purpose, and destiny from the Father through Jesus.

Being honest to God is openly admitting who we really are and no longer living out of the fear of man. But it is more than that. It is repenting of the pride that has fueled our deceptive ways of living, whatever that might mean. And it is laying down before our merciful King Jesus all our old, sinful, defective beliefs about what it means to be significant and worthy and “enough.” And it is embracing his truth, however difficult and painful that embrace might feel at first.

What God is after in this truly honest surrender is to give us the greatest joy possible: himself. He wants to align our inner beings and our outer beings with his being. And this alignment only happens when we lay aside our foolish pride and humble ourselves under his mighty hand (1 Peter 5:6), for he knows how and when to exalt us in ways that will blow our minds and increase our joy — in him.

He Will Restore Your Soul

King David wrote Psalm 22 and Psalm 23, but if we weren’t told that, we might not believe it. These two ancient songs of the faith are about as different as they could be. The first few verses of each psalm capture its tone. Here are the first two verses of Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. (Psalm 22:1–2)

Now, read the first three verses of Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. (Psalm 23:1–3)

In Psalm 22, David feels forsaken by an unresponsive God. In Psalm 23, David feels shepherded by an ever-attentive God. In Psalm 22, David’s soul is in restless agony. In Psalm 23, David’s soul is restored to a trust-fueled rest in the Good Shepherd’s care.

Two Perspectives on Reality

It is a beautiful and merciful providence that these two starkly different psalms are placed right next to each other, authored by the same person. Because they illustrate the diverse ways we experience the strange reality that is the life of faith in our world. If we live long enough, we all experience the occasional agonizing phenomenon of God’s apparent silence. And we all will also experience God’s kind restoration, peace, and protection. In fact, we eventually come to realize that what felt like abandonment was a merciful nearness and shepherding of a kind we hadn’t previously understood or perceived. We discover that God’s promises are infinitely more substantial and reliable than our perceptions.

But there’s an even deeper beauty and mercy in this poetic and thematic juxtaposition. Both psalms are messianic — they foreshadow and prophesy of Jesus. And in this profound realization, we discover that the order in which these psalms appear is no accident.

Jesus Was Forsaken

We know Psalm 22:1. Its first sentence is among the most famous in the Bible. For Jesus screamed them out while in unfathomable agony on the cross: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? (Matthew 27:46).

Stop and think over this sentence. Delve into it as deep as you can. You will never get to the bottom of it.

There was a moment, at the crux of history, when God was God-forsaken. To we who are not God, and who are only able to experience a few dimensions of reality, this is mysterious. But it was not a mystery; it was horrifyingly real. God the Son, the eternal delight of the Father, the radiance of the Father’s glory, the exact imprint of the Father’s nature, and the Father’s earthly visible image (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:15) became in that incomprehensively dark moment unholy sin — our unholy sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). And while that moment lasted, the holy Father and the Holy Spirit could not abide the holy Son made unholy. God became the object of God’s wrath. A terrible, once-for-all-time fissure rent open between the Father and Son.

For Jesus, it was a truly hellish moment, which is why, in the words of R.C. Sproul, Jesus’s Psalm 22:1 scream “was the scream of the damned. For us.” Out of a love for us we have hardly begun to fathom, he took upon himself our damnable curse, becoming the propitiation for our sins (Galatians 3:13; 1 John 4:10). And he did it for us so that our curse would be eternally removed and we might become the objects of God’s eternal mercy, clothed forever with the holiness and righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Psalm 22 does far more than give us words to pray during our seasons of spiritual desolation. It gives us words to grasp the desolation God the Son experienced to purchase our peace and restoration.

So That You Will Never Be Forsaken

This restoration, the great messianic restoration, is what made David sing for joy in Psalm 23. The Good Shepherd, having laid his life down for the sheep (John 10:11), gives his sheep eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will be able to snatch them out of his hand (John 10:28).

No one. Not “death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” the great Shepherd of the sheep — even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Romans 8:38–39; Hebrews 13:20; Psalm 23:4).

Our great Shepherd has walked through this valley before us and for us. In this valley, he was stricken and afflicted, betrayed, beaten to a bloody pulp, and brutally crucified by evil. He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5). He was smitten and forsaken by God (Isaiah 53:4; Psalm 22:1).

And he did this for us so that he might say to us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5).

He Will Restore Your Soul

In this world we will have tribulation (John 16:33). The Bible’s portrayal of tribulation is realistically horrible. Psalm 22 is a description of David’s tribulation, and it was severe. But it is also a description of Jesus’s tribulation, which was infinitely more severe than David’s — or ours.

Do you feel forsaken by God? Jesus understands. He truly understands more than you know. We can feel forsaken by God; Jesus was forsaken by God. We feel lonely; Jesus was, for a horrible moment, truly alone. As our Great High Priest, he is able to sympathize with us in all our weaknesses, since he was tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

But Jesus does far more than sympathize with us. As our great sacrificial Lamb, he atoned for every sin we commit in all our weak, faithless stumbling, removing our curse forever by becoming our curse. And as our great Shepherd, he is leading us through every tribulation — no matter how severe — to eternal restoration.

That is the promise of Psalm 23, purchased by the price of Psalm 22: your Good Shepherd will restore your soul forever. He was forsaken by God, scorned and mocked by men, and his hands and feet were pierced (Psalm 22:1, 6–7, 16) for your sake. So that he could guide you through every evil valley, honor you before every evil enemy, pursue you with goodness and mercy every day of your earthly life, and bring you to live with him in his house forever (Psalm 23:4–6).

Psalm 22 may be your song for a brief night, but Psalm 23 will be your song for an eternal morning (Psalm 30:5).

How (Not) to Read Next Year

Are you thinking through your reading goals for the new year? I don’t ask in order to compound your sense of guilt with one more thing you should do. I ask because you’re going to read lots and lots of things next year whether you plan to or not. And if you don’t decide to choose what you will read, others will choose for you.

The amount of information that will inundate you next year through an unmanageable number of communication channels is only going to increase. If you don’t give some strategic thought to what you will and will not read, large amounts of your life will be eaten up next year reading demanding, urgent-sounding, trivial, or peripheral things, and you’ll hardly notice how much time they consume. You’ll simply get to next December and wonder where all the time went and why you managed to read so little of what you wish you had read.

“Do Not Read” Principles for the New Year

If we don’t want that to be the case, we must make some sort of plan. But sometimes stating things negatively provides a different kind of clarity than stating things positively. So, I have compiled a list of “do not read” principles for 2018 in hopes that you might find it helpful.

Do not not read books.

Most of what will demand your reading attention next year will be articles, blogs, posts, tweets, bites, and ads. The vast majority of these will be ephemeral and a waste of precious time. Some will be very helpful, but short-form writing can never replace long-form writing in the form of books. Good books develop and exposit big ideas and lines of reasoning in enriching, informing, comprehension-expanding ways short-form is simply unable to do. Neglecting to read books is to allow your attention, deep thinking, and reflection capacities to atrophy.

Do not neglect to read The Book.

God wrote a book. In it are the words of eternal life (John 6:68). At the end of the day, this is the only must read you need to heed. This is “no empty word for you”; it is “your very life” (Deuteronomy 32:47). Keep looking at this book. If you look carefully, you will see more glory, and be infused with more hope, and ultimately feel more joy than any other thing you will read next year.

Do not read like the phenoms.

Theodore Roosevelt, while President of the United States, read a book every day before breakfast and often a couple more during the day. Charles Spurgeon often read 6 books a week, while pastoring a mega-church, overseeing dozens of organizations, writing 500 letters, and preaching up to ten times during that same week. And these men lived without most of the technological aids we consider essential for productivity.

View them with admiration and awe, but do not make them your reading models. They were to reading what Usain Bolt is to sprinting: genetic phenoms. Unless you too are in the top 1% of humanity, you will not be able to do what they did without letting other aspects of your life fall into criminal neglect. Know yourself and set reasonable reading goals.

Do not read too fast.

Remember how your mother told you to “slow down and chew your food”? Chewing well is important for good digestion. The same principle applies to reading. Information overload is conditioning us all to eat words too fast. Slow down and chew your food.

Do not read too much.

If eating too fast is a problem, so is eating too much. Now, statistically speaking, reading too many books is not a problem for most of us. But with all the articles, blogs, social media posts, emails, and texts competing for our reading attention, reading too much is a problem for most of us. If we eat too much junk food, we won’t have an appetite for nourishing food. And eating too much in general reduces our ability to enjoy what we do eat. Reading is not a quantity contest. It is an issue of soul nourishment.

Sometimes, do not read at all.

We all need to leave the world of written words and walk through the living library of the world around us. We must look and ponder, listen, and wonder. We must smell and, as Chesterton said, marvel at the God who thought up noses. Feel the texture-filled world and let sun, wind, and rain wash our faces. And engage in person with real persons and love them. Each person is a rich, complex living story that God has given us to study and know.

Do not read to impress others.

Don’t choose books or set reading goals to gain someone else’s approval, or posture and flex like a weight room show-off, or even just to appear within some respectable relative range. Reading for the sake of others’ perception will set you on the wrong course and suck the joy out of reading. This sort of reading isn’t of faith and therefore displeases God (Hebrews 11:6). Read to gain wisdom and understanding (Proverbs 16:16) and for the sake of joy (Psalm 119:111)! Read to make your heart burn with love and longing for God.

Do not read only in your narrow interests.

On the other hand, pay attention to what others are reading — not to impress them, but because you care about them. What is your spouse interested in? Your child? Your friend? Your pastor? Your co-worker? Read something about it. There is a world of glorious things outside the small circle of your familiarity. Explore! Read a book or thoughtful article that will help you see more than you do now. A humble mind knows how small and limited it is.

Do not read boring books — unless you’re required to.

While it’s good to try and broaden your interests, if you get a third or halfway into a book and just can’t engage either topically or because it’s poorly written, move on. We learn little when reading is drudgery.

But do not avoid reading difficult books.

“Boring” is not the same as “difficult.” Some books are mines of gold that require the hard work of digging. We learn little when reading is drudgery, but we can learn much when digging is required to discover gold. If credible sources tell you a mine has gold, put your back into it.

Do not read things that make you feel hopeless.

If the way you’re wired or your past experiences cause you to go into a spiritual tailspin when reading certain kinds of unnecessarily skeptical, cynical, or hope-draining fiction or nonfiction, don’t read them. Gifted believers such as Francis Schaeffer, Ravi Zacharias, R.C. Sproul, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Nancy Pearcey, William Lane Craig, and other gifted believers have been a despair guide for how I process skepticism. Perhaps you might push yourself, but you must know yourself. Read mainly to strengthen your faith in, boost your hope in, increase your love for God.

Grow in your not reading skills.

What you read will shape you. It will shape not only what you think, but how you think. Your life is short. You can only read a relatively small amount in the time you have. You will have to neglect reading far more than you will ever be able to read. So, resolve this year to increase your skill in how not to read.

Into the Darkness He Came

Into the world, on a nondescript night, in a small town grown weary with oppression and centuries of unfulfilled prophetic expectation, in an obscure shelter no one would have thought to look for him, in the care of poor, nonresident parents, came God the Son.

It was his incarnation, but not his origin. He had preexisted his conception. He preexisted the entire world (John 17:5). Everything in existence, visible and invisible, had been made through him and for him (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16), including,

His own human DNA that instructed each cell to perform its duty in forming a body and brain,
His mother’s blood and amniotic fluid wadding his fine, dark hair,
The startle reflex that would wake him crying,
The cotton spun into the swaddling cloths binding his infant arms and legs to subdue that startle reflex,
The trees that provided the manger’s wood now supporting him,
The bone-tired, very sore, sleeping young mother next to him who had just given him birth,
The exhausted, attentive, awed young man he would learn to call “Father,” now stoking the fire,
The mystified shepherds making their way from the fields,
The herald angels who rang the Bethlehem sky with good news of great joy,
And the strange star drawing strange Persian astrologers to adore him.

As he lay there, looking very much like any other Jewish baby born that night, he was “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). As his truly human nature slept like a baby, his truly divine nature was holding all things in existence together (Colossians 1:17).

Into Darkness He Came

Into the world came God the Son, because God the Father had so loved the perishing people populating the cursed, satanically-terrorized planet (John 3:16; 1 John 5:19). The people — we the people — were perishing because we had rejected and rebelled against the Father, and, in rejecting the Father, we rejected the Son and the Spirit also.

In rejecting our holy triune Creator, we became sons and daughters of disobedience, following the course of this world and the prince of the power of the air, living in the passions of our flesh and carrying out the desires of our bodies and minds, becoming children of wrath by nature and destined for eternal destruction (Ephesians 2:2–3; 2 Thessalonians 1:9).

But God

But God . . . but God the Father, being rich in mercy and loving us with a love so great we can barely conceive of it, even when we were dead in our trespasses against him, sent his only begotten Son — his eternally beloved Son — into this evil world to rescue us from our eternal spiritual death and make us eternally alive (Ephesians 2:4–5).

And the Son so loved the Father and so loved us, whom he had created, that he humbled himself and became human flesh so that he could bear our sins in his body on the cross, that we might not perish but have eternal life (Philippians 2:7–8; John 1:14; 1 Peter 2:24; John 3:16).

The Son came to pursue our salvation to the uttermost because his great desire and his Father’s great desire was that we would be with him forever and experience fullness of joy and eternal pleasures as we see him in all his divine glory — which we were always designed to be most satisfied in (Hebrews 7:25; John 17:24; Psalm 16:11). And in the coming ages, when this valley of shadow has passed away and he has wiped away every tear from our eyes, and death and mourning and crying and pain is no more, the Father will show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:7; Revelation 21:4).

O Come Let Us Adore Him

That’s why God the Son came into the world.

It’s why he was born to simple peasants,
Why a feeding trough was his first bed,
Why shepherds were the first to worship him,
Why pagan Gentiles were also invited to worship him,
Why he was raised in Nazareth,
Why his own people rejected him (John 1:11),
Why, after preaching a gospel of grace and healing the sick and delivering the demonized and raising the dead, he was betrayed by a close friend, denied and abandoned by the rest of his closest friends, falsely accused by the religious leaders, handed over to Gentile oppressors, and brutally crucified in the most humiliating way,
And why he was raised from the dead on the third day.

God the Son came into the world to fully bear our reproach as sons and daughters of sinful disobedience that we might be qualified to be adopted as sons and daughters of God and share with the Son, the preeminent Firstborn, every spiritual blessing of his eternal, infinite, glorious inheritance (Colossians 1:12, 18; Ephesians 1:3–6).

Come. Come away from the complexities and confusion and clutteredness of Christmas. Come to the simple manger, come to the brutal cross, and come to the empty tomb. Come and receive again the good news of great joy that is now for all people and all peoples (Luke 2:10): the works of Satan and the power of death he wielded has been destroyed (1 John 3:8; Hebrews 2:14), sin’s slavery has been broken (Romans 6:17–18), and the free gift of eternal life is yours in Christ Jesus if you will believe in him (Romans 6:23; John 3:16).

“O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.”

You Are Not Obligated to Give Gifts This Year

Christmas gift giving can, and should, be a wonderful experience — but too often it’s full of relational complexities instead of wonder. We all would want love to be the motivation behind our gifts, but if we’re honest, other motivations often muddy the waters.

Like other people’s expectations, for example. We often give gifts because we fear disappointing or offending others. We can feel obligated to give certain people a certain number of gifts at or above a certain financial threshold. Motivations like these distort Christmas gifts into appeasement offerings.

And then, of course, we have our own expectations. The kind and quantity of gifts we give others and expect from others can have more to do with us than them. Maybe we use gifts to recapture nostalgic Christmas experiences of our past, or to pursue ideal experiences we feel we’ve missed out on. Or maybe our gift exchanges have more to do with generational traditions than the real people we’re giving to. Or maybe we errantly believe our value and others’ value correspond to the expense or quantity of gifts we give and receive.

These motivational currents make for muddy Christmas waters, and they are strong in our culture. The powerful American Christmas economy is, I suspect, driven more by fear, obligation, manipulation, and personal preference than good will toward men.

To whatever degree this is true for us, it need not remain true for us. Change is possible, even this year. Gifts can once again become wonderful. For God has shown us a more excellent way.

God Shows Us How to Give Gifts

That more excellent way is found in the most famous verse in the Bible: “God so loved the world, that he gave . . . ” (John 3:16). Stop there and linger for a moment. God so loved that he gave. God is revealing something profound here. What’s the connection between love and giving? It is the very nature of love to give. And since God is love, it is the very nature of God to give (1 John 4:8). Love expressed is love given. Love given is true gift.

Now let’s complete that most famous verse: “ . . . that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). If love expressed is love given, supreme love expressed is supreme love given. If love given is true gift, supreme love given is the greatest of all true gifts.

This is the glory of John 3:16: supreme love giving the greatest possible gift. God can give no greater gift than himself. And there is no greater love than someone giving away his life, his most precious earthly possession, to those he loves (John 15:13). So, when God gave his eternal Son, Jesus, to become sin for us lost sinners (2 Corinthians 5:21) and pay our debt in full (Colossians 2:14) so that we might have God eternally (John 3:16; 1 Peter 3:18), supreme love was expressed in the greatest gift ever given.

This is almost unbelievably glorious. But God wants you to hear just how personal this gift is. When God loves “the world,” he’s not loving an abstraction. He loves individual persons. He loves you. He wants you to know he loves you. God so loved you that he gave his Son for you so that he could give his Son, and the Holy Spirit, and himself to you forever, along with all his overflowing love gifts of the new creation.

Why It Is More Blessed to Give

With this in mind, we can better understand what Jesus meant when he said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). This was no altruistic platitude or “prosperity seed” promising a future material harvest for the giver. Jesus was clueing us into the secret of volcanic divine joy.

Love is the greatest affection in the heart of God and the greatest affection we can ever experience (1 Corinthians 13:13). To truly love is to experience what God enjoys most and what actually brings us most joy.

And here’s the secret: love can’t help but overflow in giving because love expressed is love given; love given is true gift. Giving is love consummated. Love unable to give is love stifled. Just like enjoyment isn’t complete until it is expressed in praise, love isn’t complete until it is expressed in giving joy to the beloved.

That’s why “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Giving is the consummation of love. But the receiver is not at a blessing-disadvantage, for he can reciprocate by giving love in return and so also be “more blessed.” Love given and received, given back and received, on and on, results in greater, amplified joy in the mutual giving and receiving.

What Love Wants to Give

This makes a gift given out of love a different species than a gift given out of fear, obligation, selfish expectation, or manipulation — even if the gift item itself isn’t different. Love wants to give the receiver joy. Love experiences joy in meeting the receiver’s need or fulfilling the receiver’s desire.

Other motivations want to give gifts in order to appease or impress or assuage guilt or maintain equitable reciprocity with the receiver. But love is motivated by the receiver’s enjoyment and so gives without expecting in return.

And love gives far more than thoughtful, beautifully wrapped gifts. Love gives the gift of patience when Christmas celebrations don’t go as planned. Love gives the gift of kindness when holiday tempers flare, insensitive comments are spoken, and expectations are disappointed. Love gives the gift of not envying those whose Christmases seem happier, not boasting over social media with a picture-perfect (and misleading) holiday moment, not seeking its own way in a group decision over a holiday leisure activity, not being irritable with adrenalized children or crabby relatives, and not carrying resentment over past or present relational offenses (1 Corinthians 13:4–5).

Make Love Your Christmas Aim

God so loved us that he gave his only Son. He has shown us how to give. He expressed his supreme love through the greatest gift possible. And he did it because it gave him infinite, omnipotent joy to pursue our joy, even to death on a cross.

“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11). Love expressed is love given. Love given is true gift. True gift is love completed. This is the more excellent way to give gifts.

It doesn’t matter what our past motivations have been, or what our motivations have been so far this year. It’s not too late to lay aside the motivations of fear, obligation, and selfish expectations, and to make love our aim in all our gifts. It is not too late to view each person as a priceless soul God has made, and to pursue the pleasure love experiences in pursuing their joy.

Leave Your Secret Sin Behind Today

Today is a day of reckoning. A wave of judgment is sweeping leaders from their high positions of cultural, political, corporate, and religious power because they used those positions to indulge their self-centered sexual appetites on subordinates.

Things that in the dim, hidden realms of their imagination and control looked deceptively like perks of privilege and sexual entertainment — pleasures they pursued without giving serious thought to how the human objects they used would be damaged — now look lurid, foul, abusive, pathetic, and shameful when dragged out into the bright light of public exposure.

Victims are speaking out, many for the first time. Their anger is justified and palpable, and their words are carrying real consequences to their once-insulated abusers. So far this has been a very good thing. It would be a great mercy if lasting cultural intolerance resulted in the balance of power changing between lecherous leaders and vulnerable subordinates.

Is Your Heart Being Hardened?

But God is doing far more than exposing the sin of leaders. He is showing again how deceitful and desperately sick the human heart is (Jeremiah 17:9) apart from Christ, and reminding us that we have such evil blood still coursing in our veins, so prone to be “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).

And for those who will hear it, God is offering us total forgiveness and freedom. He has sent his Son into the world precisely to liberate us from our sick hearts and sin’s slavery, no matter how lurid and shameful. There is an escape; there is a safe place.

But the time is urgent and short. God can turn a day of reckoning into a day of amnesty. But he’s calling today, “Today, if [we] hear his voice, [let us not] harden [our] hearts” (Hebrews 3:15).

Christians in Bondage

God makes this offer to both Christians and non-Christians. Obviously non-Christians remain in sin bondage. But many Christians are also in the bondage to a secret sin they fear to expose. They were offered a forbidden fruit, they listened to their deceitful desires, and they ate. They didn’t fully realize they were enslaving themselves to sin (Romans 6:16), but having been snared by enticement, they have discovered sin to be a ruthless slave master.

The Bible is very clear (and our experience confirms) that we who are new creations in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) still endure the strange experience of having inside us remnants of the “old self, which belongs to [our] former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires” (Ephesians 4:22).

Therefore, we must choose to “put off your old self” and “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22, 24). We live with a regenerated nature and a corrupt nature, a new heart but an old disease still infecting our beings. And we are called to direct our regenerated heart to follow Jesus (Proverbs 23:19) and to die to the sinful desires and directives still in us.

That’s why the warnings in Hebrews about sin’s deceitfulness and responding “today” are addressed to Christians.

Insidious Deceitfulness

So, it is to our deceitful, sinful desires that this proverb is addressed: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12). This describes the deceitful nature of all sin, not just the sexual kind dominating the news.

But the sexual kind is a prime example of how sin ensnares us into slavery. It entices us with a promise of forbidden pleasure by making the way of death appear “right” to us. In the soft, hazy light of seductive temptation in the unreal world of our fallen imagination, we appear autonomous, others appear soulless, and sin appears consequence-less — all of which are lethal lies.

Then, having believed the promise and obeyed sin, we find ourselves ruled by condemnation and fear. Guilt brings down its hammer blows against us, and our sin’s exposure threatens to destroy our reputation, relationships, and perhaps far more. Meanwhile, weakened by indulgence and shame, sin re-entices us as a poisonous form of seeking comfort, and the cycle keeps repeating till escape seems hopeless.

This is the ancient serpentine strategy to imprison us in dark, damnable dungeons in order to alienate us from God and others — and, if possible, to destroy us. But as long as it is called “today,” we are not hopeless. There is an escape. But only one.

Door in the Dungeon

Into the dark dungeon of sin, where we followed our desperately sick, sinful desires, came Jesus.

Our Creator knew everything about us — every sinful thought we’ve had, every sinful word we’ve said, and every sinful, despicable thing we’ve done — and came anyway to rescue us from our hearts by taking the full punishment for our sin and our unholy shame on himself, and offering us his cleanness and holiness instead.

And when he did, Jesus made a door — he became the door (John 10:9) — in the wall of our sin dungeon leading to eternal guilt-free, sin-free, joyful freedom. He became the light in our darkness, our salvation from damnation and sin’s slavery, our refuge from divine judgment, removing all real reason for fear (Psalm 27:1–2).

In Christ, God, who is the most fearsome adversary of the sinner, who has the power to throw us into hell, becomes our one safe place free from all condemnation and fear (Romans 8:1). Jesus offers us safe escape out of the dungeon.

Today

But this offer — an offer made to both non-Christians and professing Christians — is made to those who will confess their sin, repent of it, and follow Jesus. This offer is made to perpetrators who have selfishly abused and damaged others and live in a cell of secret shame. It is made to their victims living in dark cells of bitterness and resentment. The full price for sin has been paid; full justice has been done. Therefore, full forgiveness and full freedom is yours, if you’ll take it.

Do not wait any longer. Stop listening to the tyrannical threats of sin and Satan. Jesus offers this gift today. Today is the day to walk out the door. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). If you wait longer, your heart may be “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin,” and the door may close (Hebrews 3:13).

God can turn a day of reckoning into a day of amnesty. But he’s calling today. Come out of the dungeon.

We Do Not Know What God Is Doing

Have you ever stopped to ponder just how strange everything about the birth of Jesus was? Whatever people had imagined the coming of the Messiah would look like, no one imagined it to look like it did.

In all that he reveals to us about that strange first Christmas, God is saying very important things to us about how he wants us to view the perplexing, bewildering, glorious, frustrating, fearful, painful, unexpected, disappointing, and even tragic experiences of our lives. No one really understood all that was going as God the Son entered the world. No one really saw the big picture — no one except God.

An Unexpected Messiah

It began with the unexpected revelation of the Son of God. The existence of the Son in the Godhead was not clear to the Jews prior to his surprise appearance in Bethlehem. He was revealed in the Tanakh (Old Testament) in texts like 1 Chronicles 17:13, Psalm 2, Psalm 45:6–7, Psalm 110:1, Isaiah 53, and others, but most didn’t recognize him.

Those who perceived a messianic prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” didn’t take it to mean a virgin would miraculously become pregnant with God. They assumed a chaste young bride would conceive the Messiah in the, you know, standard manner. And no one believed “Immanuel” literally meant God would become flesh and dwell among them. God’s ways were much wilder than even his people had imagined.

From the Wrong Side of Town

Nor did anyone expect God choose the backwater town of Nazareth as the place for the Messiah to be conceived and raised to adulthood. First off, no prophet ever arose from Galilee (John 7:52). And second, everyone knew that Nazareth produced nothing good (John 1:46). Besides, didn’t the prophet say the Messiah would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2)?

Indeed, he would emerge from Bethlehem. But who could have possibly anticipated that the Almighty would prompt Caesar Augustus to decree an imperial census in order to force the young peasant woman great with divine child and her bewildered new husband to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem just barely in time to fulfill that prophecy (Luke 2:1–5)?

And who in their wildest dreams would have imagined that once they arrived in Bethlehem, there would be no place for her to give birth to the long-expected Messiah, except some dingy cave used to house animals?

Welcomed by Peasants and Pagans

When he was born, great angelic fanfare was made . . . to shepherds. Profane, unclean purveyors of all things sheep, if you know what I mean. This would have been viewed with great suspicion and confusion by pious Jews. In terms of social standing, if Jesus had been born in 21st Century America, it might be like God choosing to bypass everyone else and sending an angel choir to a group of illegal migrant workers. Why shepherds, of all people?

Actually, it gets worse. God took things to a whole different level by summoning only one other group of people to welcome his divine Son into the world: the “magoi” (Matthew 2:1–2). Some English translators transliterate this Greek word into English as “magi.” Others use the term “wise men,” but it doesn’t capture the surreal nature of these strange visitors. Of all the unlikely characters and events in this story, these may be the unlikeliest.

The magi were pagan Persian priests and/or astrologers. They were experts in sorcery, divination, and other mysterious magical arts and literature. They were “wise” in the things God strictly forbade the Jews from participating in (Deuteronomy 18:9–14). And God summoned them through astrological divination by using some sort of “star.”

Today, it might be like God choosing to bypass everyone else and summoning through tarot cards or crystals a group of Wiccans to come worship the baby Jesus. Does that make you squirm? That’s how you should feel at the arrival of the magi in the story — until you make the missional connection with the purpose of Christmas. Then you worship alongside these pagan welcomers of the Savior of the world.

Into Unspeakable Horror

But the magi’s role in the story wasn’t merely marvelous. They unwittingly blazed a trail leading to tragedy. For their arrival awakened a wicked man possessing the power of the sword. And a dark horror entered the glorious story. The ancient dragon sought to devour the divine Child (Revelation 12:1–6) by manipulating Herod the Great’s paranoid, demonically selfish, evil rage. A military guard was ordered to raid the unsuspecting residents of Bethlehem and massacre every male child under two years of age, leaving the daughters of Rachel inconsolable (Matthew 2:13–18). The Child was delivered, but not the rest of the children.

Like nearly every other tragedy, no divine purpose is explained. We are left to trust through tears. But trust we can. For the spared Child of Bethlehem was given life that he might die a far more brutal, horrific death — one that would purchase the eternal redemption of Bethlehem’s lost boys and bring eternal consolation to any bereaved parent willing to receive it.

Inscrutable Hope for All

Do you see the pattern? The Christmas story has the same elements of strangeness as the whole biblical narrative, beginning to end. It is a story we would not have written. It carries a wisdom alien to sinful men:

[For] God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:26–29)

Nothing about the Christmas story was expected. As things were unfolding, no one really understood all that was going on or why. God chose ways and means to bring his Son into the world that appeared more or less foolish to all observing. There were ample things to perplex, bewilder, awe, enthrall, terrify, frustrate, disappoint, and grieve those who experienced the first Advent. The pieces were put together in retrospect.

Great Joy in Strange Days

You and I live in the present moment, not yet in retrospect. And we may be in a very strange moment. Things may not seem to make sense. There may be a convergence of odd elements and unexpected turns of events. Some things may just seem bizarre. Other things may be grievous or fearful. We may feel psychologically and emotionally destabilized and disoriented.

If so, Christmas comes to us as a wonderful gift. For the God of the unexpected — who as transcendent Creator chose to become part of his human creation to redeem us from our hopeless wretchedness, who chose a peasant teenager to bear the divine Child, chose to wield an entire empire to fulfill prophecy, chose a disreputable hometown, chose an animal trough cradle, chose profane and pagan welcomers, and chose to allow an unspeakable horror to accompany the Messiah’s birth for redemptive reasons not yet revealed — that God is with us, Immanuel. And if God is with us, who can be against us (Romans 8:31)?

God sees the big picture, and in his wisdom — which often initially doesn’t look like wisdom — he will bring all to right in the ways and at the times that will result in our experiencing the greatest joy possible (Luke 2:10).