Many of you who read ESI are in some way related to the Wilberforce Forum or the ministry of Chuck Colson. As you probably are aware, IFA is going to court next week at the federal level to make the case for being allowed into Federal and State Prisons. In today's Breakpoint Chuck makes a statement that we all need to absorb:

"So my plea to the judges would be this: Don't take away the one hope these men and women have—these poorest of the poor, the least in our society. Everybody talks about helping them, and we're doing it. Don't stop us."

He goes on to say:

"my plea to "BreakPoint" listeners and readers is simply this: Pray. Pray that IFI will prevail at the Eighth Circuit. And pray that this program will be able to continue to reduce recidivism, continue to make our communities safer, and continue to give hope to those who need it most."

I agree that we all need to pray. But I want to ask you to Fast during this time as well. The court case starts on the 13th which is a Tuesday. Let's all fast the weel of February 12th through the 16th. This is a pivotal week in the deliberation and decision phase.

We as believers know the mandate that God has given us to visit those in distress, to minister to "..the least of these" and we know that we need MANY MORE programs like those being put out by Prison Fellowship.

Remember, fasting is not always food. Those of you who know me know I am a porty feller and I like my food. I usually give something up like Television, Coffee, or anything that I enjoy and do on a regular basis. When I am tempted to just indulge I remember to pray and when we pray GOD MEETS US IN THE MIDST!!

As the New Year begins to come around again I have embarked on the painful introspection and self assessment that comes with setting a New Years Resolution. The following 10 character traits of a knight (1) pose some character traits that are worth a little introspection and contemplation. If one of these traits does not leave a person feeling at least a tinge of inadequacy, they probably need to spend a little more time defrosting their heart by the fire. Any time you read the word knight, insert your name instead. It will make it a little more real.

1. Prowess: To seek excellence in all endeavors expected of a knight, martial and otherwise, seeking strength to be used in the service of justice, rather than in personal aggrandizement.

2. Justice: Seek always the path of right, unencumbered by bias or personal interest. If the right you see rings true with others, and you seek it out without bending to the temptation for expediency, then you will earn renown beyond measure.

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As I have been pondering the events of the last few weeks here in my own home church and processing the pain and the confusion I have come to ponder on what it means to lament. Dictionary.com defines a lament as: 1) To fell or express sorrow or regret for, 2) to mourn for or over. The Bible is full of examples of both kinds of lament. The first definition is a lament in a reactionary sense. One such example is in 2 Samuel 12 vs. 1-13. David’s sin with Bathsheba had been found out and Nathan was ferreting out all the details. David than expressed regret and said “I have sinned against the Lord” (vs. 13)

So often our lament is like that of David. We sin and we sin, we wrestle with it and we try to get rid of it. What happens though is that God eventually does get his hands on us and presses us to repentance. The second type of lament, to mourn for or over is much less common, but I believe it needs to be practiced more, and that God has called His people to his purpose and that we must lament and grow.

When Job was being oppressed, he and his friends lamented. (Job 3: 11-13) As best as Job could tell he had done nothing to bring this calamity onto his family. He was your average God fearing man. When everything that the Lord allowed to happen took place he lamented and mourned not because he had done anything wrong, but because God had removed his hand of blessing. We, as a church body, need to make sure that we are mourning like Job and not like David. It is easy to internalize the sins of our leader and make them our own, but we can not. God is calling us higher and higher, not into the depths.

As a body of believers it is time to put on the sacloth, it is time to pour dust over our heads, and to mourn and lament collectively as a body. Friends need to reach out to friends, fathers to sons, pastors to the flock and so on.

Here is the great news that we all need to hear straight from the book of Lamentations:

22 Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,for his compassions never fail.23 They are new every morning;great is your faithfulness.24 I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."25 The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,to the one who seeks him;

Let us make sure that as we lament, that we are seeking the Lord in his dwelling place. We can not become self consumed and focus on our own sin and anger. It is now that we as a church must lament in a way that finds Jesus. If we lament and mourn together we will find greater strength and humility and blessings, just as Job did after he lamented.

I just finished reading the statement That They May Have Life which is a very impressive, and timely statement that come from Evangelicals and Catholics Together. It was published in the October edition of First Things It is a statement of joint values between Evangelicals and Catholics. I love it for two reasons:

1) More people need to know that Evangelicals and Catholics all come from the same ingrained belief that life is valuable. We disagree on some points (birth control), but we all should gain value and synergy from sharing in our efforts to save lives.

2) It reminds people that being pro life is not just about abortion. Euthanasia, Embryo harvesting etcetera are also very real, very important battles for the value of life. I encourage you to Read the whole article. My favorite quotes from the statement are:

"To be Christian is to be associated with a historical movement bearing public witness to universal moral truths"

"In our common humanity, we share a God given capacity to reason, to argue, to deliberate, to persuade, and to discover moral truths regarding questions related to the right ordering of our life together."

Please take some time to comment and to see who all has signed onto this statement. It is a who's who list of the Evangelical and Catholic Community.

One cannot go visit a zoo or aquarium anymore without being inundated by certain political messages. A particular message that was repeated to my husband and I throughout our recent visit to San Diego (which included both the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park) was, "Poaching is bad."

Variations on this theme were repeated to us constantly. We were often informed that such-and-such an animal was endangered and that there were "less than 1000" left in "The Wild."

Annihilating a Species is Bad
Though I believe that humans have the right to kill animals and eat them and use other parts of them to make tools or clothing, I also believe it is inappropriate to annihilate a species.

We Americans tend to romanticize tribal cultures as some sort of simpler, "back-to-nature" sort of existence. But all cultures are not created equal. It is my conviction that a culture is "good" to the extent that it reflects God's vision for society. Each culture will have details where they vary (musical styles, dress, overall personality, etc.), but God has given instructions to which each culture is obligated to conform.

When one studies Genesis, especially the first four chapters, one sees that God did not begin history with what we typically think of as a tribal culture. The description was more one of gardening/farming than anything else. It was not until after the Deluge (during which God chose a family to preserve not only humanity but animal life as well) that man was specifically given meat to eat. At that time, God put the fear of man into the animals (Genesis 9:2-5). I presume that putting fear into the animals was a way of making sure that man did not obliterate them. It is, after all, quite simple to butcher a domesticated animal.

As early as Genesis 4 is the idea of a man having a flock mentioned. When one puts together the idea of tending a flock of sheep with the gardening and cultivation of the land mentioned in the prior three chapters of the book, the picture is one of sustainable food sources.

Man is not called to be a locust upon the earth, consuming whatever is before him and leaving a path of destruction behind. And yet, this is precisely the lifestyle of some tribal cultures (including some past Native American cultures). The tribes hunt until there are no more animals to eat. They migrate and "gather" food much in the way an elephant does (an elephant herd, we learned, can destroy an entire forest in a short amount of time)--until there is nothing left.

The Problem of Africa
It is hard to isolate the various problems of Africa, because many of them stem from a refusal to bow the knee to the Creator. The area of poaching is just such a problem. The poachers see potential value in the animals--their skins, their tusks, their meat (for food known as Bushmeat). But they do not follow the Creator's guide. They often do not cultivate the ground and tend a herd. They kill and kill until the animal population drops into what many call the "endangered" level.

So then the governments, often pressured by Americans, steps in to "save the animals." And we were astounded by the "most effective" way this has been done. We were told this by a tour guide, and I am assuming this is true. Some African governments hire poachers, arm them, and pay them to kill other poachers. That's right. Africa has chosen not to elevate man back to his position of steward of the land and life, but rather turn him on himself. And now there is a situation where a dead poacher is more valuable than a dead animal.

Problem solved, in the opinion of Africa. And the San Diego Zoological Society seems to also accept this solution. After all, they exist not to put creation back together again, but to preserve animals in the name of preserving animals. So, San Diego breeds endangered animals, ships them back to Africa, repopulates the land with fresh meat, and gets comfortable with the idea that the animals won't be killed, but the hunters will be.

And it is believed all is right with the world, when it is in fact turned upon its very head!

Despite the extraordinary cinematic advances of our time, fantasy will never achieve the status of reality, for the two are immiscible substances. But fantasy has its gifts and its genius. The power of fantasy lies in its ability to recast the truths of the Real in the veiled form of allegory and by that to tell a story already told a thousand times with sparkling freshness, to awaken deaf ears to the sounds of forgotten music, to remind the mind of its passion for fascination and the heart of its need for hope. Such is the birthright of the superhero and the singular cause of his fame. One need not even ask what it is about a man whose eyes are all-seeing, whose skin is soft yet impervious to bullets, whose ears hear the cries of a billion hurting souls, whose strong arms bind up the wounds of the broken, and whose kindness is boundless and freely given, that so captures our imagination. The cry of the human heart is to believe in such a man, to touch the hem of his cape, to immortalize his memory in a photograph and forever tell others of the time you stood by his side.

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Why Contemplating Eternity Causes Random Black Outs and Major Panic Attacks in Those Who Ask the Question!

Ecclesiastes 3:11 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Arthur Stace was an ordinary vagabond. He liked his women, his beer and his lifestyle of freedom from authority and the "normal" life afforded to others. His life as a nomad was spent satisfying no one but himself. Then one day the Lord came knocking and asked him a simple question; "Where will you be in eternity?"

This one question so perplexed him, so made his life miserable, that he gave his life to Christ. He then took to the streets with a simple piece of chalk that wrote only one word..."eternity".

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I have written elsewhere that purpose is the holy grail of human existence. I reaffirm that sentiment here. The desire for meaning, for a teleology of life, is an incurable condition in the human heart, its quest a journey that no man or woman can resist. Even those poor, sodden souls who labor in the abstract of rhetoric to deny and declaim the existence of the divine pursue in the shadows of practice an earthly proxy of transcendence. It is irrelevant whether their appetite be for the ecstasy of sensuality, for the status of invincibility, for the acclaim of the cognoscenti, for the glamour of wealth, for the glory of fame, for the caress of a lover, or for the affections of family and friends; in every case it is the irresistible call of meaning that drives them insatiably onward into the deepest caves of darkness and upward to the very pinnacles of creation. Without pausing to recognize the irony, man in abject rebellion against eternity proves its existence by pining ever more desperately for its substitute.

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Editor's Note:

So sorry this one was delayed. We had some server problems not to long ago and this one got lost in the malay. It is still worthy of reflection on King Jesus though.

An Ode to Joy in Anticipation of Easter

When I survey the cross upon which you bled and died, I cannot but fall to my face in shame. For a god to tabernacle in flesh amidst his wayward creation is a marvelous mystery; for that same god to embrace death to save his creation is an unsearchable antimony. Yet you have done it; you have walked in our midst and loved us with your tears, with the dolorous supremacy of your suffering. You have cast your eyes (were they blue, green, brown, or somewhere in between?) upon our ignominy; you have seen the pain of our despair; you have touched the effluence of our diseases; you have known the depth of our wounds. You have felt the sting of our reflexive hate, our small-minded arrogance, our rancid indifference, our propensity for doubt, our pathetic simplicity, our voluble hypocrisy, our self-deception and foolishness. You have experienced the pompous and self-serving justice meted out by those we honor as wise. You have seen the destiny we design for the meek, the poor, the peacemakers, for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. You have seen how stained are our hands with the blood of innocents, how soiled are our faces with soot from the fires of our idolatry, how cluttered are our hearts with cherished artifacts of greed, pride and lust. We do not deserve you. We are darkness; you are light. We are unsightly; you are majestic.

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To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?

Once dead, now live, my spirit slept
‘Til Christ on high, His blood He wept
For wrathful weight of Father Just
Pressed hard on Him who knew no lust.

Hung as did the desert snake
Did He, the Lamb, both bleed and quake
For wretched heart and sin-stained land
Abandon, abandoned, abandoned Man.

Judgment full and fully spent!
Dead and raised His earthly tent:
The Father Good, the Spirit mine
His death, my life now intertwined.

To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?

Vessel shamed, yet mended true
In my soul, blood runs blue;
Royal priest and Kingdom bound:
“Journey forth to Heaven’s ground."

“Yet on the earth My Kingdom still
Sojourns with thee; obey My will.
In the world a stranger be
And make thine life My homily.”

To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?
From care and fear for Him alone
Mortify, mortify thine fleshly home.

Can sun exposure cause skin cancer? Absolutely. However, appropriate sunlight actually prevents cancer. Exposure to the sun provides many benefits such as promoting the formation of vitamin D. (Dr. Joseph Mercola)

I don't put sunscreen on my kids. At least, not with any regularity. I think I put it on them twice a year, for the 4th of July and Labor Day, both of which involve celebrations where the children will be out in the sun longer than they are accustomed. I tend to avoid talking about sunscreen with other mothers because there are a lot of opinions about it and I prefer not to cause a stir.

Oh, but I do love to think about things, and so, in honor of the warm sun that is outside my window after a week or more of rain (yes, we basked in its glory without sunblock for a good thirty minutes yesterday afternoon--gasp!), I thought I'd analyze sunblock a bit, just for fun.

I must give the disclaimer that though I have recently read some research that supports me in my aversion to sunscreen, it was not research that originally influenced this behavior.

Sunscreen, and the excessive societal pressure to use it, bothers me a bit because it contradicts what God said about His own creation. On the fourth day of creation, God made the great lights, with the greater light (the sun) to rule over the day. He saw that it was good.

And it is amazing to see this play out within creation as we learn more about how things work. God created man, and when man worked in the garden (in the sun) the sunlight interacted with his skin to produce Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is not the same as what you find in fortified milk and cereals (that is D2, a synthetic vitamin, much harder to break down into a usable form).

When Vitamin D3 is broken down and transformed by the liver and then the kidneys it becomes 25-hydroxyvitamin D. And this fancy word symbolizes much that is good: natural protection again cancer (especially female cancers), depression, fatigue, infertility, osteoporosis, some autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis, and the list goes on.

When God says something is good, He means it! Now this doesn't mean we should spend excessive amounts of time in the direct sunlight. (Sometimes I think sunscreen was invented as an attempt to avoid the consequences of two behaviors: immodesty and excess.)

And we do know a man who is allergic to the sun, and so the sun doesn't seem to be good for him. But a person being allergic to peanuts doesn't mean that peanuts are actually bad, and the fact that our friend gets a rash from the sun doesn't make the sun bad, either. Sunlight is a good thing.

It is always interesting to me that we can glorify God in literally every square inch of our lives. Sometimes it is as simple as rejecting society's assumption that something is inherently bad when Scripture explicitly says it is good.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how emotion-driven American society has become. I suppose the seeds were sown in the 1960s when “If I feels good, do it!” became the catch phrase of a generation. I remember how one of my college professors tried-in vain-to stem this tide by repeatedly lecturing us to say “I think X is true.” Rather than “I feel X is true.” Then there was Obi Wan telling Luke to “Trust your feelings.” And of course, who hasn’t been told that they need to get in touch with their feelings? The problem is, emotions are almost always a shaky basis for decision making.

An instrument rated pilot knows about this quite well. When darkness or clouds obscure the horizon the pilot knows he must rely on his instruments-not his feelings- to guide him to his destination. You see, the inner ear does a great job of maintaining one’s balance only as long as there are visual cues to Up and Down. More than one pilot has flown serenely through the night only to find the moon below him. A pilot who trusts his feelings over his instruments usually winds up dead.

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A Cautionary Tale of Mind over Heart in the Pursuit of Faith

As anyone close to me would attest, I am by nature an intellectual. By that I mean that due to some, perhaps unfortunate, genetic proclivities over which I have little or no control, I am a connoisseur of lofty theories, a lover of logic and learning, a collector of rare and arcane knowledge, the sort of person to whom pedantry is not pejorative but honorific. Whatever the venue and subject at issue, I take delight in the responsive music of polemics and the tête-à-tête of rarefied argument. I thrill at the rhythm of eloquence and relish the chance, however my wife may deem it inappropriate, to deploy uncommon polysyllabic words and phrases such as “jeremiad” and “joie de vivre” in rhetoric and conversation. As a dyed-in-the-wool bibliophile, I am kindred to Erasmus who spent his income on books and bought food with his change. To me a new perspective concerning an old problem is as savory as the aroma of fine wine and the gift of unexpected profundity as much a cause for merriment as a seascape splashed with the soft colors of a setting sun. Like every fallen pursuit, however, my ceaseless fascination with all things erudite and wise has been, in practice, at least as hazardous to my spiritual health as it has been liberating to my insatiable curiosity; for, no matter how I try to ignore it or justify it, the poison of idolatry ever beckons from the tree of knowledge, and the faith to which I am called—a faith destined to inherit the Kingdom—is not the faith of a sage but of a child.

I must confess that, as prideful men are prone to do, I once fancied myself immune to the gilded lures of intellectual hubris. But, of course, it was arrogance itself that blinded my eyes to the perils of trusting implicitly the guidance of contemplation. It was pride that, by a gradual and time-worn deception, corrupted the innocence of my wonder at the beauty and mystery of Creation and dressed me, ever more elaborately, in the pompous robes of the Pharisee. In retrospect, nowhere was my intellectual pride more distilled, yet more invisible to me, than in my relationship to theology. As soon as my brain forged the cognitive machinery to think abstractly, I bid farewell to the simplicity of my childhood faith and embarked upon my own personal journey to formulate a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the God of my fathers. I devoured theological tomes by the shelf-load and devoted endless hours to the cause of mastering arguments in support of my views and synthesizing counterarguments to refute all contrary positions. As the years passed, my faith increased in complexity until the desert tents of its antiquarian heritage were surrounded and ultimately consumed by a sprawling metropolis of interdependent and symbiotic philosophical propositions whose livelihood could not be sustained without a tireless refreshment of reading and thought. The books of Scripture became for me a patchwork compendium of “proof” texts that favored my theological persuasions and “difficult” texts that required further, and often contorted, explanations to satisfy my lust for exhaustive logical coherence. Gone were the days when I read the biblical writings devotionally in order to delight in and relate to God; in those days I read them intellectually to support my particular view of Him.

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One of the questions I have been asking myself in my daily walk with God lately has been “Why are my prayers seemingly not being heard?” I know that God has reasons for not answering prayers in the way that I would ask Him to, but I decided to dig in a little bit, and God answered my question.

We are given a command in the Psalms to “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.” (Psalm 100:4)

Something that I realized in my life is that my thankfulness to God is anemic at best. I realized that I came back from the slums of India last year so on fire, and so thankful to God that I had been so blessed, but life started to get in the way again and I forgot to nurture the gratitude towards God. We are shown in the book of Romans what can happen when we forget to be thankful. “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” (Romans 1:21) A darkened heart is not what I want to be accused of having.

I talked to a few people to see what they thank God for in their daily prayer life. I could not believe what I heard. Most people were not taking time in their prayer life to thank God. They did as I did, they entered into the prayer with a small laundry list of requests, a few prayers for my friends, and family and authorities in my life; and that was it. God has provided His son Jesus Christ to atone for our sins. As if that is not enough to be thankful for, what about your family, friends, health, safety, religious freedom... the list is endless.

When we are thankful truly and deeply with God we will find peace. The Bible says “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to that which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.” (Colossians 3:15)

The book of Psalms mentions the word thanks 19 times. That is just one word. Many of the words that David used were in thankfulness. David was considered a friend of God. I want to be considered a friend of God. I will give him more thanks. I must change my paradigm to remember God in all things.

How many of us feel we can truly thank God, even in the worst circumstances of life? That is the goal to aim at; to thank God in all things, in all circumstances, in all places. Thankfulness does not have to be a big production. You do not have to pray as the Pharisees did loudly and often. Just remember to spice up your prayer life by being thankful for that which God has done. I suggest starting out each prayer with what you are thankful for. That is what “entering into the gates with thanksgiving” means to me.

This is my first post as a proud member of Every Square Inch.

I'm not one for New Years' resolutions. I think this is because I know myself too well. I'm an obsessive-compulsive sort of guy who dives all-guns into something until something else catches my attention. I know that if I resolve to do something now, I might pursue it for a month or so, but I'll soon lose enthusiasm. I don't want to cheapen my "resolve" by spending it on things I'm not really resolved to do.

I've also lived through too many uncertain circumstances recently to place much value on my own resolve. A few years ago, I was a partner in a major law firm. Through a series of events I never would have predicted or wanted, I left that prestigious job to become a lowly college professor -- a job I love, but a job that is dramatically different than what I did as a practicing lawyer. Within the past year, my otherwise healthy little boy began having seizures, and his speech has not developed much beyond babbling. Just two months ago, I was the principal worship leader in a service with over 600 people. Last month, the music director resigned, the ministry was thrown into chaos, and my own role in the ministry has dwindled to almost nothing.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The Signs of Creation and the Necessity of Christ

As the Sign of the Heavens teaches perhaps more poignantly than any other, the Most High God, upon whom all men must believe to be saved, most assuredly did not leave the nations scattered across the earth and beyond the range of Scripture’s testimony without a profound and enduring witness to his Light. The lessons taught by the eight Signs of Creation are multifarious and luminescent.

First, the Sign of Beauty teaches that goodness is ever-present, objectively attractive, and always resilient. Though its fragile face may be disfigured by the beastly hands of man, the goodness of Beauty possesses absolute supremacy over deformity and ugliness except in the heart that consciously denies its right to rule.

Second, the Sign of Order instructs that immutable laws govern the cosmos with the grace of an iron fist, conveying to man the capacity to pursue the greatness of culture through art, science, mathematics, literature, and music and bringing to naught the dissolute aspirations of those who would flaunt their freedom in a manner contrary to Nature.

Third, the Sign of Consciousness teaches that the mind of man, by which he knows and reasons, could not have arisen from the slime of primitive earth without the genetic interposition of an original Mind, external to the cosmos, for knowledge and reason necessarily supervene the raw cosmological events of the natural world and require second-order channels by which free thought may be expressed contrary to the deterministic structure of natural law.

Fourth, the Sign of Conscience teaches man that he is subject to a moral order by which actions are, and ought to be, universally judged. Conscience, moreover, convicts the heart of man when he transgresses that moral order and inspires society to create systems of justice by which it may punish particularly egregious and destructive transgressions. Yet, too, Conscience, operating in tandem with Consciousness, instructs man that all such gestures at comprehensive justice are necessarily imperfect and remedially incomplete. Thus, Conscience cries out for a final Judgment where all wrongs will be redressed and righteousness rewarded.

Fifth, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs man in the beauty of process, that is, ordered change, and gestures at God’s participation in such change, at least insofar as He interacts with and intercedes in the play of Creation. Moreover, the Sign of Death and Rebirth, as expressed through the experiences of the dying, teaches man that he is a spiritual creature and that death, though ultimate in one sense, is in another sense merely a gateway to a different form of existence, which existence, given Near Death Experiences and the insistence of Conscience, must follow the pattern of reward and judgment, not the purely recapitulative path of reincarnation.

Sixth, the Sign of Love teaches that there is transcendent purpose in man’s existence and that such purpose is inextricably interrelated to the cause of relational affection expressed in feeling and faithfulness. Moreover, as the acquisition of requited Love is man’s greatest desire, Love commands a pursuit of satisfaction that, however blessed in the interim, is ultimately destined to fail, if nothing else of the disease of finitude. Thus, the man upon whom tragedy falls may either curse Love for its parsimony or believe in and seek its eternal and unfailing source.

Seventh, the Sign of Lament validates sorrow and anger as right and proper responses to the remorseless ravaging of Beauty and Love by the claws of crime and chance. Then, in the grace of consolation, Lament purges the broken heart of the poison of despair and replaces it with the unconquerable desire to live, to flourish, if nothing else to honor those who have perished. In purveying such a gift of temporal hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament teaches the ascendant heart to believe in its eternal counterpart—the restoration of all things.

Eighth and finally, the Sign of the Heavens depicts with elegant intelligibility the existence of an age-old conflict between good and evil which has engulfed the world. The Sign of the Heavens then blessedly prophesies that the forces of good will one day triumph ultimately and conclusively over the rebellious hordes of evil and thereafter banish the face of darkness from the Kingdom of Light.

Taken together, the eight Signs of Creation declare to man in a language accessible to every tribe and nation the world over a veritable smorgasbord of cornerstone truths about Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation whose likenesses are both revealed and significantly expanded in the pages of Scripture. The astute reader will notice, however, that two elements of the Christian gospel are completely missing from the testimony of the Signs—a divine promise of mercy to the repentant heart and the Name of the Redeemer whose kingdom of Light will vanquish the rebellion of darkness at the end of all things. Here I must answer the ultimate objection I noted earlier: Even assuming that a man who has never before heard the Name of Yahweh or been exposed to the Biblical writings may reach out to God by way of the Signs and embrace a living faith in His goodness and beauty, how can such a one be saved apart from the gracious ministrations of Christ? In its essence my response is simple: One cannot. No man will pass through the flames of Judgment who is not covered by the atoning blood of Christ. Nevertheless, I maintain that the path to salvation by way of faith in the God of the Signs remains open. The real issue before us, therefore, is not whether the salvific work of Christ is requisite for the perfection of salvation (it is) but whether knowledge of Christ’s Name, per se, is the sole means by which a man or woman of faith may accept the supreme gift of divine absolution made available by Christ’s work. For the following reasons, I believe it is not.

Although the thought is not natural to us, it is nevertheless true that the concept of salvation apart from immediate knowledge of the Son of God is not unbiblical, only antiquated. Abraham is considered the father of faith, yet he never saw the face of Christ (at least not obviously) nor heard the New Testament message. He believed what God told him in a dream and such faith was credited to him as righteousness (Rom. 4:9). The same may be said of all the Old Testament heroes who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and shut the mouths of lions (Heb 11:1ff). The exploits of men such as Enoch, Moses, David, Jeremiah and Daniel, and of women such as Rahab, Sarah, Esther and Ruth roll of our tongues when playing Bible trivia, but rarely do we pause to contemplate the startling fact that none of them knew the name of the Messiah whose day they longed to see. As the writer of Hebrews put it, “[t]hese were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised (Heb. 11:39).”

Given such biblical precedent, it simply cannot be argued that extra-Christian faith is necessarily insufficient to defer the wrath of God. To hold otherwise would unjustifiably exclude from the New Creation every person who delighted in the love of God prior to the Day of Pentecost and the instantiation of the Church Age. No, grace has been a constant feature of God’s relationship to man across all historical epochs and stages of progressive revelation. Having said that, the author of Hebrews makes absolutely clear that it is Christ alone who is the lynchpin of God’s entire redemptive enterprise, without whose offices as Lamb of God and Light of the World man would remain in the bleak darkness of his sins. It is Christ and no other Savior who walks upon the waves where the currents of righteousness, justice, mercy and love converge and declares the captives free. Whatever the ancients might have gathered about him from the hints and impressions visible in their native world, Jesus is unquestionably the archetypal subject, the sine qua non, of God’s revelation to man. It matters not, in an eternal sense, therefore, whether Methuselah possessed the Law of Moses, whether Rebekah understood Paul’s gospel, or whether Elisha saw the risen Christ; it matters only that their debt and ours has been paid by the very same blood of the very same Lamb before whose throne all of us will bow on the Day of his appearing.

Once one grasps this truth, one need only contemplate again the substance of faith imparted by the Signs of Creation to appreciate its potential for redemptive sufficiency in the eyes of God. The God of the Signs is not merely an amorphous “Creator God” who wound up the universe like a child’s top, released it with a certain amount of kinetic and potential energy, and then abandoned it to its own devices. The God of the Signs is a deity whose specific attributes merit man’s worship and teach his heart to believe. Consider: The God of the Signs is a God of transcendent glory, for the illimitable majesty of Beauty is his handiwork. The God of the Signs is consummately benevolent and patient with the waywardness of man, for the resplendence of Beauty is imparted to the righteous and wicked alike and sustained without price. The God of the Signs is a God of Order whose peaceful touch restrains the reign of chaos, who fixed limits for the sea and set its doors and bars in place, saying, “This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt (Job 38:11).” The God of the Signs is a God of surpassing wisdom whose work is intelligible to the mind of man but whose sovereign Genius is beyond searching out.

The God of the Signs is a God from whose righteous hand dangles the master keys to the moral order, whose judgment is always near to the Conscience of man, and whose capacity for unlimited justice, and concomitant restoration, is desperately awaited by all who understand, intimately, the sorrows of social, jurisprudential and rehabilitative imperfection that leaden the world’s gilded promises of utopia. The God of the Signs, moreover, is a God whose imprint of Light is never still yet always constant, like the sky whose face knows countless expressions yet whose horizon never changes shape. The God of the Signs is a God of now and forever, a God who breathed into man a temporal life that metamorphoses with the seasons and a longing for eternity that will be satisfied, whether by judgment or reward. The God of the Signs is a God who delights in that special unity of souls which is born of relational diversity, who created man to desire the kind of love that can only be fulfilled in the sacrifice of commitment, and who is himself the only Lover whose kindnesses never fail. The God of the Signs is a God whose image is expressed, on the one hand, by human sorrow in the face of tragedy and rage at the madness of evil and, on the other, by the gentle rhythms of consolation and comfort and the sonorous refrains of hope. Finally, the God of the Signs is a God of victory, who promises ultimately to defeat the Scorpions, Snakes, and Dragons of darkness by a Lion-like Warrior whose glimmering archer’s bow is drawn and whose arrow of light will one day be loosed to bring an end to the reign of death and chaos.

My ultimate thesis, dear reader, is this: Take off the mask by which Creation shadows his face and the God of the Signs is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus. It follows, therefore, that the man who believes in such a God, whether in accordance with the testimony of Scripture or through the illustrations of the created order, is a man who, by operation of the munificent grace of Christ, will be counted among the righteous and granted entrance into the Kingdom. Again, I grant that, given the rampant idolatry and depravity that has plagued the post-Fall world, the number of men and women saved by the path of the Signs may turn out to be few. Yet I firmly believe that when the roll is called up yonder all who once dismissed as hopelessly “heathen” and “godless” the billions throughout history (and to this very day) born into cultures devoid of Scripture’s Light will be confounded by the extraordinary ambit of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. Such a conclusion, I believe, is both logically required by the first two chapters of Romans and Paul’s apologetic in the seventeenth chapter of Acts and entirely consonant with the character of a God who is “slow to anger and abounding in love (Exo. 34:6)” and who “desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).” Accepting the witness of the Signs requires no concession to a universalism devoid of judgment; it merely ratifies the dignity of Old Covenant faith and extends its redemptive potential beyond the confines of Israel to the whole world for whose sins Christ died. As Galileo sagaciously supposed, the God of the Heavens, who in love purposed the creation and redemption of man, revealed himself in two Books, Scripture and Creation. Blessed is the man who knows and believes the wisdom of both; but for one who knows not the former, praise be to the Most High God that there yet remains a path of Light by which his face may be seen.

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

By the Sign of the Heavens I mean not to refer to the strange and wonderful phenomena modern astronomers are constantly discovering in the seemingly depthless celestial sphere (i.e. quasars, black holes, cosmic background radiation, etc.). Such phenomena, I assert, are marks of Beauty and Order, which deliver their own missional testimony. I refer instead to the message of the constellations inscribed like a patchwork quilt upon the obsidian canvas of the night sky. I read once that one of the most enduring mysteries of the ancient world is the origin of the stories attached to the figures emblazoned in white fire upon the face of the Heavens. The author of that statement traced the roots of the Zodiac to ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Chaldea, and Persia but failed to divine a source for the stories that, when compared, appeared to him inexplicably similar. In this essay, I do not intend to suggest an explanation for such parallel narratives. Rather I wish to reflect upon the lessons taught by the simple order of the stars as they appear to the naked eye. This approach should make sense to the reader attuned to my overarching point about the redemptive potential of the Book of Creation, since it is only when the order of the Heavens is stripped of all traditions of human interpretation that it may become a sign, per se, pointing the heart softened by the gentle ministry of the Spirit to ultimate truth about reality.

Having studied the constellations extensively in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, I am continuously astounded by the simplicity, clarity, and univocal nature of the message they declare. In four resplendent scenes readily visible to the stargazing eye, the Heavens tell the story of a universe mired in a cosmic conflict, which conflict must end with the final defeat of evil by the unconquerable force of good. First, there is the scene of Orion and Lepus, the Warrior and the Snake. (For ease of reference, I will use the constellations’ Latin names). During winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion glistens brilliantly, his shoulders, feet, belt and sword unmistakable against the black canopy of sky. Beneath his feet, one of which is the beautiful first magnitude star Rigel, lies a less brilliant figure that the Romans construed as a hare but the much earlier Egyptians and Persians imagined to be a coiled serpent. (As I see it, Lepus looks like a snake.) The image is starkly defined and its meaning obvious to every nation, language, and people group: Though an Enemy haunts the original splendor of the cosmos, he is smaller and weaker than the Warrior of Glory who stands above him with lightened foot raised eternally to crush his rebellious head. How curious that such is the precise promise contained in the third chapter of Genesis. To the serpent God said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

The second and third celestial scenes of cosmic conflict are much like the first, though both scenes are of a compound, and especially evocative, nature. In the second scene, the four constellations of Hercules (the Mighty Man), Draco (the Dragon), Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (the Big and Little Dippers), when considered in unison, clearly depict a man (Hercules) standing upon the head of a great serpent, or dragon (Draco), upon whose sinuous body is poured out a lesser and a greater cup (Ursas Minor and Major) the contents of which, given the context, are most sensibly interpreted to contain divine wrath. In the third scene, the constellations of Ophiucus, Serpens, Corona, and Leo depict a huge man grasping the body of a monstrous snake (both Ophiucus and Serpens are constellations of estimable size) whose head is at once straining to grasp a clearly articulated crown (Corona) and poised beneath the brilliant and descending foot of a maned lion (Leo). (Note that the star at Leo’s foot is named Regulus—meaning “regal” or “kingly”—and has a luminosity of the first magnitude). It is possible, of course, for one to question the capacity of an observer unversed in the ancient narrative of the constellations to discern and articulate such complex scenes as I have done. I would argue, however, that the sort of observer I am hypothesizing in this essay (i.e. one who, despite the burdens of a sinful heart and culture, is enthralled by the transcendent message of the Signs and longs genuinely to know the truth about the world into which he was born) would not only watch the stars with regularity but would examine them throughout his life and ponder at length their elaborate configurations. Such an observer, I believe, would make out among the starry host the very scenes I have set forth and divine from them their obvious meaning: (a) that the world is torn by strife because an evil being has sought to usurp a celestial crown, (b) that the machinations of that evil being are being resisted by someone mightier than he, and (c) that the end of such evil being will come as swiftly as the ravaging paw of a noble lion.

The fourth and final scene of cosmic conflict stitched upon the blanket of the night sky (but only fully visible south of the Tropic of Cancer) is the scene of Sagittarius and Scorpio, the Archer and the Scorpion. As any astronomically minded traveler will tell you, the southern sky (particularly toward the south celestial pole) is more sparsely adorned than its northern counterpart, but those stars that do appear are, on the whole, exceedingly magnificent. The interplay of Sagittarius and Scorpio is an ideal example of such majesty. I have never seen Sagittarius and Scorpio more clearly than when I had occasion to visit the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, five hundred miles south of Tahiti and almost exactly at the latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn. Near midnight the almost artistically rendered figure of Scorpio stretched across a third of the Heavens, while its glowing heart, the red star Antares, rested at the very zenith of the sky. Of all the constellations, I believe Scorpio is the most clearly articulated. His pincers, bright and almost symmetrical, connect at the head of a serpentine trunk which extends downward through Antares to a hook-like tail, studded with an obvious stinger. Yet the beauty of Scorpio’s figure inheres not only in the sharpness of its image but in its supernal accompaniment—the figure of Sagittarius. As I looked up at the sky that night on the white sands of one of Rarotonga’s tropical beaches, Sagittarius stood to the east of Scorpio, his trapezoidal body taut and poised and his archer’s bow aimed unerringly at Antares, the scorpion’s poisonous heart. In all the Heavens, there is no more profound depiction of the inevitable triumph of good over evil than this. Though the virile malevolence of Scorpio is grandly described, one cannot doubt that the arrow of Sagittarius, when loosed at last, will destroy such evil once and for all.

Next time: The Signs of Creation and the Necessity of Christ

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The seventh sign of cosmic wisdom evident in the Book of Creation (and the mournful counterpart to the Signs of Beauty and Love) is the Sign of Lament. Where Love is the universal patron of meaning and essential human satisfaction, Lament stalks the graveyard of Love’s shattered hopes and collects the tear-stained fragments of Beauty’s torn garments. The eternally tragic face of Lament may be observed in the weeping of a mother holding the lifeless body of her stillborn infant. Its elegy is sung by the family sifting through the rubble of a home devastated by wildfire or ripped apart by cyclonic winds. The tortured countenance of Lament transfixes us in the televised wailing of a crowd surveying the blood-splattered carnage of school-bound children dismembered by a bus bomb. Lament is that convulsive verbal flooding that occurs when the dark river of sorrow overflows its private banks and finds ready publicity in piercing and terrible sound. No matter the language a man speaks, the groans that, by some mysterious emotive volcanism, emanate from his broken heart when he gazes for the first time into the sightless eyes of his dead wife require no translation; all persons, irrespective of race, creed, age and education, understand with pristine clarity the absolute propriety of his sorrow.

Such is, in fact, the first lesson taught by the Sign of Lament—that grief, and its compatriot, anger, are entirely proper responses to the desecration of Beauty and Love by the jaws of violence and chance. With surgical precision, Lament opens the wound of the world to the bone, exposing as a sham the glib pretense and pseudo-optimistic dissimulation that man fabricates to hide the cancer at the heart of his fallen experience. Where society flees the scene of torment like rats from water, Lament embraces the unquestionable righteousness of pain in the face of grievous and inexplicable wrong. Lament screams over a pool of innocent blood that not only are the hands of man stained by wickedness but, more, that the very ground beneath his feet is cursed by some primordial imperfection. Lament weeps over the ravaging of life and zealously proclaims that all is not as it should be; that time was not intended to mark the process of decay and dying; that ocean breezes and waves upon the sea were not meant to ravage coastal villages by hurricane and tsunami; that man was not intended to victimize his fellow man, abuse his women or torment his children. Lament teaches the heart lanced by sorrow the indelible lesson that sorrow is eminently justified. Indeed, the instruction of Lament is so visible in the face of Creation that even Nature itself is observed to “groan” in the wake of disturbances in original harmony. How else but in the language of pain can one describe the tortured sound of cracking tree limbs in the vicious winds of a tornado? How else can one understand the scurrying fright of animals prior to a severe thunderstorm or the stark and utter desolation of once fertile fields scarred by blight or drought? What Paul wrote in the eighth chapter of Romans the Sign of Lament confirms, namely that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

Yet, too, the Sign of Lament knows a less abrasive presence. Like a gentle salve, Lament teaches the broken heart a way to survive its own pain. In compelling man to deride the senseless chaos and driving him to his knees, Lament forces the heart into a catharsis of grief by which it may honor all it has lost yet acquire fresh purpose for a continued existence. Thus, more than embodying that unique paroxysm of pain evoked by the sudden appearance of natural and human evil, Lament marks out the wilderness path by which the heart beset by tragedy may rise again from the ashes to hope anew in the sweet mercies of Beauty and Love. In purveying such hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament not only reinforces the absolute dignity of living but also adumbrates the prospect of ultimate divine restoration. For if a human being is scandalized by the interloping reign of disorder and madness, would not also the One by whose creative Genius the cosmos was beneficently designed lament the disarray of depravity into which the world has fallen and wish to apply, in redemptive fashion, that same Genius to emancipate Creation from its slavery to strife? Such is a postulate even more pressing than the proverbial grief-stricken question “Why?” For liberation, not mere explanation, is the answer the wounded heart truly seeks.

Of course, in similar fashion to the reckoning foreshadowed by the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Lament does not logically require the divine gift of cosmic redemption. Nevertheless, the Sign of Lament does stir the soul of man to yearn for final deliverance from the malignant reign of melancholy, the omnipresent perils of disaster, and humankind’s longstanding addictions to callousness, injustice and perversion. As it turns out, however, the Book of Creation does not leave such yearning without a reasonable ground for expectation. For, where, beneath the illumination of the first seven Signs, the idea of restoration is merely aspirational, its practical promise is revealed by the Light of the eighth and last Sign, the Sign of the Heavens.

Next time: The Sign of the Heavens

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The sixth sign latent in the pages of the Book of Creation is the Sign of Love. The Sign of Love is in many respects the Sign of Beauty expressed within the context of human relationships. Nevertheless, Love is in no sense coextensive with Beauty, for Beauty is understood primarily by observation of the world outside the confines of one’s own consciousness and Love by emotive experience of that consciousness mingled with and desirous of that of another. Expressed visually, the Sign of Love is what you see staring back at you at the altar on your wedding day. It is the glow that illumines the face of a little girl when she glimpses her father across a crowded room. Love is the force that shapes the countenances of lovers into curious facsimiles of one another after fifty years of marriage. Love is the conviction that compels a young husband to remain faithful to his frail, bedridden wife for five seemingly interminable years before her debilitating condition begins to improve. Love is the impetus that compels a soldier in the prime of his life to shield a comrade from the shrapnel of an exploding grenade with the vulnerable flesh of his own body. Far more substantial than saccharine sentiment, lustful infatuation, or unadorned duty, Love, in its purest form, is utterly personal, intimate, virtuous and profoundly supererogatory, the very weightiest of all elements in the human experience. Consequently, like gold to a potentate, Love is most precious to the soul of man. Indeed, as is suggested by the continuous avalanche of songs composed, poems written, movies produced and books penned on the subject, Love is the most sought-after commodity in human existence. Moreover, Love, like water, is absolutely indispensable to human survival. As any sociologist who has studied orphaned children will explain, babies starved of human contact in their earliest days can physically deteriorate and even die. That same principle of affective malnourishment, I would assert, applies to men and women of all ages: A paucity of Love shortens the length of one’s days. Love, therefore, is no mere prize to be won nor ornament to be collected. Its presence or absence is a matter of life and death.

Given Love’s undisputed preeminence in the hierarchy of human needs and desires, what lessons does its sign teach us about the nature of our world? Principally, I believe, the Sign of Love instructs the open heart, otherwise impressed with the wonders of Creation, that there is a guiding purpose to human existence and that such purpose, however mysterious it may be in its fullness, is inextricably intertwined with the pursuit of relational affection. Love’s unchallenged magnetism shines light upon the craggy path toward ultimate human satisfaction, and its call echoes upon the mountains and bids us come to yonder glory. Like the Sign of Conscience, however, the Sign of Love illuminates certain fundamental limitations in man’s capacity for final fulfillment within the context of terrestrial relationships. No matter how deeply a husband may care for his beloved wife, and no matter how genuinely that love is reciprocated, such love cannot constitute the wellspring of life, for, however redoubtable its fibers within the relationship, it is, quite perversely, wrecked with ease by the fallen hands of sin and tragedy. Human love, therefore, is either a cruel joke played upon the longing heart by a vicious world (the cynical, naturalist view) or an elaborate, yet penultimate, sign pointing to something more transcendent and lasting that, with Beauty, Order and Consciousness, exists originally and consummately beyond the realm of sight. That Love, although instinctual, also possesses and thrives upon a current of freedom, unburdened by the pressures of Order, exposes the fatal flaw in the naturalist’s system. For freedom, as a metaphysical entity, cannot exist in a universe populated exclusively, and most basically, by events and occasions governed by autocratic natural law. Only in a cosmos created by a Mind that is perfectly free and externally undetermined can Love, which binds Beauty to Consciousness in a glorious labyrinth of souls, express itself in freedom. Such logic, of course, does not prevent a naturalist from arguing that Love is essentially deterministic and thus illusory. But such an absurd polemic crushes beneath the weight of centuries of accumulated experiential wisdom, just like the proposition that the stars were flung into space and given their light by a random quirk of physics.

Next time: The Sign of Lament

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

In addition to the signs of Beauty, Order, Consciousness, and Conscience, which declare by the impressions of logic and experience the original goodness of the created order, the rationality and necessary justice of God, and the paradoxical resplendence and fallenness of man, the Book of Creation also contains an extensive discursive on the realities of death, resurrection, and the afterlife, which I shall call the Sign of Death and Rebirth. As any student of Nature will attest, images of death and rebirth are redolent in the natural world. In time’s grand orchestra, the brilliance of day trembles at the approach of night’s deep darkness; yet such darkness is always eventually pierced by the warming glow of dawn. The seasons, too, bespeak this transition. As the tale of life is told in the regimented language of cultivation, the fragrant, freshness of spring rains prime the soil for the limpid growth of summer’s crop, which crop, come early autumn, is harvested both in preparation for winter’s dearth and in hopeful expectation of another spring. The same tale is told in the freer wilderness tongue, though rendered somewhat differently: In the fecund moisture of spring, the leaves of the forest bud and bloom, their green the color of newborn life; in the storms and heat of summer, such leaves expand and darken as they are aged by water and sun; in the cool breezes of autumn, their chlorophyllic life, having sustained them through half the year, drains slowly from their veins, sparking that last, flaming display of variegated glory before the restless foliage falls to the earth, leaving limb and branch to stand beneath cold, gray skies, wrapped in the bleak cloak of a winter. Then, after a period of quiescence and sleep, winter, too, passes by, and the light of the Sun, once frigid and distant, strengthens and warms until the thawing ground gives birth again to the living wonders of a new year.

The inexorable progress of birth, life, death, and rebirth in nature teach three overarching lessons: First, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs the thoughtful observer that ordered existence need not be static to be lovely; indeed, that movement and dynamic change, rather than larcenously opposing the longevity of present beauty actually ripen the glory of the world and participate in its essential goodness. Second, taken together with the Sign of Order, the Sign of Death and Rebirth declares that there is something especially harmonious about change when penned within the fences of an overarching and undergirding structure of metaphysical continuity. Thus, the Sign of Death and Rebirth exalts ordered, purposeful variation, or variation grounded in eternal soil. Third, when the lesson of dynamic beauty is juxtaposed with the lesson of an original Genius taught by the Sign of Consciousness, it can be seen that the Sign of Death and Rebirth adumbrates something of the divine life of the Creator, namely that he who spoke such cycles into being and envisioned the beauty of bounded change must value such change, indeed, must in some sense participate in such change, not, perhaps, in his essential nature (though change on such a level is certainly not precluded), but rather in his interaction with the Creation. The Signs of Death and Rebirth and Consciousness, of course, do not teach that the divine is in any sense capricious; rather only that if Beauty and Order, per se, have their origin in his generative Mind, then so must the particular beauty of process, of ordered change. How interesting it is, therefore, that the God of Genesis is depicted in relationship with man, walking with him in the Garden and participating in the constant metamorphosis of his existence. Moreover, how profoundly curious that Christian theologians studying the New Testament and particularly the writings of the Apostle John have long professed the doctrine of divine perichoresis in which the Father, Son and Spirit are envisaged not in the rigid stasis of Neo-Platonic unity but rather in the perpetual dance of ordered interrelationship, of call and response, of love given, received, and shared.

Beyond the lessons that arise from the cycles of nature, the Sign of Death and Rebirth also delivers a lesson of especial poignancy in the aging narrative of man himself. Recent studies on the process of dying have documented what ancient cultures and many modern end-of-life physicians have long appreciated—that the ordinary process of human dying encompasses far more than the final judgment of physical decay, that it is, in fact, an inescapably spiritual transformation. Given widespread and cross-cultural anecdotal evidence of so-called Near-Death Experiences, it is obvious that dying persons are generally granted something of a portal of transcendent sight between this world and another world altogether different from our own. What each dying person “sees” in the midst of such an experience is unique, but all generally receive a vivid, real-time foretaste of something approaching heavenly bliss or eternal damnation. While many critics denounce Near-Death Experiences as a sort of hallucinogenic accompaniment to the process of dying, such experiences, in truth, constitute only one element of the uniquely human Sign of Death and Rebirth. How many people who have observed the passing of a loved one have later testified, using whatever words their spiritual vocabulary could offer, that the departure of that person from the land of the living, when at last it happened, was in some sense palpable to the soul, as if the tangible flame of the person’s presence had been extinguished? Moreover, how many people on their deathbed, whether historically religious or irreligious, request spiritual counsel from a pastor or priest? In this latter respect, the portal to the hereafter is, for the dying, its own sign of God’s superintendence in the life of man and man’s duty of obeisance to God. For the living, on the other hand, the experience of the dying is another rehearsal of the pattern written into Creation, and it teaches the same lesson, though more explicitly, than day and night and the passage of the seasons—the lesson that death, though final in one sense, does not lead to total extinction of life but only to some kind of transition, the likes of which cannot be described (apart from the special revelation of Scripture), only anticipated with trepidation and penitence.

One might wonder why the lesson taught by the Sign of Death and Rebirth is not the reincarnational nature of human existence but rather the lesson of fear and trembling at the unknown beyond the divide. The obvious response is that the experience of the dying fundamentally undermines the premise of reincarnation and buttresses that of judgment and reward. That is, no Near-Death Experience of which I am aware has granted the enlightened soul a vision of future life as a rabbit, a deer, or an altogether different human being. But such a response is incomplete, for the Sign of Death and Rebirth is only one sign among seven at least that tell the story of God and man in the symbols and internal reason of Creation. Consequently, when pared with the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Death and Rebirth testifies that the end of a man who has knowingly defied his conscience and embraced depravity ought to be ultimate judgment, not mere recycled existence somewhere in Creation. For even if a reincarnated soul’s status in the created order is diminished (e.g. from a man to a roach) as a result of misbehavior in his prior life, that soul nevertheless continues to abide in the physical context of divine blessing and never suffers the ignominy of ultimate divine censure. Finally, the concept of reincarnational judgment undermines the expectation of ultimate, cosmic remediation which arises from the teaching of Beauty, Order and Conscience. Under a paradigm of reincarnational judgment, the status quo is merely reordered; there is no New Creation, no restoration of all things. On the other hand, when the pattern of judgment is conceived as wrath and reward, there is room for a final reckoning in which history’s savage violence and mindless cruelty will be abolished and their tyranny replaced with a benign and righteous ordering of societal authorities under which true life, in all of its incidents and appearances, may flourish forevermore.

Next time: The Sign of Love

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Thus far I have argued that the Signs of Beauty, Order and Consciousness, visible to all men in the Book of Creation, gesture at four divine truths delineated in more detail by the Book of Scripture: the essential, original goodness of the created order; the inescapable objectivity of the manner in which such goodness is defined; the absolute governance of order over chaos; and the existence of a Mind that instantiated such goodness and order. The fourth Sign of Creation, the Sign of Conscience, takes this cornucopia of fairly lofty propositions and transforms it into an edict whose import is profoundly personal. For clarity’s sake, I begin with a definition: Conscience is that restraining element of human psychology that a Doberman lacks when loosed to ravage an intruder. Its instinctive temperance is what separates the terrorizing designs of the perfectly ordinary lion from the average human who, if granted opportunity for reflection, thinks twice before pulling the trigger on another human, even an enemy. Much like the reason inherent in Consciousness, the burden of Conscience is a unique feature of the human experience. Yet Conscience is not merely reason, for where for the directive inherent in reason is the discovery of truth, the directive inherent in Conscience is the discernment of right behavior. Conscience is like an internal compass aligned to the magnetic field of divine wisdom that surrounds and intersects the created order. Although the magnetic force of wisdom that guides Conscience is generally weak when compared with the destructive force of sin allied with human freedom, Conscience declares, nevertheless, that, as Jay Budziszewski puts it, there are some things we simply can’t not know.

This is the principal and most elementary lesson taught by the Sign of Conscience, one that, while denied intellectually by men and women seeking to justify their own dissolute deportment, is practically assumed by all persons in ordering their human relationships. At the most severe level, there is no room for argument. No matter the exigencies of the moment, it is never right to torture a baby, rape a woman, or murder a mother and her unborn child. At a more commonplace level, it is simply inexcusable for a husband to cheat on his wife with another woman, for a thief to steal what is clearly the rightful property of another, for a drunken father to verbally abuse his child, for a judge to take bribes, for an attorney actively to assist his client in concealing evidence of a crime, or for a marketing agent to defraud the public by disseminating lies about a product to generate business. The basic truth imparted by Conscience is that there is a right order to human behavior that exists apart from man, just as there is a right order to mathematics and music which cannot be contravened without resulting contradictions and cacophony.

From this primate recognition of moral law, the second lesson of Conscience inexorably follows. At the same time that Conscience prescribes nonnegotiable boundaries upon the proper range of human behavior, it convicts the heart of man when he transgresses such boundaries. As Paul wrote of men outside the Jewish race and unschooled in Scripture (precisely those persons for whom the Signs of Creation are the only possible path to God), “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written upon their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them (Rom. 2:15).” Thus, the Sign of Conscience, more than merely setting forth an objective limit upon human propriety, actually compels guilt over wrongdoing and pleads for the provision of some form of external atonement, two elements present, however bizarrely manifested, in every ancient religion of which I am aware.

Finally, beyond offering insight into the moral order and evoking remorse in the face of transgression, the Sign of Conscience, acting in concert with the Signs of Beauty and Order, adumbrates, with a delicate brush, the necessity of coming divine Judgment. The logic is this: If the Sign of Beauty describes that which is worthy and good, as a matter of natural design, and the Sign of Order demonstrates that such good is meant to be preserved, then any act which disfigures Beauty and undermines Order must be reversed if the ideal balance of Beauty and Order are to be restored. Now, to be clear, there is nothing in the Sign of Conscience that, by some metaphysical necessity, requires that all grievances of Beauty and Order be redressed by divine judgment. However, Conscience does insist, and quite zealously, that justice ought to be meted out when Beauty and Order are violated so as (a) to punish the evildoer and (b) to return the world to its proper harmony. As such, systems of human justice, which seek to uphold some standard of Beauty and restore a semblance of Order to a community torn by strife and violence, are the organic and inevitable outgrowth of Conscience.

Nevertheless, as all thinking persons recognize, every judicial system, even if governed by persons of unimpeachable rectitude and transcendent compassion, is by its very nature limited in the remedies it can offer society’s victims. A murdered man cannot be revived by a jury verdict or the swipe of a gavel. A child’s innocence cannot be reconstructed by the act of putting his molester behind bars. The marital wreckage created by wanton and adulterous lust cannot be unwritten by societal censure or an act of human vengeance. Thus, Conscience in its highest, most developed sense, cries out to Heaven for a final reckoning, a day upon which acts of goodness will be recompensed and acts of evil judged with finality. How fascinating that this is the very point Paul makes in the second chapter of Romans immediately before elucidating the notion of Gentile conscience: “[God] will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality (Rom. 2:6-11).”

Next time: The Sign of Death and Rebirth

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Men given to philosophical inquiry have long posed the seminal cosmological question: Why does what is exist at all? In other words, why not nothing? Answers have generally fallen into two camps—the theological and the mystical. Either a Prime Mover (read “God”), at some point in the distant past, spontaneous caused the generation of matter ex nihilo, or the cosmos, existing in some form of material “eternity” without beginning or end, merely possesses self-creative potential of undefined origin. I have no desire here to argue systematically for the former view. Rather I wish to suggest that the Sign of Consciousness, even more than the Sign of Order, lays waste to the latter perspective, for Consciousness insists on asking a second question of the thinker, to wit: Even if the supposed “brute fact” of the physical world is assumed, how did such a world give rise to a creature capable of contemplating cosmogenesis, who can know and aspire to know about the essence of all things? This second question does not, of course, erase the profound, and precedent, difficulty proposed to the philosophical naturalist by the Sign of Order, namely the combined theoretical and empirical challenge of hypothesizing abiogenesis apart from the controlling effects of law (whether in the incipient nanoseconds of the Big Bang or in the sterilized environs of a modern laboratory). However, as the stumbling block proposed by Consciousness is a matter of pure, unadulterated logic, its mountainous bulk cannot be circumvented by an appeal to present scientific ignorance and the inevitable illumination of future discovery.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The Sign of Order

The second Sign of Creation, the Sign of Order, is closely related to the Sign of Beauty. Order is that mysterious force which unites the universe in patterns, in accordance with fixed and immutable rules. It is not merely that which constitutes the physical building blocks of reality; it is what metaphysically grounds such building blocks and enchains the surging tempest of material and incorporeal chaos within closely defined boundaries. Without the appearance of Order in the form of grammar, syntax, and usage, this sentence could not be written. Apart from Order’s governing presence in logic, the reasoning essential to law, philosophy and theology would constitute mere posturing. Devoid of Order’s commanding statute in the natural world, not only would the rigorous pursuit of science be rendered superfluous but the densely structured cosmos about which man has liked to think would dissolve into atavistic white noise. Order is what ensures the theorems and equations of mathematics, from the most basic single-variable algebra to the most complex partial differential equations, always function in a consistent manner no matter the mind applied to work their controls. Order, moreover, is what separates the convivial strains of a Stradivarius in the hands of a skilled violinist from the dissonant, clanging madness of an exchange of machine gun fire. As with Beauty, the Sign of Order is ubiquitous in Creation. Denied its ministrations for even one moment in time, we would not last long enough to anticipate the end of our existence.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Consider first the Sign of Beauty. Beauty requires no description beyond experience, for it is all around us, in as many shapes, sizes, colors, and incarnations as the imagination can fathom, from the moment we awake in the morning until the moment our consciousness submits to the tide of sleep at night. It speaks to us in the voices of children discovering a field of wildflowers. It resonates in the incomparable music of Bach, Pachelbel, Handel and Mozart. It shimmers in the smile of a beautiful woman. It whispers to us in the sound of a mountain stream. It sails with us upon the trackless deep toward a sapphire horizon. It sleeps beside us in the peace and intimate comfort of marriage. It moves in the joints of our fingers and toes and crowns the intricacy of our minds. It swirls with falling maple leaves in a crisp autumn wind. It watches over our shoulder at the birth of a child. It strikes our ears with the roar of a hometown crowd (if you are a sports fan) or with the reading of Tennyson, Wordsworth and Longfellow. Such are only highlights; the exhaustive list is endless. Beauty is the constant companion of every man, woman and child alive, no matter their circumstances. Even in the darkest hours it stalks us with its Light (for even at Auschwitz, as the crematoriums operated to exterminate a race, the sun still rose amid pastel-infused glory). Beauty is an irrepressible force in Creation. Though its individual manifestations may be fleeting, limited, and subject to disfigurement by the bludgeons of violence, cruelty, and despair, Beauty in its grand totality simply will not release us to the autocratic oppression of ugliness unless we choose to cast our eyes upon the Prince of Darkness and submit to his chains.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The eminent scientist Galileo Galilei once observed that God had written two books about himself, the Bible and the Creation. Galileo’s steadfast belief that divine truth had been written into the fabric of the created order compelled him to study the physical world as it was, or at least as it appeared to be to his thoughtful eye and analytic mind, apart from the Aristotelian a prioris which, in his day, masqueraded as scientific wisdom in the halls of the medieval Church. In retrospect, our culture, shaped as it is so profoundly by the tides of Enlightenment thought, hails Galileo as a paragon of scholastic virtue, a hero in the ongoing battle between science and faith; yet, in a manner uncomfortably analogous to that adopted by the Vatican, modern man persists in ignoring the shining wisdom inherent in Galileo’s epistemology. For, in proposing the existence of not one but two divine texts—the first literary, the second living—Galileo had no intention of disparaging either; rather, he wished to exalt both as equally valid, and entirely compatible, sources of divine revelation. In Galileo’s view, God had revealed himself discernibly both in the Word of his Prophets and the Work of his hands. Thus, Galileo was convinced that the empirical labor of the scientist had no quibble with the diligent exegesis of the theologian, for both the scientist and the theologian were ultimately students of the Light imparted to man by the same gracious God.

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Dear Santa,

I am exited for Christmas to come this year. It is that time of year that I get to see my friends and family, I get to eat a lot of good food, and I get to hear about the birth of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago born in the manger of a town called Bethlehem. This is why I am writing to you today. I was wondering; how did you get involved with Christmas? Please do not take me wrong. I love the joy you bring every year to boys and girls and adults all around the world. It is so much like the love that Jesus showed the world one night in the manger some 200 years ago.

I often have longed to see you in that big red coat and hat. I want to feel the soft touch of the velvet in my hands. Jesus told me a story that once a woman touched his cloak and she was instantly healed of her diseases. (Lk 8:44) Since your coat is red like the blood of Jesus could I be healed by you as well? I am just trying to figure out why so many people love to talk about you. I would talk about you an awful lot if you were able to heal people.

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While in college, I befriended a kind old man who lived on-campus. We called him Old Man Ray because he was nearly 100 years old. Naturally, he stuck out in the crowd like a sore thumb, but his presence among us was welcomed. He was, after all, a 1932 Biola graduate and lifelong missionary.

I spent hours in his apartment listening to his fascinating stories. Before I left, he always made me read Bible verses or Christian quotes that he had typed on small pieces of construction paper. One of these, written by Elisabeth Elliot, I committed to memory:

"The steel of manly character is forged in the fires of control and denial."

He had me read that statement regularly, probably forgetting that I had seen it countless times before. Or perhaps he thought it needed to be seen that often. I did not know why at the time, but this central idea of becoming a man – a real man – was extremely important to Old Man Ray. Now I think I know why.

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For those of you who don't already know, I'm a confirmed gearhead- in many ways I'm also a frustrated engineer. I simply have to know how everything works. And why. In 1991 I nearly drove my lovely wife insane when I took over six months to pick out just the "right" CD player for our home audio system. Don't even ask about the new home theater. On top of all that I'm one-half German, which means that I possess genetic programming which compels me to ALWAYS READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! Needless to say, I receive no small amount of ribbing from some of my buddies, since it seems that reading the instructions is considered even less manly than asking for directions. Despite all the teasing I continue to read the instructions. You see, I've found that most of my mechanical debacles have occurred when I didn't read the instructions, skipped a few steps, and/or thought I knew better than the designer/builder of the product in question.

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Planet Earth looks so beautiful from outer space. Satellite pictures make this world look like such a beautiful and wonderful place to live, but yet we know otherwise. Increased turmoil, rising terrorism, mounting tragedies, trauma, pollution, deepening trials, and unparalleled tensions cast dark shadows over us all. This world appears to be more of a time bomb ticking just waiting to explode rather than a creation God established for us to dwell.

No wonder we all start to ask questions during times like this. Where is God in all this? Why didn't He stop it? Is He really out there? Does He care? Why all the injustice? Why do innocent people suffer while the evil people seem to control everything? Why doesn't God do something? Why? Why? Why?

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This past week has been really hard for me at Seminary. What I thought I knew about God has been brought into question, because of what I learned about last week in Systematic Theology. I learned for the first time about Calvinism and "TULIP." I heard about predestination before, but never really examined the scriptures that Calvin used to present that concept. My mind and heart has been in tangles ever since, because I have always held that "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13). A chapter before this, however it says, "God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom He wants to harden" (9:18).

I see this agree with Old Testament scripture as well. I just read today from 2 Samuel 24, and the first verse says, "The anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and He incited David against them, saying, "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah." Later, after David does this, he is "conscious-stricken and confessed to God that he has greatly sinned against Him (vs. 10). Then, God gives David three choices for how Israel will pay for David’s sin, and David chooses the plague which ends up killing 7000 people. Why is Israel punished, if God’s anger incited David to take the census? Why was God angry in the first place with Israel?

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