The true meaning is that both the rich and poor in Israel depended on God totally for anything they had. It was a mercy that the poor had little, and it was a mercy that the rich had abundance. Niether deserved anything.

The summation from the previous article:

The real message is that, for goods to be distributed more fairly, everything would go back to God, and our hands would be empty. That is real fairness. That is our real equality. Anything more than destitution is a mercy.

Throughout the Bible, we actually see no evidence that Israel ever observed the Jubilee laws, another mark in the disobedience column. But, not surprisingly, we have David summing up the point that Israel was to learn.

Psalm 62:9:

Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath. (ESV)

Once again, we see what equality actually means. Niether has enough substance to even move the scales, regardless of the pretensions.

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This was our house before Friday, March 23rd.

And this is our house after it decided to star in the Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, it didn’t get to kill any wicked witches.

Our two story house is now a dilapidated, condemned, one story shanty shack. We are told the tornado played a little hopscotch for just a few seconds on the ground before dissipating, a storm the weather service had no chance of predicting. There was no warning, and the sirens went off after the damage was done.

Our house got its 15 minutes of fame. We saw it on the local news in Denver. A friend heard about it on the news in Seattle. And it wasn’t someone else’s house. It was ours.

We lost everything. But no one was home, so really, we still have everything.

Words of Job

“The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.” I mean that when I write it and say it, but I feel like an impostor doing so. A three year old with a plastic hammer banging on plastic nails, pretending to do real work. By using Job’s words, it’s like I’m trying to identify with him, a sycophant trying to bask in reflected glory.

The great wind in Job struck down Job’s children, yet the great wind touched no flesh when it played pick-up sticks with our house. Thank God for that great mercy, because he knows just how much each of us can bear. A little hint: it isn’t anywhere close to Job-levels.

And then after Job really had lost everything, he lost even more. But by the grace of God, my family and I now live like kings in exile rather than as homeless paupers. He cradles us in his hand. We truly lack for nothing.

Family, friends, and church have rallied around us, ready to spring into action in a moment’s notice. We are grateful. We are humbled.

Order of Thoughts

While I would have liked for “Blessed be the name of the LORD” to be the first thought to have gone through my mind, I’m not quite there yet in my sanctification. Here’s the approximate order of my thoughts the moment after we got the call that our house was destroyed.

• Are they joking? They better not be joking. But I sure hope they are joking.
• I can’t believe Tonya and Adri are with me. They would probably be in the house at this time of day. Thank God for that.
• My books are gone.
• It gets fuzzy, but I think is where I mentally repeated a dynamic-equivalence transliteration of Job 1:21.

I feel like number three needs a little explanation. Yes, books can be replaced (barring certain first editions, which I didn’t have anyway), but the notes in them cannot. Those thoughts aren’t banging around in my head. That’s why I wrote them down. They also helped mark parts of books I thought were important, or something I could reference later.

Now, some of these were written as much as 6 years ago, so it might be for the best that they are lost. But the world will never know.

Besides, reading 2 Timothy 4:13, I like to believe Paul himself would have had simliar thoughts.

When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. (ESV)

Postal Observation

One thing was confirmed through all of this: the absolute absurdity of the United States Postal Service and the organization’s blindness and willful ignorance to change. They are like a waiter who, after discovering the patron at the table is dead, reaches over the corpose to continue pouring the wine and then asking if it would like any chocolate cake for dessert this evening.

Since we were out of town, we held the mail until the Saturday we got back…the day after the tornado. So, on Saturday afternoon, the postal worker drives up to the mailbox and sees this:

A broken non-house with a tilted mailbox to match it, crisscrossed with yellow borders to warn away the living. I wonder what went through their head when they witnessed the scene. Because we know the end result: they reached out, opened the door of the mailbox, and placed a week’s worth of our mail into it.

So you decide. An example of excellent custom service?

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 In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

He argues the hunter-gatherer diet is better nutritionally, as agriculture tended to focus on a single crop, like potatoes. This led to deficiencies and over-reliance, which led to events like the potato famines in Ireland. Overall, he paints a very rosy picture of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and almost romanticizes it. This comes from a Marxist perspective (big surprise):

Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

But it soon gets more interesting (or horrifying). He asks the question, if agriculture is so bad for us, why did we choose it?

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

So what should we have done instead? Well, infanticide is a good solution to the problem.

…nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means.

And here is where Diamond’s (or any secularist’s) definition of evil comes into play:

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming.

To limit growth by infanticide is reasonable. To support a larger population via farming is evil. And in other news, up is down, down is up, Lady Gaga is a serious person, and Congress is a fine group of people to which you feel comfortable turning your back.

This is what passes for morality in our brave new world. Based on speculation about history, most people who have lived are both dependent on agriculture for their life AND victims of what agriculture has wrought. Ergo, it’s better if they had never been born at all. This is what I call Over-Dramatic, Petulant, and Ungrateful Brat Syndrome. Or, ODPUBS.

And it’s strange, since the progress allowed by agriculture is the very thing that allows Diamond to write  academic papers and best-selling books in the first place. He’s a thin branch looking down at the trunk of his tree, shaking his head in condescension, and saying “You shouldn’t have grown so tall. You’ve jeopardized our survival. Don’t you know its windy up here?”

God: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth.”

Diamond and others: “Nope.”

It is no surprise that progressives like Diamond champion abortion and free contraception. And soon, maybe they will champion infanticide itself, and give up the pretense of the fabled “woman’s right to choose,” and just start bowing to Molech openly in the public square. We’ve already started down that path, with one journal of medical “ethics” saying that after-birth abortion should be allowed.

But when the idols are taken out of the closet, perhaps they’ll be easier to tear down.

If this type of reasoning from the halls of higher learning sounds familiar, it should. When you start talking about population control, you start harkening back to the eugenics movement, which is a natural outpouring of Darwinism in a culture. It is a fount of many deaths.

The authors of the “ethics” article are, of course, correct in the sense that abortion inside the fetus is no different from abortion outside the fetus. That reasoning is sound. But they just give the car more gas when they should be slamming on their brakes, shifting into reverse, and pushing the RPM gauge into the red going the opposite direction. They are discovering where their core assumptions have led them. Again. But this time they are not stepping away in absolute horror.

Eugenics, in essence, is still alive. But instead of elites and other brights deciding who lives and who dies, we have that power passed to the parents themselves, a decentralization of evil. Or rather, those who don’t want to be parents.

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The latest jab I’ve come across, that I know I’ve read before:

Better to be lowly and have a servant, than to play the great man and lack bread. (Proverbs 12:9)(ESV)

In an age of easy credit and institutionalized covetousness, this proverb pulls the red carpet out from under a culture of people who like to play at being the “great man” in more ways than one.

Playing the great man (PGM) applies to so many things. I know many people who struggle to put food on the table for a variety of reasons, and all have to do with some form of PGM. Maxed out credit cards on the latest gadgets, leased an expensive car, signed themselves into slavery with a huge mortgage, and various other ways of trying to live a life beyond one’s means.

But over-extension to keep up with the Joneses is the obvious way people can PGM. What are some other ways?

• Micro fame. Doing everything you can get a few more Youtube views or a few more Twitter followers. In most cases, these are mostly good for bragging rights. 1 million youtube views, 25,000 Twitter followers, and 25 cents will buy you a pack of gum from 1997 (thanks inflation!) But oh, you have some bragging rights.
• Video games. MMORPGs, especially World of Warcraft, touch something deep within the human psyche: the desire to grow and complete an epic quest. All in the comfort of our pajamas, sitting in front of a computer monitor. Hours and hours spent building an empire of pixels, which is a worth even less than an empire of dirt. You’ll be famous in Azeroth, though, so that’s something. And then there was the craze of Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which I joyfully took part in myself). Are you able to play Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert mode? Congratulations. Now put that on your resume or bring it up on a first date. What will the response be? How much time have we spent practicing fake guitar, so we can play at being the rock star…or PGM? For me, it was Starcraft 2, and working to have a winning record so I could impress other people who spent hours playing Starcraft 2.

I’m not knocking these things as casual hobbies, just the desire to gain some sense of worth from them. Each tap into that desire to be “great” somehow, to be known, a person of renown. Each offer an easy counterfeit. Dedication to that type of “renown” just leads to poverty, just like trying to keep up the mere appearances of wealth.

What are some other ways of playing the great man are there, and what other traps can we fall into?

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And to which of the angels has he ever said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”? Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

Chapter one is a build up to one of the author’s many “therefores,” and the end, just quoted, is a stout one. The kind that makes you want to sit down if you are standing. Let’s follow the logic:

1. Jesus has become superior to angels (v.4)
2. Why and how? Jesus is the Son, and no angel has been called that (v.5)
3. Angels are to worship the Son, and are now servants of wind and fire (v.6,7)
4. Jesus’s throne is forever. Not only that, but He has laid the foundation of the earth itself (v.8-12)
5. Jesus sits at God’s right hand, and no angel has been invited to do that (v.13)
6. Angels are to minister to those who will inherit (v.14)

THEREFORE (going into chapter 2):

We must pay all the more attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away, because what we have heard has come from the Son. The Son! And if the message declared by angels was reliable, how much greater the Son’s word? If we neglect His word, what else is there? He is above every name. There is no testimony that could have more authority or weight.

So that’s the general flow. And while the first THEREFORE could be studied extensively, I want to focus on the final reasoning leading up to it, the final guidepost before the author arrives at his point. His whole argument is telling us what the new hierarchy of creation is, ending by telling us that angels now serve us.

A man now sits on a throne in heaven, ruling with all authority. Even over the angels. This inverts what was before, the old order of creation. And because we are united with the Son and King through baptism and by the Spirit, we are part of his body.

We who were made a little lower than the angels are now above the angels, thanks to the saving work of Christ.  This is even corroborated by 1 Cor 6:3a.

Do you not know that we are to judge angels?

Chew on that. We have angels ministering on our behalf, and why? Because we are now adopted into the royal household, and have the full rights of sonship, which includes use of the household servants, who used to be over us as guardians and managers (Gal. 4:1-3). But then Galatians 4:7:

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Heirs of what? Heirs of the world.

C.S. Lewis, in his Space Trilogy, hints that this is one of the main reasons that Satan rebelled: jealousy over the authority that mankind would eventually wield over him and his like. And I think he has a point.

Satan, an angel, had some semblance of authority over mankind, but he knew that it was not to be forever. Eventually, man would mature and come fully into his kingdom. So while he still had authority, he tempted Adam to grasp for his kingdom early, the same temptation he would eventually try on the last Adam (Matt. 4:8-9).

Satan, one of the guardians or managers set to watch over us, didn’t want us to grow up into our inheritance. So he ensured we would not…at least not without drastic measures that he couldn’t foresee.

Next, I’ll delve a little into the significance of the angels being wind and fire, as that seems to be a hinge of the structure listed above.

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The most obvious example is the one directed toward the meek, which alludes directly to Psalm 37:11.

Psalm: “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.”

Matthew: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

But notice the key difference. The “land” has now become the “world.” The potential inheritance has grown.

This is consistant with the rest of the New Testament, as we see hints that the entire earth itself is the new promised land.

Paul says that the promise to Abraham, which in the OT was couched in terms of the “land”, was really that he would be the heir of the world. And we, as his children, have the same inheritance. (Rom. 4:13)

Likewise, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:2, that the saints are to judge the world. That is, to perform kingly duties, to discern between good and evil while partaking of Jesus, the Tree of Life. That is to be expected, since Revelation 5:10 says explicitly that God has made us both kings and priests, for the purpose of ruling on the earth, which you would think is so obvious and plain written, that no Christian would deny the fact. But we Christians are experts at discounting obvious parts of the Bible, and when we do, we’re called a “scholar.”

Here’s another one. When Paul quotes the fifth commandment in Ephesians 6:2 as still applicable to children, he calls it the first commandment with a promise: “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” But here, he’s not talking about the old land of Canaan. Why would the Ephesians care about that? Here, as everywhere else in the New Testament, the promise has expanded, and “land” has become “earth.”

It shouldn’t surprise us that God has made some glorious promises for his people. They are so glorious, so gracious, and so world-changing, that its understandable that we find them hard to believe. For some reason, however, we tend to believe that just the opposite is what God has in store for the world.

Which is a just tad ungrateful. It’s like turning down a filet mignon in favor of finding dinner in the dumpster out back, and thinking you’re doing the cook a favor.

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For those who don’t want to watch the video, Stephenson, as an example, calls for building a tower at least 20 kilometers tall, which is apparently possible to do with steel, even with today’s construction technology. There are a couple of things this would accomplish.

One, it’s big. So it would be a unifying beacon or a light shining in the darkness, similar to other scientific advances that people couldn’t argue with, such as the polio vaccine and the nuclear bomb. We would continue to make a name for ourselves.

Two, for a more practical reason, it takes far less energy (and therefore less money and resources) to break the atmosphere if you start at an altitude of 20 km. This makes space travel cheaper and more common.

This type of call to arms with the promise of glory is eerily familiar. Building a tower to the heavens? Making a name for ourselves?

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen. 11:3)(ESV)

And we all know how that turned out. There is nothing new under the sun.

Before anyone accuses me of being intolerant of tall buildings or suffering from raging batophobia, let me say I have no problem with 20 kilometer tall building, or even a building 18.6 miles tall (to poke the metric system a bit). I even have some friends who live and work in tall buildings. So let’s build them. But I’d rather have reasons more interesting than the self glorification of man and the perpetuation of the species.

Also in the video, Stephenson laments the ground (his version of) science is losing, such as parents not vaccinating their kids and people denying the moon landing. How do we awaken wonder and respect again? This is a good question and a noble goal, but he’s turned left where he should have turned right. The way to awaken wonder is the same way it happened during the first scientific revolution: point to the supreme Artist and Engineer. We can’t race as fast as we can to utter meaninglessness and randomness, and then wonder why everyone is apathetic at the finish line.

I will bookend this by saying that I love Neal Stephenson as a writer. His books are inventive, funny, and thought-provoking and I will go ahead and say Anathem was the best science fiction book I’ve read in 10 years. From an entertainment and consumer standpoint, I have yet to be disappointed.

But…he is pretty much a secular humanist, which is like trying to roll up the slopes of Everest in a wheelchair, saddled with oxygen tanks that are empty. You probably don’t want to undertake the climb with such a person, or follow their advice when it comes to mountain climbing, just like you wouldn’t want to take fruit from a serpent.

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She was confused, but not upset. She waddled over to the dog, wearing a curious expression.

I took the plate from the dog’s mouth and gave it to its rightful owner…who then put the thing in her own mouth and raced off, with a look back, hoping the dog would take chase.

That was pretty much the highlight of the night, up to that point. My daughter’s desire to do what the dog did and see how it worked out caused a break out of the giggles.

It also scared the crap out of me.

Not immediately, of course. True laughter and joy demands the whole man in the moment of experience, not allowing the moment to be wasted by second guessing. But introspection can come later when the breath is caught.

One time. She saw the behavior just one time before she imitated it. Imitated a dog being a dog. She is a sponge ready to soak up anything.

And so she will imitate me. For better or worse, whatever I do, she will do.  Whoever I am, she will be a version of that person, in some way. I am one of the first instruction manuals she will read about what it means to be a human, and the lessons will stick with her forever, tattooed in permanent ink. Some days I wish they were just those cheap little tattoos that you lick to stick, and then they come off after a few baths. I don’t want her to learn those lessons.

Paul: “Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.”

Me: ….

I can’t repeat that and be honest. But I don’t get to pull myself out of the game. There are no timeouts. There are no substitutions. I don’t get to rest on the bench. She will look where I am going…and then follow.

A realization like that should make you want to beg for God’s grace and mercy, that you will imitate Christ, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of your family. And so I do. Sometimes. My prayer life isn’t exactly Christ-like, after all. Not yet, anyway.

Solomon: “I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?”

Amen Solomon.

But go on further. Who is able to govern even the littlest of His children? A single one?

It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. (Luke 17:2)(ESV)

As fathers, we each have the weight of a kingdom on our shoulders. We are responsible for those we are given, and that should get our knees to knocking a little bit. Thankfully, we can ask for the same thing Solomon asked, for who is able to govern, even over the least of these? Because as the king goes, so goes the kingdom.

May we rule wisely, like the High King. May we imitate Christ.

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Yep. I was a moron.

But honestly, I still don’t like about 80% of Christmas songs. Mainly the syrupy sweet, saccharine nonsense that threatens to overwhelm your emotional pancreas. So no thanks, Bing Crosby. I still don’t need your White Christmas, and that includes the movie about the snow and the retired general and the ski resort and the crazy tap dancing.

But give me “Joy to the World.” Fill the air with the majesty and theological richness of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Let me get caught up in the desperate plea of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

I could probably listen to (and sing along with) skillful renditions of these songs all year long.

What changed?

The music certainly didn’t. These songs are much older than I am, and I’ll bet you 13 gazillion dollars that they will still be around long after I’m dead.

There are two things that changed. First, I had to get over my stuffiness and condescension over the general celebration. But even then, I was a Christmas agnostic, shrugging my shoulders in a “live and let live” kind of way. This was not ideal, but a necessary step that performed the right kind of controlled demolition to my core assumptions.

This leads to the second and primary reason I get into the spirit: I better understand the narrative arc of creation.

The story of Jesus, beginning with the wonder and mystery of the Incarnation, really is the greatest story ever told, because it is the climax of the Story. As Christians, we should always be aware of where we are in the Story. It should be the background of all of our thinking. And like many good stories, this one is a vast, sweeping epic, and has its highs and lows.

And one of the highs is the birth of the true King. The Anointed One who would crush Israel’s enemies and the Enemy. The Lion of Judah who would go to face the giant alone. The Root of Jesse who would rise in defiance of death. But first…he had to be born.

The only peak higher than the Incarnation is the Resurrection. Songs that try and harness just a little bit of that vast sweep resonate deeply, because  it was a glorious moment filled with hope and promise…and yet we know that even then, the best is yet to come. The bow has been strung and drawn, arrow notched. The tension becomes thick. We are on the edge of our seats.

Yes, even though we know the end, we are on the edge of our seats. Because these songs, the good ones, act as a master storyteller who spin a yarn so well as to make it seem new again, doing their best to imitate the Storyteller, who is actually in the process of making ALL things new.

And so when we are taken back to that night in the City of David, we can truly say with the heavenly host,

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Because God became a man, and everything changed. And that was just the beginning.

And so that’s why I have come to like Christmas music. And not only the classics. I don’t discriminate against contemporary Christmas music, as long as it assumes and understands the weight of glory inherent in the part of the story it is trying to relate. But honestly, nothing really tops the classics.

What are your thoughts on Christmas music? What is your favorite (non-lame) song?

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But the problem with using Jubilee as justification for a socialist paradise is that the set of laws screams just the opposite.

First, they presuppose some sort of inequality in order to even be obeyed, and this is in line with the rest of Biblical revelation, including that of the rest of the Pentateuch. Just look to the Ten Commandments. “You shall not steal” and “You shall not covet” tell us two things immediately: that private property is a real thing that is to be protected, and that some will have more of it than others.

Second, the Jubilee Laws actually maintains certain inequalities and locks them in. Lev. 25:29-30 specifically makes exception for dwellings within walled cities. If one is sold and is not redeemed within a year, it would remain with the new owner in perpetuity and would NOT be release for during the Jubilee.

Not surprisingly, to find the real point of Jubilee, you just need to look at the text.

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine.” (Lev. 25:23)(ESV)

“For it is to me that the people of Israel are servants. They are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 25:55)

Both rich and poort are equal in this way: what they have is really God’s, and they both rely on his mercy for their possessions no matter the quantity. And it is the ending of servitude to each other, only to affirm the people’s total servitude, both rich and poor, toward God.

Distributing goods more fairly among a certain number of people is not the message of Jubilee. The real message is that, for goods to be distributed more fairly, everything would go back to God, and our hands would be empty. That is real fairness. That is our real equality. Anything more than destitution is a mercy.

Thanks be to God for his great mercy.

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