March 2004 Archives

Hey, guys.

I’ll be out of town from Thursday, March 25th, to Tuesday, March 31st. That means you’ll have to do without me during this time. It’ll be okay, I’m sure of it. ;o)

May I recommend some archive reading if you have a hankering for me to say something different than what my page has said for the past few days? I enjoyed digging up The Meditation Trilogy, all the way from November 2002, which I recently updated to match with Markdown and Smartypants so it looks nicer. Enjoy, and I’ll see ya next week.

Meditation on Righteousness and A Meditation on 1 John 2:2 and A Meditation on 1 John 3:2-3

I attended a showing of Hidalgo tonight, the movie starring Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings) about Frank T. Hopkins who did horse races and takes on this huge, bad Arabian desert race and gets to do some action sequences and sort of fall in love in the process. Whee. It was an all-right movie, not one I’d say to spend any money on. But as I’m wont to do, there were a couple of lines that set me off to thinking.

After saving the life of one of his opponents, Frank has a conversation with him. The Arab complains that it was Allah’s will that he enter the race, and Allah’s will that he should die in it. “It is written,” he says. Then Frank says something to the effect of: “What about your will? And your horse’s will? That’s what’s going to get you to the finish line, and only then will it be ‘written.’”

You gotta love that. Oh how the sheer determining power of the will is so highly treasured in our culture! If you want to go into a town and spend a year there and be a success, then darnit, stick with it and eventually it will happen. The real thing that’s going to determine your success is you.

And if that’s so, who gets the credit for your success? You do, of course. So you claim for yourself that you did it your way, you stuck with it, and you made a name for yourself, all the while ignoring that every breath you took was given to you by God and no matter how much of your will you exercised, if He hadn’t willed it, it wouldn’t have happened.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (James 4:13-14)

Thus says James. Contrary to what we might like to think, our tomorrow is not ultimately determined by what we do with today. Granted, we should not treat today as if what we did didn’t matter. James point isn’t to bash planning or working hard or any of that. We know that because of what he says next:

Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:15-16)

So plan, work hard, exercise your will. But recognize that unless He wills, you’re not going to accomplish anything.

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. (Psalm 127:1)

I believe God has arranged it this way to make us sensibly aware of our complete dependence on Him. Don’t be deceived; even if someone does things his own way and seemingly does it “on his own,” he is like the child who helps Daddy mow the lawn by getting in his way and simply hanging on, and then runs in and tells Mommy, “I mowed the lawn by myself!” But when the redeemed recognize that “…it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13), then we will agree with the psalmist:

I love you, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies. (Psalm 18:1-3)

When we are weak it is then that we are strong, because it is Christ’s power being manifested in us to those around us, and He loves to magnify the strength and riches of His grace in weak vessels. So be careful, dear readers, about the exaltation of the human will when it divorces from it the plain admission that God’s will overrides everything. Your joy is at stake, so think Godwardly. Don’t be like the foolish Arab who presumed he knew what God was up to and was wrong, and don’t be like the arrogant Frank T. Hopkins and assume that the breath in your nostrils happens simply because you will it.

Warning: Geek-Speak Ahead

I’m playing around with John Gruber’s amazing new Markdown plugin. It’s a text converter that will take some simple text commands and change them into proper XHTML tags.

For example:

This is a *really* cool plugin. I **love** it.

Becomes, in code:

This is a <em>really</em> cool plugin. I <strong>love</strong> it.

Which becomes, on my website:

This is a really cool plugin. I love it.

Enclose your text in an asterisk and it becomes italic. Enclose some text in double asterisks and it becomes bold. This little page explains some of the shortcuts. It’s super snifty.

The only problem is that it outputs to XHTML 1.0 Strict, which my site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional. So I’m currently working on two more errors I can’t figure out how to correct in order to validate as Strict. It’s in this tag:

<br clear="all">

It’s at the bottom of my Main Index file. It doesn’t validate and I can’t figure out how to use this command and still validate. :o( Anyone who can help, please do.

All right, enough of that. Soon I’ll put an update up regarding some things I’ve been studying, from Titus 2:11 in particular. More on that later. But give Markdown a try.

Okay, so here it is. I’m pretty tired, but I promised y’all, so don’t say I’m not a man of my word. ;o)

I will assume that my readers have read several reviews of the movie already, so I will spare you the details of the plot and simply give you my impressions.

The two most moving sequences for me came from Peter’s denial and the scourging. Peter’s denial deeply moved me due to a poem of Piper’s that I read back in December. Read it if you haven’t. The scourging because I sensed, probably in one of the most profound ways of my life, that those were meant and properly belonged to me I thought much of the words of Bernard of Clairvaux:

What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered, was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior! ‘Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor, vouchsafe to me Thy grace.

Some evangelicals have made a big deal about what was added, so what do I think about what was added? First, I think that we ought to sharpen our minds against the flint of the Word and ought to recognize where artistic liberty was taken. Then, we need to evaluate what doctrinal truths, if any, are impacted by the artistic liberty. Then we should measure the significance of it. To me, I didn’t feel any foundational truths were assaulted in any way.

What do I wish could have happened? I wish when He said, “I AM,” in the garden that the soldiers would have fallen down like John says they did in John 18:4-6. I suppose the opening sequence to The Fellowship of the Ring will have to content me in the meantime. :o) My pastor wished, and I agreed, that the Roman centurion would have said, “Surely, this was the Son of God.” My friend Nathan said he wished that Jesus would have uttered the line to the women who were crying for Him, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” (Luke 23:28) Regardless of that, I was still satisfied with it.

It’s taken me a good week just to get my thoughts out. I still have a hard time describing it. You just have to see it. I think I left with a deep sense that He has paid all the debt I could owe Him and that I am now free to enjoy Him forever. His substitionary death, that is, His death in my place, was a wonderful and sober thing to dwell on. I also sensed the utter stupidity of the things I had been upset regarding prior to watching the movie.

I might write more later, but those are some initial thoughts. I’m so tired, I think I’ll turn in now.

Some have been requesting my thoughts on The Movie, and it’s literally taken me to about now before I can even coherently get them out. They’ll be coming either tonight or tomorrow, promise. :o)