⁹ And when he [Jesus] had said these things, as they [the disciples] were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. ¹⁰ And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, ¹¹ and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

The details are simple: Jesus is lifted up, and a heavenly cloud takes him from earth. Two angels appear to the disciples, as they’re gaping up into the sky (no shade; I would have done the same), and say three times that Jesus has gone into heaven.

Luke doesn’t interpret or reflect on the Ascension in that moment; but it shows up surprisingly often in the rest of the biblical literature, and has an incredible range of connections and meanings in the biblical story. Here are just some things the ascension means for Jesus and for us.

1. Jesus as righteous prophet

Moses and Elijah were the two great prophets of the Old Testament. Moses was the man God used to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, give them his Law, and forge them into the holy nation of Israel. Moses led Israel right up to the edge of the Promised Land; and then God took him up to a high mountain by himself. Deuteronomy recounts,

So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, ⁶ and he [the Lord] buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no one knows the place of his burial to this day. ⁷ Moses was 120 years old when he died. His eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated.

In a culture that valued dying among your family and burying your dead, the fact that Moses died “undimmed and unabated,” with God personally witnessing his death and burying him, was unusual.

Elijah’s earthly end was similar, but even more miraculous. Elijah was the first great prophet to Israel after the kingdom was divided. He wasn’t the first prophet, but he performed great miracles, and he kind of started the era of the prophets. In the book of Second Kings, chapter 2, Elijah is taken directly up to heaven in a whirlwind. Instead of dying, he’s brought into heaven directly.

In both of those cases, a righteous prophet that God used to instigate a new era of history finishes his life directly in God’s hands. Here in Acts 1, a righteous God used to instigate a new era of history is taken up directly into heaven. The Ascension confirms Jesus’ role as God’s prophet.

A further parallel is that after both Moses and Elijah finish their lives, there’s a spirit that fills their successor right after that. Right after Deuteronomy tells of Moses’ death, it says, “And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him” (34:9). There’s a “spiritual transfer” from Moses to Joshua. When Elijah is taken into heaven, his protégé, Elisha, is with him; when Elisha comes back, God parts the Jordan River for him to walk through, and the witnesses who see it say, “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha” (2 Kings 2:15). Once again, a spirit moves from leader successor. (This cues us nicely for Pentecost.)

2. Jesus as king

When Jesus ascended, he was taken from earth by a heavenly cloud. The Old Testament prophet Daniel was given a vision of this event from the other side of the curtain, as it were. In chapter 7 of his book, he has a vision of God’s throne room. God, whom he calls the Ancient of Days, is seated on his throne; and then Daniel sees this:

I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. ¹⁴ And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (7:13-14)

On the clouds of heaven comes one like a son of man – that means someone who looks like a human being – who’s presented before the Ancient of Days. And to this son of man is given an eternal kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. This apparently human being is brought to heaven and made the king of the cosmos.

Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 shows that the early Christians saw this. When Peter says, “God has made him both Lord and Christ [i.e., ‘anointed king’], this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36), he’s recognizing that the Ascension was Jesus’ final coronation: the proof of his kingship.

3. Jesus as high priest

The geographical and spiritual center of Old Testament Israel was a room in the Tabernacle (and then Temple) called the Most Holy Place. It was the point at which in a sense heaven touched earth: it was the closest sinful human beings could come to the direct presence of God. The Most Holy Place held the ark of the covenant; the ark’s lid was called the mercy seat, and it symbolized the throne of heaven.

There was only one time a year that a human being could pass through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, was a yearly ritual that atoned, or paid for, the sins of the people of Israel. The capstone of that ritual was that the high priest would spend days purifying himself. Then he would symbolically lay the sins of the whole people for the year on a goat. That goat would be sacrificed, and the high priest would bring some of its blood into the Most Holy Place and sprinkle it on the mercy seat. That symbolized God covering the sins of his people by the death of another being; it showed that the people were reconciled to him for another year.

Hebrews 8 through 10 walks through this in greater detail than we can here. It reminds its readers of the ritual and its significance; but then it explains how Jesus fulfills and finishes that ministry.

when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) ¹² he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. ¹³ For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, ¹⁴ how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. (9:11-14)

And again:

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, ¹³ waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. ¹⁴ For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (10:12-14)

The Old Testament ritual, though vital in its time, was an imperfect symbol. The high priest had to cover his own sins as well; he could only provide the blood of an animal; he could only come into a symbol of heaven; and he had to repeat it yearly. Jesus had no sins to atone for; he provided the sacrifice of his own perfect life; he entered heaven itself; and so he could atone for his people once for all time. The Ascension completes the work of Jesus atoning for, or perfecting, his people.

4. Our security in heaven

Another aspect of the Day of Atonement was that a human being could stand, as a representative for his people,1 in a symbol of heaven. If he could do this without God striking him dead, Israel was reconciled to God for another year.

When Jesus ascended, he brought his human body into heaven. For the first time, a human being came into the throne room of the Father. Because he did that as our high priest, it means he has carried us into heaven now. Paul affirms this to the Colossians:

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (3:3-4)

The Heidelberg Catechism words it as, “we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that he, as the Head, will also take us, his members, up to himself” (Q 49). Jesus has earned our place with God.

5. The sending of the Spirit

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure, he says something counterintuitive:

It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper [the Spirit] will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. (16:7)

Jesus told his disciples that it was better that he leave the earth bodily, because only after his ascension could the Spirit come to humankind.

The Bible doesn’t directly say why this arrangement was necessary: but it provides a few hints. First, as we’ve seen, Jesus actually sanctified his people and actually brought humankind into heaven (which the Old Testament system had merely symbolized). Because we finally became present to God, God could finally become present to us. Jesus’ ascension sanctified human nature enough to where the Spirit could dwell with us.

Jesus also inaugurated the new covenant. God had foretold that he would pour out his Spirit on humankind through prophets like Joel and Ezekiel. Jesus’ ascension began that new covenant, which Paul even describes as a new humanity:

Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being;’ the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. (1 Corinthians 15:45)

Jesus’ obedience created a new human nature in which God could actually dwell, without his holiness consuming us.

Allison and I cooked up this story for our kids and enjoyed it enough to share. Deo volente, I hope we see more of the Bunyans in the future.

Of all the homesteader kid stories that make my city friends raise a skeptical eyebrow, this one raises the most. But ask my siblings about disco rocs, Ruggy, or goose pills. They’ll swear to it: in the summer of 2021, when I was fourteen, we made a flying carpet.

It started on a typical June afternoon in the Bunyan house. We’d spent the morning on homesteader stuff: milking cows, picking berries, gathering eggs. I’d helped Dad replace some chicken wire on the gnomes’ compound where a fox had tried to dig underneath. Then my twin sister Eliza had scarfed her lunch and hiked into the woods, while my five-year-old brother Wilder and I had cut some boards for the platform we were adding to our treehouse. Now Wilder and I were in the living room, having some Mom-imposed quiet reading time.

“The babies are here! The babies are here!”

We heard Eliza’s shouts through the screen door well before she flung it open.

“The babies are here,” she said, panting like that guy who ran the first marathon to warn about the Persians.

I leapt to my feet like the Greek king or whoever must have leapt to his. I knew exactly which babies she was panting about.

The disco roc chicks had hatched.

Two miles away through the woods, a steep cliff rose over Chapell Lake. From that cliff grew a giant fir tree. And in the top of that giant fir tree, two disco rocs had built a nest. A few months ago, the mama roc had settled onto the nest and stayed there. According to Eliza, to whom research was a passion rather than a chore, she had almost definitely lain eggs.

“Did you see them?!” I said.

“Mama bird and dad bird both flew to the nest with food. I saw them hold it for something in the nest to eat. That can only mean … ”

She squealed, rejuvenated by imagining the cuteness.

I should explain.

You’ve probably heard of prismatic rocs. The giant eagle-esque bird with a layer of feathers that refract light into the whole visible spectrum (or as Wilder puts it, “the bird that flaps rainbows”). The birds use the feathers to dazzle prey when hunting, and males use them in mating displays. When they fly, they cast off little flickers of rainbow. For this reason, Dad called them disco rocs, a dad joke we adopted. (He also made jokes about classic rocs and alternative rocs, which we didn’t.)

Adult disco rocs have regular feathers as well as their special ones. But babies have only the special refracting feathers. For the first four weeks of their lives, they’re big downy disco balls. Hence Eliza’s two-mile sprint of enthusiasm.

She suddenly pounced on me, grabbing my shoulders and giving me her “this is my serious face” face.

“We have to see them,” she said.

If you’re wondering if Eliza felt this way about all baby animals, the answer is yes. Did I share that love? Generally, no. But were baby disco rocs an exception? You bet your dollar’s bottom. I was in.

“But how?” I said.

But how indeed. Their nest, as I mentioned, was in a very tall tree on a very tall cliff that was, as far as we could tell, unclimbable.

Eliza looked around to see if Mom and Dad were close, in a manner that practically screamed, “I am hiding a secret.” Mom was outside cleaning the porch, and Dad was in his office on a Zoom call.

“What do we have that flies?” Eliza whispered.

“Just Dad’s truck.”

“Yeah, we can’t take his truck,” Eliza said. “He keeps the flight key in his gun safe anyway. Could we climb?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I think I’ve seen some potions in Mom’s cookbooks that make you stronger.”

We flipped through the few promising-looking books in the kitchen.

“Strengthens your core muscles to avoid osteoporosis,” I said. “Nope.”

“Here’s one for restoring energy after exercise,” Eliza said.

“Does it give you the strength to scale fifty-foot cliffs?” I asked.

Eliza ran a finger down the ingredient list.

“Probably … not,” she said.

We got some computer time that evening and, not for the first time, searched for personal flight spells. Also not for the first time, the only sites that claimed they had working ones either had obviously fake elements or invited you to their YouTube channel claiming to show off lost Atlantean technology they’d rediscovered. No joy.

The next day, Wilder and I were in the backyard using my launchpad to fling old produce into the henyard. (For inspiration.) The backdoor opened just wide enough for Eliza’s head to emerge. She looked around for eavesdroppers, then slithered out, in a way that made her look like she’d committed multiple felonies and still had the evidence in her pockets.

“I found it,” she whispered, even though we were alone and outside. “This morning, in Dad’s library.”

The cover of Unexpected Flying Objects, Third Edition, by Gus Mendoza had a portly man sitting on a La-Z-Boy photoshopped over some puffy clouds. Naturally, Eliza had already read half of it.

“We can make our own flying thing!” I said. “Genius, Liza. How do we do it?”

“It says it takes two spells,” she whispered.

“Goose pills?!” Wilder said.

“Two. Spells. One you chant to keep it in the air. One set of commands to make it move. And it needs a substance to make it fly.”

“What substance?” I said.

“Goose pills?” Wilder offered.

“No,” said Eliza. She flipped to a page. “There are a few. You can use … powdered dragon scale.”

“How would you even get that?”

“Ground dirigible nut.”

“What?”

“Essence of bat.”

“Gross. Hard pass.”

“Goose pills?”

“Wilder!” Eliza said. Then her face brightened. “Pixie dust!”

“Hey! Is that pixie colony still in the barn?”

It was, and Dad’s summer cleaning fever hadn’t made it to the barn loft yet; so for a bowl of maple syrup and a charm bracelet with bells, we filled an old baby food jar with a nice little pile of pixie dust.

The book said an experienced flyer could maintain the chant and steer an object simultaneously; but we decided to divide up the work. Since we were using pixie dust, the spells would be in Pixie. Eliza learned the altitude chant. I wrote out the steering commands. We just needed a vehicle.

“He says a beginner should pick something like a carpet,” Eliza said. “It’s the easiest to keep balanced. The thickness helps, too.”

“Do we have a rug in storage somewhere?” I said.

“Surprisingly, no,” said Eliza. “I asked Mom.”

“You asked Mom? Are you trying to get caught?”

“I said I wanted to redecorate my room. We used to have a spare, but Wilder set the last one on fire when he broke his lava lamp.”

Wilder chuckled. “Smokin,” he said.

“Let’s try a blanket,” I suggested.

So we spread Eliza’s queen-size comforter on her bedroom floor. Eliza sprinkled a few pinches of pixie dust over it. Then we seated ourselves: me in front to be able to see, Eliza in back, and Wilder between us. Eliza closed her eyes and began chanting.

The edges of the comforter rippled like a cuttlefish in a hurry. I caught my breath.

As if hoisted by four invisible giants, the comforter’s corners lifted up. I felt my bottom leave the floor.

We had liftoff! I went through the command words in my head to try one out. But before I could: Houston, we have a problem. We were technically off the floor. But our bottoms hovered bare inches in the air, while the edges of the comforter were rising higher and higher.

“No squishing!” Wilder said. The blanket was bundling us into one another. I couldn’t see over the front edge.

“No squishing!” Wilder shouted, shoving at my back with his feet.

“Cool it!” I said. “Let me try something.” I gave the command for rise, hoping that would level out the middle.

Instead, the corners jerked up, wrapping us into a hobo’s pack and yanking us up to the ceiling.

“Ow! Liza, is your fan on?!”

“Why’d you take us up? I – oops.”

Always ready to argue with me, Eliza had stopped the chant that was holding us up. Our hobo bundle had settled to the floor. Thankfully, it had fallen smoothly instead of just dropping.

“No! Squishing!” Wilder pummeled us with elbows and knees until we untangled ourselves from the comforter.

“That dog won’t hunt,” I said.

Eliza rubbed her arm where one of Wilder’s elbows had caught her. “I need to read some more,” she said.

Between Eliza’s reading and some surreptitious tests, we determined that of all the potential flying objects in the house, the living room carpet was the only real choice. Nothing else was big or stable enough; the other rugs apparently had too much synthetic material to fly properly. (The rug had belonged a great-grandma who probably lived before polyester was invented.)

The final test took place one morning when Mom was out shopping and Dad was in the barn. We moved the furniture against the wall, seated ourselves in position, and once again Eliza took up the chant. Instead of wiggling its edges, the whole rug lifted smoothly into the air! We hovered two feet off the floor, the three of us making just a small divot in the middle.

“Good Ruggy!” Wilder said.

“Go forward,” I said in Pixie.

The carpet glided forward. When the leading edge touched the wall, the carpet slowly bunched up, piling toward my lap.

“Go backward,” I said.

The front of the carpet un-bunched as it slid backward. But before I could stop it or turn around, there was a crash.

“Bear Lamp!” said Wilder. “Ruggy, no!”

I had failed to reckon with the carpet’s altitude, and Bear Lamp — Wilder’s favorite lamp, now that the lava lamp was out of the picture — had suffered the consequences. I called the carpet forward to the middle of the room.

“It’s okay, Ruggy,” Wilder said. He lay down, put his cheek on the carpet, and patted it. “It was accident. Goforward.”

We slid forward through the air, much faster than when I had given commands. I was trying to say, “When did you learn Pixie?” which I realize now was not fit to the needs of the moment; but before I could, the carpet piled into the wall and knocked us all to the ground.

“Wilder!” Eliza said. “What did you do?”

“Clay said it first!” said Wilder. “Goforward!”

Either Wilder was touching the carpet or it had imprinted on him somehow, because it did an impression of an accordion slamming itself closed and scrunched into the wall.

“So I guess he’ll be sitting in your lap,” said Eliza, looking at me the way Mom looked at Dad when she was trying to talk parent code. “So you can …” she clapped her hand over her mouth.

But no parent code was necessary, because Wilder was feeling big feelings.

“Ruggy’s bent!” he wailed, stretching the carpet straight again. “And Bear Lamp’s hurted!”

We put the carpet back in place and reset the living room furniture. A little Kintsugi Kream and a new light bulb made Bear Lamp as good as he ever was (he was our most broken and repaired lamp; he was one-third Kintsugi Kream).

We had an aircraft. We just needed time to fly.

That came a week later. Our Pappy had sent a carrier pigeon with a coded message (this was a common occurrence) to let us know he was back from wherever he’d been wandering alone in the U. S. – Canadian wild (this was also a common occurrence), and he was back in his cabin that was merely off-grid. He also sent a wilty-looking hundred-dollar bill and a grocery order that included more first-aid supplies than he usually requested. Dad and Mom were going to run him his groceries and make sure he wasn’t seriously injured. We ordinarily loved visiting Pappy, but begged off this time.

“It’s been a big week for chores,” I said. “We could use a day at home. Wilder may want to go, though.”

“No! Goose pills!” Wilder said.

So with puzzled looks on their faces, our parents loaded Pappy’s dry beans, rice, coffee, and a medical kit into Dad’s truck and flew off, leaving us at minimum six hours of freedom.

As soon as they were out of sight, we cleared the living room. Rolled-up carpets don’t fly, so we dragged it outside and unrolled it in the yard. Eliza sprinkled on the pixie dust. I looked over the sheet of commands I’d written out. We took our seats, with Wilder in my lap this time.

As Eliza began her chant, the carpet once again rose into the air. But this time, instead of just a few feet, it lifted higher and higher. The front porch, second story window, and then the roof slid by and sank beneath the carpet’s edge.

“Righteous,” I whispered.

“Righteous!” Wilder yelled.

It was time to test-drive this baby. The book said objects responded to commands based on volume and intensity, so I said, “Go forward,” at a little over a whisper.

I don’t know what I expected, but it moved with a silent smoothness that you could barely feel. It was a little like my aunt’s Tesla at low speed. But we were on a flying freaking carpet. I got excited.

“Go forward!” I said at what I thought was medium volume.

Either I was overly loud or carpets have sensitive ears, because the rug surged forward, still silent and smooth but kicking up what felt like Interstate winds.

“Clay, are you trying to throw us?!” Eliza shouted. The carpet began to sink.

“Slow!” I said. The carpet decelerated, but was still sinking.

“Keep us in the air!” I shouted back. “Stop.”

The carpet stopped gliding forward. We stopped sinking and rose back up again. I looked over my shoulder. Eliza had resumed her chant, but her eyes were full of words that I was glad she couldn’t share.

“Do your job,” I said. “Let me do mine.”

I tested out turn and go commands until I could move us around pretty smoothly. We made a few circles around the property, and finally came to a hover over near the gnomes’ compound, maybe ten feet off the ground. A smattering of them waved or hollered at us from the strawberry patch they were working.

“Let’s do this,” I said. “Wilder, ready to fly?”

“Geronimo!” he shouted.

“Eliza, take us higher!”

Thus began one of the coolest experiences of my life. The trees were so thick that we had to fly over them, which feels really high when you’re on a carpet with no seatbelts or handrails, and really, really high when you’re also holding a squirmy five-year-old. But instead of winding through the trail, we could reach the lake in a straight line (as the disco roc flies, Dad’s voice said in my head). We glided just over the treetops. The sky was a bright, cloudless blue, and there was a little breeze, which stirred the trees into a rustling green sea beneath us. Once on a trip to Anchorage, we’d flown in one of those tiny planes that can fly pretty close to the treetops; this was kind of like that, except better in every conceivable way.

I drank it in and let us mosey over the trees for a few minutes. But once I could see the disco rocs’ tree in the distance, I was ready for less journey and more destination.

“Buckle up,” I said for Eliza’s benefit. Remembering how fast we’d gone before, I said, “Go forward,” at medium.

The acceleration made me sway back a bit. Now we were moving: the trees clipped by underneath us at a speed I didn’t want to watch too closely. The wind pulled my hair back off my head. I whooped.

“Yeeha!” Wilder shouted. “Ruggy, go—mf!”

The mf! Was because I had clamped my hand over Wilder’s mouth. Good call, Eliza. We didn’t need turbo mode.

After a few minutes, we cleared the last treetops and were flying over Chapell Lake. Our cliff was a few hundred feet ahead on our left. I slowed the carpet down to an amble, pointed its nose nestward, and leaned back on my elbows. Wilder stretched out sideways on his tummy. With the still and the quiet, it almost felt like we were sunbathing.

As we got closer, I realized I had to crane my neck more and more to see the nest. We were as still higher than the ground-level treetops, but the nest was easily another hundred feet up.

“Let’s take a breather,” I said over my shoulder. “There on the shore.”

Wilder mumbled something. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but the carpet seemed to speed up a little.

“Wildman, what’d you say?” I said.

“My turn,” he said. “Goforward.”

We definitely sped up.

“No sir!” I said. “Slow down.”

“I want a turn!” Wilder hollered. “Ruggy, goforward!”

The carpet did an impression of the speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi. It kicked from about three miles an hour to sixty. Whether because Wilder was lying down or because the carpet had bonded with him, he stayed on; but Eliza and I were briefly suspended in midair, with the rug, as it were, pulled out from under us.

Dad had taken us cliff jumping, so it wasn’t the first time I’d fallen forty feet into water; but I’d never gone in unwillingly and unprepared. Thankfully, we both hit feetfirst. Eliza popped up to the surface right after I did.

“You okay?” I gasped. It was cold.

She nodded. “Where’s Wilder? Wilder!”

The carpet had jammed itself partway up a big Christmas-looking tree. The back half of the carpet dangled down the side: it looked like a giant pointy Muppet’s head sticking out its tongue. Wilder’s head and shoulders emerged.

“Thank God he’s okay,” Eliza said.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said at the same time.

We swam to shore, frigidly aware of why most people don’t swim in northern Washington in May. When we emerged, sodden and squelching, Wilder looked down on us from his ten-foot perch.

“Ruggy’s fast,” he said. His eyes were wide, and his blond hair was blown up like a cross between Albert Einstein and that kid in Jurassic Park after the electric fence.

Wilder clambered down, and we pulled the rug out of the tree.

“It’s dirty,” said Eliza. She touched a bit the tree had swallowed and grimaced. “And sappy. But it’s not torn or anything.”

“So we’re not dead yet,” I said. “How about that breather?”

Eliza and I lay on the gravelly beach to dry in the sun. Wilder sat quietly beside us. This was uncharacteristic: the ride must have shaken even him. Once we’d stopped shivering and our pulses had returned to normal, we made Wilder promise to let us drive, then resumed our places on the carpet.

Eliza started her chant.

Nothing happened.

“Liza?” I said.

“Maybe it needs more pixie dust.”

But even after a good sprinkle from Eliza’s thankfully watertight jar, the rug lay like a … rug.

“Are you sure you have the spell right?” I said after thirty seconds.

“Of course I have the spell right!” Eliza snapped. “I was just saying it over and over for the last thirty minutes.”

“It’s okay, Ruggy,” Wilder said. He patted the carpet. “Don’t be ‘fraid.”

Then, he started chanting along with Eliza in perfect Pixie. The carpet rose off the ground as smoothly as it had in the backyard. I stared back at my sister. Her mouth was still making the spell, but she looked as surprised as I felt.

“Alright, Wildman,” I said. “Take us up.”

My siblings chanted and we ascended. At thirty feet, it still felt okay. The top of the cliff was about sixty feet up; it was a lot easier to look off the cliffward side of the carpet than the beachward side. The tree was even taller than I’d thought; I quit trying to glance over the side to estimate just how high. I was strongly tempted to lie down.

But finally, the nest came into view. We rose over the top, and –

“Ooooohhhh!” Eliza squealed. We descended a little.

“Keep it together, sis!” I said. I gave the words to float us over the nest, but I wanted to squeal too.

Because in the nest were three. Baby. Disco rocs.

I say “baby:” they were nearly as big as Wilder. But they had big, surprised-looking eyes and adorably grumpy beaks. And they were covered with downy fuzz that refracted the sunlight into a million little rainbows.

“Omigosh, omigosh,” Eliza was saying. “I don’t know if my face hurts because they’re so bright or so cute.”

I was with her. They were so gawky, with their heads wobbling around and their wings flexing. Every movement threw off new lights and colors. They were big, flashing, multicolor puffballs.

“Righteous,” Wilder whispered. He stepped off the carpet, holding out his hand to pet. One of the chicks, which came up at least to his elbows, nipped his fingers.

“Ow! No, birdie,” Wilder said, holding his hand to his chest. “Don’t be like Charlie.”

The chick shook itself, fluffing out its feathers. It actually looked like a disco ball: its feathers made lights skitter around the walls of the nest. Which, I noticed, were as high as my chest. I also noticed that the chick, which was maybe two weeks old, could fit most of Wilder’s hand into its beak. Its feet were the size of a full-grown bald eagle’s.

“The parents must be huge,” I said.

“They’re so cuuute!” Eliza said. “I know I can’t hold one, but urgh! I want to!”

I don’t know how long we and the chicks watched one another. They didn’t seem scared of us, exactly, but they stayed on one end of the nest. Seeing what happened to Wilder confirmed that trying to pet them was unwise, so we stayed in ours. So we watched them bob, flap, and fluff themselves up for … fifteen minutes? Thirty? I was mesmerized.

Until the scream.

My head whipped around before I could wonder what it was. In the sky, not close yet but close enough you could see it flickering, was what could only be the mama disco roc.

“Do you think she can see us?” Eliza said.

It screamed again. I took that as an affirmative.

“Everybody on the carpet!” I said. “Wilder, come on.”

“Bye-bye, birdies,” Wilder said. Cool as a cucumber.

“Eliza, go,” I said. “Go, go, go!”

As soon as we lifted clear of the nest, I turned us toward home.

“Go forward!” I said.

We started moving at a decent pace. Not bad for a hundred feet in the air. I glanced over my shoulder.

“Do you think she’ll come after – swoop right!”

The carpet veered, narrowly avoiding the roc’s talon-first lunge at us. The draft from her wings nearly knocked me over.

“No thank you,” Wilder said. “No thank, you, big bird!”

“Everyone lie down!” I said. I shouted, “Go forward!”

The carpet accelerated, wind whipping over us. I lay on my stomach with one arm over Wilder, trying to keep us huddled in the middle. Eliza was on my legs.

“Is she gone?” I said. “Can anyone see her?”

The roc flapped into view behind us. I prayed that she was going back to her nest.; but she rose up high and dove toward us again.

“Eliza, make us sink!” I said. “I’m dodging left.”

I shouted for the rug to go at the top of my voice. It sped up, but not enough to outfly the roc. I swooped to dodge it again, still way too close. She came up again, screamed again, and kept coming after us.

We needed turbo mode.

“Wildman, make Ruggy go! As loud as you can!”

Wilder hollered into the carpet, “Ruggy, goforward!”

Return of the speeder bike. The wind slammed my face so hard it brought tears to my eyes. I squinted and looked out for landmarks to point us home. We were lower, but still way higher over the treetops than I wanted to be.

“Is she still there?” Eliza called.

I glanced back.

“I think we’re losing her, but she’s still coming!”

I don’t know if all disco rocs harbored unforgiveness, or just this one mama bird, but she was locked on to our tail. I spotted the house and turned us there, and she flapped after us like a rainbow-spitting TIE fighter. Even if we beat her home, what were we going to do? We weren’t outrunning her fast enough.

Then I noticed the treetops were getting closer.

“Don’t drop us yet!” I shouted to Eliza.

“It’s not me! I think the pixie dust is wearing off!”

We seemed to be slowing down, too. The roc was gaining. I’d never felt such terror at seeing a rainbow.

“Pour on everything we’ve got!”

Eliza opened the jar, but fumbled it. Dust and jar sparkled in the air and disappeared. We were on our own.

A part of my mind that wasn’t fully consumed by terror asked, Could we swing by and grab more pixie dust?

God bless you, distracted corner of my mind.

“I’m going to take us to the barn!” I said. “If it gets close, tell me a direction to dodge!”

We were mostly facing the barn entrance. It was big enough; all I had to do was steer a flying carpet carrying me, my twin sister, and my little brother into it at forty miles an hour, without being caught by a giant wrathful bird of prey, and stop before we ran into anything. Without crashing into the trees that were almost close enough to touch now. A tall one scraped the bottom of the rug.

“She’s coming!” Eliza said. “Left!”

We swooped left, leaving my stomach on our original flight path. The disco roc grabbed the top of a fir tree and yanked it off in an iridescent fury that would have made awesome TV. She flapped back into the air. Still coming after us.

I veered us back on course, aiming for the growing black square of the barn entrance. We broke past the tree line just as a few treetops slapped the front of the carpet, stinging my hand. Almost there.

“Clay, she’s coming back!” Eliza said. “Go right!”

“We’re too close!” I shouted. The barn was right there. “Sloooow!”

The carpet decelerated, scooting us forward. We flew into the darkness of the barn, then back out into light – praise be, the back was open – before our shifted weight pushed the carpet’s nose into the ground. We bounced, rolled, then skidded to a stop on the grass, more or less rolled up in the rug.

“Everyone okay?” Eliza asked.

“Shhh,” I breathed. “Wait a second.”

We couldn’t see from under the carpet, but we heard what sounded like the roc trying to maul the side of the barn. After a few seconds, it went quiet; then we heard very large wings flap away.

“No squishing!” Wilder said from around my armpit.

“Hold on,” I said. I counted to ten slowly, said a prayer, then peeked out from under the carpet.

There was nothing in the sky but a faint flash in the direction of the lake. The mama roc had satisfied her thirst for vengeance and was flying home.

I crawled out onto the ground, my body relaxing for the first time in what seemed like living memory.

“I’ve never been so glad to maybe be lying in sheep poop,” I said. “I can’t make myself care.”

Eliza and Wilder crawled out from underneath. Eliza flopped on her back.

“How could one animal make such a cute baby and such a terrifying adult?” she said.

Wilder hefted the ends of the carpet, trying to flip it upright again.

“Ruggy okay?” he said.

Miraculously, Ruggy was okay (though it was either unable or unwilling to fly again). No Bunyans were harmed in the making of this story either. Other than a few bruises, some rug burn, and adrenalin jitters, we all came out unscathed. The barn was fine, if you didn’t know to look for giant talon marks. Wilder even found a souvenir, an iridescent feather as long as his forearm. Eliza and I muscled the carpet back into the living room. We vacuumed out the pixie dust, reset the room, and then each went to shower and spend some time alone with our thoughts.

We must have been noticeably subdued even hours later when Dad and Mom got home. Eliza, who felt that even not volunteering the story of our morning was lying and therefore sinning, was reading in her room so she wouldn’t have to not talk about it. I tried to act normal, which almost guarantees that I acted weird. Even Wilder kind of sat around, quietly peeling the wrappers off his crayons to make them naked. Mom checked everyone for fever and asked about our bowel movements.

“Have you been loafy all day?” Dad asked.

“We explored a lot this morning,” I said. (Technically true). “Went down to the lake. We kind of wore ourselves out.” (Also technically true, conscience.)

“We found a disco feather!” Wilder said, suddenly perking up. He leapt to his feet in a flurry of crayon wrappers and ran to his room.

Oh, no.

He came back in, swishing the feather like a kids’ movie wand. Our rainbow-slinging loose end.

“Whoa-ho!” Dad said. He took the feather and twirled it. “Did you get this from the mama bird?”

“Yeah!” said Wilder. “She was mad.”

“Mad?” Mom came into the room with a tray of steaming tea mugs. “When was she mad?”

“It’s ‘kay, she didn’t get us,” Wilder said. “Ruggy’s ‘kay too. Watch!”

Oh, no-no.

Wilder spread-eagled on the carpet. Once again, he started up the levitation chant. And either we hadn’t gotten all the pixie dust with the vacuum, or the carpet had some residual affectionate memory for Wildman, because it rose into the air. The end table holding Bear Lamp tipped off, crashing Bear Lamp to the floor once again. To complete the picture, the vacuum cleaner full of pixie dust also tried to take off, tugging against the plug that held it to the wall like Nana’s leash in Peter Pan.

There was a pregnant pause while Mom, Dad, and I watched these events unfold. Then they both turned to me with businesslike expressions on their faces.

Houston, we have a problem.

My life is hid with Christ on high
With Christ my Savior and my God

From “Before the Throne of God Above”

Forty days after Jesus’ resurrection, he ascended back into heaven. He went back in his physical body to the realm where God is visibly known and worshipped: the world envisioned in places like Daniel 7 and Revelation 4 and 5.

The Ascension fulfills several patterns and promises laid in the Old Testament. Daniel’s vision of “one like a Son of Man” being crowned king of the cosmos in Daniel 7 was a prophecy of the Ascension, when Jesus was seated on the throne of heaven and earth. The Day of Atonement, in which the high priest “carried” Israel into the Most Holy Place and reconciled them to God for a year, was a shadow of Jesus carrying human nature into heaven.1 Like my four kids’ road trip luggage, there’s a lot to unpack.

But this past Sunday, I preached from Colossians 3:1-4 on how Jesus’ ascension impacts our lives today. In these verses, Paul shows not just what the return to heaven means for Jesus; but what it means for us.

¹ If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. ³ For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

The Ascension secures our place in heaven.

We see this in the first part of verse 1: “If then you have been raised with Christ.” Note that Paul doesn’t say, “If then you will be raised with Christ.” “You have been raised with Christ.” Paul says this again in verse 3: “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” When Jesus ascended into heaven, he took his people to heaven with him.

Some friends of ours adopted a little girl from an orphanage in India. She’d been born with medical complications, and her mother had put her up for adoption. She wasn’t being abused or neglected; but her future very likely had a lot of hardship.

But as our friends went through the adoption process, there came a point where this girl’s entire life suddenly changed. The adoption papers were signed, sealed, and delivered, and this girl went from being an orphan to belonging to our friends’ family. To having a new identity, a new home, and a new future. Through no doing of her own, this girl’s life became tied to our friends’ lives. Before she got to see their house in the United States, it became her home.

That’s kind of what happened in the Ascension. When Jesus ascended into heaven, he took God’s people – every Christian – with him. It’s a little like he delivered the adoption paperwork that made heaven our home. We were brought into God’s family once for all time.

This is the fulfillment of the Jewish Day of Atonement.2 Once every year, the Jewish high priest would spend days purifying himself. He’d sacrifice animals for his own sins and for the sins of Israel. Then, he’d put on special clothes that had stones that represented the people. He’d take blood from his sacrifice into a room of the Temple called the Most Holy Place, which symbolized heaven. If the high priest could do that without God killing him, it meant that God had accepted their sacrifices for their sins and received the Israelites into his presence for another year. The high priest had symbolically carried the people into heaven.

When Jesus ascended into heaven, he took God’s people – all Christians – with him. Not symbolically, but in reality. And not once a year, but once for all time. That act made heaven our real home: our real source of identity, purpose, and destiny. Jesus secured a place for us in heaven.

The hymn “Before the Throne” is largely based on this text. It calls Jesus our great high priest, then says:

My name is graven on His hands
My name is written on His heart
I know that while in heav’n He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart

This is the hope of Christianity. It’s not that we’ll do enough that one day God will take us to heaven; it’s that Jesus has taken us with him to heaven now, entirely by his grace. Paul goes on in verse 4 to say, “Christ is your life.” When my friends adopted their daughter, they became her family. Her identity, home, and future were united to theirs. In the same way, when Jesus ascended to heaven and took us with him, now our identity, home, and future are with him.

The Ascension calls us to live by the pattern of heaven.

Most likely, you’ve seen some version of The Lion King: the original animated movie, the uncanny CGI movie, or the stage musical. If you haven’t, The Lion King is about a young lion, Simba, who’s the son of the king, Mufasa. Mufasa is murdered by his brother, Simba’s uncle Scar. Scar makes Simba think it’s Simba’s fault that his dad was killed, tells Simba to run away, then tries to kill him. (It’s a kids’ movie, if I didn’t say that already.)

Simba escapes, and he gets taken in by a kindly meerkat and warthog. They raise him to live by their philosophy, hakuna matata – which means no worries. They spend their days just hanging out, loafing around and eating bugs. Despite still being a lion and the rightful king of the savannah, Simba adopts their lifestyle.

The dramatic hinge of the movie is when some characters from Simba’s past come after him to try to bring him back. This culminates in Simba having a vision of his father; and his father says, “You are more than what you have become. Remember who you are. You are my son.”

As the rest of the movie shows, “Remember who you are” doesn’t mean, “here are some facts to recall while you live your hakuna matata life and eat bugs.” Remembering who he is means taking up his real identity and purpose. It means leaving hakuna matata behind for a pattern of life that’s more costly, but ultimately far more joyful than loafing around eating bugs would have been. Remembering his identity changes his present and his future.

Paul is getting at the same thing in the rest of verse 1 and in verse 2:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

Seek the things that are above. Set your minds on things that are above. In other words, Jesus’ ascension calls us to live by the pattern of heaven.

For Simba to truly remember who he was, his life had to change. He had to live as the king of his people, which included risking his life to rescue them. In the same way, if our real home is in heaven, that’s going to set our pattern of life too. We’re going to live into that reality.

But what exactly does it mean to seek the things that are above, and to set our minds on things above?

We might think it means we should hate everything physical: eat as little as possible, neglect our earthly relationships, or just quit caring about the world, because that’s all gross earthy stuff. We should go be the kinds of monks who live in caves, or at least people who never enjoy anything.

But right before this passage, at the end of Colossians 2, Paul warns about false teachers who were advocating exactly that kind of life: getting super-strict with physical discipline and obsessive with rituals of self-denial. In the verse literally just before where we started, in Colossians 2:23, Paul says, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” In other words, self-denial can seem wise, but it’s self-made, self-dependent religion, and it’s spiritually worthless. The difference between living for heaven and living for earth isn’t about rejecting physical life or practicing asceticism.

Paul tells us what he means by earthly things and heavenly ones in the rest of Colossians 3. He says in verse 5, “Put to death what is earthly in you …” and then lists some things that means. Sexual immorality, which is all forms of sexual activity outside of marriage. Greed, or coveting what our neighbors have. Paul says that’s idolatry: looking to a created thing to give us the satisfaction and purpose that come from God. Anger, wrath, malice – working to harm people instead of love them. Lying. These are the life of earth: selfish pleasure, organizing our lives around wealth or comfort, using and manipulating others instead of loving them. “Earth” doesn’t mean “the physical world,” but “the world of putting yourself first.” The world of selfishness and self-righteousness.

Paul says, we’re to put those things to death. We’re to starve those desires, which is what “put to death” means. It would be great if we could just execute them – drag greed out into the backyard and bury it – but that’s not how our souls work. Putting our earthly desires to death means recognizing my greed and confessing it to God and to others, then refusing to indulge it with my actions or my thoughts. I’m not going to fantasize about having more in the bank or a better vacation. I’m not going to sacrifice my relationship with my family or lie to a customer to make more money. If I’m in school, I’m not going to cheat for a better grade. That’s the life of earth. Putting that desire to death means confessing it and rejecting it.

Starting in verse 12, Paul tells us about the life of heaven. He writes, “put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” The life of heaven embodies grace to others. When someone is kind, humble, and patient, they’re bringing heaven to earth. Paul goes on to say, “put on love, that binds things together in harmony.” We’re to be relentlessly committed to the good of others. He calls us to let the peace of Christ rule among us and God’s Word dwell in us richly: we’re to be worshipping and communing with God, so that his truth saturates everything we do. Love, godliness, worship: that’s the life of heaven. Those are the “things above” we’re called to seek.

At the church where I currently serve, we have a group called the men’s recovery collective. Men who are struggling with persistent sin – substance addiction, pornography, or anything – are invited to a group where they can confess what they’re dealing with, and they can receive regular encouragement and support as they try to put that desire to death and practice godliness. They’re not doing that to keep some arbitrary set of rules: they’re doing it because the life of heaven includes seeking to be holy as God is holy, and they want to see that life grow in their soul. That pattern of confessing and rejecting sin and pursuing godliness is seeking the things that are above.

The Ascension offers the promise that heaven will return to earth.

Paul closes with a promise in verse 4:

“When Christ who is your life appears, you also will appear with him in glory.”

“When Christ appears” means that Jesus is going to come back from heaven to earth. But this time, he’s going to come in glory: as the visibly divine king of the universe. The apostle John saw Jesus in this glory at the beginning of the book of Revelation. John saw

one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. ¹⁴ The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, ¹⁵ his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. ¹⁶ In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

¹⁷ When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, ¹⁸ and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” (Revelation 1:13-18)

John saw Jesus’ glory: the divine power and perfection that filled him and were radiating out of him. When Jesus comes back, he’ll come back with the visible power and perfection of God.

And when he comes back, he’s going to stop this normal course of human history like a referee calling the end of a soccer match. He’s going to re-create the universe after the pattern of his resurrection: a new physical world that can’t be touched by death, pain, or sin anymore. And the people whose lives are hidden in him, who trusted him here as king and Savior, will be re-created in glory too. We’ll have new bodies that can’t suffer anymore; we’ll have new souls that can’t sin anymore; and we’ll see our heavenly father face to face and be filled with his delight forever.

The Ascension holds the promise that in a sense, heaven will return to earth. That as Jesus has secured a place for us now, he’ll secure our eternal life in the new creation.3 The pains of sickness and death will be no more. The sin we have to confess and repent of here will be gone. Broken relationships will be healed. We’ll never be tempted to wonder if God is there or if he’s good because we’ll know him as intimately as a bride knows her husband. Our struggle, suffering, and shame here will be replaced with God’s delight in us.

So as we struggle to live by the pattern of heaven (and fail, confess, and repent), Paul wants us to know that we don’t struggle in the insecure hope that we’ll get to heaven one day. We struggle in the confidence that Jesus has secured our home in heaven now, and that he’ll bring heaven back to earth. This is the promise of the Ascension.

Every year’s end, Allison and I (and everyone we can wheedle into it) write down Ebenezers: ways we’ve seen God help us through the year. We have a physical jar of stones for every year of our marriage. Around this time, we take a new stone, write a reminder of what we want to remember, and add it to the jar.

Here are ours for the year; if you’re willing, please share yours in the comments!

Health

As I’ve chronicled elsewhere, Allison and I were both diagnosed with chronic autoimmune diseases in 2023. Like the great theologian 80s hair band Cinderella reminded us, you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. We will never take good health for granted again.

This year, health is an Ebenezer for us because it was our first “nothing to report” year since ‘23. We each have long-term symptoms we have to live with; but our medicines are working without troubling side effects, and we’re able to exercise, rebuild muscle, and do normal physical activity. We see this as a reminder that our health comes from God’s hand; “pretty much normal” is a gift.

Friendship

This year, we’ve really seen friendships we were cultivating in 2024 take root, both for our kids and for us. I’m always surprised at how long it can take to feel comfortable in friendship; but this year, we have a home group, supper club, a workout crew, and community and neighborhood friends. What a ridiculous gift.

Re|engage

One of my big projects this year was launching the marriage ministry Re|engage at Redeemer. This summer, we took a group of potential leaders through the curriculum (Allison and I went through it too), and this fall we started it with participants.

Re|engage is a fantastic ministry, and it went well at the church; but more than anything, it was great for my marriage. Allison and I have been blessed with a fun, supportive, mostly-aligned relationship. But this pushed us into some areas of humility, confession, service, and intimacy we’d neglected, with the result that we came through it with a deeper love for one another and a stronger marriage covenant. I’ll probably write some fuller thoughts on Re|engage in the future, but it was a blessing.

Our home group

One thing that multiplied the goodness of Re|engage is that we got to go through it with members of our new home group (home groups are Redeemer’s term for community groups / small groups, because they’re intentionally based in people’s homes). This fall, we started a home group with three other couples and a single woman who live in our ‘hood and are members of Redeemer. Half of our meetings are with that core; and half are open to seekers and non-Christians in the neighborhood.

The group has been a blessing to us, because it’s helped us build relationships with Christians who live close enough to us to make friendship easy. So this has significant overlap with the “friends” Ebenezer above.

But it’s also been a blessing to see new friends either meeting Jesus for the first time or really wrestling with who he is. This kind of ministry fires me up more than almost anything else; and to have a whole community of men and women who are studying God’s Word and sharing the beautiful and hard things about life with God so non-Christian seekers can see it is just the best.

I might share specific stories soon, but one of the couples in our group seem to have come to faith this year; and another individual is praying and reading the Bible on their own for the first time ever.

I think we’re made for both community and mission. I’m grateful to have a group of friends committed to both.

Your turn!

I’d love to hear yours!

The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment has been one of the most formative books in Allison’s and my life. In a world that’s obsessed with more - seeing more, doing more, making more, having more - this Puritan book has been by turns an oasis of spiritual calm and a kick in the teeth. God has used this book to convict me of the need to choose contentment and fight for gratitude in all circumstances; we read through it over 2022 and ‘23, right before the autoimmune journey from my When I Am Weak period.

Allison recently did a miniseries on contentment on her Pace & Pattern podcast (Apple, Spotify), and I joined her for the last three episodes. We discussed some of the things we’ve learned about how God’s providence, the role of redemptive agency, and the way we narrate our life stories can help us choose gratitude and contentment over bitterness.

Episode 1: Barriers to Contentment

Episode 2: God’s Providence and Contentment

Episode 3: Redemptive Agency

Episode 4: The Story We Tell Ourselves

From the BBC’s story of the 1914 Christmas Truce of WW1 by Myles Burke:

On Christmas Eve 1914, Rifleman Graham Williams, of the 5th London Rifle Brigade, stood out on sentry duty staring out anxiously across the wasteland of no man’s land to the German trenches. He had already endured months of the brutal violence, bloodshed and destruction that would come to characterise World War One, when something remarkable happened.

“All of a sudden, lights appeared along the German trench. And I thought this is a funny thing. And then the Germans started singing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’. And I woke up, and all the sentries did the same thing, all woke up the other people to come along and see this and what the Earth is going on,” he recalled, in the BBC radio show Witness History.

The voices carried across the desolation of no man’s land, familiar songs bridging the barrier of language, a musical reminder of a shared humanity. “They finished their carol and we applauded them and we thought we should retaliate in some way. So, we replied with The First Noel.”

Remarkably, this wasn’t the only “Christmas Truce;” small truces sprung up spontaneously along the battle lines. Some had dueling carols; in others, soldiers met one another, exchanged cigarettes and food, and even played [European] football:

The ceasefires allowed soldiers some respite to recover their dead from no man’s land and give proper burials to fallen comrades. Men who just hours earlier had been trying to kill each other exchanged cigarettes, food and souvenirs from home. There are even reports of impromptu games of football breaking out, with soldiers having a kick about in barren space between the opposing trenches. Col Johannes Niemann, a second lieutenant with the 33rd Saxon Regiment, was one of the soldiers who took part.

“Suddenly a Tommy came with a football… And then began a football match. We marked our goals with our caps. Tommy did also. And we had much kicking. And then, after all, the Germans won the football game 3-2.”

The peace was so remarkable that several officers put a stop to it, “fear[ing] they would erode their troops’ willingness to fight.” They even took measures in succeeding years to prevent more spontaneous truces from emerging, that the war might not be interrupted again.

Shared humanity through shared holiness

The article quotes historian Dan Snow calling the Christmas Truce “a brief tantalising flash of individual humanity” for the soldiers. And it was: rather than seeing one another as faceless abstractions to kill or be killed by, they met one another as fellow men, even as men who might have been friends.

But I think it’s interesting that in Rifleman Williams’ account, the first volley of the truce, as it were, is the German “Stille Nacht,” which we know in English as “Silent Night.” Here’s a direct translation of the first German verse:1

Silent night, holy night,
All is sleeping; alone awake
Is only the dear, most holy pair.
Gentle child with curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!

Whatever they meant by their choice, the soldiers chose a song that marked this night, of all nights, as holy. Holy things belong to God: they’re set apart by him, for his purpose instead of ours. Soldiers up and down the lines recognized that if any day belonged not to the machinations of men but the mercy of God, it would surely be the day of his son’s birth. Their reverence for Jesus made them willing to consecrate Christmas by setting war aside.

And both the German and English versions end with the line, “Sleep in heavenly peace.” Whatever one thinks about the necessity of war on earth,2 the song recognizes that the life of heaven is peace. Peace reigns in heaven now, and peace will reign when the earth is reconciled with heaven in the new creation. If a holy day belongs to God, peace is a more fitting response than war.

The Pattern of the Prince of Peace

The shared moment of humanity came from a shared understanding of divinity. Whatever Christmas meant to the individual soldiers, Christmas existed because God the Son had been born as a baby to bring peace:

His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

While Christ’s kingdom clashes with Satan’s, there is war. While sin still poisons hearts and peoples, there will be war. But within the kingdom of heaven, within the heart and home of God, is peace. A culture shaped by centuries of celebrating the Prince of Peace making a home among us inspired these soldiers to let heaven’s peace interrupt their war. The BBC called it “miraculous,” which is exactly right. A miracle is when heaven breaks into earth for a moment; that is what happened over Christmas in 1914.

The Incarnation is the belief that God the Son became a human being. That he entered the world the way all of us do, as a baby dependent upon his mother. As Chesterton notes in The Everlasting Man, this isn’t just a fact; it’s a fact that changes us:

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection … It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much-disputed phrase, altered human nature.

The mystery of God coming to dwell with humankind – of divine power being held in a poor mother’s arms – inevitably changes us. God “humanizing” himself, especially into a blue-collar family who become refugees, carries a logic that leads to humanizing others instead of dehumanizing them. Chesterton goes on to say,

After that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s end.

(That little sound you hear is Tom Holland shouting “Amen!”)

If, as the carol says, the slave is our brother, then the Christian soldier on the other side of the line is as well; and the non-Christian is our neighbor. The miracle of the Incarnation produced the miracle of the Christmas Truce, a spontaneous recognition of the humanity of the enemy.

May the miracles multiply.

Merry Christmas!

Image: British and German soldiers meeting during the truce. From Harold Robson / IWM.

Let me tell you about a most wonderful experience I had early Monday morning, March 19, 2007, a little after six o’clock. God actually spoke to me. There is no doubt that it was God. I heard the words in my head just as clearly as when a memory of a conversation passes across your consciousness. The words were in English, but they had about them an absolutely self-authenticating ring of truth. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God still speaks today.1

So begins a tongue-in-cheek piece from John Piper. He walks through a series of “revelations” given him by the voice of God and the dramatic effects they have on him. They move his memory, humble his soul, give him a sense of God’s closeness. At the end of it, he’s overwhelmed with the greatness of God’s glory and the fresh recognition of how God is active in the world and close to us today.

Then, Piper reveals that the revelations given him are the words of a psalm, “spoken” to him as he read them in his Bible.

Piper wrote this, not to make a joke, but to convey a truth insisted on by the biblical authors and historic Christians: that God not only spoke through the Scriptures, but still uses them to speak to us today. Piper writes,

It was through the Bible that I heard these divine words and through the Bible I have experiences like this almost every day. The very God of the universe speaks on every page into my mind — and your mind. We hear his very words.

This isn’t a charismatic or Evangelical innovation; it’s following the example of Jesus. In a fight with the Sadducees, Jesus said,

“As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?”

Likewise, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews quotes Psalm 95, which was about a thousand years old at the time. Then he goes on to write,

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:12-13)

He says the word of God – including thousand-year-old psalms – is “living and active.” It speaks and acts right now, piercing and peeling open our hearts today. And he transitions seamlessly from “the word of God” to

no creature is hidden from his sight … to whom we must give account.

In other words, the word of God is living and active because God is living and acting through those words right now. God spoke them in the past; when we read them, God speaks them to us today.

How can this be? What kind of author can write words that are living and active today? What kind of author is God?

The transcendent author

You may have heard God described as transcendent, or somehow “beyond” us. That term often comes with some other big words like infinite and omnipresent. As we’re about to see, those aren’t just abstractions for a nerdy college dorm debate; God’s transcendent attributes point us to how the Bible is living and active today.

God is a spirit. He doesn’t have a body that limits his physical presence. You and I occupy a few cubic feet of space; we have the ability to see, hear, and speak a few hundred feet around us without the help of technology. Our brains are capable of focusing on basically one thing at a time. God doesn’t have those limitations. As a spirit, his consciousness isn’t limited by a body, and it doesn’t have to move like a body. Indeed, he doesn’t have to “move” at all.

God is also infinite. While we don’t know what limitations other spirits might have, we do know that God has none. He’s fully conscious of you, wherever you’re reading this; of whatever’s happening at the peak of Mount Everest; and what’s going on in the most distant galaxies from ours. He’s equally present at all those places at the same time. God the spirit has no limits to his presence, attention, or power.

That means God is omnipresent. No matter where you are in the cosmos, he’s equally there. He’s not just aware of you; he’s with you, while he’s also everywhere else. When you read your Bible, God is in the room with you as fully as he was in the Holy Place of the Temple and the Garden of Eden.

But he’s not just with us now. God is eternal: every moment of time is equally “present” to him. He was there when David wrote Psalm 95. He was there when the author of Hebrews quoted it a thousand years later. He was there when I wrote about it two millennia after that. Those past events aren’t vague memories for him; he is completely, fully aware of them all simultaneously, because he’s equally then just as he’s equally there in all places.

All of those imply that God is omniscient. He knows everything there is to know, fully and at the same time. One of our preachers said recently, “Has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God?” God has known everything there is to know, from the motion of the smallest elementary particle to how many hairs are on your head, from the beginning of the universe. When he coauthored the book of Hebrews, he knew you’d read the ESV translation of Hebrews 4:12 quoted in this essay today. That was part of the plan.

Finally, God is sovereign. He’s all-powerful, and is directing the whole course of history moment by moment. He didn’t just know we’d be here now; before the beginning of time, he arranged things so that you’d be here now, interacting with a psalm, a letter, and a book that were written in three different millennia.

When we put these things together, we could come to a humbling, even frightening picture. If God were only transcendent, he would be so much greater than us that we’d be less to him than the ants in my yard are to me. He’d be perfectly capable of authoring living words; but we’d be nothing to him. Why would a God like that care enough about us to write us a book, let alone to speak to us today through it?

The immanent author

But fortunately, God isn’t only transcendent. He is also immanent: he has a collection of qualities that mean he comes near to us, in relationship to us. When we add these to his transcendent attributes, we see what kind of author is addressing us through the pages of his Word.

God is personal. God isn’t just an infinite, eternal mind; he is a self. There is a “he” who speaks to us.2 He has thoughts, desires, and affections. He can be pleased, grieved, or angered. And he can be known, similarly to how your neighbor can be known.

This personal God communicates. God wants to be known by his creatures. He wants a relationship with us. The apostle John wrote, “No one has ever seen God; the only [begotten] God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). God uses his sovereign power not to wipe away the ants on his lawn, but to befriend them. He’s told us all about himself: who he is, what he’s done for us, and what he wants for us.

He doesn’t just communicate; God covenants. A covenant is a relationship that binds the parties together into something bigger than themselves. In a covenant, we bind ourselves to another person in a relationship that’s made to weather strain. Marriages, which used to be sealed with the promise, “’Til death do us part,” are covenant relationships. Through the Bible, God initiates covenant relationships with his people. He binds himself to them, and he asks us to bind ourselves to him. The end of the Bible actually describes the final covenant union between God and humankind as an eternal marriage! If you’re part of the covenant that we now call Christianity, God doesn’t listen to you reluctantly or half-heartedly; you’re part of his bride.

Because God is too big for one metaphor, we also see that God is his people’s Father. Jesus called God “Father,” which makes sense; but he also told his people to call God “Father” too. Theologian J. I. Packer wrote:

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God.3

If you’re part of God’s people, the transcendent author of the Bible loves you as his daughter or son. You’re part of his family, and he delights in being with you.

That leads us to a final relevant quality of God: God is love. This is more than “God is loving;” the apostle John wrote in one of his letters, “God is love.” In case we thought he made a slip of the pen, he wrote it twice.4 The God of the universe has committed himself to the good of his people. He wants the best for you, his bride, his child. And because he is the most glorious being in the universe, he wants you to know and enjoy him.

When we put these things together, we see a God who can speak to us through his Word. This eternal, infinitely powerful, everywhere-present sovereign of the universe knew everyone who would ever pick up 1 John and read chapter four while he was co-writing it. While John might have imagined that someone beyond his audience might read the letter, God literally had you in mind while he wrote it.

And we also see a God who wants to speak to us through his Word. He wants to be in a covenant relationship with you. He wants what is best for you, which includes you hearing and living by his words. You’re his son or daughter that he’s raising by his Word. You’re his bride that he’s washing clean by it. You’re his treasure, being refined by the fire of it. Why wouldn’t a God this powerful and loving speak to us when we read the Scriptures?

When we read the Bible, God sits in the room and talks to us. Sometimes it feels like that. The words sing in our minds; God floors us with his glory or lifts us heavenward with his grace. More often, at least for me, it feels much more ordinary, like eating a breakfast that got me out the door to work. Nothing can force God to show up or perform for us. But even if the words just become part of the “leaf-mould of the mind,” in Tolkien’s phrase, God can use that to grow things in us too.

How to read a living Word

God speaks to us today through his Word. This doesn’t mean we will hear an audible voice when we meditate, or that every session will change our lives; but meditation practices active listening to the Word. It reads in expectant faith that God might speak to us today. Dietrich Bonhoeffer summarizes this faith:

In our meditation we ponder the chosen text on the strength of the promise that it has something utterly personal to say to us for this day and for our Christian life, that it is not only God’s Word for the church, but also God’s Word for us individually. ... We read God’s Word as God’s Word for us.5

God might have something utterly personal to say to you. The active listening of meditation will prepare your mind and heart to hear it.

There’s a very large church in my city that has an iffy reputation. It’s pretty good at ground-floor Christian discipleship; but people seem to outgrow it and look for deeper teaching. Their messages are topical, invitational, and flirt with “prosperity gospel lite." And the rate of people who get a peek behind the curtain at their leadership and run is higher than average.

But despite these, their congregation has some incredible spiritual vitality and a heart for service.

I’ve wondered how that kind of church could have that kind of vitality. This quote from Richard Lovelace1 helped me make some sense of it:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements with grave theological weaknesses and imbalances continued to prosper, however imperfectly, because they continued to pray.

In the late twentieth century, the race is not being won by the brilliant and well organized. Pentecostals have become a “third force” in world Christianity, not because their doctrine is perfect, but because they have given themselves to the praise of God and to intercessory prayer.

And it hit me: this church organizes some serious kingdom-centered prayer for their people. They devote themselves to prayer for great periods of time; and even members who have left the church go back to some of those prayer times.

It reminded me of the promise God makes to Solomon, which has been wrongly applied to nations like the U.S. but does apply to the church:

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14)

Why might a church with wonky theology and a leadership culture people run from see great spiritual blessing? Their people humble themselves and pray.

Why might charismatic churches that overemphasize the Spirit’s work to the detriment of scriptural truth see transformed lives? Because they pray.

Why might fundamentalist churches that fence in the gospel with extra taboos nevertheless produce godly and kind people? They will if they pray.

As Jesus told us, this doesn’t mean a greater heaping up of words (Matthew 6:7); and as God said through Isaiah, prayer without humility or obedience stinks in his nostrils (Isaiah 1:12-17). Lovelace summarizes what kind of prayer God is looking for:

An increase in the volume of prayer may not be as important as refinement in the agenda. God, as Jesus tells us, is not impressed by the multitude of our words (Mt 6:7-8). He does respond, however, when we ask those things which are closely related to the interests of the kingdom of his Son. God is not looking for perfect Christians, but for those who are deeply attentive to holy purposes. … Kingdom-centered prayer is always heard by God - not only because it is offered in the name of his Son, but because it is accurately aimed at advancing his rule. (173-4)

Kingdom-centered prayer begs God to bring his rule on earth as it is in heaven. It humbles itself, confessing sin. It acknowledges my needs and desires, but asks for what God wants over what I want. It tries to align my heart with God’s rather than the other way round.

And God works through kingdom prayer. He works through it despite personal, theological, or corporate flaws (wouldn’t he, though?). He works through it because when people pray kingdom-centered prayer, they’re finally trying to align themselves with his heart and his agenda.

Prayer in any form doesn’t come easily to me. I get distracted; I feel the need to finish and go do “the important things that need me.” But God’s kingdom is the most important thing there is; and no one needs me more than they need God. I share this not as an example, but as a pilgrim who found a hard road that leads somewhere good.

May we humble ourselves to seek God’s kingdom in prayer. To offer prayers that he’s itching to answer, “Yes!”

And if you’ve come across anything that inspired you to pray kingdom prayers, please share it.

Imagine that it’s your wedding day. You’re cleaned up and dressed up in a dapper suit. Your friends and family are there to celebrate with you. There’s a shrimp and grits bar and a great reception band waiting. But there’s one thing missing: there’s no bride. You’re not actually engaged.

Would that be 80 percent of a great day? Do the clothes, the people, the food, the fun make four-fifths of a wedding?

Our men’s ministry took five weeks this summer to study the hope of heaven: the glories that God has laid up for us in eternity. We look forward to resurrected bodies that can never get sick or die. We look forward to re-created souls, that will never even be tempted to sin. We look forward to living on a renewed earth, eating and resting and enjoying life with our brothers and sisters in Christ in perfect peace. All of these blessings are amazing.

But as great as they are, they’re almost like the festivities of a wedding. They’re like the great food and the reception band and the dapper suits; but if we had all of those things and didn’t have a bride, we’d missing the element that makes the whole thing a wedding. A lifelong covenant relationship with the woman I love isn’t one of the things that makes the wedding fun; it is the wedding.

In the same way, what ultimately makes heaven heaven is that we will be eternally, completely filled with the perfectly good, holy, and satisfying presence of God. In other words:

God’s presence is what makes heaven into heaven.

⁶ Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. ⁷ Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready. – Revelation 19:6-7

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. ⁴ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. – Revelation 21:1-4

In Revelation 19, John hears a voice exulting in God’s glory and calling everyone who hears to worship him; and then the voice says, “The marriage of the Lamb has come.” This voice is setting up the climax of Revelation, the final events that bring the story to a close; and it describes the end that’s coming as the marriage of the Lamb. The marriage of Christ.

Then, after Jesus’ final victory over evil and the final judgment, John sees

the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’

The heavenly city is a symbol for God’s people; so the climactic hope of heaven, the event that ends the story, is a covenant relationship so intimate and deep and joyful that the best earthly image of it is a wedding. God will dwell with us; we will be his people, and God himself will be with us as our God.

The hope of heaven is that one day, we will come face-to-face with the infinite, all-powerful, completely holy, completely good Creator and King of the universe, and will be welcomed like a bride. That the God who is so glorious and perfect that the Bible says, he is light; who is so holy and righteous, it says, he is a consuming fire; who is so kind and good, it says, he is love, will be present to us like a husband is to a wife. We will see and feel God’s presence as completely as a small, finite human can know an infinite God, and that presence will be heaven. As Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

For God’s people, God’s presence is the source of comfort and joy and victory beyond anything we could imagine on this side of seeing him. There’s a promise from the prophet Zephaniah that summarizes the effects of God’s presence beautifully:

The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing. - Zephaniah 3:17

God is going to sing over his people. He’s going to rejoice over us. He’s going to fill us with his love in a way that satisfies the longing of our souls forever. God’s presence will be a source of endless delight in his endless goodness.

If that’s the hope of heaven, how do we enter it?

The Bible tells us that

We enter God’s presence through Jesus’ grace.

We saw in Revelation 19 that the marriage of heaven is the marriage of the Lamb. Of Jesus. In Revelation chapter 5, we see the Lamb being worshipped; and the host of heaven say,

Worthy are you … for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. (Revelation 5:9-10)

The Lamb is a sacrifice for sin; his death ransoms people for God. Before he does that, we can’t endure the presence of God. If he comes close to us in our sinful state, it’s like a fire coming close to a dry pine branch. God’s presence would destroy us.

But when Jesus’ sacrifice covers us, it makes us people who can now endure the presence of God. Jesus gives us his perfect holiness, and that covering makes us able to come close to God. It enables us to come into his presence.

We enter God’s presence only through Jesus’ grace. As Jesus said:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. - John 14:6

“This is eternal life: that they know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” – John 17:3

“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me.’” – Matthew 7:22-23

C. S. Lewis puts it starkly:

In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. … We are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. … On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.

Those who have lived by Jesus’ grace on this side of things will be welcomed into God’s presence; those who haven’t will be cast out. If we want to experience God’s presence now and enjoy it forever in eternity, we find it through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection for us.

So if God’s presence is what makes heaven into heaven and we enter into that presence through Jesus’ grace, what does that mean for us here? How do we prepare for that?

We prepare for heaven by practicing God’s presence here.

In one sense, we’re waiting for God’s presence. It will come in eternity. But just like God sometimes gives us appetizers of heaven on earth, he sometimes gives us an experience of his presence here. When I was in the early stages of my autoimmune disease, to where we knew I was badly sick but hadn’t been able even to schedule with a specialist yet, one Sunday in worship we sang “Jesus Paid It All,” which opens with these lines:

I hear the Savior say, “Thy strength indeed is small;

Child of weakness, watch and pray; find in Me thine all in all.”

As we sang those lines, suddenly I felt the presence of God with me in a way that completely overwhelmed me emotionally. I basically cried through the rest of the service, which was roughly the total amount of time I’d spent crying in the 20 years before. I felt the holy, completely good, loving presence of God, and it melted me.

I would love to say there’s a way to manufacture or guarantee that experience; but on this side of things, it ain’t so. John Piper has a helpful analogy about sailing. A sailboat requires two things to work: a properly set sail, and the wind to blow. If my sail isn’t set when the wind is blowing, I’m not going nowhere; and no amount of sailing skills can force the wind blow.

In the same way, when God’s presence shows up, it just shows up; we can’t manipulate or force his presence. But we can prepare our souls to be more likely to receive and feel his presence when it comes. Brother Lawrence called this “the practice of the presence of God.”

There are three concrete ways that we can practice God’s presence here on Earth:

1. Worship

The main thing that happens in heaven right now is that God’s creations see his glory and his grace and respond in worship. So when we worship God, through singing and hearing his Word in church, or through praying to him with friends or on our own, we’re setting our hearts on him and practicing being present to him.

2. Obedience

Jesus said, “Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and don’t do what I tell you?” Seeking God’s presence while living out of step with his Word is like cheating on our wives and wondering why our marriage sucks. Keeping God’s Word, and confessing and repenting when we fail, postures our hearts to be in his presence.

3. Love

If God is love, and Jesus said all the commands of Scripture can be summarized in “Love the Lord your God … and love your neighbor as yourself,” then serving and enjoying others, especially those in the greatest need, postures our hearts to practice the presence of God.

Our society has a strange relationship with “heart stuff.” The dominant paradigm is summarized in Steve Jobs’ famous quote: “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”1 Against this is a counter-sentiment captured in Ben Shapiro’s famous tweet, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” These seem opposed to one another. “Follow your heart!” versus “Ignore your heart!”

But Christianity offers a richer path forward than simply following or ignoring our hearts. The Proverb exhorts us, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow streams of life” (4:23). And look at Paul’s letter to Titus:

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. (Titus 2:11-14, emphasis added)

The gospel both saves us and trains us. It trains us away from worldly passions and leads to zeal for good works. In other words, God doesn’t want us to follow our hearts or ignore them: he wants us to train them, so we can love him with our hearts as well as our minds.

Training the heart: Meditation

Training hearts begins in our “Bible study” time, with the practice of meditation. Anglican scholar Peter Toon put it this way:

Those who have written books on meditation upon the contents and themes of Scripture have firmly agreed in this – that whatever method is used to digest, inwardly and spiritually, the content and meaning of God’s [Word], it must have the effect of raising our affections (for example, desire, joy, hope, love, trust) towards the living God.2

Not only can meditation try to train our affections; it must. Our meditation time should have the goal of loving what we see in the Word, not just learning it or living it. We want to “taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 34:8).

Scripture and Christian tradition offer three tools we can use to train our affections in meditation.

Tool 1: Beauty

Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea:
A great High Priest whose name is Love,
Who ever lives and pleads for me
My name is graven on his hands,
My name is written on his heart
I know that while in Heav'n he stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart

“Before the Throne of God Above” is about Jesus’ interceding, security-granting presence on his people’s behalf in heaven. We could analyze it with rich theological terms. But its poetry moves our souls in ways the jargon wouldn’t.

Beauty draws our souls. We can train our affections toward God by savoring the beauty in his Word. It may be there naturally, like in a psalm or a poetic line. We may connect a truth like justification to a song like “Jesus Paid It All,” or a story like the Prodigal Son to Rembrandt’s painting. We may even create our own beauty in response! (You don’t have to share it with anyone.) But bringing beauty into our Bible study will train us to love what we’re learning.

Tool 2: Imagination

Yahweh 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. (Ps. 23:1-2)

Psalm 23 contains deep theological truths. It’s about Yahweh’s providential care for his people; his sufficiency for our spiritual and emotional hungers; his sovereign guidance, that directs us in a life that glorifies him.

But how does it communicate those truths?

It uses simple, earthy images. A shepherd leading his flock on a mountain pass. Green grass and calm waters. It uses the imagination, which is “the power of the mind to form a mental image; that is, to think in pictures or other sensory representations.”3 Our imagination is the ability to create sensations in our minds and connect them to abstract truths. The more we engage our senses, the more powerful the truth becomes in our minds. “Yahweh is my sovereign guide” is true and good; “Yahweh is my shepherd” grips me, because I can see it.

If you read a text that has a visual image, stop and paint it in your mind. Film a scene from the Gospels like you’re making The Chosen. Imagine yourself as a branch grafted into the green vine of Jesus. Stand on the new earth and watch the heavenly city walking down the aisle. Using your imagination to render these images will bring them home to you in ways that abstract description can’t.

And if you’re studying a text about abstract truths like the atonement, find or think up an illustration to make it concrete. I don’t know where I heard John Piper’s image of depending on God being like setting a sail, but I’ve never forgotten it. The same with whoever first told me sin was like cancer that will grow and metastasize if it isn’t killed. You don’t have to preach your illustration to others; if it helps you remember and be moved by truth, it will stir your heart.

Tool 3: Self-Persuasion

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God. (Ps. 42:5-6)

As Martyn Lloyd-Jones has famously noted, in this psalm David turns from “listening to himself” to “talking to himself.” He exhorts his soul to fight against his despair and choose hope in God. He preaches to himself, persuading himself to hold fast to God.

Our study might lead us to a truth we desperately need or an idol we desperately need to hate. We might write a short sermon to ourselves, spurring ourselves toward God or away from our sin. We might rebuke our own idols like Martin Luther did with his idea of Law. Whatever would drive you toward the love and holiness of God or away from the sin that clings so closely. Exhort, argue, cajole, persuade yourself to pursue God’s truth and goodness. You’ll find yourself that much more willing to actually do it.

Image: Saint Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne

³³ And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. ³⁴ And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ³⁵ And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” ³⁶ And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” ³⁷ And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. ³⁸ And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. ³⁹ And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

⁴⁰ There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. ⁴¹ When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem. (Mark 15:33–41)

I preached this passage for my church a few months ago. As I was studying it, two details jumped out: two words that only appear here and one other place in Mark’s Gospel. First, the curtain of the temple is torn in two. That word, which is as violent in Greek as it sounds in English, is used to describe “the heavens being torn open” (Mark 1:10) at Jesus’ baptism. Second, Mark names women who had followed Jesus “and ministered to him.” That word is used to describe “angels … ministering to him” (Mark 1:3) … right after his baptism.

Those aren’t coincidental. Mark records three “baptismal blessings” that are given to Jesus at the start of his ministry. At his death, each blessing is “flipped” to a curse on him, and each “flows” from Jesus to humankind. When we look at how those blessings flip and flow, we see that they showcase Jesus’ substitutionary atonement for us: that, as Paul says elsewhere, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us … so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (Gal. 3:13–14).

Baptismal blessings in Mark’s Gospel

⁹ In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

¹² The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³ And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him. (Mark 1:9–13)

Mark records three blessings given to Jesus at his baptism.

1. The heavens are opened for him.

We don’t know exactly what Jesus saw, but the earthly “heavens” (the sky) are torn open so that Jesus can see into the true heaven. He sees with his human eyes the heavenly home he had enjoyed from eternity past with the Father.

2. The Father and Spirit descend to bless him.

In some mysterious way, the Son remained present with the Father and Spirit through his incarnation. But at his baptism, the Father and Spirit join him in his human nature. The Spirit descends like a dove, and the Father descends by an audible voice from heaven. This is a picture of the intimacy and unity of the triune God; but it was also a tangible sign to Jesus that even in his “humiliation” on earth, the Father and Spirit were with him.

And they aren’t just with him. The Father says, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” This declaration of love and Fatherly pride at the start of his earthly ministry would have reaffirmed Jesus’ place in God’s heart and God’s mission. He was exactly who and where he needed to be.

3. The Father sends angels to minister to him.

The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness to recapitulate Israel’s forty years of wandering and “test” Jesus through suffering and deprivation. But while Mark mentions Jesus’ temptations from Satan, he doesn’t tell that story in full; rather, he closes with “the angels were ministering to him.” We’ll see why this detail is relevant, but God’s provision of heavenly ministers is another sign of his blessing.

Blessings flipped into curses

But in Jesus’ crucifixion–the death that his baptism foreshadowed–each blessing is “flipped” into a curse on Jesus. Each becomes a sign of God’s judgment in a way that shows the depth of Jesus’ sacrifice for us.

1. Where the heavens were opened, now they are closed.

“When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land” (Mark 15:33). This is a fulfillment of a prophecy about the day of judgment from the book of Amos:

“And on that day,” declares the Lord God,
“I will make the sun go down at noon [the sixth hour]
and darken the earth in broad daylight.” (Amos 8:9)

On the day of judgment, God would make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth when it should be daylight. Those would be signs of his wrath.

At Jesus’ crucifixion, the heavens that had been torn open to bless him are shut against him in judgment. Rather than the light of heavenly favor, he hangs under the shadow of heavenly wrath.

2. Where the Father and Spirit had blessed the Son, now the Son cries out alone.

Instead of God’s blessing descending on Jesus, a cry of anguish flies against the locked doors of heaven. “Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) In a way we don’t fully understand, Jesus experiences in his human nature what it would mean to be forsaken by God. Psalm 22:1, which is what Jesus quotes here, begins with the anguish of a servant of God who is abandoned by all comforts and surrounded by enemies.

Divine abandonment is one of the curses of hell. C. S. Lewis puts it this way:

We are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” … We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.1

Somehow, at his crucifixion the divine-human Son of God experiences that forsakenness that is a hallmark of hell.

3. Where God’s “ministers” had strengthened Jesus, now his “ministers” bury him.

Jesus’ crucifixion ends in death. In his human nature, he drinks God’s judgment to the dregs. And the women who had “ministered to him” (Mark 15:41), taking the role that angels had held after his baptism, bury his tortured body.

Blessings flowing to God’s people

Every blessing Jesus received at his baptism is flipped into a curse at his crucifixion. But this wasn’t pointless or arbitrary suffering. Mark gives us clues that there was a purpose to his pain. In Jesus’ crucifixion, the blessings that were withheld from Jesus were redirected to humankind: they flow to us.

1. Where heaven was torn open to Jesus, now it’s torn open to humanity.

When Jesus died, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Mark 15:38). At the center of the Temple was the Most Holy Place, which was the point at which in a sense heaven touched earth. Symbolizing the Garden of Eden, it was the closest that sinful human beings could come to the direct presence of God.

The Most Holy Place was separated from the rest of the Temple by a curtain that the Jewish historian Josephus tells us was 60 feet high and 30 feet wide.2 That curtain symbolically divided heaven from earth: it was a sign that heaven, the place of God’s presence, is so holy that we can’t enter it. The curtain could only be crossed once per year, on the Day of Atonement, by the Jewish high priest, after he had purified and prepared himself for days.

At Jesus’ death, that 60-foot curtain was torn in two. And Mark emphasizes that it was torn from top to bottom: from the side of heaven, not earth.

Just as the sky was torn open so heaven and earth could touch for Jesus’ sake at his baptism, now the barrier between heaven and earth is torn open so we and God can “touch” again. The separation caused by the first Adam’s fall is ended by the second Adam’s death. The paradise we’d lost is open again.

The author of Hebrews says, “We have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). His death tore open the barrier that separated us from heaven, that we might enter God’s presence.

2. Where the Father and Spirit blessed Jesus, now a human worships him.

The Spirit’s presence and the Father’s blessing were signs that they saw Jesus for who he was. A theme Mark hammers over and over is how no human seems to see Jesus clearly. Even his own disciples “miss” him over and over. The closest any of them come is Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29); but he then goes right on to show he doesn’t fully get it.

At Jesus’ crucifixion, a Roman centurion–not just a Gentile, but a Gentile who had just overseen Jesus’ torture and death–sees him and worships him. “[The centurion] said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’” (Mark 15:39) He recognizes Jesus for who he is and responds in praise.

Mark opens his Gospel by calling it “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God” (1:1). Finally, someone gets it. The fact that the curtain is torn open in the Jewish temple and Jesus is worshipped by a Gentile soldier is a sign of what God makes clear in the book of Acts: both Jews and Gentiles are going to be called into the new people of God.

We were made to worship the glory of God. Our hearts crave it. Paul tells the Corinthians that in his grace, “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). When John Newton wrote, “[I] was blind, but now I see,” he was celebrating this blessing of us being able to see and worship Jesus as our divine Savior.

3. Where angels had ministered to Jesus, now humans minister to him.

Again, Mark only uses the word for “minister” in two places: the work of angels after Jesus’ baptism, and the work of the women who followed him after his death. Angels are sinless, immortal beings who dwell in the Shekinah glory. They perpetually enjoy the presence of God and serve him perfectly. They have such glory that when they appear to people, they usually have to start by saying “Don’t be afraid,” because even their lesser glory terrifies us.

Mark tells us that these women have in a sense joined the ranks of the angels. Their work–serving Jesus, caring for his needs and the needs of his followers–is described in the language used for the sinless spirits who serve God in heaven. Even though the women’s service in this moment is tragic, Mark tells us God has elevated them to glory. Far from the misogynism that’s sometimes slung as an accusation against Christianity, Jesus’ death shows women raised into the ranks of heaven in their service to God the Son.

Cursed that we might be blessed

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us … so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (Gal. 3:13–14). Where Paul speaks directly and logically, Mark uses narrative devices and clues to tell the same good news. Jesus willingly let go of the heavenly blessings bestowed on him, signified at the beginning of his ministry.

His work required that they be flipped into curses on him, because otherwise those curses would fall on us who deserve them. And because he did that, suffering the closure of heaven, the abandonment of the Father, and the full punishment of death, our sin could be atoned for, and the blessings of heaven could be poured out on us.

May we give thanks for being welcomed into heaven, worship the Christ and Son as he deserves, and join his angels by ministering to him and his body.

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An excerpt from a piece of mine published at Theopolis. You can read the whole thing for free there.

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If the velocity of wickedness is from walking to sitting to disintegration, the trajectory of righteousness is its opposite.

Verse 3 is the structural climax of the psalm. It describes the blooming bounty of the one who meditates on God’s Law: a life of spiritual stability and fruitfulness. Delighting in and mediating on the Word leads to true human flourishing, as God defines it. It also introduces the “trajectory” of righteousness, which follows an opposite path from that of wickedness.

Verse 3 starts in a “narrow” place: He is like a tree planted by streams of water. The man who delights in and meditates on God’s law is “seated” in one location: by the streams of God’s Word. This is equivalent to Jesus’ narrow gate: the life of righteousness seems like the rejection of a world of pleasures and powers.

But in verses 5 and 6, we see where this commitment leads. The man who is “seated” at the Word is able to “stand” in the judgment and in the congregation of the righteous. This recalls both how the righteous of Israel “stood” in times of judgment when their wicked brothers fell (e.g., Joshua 7:16-26)⁴ and how they would come to stand and worship God (Nehemiah 8:1-8). Righteousness leads not only to familiarity with God’s Word but also to community with the entire congregation of God’s people. John says the same:

If we say we have fellowship with [God] while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

1 John 1:6–7

The righteousness of faith—of confessing God truly, owning our sin honestly, and committing to his Word sincerely—leads us to fellowship with one another. Righteousness widens our social world.

But it also does more. Psalm 1 says, “the Lord knows the way of the righteous.” The righteous not only “stand” with their brothers and sisters; they walk a “way” that is smiled on by God himself. Their path is infinite because it is lived under the light of the infinite God.

When first introduced his Negative World framework, it seemed pretty true. Yes, the “positive world” meant largely white evangelicals in the West; yes, there were exceptions; but evangelicalism had enough cultural cachet, especially in the United States, that Three Worlds was a useful heuristic.1 For a time, evangelical Christianity was a “positive good” that got at least lip service from the highest cultural institutions (up to the mid-90s); then, our population and cultural norms shifted enough to make it “neutral” in the sense of it having a mixed or indifferent reputation in elite culture (mid-90s to mid-2010s); then, a sharp cultural turn led to evangelicalism being viewed as a “negative” value in personal and social capital.

In the mid-2010s up until the pandemic, it seemed like Negative World was coming. LGBT ideology rewrote social, corporate, and legal norms overnight; wokeism captured government, media, and corporate institutions; we seemed to have a new flag and a new civic religion. Donald Trump’s first election felt like the “reforms” of Julian the Apostate: the last spasms of a dying conservative power base. Writers like and chronicled what seemed to be a cultural “Blue Wave” that was sweeping conservatism, including conservative Christianity, out from neutrality to the outer darkness of deplorabilism. Conservative Christians seemed headed for exile.

And then the 2020s happened.

Aaron Renn himself has noted how much weirder the world of 2024 is than the trends of 2018 implied, but some of the most recent examples include:

• The re-election of Trump, with definite margins of gain in wide swathes of society

• Companies cutting or scaling back DEI departments, which are bureaucratic arms for codifying wokeism into corporate policy

• Religious liberties winning some key legal battles against attempts to coerce LGBT norms

• Universities walking back the inclusion of transgender males in female sports and spaces

• A wave of public figures, even those without actual faith, expressing interest in or commitment to cultural Christianity

• Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, hosting an evangelical apologist on his show and seeming genuinely interested in Christianity

Something has changed. If culture is Harry and Lloyd in a dog van, we were headed for Aspen but ended up in Nebraska.

The hidden assumption of the three-worlds framework

I’m grateful to Stiven Peter’s “In the Era of the Judges,” because this helped me see a hidden assumption in the three-worlds framework: a variable whose change shifted our trajectory from the projected Negative World (which was an absolutely valid projection that I thought would come true back then) to where we are today. I want to share Peter’s key point, then develop it further:

Negative world is not just the inverse of positive world. While Renn understates this, it is an essential point to draw out. The caveat has to do with the type of culture negative world creates. The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: “By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.” Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values. In other words, positive world is a more integrated culture because it possesses a narrative that can unite a people together. Negative world, in contrast, is fragmented, which means mass disintegration.

…

We are not in Babylon. We are in the era of the Judges.

What Peter gets right is that we didn’t go from Neutral World to Babylon – which is shorthand for a culturally strong anti-Christian order, like Renn’s Negative World.

But it’s worth emphasizing that we could have. We could have ended up in Babylon.

Here’s a rough chart that illustrates what I mean. The main gray line is Renn’s hypothesis: the transition from positive world (he uses 1964 as a marker), to neutral world (~1994), to negative world (~2014), and presumably on.

This could have happened. We could have had a culture as unified in opposition to some historic Christian teachings and Christian affiliation as Soviet Russia. In Peter’s words, Babylon.

But that only could have happened if our cultural institutions had stayed 1) unified and 2) strong. That would have created the Negative World that seemed to be coming in the late 2010s.

But instead, as Peter notes, it feels like we’re in the era of the Judges instead: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Or what Mark Sayers calls a “Gray Zone,” a weird transition between eras. While there are centers of power and cultural trends, it doesn’t feel like there’s a unified, powerful control center like it did ten years ago. We’re not in Babylon. The trend looks more like this:

What happened? If we could have ended up in Negative World, why didn’t we?

Note: I’m writing this not to score partisan points – I haven’t voted either Republican or Democrat since 2012. I’m a pastor who tries to share the gospel with and shepherd people from various political and cultural backgrounds, which includes helping them pursue the common good of our nation and world in appropriate ways. The following is my best effort to understand what’s happened in the last few years; I’m not saying that these are good or bad, just that they’ve happened. A followup piece will have some recommendations for how everyday men and women, particularly Christians, might live in light of these things.

There are a number of events we could point to: the geopolitical upheavals of 2020 and government responses; Elon Musk purchasing Twitter; some key Supreme Court decisions that prevented wokeism from being codified in law. Those all matter. But I think two matter more than any others:

Factor 1: Institutional Deconstruction

The geopolitical shocks of the 2020s exposed serious weaknesses and flaws in our society’s institutions, in an era where institutional trust was already plummeting. From basic matters of governance to supply chain issues to essential mechanisms of law and order to big-S “Science,” a large number of institutions showed themselves to be incompetent, partisan, or corrupt. (It happened under the Trump administration too; his actions around January 6 and the lawfare he seems be preparing against political opponents are inexcusable) A lot of people just lost faith that universities, scientists, and local, state, and national governments were 1) seeking truth and wisdom, 2) trying to act justly, and 3) competent at pursuing their stated goals.

Mark Sayers noted in a recent Rebuilders podcast how most incumbent regimes around the world have low favorability ratings, so this isn’t limited to the US or to the left; but there’s this collective sense that old powers and principles aren’t working, at best, or are corruptly self-serving, at worst. And people are “deconstructing” their faith in response.

For some recent examples:

• The sudden backpedaling on Biden’s cognitive health as soon as it became obvious that it … wasn’t what it had been claimed to be

• ark Zuckerberg flipping to free-speech advocacy from Facebook’s previous willingness to police content in cooperation with the Democratic consensus

• The distaste many people expressed over how the Democratic party swapped Harris for Biden as the 2024 candidate with no primary or procedure

• The stats that show people are at least as likely to get their news via a personalized social media intake as they are from legacy media

There are plenty of examples that people are unplugging from healthy or life-giving institutions, too, like marriage, parenting (which creates an institution of a family), and organized religion; again, there’s a lot of bad news here. But there seem to be very few centers of organized trust.

noted this in “Ark Head.” Using Noah’s Ark as a metaphor, he described the phenomenon of people withdrawing from institutional life into a survival mode focused on a much smaller circle of concern:

Ark-head is an interesting collective diagnosis. It’s not depression, anxiety PTSD, or collective brain fog, though all those currently common comorbidities tighten the grip of ark-head on the psyche. It’s an unconsciously adopted survivalist mindset that draws boundaries around itself as tightly as necessary to maintain the ability to function. It’s a pragmatic abandonment of universalist conceits to save your sanity.

He's not saying it’s good either; he just says ark-head thinking seems like a sane bet when the world feels a certain level of crazy.

If the Left (or anyone) had been able to hold institutional power and influence together over the last decade, we would have slid down from Neutral World to Negative World; but so many institutions collapsing at once created a situation more like the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Europe. Instead of Babylon, we get barbarians.

Factor 2: The Digital Multiverse

The other consequential change, which is connected to the first but also its own phenomenon, is one has pointed to for a long time: the rise of “digital” media (the Internet and social media) and the displacement of “electric” media (namely cable TV). Or: Internet and new media displacing cable and old media.

Building off the work of Marshall McLuhan, who coined the idea of “electric media,” Poulos has been saying for a while that digital media are going to change the world the way that the printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation. David Bowie, of all people, predicted this in an interview about the Internet in 1999:

Bowie: The potential for what the Internet is going to do for society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.

Paxman: It’s just a tool, though, isn’t it?

Bowie: No, it isn’t; it’s an alien life form.

Paxman: It’s simply a different delivery system. You’re arguing about something more profound.

Bowie: Oh yeah, I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at this moment. … It’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.

In 1999! Bowie had read his McLuhan.

Electric media, in McLuhan and Poulos’ reading, enables centralized control of information, which is transmitted as a “shared dream” that everyone experiences at the same time. If you remember the cable TV days, if you were keeping up with a show like Seinfeld, then you had to be in front of your TV when the new episode aired, watching it at the same time as the millions of other viewers following it. And the news was delivered the same way: you caught a relatively small range of programming broadcast out from a relatively small number of stations, at the same speed as everyone else. So everyone following electric media inhabits the same basic mental universe: and if someone can influence that universe, they have serious power to influence what people think about, care about, and want.

Digital media blew that up. Now information comes not from a few central sources, but from everyone (think centralized fact checkers vs community notes). It’s imbibed not in scheduled waves, but at the user’s schedule and choice. And instead of dreams being projected and then forgotten, information is “remembered,” or stored in ways that are very, very hard to erase. Even when someone tries to rewrite the dictionary in real time, there are archives that remember what they changed.

The digital revolution, which came into power around the same time Neutral World forces were moving toward Negative World, split our mental universe into a mental multiverse. The Internet, social media, and podcasts enabled people to transmit ideas from all over the mental map; you probably couldn’t censor the genie back into the bottle, but an increasing number of platforms quit trying.

You can see a realization of this in some of the TV anchors’ responses to Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024. Many people whose world was shaped by electric media simply thought she had it in the bag, and missed all the signs that her campaign was in trouble. (Remember: I have never voted for Trump and never will. I’m analyzing, not crowing) Meanwhile, people tuned into podcasts like Joe Rogan at least gave Trump fighting odds in the election, whether they wanted to or not. They saw the new world coming. (And going on Rogan might have nudged the election in Trump’s favor)

Again, the Digital Multiverse is less like Babylon than barbarism. Whatever changes in 2025 and beyond, I don’t think it will be as simple as a right-coded version of 2014. Like the Protestant Reformation didn’t take over Catholic Christendom but created a new, more fragmented Christendom, the digital revolution is going to create smaller mental universes that we’ll have to navigate in new ways. Some will feel like Negative World; some will be right-coded “cultural Christianity;” some will be shaped by various forms of Christianity. We’ll feel strong affiliations with people who listen to the same podcasts and follow the same influencers; people in different universes may feel like foreigners at best and enemies at worst.

I don’t know what the legal, economic, or political ramifications of this will be, and I don’t feel competent to guess; but in the next post, I’ll share some thoughts on how we can navigate personal relationships and particularly Christian life and ministry in barbarism instead of Babylon.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory - glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1:14

Merry Christmas! Enjoy some of my favorite quotes about the Incarnation (God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, becoming flesh and being born as Jesus of Nazareth).

Dorothy Sayers, from “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”

What does the Church think of Christ?

The Church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God "by Whom all things were made." His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of dæmon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be "like God"—He was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.

Athanasius, from On the Incarnation:

You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.

GK Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man:

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians, because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature.

CS Lewis, from Miracles:

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. … It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion—an invasion which intends complete conquest and “occupation.”

I love my church so much. One thing I love about it is its Nine Lessons & Carols service, which features Scripture readings that lead up to the birth of Jesus and incredible music. If you have time this season, you should check it out:

At the end of each year, my wife and I reflect on our Ebenezers: ways we’ve seen God help us through the year.1 We have a jar of our Ebenezers going back to 2011, the year we married; it has a stone for each year, with our Ebenezers written on it. We go through the jar with our kids each year when we add a new stone to it.

An Ebenezer isn’t necessarily a “win” or a finished story. Sometimes God’s help look like a miraculous victory; sometimes it just looks like aid carrying a burden or sorrow. But because God sanctifies time as well as eternity, we love giving thanks for his goodness when we can see it.

What follows will be a bit self-indulgent, I fear; so if you don’t want to read about my Ebenezers, you can just stop and consider your own.

Health (and sickness)

As I wrote in my When I Am Weak miniseries (one-year retrospective to come), last year I came down with an autoimmune disease that weakened me drastically. My weight dropped to 107 pounds (I’m now back up to my robust buck-thirty); my throat muscles quit working to the point that I had to take foods blended through a straw to get enough calories; my speech was barely intelligible, which is no small thing because I teach the Bible for a living. This time last year, I couldn’t put my socks on or button a shirt by myself, and couldn’t pick myself up off the ground if I fell.

Thankfully, here in 2024, my disease is fully in remission. I can eat, talk, sing, and holler at the kids when needed. I can carry wood. I went on a pastors’ retreat that involved some fairly strenuous hiking and paddling, and wasn’t any more worn out or mad about it than the other guys.

Like the great theologian the 80s band Cinderella said, you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. There are so many things, from teaching a class to picking up a kid to washing my hair, I can just do that I couldn’t do a year ago. My treatment plan is pretty involved – two days a month of six-hour infusions, plus daily immunosuppressant pills – but it has basically no side effects. All said, I’m absurdly grateful to be physically whole and able.

And, at the same time, my sickness itself provided an Ebenezer. Allison and I were broken down to “essential functions only,” to use language from the pandemic. We made meals, kept our kids alive, and showed up to work, school, and church, and little else. We prayed a LOT. Most conversations, between us and with others, were deep ones because we were dealing with elemental problems daily.

We were constantly aware of something that’s always true, but that’s easy to forget in the wealthy modern West: we always live in the shadow of death and eternity. We’re always completely dependent on God. We experienced times of prayer that were richer and deeper than we’d had in quite a while; we each had tears, frustrations, and fear, but also experienced God’s goodness and his closeness in unexpected ways. Once in the heaviness of it, we sang “Jesus Paid It All” on Sunday, and as we sang these lines I felt the goodness of God so intensely it made me weep:

I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray
Find in me thine all in all”

Other stones

That was the big’ un, so I won’t wear out my welcome by expounding on the others; but our other Ebenezers are:

Our families – we’re finally in town with both our sets of parents and most of our siblings, and we have so loved being reconnected with them.

Our neighborhood – we have some great friends within a few minutes’ drive or long bike ride of our house, and have been deepening those relationships for us and for our kids.

Our school – we started homeschooling in the pandemic; this fall, we switched to a Christian school called Crestwood Day School, with Allison teaching there and all four kids larnin’. As much as we enjoyed homeschooling and may go back one day, we’ve seen some amazing growth in our kids even just this fall.

My staff team - I have an incredible team working in discipleship at Redeemer with me: a man and two women of great heart and character, who are also pros at what they do.

A bit of rock candy

If those were true stones, a bit of rock candy is my board game Plate It Up entering the world through the excellent work of Blue Wasatch Games. Justin and his team did beautiful work producing the game; and the great reviews we’ve heard from families especially have been delightful.

Readers, I’d love to hear your Ebenezers (or rock candy) for 2024!

I was leading our 20somethings in a workshop on meditation this Sunday. In the spirit of Advent, we picked Isaiah 9:2-7 as our practice text. Here it is, with two verses I want to highlight in bold:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone.
³ You have multiplied the nation;
you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
as with joy at the harvest,
as they are glad when they divide the spoil.
⁴ For the yoke of his burden,
and the staff for his shoulder,
the rod of his oppressor,
you have broken as on the day of Midian.
⁵ For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult
and every garment rolled in blood
will be burned as fuel for the fire.
⁶ For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
⁷ Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

One of the 20somethings pointed out the contrast between the violence of verse 5 and the interjection of verse 6: from violent battle tumult to “to us a child is born.” They talked about the beauty of that contrast: how it’s possible for a world of violence to be brought to an end by the Messiah child.

That made me think of this scene from Children of Men, which tragically none of them have seen. It’s a sci-fi where for some mysterious, irreversible reason, women have stopped giving birth; for decades, humanity has stopped growing and started dying. The main character (played by Clive Owen) hears a rumor that somewhere, somehow, a woman is pregnant; you’ll see from the beginning of the clip that the rumor is true, but what’s powerful is how this miracle stops, even temporarily, a war in progress.

Sadly, we know that the birth of Jesus hasn’t immediately brought an end to war. The promise is for the new creation, not for this one. But that scene reminds me of the beautiful promise that the battle tumult will end one day, not as a temporary reprieve but in a final peace and reconciliation. May it come quickly.

I wrote this several years ago for The Gospel Coalition; it’s one of my favorite pieces.

The leaves of Indianapolis die richly. They turn through glory as they go: empyrean yellow, atonement red. A carnival of color over the streets. The blessing is sudden, a shock.

We know about cholorophyll: the science behind the magic. But behind the science, there’s more magic. Why the gratuitous color? Why make dying so spectacular? In a world charged with the grandeur of God, this riotous change of scene can teach us. God puts on the mystery play of autumn and speaks:

1. Autumn wakes us up to wonder.

When spring regenerates the world, I notice the bright new green for maybe a week. I celebrate the leaves’ birth, the world’s fresh clothes. But by August, it’s all just background. These delicate, intricate, innumerable fluttering treefingers are a green wash.

There’s nothing wrong with the leaves. It’s me: repetition inoculates me against wonder. Like G. K. Chesterton says, I don’t have God’s capacity to delight again and again at each new leaf. He keeps unfurling them—they even wave to get my attention!—but the eyes of my soul glaze over.

In autumn, the creativity of God hollers. Look at these things! These paper-thin solar cells that convert sunlight into acorns! They’re everywhere, and they’re made by a God who, as N. D. Wilson reminds us, doesn’t know how to stop creating. Autumn reminds us that there’s a world of wonder.

2. Autumn promises that there’s glory after summer.

I’m young. My leaves are green, and I’m still spreading branches. Western culture is all about the glories of youth: strength, vitality, a body not weathered or weakened by time. We are a spring-and-summer people.

Spring and summer have their splendors. But autumn has a glory all its own. Autumn leaves are delicate, but their colors are so bright they almost shine. Summer’s wardrobe of green is great, but it has nothing on the end-of-life beauty of the fall.

My parents’ leaves are starting to change. Their color is silver rather than red, but the glory is the same. They may not have quite the same speed on the Frisbee field. But they have wisdom and grace and decades of joy that shine in their faces. They’re taking on the beauty of autumn, showing dimensions of glory that my green summer-self doesn’t display.

And my father’s mother, my last grandparent still on this tree, is a golden sweetness.

3. Autumn reminds us that winter is coming.

The ruckus of autumn’s glory gives way to the silence of winter. Just in time for me to notice how many leaves there are and how beautiful each is, they’re going. The colors fade, and the leaves fall.

Autumn reminds us that our leaves too will die. The curse we inherited from our father-tree Adam means we have our seasons and then we go. Winter takes us all.

This is worth stopping to consider. My chlorophyll will break down; my limbs will turn brittle; one of these breaths I now take casually will be my last.

And what, then, when my tether snaps from this mortal coil?

Autumn can draw our attention to the one man who broke through winter into an unending summer. The one who spent three days brown and dead in the dirt and came back in an indestructible green. The one who wasn’t just a leaf; he was a whole new tree.

Winter comes to us all. But winter isn’t the end for Christians, because our lives are joined to a tree that winter cannot touch. Death has no sting; winter has no bite. We will fall from the tree of Adam; but we will flower again in a spring of eternal, glorious growth.

Holding this truth gives us the hope to die beautifully.

I love HBO’s Band of Brothers so much. To my surprise and joy, I learned this year that HBO made a podcast about the show that includes an introductory interview with Tom Hanks and an episode-by-episode walkthrough featuring talks with writers and cast members.

If you haven’t seen it, Band of Brothers dramatizes the role of the 101st Airborne’s “Easy Company” in World War 2, from their training in Georgia through the end of the war. The series is based on Stephen Ambrose’s book (of the same name), and includes footage of interviews with Easy Company soldiers who were still living in the late 90s when it was created. As Tom Hanks explains in his interview, the aim of the show was to be as close to documentary-level depiction as possible: to tell the true stories of the men’s experience in the war.

There’s a lot I could gush about from the podcast (let alone the show); but one aspect of it stood out to me. The writers and actors who made Band of Brothers spent as much time as they could with the surviving members of Easy Company: several actors were able to befriend the men they portrayed on screen.

I can’t think of a better way to describe the actors’ response to their time with the soldiers than to say that they experienced glory.

Glory = Gravity

The Hebrew word for “glory” is also translated “weight:” a substance or presence that we feel as much as see. When we describe someone as having gravitas or gravity, that’s a close analogue. Glory fills space and bends our attention around itself. And the proper response to glory is honor: to recognize and give room to what is glorious.

Over and over, the actors described learning these men’s stories and experiencing their presence in terms adjacent to glory. The soldiers’ courage, dedication, and willingness to risk and sacrifice for their brothers in arms evoked awe in their portrayers. They felt the weightiness of who these men were and what they had done.

Glory calls forth honor

As the makers of Band of Brothers discussed their goals for the show, the theme of honor came up again and again. The glory they saw made them want to honor these men and what they’d done: to portray truthfully their struggles, their challenges, and their heroism. They wanted to pay tribute to glory.

Honor is the natural response to glory. When we see greatness, we want to celebrate it and share it with others. We want others to feel the weight of it as we do.

The series actors in particular mentioned this. Acting (in their words, not mine) can be a fundamentally selfish profession, where I’m concerned with how I look, how many lines I have, etc. But the more time these actors spent with the men they portrayed (Frank John Hughes and Donnie Wahlberg are particularly good interviews here), the more they described just wanting to show what their men had done in the most faithful light possible. They wanted to give honor, not receive it.

Glory changes us

Interestingly, the actors and writers didn’t just talk about being affected by the roles in the moment; almost to a man, they said spending time with the men of Easy Company had changed them. Had made them want to be more grateful, less selfish, more devoted to the relationships that were closest to them. More respectful of those who served others.

Granted, those are words in an interview. But if nothing else, they recognize that there is an appropriate response to the glory of Easy Company’s story. That it should change us. Seeing greatness shouldn’t just make us want to honor it; it should make us want to emulate it.

Easy Company’s story of brotherhood, courage, and sacrifice models a way of living that’s bigger than mere modern self-advancement. That’s not to say they were perfect (they wouldn’t say that); but their experience showed that a life higher than self-interest is possible; and the actors who saw that felt its weight drawing them higher than themselves.

Eternal glory saves us

Again, that’s earthly glory. It can change us for the better. But Christians know that there is an eternal glory that doesn’t just improve us; it saves and totally transforms us.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. - 2 Corinthians 3:18

Human actions are glorious because they reflect, however dimly, the glory of God. Great character reflects the perfect holiness and wisdom of God. Heroism reflects the awesome power of God. Sacrifice reflects the willingness of God the Son to take on the powers of darkness and God’s own wrath against sin to rescue us. His “weight,” as it were, draws us not just out of ourselves but up into heaven itself. And the more we see that glory, honor it, and let it change us, the more we are transformed degree by degree toward the glory of Christ.

This fall, our men’s ministry is reading through Fighting Shadows by Jon Tyson and Jeff Bethke (hereafter T&B). “Christian manhood” is a fraught topic where perils and pitfalls are many, and sane voices are few. This one has a lot of good: it’s level-headed about biblical versus cultural expectations of masculinity, and a good combination of gracious (encouraging honesty and confession) and bracing (encouraging the courageous pursuit of growth).

I recently led a discussion of the introduction to the book, and thought it was worth adapting here.

Shadows are personal, social, or cultural forces that keep us from seeing or following God clearly.

If we need to fight something, we need to know what we’re fighting, right?

T&B define “shadows” broadly as any force that obscures our knowledge of God or ability to follow him. They may arise from our own soul, through my personal sins or weaknesses: anger, lust, or idolatry. They may come from a relationship: a parent who neglected or abused us, peers who bullied us or invited us to Pleasure Island. They may also come from cultural forces, like the low-level antagonism toward masculinity on the left or the BAPism of the far right. All of these can distort our view of God, ourselves, and what it means to live faithfully as a man.

And it’s tempting to play the blame game with these, but one of my coworkers shared this recently and it applies well here. The shadows we face may or may not be our fault; but how we deal with them is our responsibility. I may have generated my own shadow or had it cast on me, but it’s on me to deal with that in a way that brings me closer to the light. I’m going to need help from God and my community; but healing starts with owning.

Shadows tempt us to live out deformed versions of masculinity.

T&B go on to catalogue common ways that our shadows tempt us to live out masculinity in unhealthy ways. They can be foolishly active (the first two) or foolishly passive (the second), but all of them miss something vital about being a godly man.

1. Overreact through aggressive, defiant stereotypes of masculinity

This is the Andrew Tate, toxic manospheric “screw you” approach to difficulties: to become so strong, aggressive, and dominant that no one is going to mess with me. This pushes the good strength, courage, and even aggression of manhood to selfish extremes, channeling energy to dominate instead of serve others.

2. Stress by anxiously striving for achievement or praise

We might respond to this by some form of workaholism – a constant striving for worldly, social, or even churchly success, not driven by love or humility but by the desperate desire for praise or self-approval. Rather than ever resting in God or genuinely loving others, we sprint from task to task to build a resume that proves we’re worth something.

3. Shut down by becoming passive

We might respond by just shutting down – ducking our heads and drifting through life, maybe nodding along to voices we don’t agree with. This is the “men without chests” image Lewis describes vividly: men with no courage, no willingness to oppose cultural winds they feel are wrong, but who lie down so they might be left alone.

4. Medicate by seeking distractions or addictive pleasures

We might also just numb out: to alcohol or drugs, but also to social media or video games or online gambling. We just look for things to dull our anxieties and anger, our sense of something needing to change, rather than face our problems.

I’ve had seasons of life where I was guilty of most of these (I’ve never been an option 1 guy, but definitely know the others). Fighting our shadows starts with recognizing which of these we’re tempted to adopt, and understanding, in T&B’s words:

We become true men in and through the light of Christ.

Our shadows tempt us to hide, either by becoming passive or by faking being better off than we are. But true redemption starts with stepping into the light of Christ through 1) vulnerable honesty and 2) living into his vision of love, holiness, virtue, and wisdom.

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. ⁷ But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:5-9)

Vulnerable honesty

For Christians, healing begins with confession. We all have shadows; and we all have sin. In John’s words, pretending otherwise is dishonest both with others and with ourselves. We start by acknowledging exactly who and where we are, to a group of men we trust.

But the point of this isn’t to beat ourselves up; it’s to begin experiencing true grace. John says that if we confess, God is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse. God’s heart of hearts is the father waiting for the Prodigal Son to come home, always. He is willing to forgive as much as we’re willing to confess.

Living into his vision for masculinity

God’s grace includes the grace of forgiveness; it also includes the grace of transformation that we call sanctification. If we put ourselves into God’s light, God’s light will start working on us. He might strengthen us, redirect us, or cut out something in us that feels painful, but he will begin re-creating us to live more faithfully into his vision for us. Living in his light includes learning what he says about what it means to be a man (and a Christian), and making choices that align our lives more fully with that vision. This too is best done in a community of men who can encourage us, pray for us, help us, and challenge us when need be; but there is hope for real transformation and growth in his hands.