Category Archives: Musing

A Man and a Tree

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From ancient time they stood a-post
Planted by the same Wise Hand
From the ground sprung at once gnarled yet smooth
Extending arms ‘neath Heaven’s dome

A ruler brought a seed from home
Planting it near Freedom’s booth
For years it took full shape on land
Immortalized on minted toast

But the beloved son’s time came to an end
The strong shape kept it’s sheltering guard
Until off broke the largest branch
The tower loomed unsteadily

Such monuments men prop up readily
Though time’s decay makes honest blanch
But cables can’t straighten the heartless-bark
Of nobility lacking in the faithless friend.

O man, plant new what time has hollowed
Life by the ground must first be swallowed
In time new shade well-balanced stands
Like a man shaped by time’s just demands.

Inspired by This article about Andrew Jackson’s Tree being replanted.

“Have You No Decency?”?

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This news article from this past Tuesday, March 11, 2025, on Straight Arrow News contextualizes the title of this essay.

The question of the question comes repeatedly to my lips as I marvel at the collision of two worlds over my head in that government chamber. One World is a place in which there are only two genders designated by God, and so the most respectful thing is to call people by the gender of the body God gave them. The Other World is where human beings have the right to determine their own identity and to expect that fully informed, well-adapted human beings will address them according to that self-declared identity. The point of contact of this collision is encapsulated beautifully in this word “decency.”

The cursory Google definition that popped up on my phone for this word is: behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality or respectability. This definition lays out the trajectory for collision between these two worlds: behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality and respectability. These two worlds of the representatives from Massachusetts and Texas do not have an accepted standard of respectability to conform to. The result in this issue is that so long as there is no agreement, there is no decency to be had.

Or is there?

One is doing the most respectful thing they know by calling a transgendered representative by the title of their gender given at birth because God gave them that gender. The other is doing the most respectful thing they know by correcting someone who is not recognizing a representative’s own personal designation in this public government setting. Personally, I chuckled at the actual representative’s response referring to the Texas male delegate as, “Madaam Chair.” While it was not “decent” for that human being to do so, it kept the dialogue going, because there were more important things to discuss. Perhaps that is all we can do.

Or is it?

I watch these worlds collide and recognize my own place in one of them. One world was created by a loving God, the Other World is created as an imitation by God’s human offspring whose relationship with the Creator is estranged and hostile.

And despite what some may say, I propose that this estrangement is not the Creator’s fault. I think the fault lies at the feet of those who claim to be that Creator’s “ambassadors of reconciliation.” Their lack of willingness to carry Christ’s cross is the reason this Other World persists so, spinning on an axis centered upon the self as the highest god: because there has been so little vision of the True God represented as a New Humanity.

It is not a sad fact that only one of these two worlds will last longer than the other. After all, the way of renewed life is the One World, not the Other World. What is truly sad is that the citizens of the One World are not inclined to lovingly pursue the citizens of the Other to the point of laying down their lives for them. Decency can only exist in the One World and not the Other, because the Judge at the center of the One world is not fickle and imperfect like self, but rather is fundamentally and perfectly compassionate and inexorably justice-oriented.

I just wish that more citizens of the One World understood what “justice” means. Jesus knew, and he showed us that it looks like a cross: A cross surrendering the precious self to abject humiliation for the sake of others because the whole of all our sins merits such a gruesome spectacle.

This is the offensive glory of the cross by which only the humble can be transformed. But those who are transformed, after these two worlds are finished obliterating one another, will find an eternal place in the New Heaven and Earth where righteousness dwells. This transformation is necessary because the One World and the Other World are both doomed, and those in the One World, though it be stronger, will not escape the wrath to come unless they go the way that Jesus paved out of both of these two worlds: the cross. The cross that says, “I lay down my own identity (in the right or in the wrong), and submit to God’s desire and design to love those who do not deserve it.” And to the tender heart I think this, dear reader, better represents the true meaning of “decency.”

Care

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Trudging along the wall, her shadow bent in the sun, she carried her backpack on her left shoulder. She felt the absence of friends walking beside her on her way to class. At home, someone had said that he doesn’t care. If no one cares, why should she?

Still, the teacher was watching that shadow as she walked by. Her silhouette told things she did not know it told. The same face she turned to him: “Why should I care?”

She walked in and sat down in her new seat next to new chorus-mates. Things were different now, but nothing had changed. This was her third time around. She felt like she was stuck in a time warp.

Then one day, early in the day before the sun rose and gave definition to the odd shape slightly darkening the wall as she walked by, a rather eccentric teacher, shined a flashlight on the wall, obliterating her shadow.

She turned around and blinked at the grinning face of her teacher. Her face this time was not “Why should I care?” but it was “Why are you doing something crazy?”

The teacher said, “Some people need to be reminded they are not their shadow. I thought one of those people might be you.”

She didn’t get it.

So he walked up to her and said, “You are not your failures, or the unkindness of others toward you. You are the sum of God’s purpose for you and His delight in you.”

And then he gave her a hug. It took a little while for his words to sink in.

~Written for a former 7th grade student L. Blanco

November 16, 2021

Biblical Meaning in Context

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As I was reading through a LOGOS newspaper of the homepage, I came to a paragraph about the importance of the word “form” when talking about Philippians 2:16 “[Jesus] being found in the form of God did not consider it equality with God a thing to be grasped.” There have been a lot of debate about various meanings of the word “form.” What denomination, or creed do you follow? What do you believe about Jesus, seems to hinge on this one word! Was he fully God, or fully man, or more one or the other? However, In seminary I learned from Dr. David Palmer “Meaning does not exist at the word level, but at the clause level.” This means that if you want to know what Paul meant when he used that word, you have to follow the flow of thought to better use the context to situate the meaning of the text.

But it means more than that. Paul wrote brilliant letters, but he wrote them to simple people in the vernacular, vulgar tongue. These are letters! Read them like a letter from a leader to fellow workers. Don’t get hung up on implications of various possibilities that could mean something. Enjoy the friendship of Jesus being shared between two people whom you’ve never met before, and discover the power of Christ to transform your life too.

This is the stance I have learned to take when approaching the Scripture. The Scripture attests to a God who relates with his people in community. The meaning of what is written is not as crazy as the debates make it. At least not in Paul’s letters. This is also why learning to read in the original languages helps you see that the Word of God is not just what He says, but how He says it. And the “How” is like a web strung between two “who” people sharing understanding, for meaning of “what” to be kept/carried. We can try to understand “why” Paul used the words He used, but the answer isn’t buried in the word. It’s deeper, more powerful, and more concrete, more real, day-in-day-out than that.

Now, where does the reverence due the text come in to play? Not in word-worship, or word-wars, but in getting to know the person whom the Word reveals. “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in the person of Jesus Christ” ~Colossians 2:3. He is even more the context that gives meaning to every Scriptural text.

Example: “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus.” If instead of guarding against heresy, we are able to know Him with a theology informed as the Scripture reveals Him. Instead of going out of the house to make sure you know where your boundaries are, why not go to the owner of the house, and discover everything important about this property in Him who lives there. A preacher named T. Austin-Sparks said that whenever Christianity crystalizes against something, we forget who we are and become useless. Christianity isn’t a system of thought, but a living breathing revelation of Jesus in every day life by the Holy Spirit’s power to sanctify a believer and glorify the Son to the glory of God.

Isn’t this anti-credism? No! It’s putting creeds out of the thumbs of those who wear them thin (Josiah Gilbert Holland Reference “God Give Us Men”), and back in connection to the One who is being crede. Organize the church after the person of Christ, read the Scripture in relation of Him. Seek to know Him. Know the current of power and meaning flowing in the fellowship of Paul and the New Testament believers recorded. Surrender to that power, as the Spirit enters into your broken humanity and makes you a part of the body of Christ that continues to bleed for the world. That is the real good news of Scripture.

Maybe this is the case, but how do we guard against heresy? I posit this as a question: Could “Biblical Theology” be enough to establish the church as a unified whole? Why do we still need “Systematic Theology”? And how can we tell if someone is really preaching, or revealing Christ rightly?

Paul’s criteria: “I will not test their words, but their power.” ~1 Corinthians 4:19

Any thoughts?

He Calls

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It is shocking and inconvenient:
Like a cold wind blowing out of nowhere on a hot day.
A window of opportunity where self is left behind.
He calls us out of our world and into His world.
He whispers gently in the spirit,
His words are forceful when heard.
They have heart that answers to your own.
They smell of fire that fully inflames your own.

So light it’s brushed away by a passing thought.
But when it’s seized, it arrests you in its grip.
Who will even hear and turn aside?
Who wills to be held in His grasp?
When His call is heard He must be answered:
To not answer Him when He calls is to respond.
God bless the one who hears Him and comes to Him.
To know and be fully known.

Omni-scient or Omni-quaerens?

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I hope this can generate some healthy clarifying discussion without causing heretical divisions.

I have known most of my life that God is all-knowing, but a childish question that often comes upon the first discovery of this truth is the question, “How does He know everything?” The simplest response is “Because He’s God, and that’s just who God is. He knows everything.” This is not satisfying to me as an explanation. I want to understand what it means for Him to be all knowing. I also don’t want to make sections of the Bible fit my conception of God knowing all. Rather, I want to let the Bible be the prime informant, and the Holy Spirit be my prime guide to understanding this about God.

Anyone who talks about God flirts with heresy, a cardinal evil which is to be avoided at all costs not only for the detriment it causes to the heretic, but to all who are confused and misled by him. So why bother to reexamine the nature of God’s knowledge afresh? For me, I am motivated because doctrine separated from conversation with Him grows stale as a result of the deceitfulness of sin. Our hearts grow hard as we “figure things out” about God. Yet, are we not most like Christ when we are humble? Is Christ not imaging God best when He is being fully human? Humanity reveals God, just as the character of God reveals humanity, (Just as the Imaged and the image) and it is in relationship that these questions are answered in the way the heart needs for them to be answered. After all, if we wish to have a solid bed-rock faith, the confident assertions of theologians are not enough for many seekers to ground us in something so all-encompassingly real as God. We should ask questions and search things out, for this is the glory of a ruler. (Proverbs 25:2)

On the one hand we have the doctrine that God is omniscient—“All-knowing” that there is nothing that is not encompassed in his infinite knowledge, and therefore lacking nothing that anyone would teach Him. I have found it interesting that Scriptures that are cited for this do not express exhaustive knowledge so much as a privy position to all knowledge. 1. He knows the deepest secrets of all hearts. 2. He has understanding that is infinite. 3. Nothing is hidden from His finding out. Does this automatically mean He has exhaustive knowledge? The only passage that seems to say this explicitly says, “We will know by this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him, in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things.” ~1 Jn 3:19–20. How should we consider this in light of other passages of scripture?

On the other hand, we have a God who seeks things out. In Latin this could be expressed by the phrase omni-quaerens: “All-searching-out.” Genesis 18, Genesis 22, The Lord’s messenger expresses that the Lord is looking into things. He sees, and in the moment interprets the value and meaning of what He sees before Him, and He responds to it in an un-premeditated way. Could this same type of “(now I know)” also be applied to passages in Genesis 3 and 4, when God asks Adam, Eve, and Cain questions? Could this be a clue to how His knowing all things works?

When we put both of these together, we see both a God who knows all, and a God who discovers. There is a tension that He who knows the end from the beginning is able to express fresh, genuine, present response to a situation as it unfolds. This is a beautiful mystery, which somehow keeps in play both His eternity and His intimacy; His immensity and His immanence; His being higher than Heaven and deeper than the deepest thought; His being the crafter and basis of the craft of every human heart, and the one who turns each heart over to delight in or disdain the aspects of His creation gone awry. Is one picture more accurate to God? Both are present, and to relegate one to a lesser place of importance leads to a misappropriation of the nature of the One whose image we bear!

The same God who asked where Adam and Eve were in the Garden, was the same God who promised ahead of time what would happen to the seed of the Woman and the seed of the serpent. The same God who told Abraham the way things would be for Abraham’s Seed in Genesis 15, is the Same God who expressed “new” knowledge when Abraham sacrificed his son Isaac. Is this just anthropomorphism– talking about God in human ways but not really encompassing his True nature–or is His true nature revealed in His image of Humanity on earth, specifically in the person of Jesus Christ?

Here is where I think the conversation leads: The same God with all power and love who promised the future to be, also adjusted his course of action in response to the failure and successes of the humans with whom He partners. This, I think is key to plumbing the depth of this mystery. After all, how can an all-knowing God say He will do one thing, and then change His mind when there is a human to intercede? Surely this does not point out a deficiency in the character of God, does it? Is this just a mystery that has to wait for heaven to be entered? Or is there something here as to a clue to the relationship between Christians and God, faith and prayer, the Trinity with the church, and the intended plan of the One who was perfectly represented in Jesus of Nazareth?

Lord, grant me audience before Your throne. There is a sense in which You, O Lord, know all. What are You seeking? Do You not seek to unveil to us Your designs and desires as you invite us to step along side you and see things from Your perspective so that we can rule and reign with You one day? Is it not also for training and development You ask? Furthermore, is it true that You search out the truth of something, as G. K. Chesterton said, because You never tire of the truth? Truth is always fresh to You. Could it be that every time you see the result of a test, you rejoice to perceive that truth afresh?

Furthermore, are we most like You when we know all details in full, or when we search things out? Humility is not merely an earth-bound beauty which You do not possess is it? It isn’t possible that the earth You made could have a beauty that could not be chiefly arising from Your own person. Humility is as fundamental to Your own nature as it is to true Humanity.

Lord, grant that I approach with the utmost fear and trembling, not because you have a cold compendium of knowledge, but because you are ever attentive to each detail of my own heart and the heart of every other human. Though You have no need for anyone to teach You, You still search things out to discover and to respond, and You delight in that which You have made. Such knowledge is too high for me. May I never seek to teach You anything, for all truth is sourced in You, as Paul said. “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.” ~Ro 11:33–36.

Finally, Lord, grant that Your Spirit who searches out Your heart and mine, may guide me into all of Your truth summed up in the person of Jesus Christ. And let me discover this as You do, that I may share in Your delight!

Home

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What do you think?

An invitation. I open it, and it’s a blank card inside the envelope. It glows with golden light.

I answer, taking the feather pen from the inkwell and I begin to write:

I think there are a lot of worldly thoughts on my mind: responsibitlies, opportunities, future difficulties, present uncertainties. Of what are you uncertain? Simply the strangeness of living in a place that doesn’t feel like home, for so long: a restlessness. But what is supposed to feel like home? The place I grew up, or the place I long for that is furnished with the perpetual furnishings of fellowship, light, and truth? Is it because I have wandered like a bird from the nest, or that I am flying beneath an open heaven, free and wind-borne. Or is it that I am just in between homes? My first home which felt like home because I was loved and where I belonged, and my everlasting home which will feel like home because I am loved and belong there. It is a bit like being a tree in strange soil, a cat in a new house, a planet on the colder part of its orbit. A wanderer I once aspired to be. Now, all I want in life is home.

Do I go back? Shed the growth which God hath wrought, abandon the quest to gain more than could be if I stayed? Do I attempt to stop the movement of the glacier sliding ever towards equilibrium, or try to teach the tides to play catch up? Do I let the fire die by leaving off the stoking and letting the heat slowly diminish back to ashes? This I cannot do, for much is before me still to do.

Do I run forward? Pass each milestone like a mile marker on the interstate? Do I bury my head in the end, seeing only what is possible in the age to come? Shall I take the helicopter up to the mountaintop? Shall I read the the final chapter of the novel rather than let the story unfold. Do I cast my thoughts ever to the distance, neglecting the present reality? Such a decision would, doubtless, spoil the journey.

It is windy up here, flying like a sparrow over a vast countryside as the sun sets. Home is where the winds of change are warmed by the present love of the ones with whom we share our lives. Therefore, though I am wandering, let us wander together, so that as we too live between homes, we can keep our hearts ripe for the feast that awaits us when our tired limbs have carried us the last league. For now, as we settle into the cadence of our footfalls, let us put an arm out to steady one another, and in good time, we will be home together.

Mountains of Fire

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Written for a devotional compiled by friends going into the mission field:

Mountains of Fire

“He looks at the earth, and it trembles;
He touches the mountains, and they smoke.” ~ Psalms 104:32

A volcano borrows its name from Roman mythology. In The Old Testament they were called a “mountain of fire.” These vents for gas, gigantic clouds of ash, and blazing liquid flame beneath the surface are testimonies of God’s glory. With tremendous horn-blast, surface hardened rock, black and lifeless, is split in two by the wonderous engine of rebirth to lay out new earth and sky with its recycled elements. The theophany of Yahweh to his people at Sinai, was very fire mountain-esque. It was God’s introduction of His Law as the bedrock of their Covenant, the revelation formed in stone written with the finger of God, yet breathed with a holy breath of God’s own intimate person. What else in creation combines all these elements: molten earth, powered by subducted water, burning with white-hot fire, and fuming with various organic compounds to change the air. A magnificent testament to the living, breathing, groaning of creation as it continues the work of creation of renewed land being formed.

Such a magnificent demonstration of God’s glory grants insight into God’s character in His image here on earth. The World that we know is living not on the foundation of a dead and cold shell, but a living and dynamic underground which moves and determines much of life here on the surface. Even so, just as the World is based in this fiery reality, the human being with a body is animated by a living spark of God’s divine fire. And just as fire-mountains, raised by the internal pressure of the old to be re-expressed in new ways, are vents for the world below to cry out for the redemption of God, so we too groan within ourselves, as the holy fire of God is at work within us to make new not only our own lives, but the life of everything around us.

Therefore, what is a better metaphor to describe a prophet? As Leonard Ravenhill said, “[A Prophet] has a heart like a volcano, and his word is fire.” A mere mound of human form, raised up by the revelation which fills him to manifest God’s glory according to their secret history together. He becomes the message, and as he roars with release he descends into the aftershock, content to have been fully expended for the pleasure of the One who loves the world and makes all things new, he is established forever as a monument in the landscape of the working of God for both judgment and renewal. And what was his qualification for such an important role? Availability. He was simply there to listen, to wait, to let God’s word have its way with him. “Would that all God’s people were prophets,” (Numbers 11:29) Moses cried.

What can God do through one simply willing to wait upon Him, like a servant on his master? He will move the mountains with his faith. (Matt 21:21) This is our victory that overcomes the land, (1 John 5:4) and God will once more be glorified as the Living God, (Deut 5:26) the all-consuming fire. (Heb 12:29) Until the day when He remakes the land completely, the elements burning with intense heat, (2 Pet 3:12-13) and there is a new heaven and earth, where this no longer any chaotic wasteland of death known as the sea. (Rev 21:1). Do you not know that most of the mountains of fire that exist today are under water? What more of His glory shall we see?

Where Doom and Hope Cross–A Message for the Church in America

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Christian Church in U.S.A. is not thriving. It’s dying, and for many churches the life they continue to live is not worth living. If a group of people who are called to carry a cross for the salvation of their communities like Jesus did have settled for inactivity and living for this age not the age to come, they are wasting their time and the grace given them.

Let me explain: Christianity’s root system of the biblical story leading to Christ crucified is still in tact, but the current modern manifestations of what the branches look like above does not parallel the root system below the way a tree should. One does not need to look far to find Churches bearing the name, and claiming the aim of Christ who capitulate and compromise, or who build buildings to make their own names great, who try to maintain relevance, while many leave the shallow faith of their childhood, and the older grow proud and belligerent or indolent and fruitless. In order for the Church in the U.S.A. to thrive again it must go through the same gate through which Jesus passed: the Cross. Christianity without the cross isn’t Christianity at all, and the Cross applied to every financial, cultural, social, spiritual, physical, traditional, and national aspect of the church ensures its life as “The unseen growth that is caused by God.” No other growth can sustain the church, because a church cannot merely be a community club: she is a supernatural organism powered by prayer, if any activity of man can power such a thing.

The Church needs a renewed vision of what Christian is: a life lived by the Cross. A Cross for self-denial, a cross for luxury, a cross for security, a cross for family, a cross for wealth, a cross for power, a cross for injustice, a cross for justice, a cross for service, a cross for celebration, a cross for every precious thing in our lives, a cross for every relationship. Jesus did not love only love people on the cross, he loved people by carrying his cross. Not counting his self-denial as his own, but committing it to the righteous judiciousness of His Father. Not counting his own life something worthy to be saved, but rather, as a precious gift worth giving so that someone else could be saved, and this brought glory to the Father, as “the perfect representation of His nature.” As God’s image, out not we do the same?

This is both a message of doom and joyous hope. Because while every institution of man–even the ones originated with God but have been kept beyond their use to Him–will be overturned, overturned, overturned, the Church who is Christ’s body will merely be changing clothes. The Robes of Righteousness of the saints must remain white, washed regularly in the blood of the Lamb who leads the way to life through his own sacrificial death. If the robes will not be cleansed, they must be changed to what God intends. Again here prayer is the answer, confession of sin which stupefies the body with sin-selfish sleep and repentance–the changing of the inner being and outer doing by the renewing of the mind.

The Kingdom of Christ is a Rock made without hands and therefore no chisel in a man’s hand can harm it; only that which is added onto it by man’s hands will slide off this ever-growing mountain of Daniel’s Vision which shall fill the whole earth! So pick your side: will you carry your ross with Jesus in prayer, and repentance laying down all of your life, thereby saving it, or will you seek to save your life by staying with man’s kingdom and lose it all? For those who leave anything un-crucified in their life, this is a message of doom, for those who surrender all their life to the cross, this a message of hope.