Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
The Lord of Hosts [will] chase you down and do you good. To commit every resource of heaven to a single-minded pursuit of getting you to the garden of delight. To chase after you, overtake you, conquer and capture you, and then do you good, and be merciful to you.

Small details matter in the Bible. They often tell the story that’s under the story, or draw out a minor aspect or theme in a greater whole.

One of the details that can often matter is what a scholar might call cosmic geography. Which is the idea that some of the geographical references in the Bible—perhaps even all of them—map onto the symbolic map of the world and so carry some theological significance.
As an example, the garden planted in Eden where the man and the woman are made and live is in the east of Eden. When, after they are cursed, Adam and Eve leave the garden and Eden, they leave to the east.
In cosmic geography to travel eastwards is to move away from the presence of God and to travel westwards is to move towards the presence of God, because it is to journey away from or into Eden and therefore the heavenly temple that the garden was a pattern of. We might infer that Adam & Eve’s successful journey out of the garden as King & Queen of the world would have been westward, into the land of Eden and up the mountain the rivers flow from—which we would infer from the way mountains are employed through the rest of the Bible means straight into the arms of God.
We could overread this fairly easily. Firstly, we should check that inferring a theological edge to a direction actually adds to our reading of the text in a way supported by this passage and more broadly by the rest of the scriptures. Secondly, we should never conflate cosmic geography with actual geography: moving westward indicating moving towards God says nothing about either what we call “western civilisation” or what lies on the west of maps as we draw them.
Everywhere can be west if you shift your frame of reference, and Eden lay—depending on which reconstruction you like—somewhere in the triangle made by the Persian Gulf, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. We’re talking direction when we say west, not destination.
Broadly speaking, to walk towards the east is to go into exile, and to walk towards the west is to go on exodus: to return to the land gifted by God.
There are some interesting exceptions to this—note that the plague of locusts is brought by an east wind (Exodus 10) and blown away by a west wind, which sounds like the same thing until we remember that we name winds by where they blow from, so an east wind blows east to west. The clue here is that the west wind blows the locusts into the Red Sea, east of Egypt.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, May 13, 2022
We should be serious about food, about feasting, about serving the best our resources and skill allows—whether that’s chicken dippers or cordon bleu cuisine. We become friends around a table, because we become friends with God around a table. If at the Lord’s supper God meets with man, then at our tables man can meet with man because God has done so first, even if some round the table have not known this for themselves. 

The world is infused with wonder, and the presence of God reveals truth that was previously unseen.
When seen with the eyes of faith, every tree is a song that sings of life, of wisdom, of death that flowers with the scent of unknown spices. Every rock is the Rock and hides honey and gushing water. Every sky is a painting masterfully created for the eyes of a single human, before another masterpiece is hung as the wind blows. Every table is the Table.
I have a thing about tables. You might have picked that up if you’ve been around nuakh for a little while. You will certainly have if we know each other in real life. I’ve written why, or at least the superficial reasons why, and tables make homes, but there’s a deeper reason that I’ve only scouted around the edges of. The Table changes our tables.
Where does God meet man? At a table, where we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Not only there, but if anywhere then there is where we can be assured that God will meet with us.
As our Sunday meetings culminate in this acted story, this symbol, this faith bought opportunity to sup with God, we sit down with God at the Table. And as we eat by faith we are lifted to the heavenly Temple and feast on Christ’s body and blood, a genuine foretaste of the feast at the end of history.
If you agree with my vision of the world—riven with the presence of God through the heart of every atom—then how could this not change the world? Most importantly because we get to eat with God, but how could that event not change the nature of the act of eating on every occasion? We cannot eat anything in the same way ever again—the simple of act of sustenance has gained a new resonance, a significance beyond itself, as though it became a sign itself.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, April 3, 2022
I’ve been reading through Ezekiel recently, with Robert Jenson’s commentary as a guide. The commentary is idiosyncratic and moves from flashes of brilliance to Jenson’s seeming admission that he doesn’t know what’s going on chapter by chapter. I haven’t been able to shake Jenson’s surprising conclusions about chapter one from my mind, though.

In Ezekiel chapter one, the prophet relates to us a bizarre and compelling vision he has of Yahweh enthroned on his chariot by the rivers of Babylon.
I’ve been reading through Ezekiel recently, with Robert Jenson’s commentary as a guide. The commentary is idiosyncratic and moves from flashes of brilliance to Jenson’s seeming admission that he doesn’t know what’s going on chapter by chapter. I haven’t been able to shake Jenson’s surprising conclusions about chapter one from my mind, though.
He contends that Ezekiel’s vision is a vision of Jesus.
So far, so obvious. I understand that some readers may be uncomfortable with a fully throated conviction that everything in the Old Testament is ultimately about Christ, and that this conviction is not pasted on as a later addition but is a natural and correct reading of the text as it is. But, if you are uncomfortable with that, I’m surprised you’ve stuck around—I’ve contended elsewhere that the first word of the Bible is about Jesus, so this is less out there than that.
Here’s the bit that got me though, you tell me Ezekiel has a vision of Jesus and what I think is: yes, Old Testament theophanies—direct encounters with God—are visions of the preincarnate second person of the Trinity or of Yahweh in his Triune glory, so we can use the shorthand ‘Jesus’ for that even if a pedantic theologian would pick us up on it.
That’s not what Jenson means. He means this is Jesus in the chariot. The incarnate Jesus. In Babylon during the exile.
I told you it was wild.
Jenson suggests that broadly the vision is a vision of incarnation because the division between the heavens and the earth—God’s place and ours—is overcome as the heavenly throne has been literally mounted on wheels (well, cherubim, wheeled eye covered winged lightening serpents that are lions with the face of men: or angels to you and I).
He goes further though. Ezekiel’s vision homes in on the figure in the chariot, above the throne. One with the “appearance”, “the figure of a man,” or as the ESV has it “a likeness with a human appearance.” This is a human figure who is lit with the brightness and fire of the whole vision, and it seems the brightness even emanates from him.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 about the church being a ‘body’. He’s arguing against an idea some people in Corinth had that certain kinds of gifts were better than others, and that people with the ‘better’ gifts were due extra respect. He instead teaches them that all gifts are equal in value and all are necessary. The body needs all of its different parts to function properly.

When Aesop, busy imagining tortoises volunteering for foot races, said “in union there is strength” he was acknowledging a truth that we all recognise. Like O2 used to tell us when trying to flog phone contracts, we’re better connected.
That’s easy enough to say, but when it comes to doing something about it we swiftly decide that unity may not be worth the pain it seems to bring. Turns out that we think being joined with others is the best way to achieve something worthwhile, right up until someone asks us to join with others to do that.
That’s how I tend to react anyway—it’s easy to say that people need other people until you have to actually do something with other people.
Unfortunately, we’re all a little bit more awkward than we would like, and our brokenness makes it hard for us to be in community with others. It doesn’t come that easily. The church is supposed to be united (Ephesians 4): a lofty and laudable goal, almost impossible for mere mortals. The biggest issue church unity has is that any given church is full of people. The biggest weapon in the fight for churches to be united communities is the Spirit of the living God.
You see, God isn’t like us. He’s united as part of his nature. He’s three persons, but somehow still completely one. God is Triune, and simple: somehow God can be diverse without being made of parts, three and yet more united than I manage when I’m just on my own.
And in Jesus we find even more union, he’s the perfect union of God and man. Paul’s favourite way of describing our state after Jesus rescues us is that we are ‘in Christ’. In Romans 6 he says we are united to him. We become one with him, and by extension with all of the Trinity.
Jesus then gives each one of us his Spirit to unite us to each other by shared experiences, speaking the same truth to each of us.
A. W. Tozer uses the analogy of tuning an instrument. When you tune lots of pianos with the same tuning fork, they are automatically in tune with each other. When followers of Jesus are tuned to Jesus by the Spirit, we automatically become in tune with each other. We don’t have to strive for unity to find it, we follow Jesus and find our hearts are knit together with our fellow travellers.
A friend of mine talks about a game he likes to play in the pub, looking around at groups of people who are sat together and trying to figure out what they have in common. You can usually make a decent guess. Maybe they’re work colleagues, or play football together, or they’re old school friends. If the church is working as it’s designed to, it becomes really hard to play the game.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, March 13, 2022
 To be a disciple is primarily to live and to have our course corrected by the Lord, often in the voice of disciples who are a little ahead of us. Which means we need to be receptive to ‘feedback,’ and we need to realise that means we need to be ready to repent.

We’re all in favour, and we’re very happy to call a lot of things ‘discipleship’, but what is it?
Maybe it’s easier to start with what it isn’t. It’s not going and having a coffee with a more mature Christian—though that can be a very helpful thing to do. It’s not attending a course or an event—though courses and events can be great. It’s not growing your church or in-depth Bible study or a midweek group that meets in a home or having fun with other Christians or making younger Christians into copies of yourself.
All of the above can be good things in the right context, all of them are sometimes called discipleship, and not one of them is.
Apprentices
The word disciple just means learner. I do wonder if shifting away from the religious term would help us. ‘Apprentice’ is probably closer in our normal use to how the word ‘disciple’ would have been used in the New Testament. I like the way John Mark Comer talks about being apprenticed to Jesus as a metaphor for the Christian life, it’s a more holistic vision than when discipleship means meeting someone for coffee once every six months.
I’ve designed apprenticeship programmes for leading Universities and an award-winning global graduate programme for Rolls-Royce. I know how these things work.
When most people hear “apprenticeship,” or perhaps even “discipleship,” they imagine training courses. Which explains the way that lots of big churches approach the Christian life, “let’s run a course,” we imagine very quickly that the correct way to treat discipleship is to create the right programme. We proliferate our programmes to treat every area of life because what we think we need is skills.
This model then infects smaller churches as well because we use the courses produced by these big churches. None of this is wrong, but often rests on two faulty assumptions, one theological and one methodological. Firstly, we assume that what we need is skills, when we need character, but secondly we assume that this is how learning works.
We think if we need to learn we should run a course. The training programmes I designed included very little by way of training courses. We worked to a learning model as a guide that suggested 10% of an apprentice’s learning would come from courses and that these would be specifically targeted at specific needs.
The vast majority of our learning comes from experience, with a sizeable chunk from feedback and reflection—our guide would have been 70% experience and 20% reflection and feedback.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, March 5, 2022
Contemplating the sin and shame and death that tars us would do us good. But when you do, make sure you rise up afterwards, and turn your face to the heavens and cry tears of quick delight as you remember that God in Christ is for you. How do you know? Because he shut the dragon’s mouth, he bore the burdens we can’t set down after prising them from our grip, he made himself a spectacle of shame so we could be honoured as royalty. Because God loves you, and he wants you, and he has come to get you.

At the height of the pandemic, I was invited by one of my best friends to preach at his church in Manchester, which of course meant via Zoom from my living room.
This collided with the height of our house renovations—we had a labourer in to strip the old plaster off the halls, stairs and landing, and then plasterers in to board and skim. We do our own plastering, but we want to be precariously perched on a ladder halfway up the stairs about as much as the average tradesperson does.
Because they’re a law unto themselves, the plasterers announced on the Saturday that they would be back on Sunday morning to do some more. I carefully explained that I was preaching that morning, hoping to dissuade them, but they just assured me they would be quiet when we needed them to be.
So that’s how on the morning before the church meeting started, I was in the kitchen with the kettle on making everyone a drink and chatting with one of the plasterers about what church was like. We’d been talking earlier in the week—he was Irish, and it emerged he was a lapsed Roman Catholic who had walked away from the church long ago. He was deeply curious about faith, and this morning asked what I was going to be speaking about, so I told him the story from the gospels (Luke 7) that I was preaching from that day.
Jesus encounters a funeral procession outside of a small town. There’s a widow, who is accompanied by the town to bury her only son. Her beloved child is dead, and with his death her livelihood and hope for the future has gone. She has nothing left, no one to care for her. She is bereft.
Jesus stops the procession, comforts the mother and then reaches out to touch the bier his body is placed on. This is a taboo act, you don’t willingly touch the dead—the death transfers to you, spiritually speaking. Which is, by the by, the logic behind the Old Testament food laws, though I didn’t explain that to the plasterer.
He was rapt listening to the story. I’m a good storyteller, but this was a bare bones narration in the kitchen while I stirred a mug of tea for him to drink, the story was doing its own work.
Then we come to the climax. Jesus looks at the young man, who he is not afraid to touch, and says “get up.” In a beautifully understated line in Luke’s narration,
And the dead man sat up
The plasterer looked at me, eyes wide, and viscerally expressed his surprise in a way I will not repeat in print.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, March 3, 2022
God has branded believers as his, putting his mark on us; made it clear that we’re the real deal, and guaranteed our protection in transit to the age to come. The Spirit is God’s maker’s mark on us. It shows us that he is committed to us, and that his promises are reliable. For this to be helpful, it has to be visible to both you and others that you have been sealed.

How do we know we’re in? How do we know that God loves us and will preserve us to the end?
It’s got nothing to do with Bourbon, before you get too excited.
There are three ways that we know that we know him. I’m talking about what we commonly call assurance, the certainty that you are a Christian, you do know Jesus, and that you’re in. That’s what you need when your back is against the wall and you desperately need to know that death is beaten, that sadness will wither, and that Jesus wins. You’ve been taught it, you’ve read it, you declare it, but you just need to know. That’s assurance.
Deductive Assurance
The first way is what I would call ‘deductive’, what we typically call logic. This is when we read in the Bible that if we trust Jesus and follow him then God will not count our sins against us, and instead considers us as though we were his Son. We then think through whether or not we trust Jesus and are trying to follow him—”yes, as best I can, but a long way from perfectly.” Therefore, I must be one of Jesus’ followers and I can trust that God will be true to his word. We know with our heads that it’s true.
Inductive Assurance
The second way I’d call ‘inductive’. This is where we infer things from what we observe. We see progress in our lives since we met Jesus and continue to see that progress. We keep changing for the better in ways that we couldn’t make happen ourselves. Sometimes this requires the long view, but this is proof that what we think is true is true. Therefore, we must be one of Jesus’ followers and God is already being true to his word. We know with our lives that it’s true.
Direct Assurance
The third way I’d call ‘direct’. It’s not based on logic, but on experience. It’s when we meet with God in a powerful way and know—just know—that he loves us, is for us, and counts us as his children. It proves that everything I’ve read that is true in general, and that everything I’ve seen that seems to be true in my life, is specifically, intimately, individually true for me. Therefore, God loves me, so he is true to his word. We know with our hearts that it’s true.
This direct assurance I’ve written on recently: the feeling of joy that proves the ‘knowing’ of hope to be true.
We need all three: the head, the life, the heart. Each one proves the others. The direct heart experience is the one that does the heaviest lifting in hard times. It’s the one that is most fitted to carrying us through life, but it needs the other two to authenticate it.
If you’re missing deductive assurance, then go back to the Bible, ask Jesus, do you really believe this stuff? If you’re missing inductive assurance, then go to Jesus in prayer—ask him to show you how your character is developing and your faithfulness increasing. Ask your church family too, our friends often see us clearer than we see ourselves.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, February 26, 2022
We are meant to know God like an intimate conversation—we’re invited to the table (Psalm 23), and we get to sit and eat with God. That’s one of the patterns of the scriptures celebrated and experienced week by week as we eat the Lord’s Supper. God has made all the first moves, and we’re invited to an ever deepening knowing. We will know God and be known by him.

How does someone know that you love them? My wife knows that I love her. She can remember that I swore vows to do so, she can remember all the times that I’ve said so before, she can watch my behaviour both past and present and see that it must be true. She knows that I love her. But, if that was it, she knew because she could figure it out, I imagine she wouldn’t feel loved.
Feeling loved is more than knowing it’s true, it’s experiencing something that demonstrates it. It’s one thing to logically deduce that you’re loved, another to receive gifts, or words, or affection, or time, or help that shows that someone loves you, cares for you, and takes the time to think about what makes you happy.
Only knowing you’re loved would make sustaining a marriage through all the buffets of life a real challenge.
It’s the same with God. We can know he loves us because we can deduce it, but it’s quite something else to feel loved. For that we need to experience something that demonstrates it. To be sustained by the love of God through all the buffets of life, we need to move from knowing to feeling.
Which sounds backwards, we all know that knowing would be better than feeling—of course if we take a step back, both are kinds of knowledge and could both be called knowing. By ‘feeling’ here I mean the difference between deduction and direct experience.
When life knocks us for six, how do you find the strength to stand up again? A theological knowledge that there is hope beyond the veil? That’s a great start, but we need both a knowing of hope and a feeling of joy. The feeling lets us know, deep down in our bones, that the knowing of hope is a true knowing. Joy lets us know that hope isn’t abstract and alien, but familial. Joy lets me know that hope is for me.
I could learn something about you by looking at you, and I could probably learn a lot more about you by asking other people who do know you about you. Then I would be in the (I’m sure) pleasant position of knowing lots about you. I might even have a reasonable idea what knowing you would be like, but I wouldn’t actually know you.
The only way I can know you is by speaking to you, and even then I can only know you as much as you allow.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Jesus completed his work by giving the Spirit to his people. His promises to make them into springs of running water, his promises that he would send a helper, his promises to return to each of them and be with them forever were fulfilled in that moment.

Jesus had left the disciples. They’d seen him ascend into heaven. He’d given them a mission, his mission. He’d told them to wait.
So, that’s what they did. They waited. For ten whole days. It must have been absolutely excruciating. Most of us find it hard enough to wait for a bus, let alone anything important. This would be one of the most important events in history, utterly life-changing for each of them, and there they were swinging their heels. Waiting.
The Jewish festival of weeks, or ‘Pentecost’, rolled around, like it did every year, fifty days after the first sheaf was cut in the barley harvest. Seven weeks after the end of the Passover. Seven weeks since the world turned upside down and a dead man walked out of a tomb.
Nothing was ever going to be the same. Except, it looked awfully similar to before, waiting around Jerusalem like a bunch of smiling malcontents.
Then their waiting ended. Having died, been raised, and ascended into heaven, Jesus completed his work by giving the Spirit to his people. His promises to make them into springs of running water, his promises that he would send a helper, his promises to return to each of them and be with them forever were fulfilled in that moment.
And then, again, everything changed. It’s like the dramatic twist in a film or book when all the threads come together and the story shifts and changes. He’s a ghost? He’s his father? They’re the same man?
Brightness appears above one of their heads, and spreads from one to another like flames in a fire. A sound, roaring past their ears, like standing in a gale. Or perhaps something different, it’s a little mysterious. Whatever they saw and heard, they saw and heard it. It was definitely visible, audible and dramatic. You couldn’t be there and miss it.
Our expectation of the Spirit doing something is so often invisible, inaudible and inconspicuous. We describe him like he’s the secretive silent partner in the Trinity, like an investor backing up a business. The manager makes the decisions but behind the scenes Mr. H. Spirit is providing the funds. Essential, but never interfering. It’s hard to back this up from the Bible: the Spirit is often big, bold, and in our faces. You can’t miss what he’s doing.
This fits with my experience as well. It’s rare to pray with someone, have the Spirit move on or in them, and not be able to tell. It’s often visible, most commonly in people’s reactions or expressions, but sometimes in a mysterious way that’s hard to describe, you can see the Holy Spirit on someone. It’s a shadow or a whisper of what we see described in Acts 2, but he still acts in the same way today as he did then. Nothing has changed. My expectation is very low, but that’s my problem.
This doesn’t mean that the Spirit is never subtle (though unlike wizards he isn’t quick to anger—the opposite, dear friends), he often works carefully and slowly. It does mean that we must expect powerful encounters because this is what most of the Biblical accounts allude to.
Silence turns to wind and fire. Waiting turns to action. A small group to a great multitude. A locked door to a teaming street. Timid believers to firebrands, bold as brass.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
For the disciples, receiving the Spirit was like Jesus was with them again. Except as they travelled around and spread across the earth, as they’ve been told to, he was still with each one of them. He could now be everywhere, including inside each of their hearts and minds speaking tenderly to them and empowering them for the next test.

After his resurrection Jesus gathered his disciples to give them his parting instructions and pass on his mission. Each of the gospel writers summarise his words a little differently but they all include what Luke calls “the promise of the Father” (Luke 24).

Matthew records it as a promise that Jesus would be with them until the end of the age, Mark that their preaching would be accompanied by miracles. Luke speaks about them being “clothed with power” and John tells how Jesus acted out what would happen to them soon after by breathing on them and telling them to “receive the Spirit.” (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20).
Jesus was reminding them of what he’d already been at great pains to teach them. In order to complete the task he had given them, making disciples of all kinds of people, they needed the Holy Spirit.
He was clear with them that even after he had gone back to be with God, they shouldn’t launch straight on with the task he gave them, but should wait for the Holy Spirit, who he’d called their “helper”.
On the face of it this seems a bit strange. If my manager at work gave me an important task to do and there was a sense of urgency about it, my natural inclination would be to get straight on with it, or at least find out which of the rest of my work I can stop doing so I have time to do what she needs. I would be confused if after giving me the task, spelling out what needs to be done, and impressing the urgency of it on me, she then made it clear that under no circumstances was I to start. I was to sit tight and wait for someone to help me. I’m sure I’d appreciate help, but I’d feel faintly patronised. Surely I can start, at least, even if I need some other resources?
The disciples have been given a really important job to do, with a sense of supreme urgency about it. They have a whole world to tell about Jesus, why wouldn’t they just get on with it?
Jesus was emphatic. “Don’t go yet, you can’t start without everything you need, so wait until you’ve got it all.” He is like a drill sergeant, surveying his fresh—and slightly deluded—new recruits who are raring to race into a mock battle. The sergeant cautions them against rushing straight in, until he’s given them each some basic training and their weapon. We can be a lot like that, eager to surge ahead without picking up the basic equipment we need to be effective.
“Receiving the Spirit” was all that they were going to need. If we want to follow Jesus and fulfil his mission, presumably we need that too.
A couple of years before, Jesus and his disciples were at the Feast of Booths. This was when the Jewish people remembered God providing water for them when there were wandering in the desert, and it was when they looked forward to the Spirit being poured out like water in the future. On the last day of this festival, Jesus stood up in the Temple courts and shouted:
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”John 7
Everyone was dismantling the structures they had built for the festival and getting ready to return home. Jesus was saying “the water you’ve been celebrating is available all the time, and the eventual gift of the Spirit you’re expecting has arrived. You can get it through me.” It’s an enormous claim.
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