He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Hebrews 7:25)

Some phrases carry such strong comfort, such enduring consolation, that they ought to be engraved on the walls of the heart. Airplanes ought to write them daily in our spiritual sky. They ought to be carved on every tree in the forest of the soul. “To the uttermost” is such a phrase.

Jesus is able to save to the uttermost. “That word ‘uttermost’ includes all that can be said,” John Newton once wrote. “Take an estimate of all our sins, all our temptations, all our difficulties, all our fears, and all our backslidings of every kind, still the word ‘uttermost’ goes beyond them all.” The word carries the idea of both fullness and finality: Jesus is able to save completely, and he is able to save forever.

And the reason he is able to save his people so fully, so completely, is because “he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). In a world of ever-present danger, we have an ever-praying Savior.

Our Praying Savior

For many, a mist surrounds the present ministry of our exalted Lord. We know Jesus as a past Savior who lived, died, and rose for us. We know him as a future Savior who will come again for us. But now, between the two trumpet blasts of his resurrection and return, we can struggle to speak of him in the present tense. What is Jesus doing right now?

“Our great Moses upon the mountain, our true Aaron within the veil, Christ ever keeps us on his heart.”

He “is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). Though exalted in glory, the head has not forgotten his body, nor the bridegroom his bride, nor the older brother his little siblings. Our great Moses upon the mountain, our true Aaron within the veil, Christ ever keeps us on his heart. He prays for us.

We may wonder, however, what his intercession really means. Does Jesus literally pray to the Father, vocally asking for our deliverance, forgiveness, protection? Some theologians (like Stephen Charnock, 1628–1680) think so, while others (like John Calvin) argue that he intercedes metaphorically, his glorified scars (representing his death) serving as our eternal plea. Either way, how intercession works matters less than what intercession is: at every moment, the living Jesus applies the power of his past sacrifice for our present help.

Like Israel’s high priest of old, who would enter the temple wearing stones upon his chest and shoulders that represented the people (Exodus 28:15–30), so Jesus carries us and our concerns into the very heart of heaven. As Michael Reeves writes, “God the Son came from his Father, became one of us, died our death — and all to bring us back with him to be before his Father like the jewels on the heart of the high priest” (Delighting in the Trinity, 74). Because he died and rose then, Jesus represents us in heaven now, able and willing to save us to the uttermost.

To get a sense of the height and length and breadth and depth of that word uttermost, consider three promises guaranteed by the present prayers of Jesus for his redeemed people.

1. Your faith will not fail you.

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. (Luke 22:31–32)

At the dawn of Good Friday, the streets of Jerusalem were stained with the apostle Peter’s tears. The same man who had once leaped from his boat to follow Jesus, and raised his voice to confess Jesus, and walked on the water to meet Jesus somehow, someway found himself denying Jesus. Satan had taken the rock and thrown him like a pebble.

Yet even then, somehow, someway, Peter’s faith did not fail — not completely. Unlike Judas, he would meet Jesus once again by the sea, and once again he would leap from his boat to follow him (John 21:7, 19). And why? Five simple words from Jesus: “I have prayed for you.” Satan may sift you, Peter, but still I will save you.

We, like Peter, may sometimes find our faith spilled upon the ground. But for those who truly belong to Jesus, a deeper magic moves beneath our midnight weeping. Our faith lives on through our Lord’s intercession, and in time it will rise.

“It is Jesus who protects us, rescues us, quickens us, turns us, restores us, strengthens us, keeps us.”

If only we knew how often his prayers have rescued us — how often their heat has kept our embers burning, how often their voice has called us home, how often their hands have weaved the rope that lifts us from the pit. If we are his sheep, it is Jesus who protects us, rescues us, quickens us, turns us, restores us, strengthens us, keeps us. For it is Jesus who prays for us, always and forever.

2. Satan cannot condemn you.

Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died — more than that, who was raised — who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. (Romans 8:33–34)

The same devil who sifted Peter is called “the accuser of our brothers,” and so he does. “Day and night before our God” he prosecutes his case, dragging our sins up to heaven so he might drag us down to hell (Revelation 12:10). Who hasn’t heard the dark whisper? There’s no mercy for a wretch like you. Your sins are too scarlet to be washed white.

We may default in such moments to remembering the death of Christ, saying with Paul, “Christ Jesus is the one who died” (Romans 8:34). How often, however, do we move from Christ’s death to the “more than that” of his resurrection and the “indeed” of his intercession? How often do we follow our Lord from the cross to the tomb, and from the tomb to God’s right hand? Charnock writes,

His death is not such a ground of assurance as this, because that is past; but when we consider how the merit of his death lives continually in his intercession, all the weights of doubts and despondency lose their heaviness; faith finds in it an unquestionable support.

In the prayers of our interceding Christ, the power of Good Friday lives on today, even right now. The same Calvary love still beats in his risen heart; the same scars still say, “It is finished”; the same merit that emptied the tomb still answers, moment by moment, every accusation. So even when the devil heaps up condemnation, we can sing with the hymn,

My name is graven on his hands;My name is written on his heart.I know that while in heaven he stands,No tongue can bid me thence depart.

No tongue can bid us thence depart, for the only tongue heaven hears continually bids our welcome.

3. The Father will always be for you.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. (1 John 2:1)

Our faith will not fail us, Satan cannot condemn us — but what of the Father? How do we know he will not send us away someday, weary of our wavering love? We know because Jesus intercedes not only for us, and not only against the devil, but also “with the Father” (1 John 2:1). And as long as he intercedes for us, the Father will forever be for us.

If our advocate in heaven were someone other than Jesus, we would have no room for hope. Let Mary sweetly whisper all her grace, and Peter speak his boldness — let James and John thunder forth, and Gabriel implore with the angels — still the gates of heaven would stay fast shut to the likes of you and me. But oh, if only Jesus says the word, we are the Father’s forever.

No angel, and no mere saint, could work so great a wonder. But Jesus can. He is none other than the Father’s “beloved Son” (Mark 1:11), whom heaven always hears (John 11:42). He is “the righteous” one, “the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1–2), whose wounds and words satisfy every claim of justice. And best of all, he is the advocate of the Father’s own appointing. It was the Father who sent Christ, the Father who raised Christ, the Father who installed Christ as our everlasting advocate. All the intercession of Christ, then, only echoes his own heart-love.

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1) — and kept children of God by the advocacy of his interceding Son.

Christ a Complete Savior

When John Bunyan (1628–1688) wrote a little book on the intercession of Christ, he titled it Christ a Complete Savior. Without his present intercession, Jesus would still be a Savior, but a partial Savior rather than a complete one. He would be the founder but not the perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the beginner but not the finisher of salvation’s good work.

With his intercession, however, our Lord is a complete Savior, a Savior who rescues us not only in the past and the future, but in the moment-by-moment present. As Bunyan puts it, Christ is Lord “of salvation throughout, from the beginning to the end, from the first to the last. His hands have laid the foundation of it in his own blood, and his hands shall finish it by his intercession” (Works of John Bunyan, 1:215).

Or as Hebrews puts it, “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him” (Hebrews 7:25). To the uttermost. Such a phrase silences the objections, calms the fears, and resurrects the hopes of Christ’s believing people. There is no height, nor depth, nor breadth, nor length beyond the reach of the uttermost — because there is no height, nor depth, nor breadth, nor length beyond the prayers of our ever-living, always-interceding Christ.

Tucked away in my computer files is a little document named “What to Do with Doubt.” A remnant from a darker time.

The document was a note to self, an effort to look myself in the eyes and practice the soul-talk of the psalmist. Why are you doubting, O my soul, and why are you divided within me?

The suggestions begin fairly predictably. “Seek God,” the first one reads, followed by several verses. Or the fourth: “Don’t trust in yourself.” They begin to range toward the end, though. The sixteenth and nineteenth read, “Think of the prophecies Jesus fulfilled” and “Think of great saints.” Those who walk in the dark are glad for any starlight.

Such a document may seem strange to those who have never dealt with serious doubts — about God, Scripture, the gospel — and therefore have never wondered what to do with doubt. But then there are the Thomases of the world, people who, by some sad mixture of personality, background, and indwelling sin, have found themselves prone to saying, “Unless I see . . .” (John 20:25). We take our place among Christ’s disciples, but our faith can sometimes feel embattled, our souls divided.

We believe, but oh how we need help with our unbelief (Mark 9:24).

In Two Minds

Strangely enough, I never doubted the truth of God’s word during my nearly two decades as a nominal Christian. Only after the first joys of genuine faith, the first rush of deliverance, the first sights of Christ’s glory did I feel the first shadow of doubt. It came with the sudden violence of a mugger, and with similar effects: I lay for a while on the ground, bloody and wondering why.

Where did doubt come from, and why did it pick me? I have not a clue. I only know that one day in college, prior certainties began to shake, seemingly uncontrollably. Unwelcome, unlooked-for questions somehow gained entrance into my mind, and I found myself on the defense. Can Scripture really withstand scrutiny? the strange voice asked. And in darker moments, How do you know God even exists? I would fall asleep, night after night, debating the darkness, and morning by morning the questions returned.

The title of Os Guinness’s 1976 book on doubt captures the experience well: In Two Minds. Doubt divides and doubles you, Jekyll-and-Hydes you, splits you in the most uncomfortable places. With one mind, I only wanted to “trust in the Lord with all [my] heart, and . . . not lean on [my] own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5), but another mind called that intellectual escapism. With one mind, I read the Bible searching for sights of the Lord I loved, and with another mind I cast a skeptical eye. With one mind I trusted; with another mind I doubted. I was, as James says, “a double-minded man” (James 1:8).

It can make you desperate, doubt can. For almost two years, I burned through notebooks, journaling anguished thoughts and pleading prayers. I listened obsessively to sermons, searching for some voice that could cast away the demon. I contacted apologetics ministries on more than one occasion, once even calling at midnight. In a more charismatic strain, I felt an impulse one miserable night to read the entire book of Proverbs and pray for deliverance (I made it somewhere near the middle). And then, of course, I developed a document like “What to Do with Doubt.”

Desperate men in darkness grasp and stumble wildly. And sometimes, in the kind providence of God, they strike upon a path.

Paths Beyond Doubt

Just as the pathways into doubt are many and mysterious, so too are the pathways out. Jesus, for example, responded to diverse doubts with diverse mercies, as Jon Bloom observes: to John the Baptist he gave a gentle reminder (Matthew 11:2–6), to Peter a questioning reproof (Matthew 14:28–33), to Thomas a painful delay (John 20:24–29). Jesus is, as always, our best and only infallible guide out of doubt.

Nevertheless, doubt carries enough common elements that one doubter may say a few words to another. The following, then, are some of the paths I stumbled upon in the dark. None led me out instantly (deliverance from doubt rarely happens in a moment). But over time, they together became like “the path of the righteous [that] is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” (Proverbs 4:18).

1. Normalize doubt as a trial of faith.

Doubt came, as I said, with the unexpectedness and disorientation of a mugger — partly because, during all my years as a nominal Christian and my few months as a real one, I had never heard anyone talk about it. Lust, pride, greed, self-reliance, anger, impatience — these were known enemies, planned for and expected. Doubt was not. I was a bullet-wounded soldier who had never heard of guns.

Much of doubt’s power lies in this ability to dismay and disorient — to make us feel beyond the pale of normal Christian experience. How heartening it was to slowly grasp the truth: doubt, though unique in some ways, is a normal trial of faith, faced by saints throughout the ages. One of the devil’s first temptations (Genesis 3:1), doubt remains a favorite still.

I remember at one point in my doubts reading the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga describe doubt as simply another manifestation of the old self’s ongoing influence (Ephesians 4:22). Our old self is by nature unbelieving, trusting our own words over God’s. No wonder, then, that we who still possess “this body of death” sometimes still deal with doubt and unbelief (Romans 7:24).

Indeed, some of God’s people always have. Doubt may not be the most prevalent besetting sin among saints, but the likes of Moses (Exodus 3:13), Asaph (Psalm 77:7–9), Habakkuk (Habakkuk 1:2–4), Zechariah (Luke 1:18), John the Baptist (Matthew 11:2–3), Peter (Matthew 14:31), and Thomas (John 20:25) all battled versions of the dreaded foe. Doubts, then, do not send us beyond the pale. They do not render us automatic unbelievers. They instead rouse us to join the ranks of former saints, who responded to doubt as they responded to all other temptations and sins: with resistance.

2. Find some friends to confide in — dead and alive.

Treating doubt as an anomaly wounded me in more ways than one. Not only did I feel alone, in a dark world beyond the sun, but I hesitated to talk about it with anyone. I expected to find misunderstanding, befuddled glances, wary responses that suggested, “I don’t know what to do with you and I wish you wouldn’t have said that.” Instead, when I finally did share, I found mercy (Jude 22).

I know not everyone shares this experience. Not everyone gets to confide in friends so sympathetic. Yet I imagine that many silent doubters would be surprised at what they find should they speak. The shoulders of the saints, built to bear burdens (Galatians 6:2), are not too weak to carry our doubts. And either way, the risk is worth it, for doubt is too disorienting, too deceiving, too mind-darkening to escape on our own.

Alongside saints alive and nearby, we might also search for some dead or far-off. For me, the hymns of Red Mountain Church, the music of Andrew Peterson, the poetry of George Herbert, and the books of C.S. Lewis kept me company when others could not. These were kindred spirits, friends who knew how to articulate doubt’s inaudible agony (when I could not), and also how to apply God’s fathomless grace (when I dared not). They helped me imagine a life beyond doubt.

(In our social-media age, a brief caveat may be in order: confiding in face-to-face friends is far better than indiscriminately posting online. Doubts are not for hiding — but neither are they for publishing in real time. In all likelihood, our own perspective is too distorted, and social-media counsel too unreliable, for public sharing to be fruitful.)

“Doubt is inherently isolating. It can feel especially shameful, and sometimes impossible to explain.”

Doubt is inherently isolating. It can feel especially shameful, and sometimes impossible to explain. But seclusion does us no favors — and fellowship can work slow wonders.

3. Take time away from doubt.

Because doubt wraps its fingers around the very throat of faith, it has a way of demanding attention. A man being throttled struggles to consider other matters. Ironically enough, however, one of the worst things we can do — one of the worst things I did, anyway — is focus obsessively on doubt. For doubt, like some other enemies, often dies slant.

Of course, finding direct answers to our most vexing questions can bring relief, sometimes great relief. I can remember finding several solutions to my doubts, in books or sermons or conversations with friends, that pried a finger or two off the throat. But direct answers were only part of the solution to my doubts — and not, I would venture, the most important part.

Looking back, I can see that many of my attempts to overcome doubt were like a man trying to change his appearance by staring harder and harder in the mirror: they only curved me more deeply inward. I needed to pray about more than my doubts; I needed to read and watch more than apologetics resources; I needed to journal about more than my own internal afflictions. Doubt needs sunshine, full and clear, and my grapples with doubt often took me to the cellar.

What then can doubters do beyond seeking answers? Sit long under the sky of God’s glory, breathing deeply creation’s soul oxygen (Psalm 19:1; Psalm 104:24). Escape self by weeping and rejoicing with God’s people (Romans 12:15). Sit in the gathering and sing of glories far above you and problems not your own (Colossians 3:16). Find mind rest in the hard labor of a worthy vocation (Colossians 3:23). And above all, slowly, prayerfully, and longingly consider Jesus (Hebrews 3:1).

4. Keep seeking God.

Doubt for long enough, and you may begin to despair of ever escaping doubt. This is just who I am — the way I’m wired, you may think. I can remember days or weeks in my deepest season of doubt where a kind of fatalism set into my bones. Fighting felt like little use. The deep internal division seemed unbudgeable. I began recasting my future in terms of doubt.

Mercifully, God always roused me after a time, reminding me of a simple truth that doubt — or any long struggle — easily overshadows: God saves. The living God is a rescuing, delivering God, who enters in from the outside and shatters the bars of our expectations. He is a Pharaoh-crushing, sea-parting God; a sky-splitting, earth-shaking God; a Christ-giving, tomb-emptying God — and his hand cannot be stayed. For him, the impossible is only a word away.

And therefore, Jesus’s words in Matthew 7:7–8 put an end to all fatalism:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

“In defiance of the darkness, ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking.”

Doubt may feel too entrenched to dig out. Its shadows may seem to cover too much of the soul. Even still, in defiance of the darkness, ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking. For at one time or another, in one place or another, with one word or another, the threefold promise will come to pass: “It will be given to you . . . you will find . . . it will be opened to you.”

5. Wait patiently for deliverance.

We may, however, need to wait a while. “Ask, and it will be given to you” — but he doesn’t say how much time may separate the first asking from the final giving. And for some, the time may linger long.

How instructive to remember Thomas’s story:

“Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Eight days later . . . (John 20:25–26)

Eight days later. Why eight days? If locked doors couldn’t keep Jesus from reaching Thomas (John 20:26), surely time was no obstacle. The risen Lord was not hindered. He tarried on purpose, allowing Thomas to wait not for an hour or an afternoon, but for eight anguished days.

He has his reasons, as always. We don’t know all of them. But we do know that when Jesus waits to rescue his people, mercy governs his waiting. For doubt not only tempts and tortures; it teaches. Here in the waiting, we learn, with Thomas, just how fragile our faith is unless God upholds it. We learn the necessary virtue of self-distrust (Proverbs 3:5). We learn to sympathize with others’ weaknesses. And we learn to seek God in the face of the despair that says, “You will not find him.”

My Lord, My God

The delays of Jesus toward his people are merciful delays, ever and always. And in time, those who wait faithfully will feel the truth in William Cowper’s hymn “Jehovah Jireh — The Lord Will Provide”:

Wait for his seasonable aid,And though it tarry, wait:The promise may be long delay’d,But cannot come too late.

For those who stay near Jesus while they wait, we have good reason to hope they will eventually say with Thomas — knees bent, heart awed, doubts hushed — “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

In all your questions, then, bend your ear to hear the voice of Jesus. Strain your eyes to see him. Pray that he himself will come, speak peace, and lead you to the land of light, beyond all darkness and doubting.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15634825/better-to-have-a-burden

On the night he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus wanted to give his people a sign of his covenant love. As God had once assured Noah with a rainbow, and lifted Abraham’s eyes to the stars, and sanctified the Sabbath for Israel, so now Jesus wanted to give his disciples, and us, some tangible token of his promises, some visible seal of his faithfulness. And so, he broke a loaf of bread, and he poured a cup of wine.

Bread and wine, loaf and cup: in these two ordinary elements, our crucified, risen, and reigning Lord declares to us his victories. He tells us who we are. And he gives us a taste of his coming kingdom, when once again he will preside over a supper, this time with no coming sorrow.

And yet, if we are going to receive Christ’s covenant love in this meal, and not just bread and wine — or crackers and juice, as the case may be — we need the meaning of the elements clear in our minds. As John Calvin writes, “Assuredly this is the chiefest thing in all sacraments, that the word of God may appear engraven there, and that the clear voice may sound.”

What word, then, has Jesus engraved upon the bread and the cup? What voice sounds forth from the Supper?

Bread and Wine

When Jesus took up the bread and the cup of the Last Supper, he was handling objects thick with associations from Israel’s past. Bread and wine appear regularly, together and apart, throughout the Old Testament and Jesus’s own ministry. Here was bread long baked, and wine well aged.

At the most basic level, bread and wine sustained the life of God’s people (Genesis 27:28; Leviticus 26:26). Both were staples of Israel’s diet — bread because of the simplicity and reliability of grain, and wine because water could be so scarce in the ancient Near East.

For that reason, bread and wine were also valuable gifts of friendship and hospitality, first from God to man (Psalm 104:15), and then from man to his neighbor (Genesis 14:18; Ruth 2:14).

In similar fashion, bread and wine reflected the blessings and curses of God’s covenant with Israel. When the nation walked closely with their God, then they ate bread and drank wine in abundance (Deuteronomy 7:13); when they strayed after other gods, famine struck their fields and vineyards (Hosea 2:9).

Finally, bread and wine could serve as symbols of Israel’s eschatological hope, when God would swallow death and spread a feast for all peoples (Isaiah 25:6–8; 55:1–2). “Behold, the days are coming,” God says through Amos,

When the plowman shall overtake the reaper     and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed;the mountains shall drip sweet wine,     and all the hills shall flow with it. (Amos 9:13; see also Jeremiah 31:12)

“Life sustainer, gift giver, covenant maker, eschaton bringer, Jesus is Israel’s God made flesh.”

More associations could be mentioned, but these suffice to give some sense of the broad background to Jesus’s own uses of bread and wine. It is no accident that, in his ministry, Jesus multiplies both (John 2:1–11; 6:1–14), likens himself to both (John 6:35; 15:1), consecrates both to serve as his church’s covenant meal (Luke 22:14–20), and promises both in the age to come (Luke 22:18; Revelation 2:17). Life sustainer, gift giver, covenant maker, eschaton bringer, Jesus is Israel’s God made flesh.

And yet, we can get more specific. When Jesus took the bread and the cup, he took up not only the broad tapestry of Old Testament history and revelation, but also a few particular threads, now amplified and fulfilled in him.

Bread of the Passover

Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper on a day already charged with tremendous significance: the Passover (Luke 22:11). For centuries, the families of Israel had gathered on Passover to eat the meat of a slaughtered lamb, along with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, and to relive the night when the sacrificial blood shielded them from God’s wrath (Exodus 12:7–13, 42). God had swept his arm through Pharaoh’s land, judging his enemies and rescuing his people through a marvelous exodus deliverance. Annually, then, Israel was to remember that though they once were slaves, they now were God’s redeemed.

Yet on this Passover, as Jesus gathers with his disciples in the upper room, he looks not to the past, but to the present; he directs their gaze not upon the lamb, but upon himself. Taking up the unleavened bread, he gives thanks, breaks it, and says, “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19).

By mapping his Supper onto the Passover, Jesus does something remarkable: he gives his disciples familiar categories for understanding his covenant meal, even as he expands those categories far beyond their hopes. Like the Passover meal, the Lord’s Supper recalls a past deliverance from slavery and declares those who eat to be God’s redeemed people. Unlike the Passover, however, the lamb of the Supper is the Lord himself, whose blood protects us not only for a night, but for eternity (Hebrews 9:12). The death he dies is once for all — unrepeated and unrepeatable (Hebrews 9:26). And the exodus redemption he accomplishes rescues us not from Pharaoh, but from sin and death and hell (Colossians 1:13–14).

Whenever God’s people eat the bread, then, we say with Paul, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7), and we celebrate a festival of God’s favor that will never, ever end (1 Corinthians 5:8).

Cup of the Covenant

The cup of the Lord’s Supper, like the bread, has resonances with the Passover meal, but it also takes us to another scene shortly after. After Israel left Egypt, passed through the Red Sea, and heard God’s law at Sinai, Moses sprinkled them with sacrificial blood (Exodus 24:8). They were now God’s people by covenant, and God himself was their God (Exodus 6:7).

Jesus, recalling this covenant moment, passes the blood-red wine to his disciples and says, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). Here again, Jesus explains the Lord’s Supper with familiar categories — and here again, he wondrously expands them. For his blood and covenant are far, far better.

In the cup, we receive not the blood of goats and calves, “which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10:11), but “the precious blood of Christ” himself (1 Peter 1:19). Jesus’s blood not only purifies the flesh but cleanses the conscience (Hebrews 9:14), not only covers sin for a time but forgives it forever (Ephesians 1:7; 1 John 1:7). His blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24), for it pleads not for vengeance, but for mercy. With his blood, Jesus secured the eternal for his people: an “eternal redemption” yielding an “eternal inheritance” bound within an “eternal covenant” (Hebrews 9:12, 16; 13:20).

Or, as Jesus puts it, alluding to Jeremiah, his blood purchases a “new covenant” (Luke 22:20; Jeremiah 31:31) — and, indeed, a “better” one, “since it is enacted on better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). Under the new covenant, God writes his law not on stone but on hearts, he is known by both greatest and least, and he pledges a covenantal forgetfulness as glorious as it is divine: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:33–34).

“Jesus, our most worthy Lord, snatched the cup of judgment from our lips and exchanged it with his own cup of favor.”

And all because Jesus, our most worthy Lord, snatched the cup of judgment from our lips and exchanged it with his own cup of favor. On the cross, he drank “from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath,” the dreadful “cup of staggering” (Isaiah 51:17, 22), so that, in our hands, it might become “the cup of blessing” (1 Corinthians 10:16). And oh how it overflows (Psalm 23:5).

Our Portion and Cup

Bread and wine, loaf and cup: they could not look more ordinary, but they could not contain more glory. Small enough to fit in the palm, they are big enough to hold the world. We eat and drink them in a moment, but this moment wraps both past and future in its grasp (1 Corinthians 11:26).

And what word do we find engraved on these elements? What voice sounds forth from this Supper? In summary, this: in Jesus Christ, our Bread of Life and true Grapevine, God has shielded us from his wrath, delivered us from sin and Satan, and bound us to himself in a covenant that can never be broken.

Take, then, and eat. Take and drink. And taste the covenant love of Christ.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Tyrannosaurus Rex these days — and Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Velociraptor. I’ve also made the acquaintance of some less-familiar figures, like the long-necked, small-brained Diplodocus and the head-crested Parasaurolophus (which actually rolls off the tongue once you get the hang of it).

I’m no paleontologist or museum curator. I haven’t seen the latest installment of the Jurassic saga. I’m just dad to a 2-year-old boy. And like so many young boys, he reads, plays, and roars dinosaur.

Over the last months, his dino shirts and books (and figures and stickers) have dug up old fascinations, mostly buried since The Land Before Time and a book of Brontosauruses I thumbed through as a kid. They’ve also unearthed some new questions, especially as I try to help my son trace God’s design in the dinosaurs.

If the heavens declare God’s glory (Psalm 19:1), and his wondrous works proclaim his praise (Psalm 104:24), then surely these long-extinct giant reptiles say something spectacular about him. But what?

These Old Bones?

What we tell our children about dinosaurs will be shaped, of course, by whether we think they roamed the earth millions of years ago or relatively recently. Both perspectives have biblical merit; both also have their difficulties. I have my own leanings on the question, as most of us do, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to sidestep that matter entirely.

I won’t mind much whether my son embraces a young-earth or old-earth view of creation; I will mind greatly whether he sees dinosaurs (and all the earth) in relation to the God who made them. And the most important lessons dinosaurs teach, it seems to me, have little to do with the age of their bones. Whether they lived in the Mesozoic Era or the days of Noah, much remains the same: Many were fierce. Many were fantastical. And many were absolutely enormous.

What then can we learn from such incredible creatures? Among other lessons, consider three.

Trust the God of Wisdom

Steve Brusatte’s popular 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs tells an absorbing history of the dinosaurs’ reign. Unfortunately, it also represents and reinforces the popular view that dinosaurs have nothing to do with God. Naturalistic evolution plays the deity in Brusatte’s telling — a blind and brainless force somehow endowed with tremendous foresight: “evolution created” beasts like the behemoth sauropods (108); “evolution assembled all of the pieces [and] put them together in the right order” (117); T. Rex and his ilk were “incredible feats of evolution” (225).

The naturalistic worldview may be relatively new; the underlying impulse on display here, however, is anything but. God’s people have always needed to confess God’s handiwork over against popular myths. In the ancient world, Israel’s Canaanite neighbors considered the tannînîm (fearsome sea creatures, sometimes translated as “serpents,” “dragons,” or “monsters”) to represent “the powers of chaos confronting Baal in the beginning” (Derek Kidner, Genesis, 54). Moses, meanwhile, writes in Genesis 1:21 that “God created the great sea creatures [tannînîm].” The Canaanites can say what they want. We know that even the monsters are God’s masterpieces.

In similar fashion, God’s final speech in Job takes a massive land animal, Behemoth, and a fierce water beast, Leviathan (another monster of Canaanite lore), and describes them as God’s creatures: “Behold, Behemoth, which I made” (Job 40:15); “Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine” (Job 41:11). Nor need we wonder if God would say the same of dinosaurs. Many scholars identify Behemoth and Leviathan with the hippopotamus and crocodile, but the poetic descriptions take on monstrous proportions. Behemoth and Leviathan could easily be mistaken for a sauropod or tyrannosaur.

“Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones.”

Children growing up in a naturalistic age need to hear, often and joyously, the psalmist’s creation creed: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24). Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones. In the first place, then, dinosaurs invite us to name and trust their true Maker.

Fear the God of Power

Imagine the largest of elephants, seven tons of flesh and bone spread from trunk to tail. Now imagine, if you can, a creature seven times this elephant’s weight and three or four times its length, lumbering across the land with a towering neck, barrel belly, and tree-trunk tail. You now have some faint sense of Argentinosaurus, probably the largest land animal ever discovered.

Now consider another creature, far smaller than Argentinosaurus, but also far more ferocious. At the same tonnage as our elephant (yet ten feet longer), he romps around on thighs thick with muscle, his massive head holding a jaw that snaps with six tons of pressure — literally car-crushing in its force. You now have some dim idea of T. Rex, probably the fiercest land animal ever discovered.

Now picture yourself standing before such beasts. We would be right to say of them, as God says of Leviathan, “None is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.” And we would be right to draw the corresponding conclusion: “Who then is he who can stand before me?” (Job 41:10).

Dinosaurs ought to make us tremble — but not mainly before dinosaurs. Like a hurricane, they preach the power of the living God, the very God in whom we live and move and have our being, and before whom one day we will stand. As Matthew Henry says of Behemoth, so we might say of every dinosaur:

Consider whether thou art able to contend with him who made that beast and gave him all the power he has, and whether it is not thy wisdom rather to submit to him and make thy peace with him. (An Exposition of the Old and New Testament, 223)

God made every tooth in T. Rex’s mouth; he added every ton to Argentinosaurus’s frame. Though dead, their bones still speak, and teach us not only to trust their Maker’s wisdom, but also to fear his power.

Praise the God of Wonders

In Christ, however, the most fearsome displays of God’s power become occasions for praise. Faith transfigures the terrifying into awe-inspiring: thunder becomes the voice of God (Psalm 29:3), the vast cosmos his finger-work (Psalm 8:3), the raging sea a pavement for our Lord (Matthew 14:25), the fiercest beast a glint of his glory.

The children of God know how to look at Leviathan (and, by extension, dinosaurs) and see not only his beastliness, but his “goodly frame” (Job 41:12). They can sit inside his footprint and worship the God of wonders (Psalm 104:31–32). They can trace his scales and, like King David beneath lightning, cry, “Glory!” (Psalm 29:9).

Psalm 104 gives a good sense of what dinosaur-inspired praise might sound like. Here, the psalmist marvels not only at the gentle beauty of God’s creation — flowing streams and singing birds — but also at its harder edges: the young lions roaring for prey and, strikingly, even Leviathan himself sporting in sea (Psalm 104:21, 26). Some may hold the bones of long-lost species and see only “a meaningless swarm of life,” Derek Kidner writes. But the psalmist teaches us to see them “as giving some inkling of the Creator’s wealth, and the range and precision of his thought” (Psalms 73–150, 405).

“Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.”

Paleontology allows us to sing Psalm 104 with a cast of characters perhaps unimagined by the psalmist, but long enjoyed by God and long awaiting our discovery. Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.

Evangelical Chisels

In the century before the first dinosaur discoveries (around 1820), pastor and nature lover James Hervey (1714–1758) responded to the new, Newtonian science of his day by saying, “We should always view the visible System, with an Evangelical Telescope . . . and with an Evangelical Microscope” (The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 150). Study the stars if you’d like: chart their courses; measure their distances. Study too the cells: mark their features; describe their functions. Yet study both as the handiwork of God.

In an age of dinosaur discoveries, we might add to Hervey’s evangelical telescope and microscope an evangelical chisel. Study the dinosaurs: learn their names; consider their age; read a few dozen children’s books about them. Yet don’t neglect the even larger lessons they teach.

My son’s dinosaur-mania may fade. But in the meantime, we’ll be tracing the wisdom of God in his Ankylosaurus figure, and the power of God on his T. Rex T-shirt, and the praise of God in his 2-year-old roar.

Many of the most common troubles in the Christian life come from relating to God as if he were like us — as if his kindness were as slight as our kindness, his forgiveness as reluctant as our forgiveness, his patience as fleeting as our patience. Under impressions such as these, we walk uneasily through the Christian life, insecurity rumbling like distant thunder.

John Owen (1616–1683) goes so far as to say,

Want of a due consideration of him with whom we have to do, measuring him by that line of our own imaginations, bringing him down unto our thoughts and our ways, is the cause of all our disquietments. (Works of John Owen, 6:500)

If we were God in heaven, we would have grown impatient with people like us long ago. Our anger rises quickly in the face of personal offense. Our frustration boils over. Our judgments readily fire. And apart from the daily renewal of our minds, we can easily measure God “by that line of our own imaginations,” as if his thoughts matched our thoughts, and his ways our ways.

Thank God, they do not. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Our human nature has no ruler to measure God’s goodness; our natural imaginations cannot grasp his heights. His kindness is not like our kindness, his forgiveness not like our forgiveness — and his patience not like our patience.

‘Slow to Anger’

The God we meet in Scripture is a relentlessly patient God. He usually accomplishes his plans along the winding path. He fulfills his promises without haste. He compares his kingdom to a mustard seed.

The greatest displays of God’s patience, however, appear in response to our sin. “God is patient” means not mainly that God waits a long time, but that God shows longsuffering kindness to sinners (Romans 2:4). As God declares to Moses on Mount Sinai, he is not just “slow,” but “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6).

Consider the context of that famous declaration. Israel has just left slavery, redeemed by God’s mighty hand. They have watched the Red Sea swallow Egypt’s army. They have stood before a mountain wrapped in smoke and lightning, the entourage of the Almighty. They have been covered by the blood of the covenant. And then, in some of their first moments of freedom, they exchange the glory of the living God for a cow (Exodus 32:1–6).

Judgment follows (Exodus 32:25–29, 35) — striking yet restrained, tempered by a mysterious mercy. God does not destroy them; he does not forsake them. Instead, he reveals his glorious, incomparable name, like an unexpected dawn in an all-black sky:

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (Exodus 34:6)

Why does full judgment tarry and mercy beckon? Because, unlike us, God is “slow to anger.” His wrath visits the unrepentant (Exodus 34:7), but only after taking the slow path. Meanwhile, his mercy stands ready to run.

Here on the slopes of Mount Sinai began a song that would be sung by Israel’s prophets and psalmists, sages and kings, even under the nation’s darkest nights (Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 86:15; Joel 2:13). The living God is a patient God. And in the shadow of his patience we find hope.

Patience Toward His Enemies

God’s patience, like his love, has special significance for his chosen people — the slow-to-anger God of Exodus 34:6 is none other than “the Lord,” Yahweh, the God Israel knows by covenant (Exodus 3:13–15). And yet, amazingly, the record of God’s dealings in Scripture reveals a marked slowness to anger not only toward his covenant people, but toward those who hate and oppose him.

The most forceful examples of God’s wrath, for instance, begin as examples of his patience. The flood waters swallowed the earth only after “God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared” (1 Peter 3:20). God lingered for four generations before cleansing Canaan of its idolatry, for, he told Abraham, “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). And nine warning plagues fell on Egypt before the devastating blow to the firstborn (Exodus 11:4–8).

God’s wrath may be “quickly kindled” when the time for judgment comes (Psalm 2:12), but until then, he warns and invites (Psalm 2:10–11). God’s patience toward his enemies extends so far, Owen observes, that his people sometimes cry out, perplexed, “How long before you will judge?” (Revelation 6:10; Psalm 94:3). And still he patiently waits.

God, the patient potter, bears with the rebellious clay of his creation. He endures vessels of wrath with “much patience” (Romans 9:22), Paul tells us. How much more, then, does he deal patiently with vessels of mercy?

Patience Toward His People

When Paul rehearsed his testimony to Timothy, he framed it as a story of God’s patience:

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15–16)

God saved this “blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” (1 Timothy 1:13) so that no humble, broken sinner would think he’s out-sinned the patience of God. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus is patient toward his people — perfectly patient. As patient as the prodigal’s father, waiting on the porch (Luke 15:20).

Nor does his patience end when former rebels like us heed his summons and become his sons. As Israel’s faithful celebrated again and again, God not only “was” slow to anger; he “is” slow to anger (Psalm 103:8). His patience, like his love, endures forever (Psalm 136). To what else can we ascribe his ongoing kindness, his every-morning mercies, his present help, and his ready forgiveness, through all the fluctuations of our souls? Today and every day, “He does not deal with us according to our sins” (Psalm 103:10), but according to his great patience.

“In Christ, your life tells a story of divine patience.”

In Christ, your life, like Paul’s, tells a story of divine patience. God was patient with you as you wandered from him — scorning his Son, treasuring sin, scarcely giving him or his gospel a thought. He is patient with you now, as you daily find need for forgiveness. And he will be patient with you tomorrow, and the next day, and until the day of Jesus Christ, when he finally finishes the good work he’s begun (Philippians 1:6).

And why? Because, some several centuries after Moses, God once again revealed his slow-to-anger name. This time in flesh and blood.

Patience Supreme

In Jesus, the God-man, the song of God’s slowness to anger swells to its crescendo.

Jesus’s ministry was one of patience, for to be with us was to bear with us (Luke 9:41). He lived here as light among darkness, sinlessness among sin, the straight among the crooked — as the unrivaled prince of patience. We occasionally see the pain of his patience, as when he says, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” (Matthew 17:17). But he mostly kept the cost hidden, pouring out his soul to his Father (Luke 5:16), and receiving from his Father the patience needed as his enemies slandered him, his neighbors rejected him, his disciples misunderstood him, and the crowds tried to use him.

And thus he also died. Though twelve legions of angels stood ready for his summons (Matthew 26:53), he never called. Instead, Patience incarnate took the lashes, the thorns, the nails, allowing his creatures to mock him with the breath he gave, all while pleading for their forgiveness (Luke 23:34).

In the cross of Jesus, we see not only that God is patient, but how God can be so patient. How could he, “in his divine forbearance,” pass over former sins (Romans 3:25) — and how can he, in his divine forbearance, continue to show us mercy? Because the patience of God, in the person of Christ, purchased our forgiveness (Romans 3:23–24). God’s patience rests on the passion of his Son. And therefore, his patience will last as long as our resurrected Christ pleads the merits of his blood (Hebrews 7:25) — which is to say, forever.

Let Us Return

English pastor Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) once prayed, “Teach me . . . to read my duty in the lines of your mercy.” And what duty do we read in the lines of God’s merciful patience? In the words of Isaiah, “Return to the Lord” (Isaiah 55:7).

“Whoever and wherever we are, God’s patience invites our repentance.”

The patience of God is a beckoning hand, an open door, a pathway home. It comes to us as Jesus came to Matthew at the tax booth: not to condemn us, and not to comfort us in our sins either, but rather to turn us again to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6), whether after a miserable lapse or simply a regrettable moment. Whoever and wherever we are, God’s patience invites our repentance.

And what do we find when we return to him, confessing and forsaking our sins? We find a Father running to meet us (Luke 15:20). We find a Savior who has already been knocking (Revelation 3:20). We find a God who abundantly pardons and plentifully redeems (Isaiah 55:7; Psalm 130:7). We find a Lord whose patience is perfect (1 Timothy 1:16).

One day, we will stumble and sin no more; the good work begun at our conversion finally will be complete (Philippians 1:6). But until then, the patience of God is not bound to the measure of our weak imaginations. It is not the pinched, passing, shallow patience we so commonly find among men, and within ourselves. His patience, like his peace, surpasses all understanding (Philippians 4:7). Return to him, then, now and forever, and in returning find rest.

Occasionally, as I lie down to sleep, a restlessness bends over my bed. A vague uneasiness. A nagging sense of some tension unresolved. Some door in the soul swinging on its hinges. The stirring of an unquiet conscience.

As I relive the day, I see why. Prayers hurried or skipped. An evangelistic opportunity avoided. Grievances nourished. Self-promoting words snuck into conversations. The “prayer request” that was probably gossip. Precious time squandered. Encouragements unthought and unspoken. As the old prayer book says, “I have left undone those things which I ought to have done; and I have done those things which I ought not to have done.”

Was this a fitting response to your God? I ask myself. Was this “walking in a manner worthy” of him? Sometimes I drift off with such questions unresolved, fitful and self-reproaching yet tired enough to succumb to sleep.

But not always. Some years ago, I found unexpected help in the poem of a long-dead pastor, who asked the same questions, felt the same guilt, yet found in Jesus a rest far sweeter than sleep.

‘Even-Song’

George Herbert’s (1593–1633) “Even-Song” closes a series of three poems in his collection The Temple, beginning with “Mattens” and continuing with “Sinne (II).” The titles “Mattens” and “Even-Song” refer to morning and evening prayers in the Anglican church. And “Sinne” — well, that captures what often happens between those morning and evening prayers.

“Even-Song” is not a prayer for every evening. Herbert does not assume we only ever end the day self-reproachful, with sin having wrecked the day’s resolves. But he does assume we sometimes do — and that, often, even the most faithful Christians kneel beside their beds deeply wishing they had walked in a manner more worthy of their God.

What do we say at the end of such days, when we feel the gulf between God’s kindness and our unworthy response? More than once, “Even-Song” has met me at my bedside, speaking clarity and comfort to my troubled conscience. It has become a faithful nighttime friend.

As Night Draws Near

    Blest be the God of love,Who gave us eyes, and light, and power this day,  Both to be busie, and to play.  But much more blest be God above,

    Who gave me sight alone,  Which to himself he did denie:  For when he sees my waies, I dy:But I have got his sonne, and he hath none.

As night draws near, Herbert looks back, remembering God’s morning gifts of “eyes, and light, and power this day, / Both to be busie and to play.” Our Father, “God of love” that he is, opens the storehouses of his heart from the day’s first moment. As Herbert celebrates in “Mattens,” “I cannot ope mine eyes, / But thou art ready to catch / My morning-soul and sacrifice.” “Yours is the day” (Psalm 74:16), the psalmist says. And Herbert, surrounded by God’s gifts, feels it.

For sinners like us, though, one gift rises above the rest. The God who gives us “eyes, and light” for daytime labors also gives us another kind of sight, “Which to himself he did denie: / For when he sees my waies, I dy.” Alluding to Psalm 130:3, Herbert remembers that God, in Christ, does not “mark” our iniquities, even when we do; in a sense, he does not see the sins we see.

And why? Because “I have got his sonne, and he hath none.” God gave up his Son at the cross — and at the same time, he gave up the sun that would otherwise shine upon our guilt. Jesus buried our sins in darkness on Good Friday, and on Easter Sunday, they did not rise with him. And so, in the glory of the gospel, God no longer “remembers” the sins of his people (Hebrews 8:12); he no longer sees them. They are buried, hidden, unseen, kept forever in darkness.

But they do not always feel buried, hidden, unseen. And so, Herbert takes us back to his “troubled minde.”

Troubled Mind

    What have I brought thee homeFor this thy love? have I discharg’d the debt,  Which this dayes favour did beget?  I ranne; but all I brought, was fome.

    Thy diet, care, and cost  Do end in bubbles, balls of winde;  Of winde to thee whom I have crost,But balls of wilde-fire to my troubled minde.

Like a good father, God meets us with favor morning by morning; his “diet, care, and cost” send us into the day strengthened and renewed. But all too often, as we approach home in the evening, we dig in our pockets, wondering how we could have taken so much and brought back so little. “What have I brought thee home?” Herbert asks. “I ranne; but all I brought, was fome” — or, a few lines later, “bubbles, balls of winde.” Insubstantial nothings.

Approaching God with fists full of wind may not trouble the spiritually nominal, who care little whether they please God or not. But for those who have tasted the kindness of God, and have seen the cross as its cost, such wind can become “balls of wilde-fire to my troubled minde.” The sun has set on the day’s regrets, with no time now to remedy them, leaving us with a thorn-pricked soul. A pillow of self-reproach. A smoldering conscience.

On nights like these, some simply try to sleep their guilt away. Others search for some rationalization. Still others pray, but not in a way that douses the fire in their minds. What does Herbert do?

Closing Our Weary Eyes

    Yet still thou goest on,And now with darknesse closest wearie eyes,  Saying to man, It doth suffice:  Henceforth repose; your work is done.

    Thus in thy ebony box  Thou dost inclose us, till the day  Put our amendment in our way,And give new wheels to our disorder’d clocks.

Herbert, with wild fire burning his troubled mind, turns to God and says, “Yet still thou goest on.” The “God of love” has yet more love stored up, more favor to offer. He began the day by giving us “eyes,” and now, as night overtakes our burdened souls, he “with darknesse closest wearie eyes.” And not just with sleep: God, in mercy, closes our eyes to our sins, just as he, in Christ, has already “closed” his.

“In response to our weary, day-end regrets, God gives not more work, but rest.”

As God closes the soul’s eyelids, bidding them be blind to the day’s confessed sins, Herbert imagines him “saying to man, It doth suffice: / Henceforth repose; your work is done.” In response to our weary, day-end regrets, God gives not more work, but rest. Our work, however pitiful, can be done at day’s end because God’s perfect work of redemption is done (John 19:30; Hebrews 10:12–14). And we, by faith, “have got his sonne.”

Thus God “incloses” us in “thy ebony box” — surely a reference to a coffin. The biblical writers saw sleep as an image of Christian death (John 11:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Herbert, tapping into the theme, treats nighttime as a daily rehearsal for the moment when our ebony box will be made of wood and not of night. On that last twilight, some of God’s true children, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, will look back and ask, pained, “What have I brought thee home / For this thy love?” Our troubled nights teach us how to answer that question, readying us to lie peacefully upon our final bed as we wait for God to close our eyes, put us to sleep, and keep us for the resurrection day, which will “put our amendment in our way” — which will raise us sinless and whole, children of the everlasting morning.

Until then, we live like old timepieces, “disorder’d clocks” whose hour and minute hands begin the day aligned with God yet often slowly get off track. And every morning, God rewinds us, no matter how disordered from yesterday, and once again strengthens us to run.

Rest Deeper Than Sleep

    I muse, which shows more love,The day or night: that is the gale, this th’ harbour;  That is the walk, and this the arbour;  Or that the garden, this the grove.

    My God, thou art all love.  Not one poore minute scapes thy breast,  But brings a favour from above;And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.

As God carries us from morning to evening, we move from favor to favor, mercy to mercy, kindness to kindness. By poem’s end, Herbert muses which of the two, day or night, “shows more love”: The gale that sends us through day’s waters, or the harbor that holds us at night’s shore? The walk that takes us through day’s labors, or the arbor that receives us into night’s rest? The garden of daytime strength, or the grove of nighttime forgiveness?

“In Jesus, we find a rest beneath our rest, a pillow under our pillow.”

The question cannot be answered. In Christ, God gives us power to work for him, and he gives us pardon to rest in him. Both have their peculiar favor; God’s children prize them both. And so, “not one poore minute scapes thy breast, / But brings a favor from above.” Not one minute of the day is unadorned by the love of God — whether daytime love or nighttime love, strengthening love or forgiving love.

Herbert closes, “And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.” In Jesus, we find a rest beneath our rest, a pillow under our pillow, comfort of soul surrounding the comfort of sleep. Such rest and comfort depend, ultimately, not on what we give to God (though we long to give him much and more), but on what he has given to us: “his sonne.” And so, even the frustration and futility we feel toward day’s end can become a mercy, delivering us into a deeper rest than sleep can give.