Because he was too blind to see it himself, Pharaoh’s servants screwed up their courage to tell him:

“How long shall this man [Moses] be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” (Exodus 10:7).

We tend to be the last ones to see our own ruin: “Strangers devours his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not” (Hosea 7:9).

There is a Christian institution I know that is the last to see that it has become a “horror…a reproach, a byword, a taunt” (Jeremiah 24:9). It continues to pipe out cheery newsletters, healing its wound lightly, “saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace (Jeremiah 8:11).

When I asked an insider why they don’t stop business-as-usual and call a week of prayer and fasting, he said they didn’t want the matter to spread beyond the boundaries of the community. That’s very different from King Josiah’s style (2 Kings 23), or Moses’ (Numbers 14), or Nehemiah’s (Nehemiah 9), who called for public, sackcloth-and-ashes repentance.

Esther also knew better than to make a move without insisting on three days of a fasting back-up (Esther 4:16). Zipporah averted her husband Moses’ ruin by quick, godly thinking (Exodus 4:24,25). And even an evil man in Luke 16 had the good sense to take drastic action to avert his ruin.

“A little folly outweighs wisdom and honor” (Ecclesiastes 10:1). It is a commonplace that “more is caught than taught.” Who will be attracted to the Lord’s kingdom when in the time of testing of our faith, we prove that we don’t believe a word of it?

For all its pain, the book of Job has its delights. My daughter, a bit of an equestrian, loves its ode to the horse (39:19-25). I myself have recently been delighted by a different kind of find.

To the first-time reader the monologues of Job and those of his four friends seem all of the same cloth.  In a second reading, tonal differences emerge: the discourses of Eliphaz, Bibldad, Zophar, and Elihu seem detached, clinical, bloodless, and seminarial — as if God had nothing better to do all day than be a doctrine. Job’s words, by contrast, are emotional, transparent, and human.

But here is the most interesting thing. At no time in the book do the friends ever break from the “horizontal,” Job being their addressee and God their subject matter. We feel the friends are speaking about God as about someone far off, like the sun.

But look what happens when Job speaks. He goes along like the four visitors at first, on an eye-to-eye level. But at some point he seems to switch — seamlessly — from talking to men to speaking to God. He goes airborne. In 6:8 we are not sure. In 7:7 we have a clear eruption to God in the midst of a response to Eliphaz. By verses 12 to 21, the transition is complete, though we never saw a signpost.

In chapter 9, Job begins earthbound in answering Bildad. But so very present is God to him, that like an unsuppressible bubble of carbon gas at the bottom of a glass, he rises to God. And by verse 28, he is pleading with his Savior as if alone with him in the sanctuary, his friends’ noisy cavils having faded to white noise.

In the ways of a person who lives in constant intimacy with God, there is a fluidness of conversation between the vertical and horizontal all day long.  

Is there anything about you that, if people only knew, they would not judge you so harshly? Maybe something physical, something so odd that you don’t tell anyone because no one would believe you, but it is something that explains a lot about you? Or maybe it is a fault that, by God’s grace, you have made much headway in overcoming — and what people are reacting negatively to is actually a much improved you! They should only know how bad you used to be!

We need to be aware, especially those who are endowed with natural equanimity, that what comes easy for you may be a moment-by-moment battle for others. It’s all good, because God uses that “thorn” they’re saddled with to develop a desperately pleasing clinging to Him in faith. But it might not look like much from the outside. The person looks to you like an oddball. The fact is she could be in a mental institution and — glory to God! — she is functioning in society. A little benefit of the doubt please.

We all want to be understood and accepted. But most of us have learned not to expect much from one another in the way of understanding and patience. How sad. We have learned that people are pretty much the same — Christian or non-Christian: they’re nice when you’re nice or when you appeal to them, and not nice when you sin or you look like a loser. Push a Christian more than an inch and he will react pretty much like a pagan.

But God has called us to be extraordinary. Paul chided the Corinthians for behaving like “mere men” (1 Corinthians 3:3). The place where God is glorified is the distance our love pushes through beyond where the world stops loving. Let us beseech the Lord for unkillable love. Let the world “[take] not that these men have been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

Thomas the Tank Engine has the goods on us. Here is the plot of Good Morning Engines, which I read to my granddaughter.

Thomas and Percy are trying to catch a few winks in the engine shed, but James in the adjacent berth is boasting on and on about a special early morning run he’s been assigned to—taking people to town for a royal parade.

Morning comes and Thomas is up promptly to transport passengers on his branch line to the junction where James is to pick them up and take them to town. But when Thomas arrives at the station, James is not there! He had stayed up so late bragging that he has overslept.

“‘Oh no!’ says Thomas. He waits and waits but sees no sign of James. … Thinking fast, Thomas calls over to Percy. … ‘If you make half of James’ stops, and I make the other half. …’”

James is an obnoxious vehicle who has lorded his privileges over Thomas and Percy. And now, by his own sin, he has put himself in the position of being disgraced. There is not a person in a thousand who will not sit on the sidelines and privately gloat at his misfortune.

But the author of Good Morning Engines—whether he be Christian or no—knows instinctively that that is not the right way, not the beautiful way. Though he himself may never in his life have risen to the virtue of Thomas, he recognizes it as virtue. He yearns to be treated the way Thomas and Percy treated James, when he himself should be caught in a sin. He yearns to be a man like Thomas and Percy.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15).

Trust is built on a track record. We trust God because He has been as good as His word. And indeed, He everywhere invites us to trust Him on this basis: “Remember what I did to Pharaoh.”

In 1832 a preacher named William Miller went on tour predicting that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. That’s why you’ve never heard of him. A better prophet may be Russian scholar Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who warned, twenty-three years before “9- 11,” about underestimating the ideological gulf between us Westerners and Muslim countries. If he got that right, maybe we should listen to what else he has to say:

The persisting blindness of superiority [of the West] continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems,…that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction.

But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.

 Solzhenitsyn thus rejects the prevalent doctrine of the eventual “convergence” of nations: “It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these world are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.”

Something for the next administration to think about when devising foreign policy.

Jereboam II presided over the good times. Israel wrested free of the thumb of Aram, and expanded its boundaries “from Lebo hamath to the Sea of the Arabah.” Not only so, but all this was accomplished “in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah, son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher” (2 Kings 14:25).

Is not the Lord blessing this nation? What can be clearer? We have as evidence the conjunction of the prosperity itself and a prophet’s pronouncements. What a court favorite Jonah must have been!

As a matter of fact, this was the last hurrah before Doomsday — the well-oiled machinery of Assyria under Tiglath-Pileser (745-727 B.C.) and then Sennacherib (701B.C.). A complacent nation had wrongly gauged the Lord’s pleasure, and their own spiritual okayness, by the weather-vane method. God had to get the attention of a certain hyper-patriotic prophet in the belly of a fish: I’m telling you a second time. Go preach to the Ninevites; they’re no more unworthy of mercy than Israel.

It seems silly to us now what Israel responded to Jeremiah’s warnings of national spiritual adultery: “We will not listen to you….for then [during the time of our idolatry] we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. But since we left off making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine” (Jeremiah 44:16-18). Huh? Some cause-and-effect-challenged reasoning there.

In 1787 Benjamin Franklin had a view of the half sun on the back of George Washington’s large chair. He later remarked, “I have often looked at that picture behind the President without being able to tell whether it was a rising or setting sun….”

The best way to tell is not by Wall Street but by the Word of God.

Satan (that indefatigable worker whose desk is covered with overstuffed ashtrays and half drunk cups of coffee) has had a field day with the word “legalism.” Give a person good advice, tell a friend what helps you in your walk with God, and somebody somewhere will call it “legalism.”

Leave it to the Enemy to take our best theology and use it against us. Is his not a ministry of misinformation? Is he not the faux “angel of light”? For there is no doubt that legalism is a great enemy of the gospel. Real legalism, that is — the failure to understand that “God saves the ungodly.” Scandalous grace.

But what can I do when I want to shout from the rooftops that you must read the Bible a lot, and you must pray constantly throughout the day if you want to enjoy fuller intimacy with Christ? It sounds, even to myself (because of my inbred sensitivity to the charge) like the “L” word.

Never mind. I will cover myself with the authority, and the sanctified sarcasm, of a man of reputation:

Let the Christian live like the rest of the world…and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin….Let him not attempt to erect a new religion of the letter by endeavoring to live a life of obedience to the commandments of Jesus Christ! The world has been justified by grace. The Christian…must not strive against this indispensable grace. Therefore, let him live like the rest of the world!

Or more straightforwardly: “The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther’s perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship).

This morning I walked by an empty water bottle tossed on the side of the road. It had been there all week. I got to thinking.

I remembered a scene in Titanic where something (I thought it was a marble but my daughter says it was a bullet) rolls slowly off a table in an early, clueless stage of the impending disaster. No one particularly notices it — no more than one would notice the scene of nobody picking up a discarded water bottle. It is a non-incident. But I was persuaded this morning that whatever government-funded, “golden-fleece award candidate, studies there have been to determine the state of the union, there are no indicators more telling than the sight of a pedestrian walking casually past litter, litter that’s only feet away from a trash receptacle.

This non-act is full of speech. The person walking past (me, in this case) has seen the trash and made an instantaneous mental transaction that is the microcosm of all her other daily mental transactions. Her entire world view is shoehorned into this microcosm. It’s hardly conscious, of course. So I had to work on recovering my reasoning for you. I think it went like this:

“It’s not my job.” “The township’s job; they’re do it eventually.” Or, “It doesn’t matter.”

A sociologist, or a Bible student, would have a field day with this. All I know is that if you multiply my attitude by a few billion people, and that, by thousands of choices a day, you probably have the decline of Western Civilization.

I walk past a Buddhist chapel every morning. It used to be a church. (Reminds me of the many Unitarian structures in New England with the small print on their front lawn signs: “Formerly a Congregationalist church.” Heartbreaking stories surely lay behind those real estate transactions.)

By the time I get to the Won Buddhist Temple on Parkdale Avenue I have already spoken volumes to the Lord, and gotten volumes back. But the folks in this repossessed building don’t pray; they meditate. I briefly did meditation in college — was given a mantra to repeat to myself over and over, to usher me into blissful union with the Oblivion. I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever insights I gained in that void were just me talking to myself.

 It beats me why middle-class, Caucasian, former nominal Christians in my town would go to this place — why they would prefer an impersonal reality over a Personal one. It is the perverseness of our rebellion against God, I suppose, that we would exchange something warm and full for something cold and lesser.

And make no mistake that it is lesser. The impersonal is not higher and more transcendent than the Personal; it is a big step down. An impersonal force behind all creation (if it existed) would be like the Creator we know — but with something subtracted from Him. It would be “It,” not “Him.” We humans would find ourselves in the curious position of being superior to the force that spit us out! More highly evolved. Here we are, equipped with awesome capacities — to love, to grieve, to desire, to aspire, to trust, to have relationship, to know courage. And our “creator” is meanwhile mute and uni-dimensional.

Moreover, concepts we are hard-wired with, such as “guilt,” “fellowship,” “rebellion,” and “thankfulness” would have no meaning or intelligible origin in an impersonal universe. What a bizarre rebel is man to concoct such a faith as Buddhism.

It’s funny how we’re always thinking about the things we should be taking on for God, when it may be more to the point to think about the things we should be letting go. Who among us trust Him enough to let go of worry about tomorrow, about money, about our appearance, about being socially “okay”? We voluntarily drag this ball and chain all day long, and then drag it into bed with us. It would be heroic if it weren’t mutinous.

I have tried both — doing things for God and letting things go. It’s easier to do something for God than to give up some pet fear. Easier but ridiculous, when you think of it. As the Lord said through the Psalmist: “If I were hungry, I wouldn’t tell you” (50:12).

Jesus invites us to go to His redemption center and make exchanges, and it’s a pretty good deal: Give Him our tomorrows, our cash flow problems, our okayness issues, our kids’ futures. And our end of the bargain is to deal with what’s on our plate today (Matthew 6). Day-size is doable.

Think about something you’re not giving up. Some fear you keep in a secret pocket and stroke when nobody’s looking. Kill the little darling, this instant. And if you can’t bring yourself to kill it, hand it over to Jesus and He’ll do it. Take his light load in exchange for your heavy one. His shoulders are broader than yours.