Gog & Myblog

It genuinely scares me to see the racial tension in our country lately. All around, people are angry. Riots break out, store windows are smashed, people are screamed at, shot, run over, sometimes for no more than being a certain color. There is this seething rage that makes it impossible to have human interaction, much less spiritual relationships, possible. Calm, reasoned discourse gets thrown out the window. There is violence on every side. I thought so much of this stuff was behind us and it's terrifying to realize that it's not. Not only is this situation scary, it also doesn't make any sense. People literally have zero choice in their skin color. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin?" (Jeremiah 13:23). It also has zero correlation with their character. "...Behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues , standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes..." (Revelatio...

Some of the saddest stories recorded in the Bible involve spiritually weak or rebellious people finding themselves isolated, with no one to push or pull them back onto the right path.  With very few exceptions (like Jeremiah), no one was around to push the nation of Judah back onto the narrow path in the years before their captivity. "From the prophet even to the priest everyone practices deceit. They heal the brokenness of my people superficially, saying, 'Peace, peace,' but there is no peace" (Jeremiah 8:10-11). A storm was swift approaching which would obliterate the nation because of their sins, but very few people were doing the difficult work of pleading and rebuking on God's behalf.  It takes a special kind of person to have the moral fortitude to tell someone they are doing wrong and need to change. Most people are too afraid to do it. Living a life of moral compromise does that to a person. But there are some people who are passionate about God, wh...

Until I was sixteen, we lived out in western Limestone County, far from the lights of the towns of Athens and Rogersville. You could see a lot of stars at night. Many nights were spent out on the front porch, admiring the sky as we sat on the swing or on the steps, listening to the chorus of the frogs down at the pond. Sometimes dad would take my sister and I out onto the lawn and we would lay on our backs to look for satellites or shooting stars until the bugs in the grass started bothering us.  Tonight my mind is swirling with emotions: fear, anger, confusion, disappointment. At the same time there is thankfulness, and even peace. Sometimes things happen that can't possibly be anticipated. Sometimes those things are good; other times they are hard and painful. Maybe those times are also good, just in a different way.  I don't always know how to process thoughts like these.  But one thing that always helps me is to just breathe some fresh air. Get out of the o...

When I was 21, I befriended Hector Chavez, a Guatemalan Christian who is around my age. We spent hours together every week, him teaching me Spanish and how to cook plantains, and I teaching him a little English. I soon became obsessed with learning Spanish and developed a strong desire to understand Central American culture. I bought a plane ticket bound for Guatemala later that year. I would go alone, with zero personal contacts in the country. Thankfully my friend Leah Donahue had a relative, David Raif, living there, who put me in touch with a brother in Christ named Jeronimo Cox. Many American brethren know of Jeronimo but to me he was a complete stranger. But from the moment I met him, Jeronimo and his late wife, Hipolita, treated me like their son. They were as different from any American couple as I could possibly imagine, but it took about 5 seconds to realize that they were quality people that I wanted to know and understand deeply. My first Sunday there was also my first ...

A few years ago a beloved elder of the church invited me to start walking with him in the mornings. You may know him; he is, appropriately, named Walker Davis. Walker and I would walk for miles at a time, getting up at the crack of dawn in order to finish in time to get ready for work. I really enjoyed our time together. Of course, he still walks in the mornings and I still live in the same place but getting up at dawn is... not... my thing. But one thing it taught me was the value of spending the first part of the day in meditation. We usually talked a good bit, but not constantly.  There were always lulls in the conversation which we took advantage of to think. Or to just imagine how good breakfast was going to taste.  This morning I walked a few miles, listening to Ecclesiastes for the first half and praying for the second half. It always amazes me how much doing something like that can impact my attitude for the next several hours. It is such a blessing to be able to or...

"Artificial intelligence is mankind's biggest threat," according to Elon Musk. Stephen Hawking similarly would have us deeply troubled by the rapid development of A.I. Vladimir Putin fears the robots will "eat" us. It's scary for the average person with limited resources to hear that even billionaires and geniuses are afraid of something. They have the world at their fingertips and they are nervous? I don't stand a chance...  The same thing happened during the Cold War, M.A.D., every backyard had a bunker. The truth is, atomic bombs really could have destroyed huge swaths of the United States in the 60s. A.I. really could do bad things to us today, likely before we even realize it. This world is not safe. There are terrible things happening right now, all over the earth. Maybe the worst part is recognizing our complete powerlessness. We can prepare for some things, but time and chance overtake us all, even billionaires and geniuses. No matter how m...

Tonight at church we were reminded of one of the most beautiful passages in Isaiah: "A highway will be there... and it will be called the Highway of Holiness... The redeemed will walk there" (35:8-9). The context places this highway in the middle of an oasis which once was bare desert, "thirsty ground", "the haunt of jackals". The scorched landscape has now been transformed into a lush garden with spring-fed pools of water, reeds and rushes. Dangerous beasts like lions will stay far from the area, and foolish and unclean people will not wander on the highway. The road will be for the exclusive use of the ransomed of the Lord. The best thing about the road is the place to which it leads: Zion, the home city of God's people. It seems likely to me that many of Isaiah's Jewish readers would have imagined this Highway of Holiness as a road spanning the 900 miles of desert from Babylon, where they were held captive after the deportation, back to Jeru...

In my library I have a fair number of biblical commentaries, but one of my favorites is John H. Elliott on 1 Peter. I don't like it because I agree with all of his theological analysis, but because he provides an absolutely incredible, 39 page linguistic overview of the book in his introduction. In minute detail, Elliott examines Peter's writing style and he comes away with several gems. I'll only focus on one of them in this post, and even so, this post will be much longer than normal. Peter loved alliteration and assonance. Alliteration is what you do when you string words together that start with the same letter, like, "A stupendous inspiration for a Sunday sermon is the setting Saturday sun." Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds and diphthongs like "Anna, Anna, bo-banna Banana-fana fo-fanna Fee-fi-mo-manna Anna!" Below I will list some of the instances of alliteration and assonance which Elliot points out from 1 Peter. He actually list...

I think there's a lot of pressure in this world to always take ourselves very seriously,  to never ever be silly or really have fun. Work, work, work, 24/7, or you'll be a failure, you'll never reach your potential,  you'll let people down. On top of that there's the push by our culture to become immensely concerned when something isn't right in the world. Are you happy? Well the president just said something offensive, so you should be angry. Are you content? Well check your privilege, because there's millions of people starving right now.  On and on it goes... Sometimes we think being silly for a moment will ruin that whole Clint Eastwood tough guy act we've been perfecting... "What if they find out I'm not actually carved out of granite?" I'm so thankful that God does provide joy to his children and ways to relax and be relieved from our daily burdens in a way that is pure and wholesome. Some people turn to alcohol and drugs, some ...

It was one of those days...  My car has been having electrical/mechanical problems lately, which kept me from picking up my parents from the airport tonight. Thankfully my sister was able to do it. A mechanic charged me a pretty penny to tell me what the problem wasn't and offered to charge me another dollar to put in a quarter's worth of new parts. Thankfully I was able to buy the parts myself for less and can do the work at my house. Later in the day another driver backed into my parked car. Thankfully it caused no damage. Throughout it all, I have suffered no want which God did not supply. But I confess to having felt anger, frustration, self-pity, anger, self-pity, anger and then a little more self-pity and anger. Why does stuff like this seem like such a big deal in the moment? None of it was critical to my well-being. None of it hurt anyone I love or care about. And I'm confident none of it seemed nearly as important to God as it seemed to me.  God wa...

"Lamentations" may not be a title that was ever bound for the NYT's best seller list, but it should at least be in every Christian's top 66 picks, not only because it is inspired by God but also for the following reason: it demonstrates in dramatic fashion the terrifying consequences of sin, making this book one of the strongest deterrents to falling away from the Lord. Few other books of the Bible describe in more horrific detail what happens to people who turn away from God. Jeremiah saw the nation of Judah, and in particular Jerusalem, descend into a hellish nightmare where people traded their most precious possessions for a meal (1:11), where children died in their mothers' laps as they asked for food (2:11-12), where some women even ate their own children (2:20), presumably after they died of starvation, where religious leaders had nothing to offer (2:9), where wise and experienced people had no idea what to say (2:10), where the best and the brightest were...

It's such a blessing to have people around you that have known you for years, who, despite knowing about your less picturesque qualities, receive you into their company and confidence. Some of us at times have not even found our own company desirable, and to have someone else invite us in is almost unthinkable. But it happens because that's the way God is, and his people are a visible extension of his gracious love. We truly appreciate the people who do this even though they are known for holiness and godly living. It does not mean so much that a profligate person invites another person just like himself into his home. But when a true Christian asks a true sinner to visit and share in the warmth of a righteous home, that is a beautiful picture of God's extension of his own righteousness to us through Christ Jesus.

I'm a perfectionist by nature. If it wasn't clear already, by the end of today it was. One of my coworkers was thinking about writing a small computer program and he told me about it. I volunteered to do it myself, which may have been his intent all along. The functional aspects of the program were not complicated and something workable could have been finished in a couple hours. I spent at least 7-8 hours on it. I did run into some unanticipated issues, but around 5-6 hours in, the program was basically working. But it wasn't perfect. And I didn't like the way it looked. So I kept tinkering and toying and tweaking it until I was mildly pleased with it. Frankly, it was a waste of valuable time that could have been spent on more productive, pressing tasks. Perfectionism in the workplace, particularly in an industrial setting, can be a drain on valuable resources. In the life of a Christian it can be deadly, as I know too well. Those who aren't perfectionists may th...

I'm thankful for the parts of the Bible that seem really boring at first glance. Things like genealogies ( Perez begat Hezron, Hezron begat Ram... ), census data ( of the tribe of Dan were 62,700... ) and other registers of apparently dull information, like how many goats were donated to the temple service by so-and-so on such-and-such a day. Sometimes it's tempting to treat these sections like so many fly-over states, sections you unfortunately must get through in order to get to the more action-packed stories or deep theological treatises. But if God really inspired the Bible, then there must be some reason he included those parts. Have you ever thought about the fact that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the author of 1 Chronicles to record that " Maon was the father of Bethzur " (2:45), two men we know nothing else about, also apparently led the Apostle John to leave out "many other signs Jesus performed..." (John 20:30)! We could have had many mor...