This week’s sponsor is christianaudio.com. “The mission of christianaudio is to shape Christian hearts to think and do right. We are in the business of making contexts in which Christians can think properly about God, themselves, and the world. We believe that spiritual growth occurs within the framework of proper beliefs - the contexts that allow Christians to go about enjoying God and serving others.” I have met the guys behind christianaudio on several occasions and have always enjoyed their kindness and their desire to serve the church.
This week they are giving away the audio book of Humility: True Greatness by C.J. Mahaney. Read by Sean Runnette, the book runs 4 hours in length. You may well be familiar with this book. I reviewed it shortly after its release and said, “Humility: True Greatness is a truly great book. I do not know of a person who shows no pride in his life, and thus I do not know of a person who would not benefit from reading it. I highly and unreservedly recommend this book. I pray that it will be widely-read, that humility may be widely-practiced.”
We have ten copies to give away. Do note that this is the audio book, not the printed book.
Rules: You may only enter the draw once. Simply fill out your name and email address to enter the draw. As soon as the winners have been chosen, all names and addresses will be immediately and permanently erased. The giveaway closes Saturday noon.
Be the Church?
A long time ago I was part of a church that began to say “Don’t go to church; be the church.” Jeff Purswell has written an article showing why this is not good theology. “Now, despite the element of truth (God’s people are the church), there are all kinds of things wrong with this statement. But behind the words is obviously someone’s disappointment (and possibly disillusionment) with organized Christianity. And although I’d guess that many Christians would reject this false choice, their attitude to Sunday gatherings of the church may reveal a similar apathy.”
Praying Scripturally
Ligon Duncan is beginning what looks like an interesting series of blogs. It will deal with praying scripturally. “Few of us, probably, are satisfied with our private, family, and corporate prayer habits. And surely we all recognize that the Church of our day, at least in our land, is weak in the way of prayer. We do not pray often. We do not pray with Scriptural proportion, nor does our prayer much reflect the language and thought of the Bible. We do not pray fervently.”
The Personal Promise Bible
After a while I hardly even know what to say anymore. “Have you ever inserted your name as you read the Bible to make it more personal? Now you can experience the reality of God’s love and promises in a way you never thought possible. In the Personal Promise Bible, you will read your first name personalized in over 5,000 places throughout the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, over 7,000 places throughout the complete Old and New Testaments.” So I could have a version of the Bible that translates 2 Peter 1:4, “By which He has granted to Tim His precious and exceedingly great promises; that through these Tim may become a partaker of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.”
The Bible by Numbers: Multiples of Eleven
Just for fun, here is a list of significant numbers in the Bible, each of which is a multiple of eleven.
15 Google Interview Questions to Make You Feel Stupid
Here are the kinds of questions you might be asked if you try to get a job with Google…
I think I have done it. I’ve come up with the ultimate idea for the ultimate Christian novel. This novel seamlessly blends today’s most popular genres into one beautiful, compelling, cohesive whole. I thought you would want to know all about it. So I give to you…
Cassidy: Amish Vampiress of the Tribulation
That’s right. It’s an Amish novel; it’s a vampire novel; it’s an end-times novel. It’s the best of all worlds.
Here is the back cover text:
He is handsome. He is romantic. He is Amish.
Twenty-three year old Cassidy lives a simple life in the Amish countryside of Lancaster County. Simple, that is, until Slade Byler moves into the old Lapp farm. Cassidy finds herself irresistibly drawn to the handsome Slade; but she fears to share the secret that she alone knows. For Cassidy is an immortal, a princess in the long line of ancient Amish vampires. Will Slade’s love grow cold when he learns this great secret? Can she give to him a heart that does not beat?
Meanwhile, the strength of the Antichrist grows as he consolidates his power and seeks to destroy the peace-loving people of Pennsylvania. A blossoming romance unfolds between Cassidy and Slade as the world around them changes forever. They must fight to stay alive, they must fight to keep their forbidden love a secret, but, as Amish, they must not fight at all.
In this irresistible tale of intrigue and adventure, set against global upheaval, the bonnet meets the cape in a story sure to span the ages.
Here is a brief excerpt from the novel itself:
As if for the first time, Slade looked at Cassidy—her hair pulled back tightly and safely encased within a bonnet; her beautiful pinafore protecting her black dress; her long black cape trailing behind her with its red velvet lining peeking out around her ankles.
Cassidy spoke suddenly. “I grow weak for it has been a fortnight since I last tasted fresh blood.”
“I must bring to you a feast,” Slade replied. “I will have to face all the armies of the Antichrist to do it, for you cannot drink the blood of the Amish!”
Her heart stirred with love for the brave, brave man before her, Cassidy pushed her bonnet away from her eyes and moved to kiss Slade. As they came together she felt the smooth, clean-shavenness of his upper lip against her own. She ran her fingers through his magnificent beard. “Oh Slade! What can your buggy do against the forces of the Antichrist?”
“I don’t know. But I will think of something.”
“You must. You simply must.”
Deep in thought, Slade walked a few paces, his eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. His suspenders stood like ribbons of blood upon his shoulders. Suddenly he turned and said, “I won’t be taking the buggy, my love. The elders say I can accept a ride in an automobile, right?”
“Yes. As long as you do not own it!”
“And a tank is pretty much an automobile, right?”
“Of course!”
“Then I know what I must do,” he said resolutely, tearing his hat from his head and throwing it to the ground. “You set the table. I’m going hunting!”
This is week two of our reading project. We are reading our way through John Murray’s Redemption Accomplished and Applied, a classic text that provides a thorough treatment of the doctrine of the atonement. Murray is not a man to waste a word, so this book is dense; but he is also a brilliant theologian, so it is well worth the sometimes-difficult read. It is work, but the pay-off is huge.
If you would like to join in the fun, there is still lots of time to do so. You’re only two chapters behind. Simply find a copy of the book and get reading!
Summary
This week’s chapter dealt with the nature of the atonement. I’m not sure that I fully understood the big picture of this chapter but if I did, it went like this. Murray went looking for an “inclusive rubric” under which he could place the atonement. The atonement includes specific categories used to describe Christ’s work: things like sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation and redemption. But he sought to find a heading under which he could place even these terms. The term he settled upon is obedience. “The Scripture…uses this term, or the concept it designates, with sufficient frequency to warrant the conclusion that obedience is generic and therefore embracive enough to be viewed as the unifying or integrating principle.” This leads to a discussion of the difference between Christ’s active obedience and his passive obedience. Murray offers some valuable keys to understanding passive obedience, which I will lead you to read or review on your own. A few things stood out to me in this section, including this: “When we speak of the death of our Lord on the cross as the supreme act of his obedience we are thinking not merely of the overt act of dying upon the tree but also of the disposition, will, and determinate volition which lay back of the overt act.” When we speak of Christ’s passive obedience, we do not speak of passivity, for in all things Christ had a determined will and a determined disposition.
After this discussion of obedience as the “inclusive category in terms of which the atoning work of Christ may be viewed and which establishes at the outset the active agency of Christ in the accomplishment of redemption” he turns to the specific categories the Bible uses to set forth the nature of the atonement.
First, he looks at sacrifice. He says it is a given that Christ’s work is construed as sacrifice so the only real question here is this: what notion of sacrifice governs this pervasive use of the term as it is applied to the work of Christ? This leads to a lengthy discourse on how the New Testament writers would have understood the term based on their cultural and religious setting. “The work of Christ,” he says, “is expiatory, expiatory indeed with a transcendent virtue, efficacy.” Last week I mentioned that Murray can be difficult to read. I leave this sentence as evidence: “It is this amazing conjuncture that the union in him of priestly office and piacular offering evinces.”
Second, he looks at propitiation saying “the idea of propitiation is so woven into the fabric of the Old Testament ritual that it would be impossible to regard that ritual as the pattern of the sacrifice if propitiation did not occupy a similar place in the one great sacrifice once offered.” In other words, sacrifice and propitiation are very closely related to one another. He offers a lengthy but helpful definition of propitiation which includes the idea of “covering.” He carefully shows that sin creates a situation in which we are estranged from God but, even more importantly, in which God is estranged from us. Then he says, “Vengeance is the reaction of the holiness of God to sin, and the covering is that which provides for the removal of divine displeasure which the sin evokes.” Further, “Propitiation presupposes the wrath and displeasure of God, and the purpose of propitiation is the removal of this displeasure.”
Third, he turns to reconciliation. “Reconciliation presupposes disrupted relations between God and men. It implies enmity and alienation. This alienation is twofold, our alienation from God and God’s alienation from us. The cause of the alienation is, of course, our sin, but the alienation consists not only in our unholy enmity against God but also in God’s holy alienation from us.”
Fourth and finally, he looks to redemption. He says, “The language of redemption is the language of purchase and more specifically of ransom. And ransom is the securing of a release by the payment of a price.” He warns, though, that we cannot follow this term too far into its parallels with human transactions, lest our constructions become artificial and fanciful. He looks here to law and sin as the means to understand why an act of redemption was necessary within God’s economy. Having shared what Scripture says he concludes “redemption from sin cannot be adequately conceived or formulated except as it comprehends the victory which Christ secured once for all over him who is the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.”
So, at this point Murray has looked at both the necessity and the nature of the atonement. He continues to lay the groundwork for his eventual examination of the application of redemption. But before he can get there, there are a few more foundational matters to attend to. We will look at those over the next three weeks.
Next Week
For next Thursday please read chapter three, “The Perfection of the Atonement.”
Your Turn
The purpose of this program is to read classics together. So if there are things that stood out to you in this chapter, if there are questions you had, this is the time and place to have your say. Feel free to post a comment below.
Christians and Vampires
Oh boy. “Vamping Up: Christians Bite into Vampire Market” is a headline in Publishers Weekly’s Christians Bookline. Looks like Christians need their vampire fix, too.
Illustration Challenge
Lukas VanDyke, photographer extraordinaire, decided to take on a strange but cool little project. He read through the five most recent posts on my blog and then went out and snapped a photo related to each. You can check out the (pretty amazing) results at the link.
The Kindle in Canada
The Kindle finally comes to Canada. Strangely, though, it’s only for sale from amazon.com, not amazon.ca.
R. Crumb’s “Genesis”
Dr. Mohler writes about R. Crumb’s graphic novel retelling of Genesis. I spotted this in the store recently and was thinking about buying it. As luck would have it, when I flipped it open I was at the story of Lot and his daughters. That one page was enough to convince me that I wasn’t going to let my kids see the book!
Words and the Word of God
Mounce does what he does so well at Koinonia Blog. This week he discusses a little Greek word and asks what it tells us about verbal, plenary inspiration.
Eight Great Date Nights
There are some good ideas in this list. “Tired of the old dinner-and-a-movie routine, but not sure what else to do on your date nights? Try these eight ideas to get your creative juices flowing!”
Though I don’t feel quite right about it, I just had to give it a try. It is an experiment of sorts, I guess. I just had to know what it was like to be one of the few, one of the proud, one of the obnoxious—one of the late mergers. You know these people. Most of you, when you are crawling along the highway in heavy traffic and see a sign telling you that the lane will end in one mile (or one kilometer if you’re up here in Canada), quickly bump over into the lane that will not end, glad that you’ve immediately sorted out that problem. Now you can be assured that you won’t find yourself squeezed onto the shoulder or parked endlessly with your light blinking, trying to squeeze your way out of that dying lane while everyone else tries to block your progress. Yet, as you sit there, content that you’ve done the right thing, you can’t help but notice all those people speeding by to your right, driving their cars to the edge, to the brink, to the very last car-length of the lane that is about to end. You grouch, your grumble, you remark on their complete lack of care for the other people on the road. And yet you have to admit that they will get where they are going before you will. They seem unaffected by your plight, content to further their own goals even at your expense.
I’ve been there. And I just had to try life as a late merger. I now zip down that ending lane and merge at the very last second, finding a gap in traffic and squeezing my van into it. I get the dirty looks and angry stares. But I get where I’m going sooner than they do.
In his book Traffic Tom Vanderbilt discusses this same phenomenon. He, too, became a late merger, much to his wife’s chagrin, and he found that life is better this way. “It is a question you have no doubt asked yourself while crawling down some choked highway, watching with mounting frustration as the adjacent cars glide ahead. You drum the wheel with your fingers. You change the radio station. You fixate on one car as a benchmark of your own lack of progress. You try to figure out what that weird button next to the rear-window defroster actually does. I used to think this was just part of the natural randomness of the highway. Sometimes fate would steer me into the faster lane, sometimes it would relinquish me to the slow lane.” But he made a major lifestyle change when he became a late merger.
But the days after he first experimented with late merging were not easy. “In the days after, a creeping guilt and confusion took hold. Was I wrong to have done this? Or had I been doing it wrong all my life.” Seeking answers, he headed to an online community and posed the question to the waiting masses. He was rather surprised at the response, not just in the volume of responses but also in the passion and conviction with which people spoke. Some argued that he was a goon, refusing to do the sort of random acts of kindness that benefit all of society. By refusing to merge early, he was contributing to the overall slowness of the highway and making accidents more likely. Others argued that he was simply a good steward, using the highway to its maximum capacity. After all, what is the purpose of all that asphalt if we are not really allowed to drive on it? By maximizing the use of the highway surface he was actually making life better for everyone. Politeness or fairness (real or perceived) were actually detrimental to everyone.
Later in the book Vanderbilt gives empirical evidence as to what works best—whether early merging or late merging is better in the end. And he offers up his take on how we can best keep traffic flowing.
But for now, by way of light-hearted fare, do tell me, are you a late merger or an early merger? And how do you feel about the people who do the opposite of what you do?
Turning the Bible into Toilet Paper
Denny Burk shares a sad but interesting little fact about Ian McKellen. “In an interview with
Details magazine, gay actor Ian McKellen says that he tears pages out of Bibles that he finds in hotel rooms. Some of the Bible pages are hung up in his bathroom as toilet paper.”
Thankful for a Mother’s Devotion
Ed Welch pens a tribute to his mother. “I just received news that my mother died this morning. She was 84 and had been at Quarreyville Presbyterian Home in Lancaster County. Her mind had been erased by strokes over the last few years. It had been about 8 years since she recognized me or my sisters.”
Is Gambling OK?
Phil Johnson looks at the issue of gambling. “Is it a sin to gamble? There’s not an easy or instantly-obvious prooftext answer to that question. If you are looking for a ‘Thus saith the Lord: Thou shalt not gamble,’ you won’t find it anywhere. Nothing expressly forbids gambling anywhere in Scripture. Does that automatically put gambling into the realm of
adiaphora, or indifferent matters? I don’t think so. I would argue that gambling is a sin, full stop.
All Of My Days
Here’s another example of why I love to read Danielle’s blog.
Mass: We Pray
Surely this has to be a joke. Someone tell me this is a joke!
Fireproof Follow-up
The follow-up to the movie
Fireproof will be about fatherhood. “‘The title is one word: Courageous,’ said Fireproof Director Alex Kendrick, who will also direct the new film. ‘(It’s about) four fathers who are all in law enforcement—who protect and serve together—(and) go through a terrible tragedy. They begin looking at their role as fathers … and they begin challenging one another to fulfill God’s intention for fathers.’”
Deal of the Day: Amazon’s Gold Box
This is a bit random, I know, but today Amazon has a good Gold Box deal. They are offering their Pike Street down comforters at a really steep discount. Amazon keeps sending me their Pike Street stuff for review and it has impressed us as being high-quality for a great price.
Why should the Devil get all the good scientists? It sometimes seems that way, doesn’t it? We hear of scientists like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and others who are acclaimed as being at the top of their field and almost inevitably it seems that they are atheists or otherwise committed to explaining the world in terms of Darwinian evolution. Occasionally we find a great dissenting mind, but then we discover that that person is committed to beliefs that seem opposed to the plain account of Scripture. So we have Francis Collins who writes The Language of God but who in the book says that, though God exists, life and creation can be explained in terms of natural laws and processes that do not depend on the Divine hand of God. It is both tiresome and frustrating.
But here at last comes Edgar Andrews whose list of academic credentials include more letters than all the names in my family: BSc, PhD, DSc, FInstP, FIMMM, CEng, CPhys (which, according to a site I consulted, is together an anagram for disbenching tscpf fpsps chym- cmd ‘m). No, I don’t know what any of those degrees mean, but they sure sound impressive. He is Emeritus Professor of Materials at the University of London and an international expert on the science of large molecules (not small ones, mind you, only the large ones). His credentials include things that sound like they must set him apart; things such as this: In September 1972 he was one of four specially invited speakers at the dedication symposium of the Michigan Molecular Institute, two of the others being Nobel Laureates Paul Flory and Melvin Calvin.
Put it all together and you find that Andrews is one smart dude. He’s smarter than you and me and the rest of us put together. And in his new book Who Made God? he launches a full front assault on the new atheists. He does this not through a point-by-point refutation of their books, but by an insightful look at science and the existence of God. An excellent writer who mixes a subtle British sense of humor with a powerful intellect and a deep understanding of science, he very quickly picks apart the arguments we have for so long been hearing from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and even Francis Collins. Yet he still crafts a book that is readable and, best of all, understandable. Even the chapter dealing with string theory is comprehensible—no small feat for a smart guy writing about what lies at the very frontier of science.
The topics Andrews covers range from the existence of God to the nature of hypotheses to the abilities of mutations to create. Through it all, he shows how the claims of atheism and naturalism fall short—how they rely on bad science, how they require bad logic or unfair hypotheses and how they are beneath the very minds that create them. He draws the reader to inevitable conclusion that there is a Creator who is pre-existent and who is living and active in the world today. By the end he draws the gaze of the created to the majesty of the Creator and calls the reader to see God for who he is.
A powerful book and one that is exceptionally well-written, Who Made God? is just the book I’ve been waiting for. It aptly refutes the claims of the new atheists but does so without giving away the farm in the meantime. And I couldn’t ask for much more than that.
I came across Tim’s blog in 2005 when I was doing some research for our recording of Martin Luther’s Here I Stand. The day I connected with Tim, he told me that he had just that day started listening to John’s Gospel from the ESV version of the Listener’s Bible that we had recently published. Not long after that he interviewed me for this blog.
Last month I released a book with DVD titled Unleashing the Word: Rediscovering the Public Reading of Scripture. I co-authored it with my friend and colleague in ministry, Warren Bird, who has collaborated on 21 books, several of them award winning.
Zondervan recommended Challies.com as a community that may be interested in this new book. Given our previous relationship, I heartily agreed and am pleased to submit this brief testimonial.
The purpose of the book is to inspire and instruct people — both pastors and lay readers — how to elevate the public reading of the Bible to a more honored and anticipated moment in our worship services.
As my pastor, Tim Keller, at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City wrote in his endorsement of the book, “In most church services, the reading of the Word is poorly and hurriedly done. What a missed opportunity! Max’s book will help your church restore this neglected worship practice. There’s nothing else like it.”
In many ways this book is a compilation of a lifetime of work. It is story based, drawing from my experiences with my reading team at church, where I have led the Scripture reading ministry since 2002. The book is also informed from various other contexts where I have coached other readers, or been coached myself.
My life’s calling is to recapture the rich oral tradition of telling classic Christian literature with insight and appropriate dramatic expression. I do that with the Bible, having recorded three translations available on Bible Gateway and as speaker on the radio program, Listen to the Bible, which airs daily on nearly 700 radio affiliates worldwide. In the past year 45,000 people have experienced my live performances of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters or Mark’s Gospel, a one-man retelling of the entire gospel from memory. That production was recently awarded Chicago theatre’s coveted Jeff Award for Best Solo Performance in 2009.
Warren, as Director of Intellectual Capital and Research at The Leadership Network, interfaces with hundreds of pastoral leaders annually to consider best practices for church growth. Given his wide experience with many congregations, and my unique experience in oral interpretation, we believe that Scripture reading can be elevated from one of the more perfunctory, least-engaged moments, to one of the most meaningful and powerful moments in worship.
The book, written at a very readable level and with helpful graphics, aims to be personal, practical and not technical. A key emphasis is how to internalize your assigned scripture text in your own heart and spirit, in order to ignite a passion and conviction that will communicate meaningfully to your congregation.
To give you a taste, I’ve taken the liberty of listing the chapter titles, as they give the arc and story of the book:
My Story (Part 1)
1. How I Got Started Reading Scripture Aloud
2. Recruiting Others Who Love the Game
3. No Longer the Worst Moment
4. The 9 Percent Isolation Factor
Butterflies and Breathing (Part 2)
5. How to Sound Like You
6. From the Page to the Stage
7. Take a Breath—It Even Helps with Nervousness
8. Quick-Start Guide to Reading the Bible Aloud
How to Teach Others (Part 3)
9. Train Your Pastor to Read the Bible Better—Really!
10. Invite Youth and Children to Make Scripture Come Alive
11. Scripture Reading at Home, at Weddings, and More
Next Steps (Part 4)
12. What to Do Next
13. Q&A with Max McLean
Appendices
A. Things You Might Say before or after Reading
B. How I Prepare a Scripture Reading
C. Suggested Texts for Practice
D. Discussion Questions for Accompanying DVD
E. Resources Available from Max McLean
Since so much of this type of instruction is “more caught than taught” we’ve included a DVD that can be used for individual or class settings. It includes several compelling readings from members of my church’s Scripture reading team as well as a brief commentary in which I describe what I find to be particularly effective about each one. There’s also a panel discussion about how to pick readers as a church develops a Scripture reading team.
I believe that this unique book with DVD has the potential to help many churches experience God’s Word during worship in fresh, compelling ways. That is certainly my prayer.
In addition, you are able to purchase Unleashing the Word for 50% off at Zondervan through November 22nd when you purchase for your ministry. Go to www.zondervan.com/ministry, log in or register, search for Unleashing the Word and add it to your cart. In your cart enter source code 020085, click apply changes and finish checking out.
A few days ago I was talking to some friends about fatigue. It is a popular topic when you’re in the stage of life that includes young children (though, from what I’ve overheard, it also seems to be a popular topic as you begin to hit old age). I got to thinking about the topic and found something I had written about fatigue a couple of years ago, apparently after a particularly tough night.
*****
I got to bed just a little bit later than usual last night. But when I settled into bed, I felt that kind of comforting fatigue—the kind that is not so overbearing that I’m exhausted, but the kind that means I’m really looking forward to a good night’s rest. You know the kind, I’m sure. It’s the kind of tired that makes stretching out between the sheets a real pleasure.
There was one false start before I got to sleep. I was just drifting off when I heard the bedroom door rattle and Abby walked in. She told us that she couldn’t sleep. Aileen got up and tucked her back in, turning on a light to make sure she wouldn’t be scared. A few minutes later we were all asleep. But then, probably around 1 AM, I heard Abby calling for me. She was scared again and was crying. I have no memory of what happened next, but I guess I must have tucked her back into bed, convinced her that everything was fine, and crawled back into bed. A couple of hours later it was Nick’s turn. He marched into our room and woke me up, telling me that his ear was hurting so badly he couldn’t sleep. All things pain-related are Aileen’s department, so she dosed him with some kind of medication, put some hot cloths on his ear, and we went back to sleep. An hour later Michaela was awake, scared by the sound of the strong winds blowing through the trees outside our window. We awoke to her cries of “Mommy!” She ended up in bed with us—all twenty five hot, pointy, squirming, fuzzy pounds of her. At this point I turned off my alarm and figured I’d just have to let myself sleep in so I wouldn’t be completely comatose all day. And so the night went. I awoke at seven in the morning (which is sleeping late for me) feeling not the nice kind of tired, but the exhausted kind of tired that comes from too little rest; too little sleep. It’s the kind of tired that leaves circles under my eyes and requires an extra kick of caffeine to be able to go about the usual routine. It just wasn’t a very good night.
A few weeks after Nick was born, our first child, Aileen and I were facing the exhaustion that comes with a newborn baby. We were just learning to be parents and still assumed that every cough and every sigh meant he was dying. He was a restless baby and didn’t settle into good sleep patterns for a long time. Aileen and I both spent many nights pacing the floors with him. I remember talking to my mother around this time and the words she said stuck with me: “The next time you feel well-rested, you’ll be in heaven.” They may not have been particularly comforting words, but they were realistic. Mom said that, by the time the kids really settled into good sleep patterns, I’d be too old to sleep well anymore. When we had that first child I guess I threw away any hope of really feeling well-rested.
It’s worth it, of course. I wouldn’t trade my children for any number of good night’s sleeps or any amount of rest (though if you asked me in the middle of the night I might occasionally answer differently). But as I lay in bed last night, in those moments where I was just too tired to get to sleep, I began to wonder about heaven. What will it be like to feel really, really well-rested? What will it be like to be able to feel one hundred percent? Will there be fatigue in heaven? Will there be rest? Heaven will, of course, be rest…but will there be sleep?
As I tend to do when I’ve got questions about heaven, I opened Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven this morning and, sure enough, he had some things to say about this. He says:
Our lives in Heaven will include rest (Hebrews 4:1-11). …
Eden is a picture of rest—work that’s meaningful and enjoyable, abundant food, a beautiful environment, unhindered friendship with God and with other people and animals. Even with Eden’s restful perfection, one day was set aside for special rest and worship, Work will be refreshing on the New Earth, yet regular rest will be built into our lives.
To be honest, I am a little skeptical when it comes to Alcorn’s reasoning here, but he does make an interesting case. But what really stood out to me were his next words:
Part of our inability to appreciate Heaven as a place of rest relate to our failure to enter into a weekly day of rest now. By rarely turning attention from our responsibilities, we fail to anticipate our coming deliverance from the Curse to a full rest.
“Make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11). It’s ironic that it takes such effort to set aside time for rest, but it does. For me, and for many of us, it’s difficult to guard our schedules, but it’s worth it. The day of rest points us to Heaven and to Jesus, who said, “Come to me, all you who are weary … and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
Rest is innately good. God Himself rested after completing His work of creation—a perfect being resting after completing the perfect work of creating a perfect world. God built rest into this world. And God gave us one day to practice rest—to learn how to rest. How good it is to set that day aside and to use it just to rest. But beyond that day, God also gives us little glimpses of the rest that is to come. When we used to own a cottage, one of my favorite things to do was to head out alone over the lake in the canoe. And halfway across the lake I would just sit back with a Coke in one hand, a book in the other, and the sun shining on my face. And I’d just relax and let the water take me where it wanted. It was such a beautiful time of peace and rest. And maybe it was a foretaste of the rest that is to come. Today a similar feeling comes as I kick back on a Sunday afternoon with a cold Coke, a good book and a comfortable couch. It is rest and it is good.
I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that only rarely will I really feel anywhere close to one hundred percent while on this earth. To be an adult, to be a parent, is to be tired. But as life goes on, I begin to look to those moments of rest as more than just a chance to rejuvenate. I see them also as a glimpse of what is to come. I see them as opportunities to learn how to rest—to learn how to enjoy the rest that will come with the new heavens and the new earth. They are a taste, even if only a faint one, of the true rest.
