Author: Matthew

(This is part 2. For the introduction, see part 1.)

First, let’s talk about the larger, big-picture issue. Theologians of course are people that think about God and try to understand and explain who he is and what he does. They have a special word for this particular topic – Theodicy. Theodicies are ideas that have to do with what is often called, “the problem of evil”. (Note, for a very handy overview of approaches, see here.) Why is there suffering in the world? If God is good and also in total control, why is everything obviously a mess? This question (or some variation of it) is probably the #1 reason people don’t believe in God or lose their faith in him.

Now, the secular world has a very simple answer to the problem of evil. It doesn’t exist and God doesn’t exist. The most popular idea in the modern world – the one you are most likely to hear on TV or in textbooks, is that our ideas of good and evil are a “social construct”. Someone told you certain things were bad when you were a kid and that’s what “evil” is for you. It could be something different for somebody else. So whatever you think is right or wrong is really just some made-up ideas in your head that you picked up from somewhere else – not something that reflects the natural world. And God doesn’t do anything about it because he’s just NOT THERE to do anything about anything! You’re on your own. Oh, and while you’re at it, it would behoove you to adopt the most current politically correct values of right and wrong. This will help you go with the flow and have fewer problems getting along with people during your short and meaningless life.

Christianity, on the other hand, has always wrestled with the problem of evil head on. To fear God is also to love good and hate evil and to discern what is right and wrong in the natural world – the day-to-day world all around us. It is to be offended when things are unjust and unfair, and to be happy and relieved when they are just and fair and good. Beauty and mercy are to be praised. Ugliness and cruelty are to be condemned. And our creator God is sovereign over all of creation – over all the heaven and the earth. And He is very, very good. But wait? Why is creation full of injustice? Why so much slavery and murder and hate and to make matters worse, apparently nothing bad happens to many of the pimps, killers, and jerks. In fact, they often seem really successful. What gives?

Christians have tried to answer the problem of evil in various ways over the centuries. Saint Augustine (who lived in the 4th century) said that if God is the light, then evil is the shadow cast as the light shines on creation. Evil has no creative substance in itself, but is really just some kind of necessary side-effect of existence – an absence of total good since God is separate from His creation. OK, maybe there is some truth in that classic image, but it’s just a metaphor. It’s not a very satisfying answer for most folks.

Other people have conjectured that for man to have free will, there had to be a “bad” for us to choose. The fall of man into sin was brought about when Adam and Eve, the prince and princess of creation, chose evil. Instead of treating us like babies or machines, God gave us the dignity to choose to love him or not. God is in control of everything, but he himself chose to limit his power in this way so as to make man special and unique. There are a lot of variations of this explanation out there and depending on what church denomination you are part of, they might have these officially written down somewhere, (or not).

Still, it is a great mystery and there is only so much we can say about why evil and injustice exists in the world. It’s not one of those things that you can just figure out if you think hard enough about it or read enough books. For now, it MUST be something that doesn’t have a complete answer. But I believe it DOES have an answer and that Christianity gives us the best one.

I think our best bet is to look to the future and to the promises of a God that has conquered death. What do you need to make amends for war and put the world to rights? Not someone who is watchful and prevents tragedies, but rather a God who can raise the dead. I would like to suggest that our hope lies in the promised resurrection of the dead, and in Jesus Christ’s return to earth to rule forever. Example: Yes, it was terrible that your 5-year-old daughter died in that car accident, but after the resurrection, when she’s lived a thousand years in the light of King Jesus, that tragedy will be only the most distant memory, as if it just didn’t matter any more.

It says in Hebrews chapter 11 of Abraham and Moses and all the great prophets: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.” These were some of the most faithful and holiest of people that lived in history and yet they were swallowed up in death. But they knew that death would one day be swallowed up in life. Jesus Christ did that work when he rose from the dead on Easter morning. His work just needs to fullness of time to be completed. We’re waiting on that.

I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings to the kids at home and we got to the part where Frodo and Sam lay down to die on side of the volcano after their quest is complete. But in the next chapter, Sam wakes up in a fragrant place, surrounded by friends. He’s been rescued and the great evil permanently vanquished. He sees Gandalf (whom he thought died about 500 pages earlier) and he exclaims, “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” Tolkien, the author, was a Christian of course. I don’t think he thought winning a war with a powerful enemy would make everything sad come untrue. Only a loving and merciful God could do that. That was HIS hope in life, and I believe it’s our hope too. I don’t know WHY injustice is allowed to persist for now, but I believe it WILL be completely made right in the future. That is a big part of God’s promise to us and why he is worthy of our worship and devotion.

Introductory Prayer: Father, thank you for giving us your Word, to teach us. Thank you for giving us your Son, to save us. And thank you for giving us your Holy Spirit, to help us and to advocate for us. God, teach us not to despair, but rather give us the grace needed to trust in you though dark thoughts. Amen.

Today we are going to be taking a look at one of my favorite psalms, #73. This psalm is in two parts really and the first part is pretty depressing, and unfortunately, familiar. Let’s just take a look at the middle part right now right now.

Psalm 73:4-14 (NKJV):
[The wicked], there are no pangs in their death,
But their strength is firm.
They are not in trouble as other men,
Nor are they plagued like other men.
Therefore pride serves as their necklace;
Violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes bulge with abundance;
They have more than heart could wish.
They scoff and speak wickedly concerning oppression;
They speak loftily.
They set their mouth against the heavens,
And their tongue walks through the earth.
Therefore his people return here,
And waters of a full cup are drained by them.
And they say, “How does God know?
And is there knowledge in the Most High?”
Behold, these are the ungodly,
Who are always at ease;
They increase in riches.
Surely I have cleansed my heart in vain,
And washed my hands in innocence.
For all day long I have been plagued,
And chastened every morning.

And to maybe get a better picture oh what the writer is complaining about here, lets look at that again in the very colloquial translation, The Message.

Psalm 73:4-14 (Message)
[The rich and wicked] have nothing to worry about,
not a care in the whole wide world.
Pretentious with arrogance,
they wear the latest fashions in violence,
Pampered and overfed,
decked out in silk bows of silliness.
They jeer, using words to kill;
they bully their way with words.
They’re full of hot air,
loudmouths disturbing the peace.
People actually listen to them—can you believe it?
Like thirsty puppies, they lap up their words.
What’s going on here? Is God out to lunch?
Nobody’s tending the store.
The wicked get by with everything;
they have it made, piling up riches.
I’ve been stupid to play by the rules;
what has it gotten me?
A long run of bad luck, that’s what—
a slap in the face every time I walk out the door.

What a giant downer – so much complaining! Is this God’s Word here? Is this the sort of thing God wants us to write down or to say? Let’s step back a bit.This is just the middle part. The writer gives us some meta commentary before and after. Let’s get some background on what he just said.

Psalm 73:1-4, 15-28
Truly God is good to Israel,
To such as are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;
My steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the boastful,
When I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
Behold, I would have been untrue to the generation of Your children.
When I thought how to understand this,
It was too painful for me—
Until I went into the sanctuary of God;
Then I understood their end.

Surely You set them in slippery places;
You cast them down to destruction.
Oh, how they are brought to desolation, as in a moment!
They are utterly consumed with terrors.
As a dream when one awakes,
So, Lord, when You awake,
You shall despise their image.

Thus my heart was grieved,
And I was vexed in my mind.
I was so foolish and ignorant;
I was like a beast before You.
Nevertheless I am continually with You;
You hold me by my right hand.
You will guide me with Your counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

For indeed, those who are far from You shall perish;
You have destroyed all those who desert You for harlotry.
But it is good for me to draw near to God;
I have put my trust in the Lord GOD,
That I may declare all Your works.

Psalm 73:15-18 (Message)
If I’d have given in and talked like this,
I would have betrayed your dear children.
Still, when I tried to figure it out,
all I got was a splitting headache . . .
Until I entered the sanctuary of God.
Then I saw the whole picture.

I’m going to deal with two questions today. The first is a large abstract one. Why is there injustice in the world today? Why isn’t the world fair? Why is it full of evil and why doesn’t God do something about it?

The second question is more personal and practical. How can I avoid ending up like the guy in the psalm? Are there some practical ways to guard myself against envying the rich or the wicked so much? It seems like I find myself doing it all the time.

My philosophy of song-leading in corporate worship so far: Maximize congregational participation.

Do so in the follow ways:

1. Moderate visibility and volume – Musicians should not be very prominent – low stage, no spotlights. Being completely hidden hinders communication though, so some visibility is preferred. Use enough amplification to be heard clearly throughout the room, but no more.

2. Clear intuitive cues – Give a predictable intro to establish the key. Crescendo into refrains to help people who are lost regain confidence. Give a big V-I resolution ending – always. Don’t make people think about finding their way through the form.

3. Moderate musical difficulty – Pick songs with a relatively narrow vocal range and adjust the key if necessary – most men are baritones, many women altos. Absolutely no ambiguous rhythms. Syncopation is fine if it’s consistent, but dangling space, especially at the end of phrases needs to be filled by instruments so the next attack is obvious.

4. Moderate lyrical difficulty – Don’t force eyes permanently to page or screen, make it within the grasp of eventual memorization……Most lines should rhyme if possible. Axe poor verses of longer songs.

5. Always adjust to context: Children, foreigners, elderly, high ratio of classically-trained singers, seminarians, small/large crowds, etc. All these things should be considered. No matter how constrained your tradition may be, there are creative adaptations that can be made to bring more people in the room along, or leave them out in the cold. Those who have shown up – do your best to draw them in.

(In case your wondering, the photo is of Dietrich Bonhoeffer playing the guitar.)

From Psalm 73 (2-8):

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;
My steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the boastful,
When I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For there are no pangs in their death,
But their strength is firm.
They are not in trouble as other men,
Nor are they plagued like other men.
Therefore pride serves as their necklace;
Violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes bulge with abundance;
They have more than heart could wish.
They scoff and speak wickedly concerning oppression;
They speak loftily.

In some psalms, the enemies in question are actual mortal wartime adversaries (like the people chasing David and trying to literally kill him), but in many situations (like that above), the opponents are not so clear. Who were “the wicked” the psalmist is speaking of in cases like this?

Foreigners? Kings and rich nobles is far off Egypt of Babylon? Doubtful. His knowledge of them would have been only a rumor. And even if he did know something of them, they are too distant, both physically and psychologically, to envy potently. He would have never met any of these actual folks. Their rich lives in far off lands might as well have been on another planet. He was in no danger of despairing over the lack of something he didn’t know first-hand or likely even second-hand. So no, not rich foreigners. The wicked he was fretting about must have been much closer to home. (Girard’s insights about proximity are helpful here.)

So were there wicked men in Israel? You bet. Who were they, rogue aliens who didn’t care about God’s law? No – the few aliens that were living in Israel at the time were either literal slaves or at least of the servant class. They couldn’t have been anything like the reckless high-rollers the psalmist is angered over.

So who were these “wicked” men whose eyes “bulged with abundance” and who were “not in trouble as other men”? They must have been the guy’s own proper Jewish neighbors – men with families close by to him – people he actually ran into on the street all the time. And what were these wicked men doing? Well, probably not anything particularly illegal. This psalm was written during the reign of King David. The government was strong and largely just. Local law enforcement would have been functional. The priests in the temple were in full operation. This wasn’t the lawless wild west or some place like modern Somalia or central Iraq where local thug warlords controlled each town. No, the “wicked” things these people were doing was stuff unlikely to get them thrown in jail. Maybe some of what they did was shielded by bribes and hush money, but for the most part these evil men were seemingly law-abiding citizens minding their own business.

So what were the doing that was so bad? All I can figure is that they were oppressing their subordinates: treating their servants like slaves, cheating their tenants, dealing dishonestly in their business, keeping mistresses under the table, paying off the cops when their kids got into trouble, indulging in luxury and drinking $1000 wine from Phonecia while they foreclosed on the poor people renting their land. They were raking in the bucks at the expense of their fellow humans. After long years of this, they had amassed wealth to flaunt in various ways as they meandered around the city tending to their daily affairs. People feared and respected them because of their wealth and would listen attentively whenever they would run their mouth about whatever topic was on their mind.

Everything seemed peachy for them – they had tons of food and a nice place to live. Had all their oppression caused them to have “bad karma” and experience personal disaster? It didn’t seem like it. It seemed like they were living the high life, permanently. What’s somewhat ironic is that most of these folks would probably be considered important people or “pillars” of the community, rather than shady creepers. They weren’t like a criminal drug-dealer today, but more likely a “respected” businessman, university president, or elder. Why wouldn’t they be? But the people that interacted with them closely on a daily basis would realize they were deeply corrupted. Their position they maintained, causing the more honest among their subjects much consternation.

“And look at me”, the just man says. “I’ve obeyed all the rules and what do I have? Just a bunch of debt. Also, some goats I sold to a guy last week got sick and died on him and he wants his money back. I gave it back to him, but now I’m really hurting. I could have been like the rich and screwed that guy over and kept the cash. Heck, if I had done that, then I could have fixed that leaky roof and got my wife to stop complaining for a while. Why didn’t I do that? What do I get for being honest? Nothin’ but trouble.”

Today though, who do we often think of as “the wicked” in this psalm? Evil foreign dictators. Corrupt politicians, especially perhaps the current President or Prime Minister and his entourage. The CEO of some big oil company maybe. The thing they have in common is they are all highly-visible people in the public square. They are also people you’ve never met and who probably live thousands of miles away from you. The only reason you know anything about them is from consuming modern journalism.

The information age allows our envy and anger (just or otherwise) to cast a much wider net than it did in the time of the psalmist. Our personal accompanying images are different, giving the scripture a different flavor when we read it. The truth remains the same though. Dwelling on this seeming inequality is disheartening and poisonous. The antidote is the same – “the sanctuary of God” –  communion with one’s creator, and via that some good eschatology – replacing present outrage with trust.

For several years now, I’ve regularly led worship (meaning, play guitar and sing) at the evangelical church I attend. My wife often joins in playing bass or flute and whistle. My oldest daughter has also contributed her violin for much of the past year. I’ve always played on the only guitar I own – a nylon-string classical leftover from the days in college when I would stay up listening to Antigoni Goni records all night. It’s never been the best tool for the medium, but I dared not try to acquire something else while adoption expenses and myriad medical bills perpetually loomed.

But alas, through various fortunes and blessings, I now have a new and nicer guitar with which to stir the congregation to their feet to sing an old hymn, or some Chris Tomlin anthem. In the off hours, it will enable me to project the correct timbre as I try to hack by way through Celtic pieces. By my calculations, I’ve achieved a level of proficiency equal with Pierre Bensusan – when he was about 14 years old. Bonus, the G string actually stays in tune. It’s pretty sweet.

Last night while perusing my book shelf, I decided to pick up and reread part of one of the classics of Pentecostal “deliverance” ministry – They Shall Expel Demons by Derek Prince. Now Prince is one of those “demon hunter” guys who sees evil spirits at work in virtually every personal or psychological hang-up. He’s a bit over the top. I’ve never been a big fan of this approach to the world, but it’s difficult to get around some of the questions Prince asks with regards to prevalence of exorcism in the New Testament. They are questions we should be able to grapple with.

The basic idea is as follows:

In the Gospel accounts and in Acts, Jesus and the apostles frequently encounter demons. It’s not just a couple of isolated cases, but a frequent occurrence. Luke uses the phrase “unclean spirit” nearly twenty times. When Jesus sends forth the 72 disciples, their success as exorcists is highlighted on their return. Years later, Paul is casting out demons from people right and left.

Beyond the scriptural accounts, who of the early church fathers believed that the work of demons disappeared after the first century? None as far as I know. Their presence and continued activity were assumed throughout the Medieval period. It’s only with the enlightenment age and the rise of rationalism that we see them fade into the dubious status they hold today.

In the modern church, I think a major pillar supporting this state of things is cessasionist theory. Cessasionists believe that the early Christian gifts or “magic” powers of prophecy, speaking in tongues, and divine healing are permanently gone and no longer in operation. Christians who believe they still DO work today are usually referred to as “charismatics”. Well, one particular tool that seems to have been flushed down the drain with the other miraculous sign gifts, was that of exorcism. It’s a little bit of a gray area since casting out demons is not right next to speaking in tongues on the usual lists in scripture. It’s status as a spiritual gift (though obviously something done via the Holy Spirit) is not as clear cut. Nevertheless, it appears to have been grouped in with all the other “magic” looking things the Holy Spirit USED to do a long time ago and stuffed in the first century closet. That makes sense, but it implies something that we should all find somewhat worrisome.

If the “tool” used to cast out demons no longer exists in the church, does that mean there are no more demons? That’s it, their all gone? They were crawling all over the place in the first century but… now they’re not? The few apostles in operation around the Mediterranean Sea got ’em all? The rest just got tired and gave up? Does any of that sound just a little bit fishy to you?

“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that, but most people know it from Keyser Soze and the movie “The Usual Suspects”.

Still, do you see what cessasionist theory essentially demands? No casting out demons, ’cause no demons. Boom. That simple. No tools? Well the work must be done. You have to build a house in the wilderness but you were only given hammer and nails? Just ignore all those trees and keep looking for the nice stack of finished lumber. If you were supposed to chop down the trees, the hardware store wouldn’t have been sold out of chainsaws, clearly.

Well, check out the last few chapters of Revelation – supposedly set far in the future. The demons – they’re all still there. What, are they all just too busy watching TV right now? Imprisoned so we need not bother with them? So easily defeatable now that simply saying “Jesus” out loud (no spiritual gifts required, but thanks!) is enough to do the trick? The “kinds that only come out with prayer and fasting” (to quote the Son of God) completely and utterly out of the picture? The fact that the New Testament spends so much time talking about them must just be a historical curiosity. Oh well.

Deep thinkers and philosophers out there who study the scriptures – does that answer not seem just a bit on the hokey side to you? I think so. I’m not suggesting we all follow the path of the Pentecostal “demon hunter” or anything like that, but I DO think we need a better demonology. The Roman Catholics have one actually, even if it has its own strange issues, but still – better than nothing. Let’s not have nothing. The devil would love it if we had nothing.

Reading Tolkien to the children the past few months, I can’t help but notice how much the characters in The Lord of the Rings speak of songs of heroic deeds. Many of them wonder at the writing of verse and whether anyone will be around to hear it sung. In fact, they do this more frequently than they actually sing themselves. The works exist in Tolkien’s vast appendices of course, but in the novel proper, it is mostly contemplation and analysis. I think perhaps this is Tolkien’s own voice speaking here rather than Sam’s or Merry’s.

Today we still honor soldiers in various ways, but songs and ballads have fallen into disuse. It’s too bad really – not because we so desperately need to preserve the memory of war in art, but because it gave us something to sing about besides love and death.

There are exceptions though. What might a modern song of man and deed look like? It could look like this wonderful song, ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’, written by Mark Knoffler and featuring James Taylor. It draws on the 1997 historical novel Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon about the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomers and surveyors in the mid-1700s. What a curious topic for a song today, but gosh is it fabulous on many levels. It may be about scientists on the American frontier, but it feels closer to a lay about Helm Hammerhand than anything else you might stumble upon on pop radio.

Sailing to Philadelphia

I am Jeremiah Dixon
I am a Geordie boy
A glass of wine with you, sir
And the ladies I’ll enjoy
All Durham and Northumberland
Is measured up by my own hand
It was my fate from birth
To make my mark upon the earth

He calls me Charlie Mason
A stargazer am I
It seems that I was born
To chart the evening sky
They’d cut me out for baking bread
But I had other dreams instead
This baker’s boy from the west country
Would join the Royal Society

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line

Now you’re a good surveyor, Dixon
But I swear you’ll make me mad
The West will kill us both
You gullible Geordie lad
You talk of liberty
How can America be free
A Geordie and a baker’s boy
In the forests of the Iroquois

Now hold your head up, Mason
See America lies there
The morning tide has raised
The capes of Delaware
Come up and feel the sun
A new morning has begun
Another day will make it clear
Why your stars should guide us here

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line

 

Here, Peter Leithart points out the curious language surrounding Sarai’s plan to have Hagar bear a son for Abraham.

Sarai’s goal is to obtain children, but the Hebrew of Genesis 16:2 says literally “perhaps I can build [myself] from her.” For Sarai, having a son is a construction project, which builds her.

The phrasing goes back to Genesis 2, where Yahweh constructs (banah, build) Even from Adam’s rib. Sarai wants to be the new Eve, the built woman, not by being formed from her husband’s rib but by having, through her maid, her husband’s son.

In Sarai (later Sarah’s) eyes, what’s important is that the son be of the flesh of Abraham. Whether she is the mother or not is incidental. She is determined and not without resources. What she does with her slave Hagar is done by her own concerted will. This brings to mind a phrase from the New Testament.

But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
-John 1:12-13

“The will of the flesh”, and “the will of man” – I’ve often thought the presence of both phrases was redundant, but now it seems not. It was Sarai’s will to “build” a son in some fashion, even if not with her own flesh. The widespread use of in vetro fertilization and surrogate mothers today, along with the “light” eugenics that goes along with the practice (scrutinizing eggs for possible disease) seems also to be a sort of building. This would definitely fall under the category of “will of man” rather than “will of the flesh”, hence the differentiation. The having of children is a much richer topic than sex.

Our salvation on the other hand comes from neither power, but from God whose love for us is not so much engineered from what was lying around, but rather inherit in the architecture from before the earth itself was formed.

“The best code is no code.” is something wise computer programmers will say from time to time. I think this is actually an alternate way to say “convention over configuration”, another frequently heard bit of philosophy in software development circles. Though some pragmatic reason is usually given (performance, simplified maintenance, lower cost, etc.) I think the underlying natural force behind these ideas is a desire for the conservation of language. The richer the vocabulary, the fewer words it takes to say something specific and the fewer verbose instructions are required. When you are limited to only a handful simple words, it can take a great deal of rambling to communicate an idea. It may even be impossible.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.
-Proverbs 25:2

What are the kings (or we) doing exactly? Figuring out how things work, yes, but immediately after that, or concurrently with that, they are naming things. They give things new names, they enrich the vocabulary. It now takes fewer words to describe a platypus because you can say “platypus” instead of, “That funny animal that looks like a cross between a beaver and a duck, you know what I mean?”.

So what exactly is God doing when he conceals things (his glory to do so)? He’s enchanting the world. He’s making it richer such that the words we have right now are NOT ENOUGH to describe it adequately. And we’re not stupid. We give it a shot and we immediately recognize that our vocabulary sucks. Not only that, but we can’t come up with a new name JUST YET. During the process of thinking of one, it become clear that we don’t really understand what we’re talking about. We don’t want to give it just any old name. It’s only satisfying if we give it a GOOD name. And so we must investigate what it is – tear it apart to discover how it works, or handle it for a long enough time.

People imagine Adam sitting casually on a rock and naming the animals in the garden by assigning new gibberish words to them, thus endowing the combination of syllables with meaning. But if Adam is anything like us at all, he would have thought about and investigated each animal for quite some time before deciding on a name. He might have even changed it around a bit as he went and gone back and made corrections as his observation broadened. It would have taken a long time. It would have been hard work to do a good job. He would have worked hard but he would have enjoyed it. It could have taken years. I wonder if he was done by the time the incident with the serpent happened? Maybe he thought he was done, but on that point he would have been very wrong. We, his grandchildren – billions of cousins we are – have only scratched the surface.

We think we’re so clever since we can now talk about the electromagnetic spectrum and Adam couldn’t but that wouldn’t have made his job any easier or his creative names any less impressive. The disconnect between the words and tools we have and the reality we are trying to describe is still just as vast. We try to talk about the distance between the stars using words like “red shift” and “dark matter” and “the expanding universe”. He tried to talk about the difference between two pine trees with novel words like “edges”, “points”, and “leaves”. Oh with what joy he would have leapt if the word “needle” and its full meaning were available for his task! It’s such a better word. What key word are we missing when we talk about deep space? Not sure… yet. It is concealed.

So programmers are always wrestling to say more with less code. If there is anything lacking in our newest crop of bright young developers it is a sense of history. They come up with some hip new Javascript framework and they think they are taking a leap forward in brevity when in actuality it is five steps forward and four steps back (or occasionally six steps back). They imagine themselves to be much more brilliant than their fathers, only to find themselves burdened with the same curse and similar limits, their new abstractions just as ‘leaky’ as the old ones. Simply swapping out a term here and there won’t make the architecture any better. It takes deeper thought and greater leaps to make the improvement we all desire.

Unit tests fix a real problem, but I’ve seen them make a project’s size triple. Now things are actually worse because your code is LESS maintainable, but you’ve deceived yourself into thinking it’s MORE so because of the tests. You pat yourself on the back for best practices and test coverage, even while your app breaks in the wild and the smallest feature changes now take 40 lines of work instead of 4. I think the best measure of whether some architectural element really is an improvement is brevity. At the end of the day, are you saying more with less? (Or at least the same with less?) Are you actually typing less crap in the long run? If the answer is “no”, then I suggest it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

One more example and I’ll be done – dependency injection, or “inversion of control” as it’s sometimes called. It’s a good idea and a useful way to run your software with simulated data for testing, or even an entire simulated environment. The problem is that with most implementations, it greatly increases the number of moving parts. A simple configuration approach might be 20 lines long, all in one file, and immediately readable and easy to adjust. I’ve seen dependency injections schemes span 20 files, invoke arcane syntax, introduce all kinds of mysterious reflection libraries, and even kill performance in some cases. “Oh but then your not doing it right!” the advocates yell. Well no kidding, but the people I know that DO do it right – many have them have eventually abandoned the practice, or at least scaled it back dramatically – only using it in certain cases. At the end of the day it was a lot more code, new jargon aside. But the best code is no code.

Take a deep breath and try again. You are Adam naming the animals.

Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height. – Micah 3:12

The temple mount “like a wooded height” – a curse of de-civilization is pronounced here. Just as man’s body returns to dust, so his works return to nature.

Trees take a terribly long time to grow, but they do eventually. A friend of mine used to work as accountant for Weyerhauser, which produces lumber and paper. He told me an interesting fact. The company has been buying up forests all over America for over a hundred years and now controls about 14 million acres. And here’s the deal – after it logs an area, it plants new trees. And then they just sit and wait. Whole careers come and go and generations pass, and the forest grows up from nothing and then after about 50 years, all the trees are back and they cut them down again. It’s a completely sustainable and renewable resource because they make sure to cut them down at the same rate they are growing up. Environmental advocates might be horrified at the prospect of cutting down a million acres of forest, but what if you could prove you had another million acres growing up right next to it that you had planted earlier? That takes patience and planning to pull off.

Part of Micah’s curse in this passage is that a hill that was richly developed by man would turn back into a forest. That doesn’t happen overnight – it takes an entire generation for those trees to grow up. It has to sit there quite a while – until your children are old. We would have our works today rise up with ridiculous rapidity. Instead of a cathedral taking a hundred years, the new highest sky scraper rises in Dubai on the backs of slaves and cranes in only 2-3 years. We have overnight billionaires born of tech acquisitions. We want to get rich quick and cram as much into our lives as possible, extending it with surgery, Viagra, and dialysis. Our lives are fleeting and we desire things NOW lest we whither away before they arrive.

I think we project this impatience on God as well. We imagine his judgements to be in the form of lightning strikes or fire from heaven. That’s how we would have it done after all. But scripture shows us a God whose judgements are often slow, lasting through a great deal of time. He gives us over to sin for a while. He let’s things work themselves out for a while and then rescues us. He sends Israel to exile, not for a week, but for 70 years. The remnant is literally all pushing up daisies by then. It’s their grand children who see new things take shape. The temple mount is hosed long enough for tall trees to come back.

And then, in a sense, his saving of us is the same way. Suddenly on the third day was death defeated and Satan actually cast down “like lightning”. But then oh so slow was the rest of the redemptive work – as if a small seed was planted to grow into a garden to cover the earth. Such is His mercy for us – it can be terribly slow too. We see death as some tragic interruption or disappointment in this process. He does not. The seed is still growing.