Learning from the Venerable Dead

“The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.” -Samuel Davies

A True Friendship with God

A right and good and vital relationship with God (in all its many dimensions) is the primary point/purpose of true Christianity (the Gospel, salvation).  That means a right and good and vital way of habitually relating to God in trust, repentance, dependence, allegiance, love and obedience.

John 14:21, 23-24a; 15:14

"Christ is our best friend, and ere long will be our only friend. I pray God with all my heart that I may be weary of everything else but converse and communion with him." -- John Owen

The Christian and His Hope (and Hoping)

'Christian hope cuts against the twin temptations of distraction and despair by grounding us in another time and place.

'Take, for example, Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians. These letters show how the gospel of hope can enable us to live as an alternative society, a contrasting community that stands out by living according to the values grounded in God’s work of redemption. Christian hope lifts our eyes, not as an excuse for passivity or fatalistic resignation, but rather as an exhortation toward pursuing the day when the Lord will come. Christian hope helps us fight evil without the fear of ultimate failure.

'Oliver O’Donovan describes hope as a willingness to wait attentively “. . . attending wholly and with concentration focused on what is not yet happening, so that whatever is happening is handled with a mind supremely bent on something else.”...'

-- excerpt from Trevin Wax's post, "Can We Hope Again?"

Only One Way to Shalom

Here's what every human being needs to realize: we only find rest for our souls (true peace/shalom) when we are living under the 'easy yoke' (authoritative teaching) of Jesus Christ -- a life that puts God first, living for His glory, trusting Him for our true good. There is simply no other way to peace.

The Loss of a Transcendent, Great and Glorious Deity

And here is what I think, in many ways, is our fundamental problem: in the past human beings, for a number of reasons, had a profound sense that there was a transcendent Deity (or deities) to which, one way or another, we were accountable. Philosophers had their names for it (e.g., the numinous) -- the Bible calls it "the fear of God' -- a powerfully profound awareness (often almost sub-conscious and nearly always suppressed) that God was indeed the Supreme Being, the One "with whom we have to do."

But now, in the West at least, in the 'first world', secularizing influences have gained such a momentum and have had such a pervasive effect, that this sense of the divine and transcendent seems all but extinguished (publicly, at least) -- and the result: a hollowed out, hopeless society of men and women who spend almost all their time in superficial strategies of strenuously hiding from the hopelessness (and calling it play or entertainment) and self-medicating the meaninglessness (including via our self-styled spiritualities, aka, idolatries). Claiming to be wise, we've become miserable fools.

And, worst of all, even when we occasionally still talk about 'God', we no longer seem to have a clue as to the great and terrible and awe-ful Being of whom we speak.