God doesn’t have goodness or love that he might dispatch them; he is goodness and love. God sends these attributes after us as a way of giving us himself. “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (Ex. 33:14). So when we put the beauty of these nouns and the intensiveness of the verb together with the sense that God sets out deliberately to have us experience him in our lives through his goodness and his steadfast love, the combined effect is the beautiful reality that it is the Lord himself who pursues his people.

Psalm 23:6 speaks about two things “following” us: goodness and mercy. Almost without exception, commentators on this verse point out that the verb “follow” is in fact a very weak rendering. Richard Briggs goes so far as to say that it is “the one word in the whole psalm that in my opinion has been persistently poorly translated in English.”1 Instead, at the very heart of the word is the meaning “pursue.” Goodness and mercy pursue David; they do not merely follow him. The word is so intensive, it is often used in combat scenes, where people are “pursued” to death, but the word itself is not negative and can be used in delightfully positive, instructive ways:
Turn away from evil and do good;seek peace and pursue it. (Ps. 34:14)
In Psalm 23:6, says Briggs, “It is almost as if the verse attributes both agency and initiative to these divine characteristics here, whereas ‘follow’ might suggest a sort of tagging along with me. Instead, [God’s] goodness and mercy are dogged and determined in their pursuit.”2 God has sent them after me.
This psalm shows us how active the shepherd is toward us, and this is another signal that the Lord himself is doing something extraordinary for us.
This sense grows stronger when we consider the two subjects in the pursuit: “goodness” and “mercy.” It is no accident that the two are used together here. Neither is an abstract noun that we can understand apart from God, as if the two are ethereal forces out there in the world; rather they are covenantal nouns. In Exodus 33 when the Lord tells Moses that he has found favor in his sight and that he knows Moses by name, Moses asks to see God’s glory. In response, God says: “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy” (Ex. 33:19). God’s glory is revealed as his goodness and his name, and both are expressed in his covenant love to his redeemed people: “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Ex. 34:6–7).
In the exodus from Egypt, the people being rescued were pursued by the fury and tyranny of Pharaoh. In their ongoing rescue from sin, they were pursued in the wilderness by the goodness and mercy of their covenant Lord, who did not abandon them in their rebellion but kept making a way for their return to him. David knows that the “goodness” which pursues him is the covenant goodness of God: “You are good and do good” (Ps. 119:68). He knows that the “mercy” hot on his heels is the covenant mercy of God: it is hesed, the word for God’s steadfast love.
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The Resurrection isn’t a fable about liberation from the prison of this material world. Rather, the Resurrection is the beginning of a total renovation of this world. The Old Management has been tossed out on his ear, and New Management is running this place: the Risen Christ.

From the opening salvo of Genesis’ creation account, to the adventurous romps of the Patriarchs, Prophets, and Kings; from the scrupulous chronologies to the precise measurements for the tabernacle & temple; from the glorious conquests to the disastrous exiles, the Scripture is clear. It isn’t just a collection of moralistic assertions. It isn’t a book of food for thought for philosophers or theologians.
It’s a history. It’s our history. It’s a book about the world we live in, how God made it, and more to the point, how He redeemed it. Of course, it’s not only a history. Nevertheless, too often Christians are lured into thinking that the Scriptures are written to bring us to some higher plane.
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Three decades on and this collection of essays is just as timely as when they first appeared—even more so. The world has simply gotten even more worldly over this period, but so too has the church. We need to start dealing with the idols of our age—starting with our own.

Thirty years ago a very important volume appeared edited by Os Guinness and John Seel. It has the title which I used above: No God But God (Moody, 1992). I have referred to it often and quoted from it often. While this will not be a proper book review, it is time to devote an entire article to this key volume.
I do this in part because just yesterday I penned a piece that dealt with some of the themes found in the book. In particular I wrote that just because Christians enjoy a personal relationship with God does not mean the Creator-creature distinction is obliterated.
It remains forever: God will always be God, and we will not be. We must always have a proper – that is a biblical – view of the Living God. And that is what this book seeks to do. It has some parameters: it is written for and about American evangelicalism, but it is relevant for the whole of the West. And in good measure it deals with modernity and how it has impacted the churches.
Above all this book is about the problem we Christians have with idolatry. We can be just as idolatrous as any pagan can be. Indeed, the subtitle of the book is “Breaking with the Idols of Our Age.” Until believers deal with the idols they are worshipping, we will have little ability to break the idols of the world.
Thus the importance of this book. Incisive essays by some leading Christian thinkers are presented here. The authors are, besides Seel and Guinness: David Wells, Paul Vitz, Thomas Oden, Richard Keyes, Michael Cromartie and Alonzo McDonald. Here I will simply present some key quotes from the first three chapters. The first two are likely penned by Guinness, while the third is written by Richard Keyes.
Preamble
“Our greatest need is for a third Great Awakening.” p. 11
“It is time for our church to examine the integrity and effectiveness of its character and witness…For if the nation’s crisis is largely because of the decreasing influence of faith on American culture, the church’s crisis is largely because of the increasing influence of American culture on Christian faith.” p. 12
“[We] recognize this critical moment and reaffirm the historic call to ‘Let God be God’ and to ‘Let the church be the church—and free’…reminding ourselves that who we are comes before what we do, that faith comes before works, that worship and contemplation come before action, that citizenship in the city of God comes before citizenship in the city of man, and that as in the past the church can only be freed from its cultural captivity today by the free Word of a free God.
“We recognize that some matters must be left to God alone and acknowledge openly that a spiritual and theological awakening within evangelicalism is our greatest need, but it is not ours to predict, initiate, or effect. Such an awakening is a matter of divine sovereignty, not human engineering or historical cycles. Yet we know too the perils of fatalism, of a passive, private devotion to God, and of presuming that praying well is the best revenge for the loss of cultural influence.
“We therefore call for a humble dependence on God that is matched by vigorous rededication to doing what is ours to do.” p. 14
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