I was thinking about that sticker as a New York Times column from David French made the rounds over the weekend. I was disappointed to see French offer a glowing description of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Talarico is a theologically and ideologically progressive politician, who has argued that “God is non-binary,” and that the story of the virgin conception of Christ teaches that a woman must consent to pregnancy, thereby justifying abortion.

French spoke of him in glowing terms, despite deep theological and political disagreements. But French believes that Talarico embodies a needed “decency” and “kindness” in political life.

I’m not a David French hater. I have appreciated him for a long time. In fact, I got into an online disagreement with a Christian nationalist provocateur over French one time. That person said that he would prefer that the men in his church be discipled by Tucker Carlson on Fox News than by David French. He also said that the key way to know if your pastor is “woke” is to ask your pastor’s opinion of David French. Both of those things seem pretty absurd to me, even now.

That said, French has said some troubling things recently, and this recent column is one of them. While French didn’t endorse a radical pro-abortion, pro-LGBT candidate, he did endorse Talarico’s decency, along with that of Republican Senator John Cornyn. I agree decency has been corroded by the influence of Donald Trump (and others).

But I disagree with French, because he confuses style and substance. To say it another way, he confuses being “nice” and being “kind.” His point about decency underplays the destructive and corrosive nature of catastrophically untrue things.

I’ve said over and over that neither political side is “God’s side” or fully aligned with the gospel. The kingdom and theological truth transcend politics and partisanship. So when French argues that the real divide in American life isn’t between left and right, he’s correct.

He says, “If the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.” Decent and indecent does divide Americans and American politics, and indecency has corroded both left and right. Decency is better than indecency.

Yet French misdiagnoses what that fundamental divide in our culture actually is. The more basic divide in American life is between truth and untruth. Untruth has infected both the right and the left. Lies (whether conscious or not) flow from the mouths and tweets of both the “indecent “and “decent” politicians of our era. And untruth said brashly and obnoxiously or smoothly and sweetly is still untrue. And in fact brash lies are easier to spot than subtle ones.

Scripture points us toward “truth and grace” (John 1:17) and “truth with love” (Eph. 4:15). Love and grace go together like a human skeleton and human skin. Truth is the skeletal structure of life, giving shape and a frame to things. Truth and grace are the soft tissue. Both a skeleton without skin and skin without a skeleton are a horror show. So too are kindness without truth, or truth without kindness. Or a political victory without either one.

Christians should oppose deception, lies, murder, and sexual immorality from every side, “decent” or not. Someone telling lies (but being nice about it) isn’t kindness. It’s just being polite. Yes, let’s make our politics more “polite” again, but politeness is not the same as truth. Choosing a mechanic or a doctor prioritizes competency over personality. We put up with gruff technicians or physicians if they do their job well. But we also tend to find those who have both a decent personality and a good track record of performance.

Too many evangelicals have dismissed coarse and foul language as “locker room talk.” I’ve been disappointed by many justifying lies, coarse language, and general unkindness for the sake of political expediency. But we can also make the opposite mistake, minimizing truth simply because someone is tender, nice, or smooth.

To put it bluntly, if you could go to heaven and interview the millions of babies aborted in our nation, I don’t think that they would find Talarico‘s rhetoric particularly nice or kind. If something is untrue, it is unkind. Even if it sounds nice.

Lies are mean. And a lie that sounds nice is even more dangerous. That is Sunday school 101. That’s an apple in a garden promising knowledge of good and evil.

Truth with love and grace. Both.

Anything else is mean, indecent, unkind. And wrong.

I have the three volumes on my shelf, and I pull the relevant one down for any Old Testament text I study and teach. Alter’s translation consistently reveals insights and textures in the text that my two-semesters-of-biblical-Hebrew-20-years-ago can’t approach on its own.

So when I started our church’s Advent/Christmas series on Isaiah 9:6, I put Alter’s work on top of my stack of books. We’re engaging one title of the Messiah’s name on each of the four weeks before Christmas: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Mighty God?

I was struck by Alter’s comment on the text, and especially his take on the Hebrew term El Gibor, “mighty God.” When you see the word “God” in the Old Testament, it usually translates the Hebrew word “El/Elohim.” And the word “gibor” means “might, power, or victory.” So this title of the Messiah is “God of might,” “God of power,” “God of victory.”

Claiming that the descendant of David will actually be called God startles the Hebrew reader. “A child will be born for us, a son will be given to us…and his name will be called…God of power.”

Alter, though, doesn’t think that the verse talks about the Messiah in the traditional sense, or even that it refers to God. He says:

What the prophet has in mind is not ‘messianic’ except in the strictly political sense: he envisages an ideal king from the line of David who will sit on the throne of Judah and oversee a rule of justice and peace. The most challenging epithet in this sequence is ‘el gibor, which appears to say ‘warrior god.’ The prophet would be violating all biblical usage if he called the Davidic king ‘God,’ and that term is best construed here as some sort of intensifier.

Alter opts to translate the term “divine warrior” — a powerful yet solely human king who is filled with the power of God and fights for God.

There’s only one problem with Alter’s view of this text. The text itself. The text, Alter concedes, “appears to say ‘warrior god.’”

Because it does say “warrior God.” God of might. God of power. God of victory. The term shocks the Hebrew reader, because the true, living God of the Bible is unique, transcending humanity and creation. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4).

We can understand why someone wouldn’t have a category for calling a human son of David “God of might,” even if that person is the Messiah. But when Jesus shows up, we understand more clearly: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). God himself took on human nature, God in human body and soul.

The only explanation for Isaiah 9:6 as written is the biblical doctrine of the incarnation. The only other option is interpreting away what the text itself actually says. This connects directly with the meaning of the messianic hope itself.

A Strictly Political Messiah?

In the first half of Alter’s interpretation of Isaiah 9:6, he argues that Isaiah views the “messiah” figure in a “strictly political sense.” This view envisions a human king, empowered by God, David’s heir who establishes political, national Israel in the land.

People who encountered Jesus on the pathways around Capernaum and in the alleys of Jerusalem expected the same “strictly political” messiah. They wanted a king who would overthrow Rome and elevate Jerusalem’s throne above the nations. They wanted Rome, just in Jerusalem instead. Land, power, people, politics.

These two things—the denial of the Godness of the Messiah and the reduction of messianic ministry to politics—often go together. They combine into a human, creaturely view that can’t imagine prophetic hope in anything but political terms.

Isaiah says “the government will be on his shoulders”—and everyone expected a government that looked like David’s and Solomon’s government. Or Cyrus’s. Or Alexander the Great’s. Or Caesar’s.

They expected a strictly political messiah. They were shocked (and some dismayed) that El Gibor—God of might, the Messiah, arrived and inaugurated a different kind of government.

We still struggle with this expectation and hope today. We want a strictly political messiah, who will deliver us political victory. We want the kingdom of the world, just on our own religious terms.

This reverses the way that God is actually doing things. The great, final hope of the Kingdom is that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).

Reducing our hopes and ambitions to politics inverts this pattern. Instead of the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of Christ, we want the kingdom of God in the terms of the kingdom of the world. We want the Kingdom of our Lord to become the kingdom of the world.

We want Rome on top of Mount Zion.

But Jesus is named Mighty God himself, and he has plans that exceed our capacity to imagine. Scripture says that God is “able to do far above and beyond all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20). We often consider this “far above and beyond” as just more of our own dreams. We see a quantitative difference. More of what we ask and think. We ask for $1 and God gives us $100. God does give us more sometimes. He’s generous like that.

The real difference, however, is not a quantitative difference, but a qualitative one. A different kind of purpose altogether. God works in entirely different categories, wavelengths, and priorities. He is God. We’re not.

When the Messiah arrived and we saw the Godhead veiled in flesh, hailing the incarnate Deity, we saw how Isaiah 9:6 is truer than we ever could’ve imagined. Our small, strictly political hopes have always been way too small.

I want to talk about how we navigate a world full of illusions and skepticism. Marketing and salesmanship have cultivated a skeptical culture, because there always seems to be a catch. Someone is always selling something. Now, video evidence isn’t evidence anymore, because people can prompt ChatGPT or Claude or Grok to create a video of Elvis having tea with the Queen, providing zero proof of life in a world shadowed by death.

Illusions are things that we think are real, that actually aren’t real. Illusions yield skepticism. Fooled once, or twice, we approach everything with suspicion. In this kind of world, we can approach everything with delusion, and pretend things are fine, yielding ourselves to the metaverse or whatever else. Or we can push back with radical cynicism, unplugging our lives and hearts from the time and place of our habitation.

But God called us for now and here. We don’t have the option to opt out of the world, just as we don’t have the option to surrender to it. Instead, we need to walk in the tension of the life of following Jesus. In other words, living in the kind of world we live in requires faith. Specifically, life in our world requires the biblical view of faith as reality and proof. “Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

Faith is having what we don’t have (yet)

The “reality” in “the reality of what we hope for” is the Greek word hypostasis, which means substance or subsistence. Jesus is the hypostasis of God (Heb. 1:3). Christians must “hold firmly until the end the hypostasis that we had at the start” (Heb. 3:14).

In terms of the definition of faith, the word means, as theologian John Owen said, that God’s promises aren’t just words. God’s words are actually action. “To receive a promise, is to receive the things promised,” he says. We experience as reality the thing we don’t yet experience. We have what we don’t yet have.

When the early Christians dug into the Greek dictionary, looking for words to describe how God is both one and three, they landed on hypostasis as the word for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one nature and three hypostases. That might be all Greek to you, because you’ve probably heard the Latin word person when talking about the Trinity. Both words, person and hypostasis, grasp at what we can’t describe: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal triune life.

The Greek theologians picked the word hypostasis because, in part, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the unshakable reality of God. The Son is the hypostasis of God. Faith is the hypostasis of hope. In faith in Christ we have the full reality of God himself, and all that God promises to us. Though we hope for God, we also have God.

Faith is seeing what we don’t see (yet)

Faith is also proof. Proof is verification or evidence. When we’re told “faith is…the proof of what is not seen,” we learn that we have evidence beyond the evidence of sight. The Bible talks about this all the time. God is spirit (John 4:24). “We do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).

As John Owen says, again, we don’t see certain things for several reasons. We don’t see things that are spiritual, we don’t see things far away in distance or far away in time. Our sight limits us. I can’t see to Japan from my house. I can’t even see to the other side of town. I can’t see a different time than I’m in right now. I can’t see small things or spiritual things.

The Bible also talks about the “eyes of the heart” (Eph. 1:18). We literally, physically can’t see the good things God promises to us. After all, “hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24).

When we say that we can’t see what God’s doing, we should realize we’re in a very normal place, and even a healthy place. But more deeply than the things we can’t see, we have proof beyond the experience of the moment. Living in faith means we know something more deeply than the things sitting in front of our eyes. We see things that we can’t see, yet.

The Advent season is exactly this kind of moment, a moment of reality and proof. We already have Jesus, but we don’t have him yet. We have already seen the Messiah, but we haven’t seen him yet. This already-not yet tension is strung through this season and through our lives like strings inside a piano. When the tension is right, the notes are right too. And if you let the master play the thing, you will hear beautiful music while you wait.

Recently, I don’t know if it’s something in the water or something in the air or just an algorithmic rabbit hole, but the Edmund Fitzgerald has become a thing again ahead of the 50th anniversary of its sinking. A whole niche on social media talks about it and makes memes and TikToks and reels.

The five Great Lakes entomb the liquid graves of thousands of ships, and even more individual sailors’ lives. But the Edmund Fitzgerald is a cultural stand-in for all of them. We remember the ship because a man wrote a poem, he put that poem to music, and he played it and sang it. When Lightfoot’s lament was stamped into vinyl it was simultaneously stamped into our cultural memory.

I’ve been sort of nerding out about the Fitz recently, repeating the song, watching documentaries, listening to stories. A few things have been resonating with me as I’ve thought about the story and the song.

The Sacred Power of Story and Song

First, stories and songs have a power to preserve and make sacred. As an undergraduate student, I learned a saying attributed to Socrates (he didn’t actually say it, but it’s still worth thinking about): “Let me write a nation’s songs, and I don’t care who writes its laws.“ God has wired something about narrative, song, story, melody, harmony, into our nature as humans. We are storytellers and story-hearers. We are singers and songwriters. We are makers and shapers.

Obviously, this most profoundly relates to Scripture, which is a collection of stories and songs and poems. In an important way, we remember Israel, and Israel matters, because we have Israel’s book. Actually, we have Israel’s collection of books. We have Israel’s library, Israel’s hymn book, Israel’s music catalog, Israel’s community of sacred, true tales. The sacred nature of these writings is special among the works of the world, of course. They tell of Abraham and sons and Abraham’s Messianic Son (Jesus) and those in Him, the peculiar people descended called to be a light to the nations, a kingdom of priests. Their (and our) tales and songs have inspired countless lesser works.

The Lord tells us we should sing new songs. We preserve stories in the memories of our lives, our communities, and what God is doing in our lives. When I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I thought the story was from a far-away maritime world of wooden hulls and pirates and high seas. Not from a decade and a half before on the outskirts of Michigan. Songs and stories have a way of preserving and making timeless the things they tell.

The Necessary Practice of Lament

Second, the Edmund Fitzgerald resonates because lament is a necessary feature of our lives. I understand the criticism that the song is a beat down, most humorously captured by Tim Hawkins, as Pastor Bart Barber pointed out to me on Twitter. Yet, more deeply, Lightfoot’s song haunts in an emotionally, spiritually, psychologically cathartic way. Because we need lament in a world broken by tragedy.

One-third of the Psalms are the genre of lament. An entire book of the Bible is named after the practice, Lamentations. Our churches are marked by celebratory, neo-charismatic worship focusing on victory and overcoming. We should rejoice when God wins, but as Christians we often experience weakness and loss. Sometimes, we need simply to sit in the sadness and sorrow, and say, “This is what happened.” We need to name the tragedy. We need to tell the story, and let the tension ring out like the recurring wailing guitar riff on “The Wreck.”

The Onramps into Wider Worlds

Third, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has become an entry point into a larger awareness of the story of the Great Lakes, the shipping industry, and more. As one author of a history of the Edmund Fitzgerald and freighters on the Great Lakes said, if the song hadn’t been written, his book wouldn’t have been written either. In telling stories and singing songs, we invite people into wider worlds and larger stories. Such stories and songs are keyholes of understanding and resonance, gateway drugs into new connections. Good stories and songs open up ways into new worlds like Lucy’s wardrobe opened the way to Narnia.

This applies, for example, to our own stories, spiritually called our “testimonies.” Such witness can invite others into the wider world of the gospel and the work of God in the world beyond just our own individual lives. The story of the martyrdom of missionaries Jim Elliot and Nate Saint sparked missionary commitment for decades. We can also find personal connections that interweave our own stories with layers of meaning. The nickname for the Fitz was “the Toledo Express” because it so often shipped into Toledo, Ohio. My own father-in-law was born in Toledo before moving here to South Florida, where I married his daughter. Such connections remind us that we do indeed live in a small world, and remind us that God is threading connections for his glory and our good that we don’t yet perceive.

May the gales of November be kind to you this year.

The Space Trilogy

But he also published three of his most important books between 1938 and 1945, a trilogy of science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. These books are often called “The Space Trilogy” or “The Ransom Trilogy” (after the main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom).

I hate spoilers, even about basic plot lines, so I’m going to stay as spoiler-free as possible. If you haven’t read the trilogy, you really should. Lewis weaves in some fun, interesting, and profound reveals as the stories move along. And even though you could technically read the third book without reading the first two, you should read them in order. Out of the Silent Plant and Perelandra provide a rich and important background for understanding the context of the third book, That Hideous Strength.

It’s become almost a cliché in some Christian theological spheres to rediscover these volumes as prophetic parables of our modern technological moment. With good reason. The third volume is, I think, the weakest of the three in some ways, but more profoundly important than the first two in other ways. That Hideous Strength narrates the danger of the technological industrial complex partnered with governmental power, with a dark, spiritual backbone underneath it all.

The stories envision our world and solar system in deeply spiritual terms. The entire world is filled with a complex, tiered network of beings made by God, either working for His will or against it. Specifically, Lewis imagines a dark, demonic power in the shadows behind organizations and people who claim to be doing nothing but technological innovation.

That thought haunts us, especially in our world of AI. And it should.

One Danger of A.I.

We’re all concerned with AI, and wrestling with how we engage AI, think about AI, and protect against possible dangers of AI. For example, before our service on Sunday, a few of our key leaders started chatting about AI, impromptu. It’s on everyone’s mind: how should Christians respond?

I’ve already gone on the record with some thoughts about the topic, with a relatively neutral, maybe even optimistic, essay. I want to continue that conversation here, with a more negative caution. Like so many things, I don’t see a one-size-fits-all approach. While I don’t want to project everything in The Space Trilogy onto our modern day, Lewis pinpoints one of the most profound dangers of our technological, mechanized age.

The biggest danger of AI is the ancient temptation of the enemy in the garden: “You can become like God.” AI accumulates human knowledge in a digital, abstract way, without the presence of actual humans. Humans are both spiritual and organic—bodies and souls. But AI is electrical, machine, and digital. It universalizes humanity rather than personalizing humans. It doesn’t turn individual “humans” into little gods. But it can promise to turn the abstract mass of “Humanity” into God. It worships Man, not men. This would mean that a demonic danger of AI is not AI “coming to life” so much as AI lulling humans into a kind of death.

Let’s think about four key things God intended for us as humans when he made us in his image. First, God designed humans to be physical beings. We have bodies. God created the man from the dust of the earth. Second, God created humans to be spiritual beings. God breathed life into the man and made the man alive. Third, God also created humans to be relational beings. God made a woman from the man’s side. Fourth, God created humans to be thinking, constructive beings, naming animals and cultivating the world.

Sin dehumanizes us, and corrupts and corrodes our good nature at each point. It kills our bodies, damns our souls, fragments our relationships, and perverts our reason and work in the world.

As I reflect on That Hideous Strength, I think Lewis would warn us that AI promises to make us more than human while actually making us less than human. AI can allow and even encourage humans to further dehumanize ourselves. It can disembody our existence and substitute for real, flesh and blood relationships. There have been haunting and terrifying stories of people falling in love with AI chatbots, or being led into harm of themselves or others. AI can substitute for the human privilege and calling of thinking and creating, filling and subbing the world. It can create an impulse to put a prompt into Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT instead of spending seven minutes noodling on a problem.

There may or may not be actual, literal demons in the machines, or at work in those who are building them. But the risk is much the same, either way.

The risk is self-worship. That we will fall for the primal temptation to make ourselves like God rather than being the image-bearers he created us to be. Building machines that mirror us back to ourselves and amplify human achievements to make us feel bigger, better, and smarter than we should.

It risks us putting our heads together to build something that we can build—but shouldn’t. As the Lord saw at Babel, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (Gen 11:6). Lewis himself draws on themes of Babel in That Hideous Strength, because Babel is the basic story of humans building things for the greatness of themselves. As Lewis says, “Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the dream of Man as God.”

Technology in general and AI specifically tempts us to view ourselves not in proportion to God as those who bear his image but as those who infatuate ourselves with our own image. In other words, it threatens true worship. It risks triggering a hideous feedback loop that echoes us back to ourselves while actually removing us from ourselves and others—and from God.

For all that this statement has going for it, it has one drawback: it isn’t true.

It distorts the Bible’s teaching about who God is (his nature), what God wills, and what God does. The Bible teaches us that none of God’s attributes competes with another. All of God’s attributes are all of God, all of the time. God is simple, meaning he has no parts, no divisions, no competition between components of Himself. This is the stunning biblical doctrine of divine simplicity.

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The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

God is all of God, all the time. As Thomas Aquinas said, “All that is in God is God.” Meaning, God is fully love, fully power, fully wisdom, fully holiness, fully Himself. His attributes are full, complete, eternal, and infinite. They aren’t partial aspects of God, but perfections of God. God has no “parts.” If he had parts, then those things would be able to make God less God or more God.

I know this is mind-bending stuff, but let’s keep going.

God is one (Deut. 6:4). He is “I Am” (Ex. 3:14). If he had parts, then he could be two, or more, separated into multiple sections. But he simply IS, no assembly required. The trinitarian persons aren’t parts, but full personal possessors of the one divine nature. Simplicity actually provides the basis for the Trinity, because if the Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, then they can’t be parts of God or partially God. They must each be, simply and fully, God. God is Father, Son, and Spirit, and Father, Son, and Spirit will and work together singly and inseparably (John 5).

I know it’s challenging, but the doctrine of divine simplicity was a basic point of Christian theology for most of the church’s life. It gave folks like Athanasius a basis for defending the Trinity in the 4th century, it was taught by Augustine in the 5th century, Aquinas in the 13th century, and the Westminster Confession in the 17th century.

Unfortunately, modern theology pushed back against the doctrine of divine simplicity, for a variety of reasons. This pushback affected evangelicals. Here’s just one example. I was teaching an undergraduate theology class several years ago. At this particular school, I was assigned a syllabus as an adjunct professor, with the required textbook being a classic of modern evangelical theology, Christian Theology by Millard Erickson. In less than one page out of one-thousand, Erickson tries to maintain some key points of the teaching, but ultimately dismisses divine simplicity as one taught by “older theologies” and a “problematic attribute.”

Erickson pinpoints that the doctrine is difficult to comprehend. Yes—big time! We’ve already experienced a challenging sample of this teaching. As someone once quipped, “If this is God’s simplicity, I’d hate to think of his complexity.” But we don’t seek to comprehend doctrines, wrapping our minds around them and mastering them. Instead, we seek in faith to understand them, to “stand under” them, submitting to them in humble faith.

God is One. He is, “I Am.” So we don’t have to put his attributes or actions in competition with one another. His glory and his love don’t compete for first place. All of God is completely first, all of the time. All of God is primary.

The Stunning Reality of the Simple God

A friend once helpfully described how some Christians read the Bible. He said, “Imagine that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty (or holiness) is blue and the doctrine of God’s love is red. Some Christians see everything in the Bible as tinted blue, everything is about God’s sovereignty and holiness. Others see everything in the Bible as tinted red, everything is about God’s love.” (We could think of many colors for many Christians’ favorite theological/biblical hobby horses).

The doctrine of divine simplicity teaches us that we don’t have to choose. Instead, the Bible teaches us the Bible isn’t either blue or red. It’s like purple—it's both. Of course, God is infinitely more than this small analogy. God’s attributes are more like white light, encompassing every color at once. We might catch glimpses of a more bluish tone, or a more reddish hue at one moment or another, like a single diamond refracts light in multiple colors.

I know these analogies of divine simplicity fail, and we can’t comprehend it fully. But we can still seek to understand it humbly. We can stand in humble faith seeking the knowledge of God, fully holy and fully love (and fully all that He is, all of Him, all of the time).

I wonder if we need to seek more childlike faith. My kids got this point better than many of us theologian-types. I asked them, “Does God save us for his glory? Or does he save us because he loves us?”

All three said, almost in unison, “Both.”

Is God more holy or more love?
Is God more just or more merciful?
Is God more powerful or more wise?

The answer is, “Yes.”

Acting in simultaneous concert with the hundreds of Israeli aircraft that executed dozens of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli intelligence and special forces on the ground inside Iran disabled the country’s air defense systems. The operation reportedly relied on the use of drones and missiles launched from inside Iran…early reports indicate significant success.

Israel has so thoroughly penetrated the Iranian security and intelligence establishment that it was able to target and neutralize much of Iran’s military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership within the first minutes of the operation.

In response, Iran has begun firing missiles into Israel and the city of Tel Aviv.

As Americans, and as Christians, this conflict feels both far away, yet quite close to home. To help us think through this situation, I want to talk about three key considerations.

The History of Israel

After the assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, I wrote a reflection on five points Christians should consider about Israel.

1. Both victims and villains are made in the image of God.

2. Some things are truly evil, and we can’t “both sides” every situation.

3. We live in a world of interconnected ethnicities that aren’t the same as nation-states.

4. God’s people are a new “ethnicity” by faith, yet a special reverence for ethnic Israel remains through the gospel.

5. Christians view the world through the lens of dual citizenship: heavenly and earthly.

Specifically, on the relationship of ethnic Israel to the modern-day nation-state of Israel, I said:

I would argue that they are related but not identical. You only have to hear the longing in the voices of Jewish friends and neighbors when they talk about Israel to know that we can’t completely separate them. Israel (the nation) and Israel (the people) have a deep connection. That said, we should not assume that the promises of God for Israel apply directly to the modern nation-state. We should be careful not to use Israel (the modern nation) and Israel (the people of God) as synonyms. This demands important care and clarity.

In the Israel-Iran conflict, we find deep resonance in the biblical stories of Ishmael and Isaac, thousands of years of geographic, political, religious, and military tension and conflict.

The Complexity of Modern Politics

But in the Israel-Iran conflict, we’re not just dealing with historical or theological issues, but contemporary political ones. A few years ago, I outlined seven principles for a Christian view of politics that can inform this discussion.

1. The primary political commitment of a Christian is that Jesus is Lord.

2. God has ordained human governing, political power to preserve order, justice, and peace.

3. Satan and sin have corrupted human government and political power.

4. Human governing, political power can do good and evil and will answer to God for both.

5. God establishes his kingdom in and through the gathering of the local church.

6. The scattered church should seek the political order, justice, and peace of the earthly city.

7. Jesus will be Lord. One day all of the political power-playing on earth will give way to the prince who will rule in order, justice, and peace.

In our earthly citizenship, we should seek the order, justice, and peace of the neighbors and nations around us. But rather than this leading us to condemn Israel’s action, we can assess the regime of Iran and the government of Israel in terms of their commitments to order, justice, and peace.

Our theology allows us to be realistic about any government’s faults, while still seeing with clear moral conviction. Israel has the moral high ground here. It is a David in a sea of Goliaths who want to wipe it from the map. Our earthly citizenship reminds us that Iran hates what America represents. Iran targets civilians. Israel doesn’t.

We can clearly stand with Israel, especially with reports of America’s defense of Israel against Iranian missiles, and reports of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion striking precisely against nuclear targets that intentionally avoided unneeded casualties.

All of that leads into the third key consideration.

Some Wars are Just

Earlier I tweeted, “Call me Augustinian, but preventing bad guys from building bombs seems like a just cause.” Sorry, it’s a niche and unfunny little statement, but the point is this: some wars are just, as Augustine taught us 1600 years ago.

As I said in a piece on this theme:

The Just War tradition maintains a more strong fidelity to the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:7), realizing that Christ taught and lived suffering and peace and justice and retribution. God has given earthly governments authority to bear the sword against injustice, and the New Testament instructs Christians to be subject to these government insofar as such subjection does not compromise loyalty to Christ (1 Pet 2:13; Rom 13:1). Ultimately, the Just War view conforms itself more to Christ’s ultimate standard of loving God and loving our neighbors. We should pray for peace, and ultimately, when required, fight for peace as well.

As I read on the app formerly known as Twitter (in a post I can’t seem to find again): if Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons, and if Israel destroyed them, then Israel has not just defended itself—but the entire world.

We pray for peace. We fight for justice.

And we look forward to that day:

The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom
of our Lord and of his Christ,
and he will reign forever and ever.

—Revelation 11:15

Christians are divided on the usefulness and danger of AI. Christianity Today recently published an interview with Gloo, a technology company geared toward faith-based organizations. The interviewer had a negative view of AI, while Gloo has a more positive view. In either case, AI is the current cutting edge of technological innovation, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

Personally, I have found ChatGPT more useful than a search engine, and I deploy it relatively often for various tasks. Our kids have used it for school projects and help on homework. From instantly generating insights on a baseball glove for our son, to background research for biblical study, to explaining how to do math problems, I find the current growth of AI technology both thrilling and terrifying. I’ve glimpsed the helpful aspects, but also scared myself with how easily I might outsource my own thinking.

And as a pastor-theologian I have wrestled with how to think about AI theologically and biblically. Here are a few principles I’m working through.

Creator and Creatures

The basic reality of the world is that God is Creator and everything else is a creature. Between the Creator and creatures opens an unbridgeable gap between Eternal Being and everything else. God is God, creation is not-God.

The crowning glory of God’s creative work is humanity, the only creatures stamped with his image. God entrusted humanity with responsibility for the rest of creation. God is the King of all creation, and he entrusts a measure of that kingship to human creatures. God commands people, “Fill and subdue the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

The development of technology generally and of AI technology specifically flows from the dominion of humanity over creation. Here’s a basic explanation of what I mean: People turn sand into microchips. People put microchips into computers. People create software on computers that can consolidate knowledge into various forms in response to a “prompt.” All of this is a part of “filling and subduing” the world.

AI is a creature made by humans. Like all things we make, it can serve us as a tool, or it can be served by us as an idol. This tension is a tale nearly as old as time. For example, Isaiah describes the way humans both use creation for good and turn it into an idol.

The woodworker…cuts down cedars for his use,
or he takes a cypress or an oak…
He takes some of it and warms himself…
He burns half of it in a fire,
and he roasts meat on that half…
He makes a god or his idol with the rest of it.
He bows down to it and worships;
he prays to it, “Save me, for you are my god.”

—Isaiah 44:13–17

Isaiah describes an absurd picture of idolatry—cutting down a tree and using half the wood for fuel and half to build a statue to worship. We constantly are torn between ruling creation as we should, and worshipping creation like we shouldn’t. Creatures don’t work the way they’re supposed to, because sin fragments our hearts and misaligns our purposes.

Sin and Rebellion

God’s creatures rebelled against the Creator. Every thing we have made out of God’s world ever since the Fall has rebelled against us in some way. All of creation still reflects the glory of God, but all of creation also misrepresents God’s purposes like a shattered mirror. The world is beautiful and broken.

We as humans are also beautiful and broken. We are all beautiful humans who bear the image of God. We are also all broken humans who flip our Creator the bird. Everything we make is branded by our own beautiful and broken DNA. Therefore, no technology can ever be “neutral,” because all technology is made and used by humans. It will be both good and bad, created and fallen, “subjected to futility” (Rom. 8:20). Sin infects everything that humans are and everything that we do.

So AI will mirror this pattern. AI is a creature made by fallen creatures, so it will mirror us, both good and bad. We should expect AI technology to mirror our own beautiful patterns: truth, goodness, beauty. And we should expect AI technology to mirror our own sinful patterns: deception, evil, ugliness.

AI will yield “thorns and thistles” (Gen. 3:18), and when it does we must respond appropriately.

But if it produces thorns and thistles, it is worthless and about to be cursed, and at the end will be burned.

—Hebrews 6:8

All sin will be scorched from the earth under the fires of God’s judgment. You can watch a bunch of movies about the possible ways the AI revolution could turn bad.

But the dangers aren’t just about super robots taking over the earth. It’s more subtle. It’s about not thinking for ourselves, not doing the work. Embracing laziness and depending on an artificially intelligent created thing rather than the Creator. It means something to me that the folks I see pushing back against AI the hardest work in college spaces with college students. We might train a generation to outsource their minds, if we’re not careful.

Messing with thorns can draw blood, after all.

That said, we also know that sin and judgment are not the end of the Bible. Genesis 3 doesn’t finish the story. The story of the Bible is also a story of grace and redemption.

Grace and Redemption

God’s redeeming grace focuses on humanity through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. And the cross and resurrection have redemptive impact on all of the creation. God promises spiritual salvation and physical resurrection. He promises a new heavens and a new earth (Rev. 21). God redeems the work that we do, making it beautiful and worth something good. Bob Thune points out that the redeemed creation will be a city, and cities are full of technology.

I believe that God can redeem the things we make, the little creations we mold out of his creation. So I believe that God can redeem AI, as we use it for good. For example, AI can automate and quicken tedious, repetitive tasks. It can help diagnose medical conditions. It can collate vast amounts of knowledge and summarize it more quickly than a single (or group) of humans. Who knows what else.

As I said, I’ve seen a lot of help from various AIs, from creating images, to editing, to summarizing, to research. It can be a helpful tool. But it is not neutral. It is infected with both the beauty and brokenness of its human makers.

So, for now, the question is a question of wisdom, and ultimately of love.

Wisdom and Love

We approach AI like we approach anything in creation, with wisdom in dependence on God’s Spirit. From bees to bytes, the things in the world are either God’s creation (nature) or the stuff we make from God’s creation (like technology). With all the created world around us, we proceed with wisdom. A bee can sting us and provide us honey. So much of the world is this way. It can harm us and help us. Wisdom helps us discern which approach will bring help instead of harm.

Approaching current AI models with wisdom might include:

• Using it for editing more than composition

• Using it for research more than thinking

• Using it as a tool rather than a companion

That last point is a big one. Many people are using AI to find companionship. It makes sense in some ways. An AI will always be a prompt away, never truly contradict you, and always be what you want, when you want. But obviously that’s a shallow way to connect and nothing like a true relationship.

So the wisest among us will prioritize people. Family, friends, neighbors. Flesh and blood and souls, not bytes and bits and prompts.

In other words, the most important way to push back against the evil thorns of AI is pursuing love in true relationship with God and others.

We can fall in love with tools and with idols, but the tools and idols will never love us back.

Since then, we’ve borrowed that phrase for all kinds of toxic ecosystems. And we probably should for another: the Divisiveness Industrial Complex.

This one lives inside the church.

Big Eva and Big Diva

Sometimes we hear about the “evangelical-industrial complex”—an ecosystem of books, media, conferences, influencers, and institutions that might prize platform over discipleship. But that’s a topic for another day.

Here, I want to talk about a particular offshoot: the niche profiteering of Christian division—what I’ve started calling the Divisiveness Industrial Complex. Some pastors and leaders have made a name for themselves by segmenting the church into ever “purer” tribes. They segregate over second- or third-tier issues: the timing of the rapture, the gifts of the Spirit, Calvinism, or political ideology.

They write books. Host conferences. Publish YouTube reactions. Run Twitter/X accounts (sometimes anonymously). Film TikTok reels. And they love to tell you which Christians are “compromised” and which ones are “faithful.”

If the broader evangelical machine is “Big Eva,” then these merchants of division are an even more toxic ecosystem:

Big Diva.

(Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Jesus Prayed for Something Better

What’s tragic isn’t just the dividers themselves. It’s how much oxygen we give them.

Faithful Christians, pastors, and leaders too often align with these figures for the sake of some shared conviction—cultural, political, or doctrinal. But by sharing their content, appearing on their platforms, and preaching in their pulpits, they give air to division. Such alignment legitimates the dividers and amplifies divisiveness.

And Paul’s words to Titus are clear:

“Reject a divisive person after a first and second warning. For you know that such a person has gone astray and is sinning; he is self-condemned” (Titus 3:10–11).

Division isn’t clever. Division isn’t brave. Division is sin.

And in case we forgot: on the night before Jesus was crucified, he prayed for both unity and truth (John 17):

Unity: “Holy Father, protect them by your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11).

Truth: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

Spine and Skin

Truth and unity are not opposites—they’re integrated.

The image that helps me most is the human body. Specifically, the spine.

Some Christians say, “Straighten up!” Get a backbone. Have some conviction. And they’re right. We need to believe truth. But the “truthers” can treat the spine like a steel rod—unbending, inflexible, rigid. Ever seen someone who can’t bend their back? It’s an uncomfortable thing, and not God’s design.

Others say, “Soften up!” Be more loving. Like Buddy the Elf, they want to give you a hug. And they’re right. We need gentleness. But the “unifiers” can sacrifice truth for unity. They can remove the spine altogether. Skin without a spine leaves us with a jelly-blob.

Bones without skin. Skin without bones. Both are horror show stuff.

A healthy spine is strong and flexible. A spine stands the body upright, but it also moves, bends, and adjusts. And it only works when it’s wrapped in flesh.

Spine and skin. Flesh and bone. Truth and unity.

Sound doctrine without love is brittle. Unity without truth is squishy.

The Body of Christ needs both truth and unity, convinced tenderness and tender conviction. Harsh truth and squishy unity both defame the name of Jesus and his gospel.

The Narrow Way

The “truthers” often love Titus 2:1: “Proclaim things consistent with sound teaching.” But they can forget that Paul barely needed to re-ink his quill before he also wrote: “Reject a divisive person” (Titus 3:10).

Sound doctrine and biblical unity are two rails on the same track. Take either one away, and the train derails. Again, they are integrated and one without the other is grotesque. We must unite around truth, and love unity enough to reject division.

Some of you reading this are pastors. Some are leaders in organizations or churches. Most of you are faithful believers trying to follow Jesus in a fragmented world. Maybe you’re not the one dividing the Church. But if you give oxygen to the dividers, you’re helping keep the profits flowing to Big Diva’s accusation factories.

Be careful what your little eyes see and your little ears hear. Don’t get your discipleship from outrage. Don’t let your content consumption funnel you into the Divisiveness Industrial Complex.

We can love both sound doctrine and biblical unity.

We must love both sound doctrine and biblical unity.

Because Jesus does.

So let’s be the Body—bones and flesh, spine and skin—standing tall in truth, yielding in grace, united in Christ.

“There's something happening here…But what it is ain't exactly clear…Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down…”

As I think about the current cultural moment in relationship to Christianity, this chorus refrains through my mind.

Something’s happening. We’re not sure exactly what, but something is up. We need to pay attention.

Famous entertainers and actors like Russell Brand and Hulk Hogan are becoming Christians, getting baptized, becoming vocally evangelistic. Influential public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson are writing entire books about the Bible, posting YouTube videos about the Bible with millions of views. More young men are going to church than young women—a statistical first.

And just yesterday the most popular podcast in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience, published a three-plus hour conversation between Rogan and Christian scholar and apologist Wesley Huff. (Be warned: Rogan isn’t a Christian and doesn’t talk like one. But he is clearly curious about the faith, hence the conversation).

As plenty of folks have pointed out on social media, Huff’s presentation is masterful. He winsomely, confidently, yet humbly unpacks many points in favor of Christian faith. He shares the gospel with Rogan. And, specifically, he talks much about his own field of expertise, a relatively obscure and certainly nerdy thing called textual criticism.

It’s kind of hard for me to explain how much it blows my mind that millions and millions of people will listen to this conversation centering on textual criticism. The practice of textual criticism is fascinating yet tedious, with hours and years and lifetimes compiling and comparing fragments of ancient scraps of writing. It’s a scholarly niche.

Huff mainstreams this practice as part of an apologetics ministry centered on defending the reasons why the Bible is trustworthy. He’s a legitimate scholar, who creates online content on his website and YouTube that persuades people to believe. He’s part of an online movement with folks like Gavin Ortlund, Allen Parr, Sean McDowell of Biola University (a long-time hub of apologetic fruitfulness), and quite a few others.

As Samuel James said recently, apologetics is having a moment: “Am I the only one who feels like apologetics was a valley of dry bones just a few years ago, and now it seems incredibly important/relevant?”

I’m especially interested in this apologetics moment, because I’m immersing myself in apologetics in this season and I have a vested interested in it. (I can’t yet share about this publicly, but I will share later). I think we need apologetics now more than ever, and it is incredibly relevant and important for our time.

Defending the Faith

Apologetics takes its name from the Greek word for “defense” or “reason” in 1 Peter 3:15: “but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”

The Greek word for “defense” is apologia. When someone is challenged or accused, they would “apologize.” Not say, “Sorry,” but defend themselves. Sometimes in legal contexts: “it is not the Roman custom to give someone up before the accused faces the accusers and has an opportunity for a defense against the charges” (Acts 25:16). It’s a chance to set straight the record, even in moral contexts (2 Cor. 7:11).

The field of Christian apologetics has become a place to defend and display the truth of Christian teaching. It arises in theological, ideological, and evangelistic contexts. Paul defined his ministry in his letter to the Philippian church as apologetic:

• “You are all partners with me in grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel” (Phil. 1:7).

• I am appointed for the defense of the gospel” (Phil. 1:16).

Apologetics has sometimes been seen as a dusty, nerdy, or irrelevant discipline. But not anymore. When Joe Rogan hosts a Christian, evangelical apologist on his podcast, we know something’s up. Something’s happening here. Apologetics has an immediate cultural relevance that we can’t ignore.

Apologetics branches into many different spheres like philosophy, history, science, archaeology, and more. Likewise, specific visions of apologetics like presuppositional apologetics can sometimes seem to compete with other approaches like evidentialism. Presuppositional apologetics tends to focus on the level of worldview assumptions (or “presuppositions”). Evidentialist apologetics tends to focus on evidence for Christian faith from history, philosophy, and science. Of course, many Christians (and I’m one of them) realize these approaches aren’t enemies but friends.

Cultural and Classical Apologetics

That said, I think we can helpfully describe the need for apologetics in our culture in two ways: cultural apologetics and classical apologetics. Recently, cultural apologetics has been more popular among many folks in my broad tribe of evangelicals. For example, The Gospel Coalition launched The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. The Keller Center takes its vision from the late and great pastor Tim Keller, who said, “The job of the missionary is to enter sympathetically the worldview/story of the culture yet challenge and re-tell the culture's story so they see their story will only have a happy ending in Jesus.”

We absolutely need to reframe the narratives of our culture in light of the gospel. Desires like sex, money, power, and fame point to deeper longings. Missionary and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin (who influenced Keller) said that we shouldn’t so much make the gospel intelligible to the world. Instead, we need to make the world intelligible to the gospel. This is the task of cultural apologetics.

We need cultural apologetics, but we overcorrect if we reject classical apologetics as dry and irrelevant. Now, I don’t think Keller did this, nor does something like the Keller Center do this. After all, the arguments for the resurrection were some of the most important to Keller. I think most folks agree that both approaches have their place. We need to deploy all the relevant arguments for Christianity, and defend against all the relevant arguments against Christianity, as best we can.

This is where classical apologetics helps, as it lays out rational and intellectual arguments for the truth of Christianity. Two big examples come to mind. First, William Lane Craig, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer and others have argued that both the existence and the fine tuning of the universe point to a Creator. The existence and fine-turning arguments are technically distinct, but basically they both say that the universe doesn’t make sense without the existence of a Creator.

Next, one of the most powerful arguments for Christianity is the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Folks like N.T. Wright and Gary Habermas have argued persuasively that Jesus rose from the dead. And if Jesus rose from the dead, it’s game, set, match.

I find it interesting that Huff’s discussion with Rogan was almost entirely a classical, evidentialist approach to apologetics. It focused on history, artifacts, and evidence. Clearly our culture craves evidence in a world where anyone can say anything based on nothing.

Huff reminds us, as all the great apologists do, that Christianity can stand up to intense scrutiny. It has “evidence that demands a verdict,” as Josh McDowell’s famous book says.

The Huff-Rogan moment reminds us: Something’s happening here. “What’s that sound?” We need to stop, look, listen, and lean in. And we need to start “apologizing” like Christians, again.

You might be able guess the rest because you’ve seen the illustration—or used it yourself.

“You see, kids, if you pour the sand into the jar first—” said the teacher, tipping the jar of sand so that grains cascaded from one jar to the other.

“—then the big rocks won’t fit.” The teacher stacked one rock on the top of the sand so that it peaked above the rim of the jar.

“But, if you put the big rocks in first, the sand will fill in around them.”

Moving the rocks into the empty jar, the teacher then poured the sand in around it. Everything fit, easily.

We must put the big priorities of our lives into place before the little stuff, or the little stuff will crowd out the important things.

We need to get the big rocks into the jar before the details of 2025 crowd them out.

I can’t tell you what the specifics of 2025 will be for you, or the specifics of God’s will for you in 2025. But I can confidently tell you what big pieces you should prioritize. The biggest Rock of all is the “higher rock” (Ps. 62:1).

God.

And if you want to truly meet God, you must be where God is.

My first date with Laura was at the Starbucks where Bardstown Road turns into Baxter Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. I had to meet her at the right place, or our relationship would never have developed into anything.

We will never worship God wholeheartedly if we don’t meet him where he is.

In a big picture sense, we meet God at the foot of the cross. We meet God in Jesus. Jesus is the “place” where we find God.

In the regular rhythm of our lives, we also meet God at the cross. We meet God in the places of strain and struggle, challenge and conviction, the valleys of shadow.

We follow the path of Father Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham.

Like us, Jacob was at an inflection point in life. Between a rock and hard place. He’d cheated his brother Esau out of the family inheritance. Esau vowed to kill him, so Jacob ran away. Got married (times two). Had a bunch of kids.

Now, he was going to back, and Esau was on the way. Jacob could only assume that Esau had bad intentions.

Moses wrote the story down for us. Jacob prepared to meet Esau, separating his people and possessions into groups to appease the brother he’d deceived so many years before (Gen. 32:1-23).

The Surprising Struggle with God

With Jacob alone and vulnerable, the story surprises us with the turn it takes. “Jacob was left alone” —yes, makes sense—“and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Gen. 32:24). We pause— “Wait, what’s going on?” (Like I often ask during a Great American Family Christmas movie after I’ve been scrolling on my phone instead of paying attention…)

The Wrestler enters the story unexpectedly, without announcement or context.

So too with us. In the wilderness of our vulnerability, God shows up and wrestles with us. The narrative calls this Wrestler a man, but it becomes clear it’s God in human form (a theophany), probably a preincarnate appearance of Christ (a Christophany). As Hosea reflects on it many years later, Jacob “wrestled with God” (Hos. 12:3).

John Calvin has some strong words for this text:

All the servants of God in this world [are] wrestlers, because the Lord exercises them with various kinds of conflicts…our business is truly with him…For as all prosperity flows from his goodness, so adversity is either the rod with which he corrects our sins, or the test of our faith and patience.

That’s a lot of theological mindfuel, which I think C.S. Lewis summarized even more poignantly when Mr. Beaver famously described Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good."

This is a strange wrestling match. On the one hand, this Wrestler cannot defeat Jacob. But the Wrestler clearly and willingly takes this limitation onto Himself. He adjusts his strength to Jacob’s.

We know the overpowering strength of the Wrestler in his ability to put Jacob’s hip out of socket. “When the man saw that he could not defeat him, he struck Jacob’s hip socket as they wrestled and dislocated his hip” (Gen. 32:25). He cannot prevail against Jacob, but he can put Jacob’s hip out of joint with a single touch, “a devastating blow” resulting in an injury that lasts well beyond the match.

A human “touch” could not dislocate a hip in a healthy adult male. Reliable Internet sources explain that car accidents and falls from high off a ladder generate the force needed for a hip dislocation. A human “touch” could not dislocate a hip in a healthy adult male. So Jacob’s mysterious wrestling partner is Captain America strong, even though he does not prevail against Jacob.

But Jacob is determined. But more than determined. He is desperate. A hip dislocation wouldn’t just be excruciatingly painful. It would disable the entire leg. Picture Jacob like a football player lying on the turf needing a backboard and ambulance. Yet he holds the Wrestler, and won’t let go.

The Wrestler commands him: “‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’

But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me’” (Gen. 32:26).

Again, the power of this Wrestler indicates that he is willingly allowing himself to be held by Jacob. Clearly, the point is not the Wrestler’s inability to escape, but Jacob learning to hold fast.

Jacob would not ask for a blessing from some dude who couldn’t beat him in a fight. Jacob understands that this is not a man, but One who is able to grant a blessing. The entire fiasco with Esau centered on this word: “bless.” Jacob pretended to be Esau, tricking his dad into blessing him (Gen. 27).

But Jacob needed another Blessing. He needed the Blessing of Yahweh, the Lord. The Lord had promised that he would bless the nations through Jacob: “All the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you and your offspring” (Gen. 28:14).

Yet here we see Jacob recognizing the existential, life-and-death need for the Lord to grant his blessing to Jacob.

And the Lord was about to do “above and beyond” (Eph. 3:21) Jacob’s most desperate hopes.

The Blessedness of Limping

It starts out strangely: “‘What is your name?’ the man asked.

‘Jacob,’ he replied” (Gen. 32:27).

The Wrestler asked Jacob’s name, not because he didn’t know it, but because Jacob did know it. Jacob had been labeled with this identity since he grabbed Esau’s heel straight out of the womb: Jacob “came out grasping Esau’s heel with his hand. So he was named He Grabs the Heel” (Gen. 25:12). “Heel-grabbing” was an expression that can mean “cheating.” Jacob had always been “heel-grabber.” Cheater.

When the Wrestler drew Jacob’s attention to Jacob’s identity, Jacob confessed his name like a sin. “Heel-grabber.” “Cheater.” “Liar.”

We all have names we’ve lived with for a long time. Sometimes others label us. Sometimes we label ourselves. All too often, our behavior validates these labels.

“Liar.”

“Failure.”

“Drunk.”

“Gambler.”

“Addict.”

“Idolater.”

“Cheater.”

“Mediocre.”

“Lazy.”

“Greedy.”

“Selfish.”

“What is your name?”

God asks us in the lonely place where we have to deal with him, and him alone. The worst things we do aren’t anomalies of an otherwise good person. Those things are who we are. Jacob was honest, and we can be honest, too. Because God is There.

Jacob was “Cheater.”

But God.

God gave Jacob a new name: “‘Your name will no longer be Jacob,’ he said. ‘It will be Israel because you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed’” (Gen. 32:28).

Here, for the first time of many, many times, the name “Israel” shows up in the Bible, as the ESV Study Bible points out. Israel means, “He struggles with God.” God redefined Jacob’s entire identity, and the identity of his family. For ever after, Israel is the name of God’s people. From that moment Jacob was renamed, and his destiny and his family’s destiny were redirected.

God had the authority to rename Jacob, and has the authority to rename us. But Jacob didn’t have the authority to name God.

“Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’

But he answered, ‘Why do you ask my name?’ And he blessed him there” (Gen. 32:29).

God dismissed Jacob’s request. He received from God what God desired to give. God told his name in his own good timing. He revealed it to Moses: “I Am Yahweh: merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 3:14, 35:5-7). He revealed it in the gospel: “the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28:19).

Limping Into Purpose

Jacob couldn’t name God, but he could name places in God’s world and moments in God’s story. He didn’t have authority over God, but he did have authority under God. “Jacob then named the place Peniel, ‘For I have seen God face to face,’ he said, ‘yet my life has been spared’” (Gen. 32:30).

We have authority, too. We have authority in Christ to do and to claim and to name all that Christ has authorized us to do and to claim and to name. Nothing more—and nothing less.

We have purpose and a calling. And we limp into it, as Jacob did. “The sun shone on him as he passed by Penuel—limping because of his hip. That is why, still today, the Israelites don’t eat the thigh muscle that is at the hip socket: because he struck Jacob’s hip socket at the thigh muscle” (Gen. 32:31-32).

We walk with Jesus with a stagger rather than a swagger. And we consecrate the limp. The struggles are holy unto God. The cross is the primary sacred symbol of our faith, after all.

So, if you’re limping into 2025, maybe, just maybe, God’s got you right where he wants you.

Limping humbles the high-minded. It reminds you that you aren’t as great as you think. “Slow down, Turbo,” as we said a generation ago.

Limping lifts the low-down. It reminds you that you aren’t as bad off as you assume. You’re not stuck or helpless or hopeless. You can move toward God’s calling.

Limping calls the complacent. You have a God to wrestle with and a destiny to embrace with humble confidence.

So here’s to limping into 2025.

Pulling into the parking lot a few minutes late one morning, I found my fellow latte schleppers standing outside. The supervisor had the keys, but the supervisor wasn’t there.

5:10am came. Then 5:20.

We tried calling. No answer.

As customers pulled into the parking lot and the drive-through, we could only apologize, explaining that we were locked out, essentially powerless to change things.

I’m sure you know the feeling. Being locked out.

Maybe you’ve forgotten your house key.

Or left a car key in the ignition.

Maybe you’ve been at the constant mercy of someone to open something for you.

Some have been exiled from a relationship or network, isolated, estranged, lonely.

Powerless and helpless.

Knowing where you need to be and want to be, yet having no way to get inside can undo your pretensions of total power and absolute agency.

Being locked out, being exiled, knowing where you want to be, where you should be, feels lonely and desperate.

The Advent season captures this feeling of being locked out or exiled.

“O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here…”

The Bible tells the story of exile from early to late in the plotline. From Joseph in Egypt, to Israel in Babylon, and into the gospel era of the chosen exiles of the church (1 Pet. 1:1).

The Bible tells the story of exile in poetry and prose, in propehcy and epistle, in history and theology. And in genealogy.

We might expect the New Testament, the epic finale of the whole Bible to hook us with something big. Instead, we find this: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1).

More than a blockbuster whoa Matthew establishes the legal inheritance of the who: Jesus is the legal heir of the promises to David and Abraham. Then in the rest of the family line, Matthew shows us that Jesus is the legal heir of the throne and the land of Israel, who gathers his people in from their exile.

Among genealogies it’s remarkable, because a genealogy usually takes its name from the eldest, first on the list. This is the ancient practice of primogeniture, where the firstborn had primacy. But not with Jesus’ genealogy. Every previous generation takes its cue from him. He defines them, rather than the other way around.

Jesus’ Genealogy (The Eras Tour)

We see three eras in Jesus’ genealogy (call it “the eras tour” if you want to).

The Era of Promise (Abraham) (Matt. 1:2-6).
The Era of Power (David) (Matt. 1:7-11).
The Era of Exile (name missing—we’ll get back to this) (Matt. 1:12-16).

Exile echoes through the story of the Bible. In the era of promise, Abraham was an exile. He was given the land, but remained a foreigner his whole life. “And Abraham lived as a foreigner/sojourned in the land of the Philistines for many days” (Gen. 21:34). Stephen the martyr tells us that “Yet God gave Abraham no inheritance in the land, not even a foot’s length, but promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child” (Acts 7:5).

In the era of power, David was an exile. He lived outside the family circle before he was anointed king at a young age.

After Jesse presented seven of his sons to him, Samuel told Jesse, “The Lord hasn’t chosen any of these.” Samuel asked him, “Are these all the sons you have?” “There is still the youngest,” he answered, “but right now he’s tending the sheep.” Samuel told Jesse, “Send for him. We won’t sit down to eat until he gets here” (1 Sam. 16:10–11).

Then again, David lived in exile as he fled for years from Saul. He lived in caves, wandering around the wilderness. “Now David and his men were in the wilderness…” (1 Sam. 23:24). He even had a season where his own son drove him out of the capital city, and he was exiled from his own palace after years on the throne:

David said to all the servants with him in Jerusalem, “Get up. We have to flee, or we will not escape from Absalom! Leave quickly, or he will overtake us quickly, heap disaster on us, and strike the city with the edge of the sword” (2 Sam. 15:14).

And in the third era, exile is unending. Matthew summarizes the genealogy of Jesus this way: “So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations” (Matt. 1:17).

14 + 14 + 14. As I said in a poem I wrote years ago, “Fourteen generations times three and he came, all bloody and weak and wholly divine.”

But count the names, and something doesn’t add up. A name is missing.

The era of promise: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Perez, Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon, Salmon, Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David. Fourteen.

The era of power: Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon, Josiah, Jechoniah. Fourteen.

The era of exile: Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazer, Matthan, Jacob, Joseph, Jesus. Thirteen.

Where is the missing generation? Students have puzzled over this point for thousands of years, but I think the best explanation is that the “missing generation” is the deportation to Babylon. And this exile still exists at the time Matthew is writing. Scholar Nicholas G. Piotrowski calls it “the unending exile when there is no Davidic king.”

Into this blank space called “exile,” Matthew tells us to overwrite the name of Jesus. Because Jesus ends the exile. Emmanuel ransoms captive Israel who mourns in lonely exile.

This is good news for us, as our own stories are also stories of exile. In at least three ways.

1. Spiritual Exile

First, most profoundly, we experience exile in an eternal, existential sense. We have been expelled from the favorable presence of God because of our rebellion. The ancient tale is the true tale of the world: the man ate the fruit and suffered the curse. We all eat the forbidden fruit of sin and self, our ways instead of God’s ways. We live in lives and we live in a world cursed because of sin. Far from home. Mourning in lonely exile here.

But God doesn’t leave us in exile. He sent his Son out into the wastelands. Jesus himself experienced exile. As an infant:

“After they were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Get up! Take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and escaped to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod’s death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: Out of Egypt I called my Son” (Matthew 2:13–15).

Like Jacob leading his family away from the promised land into Egypt to escape the famine, Joseph leads his family to safety away from the promised land. And like God called his people out of Egypt, Jesus comes out of Egypt, out of exile, back into the land.

Then Jesus experiences exile as an adult. After Jesus is baptized and publicly affirmed by his Father, “This my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased” (Matt. 3:17), he is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness” (Matt. 4:1). Jesus experienced exile away from the land of promise as an infant and as a man.

But most profoundly, Jesus experienced exile on the cross. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Elí, Elí, lemá sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46).

Jesus was sent as the heir of the promise to Abraham and the heir to the throne of David to bring us out of our exile. And he did this by entering—rather, exiting into exile himself. We suffer a self-deserved and God-ordained exile. Israel flirted with other so-called gods and fell into their arms. God warned them and warned them—then he expelled them. We aren’t better than they were.

Jesus experienced the human reality of exile from the presence of God, because we mourned in lonely exile away from the presence of God. When Jesus died, he bore the wrath of God against sin, and in his human nature he experienced exile from the favor of God. When he cried, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” he called out the abandonment that was our eternal destiny—had he not joined us there.

Jesus washed up on the dirty shore of the wastelands. He pushed his hands into the wet sand and lifted his head. Pulling his knees beneath him, he leaned back and caught his balance. Slowly, he stood and he walked into the desert place, the dead place, and called as many who had ears to hear, “Come, follow me! I’m not staying here long, just for the weekend, and I want you to come back with me.”

“We were dead in our trespasses and sins…but God being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him…” (Eph. 2:1, 4).

Jesus opened his eyes, and he stood in his burial rags. Yet he didn’t open his eyes or stand up alone. All those united to him through repentance and faith in him were there, too. All who have turned away from sin and self and trusted in Christ find that their eternal destiny has been stitched into the side of Jesus. The Messiah, son of Abraham, son of David.

2. Social exile

Second, we experience exile as citizens of a kingdom that doesn’t fly a flag at the United Nations. This kingdom stands under a cross upon a hill outside Jerusalem. We are “chosen exiles,” as we belong to a different kingdom. At times this exile puts us at odds with the world. We have different values and goals, and we pledge allegiance to a far Country, a City that is yet to come. Those in Christ feel this displacement and homelessness in the world.

We see the scandal of the skin and blood and bone that Jesus brought into the world. Jesus the Messiah has some surprising skeletons in his genealogical closet. Matthew includes four women, plus Jesus’ mother, Mary. Look at the women whose blood runs in Jesus’ veins. Tamar (Matt. 1:3) impersonated a prostitute to get her father-in-law to sleep with her and get her pregnant. Rahab (1:5) was a prostitute and a Gentile. Ruth (1: 5) was an Moabite refugee. And David took advantage of Bathsheba, “the wife of Uriah” (1:6), who was very likely a Gentile like her husband. Jesus’ own mother was accused of immorality, because who really would believe that she was pregnant by a miracle of God?

So Jesus was born into the world with the blood of kings and whores and immigrants running through his body. When Jesus bled his blood for the nations, he bled the blood of the nations.

So it’s surprising, but actually not that surprising when we experience disconnection in our relationships and communities. Some experience exile because of physical or cultural features. Skin color or accent. Age or income. Some experience exile because of family strain and tensions. Dislocated relationships. Kids or parents or friends or neighbors who don’t text back anymore.

Jesus understood this exile, and he can bridge these unbridgeable gaps, too.

3. Situational exile

Third, we experience seasons of wandering and wondering and waiting. Micro-exiles, when we see a disjunction between where we want to be and where we are. Seasons of fatherly discipline, and/or of wondering where God might be.

Seasons where we feel like God has given us the desires of our hearts and snatched them away again.

Seasons in Babylon.

Death and grief. Loss and lament. Deferred dreams and hopes hanging too high to reach.

The genealogy of Jesus teaches us two things. First, exile is real. Second, exile is temporary. The promises of God might take fourteen generations times three, but Messiah is coming. Though he be bloody and weak, he is wholly Divine.

He has come, and he will come, again.

We live between First Christmas and Second Christmas. Advent has yielded to Christmas once before, and it will yield again.

So we wait, and we walk on.
So we believe, and we hope.
So we love, and we long.

So we rejoice, rejoice, because Emmanuel will come to thee, O Israel.

Does it make a difference? Does it count for anything?

Many of us have wondered about these things. We wonder if our small lives add up to anything worth something.

I’ll never forget reading the account of Lewis and Clark’s explorations of America. In my early 20s, I felt small in light of their grand adventure. These folks had done something. Just then, I came upon the words Meriwether Lewis scribbled in his journal on his 30th birthday. On the ridge of the great unknown West of the American continent, he secretly feared that his life did not matter.

I thought about this feeling this last week, as I walked through the cold and wondrous streets of Oxford, England. I felt several feelings. I was awed by the ancient spires, walking the footsteps of another Lewis, known to his friends as Jack and to us as C.S. He, C.S. Lewis, taught at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, forming friendships with several colleagues. Several of them convinced the atheistic Lewis that God was real, that Christianity was true.

Lewis wrestled with these claims on a walking path inside the grounds of Magdalen College, named for another, earlier famous former professor called “Addison.” As I stepped into the dark dirt pathway of Addison’s Walk, I wondered about the giants who had walked it before me.

Specifically, Lewis and his friend who most convinced him of the truth of the faith: J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien authored the masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. Yet he also wondered the same question: Does my life matter? Does anything I do matter? What if I never accomplish the grand goals I have with this one little life that God has gifted to me.

Tolkien wrote a story about how our lives matter, about a man named Niggle who tried to paint a masterpiece but only managed a single leaf. I wonder if Tolkien named the character for the feeling of “niggling”— which describes a persistent source of discomfort or anxiety. Niggle wondered if his work mattered. Did that little painting of a leaf matter? Tolkien wondered, too. Did the land of Middle Earth matter? Would he ever finish the story?

Maybe you feel insignificant, like a single, disposable leaf on a tree. Or more festively: like a single needle on a Christmas tree. Your existence matters no more or less than a grain of green that falls to the floor.

I get the feeling. We all get it, if we have ever wondered beyond the daily grinding of to-dos and the numbing of screens.

If life is only atoms colliding in mirco-space, we have no reason to hope. If Christmas is a fairy tale made up by religious opportunists, we don’t matter and neither does anything we do.

But if story of the gospel and the Bible is true, then we do matter and our doings matter.

In all of that, you do matter, and what you do matters.

The wrong way to think: it’s about me

Any time we focus on the value of humanity and our own lives we risk forgetting the central reality of the Bible and the world: God is.

“In the beginning, God created…” (Gen 1:1). This assumes that before creation became, God is, and was, and will be.

Before anything else became, God is I Am. He precedes and transcends all other reality. “He made known his ways to Moses, and his act to the people of Israel” (Ps 103:6), and he first revealed his name to Moses: I Am Who I Am.

Then Moses asked God, “If I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what should I tell them?” God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:13–14).

In one sense, in the scope of God’s “God-ness,” nothing else matters. Like Kenny Wayne Shepherd sings, it’s all “blue on black, tears on a river, push on a shove, it don't mean much, joker on jack, match on a fire, cold on ice, a dead man’s touch…whisper on a scream doesn’t change a thing…”

Turn on your iPhone camera on a sunny day. It’s irrelevant.

In light of God, we’re irrelevant and insignificant.

Except that God makes us significant. God makes us matter, because he made matter. God instilled creation with value because he is the one who made it.

In Oxford I visited all sorts of places connected to famous and brilliant people. Maybe most importantly (for me), I found places connected to The Inklings. The writers group of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others, where classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings were workshopped. The artifacts of these authors make them significant.

Much more, the world displays the glory of God. “The world is charged by the grandeur of God.”

These lines of poetry were written by 19th-century Oxford poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In Oxford, I was walking back to my room at Somerville College, past a beautiful Catholic Church. I noticed a plaque, “Where Gerard Manley Hopkins was priest and J.R.R. Tolkien worshipped.” Of course, I had to go in. This place mattered to me because of the connection to these men.

God made matter, so therefore matter matters. God created things, so they matter. They’re valuable because of their Creator.

Even more, the crowning glory of creation is the human race. Of all the creation, only humanity is created in the very image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image;
he created him in the image of God;
he created them male and female.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth”
(Genesis 1:26–28).

We matter because God matters, and God made us in his own image. We are valuable because of God whose image stamped on us. We are the self-portrait of God the Master Artist in the world.

Vincent van Gogh was one of the most important artists in history. He produced dozens of self-portraits, more than any other painter in history after Rembrandt. About ten years ago one of van Gogh’s portraits almost went up for sale by the city of Detroit. It was valued at over $100 million dollars, and would be worth “considerably more” today.

How much more valuable are those hand-crafted by the Master as bearers of his own image?

So we have to navigate this tension, because we are valuable, but only because God is valuable and has made us valuable.

The right way to think: I’m a needle in the Tree

In creation we are a part of a tapestry of God’s creative glory. But of course, creation was corrupted and condemned by rebellion. The image of God was marred but not destroyed. Imagine someone looking at a portrait of van Gogh and throwing their cup of coffee against it. That would be a travesty, and it would harm the painting. Sin does this. It harms the image-bearers of God (and we have spilled the coffee ourselves and gotten burned).

The gospel is God’s restoration project for his human self-portraits. He painstakingly scrubs the stains out of our souls with the only solvent that can remove the stain but not destroy the original: the blood of Jesus.

God the Father sent God the Son to become a human being in the womb of Mary. Christ was God the Son, in human flesh and bone and heart. He grew as a baby, then a boy, then a man. He never sinned, so he could stand in our place for our sins, because the paycheck for the work of sin is death. When we turn from our sin (repent) and trust in him (believe), we are forgiven and given eternal life.

The entire reality of this salvation and new life, of God’s restoration project, is called “union with Christ.” We are connected to Jesus. Identified with Jesus. Tapped into Jesus. Plugged into Jesus. Hard-wired into Jesus.

We become a needle in the true tree of Christ.

Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me (John 15:4–5).

We matter because God made us. And we matter because God saved us, united us into Christ. We matter, because the Tree matters.

Think of it this way. In the garden, God planted trees. He planted a tree of life and a tree of knowledge. He told the first man, Adam, that he could eat from the tree of life but he couldn’t eat from the tree of knowledge. Adam, tempted by the snake, disobeyed God. He died spiritually under the tree.

The cross is sometimes called “the tree.” On the tree, Christ dies like Adam, but as a Second Adam.

If you’ve ever had a real Christmas tree, you know it starts to dry out, eventually all the needles shed. It becomes a fire hazard. You leave it by the road or take it to the park where they mulch it into pulp.

Adam killed the tree, and then Christ died on the tree, but he died as a seed, and was planted into the earth in burial. On the third day, he rose from the dead, and the tree erupted fully alive and full again.

Ever leaf (if you’re thinking of an oak tree) or every needle (if you’re thinking of a Christmas pine tree) has a name on it.

Your name.

No needle matters more than another. Even if someone seems to our view to be like an entire branch, they matter only because of the tree.

But they do matter, and their doings matter, because of the tree.

Niggle found that it did matter. After died he found a real tree in heaven—and it had his leaf on it.

In Christ, you matter.

Your doings matter.

So do something. Even if it’s small, it matters.

Both Advent and Christmas.

Both brokenness and beauty.

Creation and rebellion and redemption all together.

We sing O Come Emmanuel and Joy to the World.

The Place in Between

Throughout the history of God's purposes, his people have been a people between, a people who occupy the space between after and before.

After God calls, moves, stirs and starts.

But Before he completes and perfects his plans.

All throughout Scripture we can look into the stories of the people of faith in Yahweh, the Triune God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and they have been a people between, occupying the place between after and before.

One man in this exact scenario was Joseph, the husband of Mary, the man who raised Jesus.

The Holy Spirit tells some of Joseph’s story in Matthew 1. There's so much there, about the purposes of God in enfleshing his Son inside of Mary's womb. The conceived child is miraculously created by the Holy Spirit (v. 20). He is called Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins (v.21). Our greatest need met in the conception of the Christ child. This happens and fulfills a 700 year old prophecy from Isaiah, and even greater than could be imagined, the child is God's very presence (v.22-23).

But we might skip over something significant in v.18, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place like this: after his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit."

Joseph found himself in the same place we occupy so often: the space between after and before. After the engagement, the legal betrothal, but before they came together, meaning conjugated the marriage through sexual union.

Think about this moment from Joseph's perspective. He finally got the girl, Mary. They were engaged, legally bound for marriage—getting ready for the wedding, and the wedding night. Joseph was getting ready. They were renting the tuxes and buying bridesmaid dresses, getting the wedding hall booked, interviewing florists and photographers—and then…Mary was pregnant.

Now we know the VH1 Behind the Music, that Mary didn't do anything shady. It was a Spirit-miracle inside of her. But of course Joseph wouldn't have seen it that way at first. He would assume what we all would assume.

“I know I'm not the daddy, which means that someone else must be the daddy. We have got a problem.”

Joseph was a good dude. He didn't want to shame Mary and ruin her life any more than it already would have been. So it says in v.19 that being a righteous, a just and good man, he decided he would divorce her quietly. His engagement to Mary was a legally betrothal but not yet a marriage. Sexual infidelity would make divorce permissible, and Joseph decided to end things.

Imagine what he was thinking and feeling. Heartbroken, betrayed, ashamed, disgraced. “How could she? Why would she? The ‘Holy Spirit’— yeah right!”

After he made what he thought was a gracious and fair decision, he then got a visit from an angel. The angel calls him “Joseph, son of David” (v.20). We know from the genealogy in the first half of the chapter that Joseph's dad was Jacob (v.16), but the lineage traces back to David, the king (v.6). God had specifically chosen a human man to raise Jesus in the line of David, because God had covenanted with David to sit his heir on an eternal throne.

Joseph was afraid, cautious to take Mary as his wife, in light of her unfaithfulness. But the angel says “Don’t be,” explaining that she hasn't been unfaithful—in fact, the opposite and Joseph should marry her.

This child would be the Messiah, the Anointed (with the Spirit) One, the Savior, the incarnate God in humanity, and Joseph was privileged to raise him in his house. He had been entrusted with God's own Son to raise as his son on earth.

But go back to that space in between in 1:18. After they had been engaged, but before they had come together. Why did God choose that exact moment to place the miraculously conceived human-divine Christ-child inside of Mary's womb? Why let them walk through the place of engagement, legal betrothal, yet let Mary remain a virgin?

God certainly had his reasons. So that Jesus' legal father on earth would be a Davidic father, a father who was a Son of David, so that the promise of a king from the lineage of David could be fulfilled. So that Joseph would already be bound to Mary, and feel the importance of his connection and commitment to her.

It wasn't just haphazard, but think about it from Joseph's perspective. In those moments, God let him walk through the anger, betrayal, fear, pain, and whatever else he was experiencing, and then he told him through the angel what was really up.

And we live with Joseph in that space in between after and before. We live in between, on two levels, macro and micro, the big story and our story.

The Big Story

On the macro level, we live in a broken world, fractured by abortion and racialization and sex slavery and corruption and disease and suffering. We live in a world awaiting a Savior to come in fullness and fix what seems sometimes irreparably broken. Just like the first coming of Christ, they were waiting. And all over the Scripture it says God sent Jesus at the perfect time. When Jesus came preaching the Gospel in Mark 1:15 he said, "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near, repent and believe in the gospel." Scripture says God has a "purpose set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, thing in heaven and things on earth" (Eph 1:9-10). We wait for the 2nd coming, like they waited for the first coming of Messiah. We're waiting for the "appearing of Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time" (1 Tim 6:14-15).

We’re in an indefinite season of Advental longing.

We're waiting with the whole creation, praying for Jesus to come and fix this. Humanity was the most amazing achievement of all creation, and therefore the most tragically lost when fallen and broken.

God is redeeming a people for himself through the first coming of the Messiah, and consummated in the 2nd coming of Messiah. So we are a people between, After the first coming and before the second. We live, we work, we pray, we love—and we wait, with longing and hope.

Our Story

On the micro level, we also live in the space between after and before. In so many different ways, we experience the tension. If the macro level is waiting for God's eternal purpose to save a people and renew the creation, the micro level is the small, incremental, slow, painful pruning of God's sanctifying grace in each of us.

Here we live in relationship to three salvational realities: justification, sanctification, glorification.

Those who have not experienced justification are those outside of Christ. The Bible says all humanity is guilty before God because of sin, and the only hope is justification—for God to consider us not guilty because of Jesus Christ in his perfect life, crucified death for sinners like us, and resurrection from the dead. Christians live in the forever after of justification. It’s a done deal, a holy joy.

On the other side of waiting is glorification, when we die, and in the final hour God will raise all in Christ to everlasting life in a redeemed creation. Sickness, sorrow, and sin will dissolve and joy will be our forever song.

Yet in between we walk the slow, painful, tense path of God's sanctifying grace in us.

Sanctification. It’s a place of muddiness and tension. But it’s a tension we embrace. The strings of a guitar or violin require the proper tension to ring with song. We shouldn’t try to relieve the tension. We should tune to the pitch of God’s grace, and let our lives be a new song of praise.

We live in the place between, after and before. Sometimes, the place between is minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, and sometimes we don't see the purposes of God's loving sanctifying work before we shut our eyes for the last time.

Yet we celebrate and sing.

Yet we mourn and wait.

In between after and before, we hear God’s Word to us: “Don’t be afraid.”

I saw a parallel in the ad with the story my car-guy dad told me about the launch of Infiniti in 1990. In 1990 both Toyota and Nissan were launching luxury brands, Lexus and Infiniti. Infiniti never got traction because of weird, cryptic ads. Lexus won before the cars ever shipped. “Congrats on being the new Infiniti, Jaguar,” I said.

Then another car ad filtered through the networks, this one from Volvo. It’s a three minute mini-movie that narrates the story of a man and woman who find out they’re going to have a baby. The man calls his mom, tells her the news, and then talks through his expectations for his daughter. All the while the video highlights moments from the baby’s life from infancy through young adulthood. The story ends with a lady in a new Volvo stopping in time not to hit the expectant mother in the crosswalk.

Instead of an edgy attempt at embodying the cultural narrative of inclusivity like Jaguar, the Volvo ad celebrates the permanent things (as Russell Kirk called them): family, love, care.

Both ads became symbols of vastly different moral visions, and proxies for different sides of the “culture war.” Obviously, I resonate with the Volvo side of things, and the permanent things. As a dad, the story misted up my eyes a bit, while the Jaguar ad made me roll my eyes instead.

Yet both ads were part of another cultural reality that differs from the “sides” of conservative and progressive, moral and immoral.

Both ads are trying to sell cars. Both ads are a form of marketing. As my trusty digital dictionary tells me, marketing is “the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services.”

Both ads identify a core customer, and attempt to create a story that reaches that customer—so that the customer will spend money and buy a car.

If you dig under the proxies for the culture war or moral vision, you find someone or some group trying to make money.

It’s marketing all the way down.

“It’s [blank] all the way down” is an expression that means “it doesn’t get any deeper, this is the deepest reality.” Here’s one story of how the expression developed. A city opened a brand new planetarium, where folks could sit and see the many wonders of the sky all at the same time. At the grand opening of this new exhibit, before the first viewing, a professor of astronomy spoke to a packed house about the cosmology of space, how the sun centers the solar system and the earth and planets circle the sun, keeping them from falling into space.

Afterward, an old lady came up to the professor and said, “You’re wrong about the earth and space.” The professor, wanting to be polite, indulged the conversation, asking, “How is it that I’m wrong?” “Well,” she said, “I think it’s much more likely that the earth is sitting on the back of a giant turtle.” Startled a bit, the professor responded, “If that’s the case, then what does the turtle sit on?” “He sits on the back of another, even larger turtle,” she said confidently. “But what would that second turtle sit on?” asked the professor. “Young man,” the lady said, “You’re very clever, but let me stop you there, because it’s turtles all the way down.”

The lady believed turtles are the ultimate reality of the world. The story has been told to highlight the silliness of some beliefs. But the expression “It’s [blank] all the way down” has taken on a meaning to say, “There’s no other secret behind the curtain. This thing is the reality of this particular vision of life.”

So when I say, “It’s marketing all the way down,” I mean that neither Jaguar nor Volvo are “the good guys.” They’re just trying to appeal to different markets, to sell them cars. They’re leveraging stories to capture an audience that they think might want to give them money in exchange for something.

I don’t think marketing is bad. Marketing matters in a market economy, where we have to compete with others for attention and patronage. Marketing is an action of capturing a "market” — a sphere where goods and services are exchanged for some form of payment. I’m a convinced capitalist. Capitalism has flaws, but it has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any other economic system.

And yet. Our capitalist market economy can twist our mammon-loving hearts in on themselves. We’re naturally inclined toward mammon—the Greek word often translated “money” in the Bible. Remember what Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money (mammon)” (Matthew 6:24).

As with the political moment, so too with the economic moment, we can take sides instead of realizing that the entire game is rigged to begin with. As I learned long ago in The Saving Life of Christ by Major Ian Thomas, the Lord doesn’t show up to take sides. He shows up to take over.

When Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua approached him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

“Neither,” he replied. “I have now come as commander of the Lord’s army.”

Then Joshua bowed with his face to the ground in homage and asked him, “What does my lord want to say to his servant?”

The commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did that.

(Joshua 5:13-15).

Many appearances of the angel of the Lord are preincarnate appearances of Jesus or “christophanies.” Here the angel is clearly the Lord himself, because he brings holiness to the earth as the presence of God did with Moses (Exodus 3).

The angel’s reply to Joshua should stun us a bit. Joshua was the commander of the people of God, Israel. Yet when Joshua asks him who he’s “for,” the angel says, “Neither team.”

While the Lord does fight for his people (Ex. 14:14), ultimately the Lord’s agenda transcends the narrow categories of our own. The narrow categories of our politics and our markets.

The Lord doesn’t drive a Jaguar or a Volvo but he “rides on the clouds in his majesty” (Deut. 33:26).

In the classic movie The Princess Bride, the character of Wesley the pirate tells Buttercup the would-be princess, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Of course, that cynical view isn’t biblical, but the distinctions can help us.

To live is Christ, to die is gain. Anyone who says differently is probably selling something.

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An ancient story tells the tale of valiant men fighting for truth, and a squishy prophet calling for surrender. When the most powerful nation in the world besieged their home, the holy city formed an alliance with a former enemy. The move reprieved the city, temporarily. Food still disappeared, and they knew battle would encircle them again, soon.

The prophet squeaked out his warning, “Surrender now, and you’ll be ok. Give up the fight. It’s hopeless. The battle is lost. God told me so.”

The courageous warriors approached the people’s embattled king. “We need to get rid of this guy. He’s calling for us to roll over instead of fighting. He’s weakening the morale of our warriors. We’s going to hurt the people not help them. We need to fight for our faith, for our people, for our God!”

The king was too weak to protest. He secretly admired the prophet and tried some half-measures of conciliation. But he told these formidable warriors to take care of the problem. He couldn’t stand against them. They were his nation’s last, best hope.

These men dispatched the prophet to a dark hole of political prison, and they silenced him.

The time for war had come, and they wouldn’t hear any weak calls for surrender.

An Ancient Tale Retold

This tale seems to map onto some current struggles in our current Christian, evangelical moment. Some are calling for a spiritual “pacifism,” conscientious objection to the culture wars, or even surrender. Many push back, rallying around their refusal to sheath the sword of the Spirit for the chains of insane leftism.

A loud group of Christians, especially online but increasingly present elsewhere, are calling Christians to the fight. “We know what time it is,” they protest against the squishy elites of evangelical life and their sycophants. “It’s time for battle. The old rules no longer apply.”

The ancient story I just narrated would agree with them.

Except, I told the story backwards. In the true ancient tale, the warriors were wrong and the prophet was right. Here’s how it actually went.

In ancient Israel, the prophet Jeremiah foretold the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, and he counseled the people, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine, and plague, but whoever surrenders to the Chaldeans will live. He will retain his life like the spoils of war and will live.’ This is what the Lord says: ‘This city will most certainly be handed over to the king of Babylon’s army, and he will capture it’” (Jeremiah 38:2-3).

A quartet of self-perceived valiant warriors for Israel hated Jeremiah for this message. They approached the weak and lame-duck king, Zedekiah. “This man ought to die, because he is weakening the morale of the warriors who remain in this city and of all the people by speaking to them in this way. This man is not pursuing the welfare of this people, but their harm” (38:4).

Zedekiah, despite his private counsel from Jeremiah and lukewarm attempts to help Jeremiah, rolled over. “The king can’t do anything against you,” he tells them (38:5).

The men dropped Jeremiah into a cistern, a deep watering hole. “There was no water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud” (38:6).

The warriors had silenced the squishy voice of surrender, so they could then rally the people of God to fight for the name of God.

Except the warriors rejected God’s word and God’s will. They misunderstood the times, because Israel had lost the battle generations before. God had an unfolding plan that didn’t require their belligerence. In fact, God’s plan rejected their longing for the fight.

A Modern Tale Reimagined

I’m not saying evangelical Christians should just roll over in the face of cultural insanity or pushback. We don’t live in a theocracy with a direct divine Word about our moment. Historical times don’t align like that.

Someone has said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Instead of a rhyme, I wonder if our moment is more like one of historical assonance with this story from Jeremiah. Assonance is “the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in nonrhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible (e.g., penitence, reticence).” In other words, while assonant words don’t rhyme, they have a similar sound.

I wonder if Jeremiah’s story with the “valiant” warriors of Israel and Zedekiah might sound a bit like our small (yes, largely online) evangelical moment. Far-right voices (call them Christian nationalists if you want to) are calling us to “know what time it is” and to fight for the culture and the church.

I don’t have a problem with imagery of fighting, because the Bible uses such imagery. Yet, the end of the gospels also finds Jesus telling Peter to put away his sword. Jesus heals Peter’s attempt at a death blow of the high priest’s servant, Malchus (Peter wasn’t aiming for the ear, after all). Maybe Jesus wants to heal our attempts to “kill” one another, too, more than he wants us to “fight for him.”

The warriors of Israel slandered and imprisoned Jeremiah. Many self-perceived courageous warriors for the truth likewise slander and cancel faithful brethren who have a different method and message.

I’m not sure I would apply the message of “surrender” from Jeremiah to our moment and our response. At least, not in surrendering to the empire at the gates of the household of God. Yet without passivity we should surrender to God’s will as he unfolds it our lives and culture. We should be willing to consider that a present defeat may be required for a long-term victory. I have no word from the Lord on this, but it’s worth considering.

Whether personally or corporately, we might sink in the mud for moment, as Jeremiah did. But Jeremiah wasn’t there forever, because a truly valiant man, a Cushite (a modern-day Ethiopian) called “Ebed-melech” (“servant of the king”) pulled him from the mud with forty friends.

No matter God’s will for our present and near future, won’t sink in the mud forever. We do stake our faith and forever on a message of crucifixion before resurrection, after all.

Every generation struggles for truth, and competes against untruth. Spiritual lies spoken by spiritual liars threaten the people of God, without relent. So we must struggle for the truth. We must learn to identify spiritual lies and spiritual liars. The Bible trains us for this responsibility all over the place. It matters. For example, Jude the younger half-brother of Jesus got one chapter in the Bible, one small letter; and he focused on this theme. He wanted to write about something else, but the moment required a specific form of pastoral warning and writing: “Dear friends, although I was eager to write you about the salvation we share, I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3).

For some, this verse compels an entire life-calling and ministry-vision. Maybe that’s their place. One body and many members, after all. But I think some belligerent Christians simply love to argue. As folks like Albert Mohler and Gavin Ortlund have show us, we must practice theological triage, discerning which issues are which:

We die before we deny the first-level issues. If someone were to put a gun to our head and say, “Deny that Jesus is God”—we would take the bullet.

We divide before we deny the second-level issues. For example, if someone were to demand that I baptize their infant child at our church, I would say, “I love you, but we don’t practice infant baptism.” If they believed strongly in this second-tier issue, I would point them to any number of faithful and healthy churches that agree with them on that point.

We debate before we disagree on the third-level issues. We might view the Millennium of Revelation 20 differently, or any number of things. We can discuss and even debate in good-faith, but we don’t let such things test our fellowship.

Triage, though, doesn’t fully help us figure out who the spiritual liars are, or how to spot them. Jude knew that, and explained why he had to write his contentious vision for the church he addressed: “For some people, who were designated for this judgment long ago, have come in by stealth; they are ungodly, turning the grace of our God into sensuality and denying Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord” (Jude 4). In this explanation, we find at least six descriptions of spiritual liars, and their created content: spiritual lies.

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Here Faramir (and Tolkien) echoes the vision of St. Augustine in The City of God. Augustine argued that peace was the ultimate aim of a just war. And here, again, Augustine only echoes Solomon the wise. “There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven….a time for war and a time for peace” (Eccl. 3:1, 8).

In other words, at times the battle descends on us, whether we want it to or not. In following Jesus and living within the church, lies can threaten the people of God. Deceivers and deception attack the truth. When that happens, we must fight. We don’t look for a fight. We love peace and joy. But we don’t shrink when the truth is attacked. We love the truth, so we defend the truth.

Jude, the half-brother of Jesus, provides the classic text on struggling for the faith in his one-chapter letter. Though Jude had rejected his brother Jesus as the Messiah during Jesus’s earthly ministry, Jude encountered the resurrected Jesus and bent his knee, confessing Jesus as his Messiah, Savior, and Lord. Jude writes to a church that was struggling and hurting. Some folks had joined arms with the church but then whispered lies in small groups and Sunday schools and prayer meetings. Jude refuses to play nice or to “go-along to get-along.” He calls these ancient Christians to contend for the truth, and current Christians find principles for holy contention here as well.

1. We must fight for the truth when necessary

In his short letter, Jude writes to “dear friends” (Jude 3), but this translation misses the depth of this greeting. They are literally “beloved.” They are beloved by Jude, but more importantly they beloved by God (as scholar Tom Schreiner points out in his commentary). True truth comes from love. We “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). If you love the fight but not the people connected to the fight, you’re in the wrong spot.

Jude explains that he had intended to write a letter that celebrated the gospel, but problems required his attention: “Although I was eager to write you about the salvation we share, I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith” (Jude 3).

Necessity obliges him, and he now has a more pressing obligation. Like the man who wanted to show his friend his new car, but the car wouldn’t start. An urgent need has pressed into the situation. Paul says something similar: “I am compelled to preach—and woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16).

Jude tells the Christians that they must take up the calling to fight or contend. Fight. Struggle. Strive. Wrestle. Oppose. Literally, “agonize.”

Now, we must reconcile Jude’s call to contend with the command to live at peace in many other places in Scripture. The Bible repeats itself on this point. We’re called to peace. “If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18).

So, when do we move from peace to protest? When do we move from celebrating to contending?

When we can no longer live at peace, because someone has brought the conflict to us. When conflict is already present or inevitable. We don’t start fights, but when someone picks a fight with the truth, we stand ready.

Jesus said, “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10). When the thieves break in and threaten the sheep, we fight back for the truth. We fight against invasion.

As Churchill said in the early days of the second World War:

“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

(Churchill, Address to House of Commons, June 4, 1940)

We don’t glory in fighting for the faith. We’re not crusaders. But we are defenders. Crusaders create chaos, but Defenders protect the truth.

2. We must defend and teach the essential core of Christian truth

We’re called not to defend the “fatherland” or the “soil” of our earthly life, but the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Here’s the where the newfangled Christian Nationalist vision, for example, goes haywire. We’re talking about theological and gospel battle, not political or military belligerence. “The faith once for all delivered” refers to the truth of the Bible in the Old and New Testaments. Paul the apostle talks about this faith in 1 Corinthians 15. The essential doctrines of the truth concern God, Christ, and salvation.

God is one (Dt. 6:4) and God is a Trinity (Mt. 28:19).

Christ is God the Son (John 1:1) and Christ is fully human (1 Tim. 2:5).

Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead (1 Cor. 15:3-8).

We defend the core essentials of Christian truth. In the earliest years of the church, churches had precious few scrolls of the Scripture, but members didn’t. People couldn’t just open their Bible or tap in their app to one of a dozen various translated versions. So to help Christians remember and believe the truth, the churches summarized the Bible’s teaching into a statement or standard or “rule” of faith.

I’m simplifying, but “the rule of faith” was eventually preserved in ancient statements of faith that churches would recite together when they gathered. Those who worshipped in Latin would rehearse their faith by saying together, “I believe.” The Latin word for “I believe” is credo. So these summaries took the name “creeds.”

The most ancient creed is “The Apostles’ Creed,” which summarizes the apostles’ teaching. It was confessed not long after the apostles died and the biblical text was completed. The most universally confessed creed celebrates its 1,700-year anniversary next year. “The Nicene Creed” was first drafted in 325 AD in modern-day Turkey, and it outlines the core beliefs of the truth about God, Christ, the Spirit, and salvation.

And it was a hard-won truth.

In the 300s, many Christians were being lead astray by a teaching pastor in Alexandria, Egypt. His name was Arius, and he was charismatic and popular, making up memorable phrases like, “There was when he was not.” Meaning, “There was a time when Jesus didn’t exist.” In other words, Arius taught that Jesus was not fully God.

Such a lie was deadly and damning, so another local pastor in Alexandria, named Athanasius, pushed back against Arius’s false teaching. Athanasius called the church to believe the biblical truth that Jesus is fully God, God the Son. Athanasius was exiled from his home five times, and at times nearly the entire known world opposed him. In fact, a famous phrase echoes through the history of the church, Athanasius contra mundum. “Athanasius against the world.”

Like Athanasius, we contend for the core essentials of Christian truth, sacrificing life and comfort for eternal reality. But we must ensure we’re fighting the correct battle for the essential truth of our faith.

3. We must keep first things first, second things second, and third things third

So how do we know when we should “go-along to get-along” versus when we should fight with teeth and fingernails for the truth? Numerous theologians have pointed out that some of our beliefs are more central and essential than others. We must discern which beliefs are core and which are less critical. Some have called this discernment process “theological triage.” “Triage” comes from battlefield hospitals, where medics must decide which wounds are most severe and threaten life, versus which need attention but less urgently.

Triage means discerning which theological truths are most central and which have room for disagreement. Those primary doctrines “of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3) are the doctrines of God, Christ, humanity, and salvation. The secondary issues are those things that define specific tribes or denominations. Infant baptism might be one of these. The third-tier issues are those that we can debate within our own churches, like the specifics of eschatology or “the end times.”

We must carefully discern which beliefs occupy which level of centrality to our faith. First-level issues are life-and-death, with eternity is at stake. Second-level issues are church-life issues, with membership at stake. Third-level issues are important but have room for disagreement even within closely connected communities and local churches.

To put it bluntly:

We die before we deny the first-level issues. If someone were to put a gun to our head and say, “Deny that Jesus is God”—we would take the bullet.

We divide before we deny the second-level issues. For example, if someone were to demand that I baptize their infant child at our church, I would say, “I love you, but we don’t practice infant baptism.” If they believed strongly in this second-tier issue, I would point them to any number of faithful and healthy churches that agree with them on that point.

We debate before we disagree on the third-level issues. We might view the Millennium of Revelation 20 differently, or any number of things. We can discuss and even debate in good-faith, but we don’t let such things test our fellowship.

The social media streets often confuse these things, with folks elevating second-tier and third-tier doctrines to first-tier priority. We must carefully discern the cluster of non-negotiable truths at the core of our faith. We must hold these tightly. We must discern where we have room for disagreement and where we don’t. Confusing these things damages lives and churches—sometimes eternally.

Sometimes contending is necessary, and we defend the truth we love.

But we don’t love the fight for its own sake. We don’t pick fights.

We don’t make third-level things tests of fellowship or second-level things tests of orthodoxy.

We discern when it’s time for war, and when it’s time for peace.

British apologist Amy Orr-Ewing has explained that different generations thus stumble over different aspects of God and the gospel. Older generations are more likely to ask, “Is it true?” Millennials, “Is it good?” And younger generations, “Is it beautiful?” Obviously, every generation wrestles with all three, but the times when we grow up shape our views.

Thankfully, God is all three. God is true, good, and beautiful—in fact, truth, goodness, and beauty themselves. Because God is true, good, and beautiful, his Word is true, good, and beautiful, too. We should learn the Bible, because it’s true. We should trust the Bible, because it’s good. We should love the Bible, because it’s beautiful. Let me try to convince and remind you of these three things.

1. We Should Learn the Bible, Because the Bible Is True

Jesus said, God’s “Word is truth” (John 17:17). The Bible is true theologically and true historically. Theologically (or we could say, “existentially”), the Bible explains the reality of the world as we actually experience the world. The Bible narrates a story that explains both the beauty and the horror of human existence. Life in this world stuns us with the glory of beauty and shocks us with gory brokenness. Beautiful and broken. Glory and gory. The Bible explains how this tension makes sense. A Good Lord created a good world, but the good world turned bad when it turned away from its Good Lord. The Bible tells us the story of the goodness of creation in the first two chapters (Gen. 1-2), and the Bible tells us the story of the badness of rebellion in the third chapter and beyond (Gen. 3). The Bible’s story makes sense of the actual world and our actual lives.

But the Bible is not merely true theologically. It isn’t a “poetic” or “symbolic” truth. The Bible roots its reliability in history. Things that actually happened, recounted by people who actually saw those things happen. Then those people in some cases were willing to die rather than deny that those things did happen. We have exponentially more manuscript evidence for the New Testament than for all other ancient literature combined. Sean McDowell has illustrated it this way. If someone stacked all the copies of the manuscripts for a typical work of ancient literature, the stack would be about four feet high. If someone stacked all the copies of the New Testament, the stack would be over a mile high.

Numerous times in history, scholars have questioned the accuracy of the Bible’s story of a historical event—only to have archaeological discoveries confirm the Bible’s account. For example, some scholars questioned the accuracy of the stories of David and his kingship, a pivotal question for the reliability of the biblical plot line. No external evidence for David and his kingship had been discovered. Some argued that later Israelites had created the stories of King David as fictional accounts. Then, in 1993 at a site called “Tel Dan,” archaeologists discovered an inscription in northern Israel from the 9th century BC that described “the king of Israel” and the “house of David.” Critical scholars had to adjust their skeptical views, because the Tel Dan Inscription corroborated the biblical account. We could add many more examples.

The books in the Bible are called the “canon” or the authoritative list or rule of the books of the Bible. Some skeptics push back against the Bible, arguing that the church didn’t decide which books to put in the Bible (the canon) until hundreds of years after Christ. But this objection misunderstands canonicity in two ways. First, the church did not “decide” on the books of the canon. They discerned which books the church had already acknowledged as biblical. Churches all over the ancient world recognized and studied most of the books of the Bible from the earliest years. We have an example of that in 2 Peter 3:15-16, because Peter explains that Paul’s letters are Scripture or part of the canon: “Also, regard the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our dear brother Paul has written to you according to the wisdom given to him. He speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some things hard to understand in them. The untaught and unstable will twist them to their own destruction, as they also do with the rest of the Scriptures.” In 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul quotes the gospel of Luke as “Scripture” and puts it on the same level as Deuteronomy. We could go on and on.

Both existentially-theologically and historically—the Bible is true. The Bible tells us the truth. If the Bible tells us the truth, we should study it and learn it. We should read it. We should seek to understand it.

2. We Should Trust the Bible, Because the Bible Is Good

The goodness of the Bible is based on the goodness of God himself. “You are good, and you do what is good; teach me your statutes” (Ps 119:68). God is good in himself. He does good in his actions. Therefore, we should learn and trust his Word.

The center of the biblical storyline is the gospel of Jesus Christ—the good news. The Bible is good news, because the Bible narrates how God redeems the world and the people in the world from the broken and gory reality of life. He returns rebels to himself, and he will make all things new. The Bible, in other words, is good news for sinners.

The Bible has also been good news for the most vulnerable people in the world. From ancient cultures to present peoples, certain people have always been overlooked, abused, cast out, marginalized, and harmed. The Bible tells the story of a God who cares for those on the margins. The Old Testament repeatedly affirms God’s care for “the quartet of the vulnerable:” the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant.

No culture ever consistently protected vulnerable people before the story of the Bible and the gospel leavened into the cultures of the nations. Historians like Tom Holland and Christian apologists like Glen Scrivener have demonstrated that the biblical story has deeply shaped how we value and protect minorities, women, and children.

When the Bible has deeply influenced a culture, that culture treats kids with dignity and care, empowers women for their purpose, and undermines ethnic and racial animus. Jesus was the one who said, “Let the children come to me” (Matt. 19:14). So, then, Christians were the ones who started orphanages, rather than viewing fatherless kids as parasitic street urchins. Jesus was the one who refused to let the mob execute an adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:1). So, then, Christians were the ones who shaped society so that rape and polygamy was illegal and unthinkable. Jesus was the one who met a Samaritan woman, and spoke to her, scandalizing his disciples. So, then, Christians were the ones who overturned the slave trade in Britain.

The Bible is good. Because it tells a Good Story of a Good Lord, and that Good Story has born good fruit. Yes, some abused and misused the Bible, but that in some ways highlights the proper, good fruit of the Bible. The fruit didn’t rot on the tree, but it rotted when it fell from the tree into the dirt of the world.

So we should trust the Bible. We should trust God. We should trust Jesus and his Word. We should turn from our own ways and turn to him. We should repent and believe. We should trust the Bible, especially when it disagrees with us. Tim Keller once said, “If you don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.”

So we should trust, and then obey the Bible. As the old song says, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus…”

3. We Should Love the Bible, Because the Bible is Beautiful

The Bible is a work of divine, literary art. “The command of the Lord is radiant” (Ps. 19:8). When I was first learning theology, I found myself wishing that God had just given us an index and glossary of truth. A dictionary of divine theology. I have learned better since then. The Bible is a story, and a story is more powerfully beautiful than a reference volume. Nobody reads a dictionary for joy and beauty. Nobody brews a cup of tea, cozies up by the fire in a reading chair, and settles in for an afternoon with the dictionary. The dictionary is a literary tool, not a literary work. The dictionary is a paintbrush and a book is a painting. The Bible is more like a masterpiece of a novel than like the dictionary, more like a painting than a paintbrush. A novel in which every word is true and good, a stunning portrait of real beauty.

The Bible’s literature spans centuries, languages, and genres. It has Hebrew narrative and poetry. It has Greek biography and epistle. Its pages fill up with allusions and alliterations, wordplays and personifications. With metaphors and chiasms. With irony and hyperbole, types and prophecies and parables and proverbs.

The Bible is beautiful as literature and beautiful as theology. The Bible is beautiful because it describes the beauty of God.

“I have asked one thing from the Lord;
it is what I desire:
to dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
gazing on the beauty of the Lord
and seeking him in his temple.”
(Psalm 27:4)

We should love and treasure the Bible, because the Bible is irreplaceably beautiful. Beauty transforms people. Look at the beautiful effects of the Bible on the lives of people. Turning selfish people in serving people. Turning mean people into kind people. Turning abusive people into loving people.

The Bible is like an irreplaceable work of art of personal significance. Once as a kid in Southern California, wildfires were burning dangerously close our house. As my parents discussed what to do if we had to evacuate, they said, “Make sure the kids are safe, and grab the photo albums if we can.” They treasured their people, and the things that connected them to their people.

If your house caught fire, you would save your kids before your laptop. If your house caught fire, and all your people were safe, you would grab whatever you most treasure. If you could take one thing, you would take something that you could not replace. You would take a hand-written letter from your dad, a picture of your grandma, a painting by your daughter or a drawing by your son. A stack of cash could be covered by insurance. A new laptop could arrive the next day from Amazon. But some things have an irreplaceable beauty in your life.

Because the Bible is true, we should learn the Bible. We should go to Bible studies, enroll in seminaries, read and translate, listen to and teach expository sermons. Because the Bible is good, we should trust the Bible. We should agree with the Bible’s take rather than our own opinions—especially when the Bible contradicts our takes. We should love and treasure the Bible, because the Bible is beautiful. We should treasure it more than our smartphones and TV shows.

The Bible is true, good, beautiful, for Boomers, Millennials, and everyone before, in between, and after.

I’ve often considered it ironic that the aisle between partisan platforms has separated advocates for unborn life and advocates for racial justice. Abortion and racism both grow from the same rotten root. That root denies the reality of the image of God in an unpreferred group of human persons.

Both racism and abortion are fought on the basic spiritual battleground of the image of God. The principalities and powers want to destroy the image of God, and the Prince of Peace arrived to restore the image of God. I believe that the abortion industrial complex has been a flowering of our nation’s history of defining certain groups of human persons as sub-human. A continual thread in the national story.

Christianized American culture too often thumbed its nose at the doctrine of the imago Dei, turning persons into property for profit. This failure seeded weeds into our social soil that still multiply and bear the rotting fruits of abortion, sexual revolution, and continued racial injustice.

Slavery objectified person and said they were “things” to be owned. Abortion objectifies unborn persons and says they are “things” (“fetuses”) to be discarded.

Though flawed (like any human system), the best of the founding principles of American political life and culture have prevailed and reversed some of the most horrid decisions of the past.

The American Constitution defined black slaves as “3/5” of a person in the 1770s, but the 13th Amendment declared them free humans in 1865. Plessy v. Ferguson encoded “separate but equal” doctrine into American life in 1896, but Brown v. Board of Education began dismantling it in 1954. Roe v. Wade allowed access to abortion in 1973, but Dobbs v. Jackson reversed the decision in 2022.

Legal change took decades.

Cultural change has taken even longer.

Many resisted the full dignity of black persons in American life, including Christians who should have known, believed, and done better. They argued for “states’ rights,” fighting against the “Reconstruction Amendments” (13, 14, 15) that ended slavery, recognized due process, equal protection, and voting rights for all American persons.

Legal change has always sailed into a strong cultural headwind. Laws are easier to change than hearts and minds.

A Federal Abortion Ban

With the monumental decision to reverse abortion rights, the cultural wind pushes back again. The reversal of Roe has put the abortion question back to the states, and a federal ban on abortion has become a political third rail that national politicians refuse to touch. The Democrats celebrate abortion, and the Republicans want to avoid it altogether.

But if abortion is evil, and if it destroys a human person made in God’s image, it doesn’t leave political wiggle-room. Ending slavery and Jim Crow required federal intervention, and ultimately abortion will require a federal ban as well. As theologian and lawyer Matthew Martens has pointed out, the 14th Amendment declares that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” All persons, black and white, born and unborn, bear the image of God and fall under the umbrella of this protection.

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Taking Local Action

Right now the political will and wind don’t promise much progress on a national abortion ban. So, in the meantime, we have a lot of local work to do. For example, “As of August 27, 2024, 11 statewide ballot measures related to abortion were certified in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota for the general election ballot in 2024. This is the most on record for a single year.”

While almost everyone knows who the major presidential candidates are, many pro-life voters don’t know about these measures. They will have a massive impact.

Here in Florida, Amendment 4 would enshrine abortion rights and the elimination of parental consent into the state constitution. The Amendment is worded ambiguously to sound reasonable, but make no mistake: it is a radical pro-abortion measure. It would make abortion a state constitutional right and eliminate parental authority.

As a pro-life Florida voter, defeating Amendment 4 is likely my biggest priority in November. Other things matter, but this matters a lot. Those with influence in Florida need to educate those within their spheres about what Amendment 4 would really do. So do those in all of the states with significant pro-life or pro-abortion measures on the ballot in November.

Likewise, we must continue to engage pro-life causes and ministries in our local communities. The fight for life is primarily cultural and a quest for the hearts and minds of the people in the culture. We must love single moms, foster kids, adopt babies, and continue to disprove the silly and untrue narrative that “evangelicals only care about kids before they’re born.”

Let’s continue to advocate for a federal ban on abortion, and in the meantime let’s get to work locally.