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Credo ut Intelligam

~ I believe so that I may understand

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Monthly Archives: March 2016

Risen, Indeed

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Biblical Studies, Theology

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Corinthians, Easter, Jesus Christ, Resurrection, Theology

He is risen!

So we greet one another on Easter Sunday.  We will be blessed to grasp the joy that truly underlies these words.  I’m afraid that too often Christians speak about the resurrection as though it were merely an afterthought to Good Friday, Jesus’ happy ending or the proof that He accomplished His work.  It is both of these things, but it is also the very joy of the gospel.

Paul was anxious that the Corinthian believers should understand the place of the resurrection in the Christian faith.  Beginning in 1 Cor. 15, he described to them how utterly necessary the resurrection of Christ is: without it they have no hope, no forgiveness, and no future.

For the resurrection of Jesus Christ means new life for all who belong to Christ and are united with Him by faith.  His cross and resurrection together make the center of His saving work.  Because He rose from the dead, all those who trust in Him are even now spiritually made alive, risen from being dead in sin, and are guaranteed a future consummation of the resurrection life when He returns.  Easter is no afterthought; Easter makes all the difference in the world.

He is risen!

He is risen, indeed!

Conversations in Self-Reflective Idolatry

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Books, Contra Mundum, Theology

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Books, ELCA, God, Idolatry, Paganism, Theology

Fortress Press, the publishing house of the ELCA, has a forthcoming book that appears to be a piece of straight-up paganism.  Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology–a window, I expect, into the sort of idolatry that passes in some circles for theology.

Now, this is not a book review.  I haven’t read the book, and I don’t intend to unless for some unexpected reason it should be relevant to my parishioners; life, they tell me, is short.  To all appearances this is the sort of book I should urge people not to buy–we don’t want to reward the publishers for this sort of thing.  But do not think I am telling people not to read it; perhaps the book is good for a lark, in an ‘I laugh only to keep from weeping and anathematizing’ sense.

No, what I have to say right now is simply based on impressions, the description of the book to which I have linked.  To all appearances, at least, the book is an exercise in idolatry.  We have here two ‘theologians’ engaged in a conversation with the goal of dethroning the God revealed in the Bible–the one true God who is indeed transcendent and omnipotent and–to avoid for the moment parsing the relationship of God and gender–consistently refers to Himself with masculine pronouns.

What is God to be replaced with, in the spirituality advocated by the authors?  One appears to advocate a feminist panentheism, the other a sort of pantheism. Both are unambiguously pagan ideas.

Of the host of questions and issues that present themselves when we see an ostensibly Christian publishing house producing such a book, I would like to reflect on two:

1. Why on earth should one want to reject God as revealed in Scripture?

It seems that it all has to do with comfort.  They reject the God of the Scriptures because He doesn’t meet their perceived notions of who God should be or what will work in the world.  The chapter title “Finding a God I Can Believe In” is tremendously forthright about the idolatry being embraced here.  ‘I can’t believe in the God who has revealed Himself, so I will construct a God I can believe in.’

2. What, then, is the source of theology?

The blurb gives no indication that they try to build their case on the Scriptures in any meaningful way.  Instead, the description indicates that their experiences are the source of their theology: what has my life led me to think and feel is true?  Absent from such a hermeneutic is an understanding of the Fall, and the concomitant healthy skepticism about the capacity of the human mind and heart to faithfully understand God apart from His special revelation.

God created us in His image, and we’ve been trying ever since to turn the tables.  But all our efforts are vain and less than worthless.  We must know God as He truly is, as He has revealed Himself to be, or we will not know Him at all.  It is no wonder that the theological method modeled here has led these authors to pagan idolatry.

Exalted in Strength

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations

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God, Omnipotence

“Be exalted, O LORD, in your strength; we will sing and praise your might.”

-Psalm 21:13

We do not often enough praise God for His strength.  Perhaps this is because we forget how entirely dependent we are on Him, every moment of every day, for every breath of life.  The sun rises in its rhythm and we take a new day as though the universe really were a machine, able to run by itself.  We have let ourselves be tricked by the ordinariness of life into becoming functional naturalists.

But God is strong.  By His strength we live, our bodies move and our minds think and warm sunshine falls on us.  All these ‘natural laws’ depend completely upon His strength.  Be exalted, O Lord, you who are strong for us.

Even more, God has exercised His strength uniquely for His covenant people–that is, all who belong to Christ.  The strength of our Triune Creator worked also our redemption.  All the spiritual laws of our adoption, inheritance, forgiveness and salvation depend completely upon His strength.  Be exalted, O Lord, in your uncontestable strength.

We do not exalt God for our own benefit; but if we did dwell upon the strength of the Lord and give Him the praise that is His due, I think we would find a pleasant side effect: the worries of our life would seem smaller, the challenges facing us minuscule, as we gaze upon the awesome might of God.

Be exalted, O Lord.

Westcott Turns the Tables!

18 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Quotes

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“It has been said that this mode of procedure is ‘unscientific.’  The charge is vague, but as far as I understand it, I feel unable to admit it.  It is certainly ‘unscientific’ to conduct an inquiry under the guidance of suppressed assumptions, as, for example, that miracles are impossible, or that the irreconcilableness of some of the phenomena of the Life of the Risen Lord with the phenomena of our present life proves that the view given of the Risen Life is legendary.”

-B.F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord, Sixth Edition, London: Macmillian & Co., 1898, p.xi.

Westcott

Westcott, looking smug because he just zinged materialists.

Quieted by His Love

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations

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Grace, Love, Mercy, Zephaniah

The prophets speak an interplay of judgment and mercy, sometimes moving from one to the other with startling suddenness.  In Zephaniah severe warning comes, for both Judah and her enemies.  But in the end the Lord gives His people a promise of grace in some of the warmest terms in Scripture.

“The LORD has taken away your punishment,” He says to Jerusalem (3:15).  What shall they expect of God now?  I think we expect that after punishment is done we’re in a stigmatized probationary status, or at best we’re on neutral footing.

The grace of God is extravagant.

Instead of shame His people are given security and the blessing of His presence and reign.  Far from neutral footing, neither favored nor unfavored by God, here is the image of His restoration:

“The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”

How often do we reckon with that richness of grace?  These words are spoken to Jerusalem, but the promise may be fairly apprehended by the people of God as His words of love for those He redeems.  When God reconciles a people with Himself they become the objects of His delight.  A prayer: that our restless souls would come to Him with every fear and care, and learn what it means to be quieted by His love.

Actually, it doesn’t…

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Biblical Studies

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Biblical Interpretation, Death Penalty, Exegesis, Exodus, Pope Francis

Last month, Pope Francis gave a speech where he called for an end to the death penalty worldwide.  It’s not my purpose here to discuss that broader issue, but just to make a small point about the biblical argument the pope used.

“The commandment ‘You shall not kill,’ has absolute value and applies to both the innocent and the guilty,” the pope said.  If that’s true, it certainly is a knock-down argument in favor of abolishing the death penalty, as far as Christians are concerned.

But is it true?

The commandment is found in Exodus 20:13.  Numerous bible versions give the translation the pope offered, “You shall not kill”, or similar, (RSV, ASV, DRA, KJV, CEB, BRG).  However, it is much more often translated “You shall not murder”, or similar, (ESV, NIV, MEV, NET, NASB, WEB, etc).  The reason why is easy to see.

When God spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai, He didn’t just give the Ten Commandments, He said a great deal more.  And in the very next chapter of Exodus, God who had said “You shall not kill” goes on to say “But if a man schemes and kills another man deliberately, take him away from my altar and put him to death” (21.14), “Anyone who attacks his father or his mother must be put to death” (21.15), “Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught must be put to death” (21.16), and so on.

I’m not trying to address the question of how the Mosaic law applies to modern American society any more than I’m trying to address the death penalty.  What I simply wish to point out is that the command “You shall not kill” is certainly not absolute, and certainly does not apply to the guilty as well as to the innocent.  God’s command spoke of murder, not of capital punishment nor of killing in war–which are both instances of killing that God commanded, at least in that particular context.

When we read the bible, we must read passages in their context.  If we do not, we risk misusing the Word of God to promote our own agenda, rather than humbly aligning ourselves with what the Word of God actually says.

He Saw the Light

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations

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Acts, Christ, Gospel, Paul

The story of Paul’s conversion has such tremendous power as a direct intervention of God that so suddenly turned a man from zealous persecutor to fervent missionary.  There’s nothing wishy-washy about Paul.  At first he’s convinced that Christians are a blasphemous sect that must be stamped out, and he gets authorization to go hunting them; he has a passionate drive to wipe out the Church.

Then, suddenly, he’s preaching the gospel.  There’s hardly any time in between.  Once Paul becomes convinced that Jesus really is the Christ, he unabashedly begins to proclaim this truth.  His knowledge is now in the service of the Lord, and so potent are his expositions of the truth that in one city after another the Jews seek his death (Acts 9:23-30).

What stands at the crux of this rapid transition from persecutor to preacher?  He saw the light–a light from Heaven, and heard the voice of the Lord calling him to account.  His persecution of Christians was, in fact, persecution of Christ.  Let the enemies of the Church take notice: they are enemies of the Church’s Lord, it is He they persecute, and His triumph is assured.

But Christ met Paul not only with blinding power and conviction, but with unfathomable grace.  Paul became captive to the Lord of the gospel, to his everlasting joy.

We are not given that same visible and audible encounter with the risen Lord, but the same mercy reaches out to us.  Like Paul, we too may see the light and be captured by the gospel and the Lord of the gospel…to our everlasting joy.

1 Corinthians: A Very Brief Introduction

11 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Biblical Studies

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Background, Bible, Corinthians

This is a little introduction I wrote for church:

Context on 1 Corinthians

“Context is king.”[1]

“A text without a context is a pretext for a proof-text.”[2]

What’s a Corinthian?

A Corinthian is somebody who lives in the city of Corinth.  It would be like if all of us who live in Springfield were called Springfieldians.  So 1 Corinthians is called that because it’s the first letter to the Corinthians.

Ancient_Corinth

Ancient Corinth has deteriorated somewhat since Paul’s day.[3]

            But where is this Corinth?  Corinth sits on the little strip of land that connects the big southernmost piece of Greece with the northern part.  It was a great cross-roads, strategically located for trade.  Two hundred years before, the Romans had destroyed the city, but Julius Caesar re-established it and the place became populated by folks from all over.  So we have a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis, wealthy, politically important, and filled with immorality and all manner of pagan beliefs—though there was a Jewish population, and shortly after Paul arrived, a Christian church.[4]

Who Wrote 1 Corinthians?

The apostle Paul.  For some time now, skeptical Biblical scholars have challenged the authorship of various books of the Bible, but 1 Corinthians is usually conceded to be Paul’s writing.[5]  But even if it were disputed, there are two good reasons for us to maintain that Paul wrote it.

The first reason is good, that Christian tradition claims Paul as the author of this letter.  Now, tradition doesn’t have a binding authority over us; tradition has to be tested against greater authorities, especially the Scriptures.  But if there aren’t substantial reasons for questioning Christian tradition, we should take it seriously.

The second reason is great, that the letter says Paul wrote it.  The first thing he does in the letter is introduce himself: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes” (1 Cor. 1:1).

Hold on a minute!  Why would we say Paul wrote it, if the greeting says “Paul…and our brother Sosthenes”?  Because though he includes Sosthenes in the introduction, the whole letter is written from the perspective of Paul, and he consistently speaks to them in the first person singular—“I always thank God for you” (1:4), “When I came to you” (2:1), “To the rest I say this” (7:12), Am I not an apostle?” (9:1), etc.  At the conclusion of the letter, he says “I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand” (16:21).  So Sosthenes was included in the greeting, but Paul wrote the letter.

256px-Linschoten_pinx_-_N_Verkolje_fec_et_exc_-_apostle_Paul

The apostle Paul, just chillin’.[6]

As an interesting aside, we read in Acts 18:17 about a Sosthenes who was a Jewish leader who opposed Paul when he ministered in Corinth.  If this is the same Sosthenes, then it hints at a wonderful unknown story of conversion of a former opponent of the gospel, like Paul himself, and makes perfect sense why Paul would make special mention of him when writing to the Corinthians.

But to come back to our bottom line, 1 Corinthians says Paul wrote it, and is consistently presented from his perspective.  So the authority of the Scriptures, God’s inspired and fully truthful word, stands behind the claim that Paul wrote this letter.  That alone settles the question.

To Whom Did He Write?

As the name of the letter implies, he was writing to the believers in the city of Corinth.  At the letter’s beginning, Paul addresses the recipients of his letter: “To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours” (1:2).  This is a theologically rich address!  Kinda makes you feel pretty lame for addressing your emails, “Dear John” or whatever, doesn’t it?[7]  But at the very least we have a clear picture, that the immediate letter of the audience wasn’t everybody in Corinth, but only those Corinthians who belonged to Christ and called Him Lord.

The letter is for us, too, since we call on the same Lord and these words have been included in the Scriptures for all God’s people.  But since we’re not the original audience, we have to interpret carefully whether a passage applies to us in the same way as it did to those first century Corinthian believers.  1 Corinthians 2:12 does.  1 Corinthians 4:18 does not.

Did He Know the Corinthian Believers?

Yeah, totally.  In Acts 18 we read that Paul went as a missionary to Corinth and preached the gospel there.  This was obviously before he wrote the letter, because Acts 18:8 tells us that “Crispus, the synagogue ruler, and his entire household believed in the Lord”, and Paul refers to him in 1 Corinthians 1:14.  Paul spent a year and a half in Corinth (Acts 18:11) and many people there came to know the Lord through his ministry (18:8).  So it stands to reason that many of the members of the Corinthian church, who received the letter, knew Paul personally as the one who led them to faith.

When Did He Write 1 Corinthians?

Clues pieced together by the historical evidence for Gallio, an official mentioned in Acts 18, suggest that Paul wrote the letter around the year 55, or possibly 56.[8]

Hmm, interesting.  Is that B.C. or A.D.?

Uh, do you really need to ask?

From Where?

The city of Ephesus, as Paul says in 16:8.  After his ministry in Corinth Paul went to Ephesus (Acts 18:18-19), then on through other regions before returning to Ephesus (Acts 19), which is probably the period during which he wrote 1 Corinthians.[9]

Why?

Why…what?

Why did he write 1 Corinthians?

Oh.  Lots of reasons.  Overall, the purpose seems to be to address certain troublesome problems the church in Corinth was dealing with.  Those problems include: division within the church (chapters 1-4), immorality (chapters 5-6), questions about marriage (chapter 7) and food sacrificed to idols (chapters 8-10), proper conduct in worship (chapters 11-14), and denial by some Corinthians of the resurrection of the dead (chapter 15).

So it is a letter addressing a lot of specific issues that the Corinthians were wrestling with.  But this doesn’t mean it has nothing to say to us today.  God’s truth is timeless, although it is often applied to specific situations.  Look again at that list of problems the church at Corinth was dealing with, and you’ll see that the matter of food sacrificed to idols may be the only one not apparent as a challenge being faced by the American church in the 21st century.  But even through that situation, though not strictly analogous to our own, God instructs us in how to honor Him and love one another.


[1] Lots of people have said this.  Who knows who made it up.

[2] New Testament scholar D.A. Carson says that his father originated this phrase.

[3] Image By Ploync (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

[4] On Corinth, see Carson and Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, Zondervan 2005, pp. 419-420.

[5] Carson and Moo, 419.

[6] By Linschoten pinx; Nicolaas Verkolje fec et exc (Nicolaas Teeuwisse) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[7] Unless, of course, you are in fact writing a ‘dear John’ letter.  In that case, simplicity is probably preferable.

[8] Carson and Moo, 448.

[9] See Carson and Moo, 448.

Retrospective: The Larycia Hawkins Affair

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Contra Mundum

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God, Islam, Larycia Hawkins, Pluralism, Theology

In the wake of the drama surrounding former Wheaton professor Larycia Hawkins, I offer this retrospective.  The way I see it Dr. Hawkins started out just wanting to express solidarity with Muslims, fearing that because of Islamic terrorists like ISIS there would be backlash against all Muslims.  Fair enough.  But she sent two wrong signals in doing this.

1) She decided to wear the hijab as part of her Advent worship.  I’m not an expert on Islam, but I understand that the hijab is not merely an Arabic cultural garment, it is a Muslim religious garment, and wearing it suggests that you worship Allah, which is extremely inappropriate for any Christian; to the extent that it is deliberate, might it be considered apostasy?  Wheaton decided to ignore this, which was politically wise but I think was a theological mistake.  I would expect a professor at an evangelical school to be disciplined for wearing the hijab, just as I would expect a professor at a Muslim school to be disciplined or fired for wearing a cross–especially as part of their worship for Ramadan.

2) She tweeted that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.  I think at the beginning this was just poorly thought through, but instead of choosing to back off the statement when challenged she doubled down, and forced a confrontation about it.  In her tweet, she defended this theological statement by appeal to Pope Francis (?!).  Francis is not the most theologically discerning of popes in the first place.  In the second place, he’s the pope.  I thought we were protesting that whole Roman Catholic thing?  Not a good authority figure for an evangelical to pick.

Then she appealed for further support to Miroslav Volf; I’ve heard him called an evangelical, and I don’t know enough about him to say for sure, but I have my doubts–he seems more mainline to me.  In any case, he does have better scholarly credentials than Pope Francis–and he is, at least, a Protestant.  In fact, this issue is a major area of his scholarship.  His basic argument, in my understanding, is that just because Muslims don’t believe in the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and all the other things they disagree with about Christianity, doesn’t mean they don’t worship the same God.  They worship the same God, they just have a lot of mistaken ideas about Him.

Volf himself entered the fray on Dr. Hawkins’ behalf, expressing this position–but more importantly, he demonstrated the level of his commitment to fair discussion by publicly slandering the Wheaton College administration, insisting that if they thought differently than him about this it was motivated not by genuine theological disagreement but by anti-Muslim bigotry.  It was a tremendous display of either hubris or absolute confusion because of the heavily politicized culture we live in.  He got called out for it in First Things (much more gently than he deserved), and like Dr. Hawkins he doubled down with a lame, “well, I could be wrong…but I’m not, the only reason I can think of that anyone would disagree with me on this is that they’re bigots.”  So, there’s Volf for you.

But what about his argument?  Do Muslims worship the true God, they’re just very confused about Him?  I think if we’re going to say that, we would have to say that every religion, at least every monotheistic religion, really worships the true God as long as they believe one thing about Him that Christians also teach.  So if I create my own religion, and tell you that I worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt, the God of Joshua and Daniel…who is also an enormous and delicious pepperoni pizza, I can say to you “we worship the same God.”  And you say to me, “no we don’t!”  And I say, “sure we do, we both worship the God of Abraham” and you say to me, “no, we don’t, because my God is a Trinity, immortal, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, etc…and your god is a pepperoni pizza!”  Well, I could go on with this silliness.  My point is that to the extent that the claim to worship the same God is true, to that same extent it’s almost meaningless.  And I think the claim is meant to mean something, something significant, something that creates a sense of solidarity.

In the end, I look at the Scriptures and I see gods who shared certain characteristics with the Christian God; Baal, for instance, was thought to have power over the skies.  The true God has power over the skies.  So did God regard worshipers of Baal as worshiping Him?  No, He regarded them as worshiping idols, in opposition to worshiping Him.  The story of Elijah on Mt. Carmel expresses this eloquently.  That’s why I think Volf, and Dr. Hawkins, are wrong, and that being wrong on this matter is equating God with an idol.

Now, as I thought about this matter, over time, two questions troubled me.  Providentially, the Gospel Coalition put out excellent answers to what I consider the thorniest aspects of the issue:

What about the Jews?

What about the Athenian “unknown god”?

So, the Wheaton administration went forward, and set in play a process that could lead to Dr. Hawkins’ termination.  Some students protested and expressed support for her–well, protesting is the thing to do when you’re a college student.  Far more disappointing is that some faculty took a stand by Dr. Hawkins; their concerns may have been more about due process and academic freedom than theological agreement with her statement, but nonetheless it sends the wrong message.

One of them in particular was willing to be quoted in that ultra-liberal standard, Religion News.  As might be expected, race and gender are brought in by those who wish to impugn the administration’s motives.  But now a Wheaton professor has stooped to the level of assuming bad faith on the part of the administration–if he qualifies it with the suggestion that it may be unintentional.  How very penetrating his insight must be, to see through people’s actions to their subconscious motivations.  Granted he’s a psychology professor, but my wife has insisted to me that a degree in psychology does not confer the ability to read minds.  Perhaps only when you get a doctorate?

But a couple of questions come to mind:

A) Is the truth really incapable of surmounting gender and racial differences?  Isn’t it possible that propositions (such as “Jesus is God” or “Allah is not God”) can transcend these boundaries and be understood and affirmed by people of any race or gender?  Aren’t there Christians of every race and both genders who would agree that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God?

B) Is Mangis correct to identify the problem as Hawkins not sounding like a white male American evangelical?  Consider the two luminaries she appealed to first in defense of her position: Pope Francis (white, male, not American, not evangelical), Miroslav Volf (white, male, American–but Croatian by birth, evangelical?).  It seems her position has a very fine white male pedigree.  The media gives ample evidence of how American it is.  So perhaps the real question is whether her statements sound like the views of an evangelical–which, I believe, has been the problem all along.

And, in the end, the titanic clash wound down, with Wheaton and Dr. Hawkins deciding to go their separate ways.  In my opinion, it leaves the door far too open to the idea that she wasn’t wrong to say what she did, or that the administration was wrong to discipline her.  But that’s where things have landed.

 

Glorious

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations

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Creation, Glory, God, Humanity, Mercy, Power

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

So begins–and ends–the 8th Psalm.  Bookmarked by this exultation, David marvels a the greatness of God’s creation; and especially how, in light of this greatness, God has given such honor to human beings, who are nothing next to Him.

We’re inclined to make our achievements a source of pride.  Mastery over the created environment perhaps more typically makes humans see ourselves as large.  But the psalmist finds humility even in rulership.  Seeing that God has given people headship over the created world directs David’s thoughts not to the greatness of humans–glorious among creatures–but of God, our incomparable Creator.

He is glorious.  What a wonder is this created cosmos we live in, how exquisitely crafted from the tiniest of molecular details to the spreading vastness of galaxies.  And He is gracious from the very first, giving His human creatures headship over the world He made, despite our smallness.

The intertwined excellences of God’s power and grace that are showcased in the drama of redemption display themselves even in creation.  This is the might and character of the Holy One.

Glorious.

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