You are Needy Everything you eat, drink, breathe, wear, or in any way use belongs to God’s creation.  You were born into this world naked and possessing nothing.  The first thing the doctors, nurses, and your parents learned about you was that you were needy.  You needed air (hence your first gasp and first bellowing cry).  You needed nourishment, specifically the food that your mother lovingly supplied.  You needed to be wrapped in clothes made from some plant or animal.  You needed gravity to keep your tiny body rooted in this world that you had
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Joshua fit de battle ob Jerico/ An’ de walls come tumblin’ down. —Black spiritual Yahweh’s Commander Jericho stood on a high hill.  The city was oblong and covered nine acres.  Its compound outer wall was six times the height of a man.  Its massive inner wall stood further up on an inclined earthen embankment covered with plaster.  The city was impregnable. As Joshua stood beneath it, surveying its defenses, something in the shadow caught his eye.  He looked up and saw a warrior with a sword in hand.  Joshua immediately spoke in challenge:  “Are you
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The true promised land is the “New Earth,” an earth separated from heathendom and paganism and dedicated to the service of God. —Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant (1954) The Heavenly Country Abraham lived as a stranger in the Promised Land for a hundred years. During his lifetime, he never inherited any of it (Acts 7:5). But that didn’t bother him. He saw beyond Canaan. Abraham looked for a heavenly country. He looked for the City of God (Heb. 11:8-16). And yet Canaan was the Promised Land. God promised that He would give it
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Sooner or later everyone has to decide which gang they belong to. —Pepper in Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990) Rahab’s Treason Rahab was a prostitute.  Not a temple prostitute either, but an ordinary whore.  Her house sat on the wall of ancient Jericho.  Citizens and strangers alike could find it easily.  They only had to look up. One evening two strangers appeared at Rahab’s door.  They asked for lodging for the night; there was no talk of other business from the text.  Rahab quickly saw through their disguises though.  They were Israelites.  The whole
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Western man is unprepared for genuine suffering.   Our expectations run high.  Everywhere you look, you’re encouraged to long for and expect a better car, a better waistline, or a better-looking spouse.  And what’s more, you’re told that you have a right to such excesses.  Can anyone in the West doubt those words?  Increasing wealth, ease, and comfort are the “rights” of all men.  Our governments and every media outlet reinforce that message daily.  But it’s a lie.  The flow of human history shows that suffering, adversity, and loss are every much a part of our
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… A vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homopho­bic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. —Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2008) A three year old child may slap its father in his face only because the father holds it up on his knee. —Cornelius Van Til, Toward a Reformed Apologetic (1972) The Charge of Genocide The word genocide is a modern one.  It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a brilliant legal scholar originally from Poland, but Jewish by descent.  The word literally means “killing a tribe.”  Lemkin’s first definition
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Spiritual leaders are not elected, appointed, or created by synods or churchly assemblies. God alone makes them. —J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership (1994) This was the character of Joshua… He understood the dynamics of choice —once for all choice and existential choice as well. —Francis Schaeffer, Joshua (1976) The Choosing of Leaders Since the creation of the world—for two and a half millennia—none of God’s prophets had been warriors, let alone war leaders. Abraham knew something of military strategy and tactics, but we only hear of him engaging in full-fledged battle once, and that was
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What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math? —Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (2008) Time and Chance There is more to success than genius or talent, we all know that.  Sometimes success stories are bound up with what look like coincidence and circumstance far beyond human control—what Ecclesiastes calls “time and chance” (Eccl. 9:11).  For example, the most successful hockey players in Canada are born in January, February, or March.  The most successful men in the computer industry were born around 1954-55.  The most successful lawyers
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They had the shadows, we have the substance. —Matthew Henry on Colossians 1:17 The Ever Circling Years In pagan religion, man helps sustain the cycles of Nature and perhaps the universe itself through ritualistic magic.  The traditional magician’s formula is, “As below, so above.”  For  pagan worship, the microcosm always turns the macrocosm—the universe.  Since for pagan thought and worship, history is cyclical, pagan rituals are especially bound to days, months, and years.  Man must perform the same rituals every year, or every decade, or every century, in just the right way.  The pagan calendar
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The kingdom of this world/Is become the kingdom of our Lord, And of His Christ, and of His Christ;/And He shall reign forever and ever… —“The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah Time… it is the one unifying constant, besides death, across the earth. We all march to the beat of its drum. Minutes stream into hours. Hours step into days, and days creep into years. Yet time does not just mark the passing of one generation into the next, or one season from the other. Within God’s calendar, time marks new beginnings, the passing away
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