By default, we tend to see the world around us as unfathered. We live our waking days in the dreamland of God’s absence. And that’s hard on us, isn’t it? It’s hard to live with a lie. It’s hard to walk through life as if God hasn’t fathered-forth the beauty around us—because he has. I talk about the great lie from the serpent in a book that encourages us to embrace the truth of God’s presence. 

One of my favorite poems (from one of my favorite poets) is “Pied Beauty” by Gerald Manley Hopkins.
Glory be to God for dappled things –For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:Praise him.
Look at that last line: “He fathers-forth . . .” It’s a beautiful expression. The skies, the brinded cows, the moles and trout, the finches, and fallowed fields—all of these things are “fathered-forth.”

God’s holiness is always wrapped up in his fatherly care—a mysterious love that goes before us and beyond us.

This brings a whole new perspective to that initial sentence from the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name” (Matt. 6:9). Why hallowed? Because his fatherly hand touches everything. Because he fathers-forth the entire universe without being seen. Because his wildly creative and loving care is imprinted on mussel shells and magpie nests. God’s holiness is always wrapped up in his fatherly care—a mysterious love that goes before us and beyond us.
A Fathered Place
Recently, the same wording came up in a passage I read from Tim Chester (Enjoying God). “We live in a fathered world,” he wrote.
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It’s easy to find people who are bright on the outside. The Enlightenment has been a go-to source for figures of towering intellect. What’s much harder to find are people who are bright on the inside. These are people who have had heart surgery of the highest order. The brightness they hold on the inside can then work its way to the outside.

When it comes to spiritual matters, what you see is seldom what you get. Appearances aren’t just deceiving; they can be damning. History is rife with examples of hypocrisy: those who claim to be full of light but who are, in fact, dark as dungeons. A recent example reminded me just how important it is to maintain that the inside is what matters most. Salvation is a matter of the heart, not a battle for the head. And I’ll explain why.
Enlightenment or Egoism?
I was recently reading Andrew Wilson’s excellent book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. In his discussion of the Enlightenment and the figures who changed the world with their intellectual and scientific accomplishments, something dark drifted to the surface. The enlightened all-stars weren’t all that enlightened when it came to anthropology and a basic understanding of humanity as made in God’s image. David Hume, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant were aggressively and barbarically racist (pp. 109–113). They referred to African Americans as having “no ingenuity,” as being a “low people,” being “barbarous,” and having “no art.” Voltaire even referred to them as a “different species.” And Kant went as far as to say “not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.” Their comments are crass enough to make anyone today blush with embarrassment or churn with hatred. How could people so allegedly “enlightened” think such things? Their conduct “raises questions about how ‘enlightened’ the major Enlighteners actually were” (p. 110). There was as much vain egoism for these men as there was enlightenment. They may have had bright minds, but there was darkness in their hearts, as there is for every human.
Had Hume, Voltaire, and Kant lived in today’s world, they would have been canceled before you could snap your fingers. (Wilson notes how a University of Edinburgh building named after Hume was renamed during the George Floyd protests; similarly, a Parisian statue of Voltaire was removed in 2020.) And yet the Enlightenment, for the most part, is still viewed with respect and pride, as a watershed of human accomplishment. The Enlightenment has become a celebration of the head. But has it also become an ignorance of the heart? In gushing about the Enlightenment, are we guilty of staring only at the mind and turning a blind eye to the soul?
I think we are, and it’s not limited to the Enlightenment. We still do this today. We assume that the solution for every human evil is intellectual education, not spiritual operation (Ezek. 36:26). It’s the head that needs fixing, not the heart. In fact, suggesting that the latter is the real problem can even stir up animosity.
A Dead Heart, a Broken Head
I once remarked in an open forum that I believed a rejection of God is always, at base, a matter of the heart, not the head. The vehemence that met me because of that comment still stuns me. People lashed out in defense of their intellectual qualms with Christianity. And that lashing out actually proved my point. Why were people so angry? There were lots of reasons, I’m sure, but among them must have been the fact that I was assuming something deep inside them was the problem. And that problem couldn’t be fixed with a book or a coherent argument in favor of God’s existence. It went deeper than the head.
And while there is a close relationship throughout Scripture between the head and heart, between what we think and what we believe and worship, the emphasis for redemption begins with the heart, and then trickles up to the head (Ezek. 11:19; 36:26; Jer. 31:33; Heb. 8:10).
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Amillennials like myself have good reasons for great hope, a hope that fuels our passion in the daily hours. We aren’t defeatist, disengaged, and doleful. We smile in the light of Christ’s glorious victory and look expectantly, with the rest of Christendom, to his second coming.

Defeatist. Disengaged. Doleful. That’s a caricature of what theologians call amillennials.[1] But amillennials, I argue, actually have a wonderful hope to treasure. This isn’t an article meant to argue for a position. It’s meant to correct a misunderstanding out there and encourage the global church to rally around its one true passion: the return (whenever it may come) of Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Big Three
Without getting into great detail or exegetical intricacies, there are three common positions on the end times (eschatology).[2] Premillennials believe that Christ is going to return before (pre) a one thousand year period (or at least a long period of time; Rev. 20:6) in which we rule with him before the final judgment. Postmillennials believe that Christ will come after (post) a thousand year period, during which the church will grow in prominence and influence in the world. Amillennials believe that we’re currently in the end times right now, and that we’ll continue suffering with Christ until he comes again at the end of time for the final judgment.[3] Given that summary, it seems clear why the amillennial caricature emerged. Christ isn’t coming back to reign? Defeatist. We aren’t called to take over and influence culture, bringing heaven on earth? Disengaged. We aren’t waiting for an imminent return of Jesus so that we can reign with him? Doleful. Amillennials can seem stiff, joyless, and removed.
Reasons for Hope
But that isn’t the case. At least, it shouldn’t be the case for amillennials who know the good news of Scripture. Here are a few reasons why our hope should be blindingly bright. I’ll be drawing on the thought of Richard B. Gaffin Jr. And then I’ll end with something every Christian should be able to celebrate, despite our theological differences. Such celebration is critical in our times, when the unity of the church is needed to stand against the ravages of a hostile world.
Jesus Won and He Rules Now
We believe that Jesus’s victory over sin and Satan wasn’t provisional; it was definitive. The resurrection life that crowned his head when it emerged from the shadows of the tomb still shines. And it will shine until he comes again in glory. As Gaffin put it, “The entire period between his exaltation and return, not just some segment toward the close, is the period of Christ’s eschatological kingship, exercised undiminished throughout.”[4] Jesus won, and he rules. Smile. Nothing can threaten your King. You and I are now beacons of Christ’s reigning light. As the poet Malcolm Guite wrote,
We ourselves become his clouds of witnessAnd sing the waning darkness into light;His light in us, and ours in him concealed,Which all creation waits to see revealed.[5]
We Are Victors
If Christ began his reign in the resurrection, and our life is hidden with Christ on high (Col. 3:3), then we are victors with him. Regardless of how we may feel, we are victorious in Christ. Today. Right now. My father used to keep an old Joe Namath quote on the inside flap of his Bible: “When you win, nothing hurts.” Of course, that’s demonstrably untrue, but you have to smile at the sentiment. Eternal victory burns beyond earthly sorrow. If your eyes are fixed on Christ, they’re fixed on your Captain and King, and his victory over death should take your breath away.
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Feeling anxious is part of living in a broken world, and God weaves those feelings into his providential plan for our spiritual growth. As we mature, our feelings of anxiety may abate, or they may swell. What runs constant is God’s call to trust him and act in the context of our feelings. Simply listening to our kids express their feelings is a great way to ease their burden by assuring them of our non-judgmental presence.

It takes time for us to realize we aren’t made of glass, that shattering isn’t imminent, that God can always bring us through to the other side—no matter what hellish things we experience. Time teaches us. In fact, for any person of faith, time is the only tutor.
But kids don’t have time yet—at least, they have more ahead than behind. Each day holds out threats without the assurance of safety, let alone the promise of strength for having weathered hard things. And so, for kids, fragility comes naturally. They see their smallness in a wild world. A tiny scratch demands a Band Aid. The sidewalk cracks threaten their bicycle tires. Honey bees have daggers attached to their abdomens. The world is big. Children are small. Dangers abound.
As parents, with more time behind than ahead, we go through seasons when we feel confident in God’s sovereign care, maybe even impervious to harm (or at least ignorant of it). But the longer we live, the more quickly we spot this feeling as a momentary illusion. We lose a parent. Our highschool friend dies of spinal cancer at thirty-one. A Yellowstone mudslide wipes out a bridge as if it were built of toothpicks and glue. Health issues crop up like weeds in everyday conversations. The world is uncontrollable. And though we’re more confident in God’s control than we used to be, we’re still small. And dangers abound.
Maybe that’s why nearly 20% of the American population battles an anxiety disorder, including yours truly for the last 16 years.1 I’ve written about my own anxiety war in Struck Down but Not Destroyed. But I’ve also had the joy of being a parent for nearly 9 years, which means I’ve had to take what God has shown me about anxiety and use it to help my own children. I approach them with deep empathy, as one whom the Lord has shattered and put back together many times. Let me offer what I’ve learned so far and then point you to some resources I’ve found helpful along the way.
What I’ve Learned
1. Kids are very perceptive.
While children deal with their own fears and worries, they’re also watching you, taking cues on how they should respond. As parents, we tend to think it’s best to shield our children from our anxiety, and there are times when that’s appropriate. But shielding them and denying the presence of anxiety teaches them to do the same. That’s unhealthy, and it’s unbiblical. The psalmists didn’t bottle things up; they poured everything out. That doesn’t mean you should pour out your soul before your kids each day. But it does mean they should see it’s okay that you deal with fear and anxiety, too, and you do something about it: you turn to your heavenly Father in prayer. You read his word. You walk by faith. You believe. Showing them what to do with anxiety is much healthier than modeling denial.
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As we hold to our God-given assumptions in a dark world, we can speak calmly and lovingly to people desperate for the two foundational desires of human beings: to be completely known and completely loved. Failing to have dialogue would preclude knowing others deeply; failing to stand on our assumptions would preclude loving them truly.

I’m a Matthew 5:9 child. Were my heart a forest, peace would be the log cabin deep in the woods, with a spindling smoke trail winding above the evergreen. Still. Settled. Quiet. And longing to stay that way.
But my heart isn’t a forest. Peace isn’t tucked away in the woods. The world is loud and broken. There is so much shouting, and sarcasm, and caricatures, and reductionism. In the loud world, my heart might as well be in Times Square—shaken by the decibels of discontent. Today’s controversies and disagreements literally make my stomach turn. Awkward pauses reeking with judgment swell my throat. Heart palpitations thunder when I watch people cut each other off. So, when I finished watching a recent documentary on identity, you can imagine how I felt.
But what struck me by the end of watching was how many unspoken assumptions weren’t voiced—assumptions that would’ve explained so much not just about what people thought but why. If we don’t know why someone thinks something, conversation is bound to get hijacked by misunderstanding, and offense isn’t far behind. Assumptions—our own—is where we need to start before we engage with anyone who differs from us. And in a culture where Christianity is continually marginalized, we’re going to meet a lot of people who differ from us.
Three Types of Assumptions
Assumptions are the countries we live in, the things we walk on. They are the patterns of thought and underlying conditions our feet always find. We live on our assumptions in order to function in the world. And there’s no one on the planet who doesn’t have the three main types of assumptions I’ll discuss in this article. The academic labels for these are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. But we’re simply talking about what exists, how we know things, and what makes something right or wrong.
If we want to engage peaceably with people who differ from us, we need to know what our assumptions are in these areas, and then we can use conversation to discover where others stand in the same areas. This doesn’t mean we’ll then be more likely to agree with others in the broader culture. In fact, for Christians, what we assume about metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics will ensure we’ll likely disagree with most people. But at least we’ll know why. And we’ll also establish a clear means for our conversation partners to express their own views. This can at least provide civility in a world where polarization and the demonization of dissenters reigns.
Metaphysics
What exists and where did it come from? The first part of that question seems simple enough, but you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how much variation there is in today’s world of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism. For now, let’s break up Christian assumptions about metaphysics into two points. And then we’ll need to draw a conclusion about our identity, which is the screaming topic of our culture and an important facet of public theology.
First, as Christians, our basic assumption is that this world isn’t all there is. There is God, who made and governs all things, and then there is the world, creation. Theologians call this the Creator-creature distinction, and Cornelius Van Til was adamant about its centrality. He said we must “begin our interpretation of reality upon the presupposition of theCreator-creature distinction as basic to everything else.”[1] As Christopher Watkin wrote recently,
This creator-creature distinction sets the biblical account apart from the dominant picture of reality in our own culture, which holds that there is only one sort of existence, often with conflict at its heart. This view is summed up in the words of Carl Sagan, ‘The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or evil will be.’ It is a monism, or what Van Til called a ‘one-circle’ view.[2]
There are two circles of reality, not one. And because of how God created all things—the Father voicing the Son in power of the Spirit—what exists in our world is dependent on and derivative of his character. Everything, including humans, reflects God—though humans do this in a special way. In short, we are not here on our own. The world is not a neutral playground. God is present and uses everything to point us to our eternal home in himself.
Second, everything we see around us came from and is sustained by the speech of God. This highlights not only the deeply personal nature of our world but also the centrality of Scripture, as God’s personal word to us. As Vern Poythress wrote, “Scripture is our natural instructor as to the metaphysics of the world, since the metaphysics of the world is completely determined and specified by God’s speech governing the world, and his speech takes place in Christ the Word (John1:1).”[3] The speech of the Trinity has shaped and stewarded every fleck of the material universe—from the silent stars to your cereal spoon. We exist because he spoke. We find our identity, purpose, and meaning in that speech. As Christians, we cannot account for what exists or even who we are apart from God speaking.
Now, third, what does this mean about our identity, about who we are? In looking to the speech of God for our answer, Christians must say image bearers, one of the earlier teachings of Scripture (Gen. 1:26–28). But we can go further, since many people (even Christians) don’t really know what this means. To be an image bearer of God means that we holistically resemble him on a creaturely level. We are, as Carl Trueman restated recently, mimetic creatures.[4] We imitate. We look at God’s hand in history and in our own lives. And then, by the power of God’s own Spirit, we do what he does as little reflectors of his eternal light, a light of truth, love, and beauty. The image of God covers everything that we think, say, or do.
But this holistic imitation always has a relational goal. Put in the words of the Dutch theologian Geerhardus Vos,
That man bears God’s image means much more than that he is spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God…According to the deeper Protestant conception, the image does not exist only in correspondence with God but in being disposed toward God. God’s nature is, as it were, the stamp; our nature is the impression made by this stamp. Both fit together.[5]
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I’m glad a Dutchman broke my brain that day. He took me into a windowed room I’d never entered. And now the rest of the world is bathed in biblical light as I strive to stay low, worship well, and love deeply.

Learning new things is like opening doors to windowed rooms. We can enter another space we haven’t seen before, but that other space also lets light into the hallway of the present. All we had thought and experienced before is hit with new color. In some cases, that color change is so drastic that we question whether we really saw things before as we should have. Everything ripens for the thrill of reinterpretation. As we learn, we not only go to new places; we revisit all the old ones and see them as we never had.
Something like this happened to me some years ago when I was listening to an old lecture from the Dutch theologian Cornelius Van Til. The audio quality was poor (circa 1970s), and I struggled to make out all the words. I had no idea what sort of door was about to open. And then the handle turned.
We certainly cannot penetrate intellectually the mystery of the Trinity, but neither can we penetrate anything else intellectually because all other things depend on the mystery of the Trinity, and therefore all other things have exactly as much mystery in them as does the Trinity.[1]
Hmm, Amen…Wait—what? We can’t penetrate the mystery of the Trinity—sure, I’ve got that. Who would dare to disagree? But everything has as much mystery in it as the Trinity does? Who would dare to agree?
Is a yellow tulip as puzzling as the divine persons? Is grass as incomprehensible as the Godhead? Does a dog’s bone have divine depth? Van Til’s words drove me deeper into thought. I had always learned to link the doctrine of God to the doctrine of creation (the famous Creator-creature distinction). But now I had to think about how the nature of God has an effect on the nature of the world all around me.
Here’s what I believe Van Til meant, and how it’s revolutionized my approach to…well, everything.
Differentiation and Divine Threads
The Trinity is the source of all things. That much seems simple enough. But then Van Til goes deeper. In his Introduction to Systematic Theology, he wrote these cryptic words: “for a consistent Christian theology the principle of individuation lies within the Godhead.”[2] I’ll assume that sentence produces the same response in many readers that it did in me: huh? Individuation is the ability to identify and distinguish individual things amidst the panoply of creation. It’s how we can identify the significance of one yellow tulip picked from our front yard, which has many other things on it (including some forgotten kids’ toys). This is related to Van Til’s discussions about “the one and the many,” or universals and particulars, which is a whole other rabbit hole to fall into.
If this all sounds horribly abstract, just hold on; I promise there’s a point. If we want to actually identify and differentiate between the things around us—to see their significance amidst the multitude of created things—we have to go all the way back to the Trinity. In Van Til’s words, “There is a deep and rich differentiation in the personal relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.”[3] Put differently, in the Trinity, there is differentiation among the divine persons in the one essence of God. We can distinguish between the Father, Son, and Spirit without losing the unity and deep relationship in the Godhead. And so, because creation is an expression and revelation of this God, all of the myriad things in our universe are significant and meaningful because of who God is: three perfectly differentiated persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) in one perfect essence, a God who works many things at many moments all according to one plan.
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Truth (Jesus Christ), in short, doesn’t just give us new life, a second birth; it also shepherds that new life. It makes us grow and change over days, months, years, and decades.

Learning is a matter of taking small steps forward, but then backing up so that you can take a bigger jump, clearing the mark of your previous understanding. We go forward so that we can go back to go forward again. I’ve been thinking about this with what I’ve learned about truth, for instance. I first learned that truth was a standard, a quality I could give to something or someone else—small steps forward. But then I read about how Jesus is the truth (John 14:6). I had to backpedal. “So, hold on…truth isn’t just a standard?”—backing up. “But then that means knowing the truth is really a relationship!”—the bigger jump. Learning is beautiful, isn’t it? Not just the end goal, but the whole process, the forward-back-forward.
I was reminded of this when I came across the following lines from Vern Poythress’s Truth, Theology, and Perspective (p. 108).
For any human being, redemption requires something more than that the human being know facts about God. There is guilt, liability, and demerit, which weigh us down and which have to be dealt with. We have to face the punishment of death, which, without redemption, will come in our future if God does not undertake to redeem us from the punishment. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). We need God to save us. We need a man to be united to us, to substitute for us, and to bring us out of our misery. Our savior must be God, in order to have the power to save us. He must also become man, in order to substitute for us as our sin bearer. In addition, we need to be born again, to become a new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17).
The relation of these lines to truth may not be obvious. But look where the passage begins: redemption involves more than knowing facts about God. Don’t we often assume that there is a direct or even exclusive correlation between facts and redemption, as if knowing more about God is equivalent to becoming more like God? Is that how truth works? Is redemption mostly a matter of learning about God, that forward-back-forward movement that happens inside the walls of your brain?
Truth Runs Deep
Of course, redemption involves learning, as does salvation. We need to hear the truth about God in order to receive it (Rom. 10:14–15). But the mysterious reality that truth is ultimately a person (John 14:6) and not a principle means that learning more about God isn’t enough. Redemption is learning into God. It’s growing into the Christ-shape he has for each of us.
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God as light gives us truth. And he gives us the warmth of his self-conforming love. But he is also the most beautiful and the source of all the beauty we see around us. That God is the most beautiful might not strike us as clearly biblical in terms of the language, but “for the beauty of God Scripture has a special word: glory.”[11] In fact, Scripture harps on God’s glory so much that we must say God is “the pinnacle of beauty, the beauty toward which all creatures point.”[12] Every instance of beauty around us is an index finger pointing to God. 

“The Father of lights”—that is your name,
A blinding brilliance among heavenly hosts,
For even angels with wings of flame
Can’t stare at Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Who is God? No question could run deeper, span wider, or coast longer on the words of men. There’s a rich deposit in Scripture of proper names and images. But let’s focus and just consider God as light, or as James called him, “the Father of lights” (James 1:17).
Light is closely associated with that old word “glory.” The Westminster Confession of Faith (2.2) says, “God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them.”

That may sound stiff to today’s ears—with all those “haths” and “untos.” But think of it this way: God is the great, steadfast, immoveable light that shines behind and through this world. He is radiant. And that radiance touches everything, including you and me.
The Nicene Creed calls Jesus Christ “God of God, Light of Light” because his brilliance as the eternal Son matches the blinding radiance of the Father and Spirit.
This radiant God has filled the whole world with his light. In John Calvin’s words, “Whichever way we turn our eyes, there is no part of the world, however small, in which at least some spark of God’s glory does not shine. In particular, we cannot gaze at this beautiful masterpiece of the world, in all its length and breadth, without being completely dazed, as it were, by an endless flood of light.”[1] An endless flood of light—that’s the God who stands behind the world we wake to. And yet you and I don’t wake up blinded. Why?
God is a Spirit (John 4:24). We can’t see spirits. So, while the God of radiance is blindingly bright, we walk through the world by faith in that light, believing that the Father of lights illumines all the things around us. Bavinck wrote, “The spirituality of God refers to that perfection of God that describes him, negatively, as being immaterial and invisible, analogously to the spirit of angels and the souls of humans; and, positively, as the hidden, simple (uncompounded), absolute ground of all creatural, somatic, and pneumatic being.”[2] Now that’s a mouthful! Even my favorite theologians struggle to keep things “on the bottom shelf,” as my mother used to say. Bavinck is just trying to say that God as a Spirit is invisible and yet upholds everything we see. We might think of God as the light behind all earthly lights.[3]
And because of that behindness, because the Father of lights is hidden, we can be tempted to think he isn’t really here. That, I argue in another book, is Satan’s great lie, the lie that tells us to live as if God weren’t really present.[4] The great truth is that God is always present; he’s always the Light behind all lesser lights. Our awareness of him is a matter of Spirit-gifted faith, a certainty in what we cannot see (Heb. 11:1).
What it Means
But what, more specifically, does it mean to say that God is light? Though there are many things to discuss, let’s break our answer down into three qualities: truth, warmth (love), and beauty.
Truth. The radiance of God lets us see what is, what’s real. Just as a light in a darkened room shows us what’s there, God shows us the furniture of life: who we are, what matters most, what we should strive for. Bavinck writes, “Light in Scripture is the image of truth, holiness, and blessedness (Ps. 43:3; Isa. 10:17; Ps. 97:11).”[5] God shines to show us what is true, sacred, and good. Elsewhere he says, “What light is in the natural world—the source of knowledge, purity, and joy—God is in the world of the spirit.”[6] God is the light of truth, the one who shows us all, because he is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). He helps us see what’s around us, as well as our true spiritual condition. I’ve always loved how Charles Wesley expressed this in the great hymn “And Can It Be,”

Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth and followed Thee.

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As “the mediator of a new covenant,” Jesus’s blood pleads not for justice but for mercy and grace. Justice says, “Level the scales!” Mercy says, “Don’t give me what I deserve.” And grace says, “You’re giving me all of this?” Jesus’s blood says what Abel’s couldn’t. It doesn’t speak retribution; it speaks redemption.

I never thought of blood as a teacher, as having a voice. Blood is just stuff, isn’t it? It’s sacred stuff—I know. “The life is in the blood” (Lev. 17), and blood has the mysterious power to redeem, to atone, to cleanse. The blood of Jesus Christ secured for us “an eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). Red blood can make a heart turn white. You can’t explain it; you can only put it to poetry.
Blood beckons to us in the dark,And carries movement through our veins.The red turns white the hearts God marks,Sends souls to heaven dropping chains.
But does blood teach? Does it have a voice? “Only in a metaphorical sense, in a poetic sense.” Well, then God is a poet.
For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. (Heb. 12:18-25)
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Knowing the truth and having it affect you are two different things. We know that each of us is an immortal letter, ready to be read by the world. But to have this change our spiritual life and behavior, we need to rehearse it. We need to bring it before us when new experiences strike us. Otherwise, like so many other truths we “know,” it will sit in the background of our awareness. Don’t let that happen with this. You might even use the couplet below to lodge it in your memory for easy recall. “In Christ, I will go on forever. For now, I’ll be a holy letter.”

There are billions of intersections in Scripture, places where the lines of two texts cross and offer us critical opportunities for encouragement and growth. The latest intersection the Spirit led me to was wonderfully hopeful (should I expect anything less?).
Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? (John 11:25–26)
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor. 3:1–3)
The intersection brings two truths before us: those who believe in Christ are immortaland each of us is a letter from the Trinity. Let’s unpack both.
Unpacking Each Road
Jesus Christ, the Son through whom the entire cosmos came into being (John 1:3), stands before two heartbroken women. Their brother is dead. They are pleading for hope, comfort, a miracle. And while Jesus does perform a miracle in raising Lazarus, we might miss the deeper miracle he offers them (and us). Sure, Jesus can raise Lazarus, but Jesus is life. And if you have him, you don’t ever truly die. You live on in the timeless and illuminating glory of God. Mary and Martha were focused on the life in front of them; Jesus was focused on the life ahead of them. Believe in Jesus, and you are immortal.
Now switch to Paul’s context, where the Spirit gives us a beautifully rich metaphor. Paul says each of his readers is a letter. Each is a letter “from Christ,” meaning that Christ is the central message of their life. And that message is written with Holy Ghost ink. But what Paul says of the Corinthians applies to us as well. This is a trinitarian act that involves you. The Father writes the message of Christ with the ink of the Spirit on your heart. When you walk into the world to buy groceries, stop at the gas station, or hit up the local coffee shop, you are a letter. You are being read, even if you say nothing. That’s worth a pause.
The Intersection
Now, the truth of each passage intersects to bring us that wonderfully hopeful encouragement I mentioned.
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