Across the street from our home is the holiday house. You probably have one in your neighborhood. They go all out for every holiday. On Saturday, cars stacked up on the main road leading into the neighborhood as families drove by slowly, taking in the massive display that must have cost the owners thousands of dollars.
Last week I drove by a home whose Halloween decorations weren’t as massive or ostentatious, but the lawn display was undoubtedly the eeriest I’ve ever seen. A life-like severed head hung from a tree limb. A decapitated corpse with a visible spinal cord jutting out between slumped shoulders sat underneath.
In 2023, 46 horror movies were released. 75 million tickets were sold, and the industry made $798 million in domestic revenue alone. It’s been argued that horror movies remain a draw for many in the contemporary West because there is so little actual danger in most of our lives.
Atheist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that we live in the most peaceful era of human existence: wars have decreased, human rights have expanded, and rates of starvation and lifespans have improved. Drawn to conflict, we now have access to global news coverage, which gives us the dopamine hit of feeling like we are in conflict.
What attracts us so much to the dark?
In the story of Swan Lake, a ballet by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Prince Siegfried falls in love with Odette (who has been cursed by the evil magician, Von Rothbart), after happening upon her at the lake one night during a hunting trip. As a result of Von Rothbart's curse, Odette is human only at nightfall, for at daybreak she transforms into a swan. True and faithful love is the only thing that can break the curse, and Siegfried aims to marry Odette, proclaiming such love, at a ball his mother is throwing for his birthday.
In 2003, Bart Millard still mourning his father’s recent death, penned the lyrics for “I Can Only Imagine,” a song that would go on to be the most-played song in the history of Christian radio.
Can you imagine what heaven is going to be like?
There are lots of different views of heaven out there. A couple of decades ago a cottage industry developed, selling stories of those who said they had been to heaven while on death’s doorstep. We’re told of bright lights, lives re-played, and a warm glow. Others might daydream of harps and clouds, when asked to imagine heaven.
On October 17, 2023, we (my wife Angel and I) released our first book, Trading Faces. With around four million books published annually (one for every resident of Oklahoma!), an author can feel as though they’re contributing a grain of sand to a beach. And there is truth to that! As the Preacher wisely reminds us in Ecclesiastes,
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us. (Eccl. 1:10)
Jerusalem, Israel
3:15 am, April 13
I sat up in bed to a wailing sound I had never heard before, but knew immediately: an air raid siren. Our building rattled to the booms of interceptors from Israel’s missile defense system hitting their inbound targets. I pulled back the curtains and watched as sprays of light streaked the sky.
Iran launched 170 drones, 20 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s purported attack on an Iranian embassy in Syria.
‘Bothsideism’ about Hamas is moral failure: Russell Moore offers clarity on the horrifying atrocity in Israel. He begins, “Sometimes certain moments in history reveal in minutes what was concealed for decades. And sometimes those moments of revelation come with hearing oneself say the words, “Yes, but …” or “But what about …” The aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel is not one of those times. In this case, saying who is to blame—and who is not—is not factually or morally difficult at all.”
The baobab: the strangest tree on earth: Have you ever seen one in person? They’re wild. Don Batten and Jerry Bergman share, “They are among Earth’s longest-lived flowering plants, and under normal conditions can grow for over 1,000 years. One baobab was estimated to have lived for 2,600 years. They grow to over 22 metres (75 feet) tall, with a trunk circumference that can exceed 26 m (85 ft).”
As Jesus sleeps: Ed Welch encourages us, “There are, it seems, reasons to worry. Some of his disciples would live homeless and hand-to-mouth. To be penniless is as dangerous as a severe storm. But our God does not worry. His face toward you reveals his rest and favor. During the turbulence of life, his face also reveals his compassion and care.”
On the other side of a church split: Abigail Rehmert, a pastor’s wife, shares, “The heartbreaking drama of the last year beckoned my heart toward resentment, bitterness, and pride. I have been reminded that each day, I must inspect my heart and eyes for the planks that lodge there.”
Every state’s most popular Halloween candy: This is a pretty fun list. Arizona is Hershey Kisses… go figure.
Clone-a-lisa: Need a silly diversion that puts your art skills to the test? Vole has you covered.
What are the idols of your heart? What are the ways in which you have allowed your heart which is intended to worship God, to worship the golden calves that surround us? Where else have you placed your hope?
If you’re unsure of the answer to that question, perhaps one of these questions might help diagnose your heart. What keeps me up when I’m trying to sleep? What do I fear? What do I think about? What do I daydream about? What gets me most excited in life? What do I give myself to? What do I use my time for?
Are you an idolater? I already lost you, didn’t I? Most wouldn’t raise their hand to affirm their idolatry.
Idolatry doesn’t preach well to us 21st-century Westerners. A couple of years ago, I had someone leave the church after I preached on idolatry. “You preached for most of your sermon on the Old Testament, the law against Idolatry, and how might we be guilty of idolatry today,” she reflected. She said that the sermon didn’t connect with her and didn’t offer “spiritual encouragement.”
Oh, friends, the dangers we face when we think that biblical passages on idolatry don’t apply to us!
Do you know what Jonah’s final recorded words were?
Were they words of repentance? Words of gratitude? Words of praise?
Nope. They were words of spite. The last words that Jonah speaks are, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”[i]
Those are not words motivated by suffering or grief. Those are words that come straight out of the hateful heart of our anti-hero, a prophet who cannot bear that God would have compassion on a city he deemed worthy of destruction and upset that the God who provided a plant for shade for him would allow it to wither.
The compassion of God knows no bounds. He orchestrates the salvation of a city that every Jew would have longed to see the destruction of. A city that was not only a military threat to the Israelites, but whose pagan worship was a stench to those loyal to the one true God.
It is the Hero who has the final say in Jonah. These final words reveal God’s love and call us to this deep compassion:
“You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”[ii]
The book of Jonah closes with a glimpse of the compassionate heart of God. Within the final verses of Jonah we see some incredible truths about the depth and power of God’s love:
God’s love is attentive:
Like a caring spouse or parent, no detail is left uncared for by our compassionate God. God’s compassion for his stiff-necked prophet is so deep, he grows a weed up over Jonah to shade him from the sun even as hatred boils in Jonah’s heart for those God loves. God’s love is for the big things (saving a city of 120,000 from destruction), but it also for the small things: Jonah’s discomfort in the heat, and even for the animals. Isn’t that final statement “and also much cattle” beautiful? God cares not just for the people of the city, but for the cattle of the city. God’s love extends to his creation.
Jonah was the only prophet called to people out of Israel.[i] That fact makes it easier to sympathize with Jonah’s resistance to God’s call to go to Nineveh. “I didn’t sign up for this,” Jonah must have thought. “No one else has ever been asked to do this!”
In his own book, Jonah is the anti-hero: a reminder of what we are not to do. God gives Jonah four directives in his book and Jonah (initially at least) rejects all four. The first two calls are coupled together. “Arise and go!” God twice tells Jonah. Last week we examined God’s call for Jonah and us to arise and we reflected just how difficult it is to swim against the cultural current and arise. But arise we must.
And Go. We must go into the mess. We’re called to step into the entanglements of lives around us. It’s easier to keep the lids on the trash cans, but you can’t get into the lives of those around you unless you start taking off some lids.
Some opt-out because of the mess. Others opt out because they don’t think they’re qualified. We think that explaining Christianity is best left to the experts. Better to leave it to the pastor with the theological degree to explain it than mess it up myself.
Last week we started considering how idolatry might still be alive and well in us today.
To do so, we took ourselves back to the most famous incident of idolatry in the Bible: the golden calf.[i] The Israelites created the golden calf at the very time God is giving Moses the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments capture God’s covenant with his people. God declares, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”[ii] The covenant begins with a statement of who God is: he is the saving God, the rescuing God. God then promises that his covenant is exclusive. In weddings the pastor asks the groom, do you promise to “love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” And then he turns to the bride and asks her a similar set of questions. A marriage covenant is exclusive. In it we relinquish our authority. So is our covenant with God.
As she creates the golden calf, Israel rejects the covenant and takes her authority back. The covenant that was made with God is now broken. Israel is an adulteress. As pastor Tim Keller once said, “We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one.”[iii]
I remember the first time I had a conversation with a dyed-in-the-wool Christian pacifist. I was on an immersive backpacking trip with classmates the month before I entered my freshman year at Gordon College. Our guide, a student at Gordon, and one of the freshmen on the trip were both Mennonite and were staunchly pacifist. I had never really heard a strong argument for pacifism and was intrigued by their position.
My dad came of age during the Vietnam War and shared stories with me as a kid of his opposition to the war, an opposition that he came to see as well-intentioned, but naïve. My natural response to war was similar: war is bad, but inevitable, and if our country can intervene for the betterment of those involved, we ought to do so.
My freshman ears were intrigued by the argument, but ultimately unmoved. I would encounter Just War Theory in a philosophy class and that would become my anchor point for processing the use of violence.
When a friend urged me to pick up Preston Sprinkle’s Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence, my interest was piqued but I didn’t expect much to come of reading Sprinkle’s book. But, in a way that rarely happens at this stage of my life, I’ve found my perspective on nonviolence has changed pretty significantly over the past months as I’ve read and processed the book.
Over the course of these posts, we are going to examine a biblical perspective on violence.
Do you know Jonah’s last words in the Bible?
“Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”[i]
Those are not words motivated by suffering or grief. Those are words that come straight out of the hateful heart of our anti-hero, a prophet who cannot bear that God would have compassion on a city he deemed worthy of destruction and upset that the God who provided a plant for shade for him would allow it to wither.
The compassion of God knows no bounds. He orchestrates the salvation of a city that every Jew would have longed to see the destruction of. A city that was not only a military threat to the Israelites, but whose pagan worship was a stench to those loyal to the one true God.
It is the Hero who has the final say in Jonah. These final words reveal God’s love and call us to this deep compassion:
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