Ever Expanding Pleasure

In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began (Tit. 1:2)

            When Paul writes and preaches God’s word, he does so with an eye, with an aim, with a target on eternity. He writes in hope of eternal life.  For Paul, a temporary life is never enough. There is not enough time in this life to satisfy his hunger for God. Without eternal life, people are, at best, pitiful creatures with infinite and eternal desires. If there is no eternity, then our desires can never be anything but unsatisfied.

            Our loves, desires, and passions are unmanageably large. The more we find our desires fulfilled, the bigger our desires get. The more we find pleasure, the greater our capacity for pleasure becomes. It has been noted, at least back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), a disciple of the presocratic philosopher Democritus, that pleasure seems to be affected by a law of diminishing returns. A particular experience brings pleasure, but the next time we have the same experience, we find less pleasure in it, and the next time even less. The pleasure of an experience shrinks and shrivels the more often we have that particular experience.

            Epicurus' conclusion was to reject pleasurable experiences and find pleasure in the rejection of pleasure. But others before him and after him have tried instead to experience as much pleasure as they can, seeing the dissatisfaction as something to be overcome with energetic embrace of newer, faster, and bigger experiences of pleasure. But I do not believe in the law of diminishing returns. In fact, I believe it should be rejected out of hand. Heat the tar and rip open the down pillows. The law of diminishing returns is heathenish nonsense.

            It is not the pleasure that changes. It is we ourselves that are changed by the pleasure. Our desires and our capacity for pleasure stretches and grows whenever we enjoy ourselves. When our desire is fulfilled, it is the desire that grows. A pleasure that once filled a desire to overflowing seems thin because the desire has grown, not because the pleasure has shrunk.  This is why attempts at detachment make sense if there is no God. Experiencing pleasure makes us want pleasure even more. If pleasure is limited, then experiencing pleasure is a dangerous game.

            If there is no eternity, and if there is no infinite God, then humanity is a terrible joke. There is nothing but dissatisfaction, because every satisfaction that we find in the world will only grow our capacity for satisfaction. The world is not growing in its ability to satisfy. So even if we are satisfied by the world at the moment, there is nothing but dissatisfaction in our future.

            If, however, there is eternal life with an infinite God, at whose right hand there are pleasures forevermore, who can satisfy us with the fatness of his house, then being human is not some cosmic prank. Satisfaction is a possibility. There is a well deep enough to quench the infinitely expanding capacity for pleasure. And that satisfaction is at the right hand of God, seated on the great white throne. That satisfaction is in Jesus.

Because eternal life is spent with the incarnate, infinite, and eternal God-man Jesus, we can find satisfaction. Because eternity is truly spent with the infinitely beautiful and good God, who created and redeemed us, we can find satisfaction. Our capacity for pleasure will continue to grow, but it will never outgrow the infinite God.

Who is blessed?

Blessed are they that keep his testimonies,

and that seek him with the whole heart (Ps. 119:2)

Here is a description of someone who is blessed. Those that keep God's testimony are those that are blessed. Those that seek God with their whole heart are blessed people. These two things are descriptions of a blessing. You are really a blessed person, God has been very kind to you, if you find yourself keeping God's testimonies and seeking God with your whole heart. Here, as in other places, we find that even our obedience is something to say ‘thank you’ for.

God's testimonies are a description of a blessed life. God's law is where we find a description of a life full of blessings. And keeping of God's testimonies, obeying God’s law, is the way that we find God’s blessings. God has hidden many wonderful blessings in the world, and the treasure map that he has given us to hunt out those blessings is his law. Obeying the law keeps the piano strings of our life in tune so that we can produce beautiful music. The God who made the piano understands how to tune it.

Christianity is not a Gnostic mystery religion full of secret and invisible blessings. The God of the Bible gave us the Bible in order to be clear about where the blessing were. And the psalmist tells us plainly that a blessed life is evidenced by the keeping of the law.

A blessed life is also marked by an undivided heart. Blessed are they that are seeking God with their whole heart. A divided heart is a heavy burden. Paul calls us to live our lives unto the Lord with our whole heart. Simplicity of heart, single-heartedness, where our whole heart is focused on the serving Christ, is a tremendous blessing.

“So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart” (Act 2:46). “For our boasting is this: the testimony of our conscience that we conducted ourselves in the world in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God, and more abundantly toward you” (2 Cor. 1:12). “But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3).

Following Jesus is not generally complicated. It is a matter of not letting our devotion get divided between Jesus and anything else. Serve God with your whole heart. Blessings are obedience shaped. Seek God with your whole heart. And a heart that is focused upon Jesus will keep his commandments. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

The Story of the Church Calendar

            The historic Church has sought to place memorials of Jesus everywhere. This is a right desire (Deut 6:5-9) and the calendar did not escape the zeal to memorialize. But because what we are looking to memorialize is a whole story, the memorial feasts of the church calendar are themselves a story.

             Advent celebrates the longing that God built into the world before Christ. It leads to the celebration of the fulfillment of the longing of the Jews as we celebrate the incarnation of Jesus with the twelve days of Christmas. Though God has drawn near throughout our history, God’s people had always been barred from the inner life of God. But the Son of God became a man and opened up direct fellowship with God by becoming the door to that life himself. God has always been the savior, but by taking a body to dwell among us, Jesus became savior in a new way, and bringing a salvation that was deeper, broader, higher, and longer in every way. So much so that all the salvations that God wrought in the past turned out to have been shadows of what Jesus came to do in the flesh.

Epiphany is the first day after Christmas and is the celebration of the coming of the wise men to worship Jesus. As the first Gentiles come to worship Jesus, in them we see that Jesus is the fulfillment of the longing, not just of the Jews but of all off the peoples and nations of the world. Just as the gospel went first to the descendents of Abraham, and then to the Gentiles, we move from Christmas to Epiphany, but that is just the first act.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Resurrection Sunday together make up the next holiday, the cycle of Easter. The word “Easter” is Anglo Saxon for spring equinox. Easter was calculated using the equinox, and the term for the equinox (Oestra), according to Bede, gave its name to the Feast of the Resurrection. (Incidentally, the nation of Austria is also named after the spring equinox.)

            ​We used to worship a goddess that was said to be the power behind the equinox, but she has been forgotten, and the heavens, which shout the praises of God, have come to be recognized and understood for what they are really saying. The word ‘Easter’ itself has been cleansed as the gospel has gone forth. Easter is now the festival day in which we celebrate the fact that winter is not just overcome every year; the winter of the world was overcome when the true spring began. When the Son of God burst forth from the grave as he was raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit of God, the winter of the world was wrecked.

            ​With our sin, Adam and Eve cast the world into winter, but God soon began giving hints of spring, what T.S. Elliot, in his poem ‘Little Gidding,’ calls, “midwinter spring”, where a day with winter on each side is bright with the hint of a coming spring.

When the short day is brightest with frost and fire

. . . stirs the dumb spirit, not with wind, but with pentecostal fire.

            ​All throughout the Old Testament there are midwinter spring days, where spring itself does not come, but God makes it clear that the spring is coming. Resurrection is coming, and history itself will have a spring equinox, when history turns from winter to spring.

            ​This is why we call this festival Easter. This is why we named it after Spring, and why Spring itself has come to mean resurrection. The true meaning of Spring, the actual reason that God set up the cycle of the equinoxes and seasons, is that God is a God who brings life from death. So everything in the spring is a legitimate symbol to be used in our celebration of the resurrection. Be it eggs, rabbits, flowers, dressing the children in new outfits, or seeing the ladies in beautiful spring clothes, it is all a wonderful and legitimate way of celebrating the resurrection when thethe winter of history was broken and the spring came.

            Jesus' resurrection is the turning point in history because it leads to the revolution of the ascension. Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven (Acts 1:9). Ascension Thursday is the day that the church has traditionally set aside to celebrate the installation of Jesus., that is when he was anointed as King of kings and Lord of lords at the right hand of God the Father.

It was a revolution because every authority in the pre-Ascension world was unseated by the work of Jesus. "And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Col 2:15). After the resurrection all authority on heaven and on earth is given to Jesus (Matt. 28:18). When Jesus "was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God" (Mark 16:19), the revolution was accomplished, complete, and finished and Jesus was installed as the ruler of all. Daniel describes the coming of the Son of Adam to heaven. He gives us a view at the other end of the journey of Jesus' ascension. The Apostles saw him leave for heaven; Daniel is given a vision of Jesus arriving in heaven. "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed" (Dan 7:13-14). In the ascension, the authority of mankind, the authority that was forfeited when Adam sinned, was restored to Mankind in the second Adam.

            But that restoration does not just remain with Jesus. Ten days later, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit of God was poured out on the church and the final restoration of humanity in the church began. The Church is the body of Christ, and when the Spirit was poured on Jesus as he was anointed the King of kings and the Perfect High Priest of the heavenly tabernacle, the Spirit flowed down his head, down his beard, and onto his body. When Jesus is anointed King he gives gifts unto, his Church, (Eph. 4:8), but the first gift that he gives is himself in the gift of his Spirit. Hence the name ‘Spiritual’ Gifts (1 Cor. 12:1).

            Next we come to Halloween and All Saints Day. Halloween was not, and has never been, a pagan holiday. The Christian calendar, because of the Hebrew influence, has always begun its celebration on what the Romans considered to be the day before. The first days went from evening to morning (see Gen. 1), but the Romans reckoned their days from midnight to midnight. Out of Hebrew habit, the feast day celebrations began the evening before the day of celebration. Because much of the calendrical reckoning was done with Roman calendars, it felt as if the celebrations were beginning a day early.

            What this says about the different views of history is a fun question, but for now, what is important is that is how the party on the eve of a celebration came to find itself on the calendar as its own event with its own traditions and activities. Halloween is but the contraction of All Hallows' Eve. All Hallows' (or All Saint's) is the celebration of the work of God through the church. It is the day when we make the devil-crushing feet of the Body of Christ dance at the honour and the joy of it (Rom. 16:20).

            All Saints' is the final hurrah of the church calendar after which we return again to Advent. Longing remembered, once it is fulfilled, is worthy of celebration. This longing also becomes a reminder that all of our longing and all of our love for God will find it's fulfilment in the return of Christ and the final resurrection of the Body, followed by the judgment of Christ and an eternity of life with God for the just and eternal death for those outside of Christ.


            There are no old world pagan holidays left on the calendar handed down to us from Christendom. There have been a handful of romantic poets and secularists that have wanted to keep the holidays while jettisoning Jesus, but they have had to make things up and grasp at straws. The pagan calendars have all been forgotten along with their gods. The closest that we get is May Day, but no one even remembers who Maia was, let alone how her day was celebrated in the past. There are still a handful of names that have remained on the calendar from ancient pagan times. Each of the seven names of the days of the week are derived from the Roman and Norse names of the gods of the seven visible planets, (Sun Day, Moon Day, Tiu's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Saturn's Day), but the way back to worship those gods, or to the worship of the hosts of heaven at all, has been forever blocked and dammed by the resurrection of Jesus. Now the planets are in the right hand of Jesus (Rev. 1:16), while he seven Spirits represented by the seven candlesticks of the temple turned out to be but a shadow and a representation of the seven Spirits of the seven planets as they danced in light and glory before the holy of holies built without hands (Rev. 1:4, 12-13; Heb. 9:1-3, 23-24). The principalities of the planets were created to lead us into the presence of God in the first place. Though in the new covenant that job has been taken over by the church (Eph. 3:10), there is no reason to object to the use of the names of these forgotten gods, if only to remember that they have been forgotten, having been overshadowed by the brightness of the glory of a crucified and risen Christ. Time is in the hands of Jesus

So as we seek to recover and reinvigorate the church calendar, we should remember, in a real sense, the calendar is not for religious activities. We are not renewing the covenant with God during the feasts of the church calendar, we are remembering, and the remembering causes us to celebrate. So the primary function of the church calendar is to remind us of the great works of God on our behalf, And to mark out the time of our lives according to what God has done in Christ. The primary purpose of the church calendar is to give a rhythm and vocabulary to our joy, freedom, and hope.

Your Family the Choir

Ephesians 5:18-21

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; 19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; 20 Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; 21 Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

Whenever a Christian understanding of marriage is discussed, if it is not the place where we started, we always make our way around to the 5th chapter of Ephesians. Ephesians gives the clearest and longest explanation of the Christian family. It discusses the roles of husband and wife (Eph. 5:22-24), the need for love and respect (Eph. 5:22, 25) and the fact that marriage is created by God to point away from itself to God and his relationship with creation, as Christ and the Church are brought together in a relationship of the same shape as a husband and wife. Marriage is a sign and a symbol, created by God to be lived and experienced by people (Eph. 5:32). “This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church,” Paul says as he wraps up his explanation of married life.

But what we often miss is the context of Paul's 'marriage code.' Paul has just told the Ephesians that they are to be filled with the Spirit. And they are to be filled with the Spirit in the same sort of way you are drunk with wine (vv. 18). When someone is drunk, their entire self is drunk. You cannot be drunk but still have a sober hand. You cannot be drunk, but still have a sober mind. If you are drunk, then all of you is drunk. Christians are to be filled with the Spirit that way. And as they are filled with the Spirit in that way, music will come pouring out of their hearts (vv. 19) and thanksgiving will come pouring out of their souls (vv. 20). When you sing together, it is important that submission defines your choir (vv. 21). Singing together begins with learning to submit to one another.

Paul sticks to his subject as he turns to God's intentions for the family. The husband and wife are to sing their lives in harmony. They have different melodies to sing, but they are to sing in such a way that beautiful music comes out. When the call for the wife to submit is put in the context of Paul's larger concern of the music of the Spirit in the church, it takes on a beautiful subtlety that is lost when the verse is read out of context. The husband is the choir director and is to set the key with his love, while the wife is to submit her melody to her husband's song. The husband's song is to surround his wife in love, providing a sturdy base line and steady rhythm for his wife's melody to run and dance on.

In the story of these two melodies, harmonizing and playing off of one another to produce something greater than what a single melody can, even the dissonance can become, in the final product, part of the beauty of the whole. When two melodies run up against one another, the result is grating, but music without dissonance never goes anywhere. Music without dissonance has no story. Music without dissonance is called exercise; playing scales. So embrace the dissonance as it arises, knowing that it is part of the music. It is what moves the melody forward. But look for resolution. Long term dissonance is no way to sing. Turn from your sin, open up your ears, and get back to working towards singing together.

Of course, as a husband and wife sing together, other voices are born into the choir. Children learn to sing along by learning to obey their parents (Eph. 6:1-3), but the commands that they are required to obey should bring them into the choir, not press them out of it. This is one of the reasons that it is so important for parents to be working on loving and respecting one another. If these miniature people are called to join into the song of their parents, the melodies do not need to be complicated, only consistent. Your children are called to be living breathing melodies that harmonize with you. If they always have to pick whether to harmonize with Mom or with Dad, then they will struggle to sing well, because they will always be trying to sing in two keys at once. A united front is not just for the sake of the parents getting their children to obey. A united front is where a child can most successfully flourish in discovering who God has created them to be.

So be filled with the Spirit, and learn to live your life as a harmony to the melody of Christ who died for you, and as you submit to the Master Choir Director, you will discover harmony with one another.

Asaph's Plea for the Poor

O deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of the wicked:

forget not the congregation of thy poor forever.

20 Have respect unto the covenant:

for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty (Ps. 74:19-20).

            According to Levitical law, if a person who is bringing an offering cannot afford the offering of the lamb or goat, they are to bring a turtledove (Lev. 5:7; 5:11; 14:22; 14:30). The turtledove is the offering of the poor. Asaph (the author of this Psalm) gives us a clue as to how to understand the sacrificial system. When Asaph prays for the poor, (or rather, when Asaph leads the congregation in a prayer for the poor) he prays for the turtledove. "O deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of the wicked: forget not the congregation of thy poor forever" (Psalms 74:19).

            The poor became the animal that they sacrificed. When they sinned, they brought their sacrifices. God accepted their sacrifices, because he was accepting them. When they wanted to be near God but could not because of the curse of death, they brought their turtledove. Their turtledove symbolized them. It was killed, then put on the altar, and brought near to God.

            The people could not go into God’s presence without dying, but the sacrifice, symbolizing them, went on their behalf. The sacrifice was an act of love to God, not because they gave something up for God, but because in it their sacrifice went where they desired to go but could not - into the direct presence of God. Their sacrifice was an act of worship showing a desire to cross the boundary that was created by sin and to bridge the distance between the worshipper and God.

            This is the opposite of the sacrifices of paganism. The sacrifices of the heathen were given so that the gods would keep their distance and eave the human world alone. Unless it was a plea for a defense against some other god, the ancient world wanted divinity to keep to their own sphere.

            But not the book of Leviticus. The book of Leviticus is the book where the congregation of the creator God stretches and reaches to be near the God they love. It was not just the act of the worshiping congregation. We love God because He first loved us. The sacrificial system is given to us by the God who loves us. He is teaching his people, even though they are still marred and held by the curse and stench of the tomb, how to draw near to Him because he loves us. When we are as unlovely as can be, wrapped and warped by death itself, God tells us how to get as near as we can. Near enough that he begins to spread his holiness over us, and holiness always overcomes death.

            God begins to grow faith in his people by accepting them. He begins to grow a fear of him in his people by forgiving them (Ps. 130:4). He begins to transform his people by drawing them to worship him (Ps. 115). And he begins to create an expectation that he will save them by giving them covenant promises in his presence (Ps. 74:20).

            That is why Asaph turns from a prayer for God's turtledoves to this request. "Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty" (Ps. 74:20). God's people have come to expect that, because God has accepted their sacrifices, He will keep his promises (Ps. 105:42). He will be their refuge (Ps. 9:9). He will keep his covenant (Ps. 105:7-8). He will keep them from being overcome by the darkness because they are the people that are brought near (Lev. 26:44-45). Because they have been in the light of God's presence, they know they want to be kept out of the darkness. Because they have experienced the comfort of God's love, they want the cruelty that slinks and slithers in the shadows to be held at bay.

But notice, it is their experience of worshiping God in his presence that produces in them a love of the light. It is their experience of the Grace of God in his courts that grows in them a desire to avoid the darkness. It is because God, in his love, has accepted them that they hate cruelty. God's presence transforms our loves, reorients our desires, and reawakens our taste buds of beauty. Therefore, make the courts of the house of God, the congregation of God's people gathered for worship, a priority for you and your family.