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Do not let the size of this little book fool you. It is packed with nuggets of wisdom that are presented with a humor and reality that makes for an engaging combination. While the target audience is primarily moms with young children, dads will also find this a profitable read, as well as parents with older children. Some of the principles espoused definitely apply to all stages of the child training adventure. So grab a copy and be ready to laugh, to be convicted, and to hear an empathetic voice about motherhood in the trenches.

Nashville and the Pacific Northwest may be close to polar opposites culturally, but this is worth a few minutes of your time. On the whole, I find this piece encouraging, , and am glad to hear some good things about some friends of ours.

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2011/february/sutton021111.html?paging=off

“Father of light, we praise You because You forgive iniquity and do not reward us according to our sins. What You promised to the fathers You have fulfilled in Your Son. As the east and the west can never come together, so remove our sins far from us, that they can be accounted to us no more, for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.”

Taken from a collection of prayers.

I came across this great quote today regarding the end of Matthew 4 and the beginning of Matthew 5 leading up to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.”

Before the crowds hear the Messiah’s word they are the object of his compassion and healing. Having done nothing, nothing at all, they are benefited. So grace comes before task, succour before demand, healing before imperative. The first act of the Messiah is not the imposition of his commandments, but the giving of himself. Today’s command presupposes yesterday’s gift (Davies & Allison, Matthew 1-7, International Critical Commentary, 427).

I came across these thought-provoking comments by S.G. De Graaf in volume three of his work Promise and Deliverance. The comparisons between Adam’s testing in the garden and Jesus’ testing in the wilderness are particularly insightful.

Adam was once our head. He was put to the test to determine whether he truly wished to devote his whole life to the Lord. Adam became unfaithful and rejected the Lord’s favor. When the Lord Jesus took Adam’s place as our Head (of the covenant), the temptation had to be renewed since satan was bent on destroying the covenant. In this temptation Christ not only had to show obedience but also had to justify and reconcile what Adam had ruined. Therefore the temptation came to Him under different circumstances than it had to Adam.

After Jesus had been baptized and anointed, the Holy Spirit led Him out into the desert to be tempted by the devil. The desert was quite a different place from the paradise in which Adam had lived. In Paradise everything testified to God’s favor and communion, while the desert betrayed that everything had been forsaken by God and man because of our sins. Everything had been in Adam’s favor, while Christ had everything against Him. Despite the isolation of that forsaken place, Jesus had to hold on to God.

I am finding these book recommendations/reviews more difficult to write. I simply want to say, “Read the book,” and for you to understand that I really mean it. As soon as I try to put into the words the things that I liked about the story, or the themes that especially stood out, it feels as though I’m trying to tear something away from the fabric that has been beautifully woven. I enjoyed Pete Peterson’s first installment of this two-part adventure, The Fiddler’s Gun. Fiddler’s Green is even better. This story will shock you; make you laugh; and possibly make you cry. It is unmistakably a story about redemption, but fashioned in such a way as to gradually carry the reader along like a vessel upon the sea. Perhaps what stands out to me the most is the character development that Mr. Peterson achieves in this work. Though fictitious, these are real people. These are people that you and I know. People that you and I are. And if what I’ve said doesn’t convince you, my wife loved it, too.

In a past post I introduced Dr. Ralph Wood’s excellent book, Literature and Theology, in which he examines upon a number of literary works, and their bearing on the Christian life. In his chapter on G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, Dr. Wood delves into the effects of the Enlightenment’s promotion of tolerance, and how the antidote is true Christian hospitality. Here is an excerpt that gets to the crux of his challenging thesis:

Hospitality of a Christian kind does not entail a smiling kind of niceness, a prim-and-proper etiquette, or even a gracious capacity for party giving. The word derives from hostis, a locution originally meaning not only “host” but also “stranger” and even “enemy.” Hospitality thus becomes a Christian practice and discipline, a fundamental responsibility regarding those who are alien and perhaps even antagonistic toward us. It requires, among other things, the willingness to welcome the gift that others represent – not the gift we expect or desire from them, but their often surprising and troubling gift, especially when others have convictions that are fundamentally hostile to ours. The word “tolerance,” by contrast, originally meant “to endure pain or hardship,” and it eventually came to signify “putting up with opinions and practices of others.” There is a decisive difference. Tolerance somewhat condescendingly declares that we will “put up with” others, even when their views and habits are noxious to us. Hospitality, by contrast, offers to “put them up” in the old-fashioned sense: we will make even our enemies our guests and thus our potential friends. Hospitality thus becomes an earthly analogy to the gospel itself. Just as we were once strangers and enemies whom God has patiently taken into his household (Rom. 5:10), so we must be willing to offer hospitality to those who are alien and hostile to us.

Hospitality must not be romanticized and idealized as a simply or easy practice. It does not mean, for example, that we draw no distinctions among competing truth claims, as the proponents of tolerance often profess to do. Such subtle inhospitality actually despairs of the truth. If all claims are true, then none is true. As Chesterton was fond of saying, “morality is very much like art: it consists of drawing a line somewhere.” Christian hospitality is willing to draw a line, but not to raise a bar that cannot be crossed. On the contrary, gospel hospitality is willing to hazard two radical risks regarding opponents. On the one hand, it must take them so seriously that not only can they recognize themselves in our representation of their own most basic convictions but also that we ourselves must be susceptible of conversion to their faith. Yet on the other hand, we are also called to demonstrate the case for Christianity so persuasively in both act and judgment that we help create the possibility of their conversion as well. In either case, we will not have merely tolerated each other: we will have exhibited the hospitality that eagerly engages the other (55-56).

Journey of the Magi
by T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I found this to be creative, tasteful, and moving.
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In light of what is happening to Domenic Johansson and his family in Sweden, this prayer seems quite fitting.

“Lord, righteous and almighty God, remember Your weather-beaten and tempest-tossed Church on this earth. Restrain her enemies, destroy their wiles, and hinder their violence. Preserve Yours saving truth to us and our children, and grant us to praise You with a joyful heart, now in the Church militant and forever in the Church triumphant. Amen.”

(I have a feeling I’ve posted this prayer before (though my searches came up empty). Even if I have, it is a prayer that still needs to be prayed.)

Two Sundays ago I preached a sermon on Genesis 9:20-29, and was encouraged to write a summary of the exposition of the text. While such a text requires a great deal of context and nuance, and I might be more inclined for any interested parties to simply listen to the sermon, here’s the basic argumentation that I set forth.

The popular handling of the text is to lambaste Noah for his drunkenness, and to lament how even the most righteous of men are still sinners. Regarding this incident John Calvin wrote in his commentary on Genesis, “I rather suppose, that we are to learn from the drunkenness of Noah, what a filthy and detestable crime drunkenness is. The holy patriarch, though he had hitherto been a rare example of frugality and temperance, losing all self-possession, did, in a base and shameful manner, prostrate himself naked on the ground, so as to become a laughing-stock to all. Therefore with what care ought we to cultivate sobriety, lest anything like this, or even worse, should happen to us?” And that is basic presupposition we have when we read this account, cultivated from our early days in Sunday School. We start with a moralistic approach to the text, instead of a biblical-theological one.

However, a question that we do well to ask is, “Where is Noah condemned in the text?” Or for that matter, where is Noah condemned for his actions anywhere in Scripture? The simple fact of the matter is that the Bible doesn’t condemn Noah. That being the case, perhaps we should not be so quick to condemn him either. Granted, every English translation reads that Noah was drunk, and the Hebrew term can mean that. However, it is also a word that can be translated “merry” as we read in Genesis 43:33 when Joseph’s brothers return with Benjamin to Egypt. The last verse of the chapter reads, Portions were taken to them from Joseph’s table, but Benjamin’s portion was five times as much as any of theirs. And they drank and were merry with him. That is how we are to understand Noah’s drinking. In Psalm 104 we read that wine is given to gladden the heart of man (v. 15), and in Judges 9 we read about wine that cheers God and men (v. 13). Noah was not sinfully drunk, but had drunk to the point of merriness and sleepiness, and took a nap. After all, wine can have a soporific effect.

Now, another question that naturally comes to mind has to do with Noah’s nakedness. Again, the popular conception of the story is that Noah was so thoroughly drunk that he’d taken off his robes and was just passed out in his tent. However, upon closer examination, this view cannot sustained by the text either. We should not think that Noah was passed out naked in front of the opening of his tent, and Ham just happened to stroll by and finding it funny went and told his brothers. The language indicates that Noah was “in the midst of his tent.” And this would have been quite a sizable tent, and not like a tent we use to go camping. This was Noah’s house. He was in the midst of his home. Also notice that Ham had to go inside his father’s tent to see his nakedness because the text clearly tells us that Shem and Japheth were “outside” (v. 22). So, was it wrong for Noah to be naked in the privacy of his own tent, which acted as a covering for him? Not in the least. You can no more argue that his nakedness was sinful than you can that it is sinful for you to be naked in the privacy of your bedroom. So then, why was Noah naked? Because he was resting from his labors, and had removed his robe, his garment of authority. Basically, Noah was a king, and he had set aside his kingly duties for a time to enjoy the wine from his vineyard. In Leviticus 10 we see a similar pattern with the priests and Levites who were not to drink while they were serving in the tabernacle, as well as in the caution given regarding wine and kings in Proverbs 31:4-5. In other words, don’t drink on the job. Noah knows this, and so he’s off-duty when he drinks and takes a nap. This understanding of the text is further indicated by the fact that upon Ham’s telling his brothers about their father, Shem and Japheth take the garment with which to cover their father. The translations typically read “a garment,” but the definite article is there in the Hebrew, and for good reason. Ham was the one trespassing where he didn’t belong, and was making a play for his father’s authority when he took the robe, eliciting his brothers’ collusion in the rebellion. They would have nothing to do with it, and symbolically uphold Noah’s authority by placing the robe on their shoulders, and are sure not to behold their father’s nakedness. Noah wakes up from his nap, knows what his youngest son has done, and pronounces judgment (something kings do) for Ham’s sin. And notice that the judgment has to do with authority and submission, which further indicates the nature of Ham’s sin, i.e. the punishment fits the crime.

So, that’s the argument in a nutshell, and there are probably some spots where a bit more detail would be helpful, but I trust this will suffice for the moment. Also consider, that when Adam, Cain and the Sethites sinned earlier in Genesis, the text is clear about the judgment that God brought upon them as a result. Here, Noah is not judged for sin. Ham (via Canaan) is judged (and Noah is the one who pronounces the judgment!). Therefore, Noah is not at fault, and we probably owe him an apology.

(For more nuance and detail, I commend to you chapter 4 of James Jordan’s Primeval Saints, where I was first introduced to this perspective on Noah in detail. Admittedly, I was initially reticent to accept the position I’ve espoused above, but now having studied it in greater detail, I believe it is the most biblically consistent).

“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, ‘Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,’ or ‘Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.’ They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; the can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.”

– excerpt from G.K. Chesteron’s The Ball and the Cross.