Echoes in Eternity

These graphs are depressing... 40% of American babies are now born to a single mother.

So, now the G20 have put together a single world currency... amazing how fast we're slouching toward Babel. Soon, "nothing [we] plan to do will be impossible for [us]." (Genesis 11)

My worship music pastor preached a great message this past Sunday on how to see ourselves at the Cross. In short, we shouldn't see ourselves as John or Jesus' mother Mary, but as the hateful Pharisees, mocking thief, and laughing Romans. You can hear it here.

Gethsemane is not a field of study for our intellect. It is a sanctuary for our faith.

- Klaas Schilder

It is easy as we contemplate Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter to focus on just the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. And not without good reason, as we witness a significant amount of Jesus' suffering on the cross and see His victory in the Resurrection. But, as Schilder pointed out, the Garden of Gethsemane is essential to understanding the whole of Christ's sacrifice. This is not something that I've realized in years past.

So let us consider the Garden...

Luke 22:39-46
John 14:30; 18:1
Matthew 26:36-46

The first thing we notice is that Jesus "began to be deeply distressed and troubled." Why now? Why has He been seemingly untroubled while his disciples were quite scared (Mark 10:32), even though He knew what was coming? He knew before time began what was in store for Him, yet at this particular moment as He's walking with His men up the Mount of Olives, He gets shaken. Perhaps, in a way, He is experiencing what David experienced in 2 Samuel 15:30 (the parallels are obvious, though I never noticed them before) when he went up that same Mount of Olives weeping a millennium earlier, fleeing from the rebellion of his son, Absalom. Perhaps, after those few years of reaching out to His people, the Jews, Jesus knows that the opportunity of salvation for them, His child, is lost and that they are now searching for Him to kill Him. As David before Him, He is experiencing the grief of seeing the one you love so much, and for whom you would die, wanting to murder you.

Looking down on Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives

CJ Mahaney gives another likely reason for Jesus' grief in his incredible sermon, "The Cup": He came to the Garden to spend some time with the Father and found hell instead of heaven. As one writer puts it, "It seems that particularly in Gethsemane Jesus was given a fuller understanding of the contents of the cup that he was to drink." He came to better see and realize just how horrible that cup was, filled with the FULL wrath of God against all the wretchedness of human sinfulness. He saw the wrath toward the Rwandan Tutsi who chopped up a small child with a machete. He saw the wrath toward me when I rebel against the Father by killing with my tongue and fornicating with my mind. He saw the wrath pouring out of God's holiness onto the German guard who gassed hundreds of Jews. He saw the wrath toward us all when we worship the creature and not the Creator. He saw all the wrath which the Father had stored up in His divine forbearance, the wrath that Jesus, as God incarnate, knew better than any man could ever know or fathom. As Frederick Leahy wrote in The Cross He Bore, this cup "carried the stench of hell." And it made Him collapse (Matt. 26:39).

Also, as John tells us in his gospel, Satan was there, offering Jesus one last temptation to avoid the cup. And Jesus, in that moment of extreme agony, did cry out to God asking for a solution that didn't require Him to drink from that Cup, even to its very dregs. He cried out to God as "Abba, Father," as a child cries out for his daddy. This reminds me of the young Jewish couple brutally murdered by Muslim terrorists a few years ago in Mumbai. At their funeral, their little son was inconsolable, crying out "Abba, Ima" throughout the service. It's a sign of deep intimacy and love to use "Abba" in reference to God, something that the Jews of the time would have found profoundly disrespectful. You don't call the Ancient of Days "daddy." That is, unless you are the Prince of Peace and God's Son who has existed as one with the Father for all eternity. "May this cup be taken from me" ... as Mahaney says, if it had been possible to attain the glory and joy set out before the dawn of time in some other way, the Father would have done it in an instant. "Yet not as I will, but what you will" ... Jesus rejects the temptation from Satan and begins to drink the cup, until not a drop was left when He uttered those words on the cross: "It is FINISHED."

One last reason that Jesus is in so much inner turmoil is likely the fact that THREE times his disciples fail Him when He needs them most. He keeps going back to them, both to remind them to pray earnestly as the Tempter is at hand and also so that He might receive sympathy and support in this last hour. But in their sleep, they have abandoned Him already. He merely asks them to pray for Him for one hour, yet they can't even do that. These men who have followed him for several years and have been His closest human friends don't even seem to care enough to ask His Father to strengthen Him in His need. He's desperate for support, yet everywhere He turns in heaven and on earth, He is rejected. In the movie "Changeling," an evil man is about to be hanged for murder and he begins to scream out to the people watching his execution, "A prayer! Please, someone say a prayer for me!" He is met with complete silence... and begins to quietly sing "Silent Night" as the noose is placed on his neck, knowing that He is (justly) forsaken by men and by God for his crimes. That chilling scene gives a glimpse of what the pure and Holy Lamb was experiencing as He approached His own death and damnation for crimes which He hadn't committed, nor would have ever dreamed of committing, yet was abandoned by those He loved most.

Praise to God that we don't have to drink that Cup! Instead of Jesus thrusting that Cup into our face, demanding that we drink that which we have earned, we are offered the sweet Cup of Salvation, from which we can drink for eternity and it will never dry up, never run out, and never turn sour. And may we pray as Leahy prays, "Lord, forgive us for the times we have read about Gethsemane with dry eyes."

Obama gave a speech yesterday in Prague calling for the global elimination of nuclear weapons because of the danger they pose. It was perhaps one of his most specious and absurd speeches he's ever given (and he's given quite a few worthless speeches in his young political career). Basically, he called on all countries to disarm themselves because having nuclear weapons is dangerous to the world. Does he really think that Britain's stockpile is dangerous to the world? Or ours? Or France's? Or Israel's? Those stockpiles make the world MORE safe, not less. Here's a particularly galling part of his speech:

Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy. To strengthen the treaty, we should embrace several principles. We need more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections. We need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause.
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Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response -- now is the time for a strong international response, and North Korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons. All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime. And that's why we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.

And yet, this is all hot air, since he has utterly failed to do anything about Iran and merely yawned when North Korea tested their missile this weekend. He wants the "good guys" to put down their guns while trusting that the "bad guys" will just play nice. Thanks but no thanks, Neville Chamberlain.

Which brings me to my second point: to a radical leftist like Barack Obama (and who can still deny that he is a radical lefty; why, he makes Bill Clinton look like a conservative), nuclear weapons are to global politics what gun control is to local American politics. Liberals won't give up until the only ones with either nuclear weapons on the macro level or guns on the micro level are those who intend on using them to kill innocent people. As Dennis Prager said today, liberals don't hate evil, they hate weapons.

For all those cat haters out there (or anyone who wants to waste a few minutes with a pointless game), enjoy. On my very first try, I scored 4693. Post your scores in the comments.

Before Easter comes and we celebrate the Resurrection, may we first focus on the sacrifice and suffering of our King.

Then Jesus walks on beyond the city gates. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, Friday.

Through the steady rain Jesus glances up from the base of a rocky hill. It’s named Golgotha—the Skull.

At the top he sees several posts fixed in the ground. Three of those poles stand ready to receive their crossbeams and the tattered body of Jesus and the two criminals carrying their crosses behind him.

At the top of the hill the merciful centurion hands Jesus a cup. Jesus sniffs the liquid. It’s wine mixed with myrrh, a mild narcotic to dull the pain. But Jesus is meant to feel all the pain. So he hands the cup back. This is not the cup of the Father.
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Jesus now lays naked in the dirt. The dark man places the crossbeam by Jesus’ head. This time Jesus sees his face. It is Simon of Cyrene. Jesus knows him by name and did before there was time.

The beam becomes his pillow now. Two men take hold of his hands. The soldier on his left yanks his arm as far as it will go. But the soldier to his right is gentler. Jesus turns to him. It’s the merciful centurion again. He picks up a cold spike and places it to Jesus’ wrist. Then he picks up a hammer. Their eyes meet. Eternal Love shines forth again, and the centurion is undone. He looks away and lifts his hammer.

In that moment Jesus hears his own word of power: the word of power that holds the merciful centurion in existence, the word of power that causes the hammer to be. He’s speaking it all into being: the soldiers, the priests, the thieves, the friends, the mothers, the brothers, the mob, the wooden beams, the spikes, the thorns, the ground beneath him, and the dark clouds gathering above. If he ceases to speak they will all cease to be. But he wills that they remain. So the soldiers live on, and the hammers come crashing down.

Jesus is lifted on his crossbeam to the post. He sags held only by the spikes in his wrists. Jesus designed the median nerves in his arms that are working perfectly now.

The pain shoots up those nerves and explodes in his skull as the crossbeam is set in place.

His left foot is now pressed against his right foot. Both feet are extended, toes down, and a spike is driven through the arch of each. His knees are bent.

Jesus immediately pushes himself up to relieve the pain in his outstretched arms. He places his full weight on the spikes in his feet and they tear through the nerves between the metatarsal bones. Splinters from the post pierce his lacerated back—searing agony.
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And he sags back into silence, back into countless hours of limitless pain.

Then Jesus is startled by a foul odor. It isn’t the stench of open wounds. It’s something else. And it crawls inside him. He looks up to his Father. His Father looks back, but Jesus doesn’t recognize these eyes. They pierce the invisible world with fire and darken the visible sky. And Jesus feels dirty. He hangs between earth and heaven filthy with human discharge on the outside and, now, filthy with human wickedness on the inside.

The Father speaks: “Son of Man! Why have you sinned against me and heaped scorn on my great glory? You are self-sufficient and self-righteous—consumed with yourself and puffed up and selfishly ambitious. You rob me of my glory and worship what’s inside of you instead of looking out to the One who created you. You are a greedy, lazy, gluttonous slanderer and gossip. You are a lying, conceited, ungrateful, cruel adulterer... You exchange my truth for a lie and worship the creature instead of the Creator... With all your heart you love perverse pleasure. You hate your brother and murder him with the bullets of anger fired from your own heart. You kill babies for your convenience. You oppress the poor and deal slaves and ignore the needy. You persecute my people. You love money and prestige and honor. You put on a cloak of outward piety, but inside you are filled with dead men’s bones—you hypocrite! You are lukewarm and easily enticed by the world. You covet and can’t have so you murder. You are filled with envy and rage and bitterness and unforgiveness. You blame others for your sin and are too proud to even call it sin. You are never slow to speak. And you have a razor tongue that lashes and cuts with its criticism and sinful judgment. Your words do not impart grace. Instead your mouth is a fountain of condemnation and guilt and obscene talk. You are a false prophet leading people astray. You mock your parents. You have no self-control. You are a betrayer who stirs up division and factions. You’re a drunkard and a thief. You’re an anxious coward. You do not trust me. You blaspheme against me. You are an unsubmissive wife. And you are a lazy, disengaged husband. You file for divorce and crush the parable of my love for the church. You’re a pimp and a drug dealer. You practice divination and worship demons. The list of your sins goes on and on and on and on. And I hate these things inside of you. I’m filled with disgust, and indignation for your sin consumes me. Now, drink my cup!

And Jesus does. He drinks for hours. He downs every drop of the scalding liquid of God’s own hatred of sin mingled with his white-hot wrath against that sin. This is the Father’s cup: omnipotent hatred and anger for the sins of every generation past, present, and future—omnipotent wrath directed at one naked man hanging on a cross.

The Father can no longer look at his beloved Son, his heart’s treasure, the mirror-image of himself. He looks away.

Jesus pushes himself upward and howls to heaven, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Silence.

Separation.

Jesus whispers, “I’m thirsty,” and he sags.

The merciful centurion soaks a sponge in sour wine and lifts in on a reed to Jesus’ lips. And the sour wine is the sweetest drink he ever tasted.

Jesus pushes himself up again and cries, “It is finished.” And it is. Every sin of every child of God has been laid on Jesus and he drank the cup of God’s wrath dry.
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And he dies.
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In that moment mountains shake and rocks spilt; veils tear and tombs open.

And the merciful centurion looks up at the lifeless body of Jesus and is filled with awe. He drops to his knees and declares, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Mission accomplished. Sacrifice accepted.

This video of a whipping of a teenage girl for going out in public is hard to watch, but we must not forget what radical Islam is capable of. Also, read The Kite Runner.

Mark Steyn wrote this week on the British plan to criminalize gay jokes (and by gay, I don't mean happy). Amazing how "progressive" Western society is becoming, isn't it?

George Will has an EXCELLENT piece this week on the "perils of a bright idea;" namely, politicians' mind-numbing responses to the global warming joke (a joke that unfortunately is on everyone, not just the mentally feeble in Congress). Will's case-in-point: the growing light bulb fiasco.

"Fervently" is how America will henceforth engage in talks on global warming. So said the president's climate change negotiator Sunday in Germany, at a U.N. conference on reducing carbon emissions. This vow was fervently applauded by conferees welcoming the end of what AP's news story called the Bush administration's "eight years of obdurate participation" in climate talks.

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, if it resumes after the current period without warming, a period that began, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, 11 years ago.
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Cynics will see only potential for mischief by governments, including the U.S. government, using such measures to give a green patina to protectionism. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is having its own problems with one "climate-friendly good" that might not be. Last week The New York Times front page carried this headline: "The Bulb That Saved the Planet May Be a Little Less Than Billed."

The story recounted some Americans' misadventures with the new light bulbs that almost all Americans -- all but those who are filling their closets with supplies of today's incandescent bulbs -- will have to use after the phaseout of today's bulbs in 2014. (You missed that provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007?)
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[S]ome experts have written a guide saying the new bulbs require "a little insight and planning." The Times says that "may be an understatement."

The bulbs, says the Times, "do not do well in hot places with little airflow, like recessed ceiling fixtures," and some do not work "with dimmers or three-way sockets." And: "Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect." Well, if you say so. Because all fluorescents contain mercury, a toxic metal, they must never be put in the trash, so Home Depot and other chains offer bins for disposing of dangerous bulbs. Driving to one of these disposal points might not entirely nullify the bulbs' environmental benefits. Besides, the Times summarizes the Environmental Protection Agency's helpful suggestions for coping with the environmental dangers caused when one of these environment-saving bulbs breaks:

"Clear people and pets from the room and open a window for at least 15 minutes if possible. Avoid vacuuming. Scoop up larger pieces with stiff paper or cardboard, pick up smaller residue with sticky tape, and wipe the area with a damp cloth. Put everything into a sealed plastic bag or sealed glass jar. In most cases, this can be put in the trash, but the EPA recommends checking local rules."

Worrywarts wonder what will happen when a lazy or careless, say, 10 percent of 300 million Americans put their worn-out bulbs in the trash. Stop worrying. What do you think? That Congress, architect of the ethanol industry and designer of automobiles, does not think things through?

I have yet to view The Truth Project by Focus on the Family, but I've heard good things about it. Plus, they interviewed my favorite author for it.

Last week, a plane crashed in Montana, tragically killing the three families on board. It was heart-wrenching to read about it. I just came across an interesting story about the background of the man who was waiting for his children and grandchildren to arrive at the ski resort when he got the call that they had all been killed in that crash. In short, he owns the country's largest abortion-providing chain of clinics. The site of the plane crash (a cemetary) has a memorial for the unborn. So, it is the prayer of pro-life Christians that God would use this horrendous tragedy to soften his heart and perhaps save the lives of many other innocent victims.

This utter piece of trash was posted over at U.S. News and World Report's opinion blog. I'm not sure why the writer doesn't just suggest offing all the "drains" on our economy... like welfare recipients, old people, disabled veterans. Oh wait, because she's a coward who only wants to kill those who don't have a chance of fighting back.

Disgusting. Imagine how much worse it would be if everyone had access to "free" health care...

Dalrymple has an excellent column on gratitude in this month's "New English Review."

After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste – and waste on our scale must be unthinking – implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson, in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.
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Once you become aware of a phenomenon such as waste that you overlooked or considered unimportant, you begin to see – or rather, observe - it everywhere. For example, yesterday I was walking in a street in England and I saw a box of cakes thrown on the ground. One had been half-eaten, but the rest were strewn around, so it was not merely that the box had been dropped by accident. The person who had dropped it had eaten a little and decided that the rest was surplus to his requirements.

I pass over – but not because I haven’t noticed it – the unsocial and egotistical way in which the person disposed of what he no longer wanted. Rather, I refer to the fact that whoever disposed of the cakes in that way took them entirely for granted, gave no thought to the effort or ingenuity required to produce them, assumed that there would always be more when and where he wanted them, and in general evinced no respect for anything except his whim of the moment.
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I am aware that our whole economic system depends to a large extent upon us consuming vastly beyond our needs, biologically considered, and that if we were all as parsimonious as possible and never threw anything away that was remotely usable or re-usable, the wheels of commerce would soon grind to a halt.
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Like many social phenomena, abundance is both good and bad. When I was a child, my mother used to darn our socks. I still remember the wooden mushroom that she would insinuate into a sock with a hole, the better to expose the latter for her to close up with wool or cotton thread.

This is now as unthinkable a ceremony as touching for the King’s Evil [tuberculosis] would be. Now if we have a hole in a sock we throw it away at once; and if we are short of socks, we go and buy ten pairs for what it takes us two minutes to earn.

I have no real vocation for darning socks; I think I have better things to do with my time (though, truth to tell, I am not entirely sure if this applies to everyone). Attention to and gratitude for socks is not a commonly expressed attitude. And yet I cannot help but think that this habit of throwing things away the moment they become defective leads to an unpleasantly disabused attitude to life. Computers, washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, clothes, out they all go the moment they break down or require repair. I know it is a tribute to our immense productivity that it is far cheaper to obtain a new machine than to repair the old, but in a world where everything is so instantly replaceable, what affection or gratitude develops for anything? What do we notice and appreciate is everything is instantly replaceable?
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I suppose that what I would like is an abundance that everyone appreciated and did not take for granted. This would require that everyone was aware that things could be different from how they actually are, an awareness that it is increasingly difficult to achieve. I myself can hardly remember what it was like to live without personal computers and the internet, though I have lived the majority of my life without them. I now take them sufficiently for granted that if, for any reason, I am out of range of the internet, I regard this as something of an outrage.

I still have vestiges of the requisite awareness, however. In my long distant childhood, I had an uncle who was a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, and I remember how impressed I was when I was told (sotto voce) that he still woke up in the night with nightmares of his captivity. He had gone without food, of course, and suffered beri-beri; and to this day I cannot look at rice on my plate without thinking of him. It helps me to look on each single grain as something not to be despised.

In general, a life of assumed abundance is one of ingratitude; one is not grateful for anything that could be no different from how it is. So perhaps when my mother told me that I should think of the children in Africa who did not have enough to eat, and eat up what was on my plate, she was not so much trying to benefit the children in Africa, as to benefit me: to make me grateful, and not to take for granted what, in fact, would almost certainly always be there, namely an ample sufficiency. Without gratitude, there is no happiness.