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Soul Espresso

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It was 5:00 a.m. on one of the coldest days of winter. I was a freshman in college. My friend Mitch Mitchell had told me that the first ten people to a local coffee shop got a free drink. I didn’t know what coffee tasted like, but free sounded good.

I ordered a mocha latte. Mitch proceeded to chug four shots of espresso before falling asleep on the opposite side of a chess set.

I have never liked ‘drip’ coffee, and still don’t drink it often—but since that morning I have loved espresso drinks.

Espresso is unique. Invented in Italy, it requires high temperature and high pressure to saturate the water with coffee. Once it is exposed to oxygen, the composition of espresso begins to change, which is why it is usually either combined with water or milk, or drank immediately. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the high-pressure concentration of truth: spiritual espresso. I discovered that potent and concentrated spiritual truth can come in a very small package. Here are three examples:

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

“Beware of posing as a profound person; God became a Baby.”
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 22

This classic devotional has been in print since 1924 in 39 languages. An old friend gave me My Utmost for His Highest as a high school graduation present, and I came to know Christ about two months later. The gift, at first unwanted, was not a waste. I was recently carrying one of Chambers’ books at a conference, and a friend told me “that’s a four-pages-at-a-time book.” I told him, “yeah, I can barely read one subsection before I have to stop and think and pray.” That’s what I mean when I call these writings spiritual espresso.

Oswald Chambers died at 43, but his wife Biddy had transcribed hundreds of his talks verbatim and spent the rest of her life publishing them. He was a YMCA chaplain to British soldiers during World War I in Egypt. He believed in a concept he called “seed thoughts”: simple but true statements about God and life could change your entire way of thinking. He had a bulletin board on which he posted a thought daily. (When the camp flooded, he posted, “Closed during submarine maneuvers.”) While My Utmost shows this tendency, his wife compiled an even briefer devotional called Run Today’s Race which better illustrates Chambers’ tendency for potent, concentrated thought.

George MacDonald: An Anthology by C. S. Lewis (compiler)

“The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed.”
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Entry 54

Oswald Chambers said about George MacDonald that it was “a striking indication of the trend and shallowness of the modern reading public that [his] books have been so neglected” (Christian Discipline, vol. 1, pp. 44-45). C. S. Lewis compiled MacDonald’s best “seed thoughts” into an anthology, which I facetiously call “C. S. Lewis’ best book.”

Systematic statements take you to a conclusion; once you arrive at that conclusion, you find your thought finished for you. Seed thoughts are different. They live and grow over time, and are not conclusions in themselves. This is one thing Chambers and MacDonald had in common; they asked questions as well as they answered them. The goal here is not to produce in you a thought, but to get you to think.

Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
A. W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy, p. 1

A third book that packs a lot of depth in a few words is Knowledge of the Holy. But then, Tozer has an unfair advantage here: if you want to go deep, there is nothing deeper to write about than God Himself. All of these authors are at their best when they take you to the Source of our faith without speculating, arguing or equivocating. “The knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Prov. 9:10).

But there is another connection that I have omitted. Chambers was an avid reader and quoter of poetry. MacDonald wrote volumes of poetry himself, as did C. S Lewis. Tozer compiled his Christian Book of Mystical Verse, stating that his best devotional times were alone with a Bible and a hymnbook. What is there about poetry that relates to the spiritual life?

Distilled Language

One American poet laureate said that “poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” Bad poetry, like bad stories, have a lot of words with little meaning. The best poetry has few words with great meaning. Even Bible expositors often quote hymns or Christian poetry to add something that an exposition can’t. The apostle Paul quotes Greek poetry at least three times in the New Testament. He encouraged the use of song as part of Christian teaching in Colossians 3:16: “…teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” Songs often communicate our deepest thoughts the most simply. They can contain the gospel in a concentrated form, capable of being understood by children.

Embedded in a few of Paul’s letters are extremely concise statements of Gospel which some people think were actually early Christian hymns. Two examples include Philippians 2:5-11 and 1 Timothy 3:16, quoted below in verse:

God was manifest in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Preached among the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.

Most amazing of all, Jesus quotes the ancient hymnbook of his people from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) As today, Jewish hymns were often titled after their first line. (If I shout “amazing grace” in a room full of Christians, a few might erupt, “how sweet the sound!”) So some scholars think Jesus could as well have shouted “Psalm 22” from the cross, pointing the Jews to a song that prophesied nearly a dozen circumstances pertaining to his crucifixion and resurrection. In just four Aramaic words, Jesus communicated great truth about who he is, his own death, his victory over it—and the prophetic power of one ancient worship song written in a heart of affliction.

Swarm Integrity

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I was alone, staring at a leaf, trying to figure out if it was maple, oak, or something else. My handbook for the botany merit badge didn’t show any leaves like this one. I stood still for two or three minutes, studying. Then I felt a pinching on my ankles. I batted it off, then looked down and saw what it was.
I had been standing for several minutes in the largest ant bed I had ever seen. It was several feet wide, and I, the Godzilla of ant-world, had crushed half of their great nation while identifying leaves. The ants were staging a retaliation that ranged from my shoes, which were covered, up past my knees. I ran, tossing my shoes off as I entered my troop’s campsite. Other scouts laughed as I quickly pulled my pants off and brushed dozens of ants from my legs. (Luckily, there were no girls at the camp.)

Ant Intelligence
A remarkable discovery about ants and bees is that they are able to make decisions effectively without a leader. With a total absence of central control, ants make decisions based on signals received from other ants about their environment. In this way, they can test the distance of food sources, detect threats, and, in my case, respond to those threats. All of this happens without leadership.
Although National Geographic gave major press to this burgeoning study of “swarm intelligence” in July 2007, Solomon was aware of how ants work thousands of years ago:

Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise.
Without having any chief,
officer, or ruler,
she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
— Proverbs 6:6-8, ESV

If you have noticed how in a flock of birds or a school of fish, the entire group seems to turn as one, then you have been aware of “swarm intelligence” as it appears in nature.

New Testament Manuscripts
If we look at my unfortunate encounter with ants, we can learn two things that also apply to the spread of New Testament manuscripts:
1. I had no reason to fight them until I realized they had spread.
2. Once they have spread, there is no central mechanism by which I can control (or destroy) all of them.
I can simplify my two points about the New Testament in another way: in the beginning, there was no motive to change the manuscripts, and later, there was no power to change them.

Earlier, No Motive
Signals can spread through an ant community quickly; likewise, on a human timescale, the spread of New Testament manuscripts would be relatively fast and unnoticed in the beginning. Most importantly, the gospels, Acts and letters spread without central control. At any stage, however early, there would be no means of knowing where every manuscript is or what every manuscript says. Without seeing the future, no opponent of Christianity would know the power that any of the New Testament books would carry, and therefore would have no motive to change them.
People who argue that the Bible has been changed by political heavyweights imagine a world in which Jesus appointed Peter as pope and the two marched triumphantly over the ruins of Roman civilization and religion. But Christianity first spread under a hail of persecution, execution and imprisonment. A few letters from a converted Jewish scholar to the converts of his cult would not have raised the eyebrows of the affluent. Christianity did not look good on resumés. It would have repelled the power-hungry and offended the money-minded. Christianity began as the religion of the little Lamb.

Later, No Power
In the absence of any religious “big brother,” no one could change every manuscript of the New Testament, and even if they changed one, the community would find out easily. (Case in point, 1 John 5:7.) For instance, if someone changed every manuscript in Asia Minor, the community could find out by comparing a copy from Jerusalem; this is actually how the modern science of textual criticism verifies our New Testament’s authenticity. In this sense, the swarm cannot be defeated or manipulated. It grows, spreads and influences. It is self-organizing and self-protecting.
The next time a self-styled scholar tells you that the New Testament has been changed, ask them to provide a year it was changed, a person who changed it, or a manuscript that was corrupted. If they point to 1 John 5:7, Mark’s longer ending or the adulteress of John 8, they have proven themselves wrong; the fact that we have found these additions means that the rest of our manuscripts are authentic, because no one has ever had enough power to change every manuscript in existence.

The Redeemer’s Footprint

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There are a few cryptic statements about feet in the Old Testament, which, taken together, have something profound to say about the work of Jesus as Redeemer. The first is one of Job’s prophetic glimmers of hope that shone out of his trial:

For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the earth.
Job 19:25, ESV

There is no mistaking that he is referring to God as his Kinsman-redeemer and Deliverer. Since Job was likely contemporary with Abraham, the Torah’s prescriptions for kinsman-redeemers in Leviticus 25 probably did not yet exist—not to mention, Job isn’t even Jewish (Job 1:1). We could say that Job meant ‘redeemer’ in the broad sense (deliverer, liberator) in which it doesn’t involve land or money (see Isaiah 52:3, for example). However, Job’s parallel statement, (that his Redeemer will stand upon the earth) connects to the Semitic tradition of land redemption, because the feet appear to represent the right of the redeemer to his land.

Identified by Footprint

In December 2013, National Geographic published the first chronicle in a series on Paul Salopek, who is on a seven-year journey from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego on foot. His purpose is to follow the supposed track of human migration, from Yemen to Kamchatka, then from Alaska to Chile. (This will require two boats—one across the Gulf of Aden and one across the Bering Strait—due to past tectonic shifts.) If he succeeds in his journey, he will have walked 21,000 miles.

Paul writes about the footwear they wear in Ethiopia: millions of men, women, and children wear identical rubber sandals, cheaply produced, and usually lime green in the Afar region he is traveling.

Despite the universality of the sandal, Paul’s Ethiopian assistant stoops down in the dust and examines the various tracks zig-zagging the desert. He then affirms confidently—and correctly—that their friend had passed through and would be waiting for them later. This kind of desert tracking, which can differentiate between the gaits of people who wear identical shoes, is lost to Westerners.

The Feet of Boaz

There may actually be a distant cultural link between the Cushitic Afar tribe and the Jews of Ruth’s day: If modern Afar can identify their friend’s feet in the dust, then this may explain why sandals were exchanged during a transaction of land in the Book of Ruth.

Now this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging: to confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel.
Ruth 4:7, ESV

In his Handbook on Bible Manners on Customs, James Freeman further explains this strange custom:

“It probably originated from the fact the right to tread the soil belonged to only to the owner of it, and hence the transfer of the sandal was a very appropriate representation of the transfer of property.”

There was no harm in trading sandals if they were generic, as they are in the Afar Triangle. The shoe of the former owner, combined with the gait of the buyer, creates a new footprint that would be recognized as the new land-owner. So giving a shoe to Boaz, the redeemer, meant that he could not be mistaken for an intruder: he had the house-master’s shoeprint.

John the Baptist, who was technically Jesus’ cousin, said that he was not worthy to loose Jesus’ sandal. In the vein of the familial redeemer, John could have meant that he would never be worthy to inherit any of Jesus’ family or land rights.

Stand upon the Dust

Job’s statement about his heavenly Redeemer, literally translated, says “at the last, he will stand upon the dust.” Jesus’ footprint will claim the earth: “On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives” (Zech. 14:4, ESV). Not only that, but in the Jewish understanding of Redeemer, Jesus will stand on the dust as native, lord, and rightful owner—not a trespasser. He will have fully reclaimed his right to the earth.

May Jesus have the same reception when he enters our hearts, lives, and homes. May he set his footprint there as both Friend and Master.

Come then, and added to thy many crowns
Receive yet one, the crown of all the earth,
Thou who alone art worthy! it was thine
By ancient covenant ere Nature’s birth,
And thou hast made it thine by purchase since,
And overpaid its value with thy blood.
Thy saints proclaim thee king; and in their hearts
Thy title is engraven with a pen
Dipped in the fountain of eternal love… .

Come then, and added to thy many crown
Receive yet one, as radiant as the rest,
Due to thy last and most effectual work,
Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.

William Cowper

The Puzzle of Emmaus

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But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
Luke 24:16

And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.
Luke 24:31

After his resurrection, Jesus appeared many times over a period of forty days, once to over 500 people (1 Corinthians 15). Near his tomb, he appeared to Mary Magdalene, who “did not know that it was Jesus” until he said her name (John 20:11-18). Later, the Eleven remaining disciples received anonymous fishing advice from the shore, and “did not know that it was Jesus” until the advice yielded amazing results (John 21:1-14). Most inexplicably, the disciples on the road to Emmaus walked seven miles conversing with Jesus, about Jesus, yet they didn’t recognize his face or voice until they sat down to dinner (Luke 24). Since the Resurrection is the historical bedrock of Christian faith, we can learn a lot from asking why all of these disciples were slow to recognize Jesus, especially those who were on the way to Emmaus.

These are not all the explanations, but they are some of the simplest.

Supernatural Intervention

First, many readers think supernatural intervention is evident in the text. This is seen in three places:
1) “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (v. 16).
2) “Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” (v. 31) (As in verse 16, God is not mentioned in the Greek, but it is possible that he is the actor.)
3) “He vanished from their sight” (v. 31). This may mean that he slipped out suddenly, but it may mean that he disappeared (ἄφαντος ἐγένετο) just as miraculously as he re-appeared behind locked doors in other instances (John 20:19, 26).

All three sentences could just be Luke’s idiomatic way of explaining unusual events, as Albert Barnes comments: they simply didn’t recognize Jesus when they should have, and when they did, he suddenly was gone. The NLT takes away the verbal ambiguity, translating verse 16, “God restrained their eyes.” But the Greek doesn’t state how their eyes were restrained, whether by God, their disbelief, or a lack of sunglasses. All three are possible, and the most supernatural-sounding interpretation of a story is not necessarily the most accurate.

Luke 18:31-34 states similarly that—although Jesus explained that the Son of Man would be mocked, flogged, killed, and resurrected—the Twelve “understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (18:34, cf. 19:42, Mark 9:32). Here, Luke sandwiches the “hidden saying” between twin statements that the disciples didn’t understand and didn’t grasp what was said. Would Jesus both explain something and hide its meaning? I don’t know. It is safe to be ambiguous where Scripture is ambiguous. Jesus only did one negative miracle, and blinding the eyes of doubting disciples is confusing at best.

That being said, some believe God had very good reason to restrain their physical sight, so that Jesus could build their faith, test their resolve, and provide them a few years’ worth of lively discussion about Messianic prophecy. But if that is not satisfying, below are three more ideas about why Jesus was not quickly recognized by his followers.

Crushed Expectations

It cannot be mentioned too often that Jesus’ disciples were not “in” on his plan to go to a shameful death and afterwards return to life. He told them plainly “that he must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31-32). Yet not one disciple understood the Cross before it occurred. Peter’s response to Jesus’ plan to die was “far be it from you, Lord!” (Matt. 16:22) How few have understood, even today, that it is a little Lamb on the throne of the universe (Revelation 7:17). The disciples on the road to Emmaus expected Jesus to restore sovereignty to Israel (Luke 24:21, cf. Acts 1:6), which explains why they were “downcast” (24:17)! Their lofty ambition for Jesus’ life was shattered by his crucifixion. Even Jesus’ closest followers did not expect him to die or be resurrected. They simply expected something else.

They had not rejected Jesus’ plan for their life—he had rejected their plan for hislife. He was not playing ethnic favorites, or partisan politics. His mission moved forward, silent and undeterred, more grand—and more painful—than any of them predicted.

Action movies have made it common to see characters come back from death or the edge of death. What could make a storyline more dramatic? In Captain America 2, Nick Fury’s heart stops and he is declared dead, but in classic comic book style, he reappears as a convalescent in a cave. Natasha sees him and says, “it’s about time.” But what would really happen if your close friend was declared dead, but reappeared on a road a few days later? Would you go into shock? Denial? Would you think it was your friend’s doppelgänger, or an elaborate hoax?

The true experience of the Resurrection in Luke 24 involved controversy (v. 11), denial (v. 25), fear (v. 37), awe-stricken disbelief (v. 41), Old Testament study (v. 44), revelation (v. 45), worship, and great joy (v. 52-53). If a friend of mine rose from the dead, I think that at first I would rationalize that this was a total stranger, and the resemblance coincidental. This could be what the disciples of Emmaus did.

Disfiguring Torture

Jesus’ face had changed. The most conspicuous Scripture on this is Isaiah 52:14: “His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.” Isaiah 53 then follows by exhausting the Hebrew language’s expressive capacity for suffering: despised, rejected, sorrows/pains, grief/sickness, stricken, smitten, afflicted, wounded, bruised, oppressed, cut off, travail. In his resurrection glory, the battle-worn champion was stronger than ever, but he still bore the marks of his sacrifice, as Thomas tested empirically. Some speculate that when he broke bread, he exposed his wrists to the disciples of Emmaus, revealing that he was the disfigured servant of Isaiah 52-53.

Another prophetic passage implies that Jesus allowed his beard to be pulled out, which would be a great dishonor for a Jew (Isaiah 50:6). A friend of mine grew a beard after he left for college, and his own mother had a hard time recognizing him when he went home for the first time. We can see how after suffering brutal torture and execution, possibly losing part of his beard, and returning from the dead, Jesus might appear quite different than the disciples would have thought, even if they hadbelieved that he was going to rise from the dead.

Interestingly, in the appearance involving the miraculous catch of fish (John 21), John is the first to surmise it to be Jesus. He is also the only disciple that we are specifically told was present at the Crucifixion, and may have had the best idea of Jesus’ disfigurement.

Jesus’ New Body

An important addition is that Jesus had a new body, but this doesn’t imply a total change of appearance. Thomas touched the wound in Jesus’ side after the Resurrection, so Jesus still retained some evidence of his recent torture and execution. We don’t know to what extent this is true since we don’t know what Jesus’ new body really entails, nor our future bodies for that matter (1 John 3:2, also 1 Corinthians 15:35-58). It appears that in the afterlife we will recognize each other, since the rich man recognized Lazarus (Luke 16:23). If anything, we will know identities better than we do now, since the rich man also recognized Abraham, whom he had never met (compare 1 Corinthians 13:12).

Did Jesus’ face change after his resurrection, as it did during his transfiguration (Luke 9:29)? His resurrection body might be free of any genetic limitations or skin imperfections. Or he could choose to appear in a new form if he wanted to, as George MacDonald speculates in his story The Princess and the Goblin. If he can walk through walls, we don’t know what his new body is capable of, nor what our new bodies will be capable of. Whatever it is like, it will be, as Jesus’ death-to-life mission was to the disciples, unexpectedly better than whatever we request or dream—even to the exclusion of some of our paltry expectations.

The Color of the King

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The language of color, the blood of Jesus, and why we argue about what pink is.

“Is that bag pink?”
“No, it’s red.”
“It looks pink to me.”
“I hope it’s not pink.”

My friend and I went on to discuss how we had problems identifying certain colors. One of us may have a mild color blindness, which is common in men. But the more likely culprit is a concept called linguistic relativity.

Language is based on convention, but colors usually have loosely defined conventions. Put another way, any given color is actually a range of specific pigments, which explains why we can disagree: in each person’s brain, those ranges are slightly different, whether or not they are color blind. This is why we can argue about whether something is pink or not.

Translating Colors

Color words are also difficult to translate. Some languages in New Guinea have no colors—only words for “dark” and “light”—while the Hanuno’o Language of the Philippines only has four colors (or color groupings): black, white, red, and green. Even European languages use almost identical words for different colors!

The French color pourpre is much closer to crimson:

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The German color purpur is shown in this logo:

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If you search Wikipedia for the modern Greek color porphyro, from which the other words come, the site redirects to kokkino, which is their word for red!

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So translating color words is fishy business. And any two people can tell the same story accurately but describe the colors they saw differently. This partially explains why the gospels disagree about the royal color that Jesus’ torturers gave him before his execution:

They stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. (Matt. 27:28)
They clothed him with purple. (Mark 15:17)
They unclothed him from purple … (Mark 15:20)
They put on him a purple robe … (John 19:2)
Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. (John 19:5)

Why Four Gospels?

When it comes to the gospels—especially the accounts of the Resurrection—many inconsistencies are solved by one simple principle: If the stories were exactly the same between the four Gospels, it would imply collusion, just as it would in a court case. However, the stories could also be so different as to be irreconcilable. Instead, they share the most important narrative elements but vary when it comes to the non-essentials. This alleged argument against the Gospels shows that the four writers used different firsthand sources, inasmuch as they differ. Yet the picture they paint of Jesus as a person, the attitudes he represents, the places he went, the phrases he used, is consistent.

Why Two Colors?

In modern Greek these two words (κόκκινο and πορφυρό) are actually synonyms (as mentioned above), and they may have been near-synonyms in ancient Greek. But even if they differed at the time, varying testimonies could improve the accuracy: the color Jesus wore during his humiliation was purplish crimson. Since colors are relative, the Gospel sources disagreed slightly on what the royal color was—and yet they all told the truth! John pairs the same two colors, purple and scarlet, multiple times in the Book of the Revelation, and says that the prostitute of Babylon wore them both.

The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour … (Rev. 17:4)

John may have paired the two colors to get as close as possible to the actual color, as we do when we say reddish orange or bluish green.

Hast Thou Purpled?

Lastly, the meaning of purple in English has changed dramatically since English Bible translation began. (Not to mention, it was also used as a verb!) Translating Matthew in the 1520s, William Tyndale rendered our Greek word for scarlet as purple, apparently showing he saw no discrepancy at all between the colors in Greek. Perhaps more importantly, John Donne, a poet contemporary with King James, saw no discrepancy between crimson and purple in English:

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

The color of blood was, at that time in England, within the range of hues recognized as purple. The Oxford Dictionary even says that the word “purple” comes “from Greek porphura, denoting molluscs that yielded a crimson dye”—again, equating the color, both in English and ancient Greek, with crimson.

What Is the Royal Color?

Linguistic evidence provides many interesting reasons that the two colors are not inconsistent. But I think the most interesting point of all is what Jesus actually wore. It could not have been a pansy violet color as some suppose, but, according to the combined testimony of the Gospel writers, was undoubtably much closer to the color of blood. The color of the King is not a color of florid gentleness, but the color of a royal sacrifice.

He was not just killed, but rejected, tortured, humiliated, and murdered. But the crimson garment they mocked him with became in their hands the clothing of Christ with a greater destiny: He would see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.

But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (Hebrews 2:9, ESV)

Proclaiming the Secret

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Is the Gospel a ‘Mystery’?

When discussing the greatness of God’s nature and infinitude, there is a temptation that overtakes a Christian. It is the temptation to appeal to mystery as an excuse for having no thoughts about God. We have all done it, I think. We are both humble and healthy to say often, “I don’t know.” But that’s a different thing entirely from saying “I can’t know.” In many cases, we end discussion by erecting a wall of ignorance out of William Cowper’s misquoted phrase: “God moves in a mysterious way.” We forget that the hymn that begins with God’s majestic transcendence ends in God’s self-revelation:

God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.

Of course, I am too quick to judge. We are not always wrong to quote Cowper about “mysterious ways”, depending on the subject matter. If we are discussing omnipresence, the discussion is bound to cross the path of the Psalmist: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” Here the word “cannot” is important; it expresses God’s final and inviolable transcendence. This is what is meant by Christian mysticism in its best sense, in the sense A. W. Tozer used it: we can know God as we know a friend, but we cannot comprehend him with fullness and finality. We do not yet know him as we know ourselves. As Tozer said, the moment that we understand our God fully, is the moment we have created an idol. Paul said, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

But God forbid we replace Paul’s “I know in part” with “I don’t know at all.” Some Christians have draped God’s incomprehensibility over the whole of their theology, fearing or neglecting to opine about the Friend we should know so well. And yet another day we may sing of walking with him in the cool of the day. Why?

One culprit is a misunderstanding of the biblical sense of mystery. As William Cowper and biblical David knew, mystery should lead us not into ignorance, but into worship. Mystery shows us our finiteness. But Paul uses the Greek word musterion, from which the English word comes, in quite a different sense than we do.

The revelation of the mystery … was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed … (Rom 16:25-26)

This begs the question, how a mystery, which to us means the unknowable, can be both revealed and disclosed. A quick look at the New Testament usage of this word will, I think, show us secret is much closer to what Paul usually meant, and judging by his letters, many of God’s secrets are made to be revealed in due time.

What Paul Meant by ‘Mystery’ (Gk. musterion)

The word mystery (Gk. musterion) is used 27 times in the New Testament, mostly by Paul. The word ‘mystery’ denotes grand themes such as the Church, the Gospel, the Incarnation, the Body of Christ, the Resurrection, or Christ himself. I’ve divided these passages into four lists to show four ways the word mystery is used in the New Testament.

1. As you’ll see in the first list, mystery is primarily used in the New Testament to mean, not something that’s now unknowable, but something that was once unknown. Usually Paul means the Gospel itself, which is known to Christians but which an unspiritual person “is not able to understand” (1 Cor 2:14). Paul sometimes speaks of a mystery as being kept secret but more often, he speaks of them being made known, as he does in the passage quoted above. So a better understanding of the word mystery, for Paul at least, is a secret—something that was unknown or unknowable until God revealed it to us in Christ.

2. Another common theme for Paul is “declaring the mystery” of the Gospel. Again, a gospel that cannot be understood by the Christian cannot be proclaimed to anyone else. Paul asks his readers to pray for him, that God would open a door for him to “declare the mystery of Christ” (Col 4:3). (See List 2.)

3. As I said, Christ is the greatest secret that God ever revealed to Paul. But there are a few other concepts that he calls mysteries, seen in List 3. Every concept that Paul identifies as a mystery is more fully revealed in Christ’s New Covenant than it ever was in the Old Covenant. Although Paul uses words like “unsearchable” and “inscrutable” to describe God’s transcending wisdom and knowledge (Rom 11:32-36), he never uses the word mystery in this way.

4. Finally, John uses the word “mystery” in Revelation for prophetic symbols which were not understood by John at the time that he first saw them. (You could also argue that Paul uses this meaning in Eph 5:32 for Christ and the church.) In both of John’s cases, his heavenly guide had to reveal the meaning of those symbols to him, effectively putting an end to the “mystery” of each symbol.

In the final analysis, none of Paul’s usages of this word lead us into God’s incomprehensibility—for that we have to look elsewhere. But he does show us something else about God; though he kept a big Secret from humanity all the way from Adam to Mary, it was only hidden that the dull human heart might not read it unprepared, and miss the meaning entirely. God is always ready to offer a Word, but we are rarely ready to receive it. For this reason we complain that so little-s secrets pass us by. But for those of us who have met Christ, the capital Secret has been written, as Lewis says, in small letters that our eyes might understand. It was kept so well, that angels desired to look into it—but it was, in fact, a Secret made to be broken.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father … that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. (Eph 3:14,17-19)

1. God Made Known the Secret of the Gospel

And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven …”
Mt 13:11 (cf. Mark 4:11, Luke 8:10)

The revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations …
Rom 16:25-26

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge …
1 Cor 13:2

… making known to us the mystery of his will … which he set forth in Christ …
Eph 1:9

… the mystery was made known to me by revelation …
Eph 3:3

When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. [This mystery is] that the Gentiles are fellow heirs …
Eph 3:4-6

To me … this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God … so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rules and authorities in the heavenly places.
Eph 3:8-10

… the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make knownhow great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim …
Col 1:25-28

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea … that their hearts may be encouraged … to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdomand knowledge.
Col 2:1-3

They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.
1 Tim 3:9

And the angel … swore by him who lives forever … that there would be no more delay, but that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.
Rev 10:7

2. We Declare the Secret of the Gospel

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age … But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
1 Cor 2:6-7

… servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
1 Cor 4:1

For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God … he uttersmysteries in the Spirit.
1 Cor 14:2

… making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mysteryof the gospel … that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.
Eph 6:18-20

At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ …
Col 4:3

3. Other Secrets

a. The hardening of the Jews

I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery …
Rom 11:25

b. The Resurrection

I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
1 Cor 15:51

c. Christ and the Church

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
Eph 5:32

d. End-time lawlessness

For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.
2 Thess 2:7

e. The Incarnation of Christ

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
1 Tim 3:16

4. Symbols

As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand … the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches …
Rev 1:20

And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great…”
Rev 17:5

But the angel said to me, “Why do you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman … the woman that you saw is the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth.”
Rev 17:7, 18

Stones That Speak

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The whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice … saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!“ …

And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.”

He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.“ (Luke 19:37,39-40, ESV)

The passage in which this quote appears is a knot of contradicting characters: the unknowing worshippers; the angry rebukers; and Jesus, who seems unmoved by all the attention.

First, he rides into Jerusalem on a humble donkey that no one had ridden. People wave branches and lay their clothes for him as a royal carpet. He is honored so extravagantly that the resident Stick-in-the-Mud Party, unable to hush the crowd, asks Jesus himself to calm them down. Jesus responds, somewhat cryptically, that if his disciples hold their peace, the stones would cry out. In the very next verse, he himself begins to cry over Jerusalem.

In Western pulpits there is one typical way of reading this verse, but there are at least three viable ways of understanding what Jesus meant when he said the stones would cry out. I’ll start with the most familiar to me.

1. The earth praises God.

The first interpretation is that the stones would cry out in worship, in answer to the silenced worship of Jesus’ followers. This connects Jesus’ statement to the preceding context in the story of the Triumphal Entry. Even if the disciples don’t worship, rocks, the most inflexible members of God’s creation, will replace their voices.

Creation is often spoken of as praising God in Jewish worship language. First, the desert can “rejoice” (Is. 35:1) and the fields can be “jubilant” (Ps. 96:12). Then mountains and hills can “burst into song” (Is. 55:12). The meadows and valleys “shout for joy” (Ps. 65:13). The trees of the field and rivers “clap their hands”  (Is. 55:12, Ps. 98:8).

In Psalm 148 we reach fever pitch, and all Creation is catalogued in one giant exhortation to join in: heaven, angels, sun, moon, stars, sea creatures, lightning, hail, snow, clouds, winds that do his bidding, cattle, birds, trees, kings, nations, men, women, and children. At the end, we’ve reached the most disorderly bunch of all: humans. We seem the least likely in the whole list to willingly praise God. But we are assured that if we stay silent, the stones will lift their voices, and God will have no lack of praise in the universe he created. Righteousness will always be the majority in his universe.

2. The bedrock of reality testifies about God.

E. Stanley Jones makes a totally different application about the stones. On his preaching, he says, “if I held my peace, the stones—the hard, bare facts of life—would cry out.” Jones emphasizes in many of his books the ring of truth that the Gospel has because it is founded on reality itself. The truth we find in the Bible constantly resonates with the truth we find in life.

Creation testifies to its King, along with Jesus’ disciples. But Jones does not just limit this testimony to a vague concept of God’s nature; he applies it to Christian missions. He says in The Christ of the Indian Road that even if Jesus hadn’t made the Great Commission the punchline of his entire speaking ministry, we would be compelled by all the other factors. The facts of Christ’s character, his atoning work, and the rebellion of humanity would demand that the rescue mission go on. It would be anti-reality to stay silent about Jesus.

Nature has a limitation though. For all that Nature can say about God’s unity, majesty, and worship, “it is silent about His love for sinners. It is only at Calvary that we learn that He loves us without stint and reserve.” (H. Lockyer) Reconciliation with God through the Gospel is a message which cannot be ‘hunted and gathered.’ It must be preached.

3. The ground cries out for justice.

The third way of understanding stones that speak connects them with the closest Old Testament cross-reference, in Habakkuk:

For the stone will cry out from the wall,
and the beam from the woodwork respond.
Woe to him who builds a town with blood
and founds a city on iniquity! (Hab. 2:11-12, ESV)

If Jesus was referencing a Scripture, my money would be on Habakkuk. The prophet speaks of a building built on injustice. In Jesus’ case, this could be the temple which he cleansed. The entire metaphor of “the stones crying out” is changed if we re-orient around the context that directly follows it:

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:41-44, ESV)

Here we have a totally different tone. Jesus prophesies here the siege of Jerusalem which happened just four decades later. In one way, it was the prophecy of the crying stones come true: Jerusalem did hold its peace, and did hold back worship when it was owed, and in due time the stones of the temple crashed in grief, crying out for justice for the ignored testimony of Jesus. The judgment on Jerusalem in 70 A.D. was God’s megaphone, trying to rouse a stifled people to praise.

Injustice always leave behind a cry, long after its’ victims have passed on. God told Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:10) The Christian martyrs in John’s heavenly vision “cried out with a loud voice, ‘O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?‘” (Rev. 6:10) Moses’ law says that spilled blood pollutes the land, so Creation groans under the injustice.

Even as Jesus laments Jerusalem’s future, he speaks of the day when all cries for justice will be fulfilled. And he recalls the exact words of his worshippers (from Psalm 118):

For I tell you [Jerusalem], you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ (Matt. 23:39, ESV)

The greatest injustice in history is that Jesus came to his own, and his own did not receive him. But even if God’s people again reject him, the stones will cry out, and justice will be had. Jesus’ disciples may cry ignorantly, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”—though he still reigns only as a King in exile in his own kingdom, betrayed in the house of his friends. But this same hymn that was shouted ignorantly—by those who little knew Jesus’ path to the cross—will be sung in full chorus when Christ triumphantly enters Jerusalem a second time, this time on a horse. And when that happens, no one will be able to ignore the world’s unjust silence toward its God.

Halfway Home

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Three Things Americans Get Wrong about Conversion

This summer I lived for a few weeks near the largest park in San Jose, Costa Rica. There was a well-marked dirt path for joggers, but we were a mile from the starting line, so I always started at the halfway point. As I jogged the loop from middle to finish, and then from the starting line back to halfway, I reflected several times on the order of events in the prodigal son’s journey. His story did not begin at the pig troughs; it began and ended at home. So when the prodigal son repented “came to himself,” this was not the beginning, but the middle of his story. We must not skip to the climax.

When a person turns to God for the first time, they are, in a sense, already halfway home. They have come to the dead end of the prodigal road, and turned around disappointed. C. S. Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress to explain salvation not just as a journey, but as a return home. He wrote in a letter at the beginning of his Christian journey, “it is emphatically coming home.” [1]

As we remember stories, we tend to throw the details overboard until we only have the vaguest highlights; if we remember only one thing, it is the climax, or the high-point of the story’s arc. In reflecting on conversion stories, we usually get the milestones, but we jettison the beginning, end, and supporting characters. So here are some reflections that may help us to see conversion in a better light, so that we can be less shocked when they do not happen the way we plan.

1. Conversion is a beginning, but it is not the beginning.

Conversion is the beginning of a new life, but it is not the beginning of the story for God, who sees all. For God it is a culmination. A mother knows what it took to bring a baby into the world; everyone else rejoices at the results. So God alone knows the lengths and depths of his work of salvation. As always, we gaze and rejoice at results; God and intercessors live in the process.

Some would argue that God broke into Saul/Paul’s life like a sudden light, when God knocked him off his ass in Acts 9. His is the most unanticipated conversion in the Bible. The problem, though, is that Luke carefully sets the scene of prevenient grace in Saul’s life before he is ever called Paul. He mentions Saul twice: first, he holds the clothes of the stone-throwers at Stephen’s honor killing. Then we are told that Saul, though he avoided the dirty work, “approved of his execution.” (Acts 7:58-8:1).

Stephen’s last words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Stephen’s prayer was honored when Jesus appeared to Saul and turned his hostility into humility. It was not anticipated by Saul, but it was anticipated by God. Prayer and prevenient grace were working in tandem.

Predestination, prevenient grace, and prayer are the preparation for salvation that we are never fully aware of in our own story. As an outsider Luke could note Stephen’s prayer for Saul as Stephen joined in God’s purposes. But only God could imagine the alchemy that would turn Saul into Paul. God had set his hook in Saul long before anyone had prayed. We must remind ourselves of God’s perspective: conversion is the beginning of the true Christian life, but it is never the beginning of the work of God in our lives.

2. Conversion is individual, but never personal. 

When the lost son returned in Jesus’ parable, the father ordered the fatted calf to be slain. This meant a huge party which would involve the entire village coming to rejoice with the returned son. Culturally, the son had greatly shamed the father, but the father absorbed all this shame and returned for it public honor. Conversion normally has public effects.

Paul in Galatians 6 makes two statements that explain a Christian’s basic responsibility. He starts with shared responsibility: “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Then he gives us individual responsibility: “each will have to bear his own load.” These two concepts always balance each other.

In America we have all but forgotten shared responsibility. Not very long ago, the custom of Western Christians involved family worship, which meant a daily time of corporate prayer, Bible reading, and perhaps a hymn. Today we read the Bible alone, we pray alone, and we choose our own church—sometimes separate from our spouse. All the while we subjugate the music and preaching to our personal standards. In many cultures, all of these are corporate decisions made for the good of both the family, and the family of God.

Biblically, conversion is individual. The door is only wide enough for one to enter at a time. Christ’s Kingdom can divide families, and requires that we spurn parents and siblings in comparison to our love for God.[2] We cannot fly to heaven on anyone else’s coattails.

However, the New Testament authors understood salvation as something that also influenced the destiny of a person’s household. So Jesus told Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house.” (Luke 19:9) The nobleman with the dying son believed, along with all his household. (John 4:53) Luke and Paul mention salvation in a corporate, family context five more times in the New Testament.[3] In the case of the jailer in Acts 16, he and his family are saved (v. 31), baptized (v. 33), and believe (v. 34) as one. Granted, the Scriptures balance the group and the individual—yet corporate responsibility is a concept that is practically absent in the American church and family life. My life with God (or my life apart from God) affects everyone around me. I am my brother’s keeper.

3. Conversion is rarely instantaneous.

For years C. S. Lewis was having discussions with J. R. R. Tolkien, questioning the logic of his atheism. They were meeting several times a week, often talking past midnight on all kinds of topics, when finally, reluctantly, Lewis turned to God. He was a theist for over a year before he turned to Christ. (He was 32 at the time.) When God began changing his heart, this very learned man described his conversion in the most imaginative terms; he said it felt like shedding a coat of armor that he had worn all his life, or opening a door that he had kept permanently locked. And we all thank God that he stirred this great mind to repentance after many years of pride and unbelief.

Most of us require many years of God’s kindness to lead us to repentance, yet we are discouraged when a friend isn’t radically converted after visiting one or two church meetings. Boreham has a great essay in which compares seeking true conversion to whaling, in which the stakes are higher, and more patience is required:

Only the cheap prizes are cheaply won; the really precious things of life come to us through blood and agony and tears. [4]

God prepared for thousands of years to send his son. Missionaries have only been making organized and intelligent forays into the entrenched world of Islam for  a century or two. We have not tried all we can. Let’s remind ourselves: he is not slow as we count slowness—but patient.

When God revealed himself to Moses, he said that he was longsuffering. Have we forgotten how longsuffering he was for us? Have we forgotten how patient he was? Did we forget that the new birth also comes with birth pains? Or has conversion become to us a momentous result of a momentary effort? Let us take patience so that we can watch and pray with God’s lonely work of salvation, as his kindness leads many to repentance.

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[1] Quoted by Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship.

[2] For instance, Jesus said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father… Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:34-37)

[3] Cornelius the centurion (Acts 11:14), Lydia (Acts 16:15), the Philippine jailer (Acts 16:31-34), Crispus (Acts 18:8), and Stephanas (1 Corinthians 1:16).

[4] F. W. Boreham, “The Whaler.” The Uttermost Star, Part I, ch. VI.

Precarious Places

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“So Saul took three thousand able young men from all Israel and set out to look for David and his men near the Crags of the Wild Goats.” (1 Samuel 24:2, NIV)

A young man exiled from his own kingdom, hiding out on a cliff face. He remembers how his brothers had lorded over him, claiming that he was not their brother. They had sent him out with the sheep and a kind of lyre, and he had spent his younger years singing to heaven, roaming for the best grazing land. He remembers how he could not always keep the sheep from danger, but he could keep them from harm.

Then one day a prophet had given him great news, like something out of a fairy tale. David was to be king. But he would have to bide his time; such promises do not always spring fruit like magic; they have to be watered, nurtured, and awaited.

Now our exiled king is alone at the end of the world, sitting under the shady side of a rock. He holds his little instrument in his hand. He is looking now down the road for the man who hunts him, and now up the rock at a wild goat who walks the same crags.

He slinks down when he sees a silhouette moving towards the cliff. Too short to be a human. The distinctive jaunt gives the animal away: it is a lone hyena. He crouches lower and watches to see what the mountain goat will do. But it doesn’t seem to care about the hyena. The graceful animal turns towards him calmly. The hyena reaches the face, and the goat leaps straight up, the height of a man, and perches on a tiny outcropping in the rock. David is awestruck at this amazing animal.

The goat doesn’t even deem the danger worthy of looking down. He is in no danger; the hyena cannot navigate the cliff-face. And so the poet-king plucks a string on his lyre and conjures a tune:

For who is God save the Lord? or who is a rock save our God?
It is God who girds me with strength, and makes my way perfect.
He makes my feet like the feet of a mountain goat, and sets me in high places.
He enlarges my steps, so that my feet won’t slip.

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Hinds’ Feet in High Places

We were rock climbing with a group of tourists recently. Some of them had never seen rock climbing equipment like special shoes and harnesses. One asked me if the shoes actually helped. I explained that the rough material allows you to grab the rock, and the pointed toe allows you to wedge your foot onto very small footholds.

After a few hours of hot and dusty climbing, we were on the bus ride home. Most of us were knackered from the climb. As we ascended out of the hot valley, I looked to the left and saw a short cliff face, steeper and slicker than any I had climbed. At the top, a group of goats were poking around the cliff for grass. Further up the road I saw a goat-herder or two, common in this part of the world. Then, with a shock, I remembered that word from Habakkuk:

“God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.” (Hab. 3:19, ESV)

Now animal names in ancient Hebrew are not always precise. English versions use “deer” or “hind”; but Habakkuk was certainly paraphrasing the older words of King David, who lived among the mountain goats.1 I found that the word involved still means mountain goat in Arabic, and it must be the more ancient of the two meanings.

Amazingly, three thousand years later, the nature show Planet Earth shows the Nubian ibex, a type of wild goat, in Ein Gedi National Park in Israel—the very same oasis where David hid from Saul (1 Samuel 24:1). This leaves no doubt as to where David got his inspiration.

Mountain goats are found all over the world with awe-inspiring abilities. Many nature articles have been written about their unique feet, which have properties very similar to rock climbers’ shoes: rough pads for friction, and pointed toes for grabbing. Another key to rock climbing is having multiple points of contact. One wildlife biologist points out that North American mountain goats have toes that actually spread as they climb, giving them not four, but eight points of contact with the rock.2

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Habakkuk and David: Living Precariously

If Habakkuk was walking in a precarious place spiritually and financially, David was living for years in great physical danger and persecution. Saul, the anointed king, who had been rejected by God, was committed to killing David. But David couldn’t just kill the king. He had to return kindness to him, since God had also chosen him as king. David humbly trusted that God would change the situation in his own timing. At the time, though, the situation was very dim. Though God had spoken to David as a child, he was for a time disinherited, living in caves, with no earthly guarantee that he would ever be king.

“So Saul took three thousand able young men from all Israel and set out to look for David and his men near the Crags of the Wild Goats.” (1 Samuel 24:2, NIV)

David was a shepherd himself, so he knew sheep and domestic goats. As he was driven into the wilderness by Saul, he must have seen the ibex, or wild goat, and received this goat as a parable and a promise from God. His Creator God, who had equipped these goats to straddle cliffs which no man can climb, would enable David to make his home in the most precarious of places—a narrow ledge between a king’s death wish, and God’s anointing. God did equip him, and his song was part and parcel of this equipping. God birthed in him a desire to worship his Creator in the most perilous of places.

The Safest Place

Mountain goats have many predators, but their chief protection is to live in precarious places. Steep ascents keep these magnificent animals from their earth-bound enemies. Their strategy reminds me of Pippin’s words in The Two Towersmovie:

The closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm.

If we want safety for our children, our disciples, our friends, and our congregations, the safest thing that we can do is involve them in the mission of God. It is the mission of God to reconcile that keeps us from withering into a religion that is merely “personal business.” It is the mission of God that keeps us exercising our faith on behalf of a fallen world, testing the might of our prayers for our neighbors, joined in the work that astonishes angels. The mission of God is the high cliff that no mocking enemy can reach.

Faith is a muscle that must be flexed and stretched regularly, or it will atrophy. David may have retreated from the physical battle with Saul, but he was advancing against his spiritual enemies. We either retreat into danger, or we advance into safety. And in the heat of battle, we always find that God has set a table for us, a place to recline and receive nourishment from our Savior.

_____

1 The Hebrew word in Psalm 18:33 is the feminine plural of אַיָּל, ayal (H355). Gesenius allows that this word could refer to deer, a large she-goat, or a gazelle; but David’s location as well as his analogies about strong footing make it seem likely that the אילוֹת (hinds) of Psalm 18 are identical with the יעלים (wild goats) in 1 Samuel 24:2. There is also a poetic parallel in Job 39:1. See Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon, H352 (ram) and H355 (hind). Public domain.

2 Douglas Chadwick spent seven years studying mountain goats in the Rocky Mountains. See Douglas H. Chadwick, A Beast the Color of Winter: The Mountain Goat Observed. pp. 50-52.