The Art of Truth

"Art doesn't beat you on the head with truth. It invites you to taste the truth before you know exactly what it is."
-Jan Johnson

I would add that, because art opens us up to new experiences we've never had before, it can enable our minds to detect new conceptual categories that have been philosophically camouflaged beforehand by inexperience.

Oh, how we need good art.

Love and Laughter

"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him."
-1 John 4:16b

If someone is really immersed in the love of God on a deep and life-changing level, it will cause that person to sincerely want others to experience and enjoy the love of God even more than oneself does. But one must first be deeply immersed in the love of God, or this will not take place.

Now, since this can be somewhat abstract, perhaps an everyday illustration can humour our finite understanding of such a phenomenon.

If someone enjoys a hilariously funny story on a deep level of laughter, after the initial enjoyment, one sincerely wants others to enjoy the really funny story, and to even enjoy it and laugh harder in reaction to it than oneself originally did when first hearing it. But one must first deeply enjoy the really funny story oneself, or this will not take place.

Scriptural Meditation That Is Not Dead

What if we realized that meditating on the Word of God was not merely a cerebral activity of just cognitively recollecting heady theology to oneself? What if we realized that it involved stepping out of the narrow, restrictive, and suffocating perimeters of our own mundane storyline and stepping into a world with a pulsing and absorbing plotline of God's drama-saturated blockbuster, while being accompanied by a gripping soundtrack that beautifully reverberated and amplified the deep, wordless satisfaction of being immersed in the Greatest Story ever written?

"Words have a life. The Word of God is a living and powerful thing. Powerful. Living. Something living has a movement to it."
-Dallas Willard

(1:06 - 1:20)

If we realized this dimension of alive-and-moving scriptural meditation, where the Word of God has a live and pulsing movement in its interactive dynamic due to it truly having a life of its own, we'd be on the cutting edge of the Lord's greatest weapon against a mundane and miserable existence.

It Hurts. It Burns.

Persevering for your special instructions is excruciating Lord. It hurts. It burns. It's longer than I signed up for. I don't know how much longer I can persevere for this. Many in my situation would have quit one way or another already. This uniquely tailored perseverance trial is grueling, agonizing for my soul at times. Lord, I hope it comes to an end soon. I don't know if what's in me can continue any longer for this. I need your fuel.

Mel Gibson, your movie is a Godsend

Hacksaw Ridge

So moving. My eyes dampened with water emerging from the ocean springs of the heart on several occasions. My soul gave slow-motion awe-filled applause multiple times for the courage of the hero. Profound admiration for his Hulk-like muscles of integrity to his convictions that held strong to his unshakable convictions. Convictions that refused to bow down to agonizing external pressures constantly lacerating at him on all sides to compromise. Refusing no matter what. Such a person is extremely rare in the West. Extremely.

Mel Gibson, thank you so much for this movie.

Speaking Like Solomon

"Not only was the Teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true."
-Ecclesiastes 12:9-10

There is immense spiritual importance in "finding just the right words" to express life-transforming wisdom. If wisdom touches the soul of a person, and the soul of a person is touched by art, then beautified verbal artistry can touch the soul in ways that scientific and technical verbiage cannot. A computer will never be able to construct beautiful and wise sayings phrased with soul-sourced aesthetic eloquence. There will always be Smartphones. There will never be Wisephones.

An excerpt from a footnote from my Old Testament professor's book Old Testament Theology: Divine Call and Human Response really hits home on this point:

"Israel's wisdom traditions viewed aesthetic concerns as extremely important.... Along with the aesthetics of practical organization noted in 1 Kgs 10:4-5, wisdom prized artistry of expression (see Eccl 12:9-10). Wisdom, in part, consisted of the ability to match wise content with forms of expression that themselves displayed wisdom. The sages communicated their wisdom with rhetorical and aesthetic power so as to move the receptive hearer closer to the ideals they wished to communicate. For example, Wisdom literature typically exhibits a fascinating use of words and sounds and creative use of language, much of which, unfortunately, is lost in translation. it frequently uses rhyming, assonance, and word play... Similarly, several texts are written as alphabetic or acrostic poems, i.e., poems in which each line begins with a letter of the alphabet, in consecutive order (Prov 2; 31:10-31). Wisdom also uses numerical sayings... a wide variety of figures of speech, and most especially powerful and creative metaphors. Sometimes these metaphors are sufficiently imprecise so as to provoke creative thought (e.g., "The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life," Prov 14:27). At other times they may be profoundly sensory and visceral (e.g., Prov. 10:26: "As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, / So is the sluggard to them that send him")."
-John Kessler

Thank God for modern day Solomons like C.S. Lewis, who can use careful, thoughtful, and aesthetic word choice to beautifully paint spiritual Mona Lisas of wisdom in people's imaginations.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the consolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret which also pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordworth had gone back to those moments of the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The book or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of at tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
-C.S. Lewis

Man, just look that that discernment. Sharp deep leveled perception. With so much confidence thrown in his assertion of the other's hidden identity.  Having the accuracy of his thrown assertion hitting right on target by virtue of him missing. Assured that the true nature of the man in front of him is struck bullseye by the very act of his evasion. It is only when Barry Allen finds out that he has elusively pinned himself down that he is able to put his finger on the the accuracy of the thrown assertion, causing his secret identity to flash open before his very eyes. That's something even the fastest man alive can't dodge.

Man.

But the Lord said to Samuel, "do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." Then Jesse called Abinadab and had him pass in  front of Samuel. But Samuel said, "The Lord has not chosen this one either." Jesse then had Shamah pass by, but Samuel said, "Nor has the Lord chosen this one." Jesse had seven of his sons pass before Samuel, but Samuel said to him, "The Lord has not chosen these." So he asked Jesse, "Are these all the sons you have?" "There is still the youngest," Jesse answered, "but he is tending the sheep." Samuel said, "Send for him; we will not sit down until he arrives." So he sent and had him brought in. He was ruddy, with a fine appearance and handsome features. Then the Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; he is the one." 
-1 Samuel 16:7-12

1 Kings 3:9, 1 Kings 3:16-28, Malachi 3:18, Mark 2:8, John 7:24, 1 Corinthians 12:10, Philippians 1:9-10, Hebrews 5:14

Spiritual Tatooing

"God is sovereign and in total control of your life."
"God loves you immensely and unconditionally, even when you sin doing the most embarrassing sins you can imagine."
"God allows everything to happen in your life for your good, even the things that make your soul ache."

Merely grasping these truths with our head through sermons or inductive Bible studies fails to have them penetrate and sink far down into the oceanic depths of our souls.

It takes seemingly harsh trials and hardship-ridden circumstances to create the opportunities to have them deeply etched into our bones.

Just cognitively pondering them to try to impress them into us is like using a ballpoint pen to write something on our skin. The impression of the ink only lasts for a few hours or a few days at most. Then it is gone.

In order for these truths to be permanently carved into our being, it requires something more intense. It requires suffering circumstances where one spiritually bleeds. The Holy Spirit can then use the spiritual blood that has been bled from uniquely characterized hardships as tattoo ink and tattoo the truth of God onto the soul's cornea. This happens as the soul meditates on these truths of God in the uniquely engineered circumstances that God custom tailors to cultivate the growth he desires in his myopic child. Oh, it can be painful like a physical tattoo. But after the operation, it's well worth it and the result is spiritual vision, on an intuitive level, that has innately divine perception in its eyesight. This happens because divine truth has been deeply engraved into the very constitution of the soul's being.

The Electric Drama

It's a challenge to keep God's story experientially "thick" in our lives. It's so easy for his narrative to feel so thin and seemingly absent in our day to day experience to the point where it's functionally non-existent.

I was so blessed this past week to attend an event that was full of snapshots of what God is doing around the world this moment. Egypt. Pakistan. China. Germany. Iran. Syria. Saudi Arabia. The stories being told truly leave the listener in awe of God's story. The type of drama we see unfolding in the Book of Acts is unfolding all around the world right now outside of North America. We're just blinded by CNN. Don't get me wrong. For the most part, they're reporting facts and figures. But they just get a few isolated notes here and there while completely missing the grand melody and symphony of God's story that ties all the music together. The major news stations skim the surface and miss the underlying pulse pumping through the internal veins of God's drama.

I got to sit for a couple hours in a spiritual IMAX theatre during this event, hearing concrete stories of what God and his fully immersed protagonists are doing in his story. I learned that a few months before the Syrian civil war started in 2011, many Syrian missionaries were warned to leave the country because of the impending civil war yet initially refused to leave because they wanted to urgently preach the Gospel and save as many lives as they could at the risk of their own lives (later they ended up leaving due to political reasons outside of their control). I am so challenged and in awe-full respect for Christians who are being persecuted by ISIS jihadists who refuse to renounce their faith even though their children are being tortured and killed right in front of their eyes. They belong in the hall of fame of God's saints with the greatest honour deserved amongst our spiritual kin. I also learned that there have been former ISIS soldiers coming to know Jesus through dreams and visions of him as well as encountering the love of Middle East Christians.  Then, there's huge numbers of Christians in the East as well as the Middle East willing to rise up amidst the nightmarish conditions they're persecuted in. Hearing all this stuff makes me feel like a small Hobbit hearing of all these races rising up to battle Sauron together and save the world.

I miss this kind of environment. It's been around a year since I was in one. I miss my spirit being energized like this. In narrative therapy language, these kinds of atmospheres "thicken" the story of God in one's consciousness with magnetically charged suspense. It reminds me that falling in the middle of the electric drama of what God is doing in the world is like falling right in the middle of a spiritual Avengers movie. A lot of the times there is a constant edge of your seat tension of good versus evil with hot projectiles flying heavily on both sides. Here, one feels wholly alive to a divine purpose drenched with holy adrenaline. Hearing epic testimonies of God's counterplot that constantly foils Satan's agenda surges Spirit-filled energy through one's very bodily fibres. The narrative recipe of the cliffhanging uncertainty of events, suspense-filled outcomes, and consecutive game-changing shifts in the plotline delivers deeply satisfying soul food. This is a story with a setting that feels like every square inch of the atmosphere is saturated with the dynamic tension of Good vs Evil.

Oh, what a joy and challenge to maintain the thickness of God's grand story in the theatre of one's soul. The soul hungers for such a story. However, many times, the soul forgets this hunger as well as the content of what it was created to hunger for. Hence the North American epidemic of soul anorexia.

Love Your God With All Your Soul

There is a universe of a difference between using one's mind to understand the soul versus using one's soul to understand the soul. For the soul has its own realm of experience, nonlinear developmental stages, and mysterious growth patterns that don't follow the neatly linear and logical conceptions of the mind.

To really understand the phrase "love your God with all your soul", the mind's cognitive analysis of the text is severely limited and will only get so far. One needs to experience the phrase with one's own soul in order to soulfully get it. The cognition alone, from the shores of its rationality, can only snorkel a stone's throw into the oceanic depths of the soul. The depths are reserved for another type of being.