Month: January 2007

I am four days into reading the Bible in a year and am already a few chapters behind. These plans, as we all know, create a tension. On one end I feel pulled upward to read more Scripture and a variety at that (4 chapters a day, 2 from each testament). I get more biblical information. On the other end, I am pulled downward, to center in less Scripture (a few verses). I get more meditation. We have all heard pastors talk about the value of reading large amounts of Scripture. Why? Because we tend to get the whole picture a little more clearly, and therefore, the reasoning goes, we comprehend the little bits better. Seeing the parts in light of the whole.

The tension that arises, however, is do we sacrifice quality for quantity, meditation for information? Mortimer Adler’s words come to mind: There are three purposes for reading–information, entertainment, and understanding. Most people never make it to the third. Is it possible to read four chapters a day, from different testaments, genres, and authors and not sacrifice understanding? By taking in so much information do we glut ourselves from ever reading meditation? In The Book Shop, Penelope Fitzgerald writes about a farmer’s cows whose teeth become so dull, that they can no longer masticate. As a result, they don’t get their nutrients and end up dying of malnutrition? Is the reading the Bible in a year a deadly diet? Does quantity have to trump quality, information understanding?

In Genesis 1-2, I have been reminded of the perfect yet incomplete act of creation. God formed and populated the unruly, dark, formless and void with orderly light and life. God sang with rhythm–harmony and melody. Night and day, water and earth were divided, but complemented. The steady beat of order pounded out. Sun and moon over day and night. Birds and fish over air and water. Cattle and creeping things over the ground. The sweet solo, Eden, and duet man and woman placed in the garden to cultivate and populate creation. God forever over all and in all. But creation was incomplete. Fruit did not fall of trees and babies didn’t spring up from the ground. Work was required to cultivate and poplulate, not just Eden but the entire earth! That was, after all, Adam’s responsiblity. Clearly, man was to finish what God had begun–an entire world filled with his image and order, through beauty and culture.

In Ezra 1-2, I have been reminded of that the order continued but amidst disorder and disobedience. The corporate Adam, Israel, failed to be fruitful and multiply and rule and subdue with integrity and devotion to God. Exile followed. Ezra 1 recalls the return of Israel from exile to Jerusalem to build the Lord a house, a temple, a place where God and man could meet and a city from which the orderly purposes of God and creation could flow. The fruits of culture are gathered for the rebuliding–gold, silver, goods, cattle, valuables. Even a pagan king participated. People were assigned tasks to carry out the rebuilding, a microcosm of what Adam was commanded to carry out on a macroscale. As people streamed to Jerusalem, cities flourished and culture was created. The law was opened and order established.

Matthew 1 reminds me that Israel failed, along with Adam. It begins with the geneaology of Jesus, the Messiah, promised in Gen 3.15 who would crush evil and de-creation, promoting light and life even in exchange for the dimming of his own. A sordid and splendid family history–kings, harlots, servants, adulterers, and a birth surrounded by controversy. Yet Jesus would remain pure, restore order, and release from exile all who would turn from evil and embrace him–the good and beautiful–participating in his work to put creation back on track, peopled and cultivated with beauty and order.

Does reading a lot of biblical information preclude meditation and worship? Hardly. To draw that conclusion is to confuse the cows’ diet with their dulled teeth. What we need is the good grass of his Word and sharp teeth to chew over the chunks of creation and redemption. Whether we are reading a chapter or a verse, the whole story should stand forth as one of wonderful beauty and order, creation and redemption in and through none other than Jesus. Looking through the lens of Matthew 1, I marvel at creation, God and the future with deeper awe. I consider the eternal worth of all men, the glorious destiny of this creation, and the wisdom of a ineffable God, who has drawn me into this grand story through revealed information and renewed understanding.

He’s new to me. I heard him last night on the way back to the mall to find my lost wallet with my Xmas gift cards. At 9:30 pm, driving through the pouring rain to a location 15 minutes away from our apartment, I pondered the providence of losing my commercial credit of roughly $150. I flipped through radio stations, mingling the static with prayer, and landed on “Sweetly Broken” by Jeremy Riddle. This proved to be a sweet providence–well worth the loss of time and money. This song surges from sweet piety to a simple, powerful reminder of the Mercy, Joy & Justice of the Cross. I was reminded of the inordinate wealth of my new creation inheritance and sweetly broken.

Sweetly Broken Video

Oh, and found my wallet, sweet..but not sweeter.

With its monster-selling Vertigo tour complete, U2 is ready to reinvent itself, frontman Bono said during a BBC Radio interview earlier this week. “Our band has certainly reached the end of where we’ve been at for the last couple of albums,” he said. “I want to see what else we can do with it, take it to the next level; I think that’s what we’ve got to do.”Asked by interviewer Jo Whalley if that might mean a move away from rock’n’roll, Bono replied, “We’re gonna continue to be a band, but maybe the rock will have to go; maybe the rock has to get a lot harder. But whatever it is, it’s not gonna stay where it is.”

He went on to reveal he’d like U2 to explore compositions featuring just voice and acoustic guitar. “I would like to do a couple of tunes in that direction, with just a lot of space around the voice,” he said. “I’d like to strip things down; that’s something I’d be very interested in at the moment.”

See full Billboard article here.

This excerpt is taken from Colson’s breakpoint and interview with Mark Steyn, author of America Alone:The End of the World as We Know

“[Radical] Islam is a weak enemy, and its strength is determined by what it’s pushing against.” The problem is that Europe and, increasingly, America are putting up very little resistance. If Christians won’t stand up for our worldview, and secularists won’t stand up for anything, one day we may have no one but ourselves to blame for the triumph of radical Islam. The greatest offense against aggressive Islam is a strong, vibrant Christian faith, which, of course, comes right down to you and me.”

Steyn’s thesis is that Christianity is collapsing in Europe–and possibly sooner than later in America–because secularist Europe looks down on religion, offering its citizens “a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity.” How will we respond to this clarion call for robust, worldviewish Christianity?