http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15895964/mighty-angels-flaming-fire-holy-vengeance

“Would you please, please come with me? I really want you to be there. All the other moms are going.”

My daughter was pleading with me to volunteer at field day for her kindergarten class. How could I deny such an earnest request? But since I couldn’t navigate the outdoors without assistance, I had to say no once again. She nodded her head understandingly when I explained why — she was used to disappointment. She didn’t know how much I wanted to go, how I longed to connect with her at school, or how guilty I felt that she was missing out.

Before I had children, my disability primarily impacted me. I could choose what I wanted to do, and I taught myself to want only those activities that were physically possible for me. But after I had children, I was faced with more challenging responsibilities and requests, constant reminders of what I couldn’t do. I felt guilty and responsible for what my girls lacked due to my limitations.

Over the years, I’ve met other parents who also feel inadequate — financial constraints, lack of education, limited resources, one all-consuming child, their own emotional battles, familial dysfunction, or a whole litany of other struggles. Like me, they were convinced that their inabilities put their children at a disadvantage.

“God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen us to be the parents of our children.”

Yet God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen us to be the parents of our children.

Dependence Can Be a Strength

In my frailty, I rely more on God. I need his power and wisdom because I don’t have power and wisdom in myself. And I have discovered that since “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25), I have unimaginable resources at my disposal.

When I ask for wisdom, God generously gives it. When I wait on the Lord, he renews my strength. When I am weary and troubled, he gives me rest. When I turn to God, he gives me everything I need.

My dependence and limitations have become my greatest strengths because they push me to pray before I answer or act. When I could easily do what my children asked, I didn’t seek God’s wisdom or help. I just responded. I didn’t consider alternatives or potential pitfalls. I assumed I had it under control.

The Israelites were once deceived by their Gibeonite neighbors, who claimed to have come from a far-off land and presented torn sacks, dried-out provisions, and worn-out clothes as proof. The Israelites “did not ask counsel from the Lord” (Joshua 9:14) because it seemed obvious what to do. I can relate to their actions, as I look back at the impulsive decisions I made without giving them much thought. Decisions I often regretted later. But when my children asked me for things that were beyond my abilities, I had to ask God for wisdom and help. Just as Jehoshaphat did when he said to the Lord, “We are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12).

Weakness Made Me a Better Mom

In my weakness, I begged God for tangible, specific help and saw concrete answers to prayer. The more I asked, the more God answered. The more I needed, the more he provided. The more I sought God, the more easily I found him. I would have missed out on untold blessings had I not been so needy.

My physical condition involves increasing pain and weakness, so I daily crawled to Jesus weary and heavy laden, and he gave me rest. I had to let go of my desire to do things perfectly, to meet everyone else’s needs, to wear myself out to the point of exhaustion. I had once been Martha, pulled apart by much serving, but my disability forced me into the role of Mary (Luke 10:38–42). Yet it was only then that I discovered the richness of sitting at Jesus’s feet, trusting him with all that felt undone.

God used my weakness to make me a better mother, and to forge a deeper character in my children.

When faced with something I couldn’t do, I sometimes wondered if my daughters would have been better off in a different family. But God reassured me that I was handpicked by him to address their unique strengths and struggles. Christ equips and strengthens us for everything our children need (Philippians 4:13, 19), so we need not feel inadequate.

What God Did Through Weakness

While I’d been consumed with what I couldn’t do for my children, I almost missed what God was doing in them because of my weakness. Now I see they are both creative problem-solvers. They show up for people and keep their commitments.

They are also compassionate and caring, noticing what people need and looking out for people with differing abilities. Even as small children, they never stared or asked strangers, “What’s wrong with you?” Once, when my older daughter’s first-grade teacher dropped her papers in class, Katie immediately jumped up from her seat across the room to pick them up. None of the other students even attempted to get up. When the teacher recounted the story, I realized that God was shaping my daughters through my disability in ways I hadn’t even noticed.

My younger daughter saw the blessing of crying out to God one rainy night when I was driving her to her basketball game in a neighboring town. In the stop-and-go traffic, my leg began to give out, and there was no way to get off the road. Tears rolled down my cheeks — I felt inadequate, scared, and overwhelmed yet again.

“Our weakness could be the making of our children’s faith. They learn to rely on God for the things we cannot do.”

When Kristi realized what was happening, she immediately said aloud, “God, please make my mom’s leg feel stronger and the traffic clear up.” We took turns praying back and forth together. Within minutes, we stopped seeing red brake lights, and the cramping in my leg eased as we made it to the game just in time. On the way home, she commented on how God answered our prayers.

Our Cracks Help Them See

Our weaknesses could be the making of our children’s faith. They learn to rely on God for the things we cannot do. They watch us pray. They see our limitations. And they get a front-row seat to see how God provides. As they watch our weak and flawed earthen vessels up close, they see the surpassing power that belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7). In this way, our cracks help them see.

Parenting through weakness can bring God glory. As we rely on God and his grace, he shines through our lives. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and his power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). What more could we want?

As a small index to how much our society’s attitude to Christianity has changed in the past half-century, in 1941 a Princeton University English professor published a book with Princeton University Press addressed specifically to Christian ministers. I have referenced this book throughout my half-century career as a teacher and writer, even using adaptations of its title, Poetry as a Means of Grace, to good effect.

In his opening chapter, the author offered a piece of advice for ministers (and by implication all church leaders and literary laypeople) that makes total sense: we should claim one author as our own, specializing in that author the way a literary scholar might. I would extend this bit of practical advice to include the possibility of choosing a single masterwork for detailed attention over a lifetime (though I do not thereby discourage wide reading).

With this advice in mind, I commend Paradise Lost as a candidate for lifelong acquaintance. Having written my dissertation on Paradise Lost, having taught Paradise Lost as many as two hundred times, having written articles and books on Milton, and having attended and spoken at Milton conferences, I love Milton’s masterpiece more now than ever. And it is a love I wish to share.

From Pulpit to Poetry

Paradise Lost was written by John Milton in the middle of the seventeenth century. From childhood, Milton was theoretically destined to become a minister. In anticipation of that, Milton stayed on at Cambridge University to earn a master’s degree. But then an obstacle derailed his intended clerical calling.

Milton was a Puritan by conviction, and as such he was not welcome as a pastoral candidate in the state church. Milton himself spoke of having been “church outed by the prelates,” meaning rejected for parish ministry by the governing Anglican hierarchy.

Milton scholars have long debated the question of when Milton abandoned his intention to become a minister, and the best conclusion is that he never did abandon his ministerial calling. As Jameela Lares argues effectively in her book Milton and the Preaching Arts, he simply changed its venue from the pulpit to poetry. In a prose passage where Milton discusses this, he places the vocation of the Christian poet “beside the office of the pulpit.”

And he bore some fruit of the pulpit. Out of the mass of commentary on Milton that I have read, my favorite sentence comes from the testimony of someone joining Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia who began his testimony with the statement, “I was led to the Lord by John Milton.” Paradise Lost was the work that had been instrumental in this person’s conversion.

Higher Than Real Life

Before I discuss the content of Paradise Lost, I need to begin where C.S. Lewis began his landmark book A Preface to Paradise Lost. The necessary starting point is the genre to which the poem belongs. That genre is the epic.

Epic was considered the most important literary genre from antiquity through the seventeenth century. It was an exercise in grandeur — a long narrative poem having the stature of a book. Its aim was scope — so much so that literary scholar Northop Frye dubbed epic “the story of all things” (The Return of Eden, 3). Similarly, C.S. Lewis claimed that an epic sums up what a whole age wants to say (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), 339).

An epic tells a story (and in fact many stories), but its way of telling a story is different from what modern readers are accustomed to. The successor to the epic as a species of long narrative was the novel, and what was particularly new about the novel was its realism. The novel gives us a slice of life in the everyday world. Epic, by contrast, is myth — a story of supernatural characters, events, and places. So the first thing we need to expect as we come to read an epic is myth rather than realism.

One further way in which epic springs a surprise on us is that it is poetry. We expect long fictional stories to be written in everyday prose. In the history of literature, that is a recent development, coming on the scene with the rise of a middle-class reading public in the middle of the eighteenth century. Epic is a hybrid of poetry and story, and we need to give equal attention to both.

Milton’s Theological Story

In keeping with epic scope, the story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future. The first main event is the war in heaven and the expulsion of Satan and his followers. This is followed by God’s creation of the world, Adam and Eve’s life in paradise, their fall from innocence, a survey of fallen human history, redemption in Christ as the means of reversing the destruction ushered in by the fall, and the eschaton. All of that looks familiar, of course, because it is the story of universal history as the Bible presents it.

“The story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future.”

The first time I taught Paradise Lost, a student handed me a paperback copy of the Puritan Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State. He offered no explanation, apparently assuming that the relevance of Boston’s book would be evident to me. It was. Boston’s paradigm of human nature in its perfection, fallenness, redemption in Christ, and glorification in heaven gives shape to Milton’s story.

Milton famously said that he intended his epic to be “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation.” There is edification as well as enjoyment in reading Paradise Lost. The big ideas with which Milton’s imagination worked are as follows: the centrality and sovereignty of God; the great conflict between good and evil in both cosmic and human spheres; the necessity that all creatures choose between good and evil; humanity’s unavoidable dealings with God; obedience to God as the great requirement in life, with disobedience being the essential nature of sin; and the fact of human sinfulness and the atonement of Christ as the antidote to the fallen condition.

Those are the big ideas, but there are many localized ideas as well, such as the nature of the good life as pictured in Adam and Eve’s life in paradise.

Come and See

Many added helps for engaging this poem could be given.

I could tell you Paradise Lost is what literary scholars call an encyclopedic form — a collection of discrete units within a superstructure — and so it doesn’t need to be read straight through. Or, I could warn against discouragement from the poem’s abundant allusions to both the Bible and classical mythology, which the first-time reader may not (and need not) understand.

But my intention in this article has been to open a door and entice you to an in-depth encounter with Paradise Lost. And perhaps the final note to strike is that Paradise Lost is a world with beauty and horror to be seen.

“The literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly.”

Milton’s epic deals with many theological ideas, as discussed above, but the literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly. Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr correctly claimed that “we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be, . . . and are guided and formed by images in our minds” (The Responsible Self, 151).

This is how we need to read Paradise Lost — not as a collection of ideas but as a story with characters, settings, and events, and as poetry comprised of images, symbols, and metaphors to be seen and enjoyed. He did not expect us to read his epic in the same way we read the more than twenty volumes of expository prose (including a systematic theology) that he wrote. There is a “value added” aesthetic element to literary writing, and we need to relish it.

So will you take the effort to read it? If you do, you may share the sentiment of the towering literary scholar Frank Kermode. He wrote some fifty books on the major movements and authors (including Shakespeare) of English literature, yet reserved his highest praise for Paradise Lost, calling it “the most perfect achievement of English poetry, perhaps the richest and most intricately beautiful poem in the world” (Romantic Image, 196).