• Your life is temporary. The things of this life (the “life immediate”) are temporary
• The life you are looking forward to is eternal. So are the things of that life.
• Consequently the wise thing to do is to focus on the life to follow.
• The God who has made a way for you to enter into the life to follow has every desire that you succeed.
• When you think that he is disapproving of you because you are focusing on the life immediate, you are wrong.
• This is because you think that while you are focusing on the life immediate, God is as well. The reality is, God is always focused on your life as a whole: your immediate life and your future life, and how they relate to each other.
• This is the tip of the iceberg that is an uncomfortable reality: many of the things you belief about yourself are lies.
• You come to believe these lies through reinforcement by dwelling on them; lies like “I am not worthy.” “I am not redeemable.” “I have gone to far to come back again”
• The hard thing to remember is that these lies are not overcome and replaced by reminding yourself that they are, in fact, lies, but rather by focusing on the truth: “I am worthy.” “I have been redeemed because I was redeemable.” “I am never too far to go back, in fact I can go back now, this moment.”

Consider, meditate. Rinse, repeat.

We’ve all had those friends who looked beautiful no matter what they were wearing. A certain girl could don a ratty hat and overly large sweatshirt and take your breath away. Or a certain guy could toss on shorts and a tank top he inherited from a long-dead relative and look like a million bucks. Some people just look beautiful, and not necessarily in their physical appearance only, but in the way they move: graceful and confident, or the expressions that come naturally to their face.

In a certain way I think the beauty of God is similar. It’s ineffable and ubiquitous, and proceeds naturally from his character to permeate his every action. Whether manifested in the unutterable power of the almighty Creator or in the utterly human weakness of the incarnate Son, the beauty of the divine is absolutely inescapable. I don’t think God could not be beautiful and produce beauty if he wanted to. It is simply a product of the way he is; beauty itself.

So why do we find it surprising when catch glimpses of that beauty? If God is indeed all around us and invariably radiates beauty shouldn’t we be accustomed to this? Paul says in Romans 1: “…since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…” We humans clearly see God’s divine nature, which includes beauty, in his creation. So if it’s right there in front of our eyes why don’t we notice it?

There are two reasons why, I think. Firstly, we are fallen creatures. Our ability to even minutely comprehend the higher nature of God is absolutely wretched. Paul continues in the same passage, speaking of “men who supress the truth in unrighteousness: “[f]or even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” I once heard that the supression of truth carries the idea of working to press down a spring. We sinners worked to deny the basic and known fact of God’s existence and his readily discernable attributes through the unrighteous acts we engaged in.

How can this be? I suppose it’s somewhat like chasing the bottle to dull the pain of something you want to escape. Who wants to be reminded that they are a sinner and under condemnation? Does anyone like to be faced with their own ugliness? Wouldn’t they do things that will ultimately make them more ugly to escape that encounter? Allow me to answer: Yes; I did. Can anyone truly realize the existence of God, catching a glimpse of his nature, and not also realize his depravity and how infinitely far he is from the smallest part of that perfect One? And by “truly” I specifically do not mean a pseudo-spiritual new agey confession of the divine. I mean the invasive, overwhelming, wholly alien otherness of the One True God coming upon you.

Secondly, I think that even when we live with God in our glorified bodies his beauty will stop us short, in the same way that we would be caught off guard if we were to take a stroll down a familiar hallway and find it blocked by a brick wall. God’s beauty is not like the beauty of the world, not like the things that we think of as beautiful and can become deadened to. Not deadened because repeated exposure leads to familiarization, but because our sin-wracked senses are “not satisfied with seeing, nor .. filled with hearing.” (Ecc. 1:8).

Currently, those of us living as justified beings undergoing sanctification get surprised by God’s beauty. In small things and in large things we find it where we don’t expect it. I don’t expect that this nature of experiencing God’s beauty will cease to be when we enter our glorified state. If anything the pace will speed up. When joined in communion with God, Paul says “then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) But as we are finite beings can never fully grasp an infinite God’s character (“who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?” (Rom. 11:34)), momentary glimpses will occasionally fill our vision, as an impressive showers of sparks come out of a slow, steadily burning fire.

Saint Anselm said this in his Proslogium: “[f]or when heart, and mind, and soul, and all the man, are full of that joy, joy beyond measure will still remain. Hence, not all of that joy shall enter into those who rejoice; but they who rejoice shall wholly enter into that joy.” We can then, in that state, be utterly filled with an experience of the beauty of God, as we cannot now, but we can never fully experience God’s beauty, and beauty immeasurable will be left behind.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this. The beauty of God is an incredibly special thing. And do not think that being surprised by God’s beauty is going to end, ever. Get used to it.

Ben Witherington had an informative blog post regarding the start of Advent and the Christian new year. I was not aware of this, which might be due to my protestant, non-denominational upbringing, but apparently there is indeed a Christian new year. Much like there is a Chinese new year, and a secular new year, which we (yes, Christians) celebrate on January 1st.

The Christian new year is marked by the first day of Advent, that is, the fourth Sunday before Christmas. Now Advent is a holy season of preparation in expectation of the Nativity (Dec. 25th). It runs from the first Sunday to December 24th, Christmas Eve. Christmas Day follows, of course, and it is followed by the 12 Days of Christmas which run from the 26th to the Feast of Epiphany on January 6th. That’s right, the retailers have it backwards. The Twelve Days begin with Christmas, they don’t end on it.

The beginning of advent is traditionally meant to be a time focusing on the Second Coming of Christ. Actually the root adventus literally means “coming”. This is interesting to me. For centuries before us Christians began (and ended, the Sunday beginning the new year also ends the old one) the year with a period of reflection on the future coming of Christ. Then they commemorated the first coming (Nativity) on Christmas. It at first seemed chronologically backwards to my modern mind, but after some thinking it makes sense. Past Christians rang in the new year with teaching, preaching, reflection and exhortation regarding the triumphal return of Jesus. Both the end and start of their year was marked by a focused awareness of the future. We also do this (sort of) on January 1st, but with such a secularistic bent that it’s basically devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Only afterwards (in my mind) did they reflect back on the first coming of the God-man, not to diminish it, but to place it in the proper order. The incarnation/crucifixtion/resurrection was the singlemost important event, or series of events, in all of human existence (bar creation, possibly). The second coming is the most important event coming down the pike in the future.

I know that clarion calls to hark back to the “reason for the season” are numerous and often unnoticed; not much penetrates our post-modern density. But perhaps a semi-liturgical, ecclesiastic tradition of marking the Advent season wouldn’t be an all-bad thing for our post-Christian culture. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

As I said a few posts ago, I’ve been reading (ever so slowly) through Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book really is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp on why Christian Thought is the way it is today. In this post I want to highlight one of Noll’s better strengths: charting the changes in the Christian mind through history.

He does this in several ways in the book, each delineated in its own chapter: the university, American culture, politics, science, etc. He points to the shifts and changes through time that show the effects that the deficiency in Christian thinking has had on each institution. At the end of the chapter on the “Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” Noll makes an aside that I just found too interesting to pass up.

The rest follows after the jump.

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