Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The unemployment statistics are worse than they look

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The New York Times ran an article last Friday proclaiming good news:

In the best report since the recession began two years ago, only 11,000 jobs disappeared last month, the government said on Friday, and the unemployment rate actually dipped, to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent the previous month.

Leaving aside the question of when the recession actually began, this doesn’t actually support the piece’s positive-thinking opening paragraph:

The nation’s employers not only have stopped eliminating large numbers of jobs, but appear to be on the verge of rebuilding the American work force, devastated by the recession.

“The rate of job destruction slowed” does not equal “the jobs are all about to come back,” even on its face. And here’s the kicker: what the numbers seem to say on their face isn’t what they actually say when you look at them closely. Rather, thanks to Simpson’s Paradox, the nature of aggregate statistics means that the overall unemployment rate makes things look better than they are. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Is the current economic slump worse than the recession of the early 1980s?

Measured by unemployment, the answer appears to be no, or at least not yet. The jobless rate was 10.2% in October, compared with a peak of 10.8% in November and December of 1982.

But viewed another way, the current recession looks worse, not better. The unemployment rate among college graduates is higher than during the 1980s recession. Ditto for workers with some college, high-school graduates and high-school dropouts.

So how can the overall unemployment rate be lower today but higher among each group? The anomaly is an example of Simpson’s Paradox—a common but misleading statistical phenomenon rooted in the differing sizes of subgroups. Put simply, Simpson’s Paradox reveals that aggregated data can appear to reverse important trends in the numbers being combined.The jobless rates for each educational subgroup are higher today, but the overall rate is lower because workers are more educated. There are more college graduates, who have the lowest unemployment rate. And there are fewer high-school dropouts, who have the highest unemployment rate.

“It’s the magic of weighted averages,” says Princeton University economics professor Henry Farber. “We have more skilled workers than we had before, and more-skilled workers are less susceptible to unemployment.” Still, he adds, compared with a similarly educated worker in 1983, “the worker today has higher unemployment at every education level.”

In other words, regardless of the overall statistic, whoever you are, your chances of being unemployed now are greater, the unemployment rate is higher for people like you, now than in the depths of the recession of 1982-83. Which suggests that before you buy into the NYT’s optimism, you might want to look into the underlying numbers and see if they bear that optimism out.

Diminishing returns on the Obama foreign policy

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As a presidential candidate, Sen. Obama was firmly convinced (and convinced a lot of people) that the reason for America’s unpopularity in some parts of the world was George W. Bush and his conservative policies. A vote for Obama, we were assured, would make the world like America again.

Roughly eleven months on from his inauguration, the bloom is well and truly off that rose, at least in the Arab/Muslim world.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not “unclenched their fist,” nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can’t journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can’t journey to Cairo to tell the fabled “Arab street” that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can’t tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again. . . .

In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn’t seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that’s reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

There are various reasons for this. One, which Fouad Ajami notes, is that anti-Americanism in that part of the world is useful—perhaps, indeed, psychologically necessary—as an alibi for the political and economic failures of those nations and a pressure release for the tensions and frustrations created by their autocratic, self-interested governments; having someone to blame for all that is far too valuable to be let go in return for a few pretty speeches.

As well, Ajami explains, the President’s confidence that he could make everything better by apologizing for America to everyone in sight betrayed a fundamental failure to understand Arab culture.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. “My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger,” goes one of the Arab world’s most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

It also didn’t help that in Iran, when the President was offered the choice between standing with the Iranian people protesting their oppression or standing with the anti-American religious tyrants who oppress them, he chose the tyrants. That, one suspects, will not be soon forgotten, and it’s impossible to know what the long-term effects might be.

Some might be surprised that President Obama’s approach to foreign policy is not yielding the promised results; but students of history shouldn’t be. How many horror movies do you have to watch before you learn to expect that the pretty cheerleader going alone into the dark house on a stormy night is going to end up dead? I don’t even watch horror movies, and I can see that one coming. This administration’s foreign policy is just a remake of a movie we’ve seen before; it debuted roughly 33 years ago, it was called Carter, and as Bret Stephens pointed out a couple weeks ago, it didn’t end well then, either.

An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroad. The effort includes a focus on diplomacy and peace-making, an aversion to the use of force, the selling out of old allies. The result is that within a couple of years the U.S. is more suspected, detested and enfeebled than ever.

No, we’re not talking about Barack Obama. But since the current administration took office offering roughly the same prescriptions as Jimmy Carter did, it’s worth recalling how that worked out.

Stephens explicates this through an examination of the 1979 battle over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an incident remembered little (if at all) in this country, and its aftermath—an aftermath we’re still dealing with today.

Among Muslims inclined to favor the U.S., the Carter administration’s instincts for knee-jerk conciliation and panicky withdrawals only had the effect of alienating them from their ostensible protector. Coming as it did so soon after Khomeini’s rise to power and the revolutionary fervors which it unleashed, the siege of Mecca carried the real risk of undermining pro-American regimes throughout the region. Yet American embassies were repeatedly instructed not to use their Marines to defend against intruders, as well as to pull their personnel from the country.

“The move didn’t go unnoticed among Muslim radicals,” notes Mr. Trofimov. “A chain of events unleashed by the takeover in Mecca had put America on the run from the lands of Islam. America’s foes drew a conclusion that Osama bin Laden would often repeat: when hit hard, America flees, ‘dragging its tail in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.'” It is no accident, too, that the Soviet Union chose to invade Afghanistan the following month, as it observed a vacillating president who would not defend what previously were thought to be inviolable U.S. strategic interests.

Here’s hoping that if and when America faces another such incident in the Muslim world, that the administration has the courage, will and wit to react in defense of American interests and allies, rather than to follow the Carter path of trying to be as inoffensive as possible. I am not, however, optimistic.

The old pastor didn’t do it that way . . .

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Carol Howard Merritt put up an interesting post early last week about intergenerational differences in work style and approaches to getting things done, and the ways in which those differences affect our churches.

Work looks different. And sometimes it pesters the intergenerational tensions like a chigger just below the skin. There is something annoying and wrong, although we can’t figure out just what it is. Older generations of people cannot point to anything that their younger pastor is not doing. In fact, the church might even be growing, but there is a difference in the manner in which she is getting it done that vexes them.

She lays out differences in the ways we study, the ways in which we communicate, and the work which we do; and though every pastor and every church is different from every other, as generalizations, I think the differences she identifies are quite perceptive. (Certainly her first point is all too familiar to me as something that got me into trouble at the last church I served.) It’s not a long article, but you’ll likely spend more time thinking about it than you do reading it.

Oh, and as a side note, you might pray for the Rev. Merritt, who fell last Wednesday and dislocated her shoulder.

A day that shall live in infamy

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68 years ago this morning, Japanese forces under the command of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II (though what would have happened in the Atlantic had Hitler not declared war on the US is hard to say). I appreciate Sarah Palin’s comment on this anniversary:

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the U. S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in which thousands of Americans lost their lives and our naval fleet was severely damaged. The events of that day, which President Franklin Roosevelt vowed would “live in infamy,” proved for many Americans that aggressors would not simply ignore us if we ignored them. The attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into the Second World War, and our Greatest Generation did not hesitate when asked to sacrifice for their country. American men enlisted in droves, American women went to work in the factories that became our “Arsenal of Democracy,” and many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all. They stormed the beaches at Normandy and fought on little known islands in the Pacific in the name of liberty. They don’t ask for our thanks, but I hope we will continue to give it because the sacrifice that began at Pearl Harbor is one of the many events that have defined the United States of America as “the last best hope of man on earth.”

—Sarah Palin

I agree wholeheartedly with that. The lesson of Pearl Harbor, I think, is that in this fallen, broken world, sometimes war is necessary to prevent the triumph of evil and tyranny; it wasn’t actually Edmund Burke who declared that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” but whoever said it first was wise (and in line with Burke’s thought).

Our refusal to fight others will not result in their refusal to fight us; there are nations in this world that are ruled by evil people, and if we are seen to be weak (in their terms), such powers will only be encouraged to aggression. Thus has it ever been, throughout history; thus will it ever be, until Jesus comes again. The curse of Santayana lays on all who do not accept that fact.

Rahab: A Faithful Defector

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(Joshua 2:1-14, Joshua 6:22-25; Matthew 1:4-5a)

I’ve talked to a couple people this week who thought it strange that I would do a sermon series on the women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. After all, as we read it—if we read it; most people don’t—it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to us that he’d mention a few women here and there; and of the ones he does mention, some of their stories aren’t exactly nice. But in fact, his inclusion of women is a profound break with normal practice that needs an explanation—and the fact that there’s something scandalous about every one of these women, that they weren’t the sort of people a good Jew would want in the lineage of the Messiah, is part of it. The other part, I think, is the way that God used each of them to build Messiah’s family—which in most cases was through extraordinary acts of faith on their part.

Last week, we looked at Judah’s encounter with Tamar, which led to the birth of his sons Perez and Zerah. It wasn’t long afterward that a great famine drove them and his brothers and all their family down into Egypt—where Joseph, the brother whom they had sold into slavery, had risen to be the Pharaoh’s prime minister. Though Joseph might have taken vengeance on them, instead he welcomed them (after testing them a little first), and the Pharaoh gave them the best grazing land in the kingdom for their own. As time passed, their numbers grew, until they were a powerful tribe; they were known as the Israelites after their ancestor Jacob, whom God had renamed Israel.

As their tribe grew larger, the Pharaohs who ruled Egypt began to view them as a threat. Finally, one Pharaoh tried to end the threat, first by enslaving the Israelites, and then by ordering that every boy born to them should be killed at birth. Despite this policy (which the midwives tried not to enforce), God raised up Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and back to Canaan, to the land God had promised to give to Abraham and his descendants; and by God’s grace, Moses did. And yes, I’m skipping a lot here, but we don’t have time to read all of Exodus and Numbers just now.

Anyway, as our passage this morning begins, the Israelites have reached the banks of the Jordan River, which forms much of the eastern border of the Promised Land; Moses has died, command has passed to his chief lieutenant, a man named Joshua, and the people of Israel are preparing to invade Canaan. They’ll cross the Jordan near the city of Jericho, which means that will be the first threat to their bridgehead, and the first city they’ll need to take; so Joshua sends two men ahead to spy out Jericho, its defenses and the surrounding area. They enter the city and decide to stay in the house of a prostitute named Rahab—and it should be noted, the Hebrew text is carefully worded to make it perfectly clear that they did not sleep with her, they just slept in the same house.

Rahab’s an interesting character. Clearly, she was an independent businesswoman. She’s unmarried—there’s no husband mentioned anywhere in the text—and though she has a father and brothers, they aren’t the decision-makers: Rahab runs this family. She owns the house, she runs the business, and she makes the decisions; indeed, she feels perfectly free to make a major commitment on her family’s behalf without consulting anyone. She certainly has the ability to handle the job: she thinks fast on her feet, she’s clever enough to keep the king’s messengers from finding the two spies, and whatever we might think of her deceit, she has the nerve to put her head on the chopping block for them. To lie to the king’s messengers was to lie to the king; to lie to the king and get caught was fatal. She does it without hesitation, and she gets away with it.

Like Tamar, Rahab is a strong, smart, capable woman; and like Tamar, she chose the people of God over her own people. We don’t know what about the spies caught her attention, but her speech in verses 8-13 makes it clear what won her support: the absolute conviction that God was with them, not her own people, and that they were on the winning side. To us, that might seem rather crassly opportunistic, but that misses the religious element of the conflict: she was convinced that the God of the Israelites “is God in heaven above and on earth below,” and thus that the gods of her own people were false gods. She may have been convinced by military victories, not by argument, and she may have been motivated by fear for her family, but that doesn’t make her faith any less real or praiseworthy. She could see what the rest of the city couldn’t, or wouldn’t: that these spies were on the side of the God of the world, which meant that fighting them could only bring disaster. The proper course was not to fight them but to welcome them.

Thus when the spies come to her house, she protects them and sends the king’s messengers off on a wild-goose chase; then she goes to them and confesses her faith in the God of Israel because of all he has done for his people. “Now then,” she says, and the NIV says, “because I have shown kindness to you,” which captures the sense but not the force of her statement; the key word here is the word hesed, which we’ve looked at before. Hesed, you remember, is a loaded word—it’s the word used to describe the absolute loyalty and faithfulness and unstinting love which God shows to his people with whom he has made his covenant. It gets translated “lovingkindness,” “covenant love,” “covenant faithfulness,” and other things of that sort, but none of the translations really capture its full meaning; there’s no word in English that really expresses the depths of love and commitment and faithfulness hesed entails.

Here, what Rahab says is, “Since I have done hesed to you,” preserving your life from destruction, “now you swear to me by the LORD that you in turn will do hesed to my family,” saving them from destruction as well. Basically, she wants them to treat her actions on their behalf as her making covenant with them, and through them with the whole people of Israel, and thus to make sure she and her family survive to join the people of Israel once Jericho has fallen. We might see this as her application for Israelite citizenship for herself and her family, but there’s more to it than that, because Israel is defined by its covenant relationship with God; her offered oath of allegiance is to God, not just to his people. If the spies accept it, she and her family will in every important respect cease to be Canaanites and become Israelites, heirs to all God’s promises. From the spies’ point of view, if she gets them out of this alive, they’re happy with that. She does her part, getting them out of the city and helping them get safely back to their camp; when Jericho falls, God does his part, and she and all her family are preserved.

The story of Rahab points forward to the work of Christ in a couple different ways. First, as we saw with Tamar and will see again next week with Ruth, we have a foreigner—this time with her entire family—being brought into the people of God. This fulfills in a small way God’s promise to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham, and it anticipates the day when Jesus Christ would come to fulfill that promise in earnest. Indeed, since all these women are ancestors of Jesus, each is a part of that fulfillment: because of them, when he came, he came not as a pure Jew, but as a Jew who already carried the blood of the nations in his veins.

Second, Rahab is accepted as one of the people of God because of her faith, not because she had lived an exemplary life and kept the Law. She was living in a pagan society, worshiping pagan gods, and earning a living as a prostitute—she was a long way from being a model of righteousness by Jewish standards. But whatever one might say about her life in Jericho, here’s the important thing: when she saw something better, she went for it. When she saw the true God, she knew she needed to set aside her false gods and worship him. Where others merely saw danger, she saw deliverance, and when it came within her grasp, she took hold and would not let go. She was given the choice between the way of friendship with the world and the way of friendship with God, and she chose God. For this, she is named in Hebrews 11 as one of our heroes of faith.

Note this well: her act of faith was a total change of allegiance, laying everything on the line. From the point of view of her society, the people of her world, she was a traitor; if she’d been found out, she and all her family would have been dead. But she took that step in the absolute faith that she and all her family would be dead if she didn’t act—in the utter conviction that the only path to survival, the only path to life, was to turn her back on Jericho and join up with the people of God. A few weeks ago, we heard James calling us to choose our side, to give up double-mindedness and commit completely to God; in Rahab, we see what that looks like. She set herself apart from her friends, neighbors, customers, government, society, everybody; she chose God over all of them. They would no doubt have said that she betrayed them, though one imagines that she would have saved some of them if there had been any way to do so. She chose God over her entire life—she turned her back on everything she had ever known, and gave up everything she had, except her family, whom she brought with her—and she never looked back, because she had no doubt that what she gained in return was worth it.

Hymn for Advent—more than I knew

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Of the Father’s Love Begotten

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

At His Word the worlds were framèd; He commanded; it was done:
Heaven and earth and depths of ocean in their threefold order one;
All that grows beneath the shining
Of the moon and burning sun, evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion, death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

This is He Whom seers in old time chanted of with one accord;
Whom the voices of the prophets promised in their faithful word;
Now He shines, the long expected,
Let creation praise its Lord, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing, evermore and evermore!

Righteous judge of souls departed, righteous King of those alive,
On the Father’s throne exalted none in might with Thee may strive;
Who at last in vengeance coming
Sinners from Thy face shalt drive, evermore and evermore!

Thee let old men, thee let young men, thee let boys in chorus sing;
Matrons, virgins, little maidens, with glad voices answering:
Let their guileless songs re-echo,
And the heart its music bring, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!

This text (with one slight alteration on my part to adjust the rhyme scheme for shifting English pronunciation) is courtesy of Dan Clendenin. All I’ve ever seen in hymnals is verses 1, 6, and 9 of the above; it’s interesting how much theology they cut out, and how much deeper is Prudentius’ exploration of the mystery of the Creator becoming the created. I admit, you’re not likely to get most congregations to sing nine verses of a hymn . . . but it’s too bad.

The original of this hymn is a Latin poem from around the turn of the fifth century; I presume the above text is all John Mason Neale’s translation. Of the poet, Aryeh Oron writes,

Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (whose name is some times shown with a prefix of “Marcus”) was a Roman Christian poet. He was born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain). The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta Saragossa, Tarraco Tarragona, or Calagurris Calahorra. He came of a distinguished Christian family and received an excellent education, studied law, became an office-holder and rose rapidly, was twice governor of a province, and finally received high office at the court of Theodosius. Towards the end of his life (possibly around 392) Prudentius retired from public life to become an ascetic, fasting until evening and abstaining entirely from animal food. He decided to devote himself to poetry in the service of religion and the Church. He collected the Christian poems written during this period and added a preface, which he himself dated 405.

Neale set this text to a plainsong melody from the 11th or 12th century; the tune is now usually referred to as DIVINUM MYSTERIUM (Divine Mystery), though the CCEL page identifies it as CORDE NATUS EX PARENTIS, after the first line of Prudentius’ poem.

The pursuit of God

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I would be willing to bet that if you read the Bible much, you have a favorite part. For some, it will be the letters of Paul; others love the gospels best, for their stories of Jesus; and still others are drawn first to the Psalms. For my part, I love all those, and others, but I go first to the prophets, and especially to Isaiah. I’m not sure why that is, but I think our vacation to the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona a few years ago gave me an insight: like standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon or inside Double Arch, in the prophets I am captured by the power of God’s imagination, and the power with which it communicates his love and his beauty.

At the same time, though, reading the prophets can be more than a little frightening. I say this especially as a preacher, for anyone who stands to preach the Word is exercising a small part of the prophetic ministry and calling (which is one reason why preaching is such a dangerous act, at least for the preacher). The prophets are people who have been captured by God to a greater degree than almost anyone else, and in their impassioned calls to the people of God, we see the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness more clearly than almost anywhere else. We also see, just as clearly, God’s absolute determination to cross that gulf with his love and redeem us despite ourselves, a determination which led to the birth of the Son of God, and his death on the cross.

And of all the prophets, I think we see most clearly the lengths to which God will go—and to which he will command his prophets to go—in Hosea. This is a deep and remarkable book, and a remarkable story. It begins with this command: “Go marry an adulterous woman and have children of adultery, for the land has been unfaithful to Yahweh.” So he goes and marries Gomer, and they have a son; and then she has two more children, and while we can’t be sure, the text suggests that maybe they weren’t Hosea’s. Things escalate, and she abandons her husband and children for her lovers; and in all this, God tells Hosea, the pain and hurt of the prophet’s experience, the betrayal he suffers, mirror God’s experience with Israel. Just as Hosea’s wife has gone chasing after other men—pretty much any man she thinks she can get something from, it sounds like—so Israel has gone chasing after other gods.

Now, we know how this sort of story ends—in divorce court—and that’s pretty much how it ended in Hosea’s day, too. But that’s not what happens here. Instead, we see Hosea’s determination to woo his wife back, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered, and to rebuild their marriage into what it should have been; and through him, through this acted parable, this enacted prophecy, of the love of God, we see God’s determination to do the same with Israel. And so God tells Hosea, “Go love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”; and so he does.

I have to wonder what Gomer thought of this. Here she’s run away from her husband, she’s living with her lover, and one day her husband shows up on the doorstep and says, “I’d like to buy my wife back.” And what does she hear from the guy? Protestations of love? Demands that Hosea leave and never come back? No, she hears, “Sure—how much?” That can’t have been good for her ego. But on the other hand—she’s left her husband, she’s shamed him before all his people, she’s run off to be with another man—and yet, despite all that, her husband not only still wants her back, he’s willing to pay a steep price to get her back. That had to have made her look at Hosea in a new way.

So what does she make of it all? How does she respond to this costly demonstration of her husband’s love? We don’t know. We know what Hosea tells her, but we don’t know how she responds—we don’t know what becomes of them. We’re given the assurance that at some point in the future, Israel will return to God, that that relationship will be restored; but whether the same applied to Gomer and Hosea, we aren’t told. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished, wondering what happened next.

Now, strange as that is, I think there’s good reason why Hosea’s story stops in the middle; and if you’ve been wondering why we’re talking about this on the first Sunday of Advent, here’s the reason. You see, Jesus does much the same thing in the story of the prodigal son and his brother—we’re left hanging at the end with the father’s appeal to his older son, with no hint given of the older son’s response. The reason for that was that the older son represented the Pharisees and their allies, and it was up to them to make that response. The story—the real story—wasn’t finished. In the same way here, the deeper story wasn’t finished; telling the end of Hosea and Gomer’s story would have given it a false sense of closure. But this way, we’re drawn in to try to finish the story ourselves.

That’s important, because the deeper story here is the story of Advent. Remember, the season of Advent is a season of waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ—preparation to celebrate his first coming, which we do on Christmas, and preparation for the time when he will come again. The cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, O come, Immanuel! Come and buy us back, come and set us free!” And the message of Advent is that he did come and buy us back, at a far greater cost than just silver, barley, and wine—he bought us back and set us free at the cost of his own life; and having done so, he is coming again to take us home with him.

Now, we all know this, or at least, we’ve all heard it before; but I wonder if we’ve ever thought about what this really means for our lives. I hadn’t, until a colleague of mine gave me a copy of the book Furious Pursuit. I have a number of quibbles with the book, but I still highly recommend it, because the audacious truth at the center of this book is something we desperately need to hear: Christianity isn’t about us chasing God, it’s about God chasing us. It isn’t about us earning his love, it isn’t about us being good enough or obeying hard enough; to pull from another colleague of mine, from a sermon that nearly put me on the floor, “We hear God saying, Obey me, obey me, obey me, but that’s not right. Yes, God wants our obedience, but that comes later. What God is really saying is Trust me, trust me, trust me; and as we learn to trust, we learn to obey.” Christianity isn’t about you straining every muscle to hold on to God, it’s about the fact that God will never let you go—never—and that whether you run to him, run away, or just try to ignore him, he will never stop pursuing you, because he loves you.

That’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who loves you so much, who loves all of us so much, that even though we had rejected him, he came down to this earth, looked the devil square in the eye, and said, “I’d like to buy my people back.” We were in rebellion, we had set ourselves against him as his enemies; despite all that, at the right time, he died for us, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered. The Son of God traded in his throne and his crown for dirty straw and dirtier diapers; he gave up all the wealth of heaven for the poverty of homelessness; he set aside all the power and honor of deity to accept the powerlessness and shame of a criminal’s execution on a torture device. And he did it all for you.

What will you do?

“All to Jesus I surrender . . .”

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Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses. Yes, let us ask whether we have learned to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving how Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us or done to us is lost and swallowed up in the thought that Jesus is all.

 —Andrew Murray

Amen. May it be so.

HT: Ray Ortlund

One unique incomparable Savior

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—
true God and at the same time
truly human and truly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,1

who was given us
to set us completely free
and to make us right with God.2

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As Reformed Christians, we affirm that salvation is all of Christ and none of us, because no one but he could have accomplished it. He is unique, and not in any minor way; he is the only one who could encompass the work that needed to be done and the price that needed to be paid so that we might be saved, and no one else could even have begun to approach it. We don’t have to be worthy, we have no claim on pride in our own salvation, we cannot undo or lose this great gift—it is all of Christ, bestowed on us through his Holy Spirit by his incomparable grace and unfathomable love toward us who were his enemies, until he redeemed us despite ourselves and made us his friends.

Exploring The Westing Game

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My eldest daughter’s class is doing a unit on mysteries, and one of the books the class is reading is Ellen Raskin‘s novel The Westing Game. My daughter’s reading a different one, because she’s already read that one—I suggested it to her, because it’s one of those books I loved as a child and still love now. On a whim, I looked Raskin up on Wikipedia, and was interested to find that she had donated the manuscript of The Westing Game to her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin; they have made portions of it available online, accompanied by audio of Raskin talking through the manuscript. I haven’t had time to fully explore this yet, but I’m looking forward to it.