Text: Psalm 81. It is too long for this format but I encourage you to read it. For the purposes here, I will highlight its recurring theme: The obedience of God’s people leads to God’s blessing; disobedience leads to God’s judgment. This principle applies to individuals, countries, and cultures. 

Over and over again in the psalm, God speaks through the poem of Asaph, stressing this fundamental law of the harvest: “Hear, O my people, while I admonish you/O Israel, if you would but listen to me!” (v. 8). 

And v. 10 says, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,/Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” And vv. 11-12 drive home the principle again: “But my people did not listen to my voice;/Israel would not submit to me./So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,/to follow their own counsels.” 

Connection to today:  For anyone with eyes to see and courage to say what’s obvious, this is exactly what is unfolding in the West. By and large, the culture hates God, wants to silence godly prophetic voices, wants the truth to remain inside the doors of buildings with steeples, and to remain in quiet Bible studies, but to have no effect upon actual daily life. Just be irrelevant, and you’ll be fine: that’s the message. 

But for things that God hates, the things that God claims merit His wrath, we’re forced to celebrate and nod in assent, or risk being made pariahs, lose our livelihoods, or worse. In other words, it actually costs something to be a believer. You don’s say? What a concept, that following God might actually cost something. 

Over and over in Psalm 81, God promises to bless His people, but they actually need to be faithful to His revealed will, and not hide the light of truth under a basket. Otherwise, God gives people over to follow their own stubborn hearts (v. 12, Romans 1) as just judgment for sin. 

Encouragement: The heart of God for people is overt in Psalm 81. Come to Him in repentance, humility, trust, obedience, and receive divine benediction. Reject the God who made you and all things, and see where godlessness leads. You needn’t look far. But there is yet time to return and be restored. 

I am continuing to teach through Matthew with some saints from church. Currently I am in verses 25-34 of Matthew 6. They are some of the most familiar words of Christ to many people, many of whom have just heard them referenced or quoted as a sort of emotional salve. But there is a lot going on here. Follow me.

Jesus was continuing his sermon. We now call it the Sermon on the Mount. The best scholarship tells us that this is a sermon Jesus taught repeatedly during His public ministry. This is why different gospel writers emphasize different pieces of the sermon’s various topics.

The main issue under discussion in these verses is anxiety; ανησυχία in Greek means “anxiety, disquiet, restlessness, straining concern.” It should go without saying, I suppose, but I do not know anyone who does not battle some degree of anxiety. The main reason I cannot bring myself to engage in social media platforms is due to some people’s anxiety and anger being launched at others like verbal artillery. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a landscape looks like after artillery descends, but it’s not exactly Eden.

But beneath that vitriol that characterizes so much of today’s commentary is anxiety. People are restless, disquiet, strainingly concerned, and anxious about where things are, where they are headed, and what to do.

And yet Christ says to His people: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Mt 6:26).

Last week I was in southwest Florida with my job. Each morning I would walk down to the beach early to catch the sunrise. Each morning, the pelicans, seagulls, ducks, and more would fly above me. Even as hard of hearing as I am, I could hear them as they called to one another, found fish, and their wings sliced through the Florida skies. The lesson was so clear.

I don’t know what the weather was like when Jesus preached this sermon in Israel. The text does not say. But I can just picture birds that might have been around, and how He may have pointed at them, then looked at His hearers, and said, “See, dear ones? See? Watch and learn. Then, come to Me and I will teach you the deepest things of God.”

“Give me a good something to write about,” I said. “I’m so … tired out … I feel like I have nothing left.” That was my message to her. She texted me, “Write about Solomon in Ecclesiastes.” As usual, she was right. Therefore, here goes …

For as long as I can remember, Ecclesiastes has remained my favorite book of the Bible. I have shelves of Bibles. And when you pull almost any of them from the shelves, they will fall open to Ecclesiastes. I have marginalia there, sermon notes there, teaching notes there, personal notes there, underlining there, etc. I see so much in Solomon that I want say to him, almost as if he were standing near me, “You too?” I’ve been there–have made countless blunders, been in abundance, been in penury, been fleshly, been close to the Lord, been in rebellion against Him, and on and on. There’s no good in hiding; I admit it head-on. Solomon, I get it.

Solomon was the child of a king. King David was his dad. But David, like his son later, had sin in his life, blew it in certain areas of his life, reared rotten children oftentimes, was a bad dad, battled the flesh, and on and on. Yet, folks tend to laud David as if he were a great man. Well, he was. And, well, he wasn’t. Just like his son, Solomon.

Solomon prayed for wisdom–and received it. Solomon was graced to build the temple, the remnants of which you can still visit in Israel today. Solomon was blessed with riches, beauty, friendship, women, dominion, popularity, and more. Yet, he wrote Ecclesiastes. Why? Even folks who know next to nothing of Scripture know this: “[V]anity of vanities! . . . All is vanity.”

There is a lifetime of wisdom in just the first 11 verses of Ecclesiastes. For tonight, I just want to focus on one verse: verse 3: “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” There’s a pun going on in the question. Whose rule are we under? Are we working under the sun or under the Son [of God]? That’s the theme of Ecclesiastes. This world vs. heaven; the temporal vs. the eternal; the visible vs. the spiritual; the now vs. the forever.

I appreciate Solomon so much because he was honest. I’d rather have an honest and spiritually-broken preacher than a sanctimonious poser with no blisters. Give me the scarred saint over the cloistered bromide boys.

More to come. But for now, read Ecclesiastes. Then, read it again. I will join you.

Text: “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Pr 19:21). 

Context: When you read Proverbs 19-20, you see a kind of blueprint that emerges. The blueprint uses the Hebrew poetic form known as parallelism. The first part of the verse expresses an image or idea, and then the second verse accentuates the principle taught, either by repetition or by contrast. An example helps: “All a poor man’s brothers hate him; how much more do his friends go far from him!” (Pr 19:7a). The first verse teaches the principle of how people flee one in need, and the second verse emphasizes the same idea via repetition. 

Connection to today: I perused the headlines this morning after I awoke. To state the obvious, they were troubling. America’s a nation without borders; Haitians and others are being flown into the nation by our government; Fulton County, GA’s corrupt justice system is once again in the world’s spotlight; twin NYC girls are stabbed, one of whom dies; and more and more stories of men playing in girls’ sports and running the tables, etc. It was just more of the same. It seems as if, to quote Dylan, 

Broken lines, broken strings

Broken threads, broken springs

Broken idols, broken heads

People sleeping in broken beds

Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking

Everything is broken

Doctrine & application: The second half of Proverbs 19:7 is synonymous parallelism, which just means it’s another way of saying the same things as the first verse; it emphasizes a principle via repetition: “He pursues them with words, but does not have them” (Pr 19:7b). The idea is simple but powerful: Money attracts but poverty repels. But look at the verse with which I began, Proverbs 19:21. It’s antithetical parallelism that’s used in that verse. The second verse teaches a principle via its contrast—”but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.” See the contrast? 

The first half of Proverbs 19:21 appears to be taking you a direction where you might think that man’s corrupt machinations will win, but then the second verse puts the kibosh on that idea. The purposes of God will stand, that’s the point. 

When the wheels are coming off the train; when words are forcibly stripped of their clear and historical meanings; when truth is on the scaffold; when we’re told, “All is well; everything’s secure,” but then you see with your own eyes murders and assaults and robberies, know that God’s purposes will stand. Why? Because God is not mocked. When you spit in the wind, it comes back twice as hard and is rather nasty. Theology is not just for the academy; it undergirds every worldview. When we see the harvest of mayhem, may we have the wisdom to repent and return to the Lord whose plans will stand. 

David Foster Wallace wrote, “To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human is the key to modern life.” True to his timbre, Wallace was a prophetic voice, a John the Baptist with razor-sharp wit, a man crying in the wilderness that is the modern West. His point was that we’re jettisoning the proper values and ingesting toxic values. We’re upside down. We’re calling darkness the light and light the darkness. You remember the prophet’s words, right (cf. Is 5:20)? 

Connection to today: The U.S. Military Academy jettisoned “Duty, Honor, Country!” as the school’s motto. You see, there’s always a god of the system in everyone’s worldview, folks. Who would want the Army’s officers to espouse duty, honor, and country anymore? That’s now passe. But why? Who says? By what standard? 

Modern secularism knows better, you see. That’s the message. The pivot is to the Army Values. Did you catch it? It’s never a question of whether but which. Always, always, always, a set of values is put forth. But which values will they be, that’s the issue? By what standard are values evaluated? Fallen men’s standards? If so, which men? 

I fully support the current list comprising the Army Values. That’s not my point. My point is that there’s always a god of the system, someone whose values are to be followed. If the USMA can jettison its motto and attendant values with the stroke of a pen, on what basis should one think the current Army Values will endure? 

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Pr 14:12). 

This past week, I was TDY for some training in skillsets we chaplains are still allowed to teach—principles regarding families, marriage, spiritual fitness, and more. I love chaplaincy to my core, I truly do. But we are living through a values revolution in our nation where one set of values will attain dominance. The question is, Which set? Will it be those that reflect what is best for human flourishing because they are rooted in their Creator’s Word, or will they be those erected on shifting sands of human secularism? 

Rejoice in hope: My prayer is that God is raising up courageous and biblical leaders who will live and speak truth to those in power, in full knowledge that we all will answer to the Judge of all the earth who always does what is just (cf. Gen 18:25). May God see fit to raise up another generation of Josephs, of Gideons, of Jeremiahs, of Nehemiahs, and more who know what they believe and why they believe it–because the forces of darkness know, and they show no signs of letting up.

It is odd the way it happened. I was tired from writing, rewriting, and editing a paper on human development. It is one of the papers I am revising as part of professional development. I quite enjoy research and am a voracious reader, so it was not the work that was wearing me down. I was rather spiritually worn down by the content I again and again discovered when reading academic books that viewed human personality via a clinical lens. Something, I thought to myself, is lost via that approach.

So I pulled my chair back from the desk on which my computer sat. I walked over to a stack of books I keep by my reading chair. I took up a biography of Charles Dickens I’m currently reading. It is superb. But I am admittedly biased; I adore Dickens’ novels.

I am about halfway through this long bio of Dickens. And I was reading of Dickens’ fascination with death. It was a theme that occupied much of Dickens’ literary world. The death of children especially grieved Dickens. And then Kaplan wrote of Dickens’ views regarding death:

Even in Paris, the wages of sin were death, death inexplicable, nontheological, a fact that from childhood on he had had as an obsessive part of his imagination and consciousness. To look at a corpse was to look at the ultimate, most threatening mystery, the body without spirit, the flesh without animating life, turned into meat for carrion, into the infant corpses in Rochester that had seemed to him as a child like pigs’ feet set out in a butcher shop, into the dead river-eaten bodies of suicides fished out of the Thames, into the victims of the devil-rat, Chips, into the corpses preserved by the cold at the great St. Bernard Convent, into the row of dead sibling infants represented for Pip by the small tombstones in the graveyard in Kent. (214-15)

The other view, of course, is the Christian one. In that one, death is not a cessation of consciousness where material becomes worm food. No; in Scripture, we see a vastly different worldview. At physical death, “the souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united in Christ, do rest in their graves, till the resurrection” (WSC, A.37).

The way Paul phrases it in his second letter to the Corinthian believers is, “So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:6, 8).

The biblical view of human development is so beautifully different from secular clinical views of people and of death. In the gospel, there is hope.

In secularism, there is insignificance and silence. As John Lennon wrote, “no hell below us, above us only sky.” We’re all ‘nowhere men/women’ in that worldview.

As I wrote above, I adore Dickens’ stories. I resonate with his hatred of the enemy, death. But my fear is that he did not go far enough in his thinking. He didn’t come to see that death is swallowed up in victory for all those who are in Christ.

In the biblical storyline, the reason believers have hope is because the Creator Himself laid down His life for His people, submitted to an ignominious death via crucifixion on a Friday in Jerusalem, Israel, but who took His life up again three days later by walking out of a guarded tomb (Why guard the tomb of a corpse, by the way, unless you knew that the corpse had power over death, hell, and the grave?).

These are two very different ways of viewing death–the secular one and the Christian one. The first leads to no ultimate answers. You’re here and then you’re gone. No significance. No objective meaning.

But in the Christian view, you have ultimate answers. You’re here, your actions matter; you are signficant. You have objective meaning. And when physical death takes the Christian, believers will see Him who overcame sin, banishment, and the curse on their behalf.

And now I get to return to editing this paper on human development, but it is with a renewed spirit. It is almost as if even my beloved Charles Dickens’ anthropology was used to remind me of what I know to be true: Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting? 1 Corinthians 15 is there; it abideth still. And it is beyond good news.

In a word … yes!

This morning before class I was able to enjoy my favorite time of the day. As I sat on the bench, the sun was rising at my 2 o’clock position. Pelicans flew solo and in squadrons above. A lone seagull landed upon a pole. The city was on the left horizon. A breeze blew westward. And for the 90 seconds – (2) minutes captured in these pictures, I don’t know how anyone who is intellectually honest can be an atheist. Creation screams design. The gulls, the fish, the bay, the city, the order, the repetition, the pattern. “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD” (Ps 150:6a, ESV).

Spotted some dolphins who appeared to be playing near the shoreline, too, so I had to share their beauty. Here’s a 70-second video:

I have learned to be reserved in my judgments when I hear people say they’re Christians or they read their Bibles. When you talk to them and ask even the most basic of questions, what you’re liable to hear is “Well, I feel that …” or “In my view, God wouldn’t do _______” or “I think that God is _______.” And what you learn is that their view of God is based upon their feelings, their wants, their desires, and not upon the actual text of the 66 books comprising Scripture.

When I talk to my wife, however, I don’t get that. Follow me as I let you in on a recent conversation we had about Moses, his denial by God, and yet his (Moses’) commendation.

For as long as I can remember, my wife has loved the book of Deuteronomy. It’s the Old Testament book most often quoted by Jesus in the New Testament, of course. It’s the last book of the Torah, the Pentateuch, penned by Moses. Moses was, to be sure, unique and mighty, a mighty man of God.

Anyway, the conversation with my wife went like this:

CJ: I just cried this morning as I finished Deuternonomy again.

Me: Why?

CJ: Moses. He was up on Mount Nebo. After all the struggles he’d put up. After all the years leading the people. And he was allowed to see the Promised Land. But God wouldn’t let him enter … because of his sin. And it just killed me. This was Moses. I just broke down and cried.

Me: I know. It’s heartbreaking.

CJ: All because Moses sinned in his striking of the rock. He didn’t want to give God the glory that time. And God kept him out of the very place to which he’d led the people.

Me: I know. It’s staggering.

CJ: And Moses is called great in the New Testament. We’re told he is in heaven, that he was one of the greatest of men.

Me: Yes, exactly.

CJ: I just love Moses. And I don’t want to be told “No, You can’t enter,” like Moses was. (She cries some more.)

Me: You know this, but I’ll say it anyway. That’s why we flee to Christ. He’s the greater exodus. He’s the One who brings Moses in, who brings any and all in who flee to Him in the gospel. It’s God’s grace from beginning to end. That’s the point: It’s not a human work; it’s a 100% divine work of God’s grace towards sinners.

Encouragement: I have been married several decades now to the same woman. She’s in the Scriptures every day. She’s steeped in prayer every day. And we have such conversations sometimes where, well, all I know how to do is write and try and share the story. And my hope is that you’ll see the encouragement here, and flee to the gospel. We are told that he who finds a wife finds a good thing. When I hear my wife’s tears over the phone, of where she’s been so moved by the closing chapter of Deuteronomy, when Moses’ life was taken by the Lord he served all those years, and yet we’re told in the NT that Moses was a saint, uniquely used by God in his generation, it moves me. And it summons from my heart of hearts one banal but sincere phrase: Thank you, Lord.