A Eulogy for Monoliths

I have an Atlas Obscura desk calendar. Each day, it showcases a different location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as Hierve el Agua, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the blue ghost fireflies of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the House of Mirrors, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or Decebalus’s head, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its inhabitants.

Photo by Quentin Melson

The Georgia Guidestones are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous “Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group, they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following guidelines in seven different languages:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500 million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but ”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World Order.

On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the accusations of Satanism and New World Order.

I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite; the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may have to pass through the one to get to the other.

These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness, to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20, etc.). As James Sire writes in The Universe Next Door,

The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)

There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America. Modern culture instead seems to de-spiritualize, depersonalize, and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left. Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while the decline of local news means we often know more about current events in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’ efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other all the time, with little space to be alone or to be different or to agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin observes,

Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense, divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.

It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home regardless.

But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad while still thanking God for the good.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Hear, O Israel!

Israel’s name means “he strives with God.” Jacob strove with man and God for most of the first part of his life - manipulating his brother Esau into selling his birthright, tricking his father Isaac into giving him his blessing, scheming against his father-in-law Laban, bargaining with God after God’s appearance to him in a dream at Bethel, wrestling with God at Peniel. And Israel, the nation named after Jacob, strove with God too, in continual cycles of rebellion, apostasy, and syncretism. Here, Israel is instead offered - and commanded - to cease their strivings and love God.

The name Israel may also be translated, “God strives.” God strove with Israel. As my grandfather said, “God chose Israel to bear the full brunt of his faithfulness.” No matter how many times they tried to leave him, he pursued them, through prophets, priests, law, and judgment. And, when even that was not sufficient to bring his people to him, God gave his own life.

And God strove for Israel. He chose his people; he delivered them from slavery and oppression in Egypt; he fights for them.

When Jacob wrestled with God at Peniel and was given the name Israel, he finally understood: he strove with God, not in an attempt to bargain with him or exploit his own advantages, but because he recognized that he was dependent on God to bless him. We strive with God to pursue him, to be faithful to him, to acknowledge our need for his blessing.

The Lord our God

“Lord” is how our English Bibles render the Hebrew Yahweh: God’s name as revealed by himself to his covenant people, “I am who I am.” Quoting Alastair Roberts:

And the answer that God gives here [to Moses in Exodus 3:14], “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be” could in some way be seen as not an answer. God isn’t defined by anything other than himself. When we think about naming things we’re typically naming things as a means of getting control over them. When we give something a name we feel we have some power over it, some understanding of it, and yet when God gives his name, God is the only one who can pronounce his name truly, and when he pronounced his name is not a name that we can define relative to anything else. God is self-defining and God’s name is also something that speaks of his existence and perhaps also his self-determination. God will be what he will be. It’s not for us to put God within our control; we cannot do that.

A further thing to reflect on here might be the other attempts that we see in Scripture to ask God’s name. In the book of Judges 13:17-19, the name of the angel of the Lord is asked by Manoah and his wife, and the response is, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” It is a name that is not truly given. But then Manoah offers sacrifices to “the God who works wonders,” playing upon the name. It seemed here that maybe there’s a giving of a name in a not giving of a name. In Exodus 3, maybe it’s the other way around; maybe there is a giving of a name, but that name that is given is also in some sense not a name. God has a name but the name itself describes something of God’s ineffability, that God cannot be captured by any name, that no name actually is adequate to speak of God, that God exists beyond all names, and what names we have that we used to speak of God are all found to be lacking. Ultimately, God will be who he will be…

There’s a veiling but also an unveiling… [of] God’s commitment to be with his people. Remember, the first time we see “I will be” is in reference to God’s promise, his assuring promise to be with Moses as he goes to the Egyptians. And perhaps one of the things that the name of God describes here is his unchanging and unfaltering commitment to his people, the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he’s the Alpha and the Omega, he’s the beginning and the end, he’s the one who does not change, and as a result he will be with his people and assure his people of his presence, not just in their present sufferings but in whatever sufferings they may face in the future.

So, by affirming that the LORD is our God, we affirm his transcendence and his glory, his existence beyond creation and beyond our understanding, but also his presence with us. And we may remember that, while his foundational self-revelation to Moses expressed his ineffability and supremacy, in his ultimate self-revelation in Christ, he gave the name Jesus: “the Lord saves.” I AM saves his people.

The Lord is one!

Quoting Alastair Roberts again:

There are various ways in which this statement has been interpreted and translated. Some see it as, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” That’s a statement of the exclusively of God as the Lord of his people. There are no other gods that they will have besides him…

Another way to take it is that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” That being a statement about God’s nature: that God is unique, there is no other being like the Lord, or that God is simple: that there is no division in God, there’s no separation is no distinction between action and potential in God or between genus and species.

It could also be interpreted as, “The Lord our God is one Lord.” The claim there would be that the Lord is not many, a lord of this location and a lord of that location, but the Lord of all the earth, the Lord of all things.

You shall love the Lord your God

“Love” is a heavily overloaded word in English; it may cover how we feel about anything from our spouses to our sports teams to God to pizza. The NET Bible suggests that here it “communicates not so much an emotional idea as one of covenant commitment. To love the Lord is to be absolutely loyal and obedient to him in every respect.”

I appreciate Voddie Baucham’s definition of love: “an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action on behalf of its object.” He applies this definition in discussing the New Testament’s command to love each other, but it can apply to God as well: We choose to love God by committing to be faithful to him. This doesn’t depend on emotion, but it’s accompanied by emotion; how can we not feel gratitude, awe, and affection? And we act based on this, seeking to learn more about God, enjoy his presence, deepen our relationship with him, and serve him.

With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

The heart, in Hebrew thought, was the seat of the will and intellect. We must love God with all of our minds.

The soul refers to someone’s self, life, or being. The Hebrews didn’t think of a human as the union of a physical body and immaterial soul - that was a Greek idea - so the idea is instead to love God with all of one’s being, with all of one’s self. I too often feel scattered or dis-integrated - pulled in a dozen directions by worries and distractions and competing desires. I instead want to be integrated and single-minded, making God my goal, and letting the rest of my life flow out of that.

And we must love God with all of our might - our capabilities, abilities, strength.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

We’re told to talk about these commandments. People naturally enjoy talking about what’s important to them: current events, their families, their work and hobbies, sports teams’ accomplishments, the media they’re following. It should be natural to talk about what we’re learning about God, what our church is doing, what God is doing around us, how we seek to serve and grow.

We’re told to create physical reminders of these commandments. Early Jews took this literally: they put fragments of Scripture in leather boxes, called tefillin or phylacteries, and tied them around their arms and forehead. Physical practices and symbols like those can become rote or legalistic, but if used properly, they serve a useful purpose: we’re physical creatures, and so physical objects and actions serve as a way to direct, reinforce, and remind ourselves of our focus. This may be most obvious as part of the role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but many Christians also practice it with physical Bibles, kneeling, lifting hands, intentionally chosen decorations and mementos, and so on.

And we’re told to teach these commandments. That can mean formal instruction, but much of teaching is simply a way of life: demonstrating the kind of life that’s transformed by God, showing what it means to follow God, showing that God is real and worth following, so that people who want to know what it means to follow God can use us as examples (Phil. 4:9).

And underlying all of these specific actions is the assumption, belief, and knowledge that this commandment in Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is part of God’s Word; that, like all of God’s Word, it’s worth repeating, studying, and meditating on. At 114 English words, the average adult can read these verses in thirty seconds or so; yet it’s repeated every morning and evening as part of Jewish prayer services for thousands of years. And, as we’ve seen here, even these 114 words have significant depth and richness as we meditate on God’s glory, transcendence, uniqueness, and faithfulness and on what it means to be part of God’s people, to recognize him, to love him with all of our being, and to live out from that.

God and Government

Between Facebook, Twitter, and the ever-expanding op-ed and “analysis” sections of online news sites, it’s hard to go online without finding political opinions. Too bad they all disagree with each other.

Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden is weak. Putin invaded Ukraine because the US has been encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence for years. Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless. Biden is doing too much for Ukraine and should pay more attention to matters at home; Biden can’t do more for Ukraine, because we might provoke Russia; Biden should do more for Ukraine and should make Russia afraid of provoking us. Biden is doing great; Trump would do much better; Trump would do much worse.

Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war (Mt 24:6).

Inflation is transitory and not much to worry about; inflation is a huge problem, and we should vote the politicians responsible out of office. Inflation is because of too much pandemic spending, so we should spend less. Inflation is because of supply chain problems or human infrastructure limitations, and we should spend more to address those.

Jesus said that we would always have the poor (Mt 26:11).

Covid arose naturally from a wet market; Covid leaked from a lab; Covid was a Chinese bioweapon; Covid was the product of an American conspiracy. The best way to deal with it is mask mandates and lockdowns; mask mandates and lockdowns are harmful and should be avoided; we need more vaccination; we need less vaccination.

Revelation says that death and pain will be removed in the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:4) - but not before then.

And I enjoy some of these discussions, and I’ve engaged in a fair number myself. But I can’t help but think there’s sometimes some arrogance there. I am neither a foreign policy expert nor an economist nor an epidemiologist; I can have an informed opinion, but humility should remind me that I likely don’t know better than the professionals, and I may not have much basis for thinking that my preferred remedy would actually work.

Within my chosen niche of software development, we have plenty of our own opinions to argue about - enough that these have earned the tongue-in-cheek name of “holy wars.” Which text editor should you use to write source code? Which hardware design is best? Which programming language is best? Should you use a Mac or a PC? One of the most famous holy wars is whether programmers should format their source code with the tab key or the spacebar; this has gained enough notoriety that it made an appearance on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

Even tabs versus spaces, though, pales next to the debate of Windows versus Linux. For years, an assortment of developers and upstart businesses pushed Linux, a free operating system, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, backed by Microsoft’s billions of dollars and monopoly business power. Countless marketing initiatives, technical whitepapers, and websites pushed one or the other. Developers on both platforms competed to write the best Windows-only or Linux-only software. Emotions ran high. In one of the more noteworthy examples, Dan Greer, a cybersecurity researcher, wrote a 2003 report arguing that Microsoft Windows’ dominance was a threat to national security. He was fired from his consultancy the day the report was released.

It turns out that the answer to Windows versus Linux is, depending on how you slice it, either “Both” or “Who cares?” “Both” is because businesses still happily run Windows, while servers and cloud computing (even at Microsoft) often run Linux; “who cares?” is because the operating system on your desktop matters little when all of your activities are conducted through a web browser, and mobile phones and tablets have replaced desktop and laptop computers, both as a focus of innovation and as many people’s primary computing device. Time and change rendered the entire debate irrelevant in ways that neither side foresaw.

Dan Greer is relevant to this discussion for reasons other than his Windows-versus-Linux foray. In 2013, he delivered a talk, “Tradeoffs in Cyber Security”:

I previously worked for a data protection company. Our product was, and I believe still is, the most thorough on the market. By “thorough” I mean the dictionary definition, “careful about doing something in an accurate and exact way.” To this end, installing our product instrumented every system call on the target machine. Data did not and could not move in any sense of the word “move” without detection. Every data operation was caught and monitored. It was total surveillance data protection. Its customers were companies that don’t accept half-measures. What made this product stick out was that very thoroughness, but here is the point: Unless you fully instrument your data handling, it is not possible for you to say what did not happen. With total surveillance, and total surveillance alone, it is possible to treat the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. Only when you know everything that did happen with your data can you say what did not happen with your data…

We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like “X did not happen” can only [be] proven true if you have the enumeration of everything that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We all know that when a President says “Never again” he is asking for the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives, is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience. Omniscience requires god-like powers…

John Gilmore famously said, “Never give a government a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.” I might amend that to read “Never demand the government have a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.”… When you embark on making failure impossible, and that includes delivering on statements like “Never again,” you are forced into cost-benefit analyses where at least one of the variables is infinite. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t know Greer’s religious beliefs - if he’s actually trying to make a theological point, or if he’s using (to him) nothing more than a vivid metaphor. But he’s right. In some of the more extreme versions of our political debates - and in some of what we ask our governments to do or seem to think they can do - we act like war or poverty or disease would cease to be urgent issues if our opinions prevail. In doing so, we claim to solve problems that Jesus himself says are not fully solvable in this lifetime. At best, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment; at worst, we’re asking fallible humans to try to claim enough power to do God’s job. Bob Weinz at Christianity Today made a similar point in 2005, reflecting upon 9/11:

Last March former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the U.S. government “failed to prevent the tragedy of 9/11.” He proceeded to apologize for that failure… Clarke seemed to presume that “your government” should somehow have been able to anticipate and prevent evil from happening—both the evil that we call natural disasters, and the evil that comes directly from the hearts and hands of evil people. It is a false premise. To presume the government’s ability to prevent such a catastrophe is to assume that it possesses qualities and abilities that no person, let alone a government, can ever possess. Omniscience and omnipotence are qualities that we ascribe only to God.

There’s a saying: “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has a couple, and most of them stink.” I saw a more positive alternative online: “Opinions are like luggage: expensive, and heavy to carry around, so don’t take more than you need.” Paul wrote to “reject foolish and ignorant controversies because you know they breed infighting” (2 Tim 2:23) and to “avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law because they are useless and empty” (Titus 3:9). There’s nothing automatically wrong with having opinions, debating, and discussing them. It can be an important part of loving God with all of our minds and trying to use our gifts and positions to serve others. But let’s practice humility, realizing that we may easily be wrong. Let’s travel lightly, saving our time and energy for people and service. Let’s avoid foolish controversies, remembering that time and change will render so much of these moot. Let’s remember that we ultimately depend on Jesus to solve the world’s fallenness, rather than hoping in or foolishly empowering our institutions to try and do so.

Psalm 22

Sometimes, I think, we may not give the Psalms enough credit. We read them for moral lessons (like the importance of God’s Word from Psalm 119), or comfort (Psalm 23), or as prophecies of Christ (such as Psalm 110). Or we use them as the basis for praise songs like U2’s “40” (Psalm 40) or Third Day’s “Your Love Oh Lord” (Psalm 36).

And all of those are good and true and wonderful. But the Psalms are more than that; it’s the prayer book of the Bible, and the prayers and praises written within it can become part of our prayers, shaping our thoughts and attitudes towards God and giving us the words to say if we don’t know how to pray. As my grandfather used to say, the book of Psalms is unique because, in it, humanity’s words to God become part of God’s Word to humanity.

What would it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer?

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.
My God, I cry out during the day,
but you do not answer,
and during the night my prayers do not let up.
You are holy;
you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted in you and you rescued them.
To you they cried out, and they were saved;
in you they trusted and they were not disappointed.
But I am a worm, not a man;
people insult me and despise me.
All who see me taunt me;
they mock me and shake their heads.
They say,
“Commit yourself to the Lord!
Let the Lord rescue him!
Let the Lord deliver him, for he delights in him.”
Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb
and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts.
I have been dependent on you since birth;
from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Do not remain far away from me,
for trouble is near and I have no one to help me.
Many bulls surround me;
powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in.
They open their mouths to devour me
like a roaring lion that rips its prey.
My strength drains away like water;
all my bones are dislocated.
My heart is like wax;
it melts away inside me.
The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery;
my tongue sticks to my gums.
You set me in the dust of death.
Yes, wild dogs surround me—
a gang of evil men crowd around me;
like a lion they pin my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones;
my enemies are gloating over me in triumph.
They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;
they are rolling dice for my garments.
But you, O Lord, do not remain far away.
You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me!
Deliver me from the sword.
Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lion
and from the horns of the wild oxen.
You have answered me.
I will declare your name to my countrymen.
In the middle of the assembly I will praise you.
You loyal followers of the Lord, praise him.
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.
All you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him.
For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed.
He did not ignore him;
when he cried out to him, he responded.
You are the reason I offer praise in the great assembly;
I will fulfill my promises before the Lord’s loyal followers.
Let the oppressed eat and be filled.
Let those who seek his help praise the Lord.
May you live forever!
Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the Lord and turn to him.
Let all the nations worship you.
For the Lord is king
and rules over the nations.
All the thriving people of the earth will join the celebration and worship;
all those who are descending into the grave will bow before him,
including those who cannot preserve their lives.
A whole generation will serve him;
they will tell the next generation about the Lord.
They will come and tell about his saving deeds;
they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.

On Good Friday, we read this as referring to Christ. And we should! The details of Christ’s death - pinned or pierced hands and feet, thirsty, surrounded by enemies, with sarcastic taunts that God should save him, his clothes divided up and used as gambling prizes - are uncannily accurate for something written one thousand years before. Clearly, the Spirit spoke through David, to enable him to prophesy. But I don’t think that David necessarily knew he was prophesying; instead, I think, he spoke metaphorically about his own life, and his prayer was truer than he knew.

David could have written Psalm 22 in response to several circumstances in his own life. Saul, his master and the anointed king of Israel, went insane and tried to kill him; David’s son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar; his son Absalom conspired against him, forcing him to flee Jerusalem for his life; his trusted advisor Ahithophel betrayed him and joined Absalom’s rebellion; his son Adonijah tried to steal the throne in David’s old age.

Since the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, and if David initially wrote Psalm 22 about his own life rather than Christ’s, then can we pray it, too? I believe we can. Most of us have experienced times when God seemed to not answer, or when his help seemed far away. We haven’t (I hope) had enemies like David’s, but we have experienced enemies; we’ve seen people taunt believers and sarcastically dismiss God’s help; we may have felt times when our strength drains away, when our hearts are like wax. Praying Psalm 22 helps us give words to these experiences. And it also reminds us, as David reminded himself, that God protected our physical and spiritual ancestors; that he has provided for us since we came out of our mothers’ wombs; that we look forward to praising God for his response; that nations and future generations will acknowledge God. And remembering God’s faithfulness in the past, both to past believers and in our own individual lives, and remembering his promises for the future can help us in the present.

What does it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer on Good Friday? Good Friday reminds us that, just as David’s words in Psalm 22 were truer than he knew and ultimately applied to Christ far more directly than they did to David, our own prayers are truer than we know. If we feel that God does not answer, Jesus felt that too; if we feel weak or despondent, Jesus felt so more; if we face opposition from others (either personal hostility from individuals or generalized rejection or indifference of a fallen society), Jesus received far worse. And he chose to do so: all the suffering that David prayed, that we pray, Jesus voluntarily took upon himself on the cross, to defeat evil and show his love for us. All the pain that believers throughout history have prayed, all the pain from believers and unbelievers alike that has gone unspoken, Jesus took upon himself. Not only that, but all the times when we’re the enemy - when, knowingly or unknowingly, we’re the ones hemming others in, piercing them or pinning them down, acting like we don’t believe in God’s help, leaving someone feeling weak or in despair - Jesus took that upon himself too.

Because Jesus didn’t just pay the penalty for our sins on the cross (as if the word “just” could apply to so great a salvation). Easter shows us that God the Son fully identified with humanity; that, whatever the depths of our fallenness and suffering, Jesus did not exempt himself from that; that we can therefore trust in him and his love.

Four Anecdotes

One

There’s a blog called Coffee & Covid that made the rounds a couple of times on Facebook during the pandemic, so several months ago, while the delta variant was making the news, I took a look at one of the posts. The author, a Christian lawyer, makes the following arguments:

1. Covid (and the delta variant in particular) aren’t nearly as bad as they’re made out to be, and the Covid vaccines aren’t as helpful as they’re made out to be.
2. Culture is surrendering to a “Spirit of Fear” about Covid. Fear is a spiritual problem, not a medical or scientific or political problem. It’s manifesting itself in anxiety, depression, and more. The Bible teaches is not to fear (Phil. 4:6). The church needs to boldly speak out against this Spirit of Fear.

I could argue with some of his first point, except that I’ve made a policy to not get involved in Covid debates online. I agree with much of his second point: Covid has caused a lot of mental harm, and the Bible does command us not to fear. I think that fear is an “acceptable” sin among Christians - the prevalence of anxiety and stress and worry among Christians (not just around Covid) suggests that we aren’t taking Scripture’s teachings seriously here. If the church can speak to this and can help people with their fears and anxieties, as the Coffee & Covid post argues that it should, then that’s great!

I’m more interested in the relationship between the first and second points. If Covid isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and if the dilemma about whether or not to get vaccinated isn’t as high-stakes as it’s made out to be, then fear is an intellectual and emotional error, not a spiritual problem. (In other words, we don’t need to fear because there isn’t really anything to be afraid of.) Saying that fear is a spiritual problem means that, even if whatever we’re afraid of is genuinely terrifying as all get-out, we need to trust God regardless.

Two

Donald Trump’s position on abortion has been the focus of much scrutiny over the last several years. In older interviews, he described himself as pro-choice, but starting in 2011, he said that he was pro-life:

I’m pro-life, but I changed my view a number of years ago. One of the reasons I changed – one of the primary reasons – a friend of mine’s wife was pregnant, in this case married.

She was pregnant and he didn’t really want the baby. And he was telling me the story. He was crying as he was telling me the story. He ends up having the baby and the baby is the apple of his eye. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.

He elaborated in a 2015 debate:

“Friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances.”

In another exchange,

he responded to a reporter who wondered if he would have become pro-life had the child been a “loser”: “Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.”

In some of the ensuing abortion debates, some pro-life advocates pushed back on Trump; they argued that abortion should be opposed because human life is intrinsically valuable, not because the fetus may go on to be a superstar and an outstanding person.

Three

In Joy at Work, Dennis Bakke, a Christian business leader, talks about his philosophy and experiences as the head of AES, a multi-billion-dollar international energy company. When he and cofounder Roger Sant started the company, he adopted the philosophy that enjoyment - joy - at work came from making meaningful, challenging, and rewarding decisions, and companies’ approach of a centralized hierarchy of authority stifled employees’ ability to do this. AES therefore radically decentralized its decision-making; decisions such as HR, salary, and acquisitions were pushed out as far as possible to those most directly affected, while executives merely gave advice. Bakke also made a commitment to operate the business on Christian principles and to consider its impact on society, employees, suppliers, and customers, instead of prioritizing the interests of the shareholders.

When AES went public, they included the following text in their public-offering memo:

Adherence to AES’s Values - Possible Impact on Results of Operations. An important element of AES is its commitment to four major ‘shared’ values: to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible. See ‘Business - Values and Practices.’ AES believes that earning a fair profit is an important result of providing a quality product to its customers. However, if the Company perceives a conflict between these values and profits, the Company will try to adhere to its values - even though doing so might result in diminished profits or forgone opportunities. Moreover, the Company seeks to adhere to these values not as a means to achieve economic success, but because adherence is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. The Company intends to continue these policies after this offering. (p.39)

Bakke explains that, when they submitted this memo to the SEC, the SEC suggested that they move this paragraph under “Special Risk Factors,” advising potential investors of risks of investing in the company. He writes:

In our case, the SEC thought our values were a hazard… I loved it. I could now say that the U.S. government thought it was very risky to attempt to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun.

AES was very successful. Bakke goes on to write, though, that explaining its values was a constant challenge; the board of directors kept thinking that AES was successful because of its values and its radical approach to decision-making, and Bakke kept trying to explain that AES followed its values because they believed it was the right thing to do, and he would continue to do it even if it wasn’t successful. He ultimately failed; when the energy industry was rocked by the Enron scandal in 2001 and AES’s stock price tumbled, the board decided that its philosophy was no longer working, and they forced Bakke out.

Four

I didn’t watch the 2014 movie God’s Not Dead, but I heard enough about it that I’m familiar with the basic plot. A Christian college student named Josh enrolls in a class taught by an aggressive atheist who challenges the class, “God is dead.” Josh ends up being challenged to a formal debate with the professor. At the end of the movie, Josh is vindicated: he wins the debate, and the professor reveals that his atheism stems from anger with God at some past tragedy in his life.

The movie was very popular within evangelical circles: it cost $2 million to make, grossed $62 million, and spawned three sequels. I felt like the ending was a little bit of wish fulfillment, though; evangelicals feel harassed or looked down upon by broader culture (especially the cultural elites of media and academia), so we wanted to see a movie where the Christian “won.” If Joshua had lost the debate (which, humanly speaking, would be likely, given the professor’s broader learning and experience), flunked out of college, and worked as a Starbucks barista for the rest of his life, it would still be a story of faithful Christian witness; in fact, compared to many historical Christian witnesses (the original meaning of the Greek word “martyr”), he would have gotten off easy.

Why?

What do a pandemic blog post, a president’s pro-life conversion, a billion-dollar energy company, and a possibly kitschy Christian film have in common? All of them confuse means with ends; all of them confuse the value that a thing can bring with the value of the thing itself.

We say that God’s eye is on the sparrow and that we don’t have to fear anything, yet we can’t help but try and argue that our fears are smaller instead of remembering that God is greater. Truly conquering the spirit of fear would mean saying that, even if all of the worst doomsayer predictions of Covid were right, and it killed one of out ten people and could spread through surfaces and even the briefest outdoor contact and required brutal lockdowns and became endemic with unending variants, we can still know that our heavenly Father will provide all the things that we need (Mt. 6:31-33).

If Trump’s friend’s baby really did help Trump realize the value of life, then that’s great. But the reason we’re pro-life is because we believe that human life has inherent value, because it’s made in the image of God, and that life has value and is worth protecting even if Trump’s friend’s baby grew up to be a total scuzzbucket who brought his parents nothing but grief and heartache.

Countless business books, articles, and talks espouse virtues such as leadership, teamwork, trust, communication, and responsibility and talk about how these can promote success in business. Few business leaders are willing to say, like Bakke, that the real reason to talk about these good traits is because they are, in fact, good, and they remain good even if they don’t “pay off“ and even if they hurt a company in the marketplace.

And I appreciate God’s Not Dead’s depiction of a Christian willing to stand firm for his faith. But I can’t help but think that it would not have been nearly as successful if it didn’t also show him winning the debate and succeeding in college as a result of standing firm for his faith. (Case in point: Silence, a movie about the brutal persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan, featuring a Catholic missionary who renounced his faith, earned only $22 million against its $50 million budget, despite critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination.)

And so forth. So many of the stories, fables, and works of fiction, both for children and adults, show someone doing something good and then being rewarded for it. Good stewardship is encouraged as a means of achieving financial success, instead of simply the right way to treat the finite resources God gives us. Christian purity culture encouraged abstinence before marriage by saying that it would result in better sex within marriage, even though that risks getting further involved in culture’s over-sexualization rather than offering a meaningful alternative. Left-wing writers, in a well-intentioned effort to oppose inequality and discrimination, insist that there are no meaningful differences in skill or aptitude between men and women; maybe so (the topic of gender differences is worth books by itself), but this argument leaves unchallenged the deeper lie that our skills and aptitude determine our worth, that someone who’s smart or a math genius or socially adept is simply better than someone who isn’t. Right-wing writers uphold Christian values as part of what makes Western civilization great; maybe so, and following God’s ways can certainly brings blessings, but we’re better served (and better serve) by quietly living out Christian values (1 Pe 3:15-16) than by getting involved in culture wars over Western civilization.

Most of us within evangelical churches are very aware of the dangers of the prosperity gospel: the “name-it-and-claim-it” idea that God will always reward us with financial success, physical health, and temporal happiness, as long as we approach him with the right kind of prayer and sufficient faith. But the prosperity idea can be much more subtle than that: the idea that it’s better to be smart, sexy, successful, rich, well-respected, independent than not; the idea that goodness and morality and God’s ways are good because they can help us achieve these states; the idea that doing the right thing will produce good results; the idea that, if you didn’t get good results, it’s because you did something wrong. Now, obviously, God does bless those who do the right thing. And following God’s ways will make things go well for you (he did, after all, create the universe in accordance with his ways) - but maybe not right away, and maybe not in this lifetime, and maybe not where we can see it. And, regardless, that isn’t why we do it - the point is our desire to please the One we love, not the benefits that we may or may not get out of it.

When the fig tree does not bud,
and there are no grapes on the vines;
when the olive trees do not produce
and the fields yield no crops;
when the sheep disappear from the pen
and there are no cattle in the stalls—
I will rejoice because of the Lord;
I will be happy because of the God who delivers me!
The Sovereign Lord is my source of strength.
He gives me the agility of a deer;
he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain.

—Habakkuk 3:17-19

Fractal Fallenness

Fractals have been on my mind lately. A fractal, according to Merriam-Webster, is “any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size.”

That’s a fairly obscure and technical definition. An example helps. One of the better-known fractals is the Sierpiński triangle, which is created by taking an equilateral triangle and then repeatedly dividing it into smaller triangles:

Because this application of triangles can be done at smaller and smaller levels, you can zoom in or out as much as you want - even infinitely. It’s a rather mesmerizing (or at least dizzying) effect.

Fractals aren’t just a mathematical curiosity, though. For example, they show up in nature, “in such places as broccoli, snowflakes, feet of geckos, frost crystals, … lightning bolts,” and the circulatory system (Wikipedia). Tree branches are one example: the trunk splits into boughs, which split into smaller branches, and so on down to twigs, with (often) a similar branching pattern each step of the way.

Ukraine has been on my mind lately. News stories regularly try to sum up the current state of suffering: As of Tuesday morning, 401 civilians confirmed dead and 801 confirmed injured, with the actual casualties likely much higher. More than 2 million refugees. But that’s just the big picture. Like a fractal, you can zoom in to see more and more detail, and more and more suffering. A wedding with military fatigues and rocket-propelled grenades. Reports of a girl, trapped in rubble, dying of dehydration. Photos of farewells at train stations as the war separates families. A man digging through the rubble of his house after his wife and daughter were killed.

Or you can follow a different branch of the fractal tree to look at Russia: 140 million people in an economy that’s cratered under crippling sanctions, a government that may be about to default on its debts, thousands of Russian soldiers killed, under a regime so repressive that merely calling what’s happening in Ukraine an “invasion” can be punishable by up to three years in prison. All for a war that none of them had any real say in.

Let’s zoom out a step. Here’s a map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as of this week, courtesy of The Washington Post.

Ukraine’s population is (was) 43 million people. Plenty of those 43 million people live outside of the red areas.

I don’t know how the demographics break down - how many of the casualties and refugees are from different parts of the country - but, given that Putin’s aim appears to be to take all of Ukraine, it’s easy to fear that things could get much worse.

Let’s zoom out again. Here’s Moldova.

It’s another former member of the Soviet Union, just south of Ukraine, small and (like Ukraine) relatively poor. Moldovans worry that their country will be invaded next, especially after Belorusian dictator and Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko showed a map that appeared to indicate planned troop movements into Moldova. Moldova has its own separatist region, Transnistria, similar to Ukraine’s separatist, Russian-friendly regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Transnistria is tiny (500,000 people), completely outside of Moldovan control, and backwater:

It’s a place of Lenin statues, hammer-and-sickle flags and once-grand Soviet architecture in decay… Unrecognized by the United Nations, it has a currency, the ruble, that is virtually worthless outside its borders. International bank cards don’t work at Transnistrian ATMs. Salaries are low. For all of Russia’s influence, the biggest power in Transnistria is a monopolistic company, Sheriff, that operates with scant oversight and controls everything from the gas stations to the supermarkets to the soccer club.

Anywhere along the fractal, it seems, we can see more loss, more fear, more scars from the past. And that’s just from looking at current events in and around Ukraine. We can follow the branches back through history, to look at the Russian poverty and malaise after the collapse of the Soviet Union that fueled Putin’s rise to power, or the history of autocracy, imperialism, and politicized religion that Putin has inherited. Or we can zoom out further and follow the fractal’s boughs to the civil war in Ethiopia between Tigray and the central government, with “ethnically motivated killings, sexual violence on a massive scale, looting, and mass displacement to unequipped neighbor states and countries”; or the civil war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia, using US-provided weaponry, is waging a brutal war against Houthi rebels that’s killed over 100,000 people and started a famine that’s killed 85,000 more.

And, of course, if you follow the branches and boughs back far enough, you come to the Fall, to humanity’s rebellion against God that started in Eden and ripples throughout history and throughout the world.

What’s a Christian to do? Or, to be more direct, what is God doing? Our typical answer is that Jesus’ death and resurrection means we can escape all of this and go to Heaven. And that’s true, good, and wonderful, but it’s only part of the story. After all, it would seem strange if God saw this infinite fractal of pain, loss, and death and gave only a single, unitary response. Instead, I believe, God’s redemption and its outworking are similarly fractal, being rooted in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection but branching out into every aspect of our existence:

• God at work in the thousands of blessings of everyday life - good meals and sunrises and jokes with friends and a sound night’s sleep
• God at work in the arcs of our individual lives, guiding us as we live and work and learn and grow
• God at work in the local church, where we share in the love and support of our brothers and sisters as we worship and serve
• God at work in society, as believers and non-believers alike work under God’s common grace to treat poverty and illness, address injustice, and otherwise ameliorate the effects of the Fall
• God at work through his Word, speaking to us today just as he spoke to its human authors, and speaking to us through the millions of lesser words of Christian preachers, speakers, authors, singers, songwriters, theologians, and journalists who use their gifts to build us up
• God at work even in our hardships, as our hardships help us to develop endurance, character, and hope (Rom 5:4); provide an opportunity to show our faith and gentleness (1 Pe 3:13-16); and inspire others (as Ukrainians’ courage is inspiring many around the world)
• God at work throughout history, as his church spreads the gospel “throughout the whole inhabited earth as a testimony to all the nations” (Mt 24:14)
• God at work through Jesus, who exactly reveals God to us, and whom we can know and relate to as surely as the disciples who walked on earth with him 2,000 years ago
• God at work through the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, where the Fall is not merely escaped but destroyed, where “he will live among us, and we will be his people, and God himself will be with us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev. 21:3-4, paraphrased)

Peace on Earth

A friend of mine left church early yesterday so that he could make it to his family’s Christmas celebration. Now, I know that there are a wide variety of Christmas traditions, but late February doesn’t seem to work for any of them - too late for Epiphany, way too early for Christmas in July, etc. He explained, however, that this was simply when his family could get together. I’ve done the same in the past, thanks to having family scattered from North Carolina to Michigan; I think our record was a family Christmas get-together in April.

Despite the calendar mismatch, the mention of Christmas put me in the mind of Christmas songs. Not the traditional, happy carols like “Joy to the World” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” (although I do love those). Nor the modern, intricate instrumentals of Trans-Siberian Orchestra or Mannheim Steamroller (although I do love those, too). Instead, I was thinking of the not-so-happy songs, like U2’s “Peace on Earth”:

They’re reading names out over the radio All the folks, the rest of us, won’t get to know Sean and Julia, Gareth, Ann and Breda Their lives are bigger than any big idea

Jesus can you take the time To throw a drowning man a line Peace on Earth To tell the ones who hear no sound Whose sons are living in the ground Peace on Earth Jesus in the song you wrote The words are sticking in my throat Peace on Earth Hear it every Christmas time But hope and history won’t rhyme So what’s it worth? This peace on Earth

Sean, Julia, Gareth, Ann, and Breda were victims of the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland on August 15, 1998.

Or “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”:

I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play; In music sweet the tones repeat, “There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”

And in despair I bowed my head: “There is no peace on earth,” I said, “For hate is strong, and mocks the song Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem upon which this song was based in 1863, during the height of the American Civil War. His wife had died in a fire two years earlier, and he had received word that his son, who had joined the Union Army without his blessing, had been severely injured in battle.

And this seems like a downer - inappropriate Christmas songs for an inappropriate Christmas season - but there’s a lot to be down about right now.

An unprovoked war rages in Ukraine, leaving hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes, and it’s just starting.

Economic hardship is bearing down on 140 million Russians, most of whom have little or no involvement in the war.

India remains conspicuously neutral, because of their own past conflicts and history with the West.

Civil war in Ethiopia continues, with thousands dead and 2.5 million displaced, with a fraction of the attention that the war in Ukraine has received. (Because people aren’t concerned about it threatening surrounding countries? Because they don’t look like us? I don’t know.)

There is much evil in the world.

And that’s to say nothing of the smaller, personal tragedies hitting those around me: A beloved church elder and businessman dies suddenly from Covid. A young couple’s marriage falls into pieces. A family deals with the fallout of their daughter’s molestation. Another man battles cancer while weighed down by depression, a history of health problems, and bad medical advice. A family copes with the revelation that their newborn has a fatal genetic disease. All of these pale in size and scope to wars in Ukraine or Ethiopia, but that makes them scarcely less painful to those affected.

Sometimes downer songs are an appropriate response - to mourn those lost, to acknowledge if we’re drowning or bowing our heads in despair, to feel the gulf between Christian hope and humanity’s history. In Biblical terms, to lament. Because these Christmas songs also remind us that lament isn’t the end. Longfellow’s carol continues:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor does He sleep, The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then ringing singing on its way The world revolved from night to day A voice, a chime, a chant sublime Of peace on earth good will to men.

Christ has come! God is with us. And he has promised to make all things right, to defeat evil and death, to wipe away every tear, to remove mourning and crying and pain (Rev. 21:3-4).

And, even when we can’t hear the Christmas bells’ promise - when, like U2, the words stick in our throat and we’re left wondering what it’s worth - the act of bringing these laments to God is itself a statement of faith in God. Because we know that Immanuel, God with us, means that Christ has experienced the same hurts that we have, that he has taken the world’s evil upon himself, that he is with us even in the midst of our despair.