Pastors are men atop a watchtower. They keep awake, while others sleep. The Holy Spirit has placed them there to oversee the church. They scan the darkness; they have a horn to alarm the people of noiseless foes and distant lanterns.

The good pastor descends from Ezekiel.

Son of man, I have made [you] a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. (Ezekiel 33:7–8)

He alarms the people against their dearest enemy: their own sin. He alerts them of more than heresy and wolves and Satan, but of God. The Holy One is coming; are they ready? If the pastors blow no trumpet, how will those unprepared not die unthoughtfully in their sins? They were elevated to see and to speak and to give the alarm. When pastors tell them about what they do not wish to hear, we do so to save their lives (Ezekiel 3:18).

God branded this image of the watchman upon the apostle’s soul. In his farewell speech to fellow pastors in Ephesus, Paul lifts up his hands: “I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26–27). Paul did not shrink back from the hardest parts of Scripture. He stood up straight, and if anything would profit their souls, he taught it without apology (Acts 20:20). And as he did, he called his fellow pastors to the watchtower with him:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. (Acts 20:28)

The Discomforter

Brothers in ministry, have we withheld some of God’s counsel to sinners and saints? I feel tempted to. How easy it is to downplay God’s holiness, evil’s contortedness, humanity’s sunkenness, sin’s deceitfulness. How subtle to laugh off death’s suddenness, hell’s foreverness, Christ’s exclusiveness, judgment’s nearness. How comfortable to never lay siege to flinty hearts; to leave the scalpel outside the operatory. Few will complain.

Though we desire to give hope, comfort, and satisfaction to our people, we must not do so unlawfully. We have different ministries, temperaments, and ways of saying things — but we preach the same Bible. The Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures is clearly not only a Comforter, but first a Discomforter. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and coming judgment when we faithfully preach his word (John 16:8–11) — his word that “is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). And he charges his messengers not to shrink back.

Our focus is Jesus Christ — “him we proclaim . . .” And how do we proclaim him? “. . . warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28). Far from being irrelevant, warnings serve the church to present everyone mature in Christ. We want everlasting happiness and comfort and satisfaction in God for our people. And God has issued sacred cautions to help us all safely home.

Thornless Roses

The first way to deal falsely with souls, then, would be to withhold the warning to the wicked or the lapsing: “If you continue in this way, you shall surely die.” The second, more subtle way would be to yell indiscriminately from the tower, “You all shall surely live!” In other words, to hand out the conditional promises of God unconditionally. The first withholds rough words; the second hands out precious promises to anyone who happens to hear them.

Imagine you are assigned to preach the incomparable Romans 8:28: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” How would you preach this?

This preacher would spend all his time tasting the honey. “All things work together for good. All things. Who has thought too much about this promise or flew above its clouds? Only begin to wrap your heart around the good that God is sailing your all things toward, and it would burst for joy.” The problem is not what he teaches, but what he does not teach. If his set pattern is to overlook the conditions, we have found a mortal wiser than God. In reality, he takes a knife to the promises and hands out thornless roses. Two thorns lay on the ground: “For those who love God . . . for those who are called according to his purpose.”

What does it mean to love God? Do I love God? He will not think to ask or tell. What is this calling and this purpose? He does not say. He skips ahead to the promise; he wants good for them, and he will hop the fence to give it to them. To him, the text simply says, “God works all things for good.”

A Book of Conditions

Despite our mixed motives, it is never safe to abridge God’s word. Such consistent oversight in your preaching will ring hollow for all students of Scripture and allow the enemy to smirk past your tower in broad daylight. Consider how many promises of our great inheritance post conditions at their gates.

“God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. (Romans 4:5)

“You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (John 15:14)

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13)

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked. (Psalm 1:1)

As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. (Psalm 103:13)

“To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” (Revelation 2:7)

[God will] present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel. (Colossians 1:22–23)

The promise that God uses all pains, groans, tears, setbacks, cancers, miscarriages, tragedies as winds to blow his people to the eternal harbor is not for mere sermon-hearers, nice neighbors, or religious hobbyists. It is offered to them through repentance of their sin and faith in Jesus Christ, but it is only possessed by those who love God and are called according to his purposes.

God Meets His Conditions

Does this make our salvation conditional? Some aspects of salvation are; some not. God elects unconditionally (Ephesians 1:4–5). He causes us to be born again unconditionally (John 3:7–8; Titus 3:5). Other conditions that we experience below — repentance, faith, love, holiness, and so on — God gives or empowers his people to meet.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12–13)

And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:27)

An ocean exists between preaching a works-based religion (a false religion) and preaching God’s utter, sovereign grace in our salvation along with his warnings and conditions. We must preach the latter. Everyone is not a Christian who sits in a pew; everyone is not on a Christian journey; everyone is not a child of God; everyone is not a recipient of every kind word of Scripture because they chose to come to church that Sunday. We must not lie and flatter, casting gospel pearls indiscriminately before swine.

Innocent

Charles Spurgeon once said from his own watchtower,

Our ministry ought always to be a killing as well as a healing one — a ministry which kills all false hopes, blights all wrong confidences, and weeds out all foolish trusts, while at the same time it trains up the feeblest shoot of real hope, and tends comfort and encouragement even to the weakest of the sincere followers of Christ. Do not, then, be needlessly alarmed about our ministry. Just give us plenty of elbow-room to strike right and left. . . . To our own Master we stand or fall, but to no one else in heaven or on earth. (The Weeding of the Garden)

Men of God, put forth the Lord Jesus Christ in all his beauty; lift their souls to the gates of glory. Be the man to tarry in God’s presence, a man who can train up the feeblest shoot of real hope, declaring, Behold your God! And love their souls enough, love Christ enough, love God’s word enough to wound proud unbelief, favorite sins, and respectable worldliness — to kill false hopes, blight all wrong confidences, and weed out foolish trusts.

You do not have to be your people’s best friend, but you need to be their pastor. You have a high and noble office. Do not shrink back because God’s remedies are sometimes rougher than you (and your people) would prefer. Handle the promises with care, speak plainly with them about sin as you point repeatedly to the all-sufficient Savior. And be free from assuming you’ve been arrogant because you find yourself asking Paul’s question, “Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (Galatians 4:16).

We are watchmen of souls. At times, we will misjudge or overreact or raise the alarm at shadows we thought were soldiers — ask for forgiveness. As far as it goes with you, perform the watchman’s work with joy and sobriety as those who will soon come down from the tower to give an account for how you kept watch over souls. May we be able to truthfully say on that day, “I am innocent of the blood of all.”

The Christian man who makes women and children and the church safe, is the man who makes demons and the wicked uneasy. A shepherd, his staff and rod comfort them. “Gentle,” “meek,” and “compassionate” actually mean something because he is not merely these. Like the warrior-hero of old, the Christian man “shares many characteristics with the monsters he conquers, as he must if he is to conquer them” (Leon Podles, The Church Impotent, 95). In other words, the Christian man must be strong.

The goddess of feminism shrieks at the mere citation: “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13). She does not like (and would threaten you not to like) men acting “like men.” If she cannot make men brutal, she would have their souls emasculated by pornography, disinterested in dominion, wasting their fleeting lives staring at a box in the corner of the room. Paul, by inspiration of God, would have you live for something, stand firm for something, die for something, rise from the grave to reign again — “quit you like men” in the old King James — be strong.

This command is no innovation. Paul, steeped in Old Testament Scriptures, grew up on tales of Abraham and Noah, Moses and Joshua, David and Jonathan, Elijah and Nehemiah, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. When Paul says the entire church ought to “act like men,” he uses a word — andrizomai — already familiar to readers of the Greek translations of the Old Testament. The Israelite grew up with clear categories of what it meant to act like men, to stand firm in the faith, to be strong.

Men Demons Recognize

“Act like a man” was a common commission given to the generation about to enter the promised land. I can’t recount how many times my own retreating spirit has needed to drink from Joshua’s chalice. His Lord charged him,

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous [andrizomai]. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:9)

Joshua, and indeed all of Israel, would need to “play the man” to conquer their own fears and enter the land swarming with enemies fierce and fortified (Deuteronomy 31:6). God had already executed the cowardly spirit of the spies by a forty-year march through the wilderness. Only the two soldierly spirits who trusted their God survived: Caleb and Joshua. Joshua is charged repeatedly — by Moses before all the people, by the Lord himself, and by the people themselves: Act like a man and be strong (Deuteronomy 31:6–8, 23; Joshua 1:1–9, 16–18).

Andrizomai connotes strength of soul. Men act, and act from a soldierly spirit, for those they protect, while trusting their God. All they do is to be governed by love (1 Corinthians 16:14), and that loving spirit doesn’t negate the strong, resilient soul; it focuses it on right ends. “A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him” (G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1911). Such a soldier turns to a brother during warfare, attacked on both fronts and with his people on his heart, and says,

If the Syrians be too strong for me, then thou shalt help me: but if the children of Ammon be too strong for thee, then I will come and help thee. Be of good courage, and let us play the men [andrizomai] for our people, and for the cities of our God: and the Lord do that which seemeth him good. (2 Samuel 10:11–12 KJV)

Demons recognize this man. His wife respects him. His sons look up to him. His daughter is safe with him. His people trust him. He is a soldier of his King, a son of his Father, a Christian man.

Sin of Timidity

How is it, then, when you visit more than a few Christian quarters today, you might assume Paul instructed, “Stand firm in your feelings, take it easy, act like androgenous beings, embrace your unchanging (and unchangeable) weakness”?

The call to “gentleness,” in these cases, has not accented the Christian man’s strength but bludgeoned it. Love has not ordered the strong soul but trumpeted its retreat. King David could soothe with the harp and harm with the sling. The Lord himself bade the children come and yet was consumed with zeal for his Father’s house and drove the moneychangers out. Are we in their lineage? “Be more tender” cannot be the only message for a generation increasingly unschooled in being assertive, convictional, or heroic.

Charles Spurgeon bemoaned the soft and unmanly spirit of his times. In the May 1866 edition of The Sword and the Trowel, he diagnoses his generation, with uncomfortable relevance to our own:

Is not timidity a common vice among Christian workers? . . . Is it not a sin to educate God’s people into habits which unfit them for Christian warfare? Are not these such times as to demand a more manly bearing from believers than the most of them as yet exhibit? (The War Horse)

Timidity is a vice, but what of Christianity’s celebration of “softer” virtues like modesty? He continues,

You remind me that modesty is a great virtue; I believe it, but I also believe that there are other virtues equally necessary to a soldier. The modesty which keeps a soldier in the rear in the day of battle will earn him few laurels [honors]; and that retiring disposition which makes him retreat when the order is given to advance is called by another name by men of courage.

Spurgeon often dressed his sermons in soldier’s apparel. He had a masculine ministry, which resisted the sheepishness he witnessed in too many pulpits of his day:

A spice of this traitorous modesty flavors our ministry still, and some palates crave for more of it. We are expected to appear before our hearers with a sweet bashfulness which disclaims all dogmatism, and sues for a hearing as a beggar for an alms. God’s ambassadors, forsooth, are to lick the dust, and to deliver their Master’s message as though he borrowed leave to be.

In other words, as a pastor he borrowed from Shakespeare’s militant Coriolanus, “Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me false to my nature? Rather say I, play the man I am” (Coriolanus, 3.2.15). “A man of God is a manly man,” declared Spurgeon. “A true man does what he thinks to be right, whether the pigs grunt and the dogs howl” (“A Man of God Is a Manly Man,” Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, 211).

Soul-Destroying Politeness

But what is Spurgeon specifically getting at, and how do we apply it today? The false religion of modernity (alive in his day as well), would have us pay homage to the pantheon of the gods. A man must not “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). A man may have his private Jesus, but not the public Lord who possesses all authority over every nation and to whom each sinner must bow. This Lord, pluralism hates — though as Dagon before the ark, it shall soon fall, headless.

Our warfare, then, both at that time and today (and in the first century), has much to do with plain speech of the true Christ for the good of souls. We wield spiritual weapons, destroy strongholds, largely through speech, as we “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

If we were in the Old Testament religion, and geography defined the borders of God’s kingdom, if the dwelling place of God was behind the walls of Jerusalem and God’s ark dwelt within the temple, if we were the nation of Jesus Christ, then we could imagine the charge to men of God today being: “Pick up your sword, man, and fight for the church against her enemies!”

And while a normal man should be able to pick up a sword and do a pushup, we know that in Christ our warfare has been raised to a far higher hill. Or is it a smaller thing to war daily against untiring and unseen enemies, to be on guard against traitors as close as our own flesh, to contend with spirits who shoot flaming darts to sting the heart, to incense the dark and mighty jackal who holds immortal souls mercilessly within his jaws? Strong men, strong in the faith, strong in the Lord, stand firm and dare to defy the world, the flesh, the devil.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his day, “They that know have grown afraid to speak. That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester” (The Great Divorce, 106). Will we summon the strength of soul, to tell the unbeliever living in Vanity Fair that his way leads to hell, his god is an idol, his hopes but drunken dreams?

Spurgeon roars, “Men are perishing, and if it be unpolite to tell them so, it can only be so where the devil is the master of the ceremonies. Out upon your soul-destroying politeness; the Lord give us a little honest love to souls, and this superficial gentility will soon vanish” (The War Horse). Will sorrows that once purified now fester because Christian men grow afraid to speak — or speaking, slash the force of what we say with mumbled apologies?

Sharpening of Brothers

Perhaps we have cut Samson’s hair because we have left men to be heroic alone, having lost the sharpening brotherhood. Perhaps Christian men don’t speak more courageously to their neighbor because they don’t speak more courageously to one another. Where they remain, men’s accountability too quickly devolves into secular therapy sessions where the listeners can only empathize and affirm the drowning man. We’ve forgotten how to spar, how to sharpen as iron, how to act like men among men.

Am I too harsh to observe that many operate by the unspoken rule that we can be as wobbling fauns forever taking first steps in discipleship? Is the frontline to move forward? Is it not becoming a pastime to huddle together as startled sheep baaing of how broken we all are without any desperate plea to God (and the brothers) to help us grow stronger? I hope not.

Remember Peter’s vision for the Christian life. His is one of divine power for the believer to make every effort and actually to increase in holiness, one with a calling to God’s own glory and excellence, one of progress and precious and very great promises, one of confirming our calling and election as we campaign our way with the saints to the celestial city (2 Peter 1:3–11). Setbacks? Certainly. Sin? Who could deny it? But growth? Absolutely. Onward Christian soldier is our inheritance. The church triumphant marches behind Christus Victor, and the battle begins in our own souls and processes into glory.

Act Like Christian Men

This brings us to the final point: God’s call to masculine strength is distinctly Christian. The Christian man does not rely on self or chariots. He does not strut around like Gaston, singing, “As a specimen, yes I’m intimidating!” The story of Joshua, a story the author of Hebrews calls us to appropriate (Hebrews 13:5–6), teaches us that the man of God is strong and courageous because he believes God’s promise, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Mighty men know that their strength is utter weakness apart from God. “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might” (Ephesians 6:10).

Acting like a man, red-blooded and vigorous of soul, means acknowledging we are but men. As the adage goes, “The best of men are men at best.” If God does not go with us, down goes our strength. With God, we stand bold as a lion. Without him, we melt into a puddle.

But God has promised not to leave us. Away, then, with unmanliness disguised as virtue. Speak of Christ so as to be heard. Get a job. Find a wife. Raise children. Serve the church. Love your neighbor in the name of Jesus. Learn to sweat, develop your abilities, and use them. Walk humbly before your God and his word; stand tall before men. Lift holy hands and pray. Study. Sharpen one another. Stand firm. Let all you do be done in love. Be strong in the Lord. Act like Christian men.

A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her is more precious than all the favors that all the other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love.” (Meditations in a Toolshed, C.S. Lewis)

Can you recall the enchantment? The intoxication of young love? Its gravity, its force, its demands? Perhaps we squint to remember what we thought we could never forget — the bottomless conversations, the nervous smiles, the rewatching in the mind moments just past. We may smile to ourselves, that was a lifetime ago. “Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life” — doesn’t that capture it?

But that was then. The spell wears off. The kids come. You’ve spent days and weeks and years together. You’ve seen her without the composure and the makeup; she’s seen you without the confidence and the strength. You’ve searched out this island called marriage; there is less to explore now. In love still, just a different kind. More realistic, we tell ourselves. The description above undergoes a revision.

A young man marries that girl. The world returns to normal a few years after. He seems to have remembered that thing that pestered him, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her seems next to impossible with young children. He is, as they say, “settled down.”

Much has been gained; something has been lost. You wish, at times, you could return to that first meeting, that first date, that first time telling her, “I love you.” The romance is still honeyed — when you make time for it. She is still beautiful, when you remember to really look at her.

She sleeps next to you now but seems, on some days, farther than ever. She is yours, but come to think of it, you miss her. You’ve grown: better friends, perhaps, better partners in the family enterprise, but are you better lovers? Has the poetry, requiring so much time and attention, turned into abbreviated text messages and generic emojis?

What a different vision for godly marriages the father of Proverbs hands to his sons:

Let your fountain be blessed,     and rejoice in the wife of your youth,a lovely deer, a graceful doe.Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;     be intoxicated always in her love. (Proverbs 5:18–19)

Husbands, “be intoxicated always in her love.” What a command. Literally, “be led astray” continually in her love. Be swept up. Lose track of time. Forget about your phone. Wander. Inebriate yourself with the dark-red of marital love.

Your wife, as the father crowns her, is a lovely deer and graceful doe. Do we need reminding? As familiarity threatens to blind us, as fights and frets and changing figures would cool us, the king bids his son memorize the lover’s irrepressible song, “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart” (Song of Solomon 4:9 KJV). She, not the adulterous woman, must be his addiction.

Led Astray to Her

We need this command, don’t we? We are so prone to be led astray by lesser things; we whose passions can somehow weaken with possession; we who dull with acquaintance and brighten at novelty. We need a father to tell us on our wedding day (and then again at our ten-year anniversary), My son, be led astray continually to her — away from the tyranny of good pursuits or worldly ambitions — be intoxicated always in marital love.

“In a blur of married and modern life, are we still awake to our beloved?”

Has your pool of passions stilled? Many of us remember being implored before marriage, “[do] not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (Song of Solomon 2:7). Natural sprinters we proved to be. Desires galloped prior to marriage — when Satan tempted and we ached while apart — but now that time pleases and heaven smiles down, how our love slouches and our once unsleeping passions can hardly keep awake past nine.

In a blur of married and modern life, are we still awake to our beloved? Do we only see the mother of our children? Will we never pause to really see her who is beside us on this grand adventure?

The wise father knows that our hearts, unwatched, grow blind to beauty. We think life unextraordinary — as we live on a planet spinning constantly, flung into a corner of the cosmos, revolving violently around a massive flaming ball — yet we yawn and call it Tuesday. But what is more wondrous still, we live with an immortal soul — in Christ, a coheir of the universe, a redeemed one, indwelt by the God who made everything. A Christian wife. The Alphabet of good husbanding begins with seeing her through faith’s eyes. That is why I suggest, we need to cultivate the habit of seeing her as the Scriptures teach us to see her.

Look at Her

The husband of the Song of Songs, drunk on anticipation and admiration, observes her as an artist bent over a portrait or as Adam waking to behold Eve,

How beautiful are your feet in sandals,     O noble daughter!Your rounded thighs are like jewels,     the work of a master hand.Your navel is a rounded bowl     that never lacks mixed wine.Your belly is a heap of wheat,     encircled with lilies.Your two breasts are like two fawns,     twins of a gazelle.Your neck is like an ivory tower.Your eyes are pools in Heshbon,     by the gate of Bath-rabbim.Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon,     which looks toward Damascus.Your head crowns you like Carmel,     and your flowing locks are like purple;     a king is held captive in the tresses. (Song of Solomon 7:1–5)

Now here, distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive. Charge not forth, good men, to describe your wife in this exact manner. But do learn from the husband’s focus, his alertness, his ever-attentive eye that surveys his bride in quiet wonder. Husband, what does your wife’s neck look like? Her smile in the morning? Her gentle spirit? Her strong convictions? Speak of them, perhaps sparingly, but notice them constantly. And when you do, thank God, the Artist, for what he is painting.

Keep Looking at Her

Does this sustained, admiring stare depend on the beloved’s appearance? Kept curves, bright teeth, ungrayed hair? Notice that the father teaches that the eye of the beloved does not recoil when it observes new wrinkles on skin, new wear and tear from everyday life. Look again at his charge,

Let your fountain be blessed,     and rejoice in the wife of your youth,a lovely deer, a graceful doe.Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;     be intoxicated always in her love. (Proverbs 5:18–19)

“Rejoice in the wife of your youth.” How old is she now? Youth is somewhere in the rearview; the wedding day a distant memory. Decades have passed, perhaps. “Always” is your delight and duty. There she is. You gaze over your morning coffee at her — what do you see? The wife of your youth, the wife of your reminiscences, the wife of your now and former days.

The world, so crude and boastful, would tell you that she, with chronic knee pain and doctors’ visits, is past her prime, perhaps even disposable. With its diseased and rasping voice, it points to the youthful employee, the pornographic magazine at the checkout counter, the woman running past in painted-on attire — behold, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. She will thrill you with the chase, satisfy you with fresher springs.

No, no, no, foolhardy flesh. I have my lovely deer, my graceful doe. She, no longer a youth, is better: the wife of my youth. We keep a most blessed fountain. Her breasts have not stopped filling me at all times with delight. No, no, no, O dark and devilish temptation, you have no mastery here. My God, by his grace, has given me himself and more; he has gifted me her. And though our stay in this body be brief, though our figures droop and drag and waste away, she is even more beautiful now (more Christlike than ever before), a companion no harem of illicit pleasure could rival. Be gone, all others, be gone! I am swept away — intoxicated — always in her love.

King Caught in the Tresses

Consider how closely Christ looks at his bride. How particular is he to pore over that beauty which he himself bestows upon her (and at what cost)?

Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:25–27)

His life, his crucifixion, his being “marred, beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14), all so that he would watch her walk down the aisle toward him — “in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” before him. His eyes, keener than eagles’, survey her.

Behold, you are beautiful, my love;behold, you are beautiful;     your eyes are doves. . . .You are altogether beautiful, my love;     there is no flaw in you. (Song of Solomon 1:15, 4:7)

And then he, the perfect Groom, will call her from this cursed world,

Arise, my love, my beautiful one,     and come away. (Song of Solomon 2:10)

What Marriage Whispers

Marital intimacy, though not the Aphrodite culture would make her, is a precious gift. The father, while not merely pointing us to the marriage bed alone, is here bidding old lovers to drink deeply of the uncorked vintage of God’s design.

Marital sex, a lordly and bright sunlight, should itself bow. I believe we learn something of intimacy’s proper place from (of numerous other passages) a text that has always struck me as something of an oddity. Concerning the marriage bed, Paul writes,

Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)

Contra many skeptical notions, intimacy, in normal circumstances, should be enjoyed and regular. Our lack of self-control and Satan’s sure temptations ground this dictate. The soak under the silver waterfall serves more than delight and unity; it serves holiness. Regular “coming together” builds a gleeful rampart against the schemes of the enemy.

But this was not the oddity. The oddity to me concerned what the couple might decide (together) to lay it aside for. “[Don’t] deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer.” It struck me as odd that the apostle considered prayer the alternative and the superior.

What does prayer as a planned interruption to the marriage bed suggest? It tells me that sex is a good and necessary gift for married couples from a good and gracious God, but not an ultimate gift. Sex was made for man, but not man for sex. Greater pleasures perch on higher branches. One might halt the lesser intimacy, might intentionally fast from the feast, for the higher and the greater — prayer. The prayer closet — the place of intimacy with God — holds higher rank.

Swept Away

Marital intimacy — with all its high glories and some crawling challenges (here left undiscussed) — samples wine from a coming orchard. Wine within this covenant challis is ultimately about blood-bought union with a covenant-keeping God. The mountain peaks, the ocean deeps, the untamed thrill, the transfigured moments of pleasure and beauty in a healthy married life exist for him (Colossians 1:16). Our union with him is not of one flesh as with a wife, but greater, of one spirit (1 Corinthians 6:17). Considering Ephesians 5:31–32, John Piper clarifies,

Leaving parents and holding fast to a wife, forming a new one-flesh union, is meant from the beginning to display this new covenant — Christ leaving his Father and taking the church as his bride, at the cost of his life, and holding fast to her in a one-spirit union forever. (This Momentary Marriage, 30)

Marital union sketches union with Christ.

So, husbands, look at her, keep looking at her, awaken slumbering summer, foment tidy sheets, cast down enthroned shams — and forgo this intimacy, at times, to pray. Be intoxicated always in her love, be led astray, and in that affection be swept away to a higher love, the love of Christ. Let her voice and her love remind you of what you’ve been trying to remember all your life.

Maybe you’ve had this experience while reading the Bible. You turn to Psalms for encouragement. You begin to read, say Psalm 139, and find a warm blanket for your soul.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!You know when I sit down and when I rise up;     you discern my thoughts from afar.

Are you standing or sitting? He knows. He sees. He cares. Amazing. Your happiness soars as you read how he surrounds you, intervenes in your life (vv. 2–12), how he knew you before there was a “you” to know, knit you together in your mother’s womb (13–16). You seem to climb Jacob’s ladder to golden gates, praising God that the sins of yesterday and last week and last year have not driven him away: You awake, and he is still with you (17–18).

Then you stumble upon verse 19:

Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!     O men of blood, depart from me!

You pause and reread. You stop and check if you’re still in the same psalm. This verse, so abrupt, comes with violence. Slay the wicked? Hate them with a perfect hatred? What do you do with these lines? Pretend you didn’t see them? What about when you notice more?

Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer. (Psalm 10:15)
Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of the Lord pursuing them! (Psalm 35:6)
Let burning coals fall upon them! Let them be cast into fire, into miry pits, no more to rise! (Psalm 140:10)
Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive. (Psalm 55:15)
Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun. (Psalm 58:8)
Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. (Psalm 69:23)
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow! May his children wander about and beg, seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit! (Psalm 109:9–10)

How do you explain curses like these? How do you answer your atheist coworker? How do you pray them in family worship? How do you quiet your own discomforts? What do we do with them as Christians, on this side of the coming of Christ?

Devilish Psalms?

C.S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, offers us this advice:

We must not either try to explain them away or to yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious. . . . The hatred is there — festering, gloating, undisguised — and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves. (Reflections on the Psalms, 26)

Devilish, terrible psalms, he goes on to call them, authored by “ferocious, self-pitying, barbaric men” (27). Is he right?

How do we interpret these “imprecatory psalms,” these psalms of curse (more generally, Psalms 55, 59, 69, 79, 109, and 137)? As a brief introduction, consider such curses in four spheres: in the Old Testament, in the New, in heaven, and curses today.

Curses in the Old Testament

First, we’ve already seen curses in the Psalms.

How do we answer the objection that these psalms — mostly written by David — are personal and vindictive? We could spend time looking at David, wondering aloud if he who cut the garment instead of stabbing the back of Saul (not to mention his patience with Doeg, Absalom, and Shimei) was really a vengeful spirit. Instead, notice three threads in the imprecatory psalms.

1. David isn’t cursing directly.

Curses are pronouncements of harm over others, often involving a ritual or sacrifice. May your fields rot, or your wife be barren. “In the ancient Near East in general, life was dominated by the need to cope with the terrifying threat of curses and omens” (New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 397). The ancient world often saw these pronouncements as powerful in themselves.

Israel was different. They knew no curse had decisive power apart from the one true God. Balaam, borrowing an Israelite conception, says, “How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?” (Numbers 23:8). The imprecatory psalms, then, are not direct curses upon the wicked apart from the Almighty. They are prayers offered and entrusted to the wisdom and enforcement of the psalmist’s covenant God.

2. David often prays Scripture.

David wasn’t brooding in his room, writing hate-poems in his little black book. As the king, David meditated day and night on God’s blessings and curses found in the Torah (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 27–28). How should any Israelite feel about the curses? The Lord’s catechized people say, “Amen” (Deuteronomy 27:15–26).

Likewise, David in the Psalms often takes statements of fact about God’s judgments and simply prays them. “In almost every instance, each expression used in one of these prayers of malediction may be found in plain prose statements of what will happen to those sinners who persist in opposing God” (Hard Sayings of the Bible, 280–282). Thus, as one example of this, the statement of fact given in Psalm 1, “The wicked . . . are like chaff that the wind drives away” (Psalm 1:4), becomes for David, “Let them be like chaff before the wind” (Psalm 35:5).

3. The psalmist’s enemies are God’s enemies.

Whose enemies are they in Psalm 139:19–22? “Against you,” “your enemies,” “your name,” “those who hate you,” “who rise up against you.” These men became David’s enemies by proxy — “I count them my enemies.” Here we find another crucial element about the imprecatory Psalms: They often stem from righteous indignation about how the wicked treat God, God’s people, and God’s Anointed King.

David’s epic showdown with Goliath illustrates this. What was his personal history with the giant? Goliath hadn’t killed David’s father, like the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride. He had no ill will but this: Goliath dared to defy the armies of the living God.

Do we ever grow warm with righteous anger? Not because we are insulted, but because God is? In 1945, communist Soviet Union occupied Romania. To pay tribute to the new state order, the communists convened a congress comprised of four thousand Christian leaders and broadcasted it to the country. Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand were in attendance. One after another, Christian leaders stood and hailed the atheistic state and promised church allegiance.

Sabina leaned over to her husband, “Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in his face!” “If I do so,” he replied, “you lose your husband.” “I don’t wish to have a coward as a husband,” came her reply. And so he did. He later wrote, “Afterward I had to pay for this, but it was worthwhile” (Tortured for Christ, 10).

Do we ever take our occasions, however much smaller, to wipe the spit from the face of Christ? Have we become insensible to hearing Christ’s name dragged through the mud? John Stott comments,

[The psalmist] has completely identified himself with the cause of God, [and] hates them because he loves God. . . . That we cannot easily aspire to this is an indication not of our spirituality but of our lack of it, not of our superior love for men but of our inferior love for God, indeed of our inability to hate the wicked with a hatred that is “perfect” [as in Psalm 139:22] and not “personal.” (The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, 116–117)

Do we ever say anything uncomfortable in the presence of evil — or worse, do we even care? The psalmists did. We accuse them of cruelty; they accuse us of a twisted sentimentality. We accuse them of not considering man; they accuse us of not considering God.

Curses in the New Testament

Do we have curses in the New Testament? Yes.

Peter exclaims, “May your silver perish with you!” (Acts 8:20). Paul hands people over to Satan and curses anyone to hell who preaches a different gospel or refuses to love Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:8–9; 1 Corinthians 16:22). Even Jesus curses a fig tree — and blasts the Pharisees with mighty woes (Matthew 23:13–36).

But more to our consideration: How did Jesus and his apostles view imprecatory psalms?

The New Testament authors, from John to Paul to Peter to Jesus himself, quote unhesitatingly from these psalms. The apostles did not have the qualms of so many modern scholars. Not one New Testament author gives the kind of preface we do when recommending a good television show: “It is really good — except that one part.” They treat such psalms as we should: with reverence as sacred Scripture.

Consider the New Testament’s usage of Psalm 69, which includes one of the longest sustained imprecations (Psalm 69:22–28) and the most severe imprecation in the Psalter: “Add to them punishment upon punishment; may they have no acquittal from you” (verse 27). Keep the blows coming. No mercy. No forgiveness. Let them be damned. Surely the New Testament would avoid such sentiments, right?

The psalm is actually one of the favorites of the New Testament, including citations from the imprecations themselves (Romans 11:9; Acts 1:20). Let’s limit the quotes here to the beloved and gentle apostle John. He takes up this psalm to explain the temple-cleansing incident with Jesus and the whip: “zeal for your house has consumed me” (Psalm 69:9; John 2:17). He records Psalm 69:4 upon Jesus’s lips in the upper room, as the Lord explains how the Jews “hated me without a cause” (John 15:25). And most stunningly, upon the cross itself: “Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst’” (John 19:28) — a reference to verse 21, “They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.”

John Piper comments,

According to the apostle John, Jesus died fulfilling Psalm 69. What more glorious tribute could be paid to a psalm? The very psalm that we tend to think is a problem because of its imprecations was the one Jesus lived in and the one that carried him to the cross and through the cross. (Shaped by God, 61)

Here we find the foundational reality. God allows curses into this world for the glory of Jesus — to paint a dark and bloody and beautiful picture of his sacrificial love. Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood, Korah’s rebellion, Canaan’s ban, the cry over Egypt’s firstborns — all shadows compared with the tremendous doom of this one who cries, “I thirst,” from the cross. He plunged into the depths of hell itself. Curses exist to explain this good news to you:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” (Galatians 3:13)

Christ became a cursed one, a doomed and condemned man — why? For us. The bread, broken — for you. The wine, poured out — for you. The judgment drank to the bottom — for you. The history of all curses for every human on the planet ends here, at the cross, or in hell. Nowhere else.

This clarifies our call in evangelism:

“Sir, can I speak with you about Jesus?”“Why would I need to hear about him? — I’m happy enough.”“Because, sir, sin has placed you under God’s curse, whoever does not believe is condemned already, the wrath of God remains upon you, and only Christ, who became a curse for all who would repent and believe, can remove it.”

Curses in Heaven

Now, a question you may not have asked: Are there imprecatory prayers in heaven? Yes.

John records the voices of martyrs slain for God’s word, crying out in a loud voice,

“O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been. (Revelation 6:10–11)

The martyrs — perfected and with the Lord in glory — pray for their blood to be avenged on earth. Or again in Revelation 18:6, against spiritual Babylon:

Pay her back as she herself has paid back others,     and repay her double for her deeds;     mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.

And as God’s enemies fall, how does heaven respond? God’s vengeance on the wicked fuels their hallelujahs,

“Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.” Once more they cried out, “Hallelujah! The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.” (Revelation 19:1–3)

Don’t our own children’s stories reveal that we know this is good? They end the same: the witch is cursed, the monster slain, the evil king dethroned and punished. Do we weep when Scar is fed to hyenas? No, not even our children. Why? Because we know, even at a young age, the rightness of villains being punished. What is hard for us to bear is that, outside of Christ, we (and those we love) are the villains.

Curses Today

Psalms of curse were prayed in the Old Testament, approved in the New, and this same heart has its counterpart in heaven. But what about us today? Should we pray them?

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. . . . Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. . . . Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” (Romans 12:14, 17, 19)

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:44)

These texts clearly teach that we leave personal grievances with God to repay. They teach that God’s wrath — exhausted at the cross or in hell — frees us to love those who have hated us and bless those who have cursed us.

But are they incompatible with praying the imprecatory psalms? Personal vengeance, after all, is outlawed in both covenants (Leviticus 19:17–18). That vengeance belongs to God was not new (Deuteronomy 32:35; Psalm 94:1). The next verse in Romans 12 is a quote from Proverbs 25:21: “To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head’” (Romans 12:20).

Some evil is so pronounced and prolonged (especially against the global church) that we are right to pray that if the wicked are not stopped by converting mercy (the kind of mercy that stopped Saul), that God stop them by any other means. As James Hamilton exhorts Christians today,

Pray that God would either save those who destroy families and hurt little children or thwart all their efforts and keep them from doing further harm. . . . Pray that God would either redeem people who are right now identifying with the seed of the serpent, or if he is not going to redeem them, that he would crush them and all their evil designs. (Revelation: The Spirit Speaks to the Churches, 201)

Whether you conclude that mercy should silence these prayers today or not, be assured, it isn’t because judgment isn’t coming, and at any moment. The pressing question, then, in conclusion, is not why judgment and curse exist, but why aren’t we all drowned beneath it every moment?

That was the angel’s perplexity: generation after generation of mercy to sinful men — but how? The blood of goats? Until they saw it, a greater enigma still: The only blessed Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords who took on human flesh, earned every blessing by perfect obedience, now exhausting every curse for his people upon the tree. In this Christ has arrived the day of salvation for all under the curse. “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:12).

What’s the point of it all? The inquiry does not relent. Resist it for a time — fill your days with noise, stare hard at the patch of life before you — but you cannot always avoid the silence, cannot always avoid looking up.

The question catches up to most of us halfway to the grave. What else is a midlife crisis? When nests begin to empty, the chirping quiets and memories take their place, her interrogation loudens. Contemplation stares from the corner of the room. We can hurry off to a new distraction, or stare back.

Midlife. Halfway to somewhere, but to where? Away. To death — and to more — to whatever lies beyond, to that “undiscovered country” that

puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of. (Hamlet, 3.1.87–90)

Half of your life (at best) is gone. You map where you have been, where you are now, and the limits you can yet travel. You begin to feel the gravity of time. You look back. The distance behind is greater than the distance left ahead, and the rapids seem to quicken toward the falls. But to what end? Anxieties paw within, looking for an escape.

Young dreams have grown up. Some hopes, along with some friends, have died. Ideals have given way to reality. What ifs have cocooned into What was and What actually is. The butterfly, so perfect in the mind’s eye, is not as beautiful as expected. Regrets mingle with misplaced joys. The questions that youthful optimism brushed off will no longer be dismissed: What was the point of it all?

Unhappy Wisdom

Many today would call midlife reflections of this kind cynical, jaded. Some interpret their intrusion as signs that they haven’t found the spouse, the adventure, the career that they were truly made for. They try another. But the wisest man ever born of men, a man who touched the ends of the earth’s delights, called such contemplations wisdom. Wisdom that agitates our joy. A frustration at the futility we face in this fallen world.

In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

We might imagine a hypothetical alternative: one where Adam and Eve waited to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in God’s timing upon God’s invitation. But the unlawful bites into forbidden knowledge demanded God thrust futility and curse upon the world. We have knowledge of good and evil, but mostly evil.

“Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore.”

So, from the ruins, we pluck the rose of wisdom, and feel her thorns and thistles. We enjoy wisdom, when we enjoy her, wincing. While she must be preferred above all alternatives (Proverbs 3:13–15), she casts a shadow for those inhabiting a world under the sun. She will not flatter us. She lives near reality — too near — and she is too honest. She clarifies and she saddens. She guides and she wounds. She points out many perplexities this side of eternity.

Perennial Pointlessness

What did wisdom reveal to turn the king into the unhappy philosopher we find in the book of Ecclesiastes? She shows him a world full of vanity. A world that cannot bear our deepest hopes, or satisfy our inmost longings, or gratify our great exertions.

A sampling from the first chapter.

Wisdom shows him a meaningless shore where generations come, and generations go, washing back and forth. Wisdom lifts his chin — the sun rises, falls, and hastens to rise again — for what? He begins to notice how the wind can’t make up its mind, blowing north then south only to return to the same place it started (Ecclesiastes 1:4–6). And for man, the hamster wheel spins until the hamster dies, and another scurries in his place. Perennial pointlessness.

He looks out at the calm waters and savors no peace:

All streams run to the sea,      but the sea is not full;to the place where the streams flow,      there they flow again. (Ecclesiastes 1:7)

Where will his soul find fullness? His eyes have seen great things. His ears have heard marvels. He tested his heart with all manner of delight (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He found pleasure in them for a season, yet in the end, he discovered his blisses were not loadbearing.

All things are full of weariness;      a man cannot utter it;the eye is not satisfied with seeing,      nor the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8)

What, then, is the point?

Sad Soliloquy

Through the spectacles of wisdom, he beholds a good world (with beauty and laughter and love), but a cursed world still. He longs for fruit from Eden, and cannot find the like below. As the richest king of Israel, he feasts on the delights we still chase today, yet without finding a way past the fiery sword guarding the tree of life now denied us (Genesis 3:24).

Days begin to blend; routine squeezes the zest from life; wisdom points past the momentary pleasure out into the fog, wondering where this is all going. The sad conclusions begin to mount.

Nothing is new; only hand-me-downs passed down the generations. What came before, came and went; what we know as the momentary now will pass, soon to be forgotten. The historic present falls with the consequence of a snowflake — dazzling, glittering, melting. Death comes for the wise and the foolish alike (Ecclesiastes 1:9–11). The walls were closing in.

“I hated life. . . . I hated all my labor,” the wise man sighs (see Ecclesiastes 2:17–18). His was a sad soliloquy. He turns to us, the audience of his one-man play,

A bird within a shallow cage,Ink written on a burning page,Calloused hands without a wage,The musing of a dying sage.

With eyes not to be satisfied,I saw all is absurdity.My heart was never gratified,For what could fill eternity?

Banquets of laughter, food, and drink,Feasts of different women’s thrills,Life caressing Canaan’s brink,Streams to seas that never fill.

At midlife (for some before, some after), we taste a piece of the Preacher’s grief. Vanity of vanities! An unhappy business. A striving after the wind. Life under the curse.

Recalculating Midlife

Demons hatch when good is god,When life is sought in tombs of men.When Joy is taught as a facade.And death is thought to be the end.

Midlife crisis, for anyone feeling its stress, is not really midlife at all. It lands us (should the Lord provide another half) mid-page in the mere preface of life. The first chapter of eternity has not yet begun. We are all immortal beings, babies even on our deathbeds.

Yet life after this life, in answer to the question of futility, does not render earth’s life span of little consequence. This life ripples into forever, and this truth returns to our Preacher some clarity, some sanity. He concludes,

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14)

Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die” — and a time to rise again and face our God (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2).

Fly away to God

To the next world we go. To God we go. To Jesus Christ — a Savior, a Lord, a Judge. A God whose justice will publish our story’s destiny — eternal life or eternal death. Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.

I wonder if the Preacher’s hundred perplexities would have been assuaged by testing his heart one more time with one true glimpse of Jesus Christ on the cross. Would the eternity in his heart not burst with praise? It did for Charles Spurgeon as he quotes:

The cords that bound my heart to earthAre broken by his hand;Before his cross I find myself,A stranger in the land.

My heart is with him on his throne,And ill can brook delay;Each moment listening for the voice,“Make haste, and come away.”(cited in Alas for Us, If Thou Were All)

“Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.”

The Point of it All, our Wisdom, took on human flesh and dwelt with us under the sun — to live, to teach, and (beyond belief) to die, that he might redeem us from the curse by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). Labor, life, wisdom, death — the rising and setting of the sun — find their purpose in him. Where streams empty into our insatiable seas, he cries out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37).

Passing Shadows and Forever Beauty

While Christ is our all in all, our Bread of Life, our Joy eternal, we are still perplexed in seasons, even as believers (2 Corinthians 4:8). We “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” still groan inwardly — but not nihilistically — since we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons. And creation still pants “in the pains of childbirth,” having been subjected to vanity, not willingly, but in hope by its Creator. We know that the bondage of corruption shall yet be finally broken when all becomes new, when the sons and daughters of God are revealed (Romans 8:18–25).

For those in Christ, all futility, all senseless wonder, all burdensome enigmas in a fallen world will be finally, utterly “swallowed up by life” in the resurrection and the coming of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:4). Until then, we may become distressed in our waiting, yet acknowledge with Samwise that “in the end the shadow was just a small and passing thing. There is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach” (The Return of the King, 186). Midlife is midway home.

My Dear Globdrop,

I shall happily give you sex advice for your (thus far) happily married man.

As a most impure spirit, you admit a certain revulsion toward the “grotesque images of bodies enmeshed and limbs flailing.” While I may know some of their sexual enchantments — we can save talk of the Nephilim for another time, perhaps — I understand your natural aversion with the physical and primal urges of the humans. You wouldn’t give the act a moment’s thought if it did not mean so much to them and to the Enemy.

But oh, how much it means to them! What opportunity sex presents. The passions of their flesh, under our sway, “wage war” against their souls (1 Peter 2:11). The steps of lust — sensual and beckoning — go down to death, as the father once tried to warn.

It appears to me that you’ve chosen the proper time to begin your temptations. The honeymoon season is setting — now is the time for the paint to begin to chip. Little quarrels start to creep in; mice move in the walls. Gestures and quirks (so adorable while dating) start to shed their skin — real married life begins. Although he has heard of our designs already from other husbands, this doesn’t deter us. He sympathizes, sure — but such will never happen to him. Although he has done “fellowship” with a few graduates over the years, this is still a most excellent time to initiate our Marital Abstinence Program (MAP).

Untangle Bodies

Globdrop, I know how quickly you mean to steer your ox toward the muddy hillsides of pornography or the fresher pastures of his neighbor’s wife, but patience, young apprentice. First, we must place the hook firmly in his nose. Dry up his sex life with his wife. Dehydrate the marriage bed, and then, all in due course, lead him to other streams.

Is this not the strategy the apostle sought to expose? “Do not deprive one another . . . so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:5). Wonderfully for us, they often miss the spiritual warfare surrounding their married sex life. And of course, they barely talk about it with each other (your man, somehow an exception). Which pastor is going to tell lazy husbands or selfish wives that their bodies actually belong to their spouse?

A few steps, then, for cultivating this blessed deprivation, this unholy untangling, this wintry and lifeless marriage bed so unthinkable to him at present.

1. Cool through familiarity.

The sex we offer is colorful, impassioned, daring, free. It is to swim with dolphins, soar with eagles, run with wild horses, soak bare under banned waterfalls.

But what of the married sort?

Sameness, dreary and inescapable. Slowly unveil monogamy’s monotony. “You mean fifty years of sex with the same person!” blurted one man he knew, mouth agape. That is the response we relish. A vineyard boasting of one cluster; a stock falling, diminishing returns.

Globdrop, they can hardly endure the well-known. The same picture on the wall vanishes. A symphony on repeat fades away. Hearing they do not hear; seeing they do not see — oh, blessed familiarity. They soon tire of heavenly bread and desire the meat pots of Egypt.

What happened to that raging fire that burned while dating? Stoking the dying flame now feels more like an inconvenience on cold and tired nights. As necessity arises, let them guzzle the wine (but forget to savor it). Most nights, let them sleep on either side of busyness, bitterness, or boredom. Several kids later, several fights later, the garden that teemed with wonder fills with weeds.

2. Behoove the husband.

We love it when the thought eventually arrives (and slip it in quietly after some time), This is not quite what I expected — often meaning (even without realizing), The marital sex life is not like pornography at all. Your man may have some distance from that gutter, but is he really out of gunshot? We must ensure that monogamy with a real woman (whoever she might be) is set up to disappoint. The new-car smell must wear off eventually.

In our videos, the woman is always desirous, has no children, shares no emotional life with the male, doesn’t argue with him or know his faults. She bears no scars from her past or sadness in her present. She is untiring, enhanced, and accessible — enticing and already enticed. She doesn’t want to talk or cry or sleep or share burdens; she is never insecure.

Intimacy — at its finest, you must gently remind him — is not intimate in those other ways. That which is of the flesh is flesh. Our versions transact thin, quick pleasure. The marriage bed, in comparison, is sadly distracted from this sensual single-mindedness.

And in frustration to this, if she is ever too drained, too distracted, too detached, or too selfish herself to be so vulnerable, wound him and send him immediately to the bottoms. “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights” — he is trying (1 Corinthians 7:3). Self-pity is a man’s (and therefore a demon’s) best friend. Let him sleep with resentment (if not his wife), and so afford an “opportunity to the devil” (Ephesians 4:27).

Feed this loop. He grows bitter and lazy; she grows oblivious and content; we grow fat and satisfied.

3. Weary the wife.

Considering different seasons of hormonal changes (a design that makes our job the easier), an unequally yoked sex drive may appear. Be prepared. At other seasons, if the two do have that baby, sheer tiredness from children hanging from arms and berating nerves usually helps us. With all of this, we must wonder aloud something like, How can he be so inconsiderate to even ask after such a day as mine?

The days fill with good things; the nights with exhaustion. We wonder why the Old Preacher did not add to his poems about the seasons,

There is a time for sex, and a time for children.

It is just like the Enemy to bestow the gift, and then give them offspring that threaten the gift that bore them. Let the Enemy name kids “miracles” all he wants — the marriage bed begets its assassin. He warns them not to deprive each other and then produces the chief competitor to the time and energy required.

And beyond that, realize, Globdrop, that her body will eventually begin to change. She will know it; doesn’t he? Will he start noticing other women? She will not feel as desirous, and so ensure she lessen in desire. Even the heroine in their Song admits it: “Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has looked upon me” (Song of Solomon 1:6). The more naked, the more ashamed — we must turn this constantly to our advantage. Strangle to death any obedience to that enchantment love gives the eye, even into old age: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe” (Proverbs 5:18–19).

4. Lure to other trees.

At this point, Globdrop, you will be ready to reenchant him with the sheer exquisiteness of sex.

Its ecstasy and spell, its royal banquet, its private garden where fawns wander. Its hidden waterfall, its lands of hushed laughter, its secret vineyards. Its taste of Eden — naked and unashamed. Is it not the gift of the gods? Is it not embodied poetry, two bodies set to rhyme — copulate, or couplet? Uncover this beauty that breaks mathematics: 1 + 1 = 1. Ribs return to sides. The two become one flesh.

Oh, the intoxication of sex! “Sex,” of course, outside of marriage — not the knotty, shriveled thing his actual sex life will have actually become. To those unwed: sex, sex, and more sex. To the married: bickering, busyness, and a bed shared by a roommate. Turn his gaze away to the wild elsewhere. For what pleasure can really exist in the marital bed, stripped of the forbiddances, inebriating novelties, and the most greedy and devouring gratifications?

Deplorable Design

Busyness, lust, fantasy, fights, miscommunications, withdrawings, insecurities, changing bodies, knocking kids, manipulation, rejection, self-pity, and shame are only a few weapons at our disposal. Time fails. But let me finish with the worst of it.

Why did the Enemy make them sexual? Why not form all babies from the dust? The Enemy intended the marriage bed — I shriek to even write it — to foreshadow his own intentions of intimacy with the humans. Copulation was his cursive written into human relations that murmured something of his love to them — whom he even calls his bride. Did we need any other reason to storm down from heaven? He really meant to suggest a Marriage beyond all marriages, a vast intimacy beyond all marriage beds. The givenness, the belonging, the absorption, the two into one — telling something of man with deity — how could any free angel bear it?

Over our dead and damned spirits! To your post, Globdrop: dam the marriage bed, turn the river into a swamp full of swarming mosquitoes and frogs. Mar all the Enemy intended. Foment their neglect; muddy the fountain. Then drown them in the more sparkling streams of lawless sexual delights. Strip what he has now down to a transaction, a duty, a boredom — then offer them the delectable fruits of better trees.

Your marriage counselor and uncle,Grimgod

His condemnation on judgment day will punctuate the unhappiest story ever told. Never will a smile so drain of its color; never will hope shatter from such heights; never will victory retreat so ruthlessly; never will hell devour a victim so dejected and amazed as when the Almost Christian is led away to the lake of fire.

The Almost Christian. He was almost saved. He almost escaped the wrath of God. He almost found joy forevermore in the God who was almost his God. Almost.

On that Day, he might expect angels to receive him with song, his works to prove themselves gold, his Master to declare, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23). He may have closed his eyes serenely in death, thinking himself a saint. This is the most miserable creature in hell, one who was always approaching, but never crossed over, the asymptote of everlasting life.

We want to look away. This bird twitches before us on the pavement, wings broken, reaching its pitiful talons in vain toward the heavenly branch it shall never reach. It flew so high once — yet fell.

“You have here one of the saddest considerations imaginable presented to you,” Matthew Mead (1630–1699) writes, “and that is how far it is possible a man may go in a profession of religion and yet, after all, fall short of salvation; how far he may run and yet not so run as to obtain” (The Almost Christian Discovered, xiv).

To such considerations we turn. We don’t incline to, but we must. We walk a dangerous road if we never inquire into our account, never check our foundations, never ask, “Lord, is it I?” Many, Jesus teaches, will enter the final Day thinking themselves saved without so being (Matthew 7:21–23; Luke 13:24). I do not wish for you or me to be among them.

Collage of Almost Christians

To show how near the forgery comes, to warn us from building our houses upon sand, to burst false hopes or biased examinations, let us look carefully at a few pictures of the Almost Christian to see what, on their own, are no sure signs of salvation.

1. Obeying God: Rich Young Ruler

He said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” (Mark 10:20)

Observe this young rich ruler, this seeker of eternal life. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks (Mark 10:17). In response, Jesus first corrects his view of goodness, and then reiterates the commandments the young Jewish man knew by heart: “Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother” (Mark 10:19). Notice his reply: “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”

If we take him at his word, this man not only obeyed God, but as Mead observes, he obeyed universally and constantly. First, he obeyed: “Teacher, all these I have kept.” Second, he obeyed universally: “Teacher, all these I have kept.” And third, he obeyed constantly: “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”

Let’s assume he did. If so, then his was no partway obedience, no pick-and-choose submission, no seasonal or spasmodic soldiery. He received God’s word and set his will to obey it. “Now would you not think this a good man?” Mead asks. “Alas, how few go thus far! And yet, as far as he went, he went not far enough. He was almost, and yet but almost a Christian” (10).

While obedience to Christ is essential evidence of saving faith (James 2:17), external conformity alone is no sure sign. This man, invited to follow Eternal Life himself, turned from Christ and his promises of heavenly treasure out of love for this present world and his stuff (Mark 10:21–22).

2. Blessing Others: Judas

“The eye sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things,” stated Brutus to Cassius (Julius Caesar, 1.2.58–59). And so, with regard to our salvation, we may think we cannot see our assurance properly but by our reflection in the eyes and lives of others. Have I benefitted others’ souls? Have I blessed my wife and children concerning heavenly things? Have any profited from my life or ministry?

Yet rickety is this bridge of spiritual service if we think to rest our weight on it. Consider Judas. One of the twelve, a disciple, a preacher — and also a devil, an almost Christian. The logic seems naked enough.

Now a man may edify another by his gifts and yet be unedified himself. He may be profitable to another and yet unprofitable to himself. The raven was an unclean bird. God made use of her to feed Elijah. Though she was not good meat, yet it was good meat she brought. A lame man may, with his crutch, point you to the right way and yet not be able to walk in it himself. (19)

I shudder to think of the missionaries, pastors, spiritual mentors who live as drowning men, helping others grip the heavenly shore they themselves will never reach.

3. Desiring Salvation: Five Foolish Virgins

The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” (Matthew 25:8)

Jewish weddings could last all day. After an initial ceremony filled with dancing and mirth at the bride’s home, the wedding party would return to the groom’s home for the wedding proper and feast to follow. This usually occurred at night (ESV Expository Commentary, 374–75). The virgins of the parable wait to light the procession for the wedding party and the bridegroom. Five are wise, bringing a good amount of oil; five others are foolish, not ensuring they have enough. As the bridegroom delays, they all sleep, but then awake at midnight to the cry, “Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him” (Matthew 25:6).

Panicked, the foolish virgins beg the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out” (Matthew 25:8). Mead observes,

They sought for true grace. Now, do not we say that the desires of grace are grace? And so they are, if true and timely, if sound and seasonable. Why, here is a desire of grace in these virgins, “Give us of your oil.” It was a desire of true grace, but it was not a true desire of grace. (11)

When refused, the virgins rush to purchase more, arriving at the groom’s house only to be greeted by a locked door.

You see how far these virgins go in a profession of Jesus Christ, and how long they continue in it even till the bridegroom came; they go to the very door of heaven and there, like the Sodomites, perish with their hands upon the very threshold of glory. They were almost Christians, and yet but almost; almost saved, and yet they perished. (12)

Desiring salvation, while a good sign, is no surety of possessing salvation. Many want to be saved — believe themselves saved — wait with true Christians for Christ, trim their lamps, ready (in some measure) for the bridegroom, and yet shall perish on the wrong side of heaven’s door.

4. Joy in Everyday Religion: Israel

They seek me daily and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the judgment of their God . . . they delight to draw near to God. (Isaiah 58:2)

Some of us may rest our assurance upon our feelings during religious exercises. Why would I read the Bible and pray and go to church — and generally enjoy it all so much — if I were not really a Christian? God’s word to the people of Israel proves this sign fallible.

This Old Testament people sought him, even daily, through their rituals, and even delighted in so doing. They drew near with a pep in their step and a song on their lips. When the ill report came of their spiritual activity, they asked the Lord, “Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?” (Isaiah 58:3). In the end, the fair scent of their spiritual habits could not mask the stench of their deep unbelief, injustice, and hypocrisy.

Am I His?

’Tis a point I long to know,Oft it causes anxious thought;Do I love the Lord, or no?Am I his, or am I not?—John Newton, “’Tis a Point I Long to Know”

Sounding the trumpet, as I have only begun to do here, is difficult. Many of us resonate with John Newton’s verse above, and I have not left us with many sure signs of salvation in this article. We have but looked at four positive signs — obedience, profiting others spiritually, desiring salvation, and drawing near to God with joy — and noticed them not to be decisive signs of salvation by themselves.

With Mead, my design

is not to make sad the souls of those whom Christ will not have made sad. I would bring water not to quench the flax that is smoking, but to put out that false fire that is of the sinner’s own kindling lest, walking all his days by the light thereof, he shall at last lie down in sorrows. (8)

None of us should go forth to death with unexamined hopes. To do so is both unsafe and unscriptural. “Examine yourselves,” Paul enjoins the Corinthians, “to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

“It is the greatest business of this life to not settle for being an Almost and I Think So Christian.”

And how can we not, with so many eyes of Almost Christians staring back at us from the holy book? We read of Cain’s offering rejected, Esau’s birthright refused, and Israel’s passing through the Red Sea, surviving behind the red door, yet dying in unbelief. We read of disciples forsaking Christ by the thousands after a single meal, brothers forsaking Paul for the pleasures of the world. We hear of some that were enlightened, participated in the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of the word and the powers of the age to come, and yet voyaged below in the end (Hebrews 6:4–6).

We read of an elder brother left outside the party, of soils that grow a plant for a time, guests inside the banquet hall without wedding garments, houses built upon sand. We read of Demas and Balaam; King Agrippa and Festus. We read of the earliest churches claiming the name of life when dead, assuming themselves rich and without spiritual need when they were poor, blind, and pitiable. And we hear an army of Almost Christians on the final Day when “many,” assured of their heavenly claim, are left to stammer, “Lord, Lord, did we not . . .” (Matthew 7:22–23). Many go to judgment feasting on vague hopes and strong delusions. Many go so far and no further.

A Complete Christ

A final word to those who read this and get stirred into a frenzy of activity while losing focus on Christ. On the one hand, necessary exhortations exist for us: Throw off every weight and sin; cast yourselves daily upon his mercy; take heed to how you live, what you love, and how you walk. Examine yourselves to make sure you are his; make every effort to make your calling and election sure; work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Yet at the same time, we must not run so as to forget Christ or his and the Father’s towering love for us displayed in the gospel.

How can you cultivate Christ in yourself? “This is how you must cultivate Christ in yourself,” Martin Luther replies:

Faith must spring up and flow from the blood and wounds and death of Christ. If you see in these that God is so kindly disposed toward you that he even gives his own Son for you, then your heart in turn must grow sweet and disposed toward God. . . . We never read that the Holy Spirit was given anybody because he had performed some works, but always when men have heard the gospel of Christ and the mercy of God. (Why the Reformation Still Matters, 77)

It is the greatest business of this life to not settle for being an Almost or an I Think So Christian, but to be an Actual Christian, born again of the Spirit. But hear the actual Christian declare, “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). To bask in his love grows us tall in Christian maturity and assurance. True faith knows Christ not as an almost Savior who almost atoned for almost all our sins; a Shepherd who almost leads us home and gives us his Spirit to almost complete the work he started in us. True Christians, through true faith, soak in the true love of the true God shown perfectly in the true and finished work of the true and glorious Christ.

Man is a creature who hardly knows himself. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Even as a Christian with a new heart, I continue to discover within myself new contradictions, fresh perplexities, strange paradoxes. Take, for example, the cohabitation of a desire for a sturdier faith in Jesus Christ, with a quiet and competing preference for a scrawny faith.

On the one hand, I grimace as I watch Jesus routinely chide the disciples for their “little faith” (Matthew 8:26). Lord, I am too much like them. Fix my eyes firmly on my King. Strong faith, even when unpossessed, is not undesired.

But then I discover an Achan in the camp, a Judas among the twelve with his hand in the moneybag. A skulking and smiling and sinister wish that sabotages progress in the faith. C.S. Lewis first warned me of his presence.

I’m not sure, after all, whether one of the causes of our weak faith is not a secret wish that our faith should not be very strong. Is there some reservation in our minds? Some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real? I hope not. God help us all, and forgive us. (Essay Collection & Other Short Stories, 137)

At first, it seemed absurd. Who wouldn’t want to move mountains? Who wouldn’t want to bludgeon unbelief? I tried to move on. I tried throwing my conscience a different bone. But it wouldn’t budge.

“Some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real” — that sentence drew the blood. Did I not want all of this to become more real? Was I afraid of what it might be like farther off from the shore? Are you?

Afraid of True Religion

What might Lewis mean by this dread of strong faith, of a religion too real and near?

He means that some of us suspect, deep down, that if we meet the real thing more often, if we galloped too forcefully toward eternal realities, they would unhorse us. And what would follow? If our faith were too solid, we might lose much in this world. We might become the oddities we wish to avoid. They might shackle us and carry us off we know not where, and pressure us to risk more than we would mind losing.

Our relationships would change. Our priorities would change. This world would start to fill with devils, with immortal souls, with warfare. Nature would kneel before supernature.

“The richness and depth of our world comes from the relationship between ordinary pleasures and transcendent beauty.”

God would grow. Death would stare. We might hear Satan laugh. Would the weight of it all crush our finitude? It could certainly stampede some dreams. If Christianity became entirely real, which of our Isaacs are safe? What sacrifice would be too great, or trial too burdensome, to endure for his glory? If the roots went all the way to the bottom, then my life really is not my own, is it?

Hell — how could we conceive of it? Heaven — how could we live for less? Gospel — how could we ever withhold it? Time — how could we ever waste it? Christ — how could he be less than all in all?

Such unbending realness, we can now begin to see, might secretly wish to be kept at bay. Jurassic Park is pleasant until the electric fences go out. We have done a fine job today creating our theme park and barriers where forces from the next world might be seen from time to time grazing safely on the other side of our passions and amusements. Yet, for all of that, we fail to realize that the electricity was never on.

High and Perilous

Strong faith knocks powerfully as an intrusive and demanding visitor. Is he not the great culprit in Hebrews 11, sending those saints forth to be swept off to otherwise unpleasant, inconvenient, and sometimes fatal adventures?

This faith is like pesky Gandalf to our hobbit holes. Austin Freeman comments,

Gandalf intercedes in the culture of the Shire because the hobbits had begun to forget their own stories of daring and danger and therefore their sense of the world’s greatness. They needed to renew their memory of the high and the perilous. The hobbits must be reminded of an element of danger in order to appreciate what they have. (Tolkien Dogmatics, 80)

Haven’t many of us lost much of what we once had? Haven’t we also grown stale, forgetting the greatness of the world — the greatness of this Story that God is writing around us? Too often, we have edited out the high and perilous, the epic and the eternal, the glorious and the numinous. Or at least we relocate dangers to chapters before and after our own page. Not in our doctrinal statements, perhaps, but in our daily sense of what is most ultimate, most urgent.

Freeman goes on to depict how the unpredictability and hazard of such faith actually becomes invaluable to our soul’s happiness.

The good things that make hobbit society valuable, such as freedom and peace and pleasure in ordinary life, require a greater and more dangerous world outside their borders in order that they not grow stale. The richness and depth of our world come from the relationship between the ordinary pleasures, such as food, drink, and family on the one hand, and the longing for transcendent beauty, quests, and noble sacrifice on the other hand. (80)

“Our secret wish for little faith, should we indulge it any longer, will only rob us in the end.”

Domesticity must dance with dragons. The richness and depth of our world comes from the relationship between ordinary pleasures and transcendent beauty. Reality, without consulting us, sings a duet: the ordinary with the extraordinary. This world lodges firmly in the shadow of the next. Yet, the transcendent is often gone — not from our Bibles or from our actual world — only drained from our bloodstream.

Befriend and Obey Reality

Weak faith contents itself to have it so. Weak faith minds the times and stands no taller than is necessary. Weak faith knows that a host of awkward conversations, probable persecutions, and unquenchable sorrows are restrained on the other side of the dam.

Yet without such a torrent, we live half-lives (if that). Again, “The richness and depth of our world come from the relationship between the ordinary pleasures, such as food, drink, and family on the one hand, and the longing for transcendent beauty, quests, and noble sacrifice on the other hand.” Reality will have her vengeance. Remove the spiritual, the beautiful, the sacrificial, and you flush all the wonder and meaning from the superbly ordinary.

But should we dress in the whole armor of God and war against spiritual powers, when we savor our food and glorify God as we drink, when we raise families and care for neighbors and serve a local church full of normal saints, when we sacrifice and suffer and wait and worship — bowed smilingly beneath the lordship and love of God our Father and our Savior Jesus Christ — we live, really live.

Our secret wish for little faith, should we indulge it any longer, will only rob us in the end. Reality, to the Christian, is a best friend to be fully embraced, a captain to be dutifully obeyed. The unseen is more real than we think. Christ is more worthy than makes us comfortable. Death is nearer, hell is hotter, heaven more heavenly, sin more sinister, the church more dear, the gospel more atomic, the Father more holy, compassionate, and just than little faith wants to imagine. The real thing is the only reality that is, the only reality that will be, and the only reality that Christians will ever truly wish to be.

She allured men to many places,She who is fatally coy.Men, who knew not her embraces,Called her by the name of Joy.

I can’t recall the first moment I experienced the tease, the turmoil, the torment of Joy.

When most speak of joy — when for many years I mentioned her — they mean a smiling joy, an uplifting joy, a joy for sunny days, a pleasant satisfaction. Comforts, fulfillments, good health, gratitude fills her banquet. She bequeaths a desire to be where you already are, a wish for what you already have.

But these were mere honeybees; the hive held a Queen.

The empress Joy emerged with a supremacy that murdered her rivals. She made common stones of former jewels; ruined my appetite for other meals. When she came nearest, the world beside leaked emptiest. Beauty was her weapon; splendor, her sorcery; allure, her deadly art. She was as a goddess, divine, bewitching.

She did not bestow a quiet contentment; she provoked a desperation, carnivorous and untamed. She knifed an ache for somewhere I wasn’t — a fierce and restless angst (a madness, it at times seemed) for a blessedness I did not possess, a blessedness I did not even know truly existed. What before I never needed, I could no longer live without. My Helen of Troy, hers was the face to launch ten thousand ships.

Shadows in the Water

She had but to smile in my direction and I set sail. She became my White Whale — or rather I her Ahab.

I remember her shadow showing beneath the waters during late evenings salsa dancing at Latin restaurants. While we inhabited the music, dramatizing masculinity and femininity in rhythm, a flicker transcended the fluidity of the dance — a moment — a glimpse.

I sensed her nearness on the football field, the place men feign war. At the helm of combat, time-warped and slowed. A friendly uniform flashed down the sideline. The ball catapulted — spiraling forth with mathematic eloquence, returning from its flight as a falcon diving at its prey. The crowd exhaled a roar — she, for a moment, smiled.

I heard her ancient voice through doorways into other worlds. In stories bigger than men, valor glistened from other lands, evil threatened, a mission dawned worth dying for. Beyond the make-believe worlds of magic and orcs and elves, beyond the battles and the wars and the triumph and restoration — she summoned. But to where?

At other moments, she would peer at me from the other side of a sunset, hike with me through kingdoms of green, smite me with her strings during beautiful symphonies, chuckle with delight through a child’s laughter, or converse intimately while on an evening’s date — but these were never her. “Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance” (The Weight of Glory, 41). She but left her perfume upon the doorknob.

Yet, for a moment, as fragile as a whisper, everything seemed right; a ray pierced into the clouded world. But the blaze soon extinguished; the snowflake melted; the credits rolled; the song fell with the heavy thud of silence. These Moseses brought me only to the borderland; quitted me on the wrong side of the Jordan. She invited me up to glance at the land flowing with milk and honey — but not to taste.

As quickly as the thought surfaced — Now this, at last, is what life is all about — she vanished. Her sun set violently. She teased and tore through my sky only to pass the scepter again to the lesser lights, leaving behind a dark and colder night.

Seasick

She led me there and back again,Old age and blisters all I found.The Siren of the souls of men,Forsook me to the ocean’s ground.

Years fled away in this fashion. She would neither give herself to me nor let me die politely with earthly pleasures. Upon these waters I learned the throb, the pain, the menacing loveliness of this Joy unheld, uncaught. I spent years searching at sea, and yet she drew no closer than Tomorrow. Her silhouette draped over creation, estranging me to my own world. Was this angel from heaven or from hell?

“Vanity,” a voice sighed from a farther and sadder sea. He too searched this world for her. “I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself’” (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He built massive houses, planted gardens. He piled gold atop silver. Peerless was his crown; matchless, his wisdom. The choicest singers followed him with song. He drank nightly from a vineyard of women (Ecclesiastes 2:1–9).

“Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure,” came his testimony (Ecclesiastes 2:10). But behold, vanity! All is vanity. She did not exist under the sun, he said, tossing aside the best earth had to offer. If he could not capture her, what chance had I? Should I turn back?

“Joy itself did not reveal God to me, but she kept me groping after more than this earth.”

She defied my nets, but I couldn’t escape hers. How could I give you up, O my Ephraim? Her seal was upon my heart, her name upon my hopes. My desire for her burned as fire — a fire these many waters could not quench. Although harpoons floated, broken in the sea, she still beamed just beyond with the brightness of first introductions. In truth, I would die reaching out for her; fall slain in her shadow. Fleeting dances with her upon the open water were better than all the inlands of worldly pleasures.

Man After My Own Heart

I perplexed myself. Why strain to sail beyond the sea? Why hunt a brook whose water left me thirstier?

Because “though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight,” voiced another in the waters. “This desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth” (The Pilgrim’s Regress, 234).

A hunger better than any other fullness; a poverty better than all other wealth. Nowhere have I found Joy better captured than in C.S. Lewis.

Joy sweetly dragooned Lewis onto the seas through a childhood memory.

Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. (Surprised by Joy, 17)

Decades later, this Romantic voyager would recount, “In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else” (19).

What was Joy to Lewis?

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with [Happiness and Pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. (19)

A grief better than other delights, a golden unhappiness. Lewis would travel further still to translate the Longing’s secret: you were made for another world.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (Mere Christianity, 136–37)

Men hunger because food exists; they desire women because sex exists; they crave Joy and a beauty bigger than this world because another world exists.

Water at the Well’s End

God used Joy in my own story to prepare me for Jesus. Her honeyed voice cried in the wilderness, “Among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie” (John 1:26–27). The Father used this inconsolable longing to “make known to me the path of life,” to accept with David that “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). I was made for another world, another Deity.

Joy itself did not reveal God to me, but she kept me groping after more than this earth. Joy did not forgive my sins, but she kept me from being gratified with or “given over to” my sin. She did not have the words of eternal life, but she helped them resonate when I did hear them.

Heaven’s hive buzzed when Joy’s Master finally came to earth. And he visited me. He approached my shallow wells of small pursuits and said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

He stood up at the feast of my greatest enjoyments and cried, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).

He spoke over every lust and darling sin, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that [you] may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). “Bring your hunger,” he said. “Bring your strongest and most violent appetite for the good, the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, the ever-increasing — I can meet it. You search for Joy because you think that in her you may have eternal happiness, but it is she that bears witness about me. Come to me and have Life.”

His Joy — a waterfall pouring down from forever, shattering the tiny hearts of his worshipers — is what I needed. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). As a ruined and rebellious son of Adam, I bartered away the knowledge of what I truly desired my whole life. By the Spirit’s recreating power, the long-standing hunger knelt to feast on the Bread of Life.

Old and Stubborn Ache

But if I may end with a word to fellow sailors: the old sore will still irritate — even after knowing Jesus. Lewis would write, “The old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life” (Surprised by Joy, 291).

Does this mean we have not found what we are looking for? A moment’s reflection bids us to ask the opposite: Why shouldn’t Joy still pierce with her sugared melancholy? Are we finally home? Are we safe upon the right side of the Jordan? Is the dwelling place of our God now with man? Is Christ before us, shining the sun into retirement?

“Time holds its breath; we hold our breath; Joy holds her breath — for him.”

No, not yet. The old ache — now unmasked — still aggresses my journeying heart, as it did Lewis’s. We still “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons” (Romans 8:23). Joy still serves salvation. We read that it was the Lord’s mercy that moved angels to seize lingering Lot and his daughters, and bring them out of Sodom to safety (Genesis 19:16). Joy has angelic hands, so guiding us from this Gomorrah all the way to glory.

But for all of that, the importance of Joy, for those who have found Christ, changes. He must increase; she must decrease. The thirst is no more a goddess. She meekly (yet still sometimes roughly) reminds us to go to Christ, drink of Christ, wait expectantly for Christ. On his diminishing interest in Joy, Lewis wrote, “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed larger in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter” (291).

The end of Joy, for those who have come (by grace) to translate the purpose of Joy, is the homesickness for Christ “who is [our] life” to return (Colossians 3:4). One thing have we asked of him; one thing do we seek after: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his presence forever (Psalm 27:4). Creation groans; Christians groan. Time holds its breath; we hold our breath; Joy holds her breath — for him.

As C.S. Lewis ended his lecture on petitionary prayer, he asked his audience of clergymen a question: “How am I to pray this very night?” He did not know. “I have no answer to my problem, though I have taken it to about every Christian I know, learned or simple, lay or clerical, within my own Communion or without” (C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 204).

What problem could he not solve? In short, he could not reconcile the seemingly mutually exclusive ways in which we are taught to make our requests known to God.

The first way, which Lewis calls “the A Pattern,” is the “Thy will be done” prayer. The deferential prayer, the creaturely prayer. We bring our requests to our All-Wise Father, but leave them at his feet to answer how he sees best.

Jesus taught us to pray this way in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus prayed this prayer himself in that most dire hour in Gethsemane, when he first asked for deliverance from the cup and yet ended, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assures us that our Father in heaven will give us good things when we ask him, but often not the exact thing we ask for (Matthew 7:9–11). We ask for “bread” and only know our Father will not give us a “serpent.”

So far, so good.

Ask Whatever I Wish?

Then comes “the B Pattern,” the “Ask whatever you wish” prayer. Instead of explicit deference, this prayer requires faith that what is actually prayed will be given by God. “Whatever you ask in prayer,” the perfect Pray-er also taught, “believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Or again, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22). This pattern requires “faith that the particular thing the petitioner asks will be given him” (199).

Jesus is not bashful to teach this pattern. “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Jesus (not some modern prosperity preacher) teaches, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14; John 15:7; 16:23–24).

So, the question: “How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith — an untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (James 1:6) — that you will get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance for a possible refusal?” (Letters to Malcolm, 35).

When he (now we) bend the knee in prayer, interceding for ill Mrs. Jones, by which pattern do we pray? Do we ask for her healing if the Lord wills (Pattern A)? Or should we pray for her healing in Jesus’s name, expecting — and not doubting — this to happen?

Lewis wrestles:

Have all my own intercessory prayers for years been mistaken? For I have always prayed that the illnesses of my friends might be healed “if it was God’s will,” very clearly envisaging the possibility that it might not be. Perhaps this has all been a fake humility and a false spirituality for which my friends owe me little thanks; perhaps I ought never to have dreamed of refusal, μηδὲν διακρινόμενος [without doubting]? (Essay Collection, 203)

If we pray prayers of deference (Pattern A) when we should have prayed prayers of assurance (Pattern B), could we be the doubter who clogs the drain of his own prayers (James 1:6–8)? Yet, if we pray Pattern B when A was best, we expose ourselves to presumption, false expectation, and disappointment.

What Wicked Men Understand

To deepen the question, we hear this same promise on the lips of another in the Gospel of Mark. Though he was a wicked man, the scene provides another valuable lens.

When Herodias’s daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.” And he vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” (Mark 6:22–23)

This, you remember, is how John the Baptist’s head ends up on a platter. What did he mean by this promise? When Salome requested the prophet’s head instead of half the kingdom, “the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her” (Mark 6:26). He realized (and assumes his guests realize) that having promised “whatever she wished” up to half the kingdom, anything other than John’s head would break his word.

This understanding strikes the nerve of our silent misgivings over Pattern B. What do we make of the unanswered prayers of so many saints who thought they prayed with expectant faith? “Every war, every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted” (Letters to Malcolm, 35). Again, he sees no problem with Pattern A — God always knows best. But how can we comfortably make eye-contact with Pattern B when it contrasts so much with our experience, dwelling now on the borderlands of the unbelievable?

Unhappy Birthdays

Some hurry to man the gap between the promise and our apparent experience of the promise by insisting that “whatever you ask” really means “whatever you ask . . . according to his will.” They cite 1 John 5:14: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” See, “according to his will.” Whatever is not a blank check in which one can write “a new Ferrari” or “a Christian spouse” or even “the conversion of my son” and safely believe to have it. Only checks that accord with his definite plan will cash.

Lewis finds this answer unsatisfactory.

Dare we say that when God promises “You shall have what you ask” he secretly means “You shall have it if you ask for something I wish to give you”? What should we think of an earthly father who promised to give his son whatever he chose for this birthday and, when the boy asked for a bicycle gave him an arithmetic book, then first disclosing the silent reservation with which the promise was made? (Essay Collection, 203)

Although the book might be better for the child, Lewis argues it arrives with a sense of “cruel mockery” for the boy without his bicycle. And Lewis’s understanding that sees whatever as quite simply whatever accords better with Herod’s understanding as well.

Splashing in the Shallows

As I wrestled with the tension Lewis exposes here, I began to realize a problematic tendency in my own prayer life: How often I have defaulted to Prayer A as a way to protect unbelief?

How many of my own If the Lord wills prayers have, beneath the surface, really been prayers saying, “I don’t really expect you to answer, so I’ll not get my hopes up?” How much has unbelief masqueraded, in Lewis’s words, as “fake humility and a false spirituality”? A tying of a rope around my waist as I venture out to meet Jesus upon the waves — just in case.

How many of us are men and women of little faith, not seriously considering Prayer B as an unconscious strategy to ward off suspected disappointment? I see this most in myself in my willingness to pray grand and abstract prayers, but rarely granular and specific prayers. Even if I ask Whatever I want prayers, they’re general requests that beget general (and open-ended) answers. But if I pray specific, time-dependent prayers, I know whether they’re answered as I prayed them or not.

Although I abide in Christ, ask in his name, have his words indwelling, possess a concern to bear fruit for his fame, I too often beach-dwell, splashing in the shallows of prayer, tempted to distrust that I ever will see whales and dolphins in the depths, as God offers.

Where Did Lewis Land?

How does Lewis answer his own riddle? Lewis guesses that Prayer B prayers must be expressions of a special God-given faith for specific kingdom work.

My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work. It is the prophet’s, the apostle’s, the missionary’s, the healer’s prayer that is made with this confidence and finds the confidence justified by the event. (Letters, 37)

In other words, this is a special “prayer of faith” for God’s fellow-workers. And the faith for this prayer, for Lewis, is not manufactured by us through a feat of “psychological gymnastics,” rather, it is God-given. We do not clench our fist and furrow our brow and prod our imaginations and confuse this with faith. God must give the gift. “For most of us,” Lewis admits, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model” (Letters, 37).

So, how should we pray tonight?

Lewis reasons along these lines, “Can I ease my problem by saying that until God gives me such a faith I have no practical decision to make; I must pray after the A pattern because, in fact I cannot pray after the B pattern? If, on the other hand, God ever gave me such a faith, then again I should have no decision to make; I should find myself praying in the B pattern” (Essays, 204).

Even this solution, however, did not ease all tensions,

But some discomfort remains. I do not like to represent God as saying “I will grant what you ask in faith” and adding, so to speak, “Because I will not give you the faith — not that kind — unless you ask what I want to give you.” Once more, there is just a faint suggestion of mockery, of goods that look a little larger in the advertisement then they turn out to be. (204)

How Will You Pray This Night?

For my own part, I look forward to help from wiser, more experienced saints. I confess my weakness, that I still do not know how to pray as I ought (Romans 8:26). Yet doesn’t Paul unearth a secret to our trouble with the next line commending the Spirit’s help to our faltering prayers? “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and, “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). He always prays B-pattern prayers on our behalf (if so they can be called). So, I must pray as I’m able, knowing that the Spirit’s groans make up perfectly for my ignorance.

How will I petition this night? I will petition God as one who loves God, his glory, his church, and his world. I will petition to bear fruit and to see souls bow to Jesus. And I will pray for faith to pray more boldly, more expectantly, as one who has a check signed by the King. I pray to experience this prayer of faith (if so it is). And I also pray reverently, “Thy will be done,” leaving room in my prayers for his will, the Spirit’s groans, but not for unbelief.

How will you pray this night?