When Grief Like Sea Billows Roll through Your Holidays
Losing my mom has made me recognize afresh that I am a child of weakness. My strength indeed is small. The loss of a loved one removes our veneer of self-confidence, our masks of self-sufficiency. C. S. Lewis said that the death of a loved one is like an amputation. So, until we meet again in that heavenly city, I’m a son without a mother—walking with a limp and leaning on Jesus.
When my mother passed away last winter, I discovered the gift of grief.
In the span of a single year, my mother went from a vibrant, constant presence in my life—through phone calls, texts, and when we could, in-person visits—to a swift decline in mental and physical health.
The first sign, for me, was an unexpected call at 5 a.m. one morning. Mom had many skills but being active at 5 a.m. was not one of them. Calls at 10 a.m., lunchtime, or late in the evening were much more likely. I immediately answered, thinking something had to be urgent.
“Mom, is everything okay?” I asked, pretending I had been up for hours while clearing the cobwebs from my mind and the frog from my throat.
“Oh, I’m just calling to see how you are doing,” she said, “but I hope I’m not interrupting dinner for you guys.”
Maybe she’s just confused. Maybe she had a bad night’s sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to believe this was what my sister, Laura, had been gently warning me about. My sister and her husband had recently moved back to Illinois to live near my parents. And in recent weeks, they had told me that Mom had forgotten how to write a check. Well, that’s not that crazy. Who writes checks anymore? I had rationalized at the time.
“Mom, you do know that it’s five o’clock in the morning, right?” I offered.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You know, I keep getting my times mixed up, with daylight savings and all,” she replied, though we were nowhere near a time change. After talking a bit more, we ended the call. When I told my sister about it, she said these sorts of incidents were becoming more common.
A few days later, I got another call from Mom—this time more bizarre. She insisted that men were in her house, that my father had let them in, and that she’d called the police. My heart sank as a realization began to set in: I think we are losing her.
We clung to one last desperate possibility that it could be Mom’s iron deficiency, something she’d struggled with for much of her life. We were hoping against hope that with a few doctor visits and medical adjustments, Mom might return to her normal self. My sister dutifully begged, cajoled, and shepherded her to doctors and specialists, updating me every time.
My dad quit his job so he could take care of Mom as she slowly lost her memory, until we learned the hard, final, difficult news: The results of her MRI revealed significant dementia.
Dementia is still a mystery, even to the most learned minds. In the season after her diagnosis, we talked with experts and with friends who had endured this journey with their own loved ones. There was no way to predict which course Mom’s health would take. Would she, like the sweet wife of a friend in my small group, slowly decline over nearly a decade? Or would she, like my late mother-in-law, decline quickly?
When you lose a loved one to dementia, you grieve twice—once when they lose their mind, and again when they lose their life.
The early grief is like a weight on the soul. I can’t explain the heaviness you feel in realizing that the one who birthed you, raised you, consoled you when you came home crushed after a bad day at school—the one who stood on the sidelines and cheered at your basketball games, who said everything you wrote was amazing even when it wasn’t; the one who introduced you to Jesus—is slipping away.
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The Trinity and the Gospel of John
Written by Scott R. Swain |
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
In describing the true light’s reception by believers, the prologue picks up a theme already introduced in John 1:3 and elaborated more fully throughout the Gospel, namely, the indivisible operation of the persons of the Trinity. The believing reception of the Word, resulting in the reception from the Word of “the right to become children of God,” is a reception effected by God (through the Spirit: Jn 3:5-6, 8): “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:12-13).Brandon Smith’s most recent book, The Trinity in the Canon: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Proposal (B&H Academic), offers fifteen chapters on a variety of topics related to the Trinity and the Bible written by a gifted group of biblical scholars and theologians. I was delighted to contribute the chapter on the Gospel of John. Below is an excerpt on John’s Prologue, which is posted with permission of the publisher.
The Being of the Word (Jn 1:1–2)John’s prologue begins with “three short affirmations” regarding the central subject matter of the Gospel. These affirmations tell us who that central subject matter is, how he is, and what he is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).[1] The threefold repetition of the verb “was” locates the Word on the divine side of the creator-creature distinction, on the side of God’s eternal and unchangeable being as opposed to the creature’s temporal and changeable becoming.[2]
In affirming the Word’s eternal existence (“In the beginning was the Word”), John’s prologue echoes Proverbs 8’s speech regarding divine Wisdom in at least one regard.[3] John identifies the Word not merely as a divine attribute, much less a literary personification. John identifies the Word as an eternally and unchangeably existing “someone,” a “who” and not merely a “what.”[4] “This one,” the prologue tells us, “was in the beginning with God” (Jn 1:2).
In describing the Word’s eternal relation to God (“the Word was toward God”), the prologue suggests why John has chosen the title “Word” instead of “Wisdom” to identify the second person of the Trinity.[5] The Word’s eternal, Godward repose is what qualifies him to perform the divine works of making, saving, and glorifying all things, especially human beings. According to certain ancient conceptions of human psychology, a word faces two directions and fulfills two functions.[6] As “inward logos,” the word remains within a person and grasps what a person knows. The inward word is the mind in the mode of being understood,[7] what Augustine calls “a word in your heart” (cf. Matt 12:35).[8] As “outward logos,” the word expresses and communicates to others what a person knows, making that knowledge common to, shared by others. The outward word is the mind in the mode of being uttered (cf. Matt 12:34).[9] John 1:1-2 identifies the Word as God’s “inward logos,” who eternally sees, hears, and contemplates God and God’s plan for creatures (Jn 3:11, 32; 6:46; 8:26, 38, 40; 15:15). This, in turn, qualifies the Word both to interpret and execute outwardly God’s plan for creatures (Jn 1:3-5, 14, 18; cf. Rev 5:4, 9), which, in the case of human beings chosen, redeemed, and sanctified by the Trinity, ultimately involves coming to share the Word’s own contemplative repose as friends and fellows of God (Jn 1:18; 13:23; 15:15; 17:3, 24; cf. 1 John 1:3). The Word’s eternal relation to God is what ultimately distinguishes him, not only from John the Baptist (Jn 1:5-9), but also from Moses (Jn 1:17), to whom God spoke “face to face” (Exod 33:11; Deut 34:10). “No one has ever seen God”—except the Word who faces God (Jn 1:1; 3:11, 32; 6:46; 8:38; cf. Exod 33:20). Therefore, the Word alone is fully qualified to make the Father known (Jn 1:18; cf. Heb 1:1-4).
John’s prologue not only describes the eternal relation of the Word to God (“the Word was toward God”). It also predicates deity of the Word (“the Word was God”). By itself, such a predication is not necessarily distinctive or unique. Philo of Alexandria calls the Word a “second god.”[10] What distinguishes John’s predication from many Greco-Roman and Jewish descriptions of the Word, is his claim that the Word is uncreated God, and thus divine in the full and supreme sense of the term.[11] Unlike Philo’s Logos or 1 Enoch’s Son of Man, the Johannine Word is not God’s first and supreme creature, through whom God relates to all other creatures.[12] The Johannine Word is one with the uncreated God, existing before and above all other so-called “gods” (Jn 1:15, 30; 3:31; 10:30, 34-36; cf. Pss 8:5; 95:3; 1 Cor 8:4-6). As we will see more fully below, John 1:1’s predication of deity, in the full and supreme sense, to the second person of the Trinity is both comprehensive and structurally significant (Jn 20:28).
One final observation regarding the eternal being of the Word is in order. Though John moves away from identifying the second person of the Trinity as the Word after the prologue, he does not move away from the conceptual framework the prologue has established. Throughout his Gospel, John offers a twofold description of the Son that mirrors the prologue’s twofold description of the Word. In conveying the distinctive nature of the Son’s person and work, John speaks in a variety of ways about the Son’s relation to God (that which distinguishes him from the Father, i.e., his mode of being God); and he speaks in a variety of ways about the Son’s oneness with God (that which he holds in common with the Father, i.e., his being God). In John’s testimony, both patterns of speech are essential to identifying who the Son is and how the Son operates. This twofold pattern of speech, in turn, becomes central to the conceptual framework of later trinitarian theology.[13]The Agency of the Word (Jn 1:3–5)
The eternal being of the Word determines the nature of his activity in the production of creatures. As we observed above, John 1:1-2 locate the Word on the divine side of the creator-creature distinction, on the side of God’s eternal and unchangeable being, not on the side of the creature’s temporal and changeable becoming. John 1:3 underlines this point by identifying the eternal Word as the creator of all things, the producer of everything that has come to into being: “All things came into being through him, and without him nothing has come into being that has come into being” (Jn 1:3).
In stating that all things came into being “through” him, John identifies the Word who is internal to God’s being as an expression of God’s immediate agency, the divine Word whose utterance brings all things into existence (cf. Jn 5:25; 11:43-44; Rom 4:17; Heb 11:3).[14] To accomplish this identification, John employs the language of “prepositional metaphysics,” which in ancient philosophy was a means of identifying the various “causes” of all things (e.g., efficient, formal, material, final).[15] However, unlike Philo, who identifies the Logos as an “instrumental cause” through which God produces all things,[16] John identifies the Word as a personal mode of God’s immediate agency, in whom God’s own life-and-light-giving power resides (Jn 1:4; 5:26; 6:63).Read More
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5 Essential Traits of Teachable People
A truly humble man or woman will have thoughtful formed opinions and strong convictions; however, he or she will always be ready to have those opinions and convictions challenged–first by God’s word and then by those whom God may bring across their paths.
One of the great goals, to which each of us should aspire in our short lives, is that of becoming a teachable person. That statement sounds, at one and the same time, both noble and straightforward. A careful consideration of this subject, however, leads us to conclude that it is commonly mischaracterized and misunderstood. Many have wrongly implied that teachability is antithetical to voicing convictions or formed opinions. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Teachability sweetly complies with thoughtful convictions and opinions. True teachability is actually one of the rarest of qualities in the hearts and lives of people. So, what is required in order for us to become teachable?
1. Teachability requires revelation.
The first mark of a truly teachable person is that he or she is eager to listen to God in his word. No matter what interest a person may have in science, mathematics, literature, art, music, linguistics, politics or athletics, if he or she does not have a deep and abiding interest in Scripture, then all the learning he or she has amassed is ultimately useless.
The great lie with which Satan tempted our first parents was the lie that they could interpret the word by means of their reasoning capacity as detached from the special revelation that God spoke to them concerning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Solomon explained the futility of the quest for knowledge apart from the desire to know God through his word when he wrote,Of the making of many books there is no end, and much learning is wearisome to the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”(Eccl. 12:13)
Jesus also drew this conclusion when he said,
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?”(Mark 8:36-37)
A teachable man or woman is one who gives himself or herself to a pervasive study of God’s word, in order to know him and live for him.
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The Application of Scripture
The most important application that preachers can make is to show how the text demands a particular pattern of thought that is then to be applied amongst the innumerable variables of life. Of course, only the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom can apply God’s word to the soul transforming the mind of the hearer. But when he does, he will not only stir up love for God and his ways, but also enable biblical reasoning, right reason, that will lead to wise decisions.
Your teen-age daughter wants to start dating a young man who is quite nice, very likeable, professes faith in Jesus for salvation, but his dad is an adulterer, even while remaining married, and is verbally abusive toward women. What do you say to her, and why? Someone on pastoral staff at your church, who is not the senior minister, has a spouse who routinely uses profane language. To whom do you go about the matter and why? One of your colleagues at work regular drinks alcohol while on the job in violation of company policy, and you are the only one who knows about it. Do you say anything? If so, to whom? What do you say, and why? The last I checked, none of these scenarios are explicitly addressed by Scripture.
In fact, what we discover when we read God’s word is that it does not explicitly address the vast majority of the scenarios in which we find ourselves. So much for the practicality of Scripture! Not only this, but God has only given us Ten Commandments for all of life, and Jesus went a step further and reduced them to two: Love God and love your neighbor. You do realize what God is telling us in all this, don’t you? God demands that we think! More specifically, God demands that we think his thoughts after him, or think in accordance with his word.
But it is perhaps safe to say that thinking scares many of us. How much easier it is just to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, when to do it, with whom to do it, with whom not to do it, etc. How much easier it is just to have our lives micromanaged for us; for someone to do our thinking for us. You know, for the government to tell you how to keep yourself safe in every situation in life.
Of course, we must implement this kind of micromanagement with the care of very young children.
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