Retrospective
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson and I’m here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and this is our temporary final episode.
We have run through the entire Old Testament and we made a lot of recommendations about books and food, and then we listened to your recommendations about books and food and music and stuff, and today we’re going to kind of do a retrospective on everything we’ve said so far.
But before we get to that, we missed a recommendation from last time. It was buried in my inbox and I’m so sorry, but here it is. This is also from Gwen. Thank you so much, Gwen.
“Hi. I would like to recommend the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. I’ve had this book on my to-read list for a long time and finally read it. I really appreciated what she had to say in the beginning, that people used to be rather quiet. The important things were character and doing what was right.
“Beginning with Dale Carnegie, things began to change. People were expected to be assertive and well-spoken and able to sell themselves. Now with the advent of social media we see where this has led. I enjoyed the book and learned much from it.”
I have not. My wife bought it and read it so she could understand me. Apparently, she thinks it helped, so there you go.
No. I have heard of it, and it may or may not have been recommended to me in times past. I don’t remember for sure. It sounds familiar.
I’m kind of in that boat. I definitely have heard of it and haven’t carved out the space to read it, but I’m glad to hear that it’s good, and it sounds really interesting from the historical perspective especially. I hadn’t heard about that aspect of it.
So today the title of our show – Halting Toward Zion – is the title of the series of articles that you wrote, Greg, from which we drew the content of the show. Why halting? That’s an old-fashioned word.
Which is kind of what’s going on here. It’s also an allusion to a particular story in Genesis, which you also allude to every time we begin. Jacob wrestled with God at Peniah, and he would not let God go, so God touched the hollow of his thigh, and his thigh went out of joint, permanently apparently, and that’s where God named him Israel.
From that day, as he left and as the sun rose upon him, he halted upon that leg. Jacob would spend the rest of his life, we would say, limping. Anytime anyone would ask him, “Hey, Jacob, Israel, what’s that with the limp?” he would say, “That’s where I wrestled with God and I won, sort of. It’s where God let me win.” Sometimes you have to wrestle with God before he lets you win.
This story shines light backward and forward upon the whole history of the Old Testament. We can go back to Genesis 3:15, the protoevangelium, where God promised Eve that her seed would crush the head of the serpent, but in the process his heel would be bruised. In other words, he’d limp. He’d be hurt.
The devil would be smashed to pieces by comparison. If your skull gets crushed, that’s pretty much it, in a short time at the very least. If you bruise your heel, you’ll probably get better eventually with proper treatment. Resurrection is pretty good treatment.
Jesus came into this world humble, laying aside his glory, not taking on Satan with sheer power and force, but as one lowly and weak to all appearances, and he won by dying, not the world’s normal concept of how you win things.
If we go back and look at the whole Old Testament we see this pattern played out many, many times. You can think of the 10 plagues. There God won with a lot of force and glamour and power and special effects, but that didn’t happen very much. Usually it was something very different – a little boy with a sling, a man praying for rain when there’s not a cloud in the sky. You can walk through the Old Testament and look at all the times – a man with long hair and the jawbone of an ass, another man with a long wooden goad.
There’s room here if anybody’s interested to talk about God’s sense of humor. As devout Christians, sometimes we miss the way God tells stories. He’s not Hollywood. He’s not even Broadway. A lot of the stories in scripture spin around odd, seemingly insignificant, even laughable solutions. A baby in a manger? A man dying on a cross? Really? Yeah, that’s the story and it’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole battle.
God could have smashed Satan in a second, but he left him around as a sort of plot device just to cause trouble and to be somebody he could play off of, a foil I guess, so that he, not with sheer power but with wisdom and mercy and grace and a sense of humor for the most unlikely thing around, pulled off the story we know as the Old Testament and the coming of Christ. So there are things there to consider about the nature of our God and how he gets things done.
He let Jacob win in the wrestling match, and in the same way he let Satan get a hit in. It’s like he did it with one hand tied behind his back. That’s the sense of this, isn’t it.
If you think about doing anything with a blister on your heel, it’s a little thing but it’s annoying. It’s like the worst thing in the world when you’ve got one.
I think Chesterton said the worst pain in the world that anybody’s ever felt is the toothache that someone has right now, so present.
‘Toward’ signifies that we’re not there yet. The Old Testament saints were not there yet.
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off and were persuaded of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.
There’s a movement through the Old Testament, not simply through time but in terms of deeper revelation, more clues, more hints about what’s coming, and a greater revelation of the One who’s laying the hints, the breadcrumbs that are leading you on to something, and occasionally you get a glimpse of that something. It’s big and it’s beautiful and it’s bright and there’s love and there’s joy, but exactly what form it’s going to take is a little unclear – “A city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
As I’ve told you before, when I was a small child in my Christian school and chapel, our pastor used that phrase and it seemed overwhelmingly significant. I think it was Lewis, or was it Wordsworth, who said, “charged with significance,” but no one ever explained it to me. All I could remember was, “Foundations? Well, Jesus is called a foundation. I wonder if…” and it never got any further than that, but it stuck with me.
I wonder how far the Old Testament saints got with it. A city? They would understand that to mean community, people communicating with one another, sharing with one another, working side by side, and as we’ve seen many times by now in the ancient world, communicating and working in terms of a common religion, common worship, where your identity is defined by the one you worship, and in this city we’ll all have the same identity. We’ll all worship that one God and be part of that same family, that same city, that same community and kingdom.
It will be good and it will be wonderful, and somehow it will be better than anything the world has seen, but that still doesn’t say a whole lot. Will it be in Jerusalem or Saint Louis, Missouri, or London or Paris or Moscow or Constantinople?
Is it that kind of city? And what will we do there and what will it be like? Then the other part of this, in going toward it, is how are we going to get there? Is it just enough that time passes and God drops clues and eventually one day – tada! – here it is?
It’s never that easy, and the Old Testament saints understood that there were things they had to do. Each one was called upon to do something, and here’s Hebrews 11. Abel offered a sacrifice. Enoch walked with God. Noah built an ark. Abraham went out looking for the city. Jacob worshiped, leaning on his staff. Joseph made mention concerning bones. Moses forsook Egypt, and so on. Each one was called to do something that, in terms of what was going on in the world, seemed a little weird, back to that idea of God’s sense of humor.
Yes, they had to not kill people and not commit adultery and not steal and all that, but in each case there also tended to be a special mission or special role that each one took up that somehow moved everybody closer to the goal, and still they sought afar off. They didn’t know what exactly they were dealing with, but there was the mention of this seed – seed of Eve, of Shem, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Judah, of David – so we’re getting the idea it’s a person. The further we go, we get other clues – a king, a prophet, a priest – so are there three of them, or two? Can one person do all that?
And what’s this about suffering and dying? And what’s this about reigning forever? That sounds like two different people, right?
Yeah. Psalm 110 gets repeated than any other psalm in the New Testament. “The Lord said unto my Lord…” How is he the Everlasting Father, Mighty God, Prince of Peace? And yet suffering and dying? “Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin.”
They got the pieces, they got the bits, but it’s a jigsaw puzzle. The one thing that God required of them is that they believed it, that he had a plan, that he was giving them pieces of it, and although they may not understand all of it, he would be faithful. He would keep his word. He would save his people from their sins and from the consequences of sin. How that was going to play out they did not know.
So over the last three years we’ve seen the covenant formatting change. We start with patriarchs and relatively small families, and then one of them gets called aside into a particular land with a particular right that sets him and his seed apart from everybody else. But then they go down to Egypt and they become a great people, and God exoduses them out and makes them a nation, a kingdom with laws and government, and puts them back in the land, which they will now defend with military force and will also drive out the inhabitants.
Then that gets converted into a kingdom with royalty and monarchy and palaces and a standing army, and then eventually a temple, and that goes on for a while. But then God smashes all that and scatters his people, then calls them back to a little temple in a no-account city in the middle of a huge Gentile empire.
At each step people are going to say, “Well, when God fixes things it will be like….” And what do we always think of? The good old days.
You two may be too young that you’ve escaped this, but when I was a kid say in the ‘70s or maybe the ‘80s, if you wanted to talk about the good old days you were talking about the ‘50s that we still saw in black and white reruns on late night TV – Leave It to Beaver, and My Three Sons, and Ozzie and Harriet and all that, because that was the America that people remembered.
There wasn’t any swearing and cussing on TV, and no sex scenes, and every story had a happy ending, and everybody was middle-class and owned their own home, with two cars in every garage. It doesn’t get any better, right? The church was respected, and God was respected, and everybody said they were a Christian.
You can’t go back. Something that I’ve encountered and perhaps you have too is the temptation of Christians to single out one era in history and say, “Our homes, our families, our churches need to be like that” – the ‘50s, or Victorian England, or Jane Austen’s England, or Puritan New England. You can go back to Calvin’s Geneva, or further further further back to Alfred’s England or to Arthur’s Britain. Someplace, surely. How about the first century church, where they still had apostles and they had it all together, right? Corinth, Laodicea, Sardis…
Yes, you could. There is wisdom and instruction to be drawn from the past. We try to put together the clues they were given because we should be a little smarter and know a little more. God has spoken a whole lot more, but to try to focus on some time period in the past and say, “If we just made our homes and our churches like that, then we’d get it,” is a serious misunderstanding of God’s plan for history.
Here's one. If the church in the 21st century were more like Rome in terms of visible unity, doctrinal coherence, everyone respecting one another’s courts, if we all ecumenically came together as one church, wouldn’t that be so much better?
You’d just end up with what Rome already is, which is a bunch of people that are under a nominal unity. Even now within Rome you have radical traditionalists rubbing shoulders with post-modern gender-queer kind of people with the colored hair and everything. It’s not what the marketing says it is.
So the ‘toward’ is that. We’re going someplace and we’re halting, which means this is not because we’re so strong and great and wise. We’re halting because we’ve picked up our Savior’s limp. Upon leaving he could have said, “Alright, you’re all full of the Spirit, so go out and do miracles, raise the dead, bring up frogs and flies, blot out the sun and moon, do whatever. Cities will fall before you and people will convert and…”
He didn’t do that. He left behind kind of a ragtag band of people, some of whom were kind of educated, some of whom were kind of not. The appeal was very early to slaves and to the underclass. It reached some rulers and kings and priests and such, but Christianity has never been an upper-class movement.
Paul said much the same thing. He’s chosen the weak things to confound the mighty, and things that are not, to bring to nought things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence. There’s the thing. This is God’s story and Jesus is the hero, so we don’t get to be the hero. We don’t get to be the ones who save the world. We just get to do our own little jobs, and when we do it by faith, trusting Jesus and giving him the glory, God smiles at us and he’s well-pleased, and that’s all we need.
We don’t have to come away feeling we’re the great heroes of the story that made the big difference, but we do make differences.
He chose the most amazing means, which is the word. One of the most amazing revolutions in history, the American Revolution, started as a revolution of words, but eventually it came to blows. They couldn’t have done it without swords and guns and ships, but that’s not how God claims the world. That’s not how he wins. He wins just through words. It doesn’t take any more than that.
Yeah, sure. I smile every time I hear you pronounce it zy-on, because it’s undoubtedly correct. I just never say it that way.
It was originally a hill in and about the city of Jerusalem. When David took Jerusalem, he took that part of it and built a fortified palace there as the capital within the capital, the royal territory within the city that he was now claiming to be the capital of Israel and capital for Yahweh, from which God would rule his people, and thus the importance of bringing the ark to Zion.
Well, it turned out in time that God wanted to build a temple not on Zion but on Moriah, the hill next door, as it were. In the meantime, David housed the ark in a little tabernacle, called the tabernacle of David, where worship was very simple. There were no choirs and musical instruments, little or no sacrifice going on, no barriers or veils, no sprinkling of blood, no elaborate ceremonies, and David, as God’s adopted son, could walk right in and sit before the ark in the very presence of God.
When the prophets began to look forward to what God would do in history, they spoke not of Solomon’s temple on Mount Moriah, but they always spoke of Zion. Throughout the Psalms and through Isaiah and the minor prophets, the common word is Zion.
When we get to the New Testament we find only a couple really explicit references, that is references that use that name. I will read you one because it pretty well sums up what the New Testament thinks of all this. The writer of Hebrews first off tells his listeners, “You have not come to Mount Sinai that was dark and fire and tempest and scary and dangerous,” and all that. Then in verse 22 of chapter 12 he says:
But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.
The first thing we have to see is the verb tense “you are come.” Speaking to the first-century church, the writer of Hebrews could say, “Zion is here” or “you’re there,” or “you’ve come,” and in coming there there are some things that belong to this.
First, he calls it the city of the living God. The Psalms talk about the city of God. Then the heavenly Jerusalem. Paul had mentioned the heavenly Jerusalem in Galatians and it comes back in the book of Revelation at the end.
“To an innumerable company of angels…” We don’t see angels, and most of them seem to be in heaven a good deal of the time, worshiping God. Again Revelation 4 and 5 shows us that.
“To the general assembly and church of the firstborn which are written in heaven…” So it encompasses and includes the whole church.
“And to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect,” so there’s a unity. We’ve come to the city and yet it includes not only us who are alive on earth, but those saints who have gone on and are with Jesus already.
“And to Jesus.” We come to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant and to his precious blood.
This is the reality and I think the normal response is something like, “Well, that sounds really good, but when do we see this? When do we experience this? How does this play out? If I could see this with my eyes, if I could see Jesus, if I could hear the voice of God, if I could feel the wind wafted by angels’ wings all around me while I hear their songs, then that would be great! It would be so much easier to be a Christian.”
At one point he did, and yet Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” These are things of faith. They’re real.
When we come to church to worship God, it used to be common and I guess it still is, I’m not that familiar with what all churches do, but it used to be common for the pastor to speak of, “We’re coming now to meet with God. We’re coming into the presence of God. We’re all standing before God.” It's easy for those things to just kind of roll off of us, as if “Yeah, yeah, that’s the language we’re supposed to use because we’re in church.” No, that’s the reality.
I appreciate the usefulness of science fiction sometimes to help explain philosophical and theological concepts. The idea of dimensional barriers here I think may help. Heaven is not light years away. It’s not beyond the rim of the known universe. It’s close enough, as it were, to reach out and touch, if God would let us. It’s just a heartbeat away, but it’s not here exactly.
And yet when we come and worship – and again Revelation 4 and 5 show us this visually – we come and we worship with angels and saints. The hymns of the church, particularly the older hymns, are full of this kind of language. You can think of the Te Deum for instance.
So we’re here. Is this all there is? There are some people called hyper-preterists who say, “Yup, this is it. This is as good as it gets.” No.
Yes, most miserable if this is it. What we have by faith is incredible and tremendous, but it’s only the beginning.
You spoke about recalling things from previous episodes, which for me simply means telling the same stories again pretty much, so I know I’ve told this story. When I was a kid I was promised to get to go to Disneyland and we drove down to LA, and for some reason I thought Disneyland was in LA. I don’t know how that happened, but I waited and waited. It was a long ride, long, long, and finally here’s a sign that says “LA City Limits,” and I get up and look around and there’s nothing. It is barren. There are a couple warehouses or something a couple miles out in the middle of nowhere, and there is nothing else, and yet, we were in LA.
You could tell, if you took the trouble, that if you broke a law, LA police would arrest you. If you didn’t pay property taxes to the LA city government, people would come and have a serious conversation with you. If you wanted to build something, you had to get permits from the LA city government again.
The government was real, and although it wasn’t exactly very visible, under the right circumstances it could manifest itself really fast, I’m sure. If the LA police were chasing someone out of town on a high-speed race up I-5, they would know, “We just crossed the city limits. Okay, we need the county to pick up, or we need the next county to pick up, because our authority just ran out. We’ll see if they’ll include us.”
A city does not have to be in its full glory for us to truly be in it, be part of it, and part of what it’s doing.
Exactly, and yet there is a difference, to be sure. So we here in the 21st century are somewhere across the line. Jesus has come. The King has come. Jesus told us, “The kingdom of heaven is here. It’s among you.” He is on the throne.
Most of the citizens of the kingdom right now are in heaven. If you calculate the possibilities and the population of 4,000 years of the Old Testament and now 2,000 more, probably at this moment there are more people in heaven than there are saints on earth. It may not always be that way. We don’t know how God’s going to work that out, but if you ask, “Why is this called the kingdom of heaven?”
“Well, the king’s in heaven and the bulk of his people are in heaven. It seems like a good name somehow,” but that doesn’t mean we’re not. We who live under the new covenant, which is the treaty and the constitution for that kingdom, for that city, includes us, so we continue to move toward Zion, toward its fullness. We have the reality, but we don’t have the fullness.
Yeah, and our churches are embassies of the kingdom of heaven, which is why other governmental entities should leave their hands off of them, unless they actually commit a civil crime by God’s standards, but that’s something else.
So Halting Toward Zion – we still limp. Jesus has come and he’s not limping anymore, but he works through us and we limp a lot. I spoke before of him not giving us superpowers, but far more important he didn’t instantaneously deal with all of our sins either. So he’s working through a lot of sinners who’ve still got a lot of sin they’re struggling with and working through. There is this thing called progressive sanctification whereby we grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord, and we are conformed more and more to the image of Christ, but it’s a slow journey and struggle. We wrestle with God and God wrestles with us.
Yes, very much so, because if he just released all of his power, there’s not much story in that, honestly. Sometimes we just reduce it to that. It’s a poor joke and there’s no story, because these are also attributes of God – God the storyteller, God the comedian, God who seeks his own glory more than our comfort.
We can look at the circumstances around us, and for quite a few decades now I’ve been told by usually those older than me that the world’s really bad and Jesus is coming back anytime soon, or the Marxists are going to walk in and take over and we’ll just lie down and let them. There’s going to be nuclear war. I have seen so many prophecies of doom and gloom.
And yet the world’s gotten worse. One of the memes that showed up on my LinkedIn account was a soldier with the gas mask thing on. You can’t really see his face, just the big goggly eyes, and he’s obviously looking over his shoulder and someone is saying, “You’re right. The world’s a mess, but you know what? It’s going to get a lot worse.” That’s the meme.
Well, it may indeed. The world today is a lot worse than anything I remember, and I remember a lot. I was told all the time as a kid that the Soviets were going to come and take us over and we’d be sent to labor camps and all that kind of stuff. It never happened. The Soviet Union fell into the dust of history, and yet what we’re seeing today is insane.
But God has not been caught off-guard. God is not losing. Whatever God does in all this, on the other side people are going to sit back and say, “Wow!” and applaud and say, “What an incredible God. We never saw that coming.” Whatever we think the solution is, we’re probably wrong, except that it will involve the Word of God.
That’s why we do this kind of thing. There are people who come and listen to this podcast because they want to hear a little more of God’s Word, or because they want a slightly different slant on it. As long as they want to listen, I’m willing to go on doing this.
That’s Halting Toward Zion. We’re in process and we’re not there yet. In the meantime, limping on a bone spur hurts. That’s life, guys.
On the subject of continuing to do the podcast, this is an end of sorts, as I mentioned, but we will be back in January. We’re going to begin a new series on world history and church history. The exact configuration is still being settled – the exact outline, how long that arc is going to take. We’re still working through all those things because we need a break. That’s why we’re not releasing until January, but you can expect to see us back then, so watch this space, as people say.
Sadly, Bryan will not be joining us for the next arc. Bryan, we’re going to miss you a whole lot. You’ve said so many wonderful and edifying things. One of them that has resonated with me and has come up in so many different contexts – I think you first said it actually on our test recording episode, and the theme has run through almost everything we’ve talked about. It was relating to common grace and how God’s goodness in the world is all for the sake of his people.
That is God’s wonderful gift to us. That’s how we experience all those things that are ongoing in the world that we wish weren’t there, all the problems. They’re there because the tares are allowed to grow up for the sake of the wheat. So thank you very much for that and for all of your contributions. It’s been a real joy working with you.
The things that you’ve said that have blessed me the most have to do with the being and nature of God, both your own comments and the books you’ve recommended. Theology proper is not an area that most Christians – most pastors even, most seminary professors either – spend a lot of time with, and some take it for granted. It’s either, “Yeah, there’s God. Now let’s get onto something interesting,” or “Surely everybody knows what I know about God, so there’s no need to repeat it.”
There are so many things about who God is. I know you’ve spent a good deal of time, as I have, talking about the simplicity of God and all that’s involved in that. I really appreciate you coming back to who God is again and again, as it is absolutely key.
I’ve been accused of not being able to get out of Genesis, but more and more I’m not getting very far away from God in Himself, the attributes of God, God as Creator and God as Trinity. Until you’ve thought through that a lot you really don’t know where you’re going next, and you have been very very good to keep bringing us back there and to recommend really sound books and materials that keep us thinking about that.
And of course the thing that I appreciate about you and about Emily both is your constant taking us back to the gospel. It’s constantly about Jesus’ blood and righteousness. It’s about God’s verdict, not our works. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christian broadcasters and podcasters and whatever who believe that, and yet trying to find it in their writing and their talking is sometimes problematic.
So thank you, Bryan, especially since you’re going on, and Emily too, of course, that that has remained a focus of what we’ve done here, because if we haven’t got that we don’t got anything. Who is God and how is he our Savior? Because we’re not our Savior and we’re not God. I suppose if there’s a pivot point for this podcast, it’s those things.
So yes, thank you, Bryan, for all your contributions. Also I’ve just loved your ducks and your garden and all those homey touches about life in the frozen nether-lands. And of course you’re always welcome to come back anytime you want for this or that, or for some new series or whatever. In the meantime, enjoy your wife, your family, and may God give you a job that you can really sink your teeth into and with which you can do wonderful things.
Thank you for all of that. I’ve really appreciated being able to talk about things that are of interest to me that you could say are hobby-horses and soapbox subjects. Especially in the past three years, the doctrine of theology proper – I don’t want to say it’s been revealed to me as super-important. It was always super-important, but it’s one of those kinds of things, like you said, that is overlooked or pushed aside, but there’s so much beauty to it.
Really, you can understand the gospel without knowing all of the nitty gritty, all the itty tiny details about hypostases and ousia and other Greek words that I can flex my reading knowledge with, but if you’re going to go into higher levels of study – personal study or for ministry – it is of invaluable importance. It is pastoral knowledge to know this theology.
That was the realization I had in 2020-ish. Other theological topics that I’ve studied have also been very pastoral, kind of reclaiming the idea of the law/gospel distinction for Reformed theology, because it’s there. It’s there in the Westminster. It’s not called that. It’s called covenant of grace and covenant of works.
That’s right, yes. If I could ever boil down the things that I think are most important, besides Jesus’ work and life and resurrection and coming again – let’s put those all to one section – it would be theology proper, divine simplicity, and inseparable operations being two really important parts of that, and the law/gospel distinction.
I guess in these categories of theology is rest for the soul. It’s saying, look, you should respond to grace with a change of heart, but you don’t get the grace by the change of heart. It also says – and I may have mentioned this in the past couple episodes, I don’t remember for sure – one of the really important things and a pastoral application of something that seems like a heady doctrine, like just ivory tower kind of stuff like inseparable operations or divine simplicity, is the practical application.
If God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one in essence and one in will, and everything that one of them does is technically an act of all three members of the Trinity in the Godhead, that means that there is no distinction between the love of God the Son in Jesus on the cross, and the love that God the Father has for you.
I see so many people even in my own personal circles that feel God the Father is distant and harsh and uncaring and unkind, and that it’s Jesus really just being this advocate. “Hey, trust me, He’s really good. You can trust this guy. He’s with me,” that gets God the Father on your side. Otherwise he’s just like, “Oh, you again? I don’t care about you, but my Son vouches for you.” That’s not the case. It’s never the case.
Some of those things I’ve been saying in our Wednesday night Bible study a good deal, and you’re right. The things you started with are the things that lead here. Once you know who God is and what the Trinity is all about, it’s not just this simple formula – “one essence, three persons.” That doesn’t even come close to what’s going on there, but it ends up with something so utterly practical and comforting.
We have been invited into the very heart of the Triune God, and the love that flows between the Father, Son, and Spirit is the love he has for us. Calvinism is not cold, except when we don’t really even understand it and think we do, which is always a problem. There’s so much richness here. Again, thank you for bringing so much of that richness to this program.
Any other fond memories to close us out of the show? I will go first with a fond memory. This particular fond memory of the show was when I wasn’t on it. David and David and David were on the show and they were talking about being a scientist who is a Christian, a mathematician who is a Christian, and how that fits in with the Christian life.
The answer is not that you have to study creation science and why evolution is wrong. That’s not what it means at heart to be a scientist who is a Christian. What it means to be a scientist who is a Christian is that you go to work and you work with other scientists, and you’re a Christian among them. It’s your daily business. I thought that was so edifying, and I was so thankful to be able to sit back and listen to that.
I think one of my favorite things looking back – I have a terrible memory for anecdotes, especially in something over three years long that we’ve done – but I remember where I was when we were meeting. Obviously, the past couple of years it’s been here at my house, but there was a stretch of time and I just remember how much fun it was working out of my hometown.
I had moved to do a job on the coast, and being the only one in the office, holing up in one of the meeting rooms on a completely empty floor of an office building and opening up the laptop and joining and doing this while looking out over the city skyline to my right, and just how much fun that really was.
Then I think as far as the podcast itself, there are other funny things, more like recurring themes, like in the first couple years of doing this, the Gnosticism bell, and then me forgetting how many times I’ve already recommended That Hideous Strength.
And people telling us we should have a list of all these recommendations, and we say, “Yeah, you’re right, we should,” and never did.
Speaking of which, those were some of my favorite parts of the show. I know it wasn’t on the show exactly, but I loved your summaries using backhanded cliches and allusions to other things to communicate what was going on. I always looked forward to seeing how you were going to phrase something. “Wait, what in the world is she talking…oh, I get it.”
Yes, those were a lot of fun, as were the memes you did, and I still continue to cite them in other contexts.
Thank you both so much for this conversation and for 3-1/2 years of conversations. It’s been a delight. A big thank-you also to David, our producer and my lawfully wedded husband, to our financial supporters, to everyone who sent in recommendations, and to all our listeners for tuning in. We so appreciate the opportunity to do this and we will see you in January.