I gotta have my orange juice.

It is good to belong to Jesus.

To emphasize the pro-noun is to perpetuate systemic injustice against other parts of speech like verbs and prepositions. I have learned to be an ally and thus in this moment I prefer to share my preferred pro-verbs.

The only trouble is, it’s difficult to choose.

The evil will bow before the good,​​
And the wicked at the gates of the righteous. (Proverbs 14:19, NKJV)

They say that a mandate is not discriminatory if it applies to everyone. Ha, good one!

“So, all the months with ‘ber’ at the end, does that mean it’s cold?” (Amos Moonen)

You should read Mark Horne’s reflections on difficulties: legendary mode; training versus hero battle.

I have until now not paid close attention to the ritual symbolism of faces, thinking it was legitimate but a light and mostly extra–Biblical consideration in things that have taken place over the last two years. But this week I stumbled across this word. I am struck by both the tremendous breadth of this, and also how our translations have left it off the face of the text (so to speak), hiding it from our faces (as it were). One book—Esther—takes pains to show how seeing and seeking the face of the king is crucial, and how hiding or having your face hidden from the king is both the cause and the result of the king’s judgment that you are forever banished from his own face. Ritually speaking, then, a ruler who masks his people is laying judgment and humiliation on them; and a worshipper who masks himself is hiding from his king.

But there’s also this:

Other than Bach, I’ve experienced the most musical delight playing versions of La Folía. So I enjoyed this collection:

Reflecting on That Hideous Strength, I’ve often wondered what it would look like for Merlin to show up. But now, absent any Merlin and simply relying on judicial confusion sent by God, it’s amazing just how incoherent the raging of the nations is all by itself, and how the simplest and most obvious truths now send it into a tizzy.

“Do you validate?” With millions of man-hours being invested in real-time digital systems of validation and badging, increasingly the answer is, “Yes, we insist!”

Praise God that, at the moment, some of these systems are programmed to (tediously) validate by reason of obedience to God rather than man. I’m thankful for the validation but reject the idolatry that lies beneath it; and what an interesting judgment it is to see all those man-hours wasted on raging. See also The Abolition of Man for some reasons why it really is idolatry and raging.

Jason has harbored them, and these are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king—Jesus. (Acts 17:7, NKJV)

The NKJV has a wonderful “we” in Joshua 5:1:

“So it was, when all the kings of the Amorites who were on the west side of the Jordan, and all the kings of the Canaanites who were by the sea, heard that the LORD had dried up the waters of the Jordan from before the children of Israel until we had crossed over, that their heart melted; and there was no spirit in them any longer because of the children of Israel.”

This is our history. We have been grafted into a tree (Romans 11), adopted into a family (Romans 4).

This is excellent: I Survived (Because of) Bible Belt Religion.

It’s November. I used to wait until Thanksgiving to stoke the festivity but I have no such scruples anymore.

If we believe in the sonship-kingship of all believers, that we are all vice-regents (that is, vice-gerents), should we not be doing something like this?

Also it shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book, from the one before the priests, the Levites. And it shall be with him, and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God and be careful to observe all the words of this law and these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted above his brethren, that he may not turn aside from the commandment to the right hand or to the left, and that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his children in the midst of Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18-20, NKJV)

If Saul had done that, then he had absolutely no excuse when it came to Agag:

Therefore it shall be, when the LORD your God has given you rest from your enemies all around, in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget. (Deuteronomy 25:19, NKJV)

I usually think of the levirate brother as a type of the pastor tending the bride for Jesus’s sake. But there is a way in which all of us are raising our households for Jesus’s sake. Thus shall it be done to the man who does not build up Jesus’s house:

But if the man does not want to take his brother’s wife, then let his brother’s wife go up to the gate to the elders, and say, ‘My husband’s brother refuses to raise up a name to his brother in Israel; he will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother.’ Then the elders of his city shall call him and speak to him. But if he stands firm and says, ‘I do not want to take her,’ then his brother’s wife shall come to him in the presence of the elders, remove his sandal from his foot, spit in his face, and answer and say, ‘So shall it be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house.’ And his name shall be called in Israel, ‘The house of him who had his sandal removed.’ (Deuteronomy 25:7-10, NKJV)

God commissions families to bring new worshippers into the world (Malachi 2:15), and commissions us to bring them to him:

In ways both explicit and implicit, scripture says that there is a faithful relationship between Christian-infants and God. We are called on to confess this before God, and we are called to teach it to our children. And we can relax theologically in the rest of knowing that recumbency (lying back in the arms) is the picture God gives to portray faith in the womb.

In fact, it is in the very nature of a covenant that it binds generations yet unborn:

I make this covenant and this oath, not with you alone, but with him who stands here with us today before the LORD our God, as well as with him who is not here with us today . . . so that there may not be among you man or woman or family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations, and that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood; and so it may not happen, when he hears the words of this curse, that he blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, even though I follow the dictates of my heart’—as though the drunkard could be included with the sober. . . The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deuteronomy 29:14-29, NKJV)

All covenants are evangelical; this is from the book that urges circumcision of the heart (Deuteronomy 10, 30), and urges faithfulness to the covenant, “you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 30).

James Madison overstates his case when he says, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Better to say that the governor’s sword would go unused except as a glorious display. There will always be a need to decide whether and where to build the king’s highway, what time we will assemble to pray, etc.; and these decisions need not be purely democratic. In fact, as Chesterton points out, they must not.