A Pledge of Stars

The end was near and the family stood vigil, a somber semicircle around his bed. As the minutes passed, holy silence filled the room and Abraham’s breath became shallow, his breathing labored and irregular. Long moments passed, the room in stillness, before his chest rose slightly, almost imperceptibly, then fell — his last breath. His eyes closed one final time, and they saw him die.

But death is not what filled his vision.

For him, the end, when finally it came, was a beginning. If only he had known, could he ever have feared its coming? True, weakness overtook him, a dimness of vision, and then darkness, as he fell into the sleep from which he would never awaken ... except, that very sleep was wakefulness itself. And death was life — or, more precisely, death was overtaken and consumed by life. In the end, that which had been so terrifyingly unfamiliar in its coming was not unfamiliar at all. It was not the Great Unknown, it was instead the Finally Known. And it was hope.

Everything was warmth and comfort, and he found it was the Father’s embrace. Everything was light and brightness, and it was his Father’s eyes.

Abraham saw a vast and spectacular city, so long sought, and he knew its architect and builder was God. He soared above an unending seacoast and saw at once its scope and its detail — grains of sand, infinite, too numerous to count. He saw a stellar sky rushing toward him and each star was a face, and in each face he saw his own likeness.

Abraham was finally home.

And hope had become sight.


Copyright © 2008

Quality Product

Picture God enjoying a creative day. He calls light out of darkness. Spreads the vast expanse of space. He uses words to gouge out a place for the seas and molds mounds of mountain, thousands of feet high, out of common dirt and stone. His fertile imagination calls lush vegetation into being. He hangs stars and moons on threads of nothing and sets them spinning in their places.

A word, and the seas teem with fish, and out of nowhere birds take to the air. He speaks again, and livestock and reptiles spring into being to roam and prowl the earth. Then, finally, God gets to the good part, the really good part: People. Like me. Like you.

Philosophers might suggest we take time out from making and spending money, time out from eating and sleeping and mating, time out to ask:

How did I get here? Who am I? What am I like? Where is life headed?

Well? Have you asked yourself any good questions lately?

Where did I come from?
From the fingertips of God.

Here, opinions differ radically. Most people who give thought to where we came from assume we gradually happened, and all by chance. If we take enough backward steps in time, we find ancestors quite unlike us. Further back, single cells got tired of being single and married into complexity. Further back still, life emerged from nonlife. In the beginning, if ever there had been a beginning, matter and force existed alone, spending long, lonely evenings together, waiting for things to happen.

Chance takes time. Years in the millions. The billions. And how can even that be enough for something to spring out of nothing of its own initiative, or caprice, or ... well, chance.

Christians assume that God created out of nothing. Had he not decided to create life out of nothing, life would not have happened, spontaneously or otherwise, no matter how many years or eons passed. Nothing would have happened.

On this point, the explanations you hear can be, frankly, embarrassing. But no one need blush at the Bible’s basic concept of creation. With God around, we can accept the idea that nothingness was overtaken by somethingness ... and all it took was a word. Or a short sentence. “Let there be light,” for instance. Or, “Let us make man.”

The mechanics — the technical “how” of creation — is not addressed in Scripture, of course. It is left to the poetic precision of word painting, and that imagery powerfully conveys the heart of our origin:

“In the beginning, God.”

Who am I?
The pinnacle of Creation.

Regardless of how you read the first couple chapters of Genesis (Beginnings), certain things stand out:

A personal, caring God was involved in each step of the creative process.

Creation did not require great effort. A word of two was sufficient to make things happen. Cosmic things. Again, the language is poetic, but poetry does not diminish the power of the idea it conveys, if anything, the opposite is true: It gives the idea greater power. For God to fashion nature is easy.

There was a purposeful progression to all this creative effort. Was anything left to chance and happenstance?

God was pleased what he made. He found joy in it.

Humankind was his crowning touch to creation. And if anything, God gives greater deliberation to the creative artistry that gave birth to people.

Hear the words of Creation’s Poet:

“God said,” and light was created.
“God said,” and there was sky.
“God said,” and seas and dry land appeared.
“God said,” and vegetation sprang out of the earth.
“God said,” and suns and moons lit the expanse of space.
“God said,” and fish flipped fins and birds flapped wings.
“God said,” and critters crawled the planet.

Then came people.

The rest of creation was the product of the Poet’s oratory. Animal life was uniquely handcrafted — the Artist resorts to sculpture. But people in particular ... he lingers over people. He took his time with the maleness and femaleness of it all.

Over all that was created, God placed the label “Good.” But when he finished with people, a superlative was in order, and he pronounced them, “Very good.” And he made man monarch over all that he created, King of the Earth.

Galaxies and fruit trees, fowl and flower, all sprang from the creative mind of God. Humankind was modeled after God himself, a creation fashioned in the Creator’s image. We are not part of the physical machinery. We are unique. We have more in common with God than we do with celery stalks, amoeba or chimps.

We were created with a body, a physical dimension. But slugs have slimy little bodies.

We were also created with a soul, charged with emotional and intellectual energy. We may look at gorillas or dolphins and wonder if we see in them faint reflections of our intelligence. Or even of emotion.

We were created with a spirit, fitted for eternal living and friendship with the Creator. Here, without qualification, we stand unique. Face-to-face with God.

If you think of Creator versus creation, you see an infinite gulf between God and us. We seem little different in significance than a fist full of silt, a head of cabbage, or a gadfly. He made us all. But if you take the Poet’s words at face value and accept that we, and we alone, are made in his image, the gulf shifts.

And so there are minerals, and vegetables, and animals ... and between these and us, a great gap. And we are on the God-side of the gap.

So far, though, this talk is rooted in creation. Our first parents. Ages ago. But with every life conceived since, God is aware. Involved. Caring. Sensitive, Watching. Planning.

Can we even calculate how much we matter to God?

“You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well.

“My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

“How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.”

God does not simply care about humankind. He care about individuals. People like me. Like you.

He cares about the rest of his creation, too. Again, the Poet speaks, putting across such profound ideas so delicately understated: He notices when something as commonplace as a bird dies and falls. And why does he bother to point that out? To tell us that we matter far, far more. He talks about evil people who would do violence to us and he reminds us that God is the superintendent of the gates of hell as well as heaven. He will not fail to practice justice, and he does not forget the injustice done on the face of the earth. He watches us, vigilently. He even knows when our hair is ruffled. So poetic, so poignant. And so he tells us, “Don’t be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”

So, as I say, there are minerals, and vegetables, and animals ... and between these and us, a great gap. And we are on the God-side of the gap.

What am I like?
The greatest creature imaginable ... and also the worst.

The greatest creature, because we were created on the God-side of the gap, separate from the rest of creation. We are made in the image of God. We have personality and will. We can communicate and make decisions. We live above mere instinct. We have moral sensitivities and conscience.

We are the greatest creatures imaginable. If we could see ourselves as we really are — or should I say, as we are capable of becoming? — we would be astounded.

Yet somehow, through a quirky twist of rebelliousness, we are also the worst creatures imaginable. And why? We have fallen in the image of Satan. This may sound too Sunday-schoolish for sophisticates. But consider our capacity for inhumanity. We can’t be too hard on the law of the jungle — strong beasts tearing the weak to shreds — when we realize that we, the Kings of Creation, do the same to one another.

The Poet speaks: It was a simple, silly sin that started our downward spiral. Imagine our original parents enjoying good life in God’s garden paradise. The rules are minimal. One fruit tree off-limits. The why behind the law is incidental. The point is, the original parents had all their needs met. They lived in comfort. They walked with God.

Then the man stumbled. He fell. The gates of Eden closed, the gates of suffering and death opened. All the years since are a blur of scientific breakthroughs and bloodshed, loving friendships and oppression, nobility and war. We are haunted and hunted by our own capacity for evil. Pride and rebellion, temptation and moral failure.

We are all susceptible. We all fall. If we could see ourselves as we really are — the depth to which we are capable of falling — we would be terrified. Fearful and ill. And what makes the prospect so hideous is the great contrast: What we have become. What we could have been.

But the Poet speaks through his own life, his own blood. He speaks to say, “Eden will be restored.” We can be remade in the image of Christ. We have the capacity to know God. Jesus has opened the way. In him we regain the majesty that we threw away through our rebellion against God. And he stirs within us to transform us into a perfect reflection of his character. He is pleased, in fact, to count us in as family.

“Both the one who makes us holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”

Through faith, we are family.

Here, then, is how we gauge how great we are in creation, how bad we are in our rebellion, how good we can be in Christ — the image of God, the image of Satan, the image of Christ:

What was required to restore God’s image in us? His Son.

What was God will to give to bring us back to himself? His Son.

And so I picture God enjoying a creative day. A special week. I do not doubt he found the work of creation exhilarating. But I choose to image that when he came to the work of making people, with all their potential, he visualized each individual who ever would be born, descendants of the first couple. People like me. Like you. And when his mind fell on each of us, I imagine his pulse quickened.

And he smiled and cried and smiled at our potential.


Genesis 1—2
Psalm 139:13-18
Matthew 10:29-31
Hebrews 2:11

copyright © 2008

Open Secrets

I knew the book was special long before I knew why. It had been a Christmas gift from my parents back when I’d have chosen cars and trucks and guns. And yet there was, I sensed, something different about this boxed Book with its black Leatherette cover.

The Holy Bible
CONTAINING THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED. THE AUTHORIZED KING JAMES VERSION, 1611, RED LETTER EDITION.

I was 9.

Over the years, I made gradual progress deciphering the Book. But it was seven years later, at 16, that I first had the startling experience — and may I say how I felt it? — the startling experience of this Book “speaking to me.” It was that crisp, later-summer night high in California’s Sierra Nevada, before a crackling campfire, reading about the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus. The words, even the King James-ish thee’s and thou’s, seemed not so much a part of a book being read as a conversation being spoken. It was very much like being let in on a dreadful but exhilarating secret.

Was God “talking” to me through this Book of his?

I have occasionally had similar Bible reading experiences since. I have related, for instance, how the words, “Every good and perfect gift is from above” seemed to rise off the page as I had read them. Meaning was coming to me. Understanding. As if God were letting me in on another of his secrets: “Guess what? I am the giver of all your good experiences!”

I realize it is not uncommon for a reader to be struck by an aha! kind of feeling at reading most anything. Catching the meaning of something for the first time or seeing a concept in a new light may give a gentle high. But this was different because the ideas were different. God was letting me in on his thoughts.

I am now convinced that, in giving us the Bible, God has placed his secrets out in the open. Down where we can reach them.

Read them.

It does make sense to me, hearing these words I read as God’s. Think about it. God loves us — he’s dramatically demonstrated that. So wouldn’t he choose to communicate with us somehow? Wouldn’t he want us to avoid exhausting speculation about what he’s like and who Jesus was and where evil came from? Wouldn’t he warn us if he saw we were in danger?

God knows life can be perplexing, at time even sickening. Wouldn’t he give us information so we could understand it, and perspective so we could tolerate it?

God has expectations of us and has made promises to us. Wouldn’t he formalize things, put it all in writing like a contract?

And yet, I wonder: Why a book? Why written ideas? Why couldn’t God communication, wwarn, inform, promise privately? With each of us, individually? Why couldn’t he simply whisper his ideas in my mind, and yours, and his, and hers, and theirs all at once? It would be so personal. So identifiable. So unmistakable. He is God, after all. He listens to millions of complex prayers simultaneously. Why couldn’t he talk to us — all of us — directly?

I have thought about this a lot and magnanimously grant that he could have spoken privately, individually, personally, simultaneously, directly. Since he didn’t, since he spoke through people into a Book, and through the Book to us, there must be some good reasons. And I have concluded there are some distinct advantages to receiving God’s secrets openly, in a book.

The Book is objective. Objective, as in “object.” I can hold it, look at it, evaluate it, explain it. So can you. So can we, together. We can read it. Study it. We might come to different conclusions on the meaning of some phrase or idea, but we have a common source we can come back to: the Book.

Can you imagine, if we each claimed a private pipeline to God, how competitive we could become? Private “revelation” is so subjective. Subjective, as in “subject” — a subject in the mind to be pondered and discussed. We might disagree sharply. Who would arbitrate? And by what standards? How could we judge the ideas that you say flow through your direct, private pipeline? Or the ideas that I say God gave me?

The Book is something we can hold and value. I don’t mean worship; we worship God, not a book. And yet, these ideas about God are available in print. A portable library of life, telling the story of God’s unfailing love. Shouldn’t we value it?

The Book calls for our energy and involvement. Perhaps God’s ideas spoken directly into our minds would have been too easy. God seems to appreciate it when we invest our energy in seeking to understand him, our involvement in bringing the ideas off the page. We read. We study. We exert mental energy. We take part in the process of finding God.

The Book connects God’s friends together. I might, in having a private link with the perfect God, shun interaction with his imperfect people. Instead, we are linked together to cooperate in our search for understanding.

The Book — here are 66 individual books, written by 40 authors, in three languages, in several different countries, over hundreds of years. Yet, taken together, we have one unified Good, authored actually by God. But with such human involvement!

The words in the Book were passed as stories from generation to generation. The scrolls hand-copied who knows how many hundreds of times. The manuscripts circulated, read, explained, collected, ultimately printed and distributed, translated and re-translated as we learn more of the language and culture, and as our own language changes over time. And that Book, those words, over generations, read and studied and explained.

We would not have God’s ideas without the help of God’s other friends. Obviously, God values all this connectedness of his people, his family, his kingdom, his priesthood.

He could have conducted unending individual spiritual conferences. But he does not want us connected only to him; he wants us connected also to one another.

So, whose Word is it? In spite of such human involvement, the Book we read is called, “The Word of God,” not “The Words of People about God.”

“The word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

It is called the Bible, meaning “the Book,” precisely because of its uniqueness. It is not a book, it is the Book. God’s Book.

It is called the Scriptures — the writings — for the same reason The Writings. Unique. Set apart.

It is called the Old and New Testaments — testaments, covenants, agreements — because it is a book detailing God’s promises and agreements with his people. With us.

It is called “The Law and the Prophets” because it contains God’s expectations and principles for life.

It is pictured as a mirror, reflecting our inner attitudes.

It is pictured as a seed, giving life.

It is pictured as cleansing water, bringing purity to our motives and actions.

It is pictured as light, offering clear guidance for life.

It is pictured as food, bringing nourishment to the inner life.

On and on the images go. Each stressing the uniqueness of this Book. Its power. Its supernatural author. God wanted to help us with life, wanted to share his secrets. Openly. So he wrote them down.

And how many writers? We say, “God wrote a book.” But we credit David with many of the Psalms. Solomon with most of Provers. Paul with half the New Testament. John with five books. Forty authors, when the roll is called. So, were there 40 writers or one?

Both.

“No prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” God ideas, then, came through a partnership. God’s will, human voice.

I do not take this to be a mechanical sort of thing, either. Read the Bible. You find unified themes spoken through varied personalities, intellects and styles. Matthew was a tax collector. Luke a doctor. David a monarch. Peter a fisherman. And their writings are colored by their backgrounds.

Peter noticed this difference in Paul’s writings — logical, intellectual Paul. What did Peter say?

“Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

What did Peter say? He said that Paul’s message agreed with his own. He said that Paul wrote out of the resource of God’s wisdom. He said that Paul had certain recurring themes. He said that Paul was sometimes hard to follow. He said that Paul’s message was tampered with only out of self-destructive foolishness. Why? Because Paul’s writings are Scripture.

Moreover: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

There’s help for our understanding. For us to gain good from God’s words, we must be able to understand them. As Proverbs so aptly puts it: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

We are astoundingly capable of self-deception. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”

Who? “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind.”

If we cannot figure out our own mind, how can we fathom God’s ideas?

How? He helps us. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him — but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.”

And what has God freely given us? Open secrets about his way for us to live — loving, forgiving, exercising self-control, showing patience, finding joy even in hardship.

What has God freely given us? Open secrets about God and his agenda for time and forever: God loves us; Christ died for us; the Holy Spirit helps us; Satan hinders; hell is real, but so is heaven.

And yet, in some mysterious way, as open as God has made his secrets, people who do not know God do not understand his ideas either. The secrets seem stupid; too silly to be wise.

“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. ... For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

I guess, one day it just clicked. I do not recall when it happened. But I turned a corner in my mind. The Book that had seemed so special because of its protective box and Leatherette binding took on a deeper meaning. It had once captivated me precisely because it seemed so forbidding, unapproachable:

The Holy Bible
CONTAINING THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED. THE AUTHORIZED KING JAMES VERSION, 1611, RED LETTER EDITION.

Then something clicked.

Was it that night in the Sierra? Was it some afternoon when curiosity prompted me to crack the Book open? At some point I realized I was no longer reading words from people about God, I was reading God’s Word. His Word to me.

And a responsibility settled over me with astonishing weight: I have only one life to master this Book.

I may have forever to get to know God.

But I need his open secrets now.



James 1:17
Romans 5:8
Hebrews 4:12
James 1:23-25
James 1:18
1 Peter 1:23
Ephesians 5:25-27
Psalm 119:105
1 Peter 2:2
1 Corinthians 3:1-2
2 Peter 1:20-21
2 Peter 3:15-16
2 Timothy 3:16-17
Proverbs 14:12
Jeremiah 17:9
Jeremiah 17:10
1 Corinthians 2:9-12
1 Corinthians 2:14-16

copyright © 2008

Uncommon Gifts

I’m not sure when I first noticed it. The awareness dawned gradually. Like waking up without the jangling of an alarm clock. There is a drowsy stirring. An eye opens slightly, then squints against the morning’s brightness. There is a moment of half-sleep twilight. All this before fully awakening.

For me, it was a thought. An idea. A possibility. Waking up to a reality, squinting in surprise against it:

Every good gift is from God.

Sun, rain.
Sight, taste.
Intelligence, speech.
Friendship, family.
Health, life itself.
Every.
Good gift.
Is from God.

The Bible had been a gift from my parents. For years I had regarded it as a special book, though I never read it. Until that evening, high in California’s Sierra, as I read Matthew’s Gospel, alone, by the light of a campfire. The generosity of it rocked me. The gift of Jesus — his grisly death — had opened the way for me to know God and enjoy him forever.

With hell’s fire in plain view, I could recognize in forgiveness a good gift when I saw it.

But as good a gift as forgiveness is, this awakening awareness that every gift is from God was something far different. Something, in a sense, more comprehensive than the promise of heaven, tomorrow. Or at least more encompassing, inclusive.

Forgiveness was God’s special favor to his people, his family of faith. But this every gift idea included everyone. Good gifts were freely lavished on everyone — friend of God, enemy of God, alike. Heaven was the Christmas gift from the Father to the members of his family. Every good gift was for that larger gift list on which every human’s name appeared, whether they recognize it or not, acknowledge it or not, everyone receives.

From the hand of God.
Every.
Good gift.

It was that same long-neglected Bible; it had introduced me to the gift of eternal life, now it sparked my awareness of God as the Giver. I had read the New Testament book of James — when, I don’t recall — but I had read it with a yellow marker in hand. I had underlined much of the first chapter.

Months passed. Perhaps even a couple years. Then one afternoon as I skimmed James, a bright yellow patch of Bible words rose off the page:

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

Every gift.
From God.

An idea was stirring. A thought awakening.

I had read it before, noted the words for their simplicity and power. But new meaning was dawning.

I realized that Christians asked God for things. (James talks about this, too.) And God often grants their prayer requests. He often gives what has been sincerely requested, as a gift. But prayer wish lists, prompting the generosity of God the Giver, were not the same as this new every gift awareness.

Prayer-answers were special gifts. Gifts requested. Gifts dispensed by God to his own people who knew how to pray.

This every good gift idea was fundamentally different. These gifts were common: food, shelter, ingenuity, life. Yet they were uncommonly special. But in their commonness (I call them common only because God was so unbridled in his giving) they were most often overlooked by us as gifts. They were merely life’s standard equipment. Who would think to thank God for something as expected as beauty in a sunset, simple as a smile, as routine as emotive music?

These everyday gifts were not only common, they were unrequested. They just happened, simply arriving in our lives. Who would think to say thanks to God for something life itself dished out — to all?

Yet I found myself waking up to an idea. Every gift. Sitting bolt upright out of sleepy presumption. Is from God. I was facing afresh the commonplace ... and seeing God.

Every.
Good gift.
To everyone.
Is from God.

And I was impressed with God all over again, in a new way. Impressed by his generosity, his creativity, his willingness to give without fanfare, without thanks in return.

You might reverently say that God was just the kind of guy everyone would want as a father if just once they could see him as the giver of every good gift.

Wildlife and waterfalls.
Flowers and flamingos.
Clouds and stars.
Music and art.
Medicine and high technology.
Human brilliance and humanitarian impulse.
Something was behind it all.
Someone.

Think of it! The growth of vegetation is possible because God cares enough to feed us, to shelter us, to convert carbon dioxide into breathable air. Rain and sun and fog and wind and ice. Beauty, variety, balance.

Think of it! You bite into a strawberry, or a lemon; fresh fish, or dark chocolate.

Thank of it! You feel the lightness of a gentle rain on your face, or a special friend’s touch on your arm. You splash in Pacific surf or slip into warm covers on a cold January night.

Symphonic sound envelopes you. A friend whispers a compliment. You step off a curb and someone shouts a warning.

The evening’s darkening sky fills with stellar pinpoints of light. You see the face of a friend. You examine delicate floral patterns.

You read, reason, talk.

You communicate with strangers. Establish friendships. Mate.

Think of it!
And thank the Giver.

And understand this. Jesus said, “Love your enemies ... that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

God is perfect. We know, because he gives gifts freely, perfectly, to all of us. Friends or enemies.

Every.
Good gift.
In from God.

I should have understood before, awakened sooner. The thought is exquisite: Every good gift is from God.

Sun, rain.
Sight, taste.
Intelligence, speech.
Friendship, family.
Health, life itself.

Every good gift is from God.

Is it any wonder I would choose him as my Father?


James 1:17
Matthew 5:44-46

© 2008