A slight breeze of discomfort blows a thought through my mind: What am I doing here? The room I’ve known for years suddenly takes an awkward shape. The silence, the stillness gives everything an unnatural quality, like a deer’s head mounted on a wall. Eyes are open, yet nothing moves.

As I finally settle into the stillness, distractions offer themselves from all sides. “My Father who art in heaven,” I begin to pray, “hallowed be thy name. In my city, exalt your name. In my life” — why are my feet so cold?

After I tiptoe back with socks, I kneel. Where was I?

Oh yes. “Exalt your name in my life, Lord. And please make your kingdom come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” — wait, what was that sound? One of the kids? What time is it? It cannot be.

As I glance down the hall, I notice books disjointed on the shelves beside me. Hmm, I should really read Holiness again. . . . I still can’t believe Amazon shipped the book with that damaged corner — I should have returned it. Packages, packages . . . wasn’t something supposed to come yesterday? What was it again?

Running from Solitude

Of late, I’ve noticed I’ve been getting worse at being alone. That sanctuary of solitude with God, a place where hours could pass unnoticed, has fallen victim to a life filled with activity. “Quiet times” have become harder to bear. Money-changers now sit in my house of prayer, noisily selling pigeons and livestock. And what is worse, I invited them in. But why?

“That sanctuary of solitude with God, a place where hours could pass unnoticed, has fallen victim to a life filled with noise.”

Blaise Pascal explains well enough why the unredeemed world hates silence. “Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things” (Christianity for Modern Pagans, 170).

Pascal sees men without God fleeing their Creator, and themselves, at every turn. This world swirls with hustle and bustle, men busily chase what they don’t want because fallen humanity will not — cannot — endure the frowning thoughts that meet them in stillness.

Thus, clamor keeps back the awful light of self-knowledge, the unwelcome truth that Adam’s race is a terminal patient, busy building vanities upon the seashore to keep him from considering that he is a creature, dying. Or as Jesus depicted, a branch withering, soon to be cast into the fire and burned (John 15:6). Pascal ventures, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (172).

Threats to Quiet

But of course, this is not the Christian’s case. God found us at midday, drawing water alone from the well. There, he told us of our sin and situation. But there too, he offered himself to us as living water. In the quiet moment, a bush burned before our souls; we removed our sandals to be broken and healed by his voice.

And this begins a pattern: Daily quiet times become opportunities to meet with God. Journals are filled. Words underlined. Prayers spoken. Tears shed. Songs sung.

“Slowly, if we fail to keep watch, the good portion, the one thing necessary, the quiet closet becomes forgotten.”

But slowly, if we fail to keep watch, the good portion, the one thing necessary, the quiet closet becomes forgotten. That rural religion — green, organic, discreet — moves closer to the city of metal, machines, and commotion.

Three dangers, I notice, threaten my desire for solitude with God.

First, a Friendly World

The world outside my room stands with hand outstretched, ready to invite me into its fellowship. John Bunyan described Christian’s path as leading through the stir of Vanity Fair. And so it is.

Some of what I have called “busyness” — building a career, seeking a spouse, pursuing happiness — Jesus calls indulging the “cares of this world,” the “deceitfulness of riches,” and “desires for other things.” When they threaten to choke out his voice in my life, gifts become thorns.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus says,

Others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. (Mark 4:18–19)

God’s truth gets strangled in hearts and minds, not just by the fierce grip of persecution, but by the gentler hold of the American dream.

I need to be reminded,

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (1 John 2:15)

At times, I need to be confronted,

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? (James 4:4)

At other times, I need to be shown,

Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. (2 Timothy 4:10)

And always, I need to pray,

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. (Psalm 90:14)

Second, a Thinning Soul

When I desire the world, when I grow too busy to be alone with God, when the world in my pocket entices me more than the world of the Scriptures, my soul stretches and thins, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

My weakened desires take me away from God into my phone. I follow Jonah into the Tarshish of technology. And when I set sail several times, it becomes easier and easier to go again, and harder and harder to sit with God as before. My soul fidgets, anxious for something, anything to distract and entertain me. As I stick my hand in again and again for more and more salty snacks, my appetite for the great feast diminishes.

Third, a Shrunken Faith

Cutting myself off from the means of grace injures my faith. When I do return, the silent room questions me: Is all this really real? Against this suggestion, I must take up the shield of faith to endure the initial discomforts.

With warming feet, I continue, “Lord, please give me this day my daily bread, and forgive me — for my many distracted, neglectful, worldly transgressions — as I forgive those who trespass against me.”

Are you sure God hears you? the thought comes. Hours and hours that add up to days upon days amassing to years and years of nothing — if it’s all untrue.

“Lord, lead me not into temptation — nor into distractions — but deliver me from them and the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Amen.”

Upon that floor I return from a cold world to my Father’s presence.

Drawing near to him in solitude tests my faith that he exists and rewards those who will meet him there (Hebrews 11:6). If God does not exist or meet us, we do waste precious moments on a dream and a shadow. But blocking out the world and turning our back on doubt, our seeking says, I trust you. I need you. I long to be with you.

Will You Return?

Will he “who is [our] life” (Colossians 3:4) woo us away from the busy and noisy world? It is today as it was with Elijah:

Behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. (1 Kings 19:11–12)

Literally, God revealed himself to Elijah in “a voice, a thin silence.” God often forgoes the thunder, the tearing winds, the earthquake, the roaring fire, preferring to whisper to us through his word and Spirit in the quiet room. Will we visit our prayer closets, get alone, shut out the world and its distractions to sit again with our God who delights to meet with us?

All of Jesus’s human life led him to this garden. As he knelt and prayed in Gethsemane, waiting in agony — with beads of sweat “like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44) — here he made the Choice.

Countless decisions, big and small, brought him here, but only in the garden did he finalize the decision to go to the cross. Gethsemane marked his last and most distressing moments of deliberation. He chose to enter the garden, and he could have chosen to flee.

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me,” he prayed. “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). There, on his knees, Jesus chose — with his human will, like ours, which naturally recoiled at the threat of pain and death — to embrace the one divine will of his Father, which was also his, as eternal Son.

When he rose from prayer (Luke 22:45), the decision was done, his fully human will in perfect synch and submission to the divine. Now, as Judas and the soldiers arrived, he would be acted upon: arrested, accused, tried, struck, flogged, and crucified.

Two Wills in Christ

For centuries, dyothelitism is the term the church has used to refer to the two wills of Christ — the one divine will he (eternally) shares as God, with his Father (and the Spirit), and a natural human will that is his by virtue of the incarnation and his taking on our full humanity. We speak of two wills in the one unique person of the God-man.

“Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.”

In multiple places in John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his human will in distinction from that of his Father, “the one who sent me.” “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30). “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

Yet the place where Jesus’s distinctly human will stands out most is Gethsemane, in those final moments of Choice before he is taken and, humanly speaking, there is no turning back. Not only did Jesus teach his men to pray to his Father “your will be done” (Matthew 6:10), but in the garden, Christ himself prayed, “not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39), and then again, “your will be done” (Matthew 26:42). And in doing so, he embraced the divine will with his human volition.

Human All the Way?

The early church endured attacks against both Jesus’s deity (from Arians) and his full humanity (from Docetists and Apollinarians), questioning his fully human body, emotions, and mind. The battle for his human will came last and was the most sophisticated. The conflict, prompted by political intrigue, raged in the seventh century and led to a sixth ecumenical council in 680–681, the third at Constantinople. Obscure as the refined nature of the controversy may seem to us today, the debate between dyothelitism and the opposing view (monothelitism) still carries the theological significance it did more than twelve centuries ago, and warrants our attention, perhaps all the more in circles where it has been neglected or forgotten.

In contrast to monothelitism, which claims the divine will of the Son animates the human body and soul of Jesus, dyothelitism presses for the full, uncompromised humanity of Christ. We find two wills in the agony of Gethsemane in the one person of Christ. There is a human nature in him that desires the removal of the cup — that there be some other way, if possible, than the divine will. The question, then, is when Christ prays, “not my will, but yours, be done,” whose will is “my will,” and whose is “yours”?

When the question was freshly pressed on the church in the seventh century, the explanation that emerged as most compelling, and enduring, was that of Maximus the Confessor (born 580) — even though he did not live to see the triumph. At the time, dyothelitism was not politically expedient to the emperor Constans’s ambitions to reunite Christian regions against the threat of Islam. Maximus was arrested and exiled, and he died in exile eight years later at age 81. Seven years later, Constans was assassinated. Soon the imperial attitude changed, and twenty years after Maximus’s death, his theology carried the day at the ecumenical council.

It was Maximus, claims Demetrios Bathrellos, who “was really the first to point out in an unambiguous way that it is the Logos (the eternal Son) as a man who addressed the Father in Gethsemane. . . . [Maximus] emphasized the fact that in Gethsemane Christ decided as man to obey the divine will, and thus overcame the blameless human instinctive urge to avoid death” (The Byzantine Christ, 146–147).

In this way, we confess two wills in the unique divine-human God-man. As God, Jesus “wills by his divine will and as man obeys the divine will by his human will” (174). In Maximus’s own words, “The subject who says ‘let this cup pass from me’ and the subject who says ‘not as I will’ are one and the same.” So, writes Bathrellos, “[B]oth the desire to avoid death and the submission to the divine will of the Father have to do with the humanity of Christ and his human will” (147).

Why His Wills Matter

Obscure as the ancient debate may seem at first, one reason for its enduring relevance is our own humanity. We are human as they were human. And in particular, our wills are human, constrained by finitude. Humans like us have an interest (not just intellectually but very practically) in the question, Was Christ indeed “made like [us] in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17)? And is he able “to sympathize with our weaknesses [as] one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15)?

“If Christ is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans.”

Even more than sympathy, Is Christ truly able to save us? If he is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans. As the famous maxim of Gregory of Nazianzus claims, that which Christ has not assumed, he has not healed. And not just healed eternally, but even in this life. What hope do we have of his reclaiming, sanctifying, and redeeming our own fallen, sinful human wills if the eternal Son has not descended to the full extent of our humanity, yet without sin? As Edward Oakes writes, “Since will is the very seat of sin, its fons et origo, we are still left in our plight if Christ did not have a human will” (Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 162). Would Christ come in human flesh and blood, emotions and mind, and leave the human will, “the very seat of sin,” untaken, untouched, and unredeemed?

Also, a “trinitarian logic” informs and reinforces the two wills of Christ. According to Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves, “Maximus argued that since in the Trinity there are three persons and one nature, and also one will, the will must be a function of the nature, not the person” (150). That is an important distinction: that the will, whether divine or human, is a function of the theological category “nature,” not “person.” Two wills in Christ (one human, one divine) correspond with one will in God. One will in Christ (divine only) would mean that the two wills in tension in Gethsemane would be between divine “persons” (Father and Son) rather than between “natures” (divine and human), challenging oneness in the Godhead, and thus revising not only orthodox Christology but also trinitarianism.

Yet, “even more significant,” notes Fairbairn and Reeves, is the “soteriological conviction that the unassumed is unhealed” (150). Human salvation in Christ is at stake in the human will of Christ, not only in his receiving in himself the penalty of our fallen wills (as we’ve seen), but also in his own obedience, as the God-man, to his Father. As man, Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), and as man, “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8). “The many will be made righteous,” says Romans 5:19, “by the one man’s obedience” — a human obedience, by virtue of the incarnation, he could not have rendered apart from a human will.

Cult of Will

Not only does dyothelitism correlate best with God’s triune nature, our human nature, and the nature of the atonement, but in locating the will as a function of the “nature,” rather than the “person,” dyothelitism guards us against the modern “cult of will.” Oakes warns, “When personhood is identified without further ado with the will, then the cult of will in Friedrich Nietzsche and his postmodern successors inevitably follows” (164). Oakes points to Bathrellos’s “extremely thought-provoking observation that so many of the ethical outrages of today can be traced to the . . . error of identifying nature with person.” Says Bathrellos,

The tendency to identify personhood with nature or natural qualities and especially with the mind . . . seems to occur quite often in the history of human thought. It is remarkable that in our own day some philosophers of ethics give a definition of “person” based on mental and volitional capacities, and in doing so make it possible to justify, for example, abortion and even infanticide. (14)

However far-reaching the implications of Christ’s two wills, and full humanity, we as Christians are worshipers first and foremost. We declare, as the cardinal confession of our faith, “Jesus is Lord” — and when we do so, we submit to a Sovereign not only infinitely high above us as God but one who has drawn near as our own brother and friend, and went so low to serve and sacrifice himself for us. In addition to his divine will as God, Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.

What assassin better cloaks himself than Satan? He is a rumor whispered, a rustling of the bush, a cutthroat who leaves no witnesses. Everywhere he devastates, yet, seldom perceived, he attacks by submarine. Out of sight, out of mind, he burrows to the roots; we only see the forest dying.

In the West, a shy assassin, he conceals himself within a joke — a horned Halloweener dressed in red, brandishing a plastic pitchfork. He chuckles along with freethinking societies, nodding that his existence is but a ploy to maintain religious power or a fairy tale to parent naughty children. As Master of the air, this Pied Piper plays his music, his hiss, full of sweetness and song, suggesting softly of fruit able to make one wise.

Scripture unearths and names him. Slanderer. Accuser. Adversary. Tempter. Deceiver. Evil One. Prince of Demons. Great Dragon. His arrows, venomed, sink to the heart. His chariot wheels, when meant to be heard, quake the brave. His crimson fingers colored a third of heaven’s host. Great was their war; great is their war. Their skirmish toppled heaven; the serpent spoke on earth.

If the lights turned on, if we could see with physical eyes the god of this world and his troops arrayed about us, fetal would be man’s position. Staring at the beautiful face, hearing the capturing voice, would we be tempted to worship? Would most kneel, trembling, or try to crown him king? Though he remains absent from news channels, dire is our station; extreme, our contest; savage, our enemy.

“Stand upright, men of God; grip the hilt firmly. Your God is with you.”

Yet forward, Christ calls us; to a bloody victory we march. Onward, to a clash forbidding cliché. Advancing, for as Bunyan reminds us, we have no armor for our backs. But what can stir our blood and steel our mettle before such a terror? As great generals of the earth ride up and down the battlefront to rouse great deeds, men of God reached for words.

A Summons

Overhear Paul’s call to battle as he writes Christ’s troops in Ephesus. To begin, he does not undersell their foe. They cannot meet the like on earth.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

Not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces, bodiless battalions. Not against a race of slaves or inferior beings, but against rulers and authorities and cosmic powers. Not against fortresses of stone, but against towers in the heavenlies. We are not outmanned but outspecied. Do trees array for battle against the forest fire? Do sheep march on a pack of wolves? Does wheat charge the sifter? Does flesh dare ascend the hill to demonic spirits? If words hold heat to waken courage, what words can help us keep rank against such terror?

To War

As if he can see the uncertainty in our eyes, the apostle cries, “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might” (Ephesians 6:10). Mount no steed of your own strength. Paul rides to the front lines as the Levites did the Israelite armies of old: “Let not your heart faint. Do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the Lord your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory” (Deuteronomy 20:3–4). Stand! Stand! Stand! in the Lord (Ephesians 6:11, 13–14).

Stand upright, men of God; grip the hilt firmly. Your God is with you. Let not unbelief unhorse you now. As the fiends drum and hell hollers, one is with you higher than they, who greets their joint armies with a laugh. Stand firm. Withstand in this evil day. Take not one step back.

He goes forth with his people and clads us in his own armor. David required no great armor of the king, but we need the armor of the greater King David. “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). Charge not forth in the chain mail of pride. You face battering rams beyond your defenses, strategies beyond your devising, weapons beyond your shielding. “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13).

Spare not one piece: “Put on the whole armor of God.” Fasten on the belt of truth. Clasp the breastplate of righteousness. Shod your feet with the gospel of peace and its readiness. Forget the shield of faith to your own peril. Step not within bow range without your helmet. Go nowhere without his word, God’s two-edged sword. Pray for yourself; pray for each other. Watch over yourself; watch over others. Have each other’s back, left, and right. To war we ride.

To Christ

We dress not only in God’s armor, but go forth with God’s own Son, our own brother in the flesh. “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep,” Alexander the Great once remarked. “I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

Oh, the enemy has much to fear. Though we be regarded as sheep and are killed all the day long, what lion stands among us, before us, beside us. Weep no more, you troubled saint; the Lion of Judah has conquered. Though the giant barks loudly, we have one Man of War among us who does not need all five smooth stones. Though we still must fight if we would reign, he returns with the head of our foe.

“War has never seen the like before: conquest through crucifixion, dominion through death.”

What Brother is better born for the day of adversity than he who was born to bear our adversity? Having refused Saul’s armor, the greater David did not refuse Saul’s flesh. Born in the form of a slave, the eternal Son did not unsheathe weapons of divinity to win the war. See him stand fast, as man, for men. Tempted in the wilderness as man. Mocked, bleeding, dying as man. He wore the peasant’s weakness over his robes of eternity that he might win our salvation through the gory affair.

And how he conquered. He took on flesh to have it torn, a body to have it broken, blood to have it spilled upon the altar — for us. War has never seen the like before: conquest through crucifixion, dominion through death. Men twisted thorns, but crowned him; he hung under the name of “King.” Alexander’s Lion is also the Lamb, slaughtered, risen, reigning.

Will we not say, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16)? What safer place exists than on mission with Jesus? Demons fall distraught before him: “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29). He holds the keys to Death and Hades. A sword protrudes from his mouth — one little word shall fell the ancient foe, as Luther put. An iron scepter is in his hands. On his blood-dipped robe he has a name written: King of kings and Lord of lords. His eyes flame with fire. On his head rest many crowns. The armies of heaven follow behind on white horses (Revelation 1:12–16; 19:11–16).

He is our brother, our Savior, our friend. No safer place in all the world than beside him in his conflict. “Let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:13–14).

To Glory

Do not fail to look to the time beyond. Feed your warring spirit thoughts of coming peace. The end has been proclaimed from the beginning. Soon and very soon it shall be asked, Where now are his foes? Where now the boasts of men? Where now those mighty authorities and cosmic powers? Sunk to the bottom of the sea like a stone.

Mighty ones of the earth, show yourselves! Nations gathered against his Anointed, come forth! Shattered they soon shall lie, dashed to pieces like a potter’s vessel. Soon it will be asked, Where now is your taunt, you who refused to kiss the Son? Soon it will be commanded, “As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me” (Luke 19:27).

So come, my brothers and sisters, heirs of the kingdom, sons of Abraham by faith, mighty men of heaven, precious daughters of the King — while as yet despised of earth and beleaguered. Come, citizens of the unseen world, rulers of the age to come, judges of angels. Rise up, you men of the cross, sisters of the crown, soldiers of Christ endowed with his very Spirit. Come and speak. Come and die. Come and serve. Come and overcome. Come and stand firm. Crawl not after the same grass that entertains the cattle of the earth. Rise up! Partake of the heavenly bread, the heavenly conflict, the heavenly reward.

Do not mind you are outnumbered: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Pay no heed to man, in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he? Do you suffer? Think it not strange or worth mentioning compared to the glory that is to be revealed. Grumble not about those scars — very soon, they shall shine in heaven as your crest of glory. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” march on. Make good your fealty of faith. For glory. For honor. For immortality. For the King, with the King, in the King’s power. Onward against the foe, brothers and sisters: to war, to Christ, to glory.