Dane C. Ortlund on Jonathan Edwards:
The reason no one can see God and live is not God’s wrath or justice, but because “God is arrayed with an infinite brightness” that “fills with excess of joy and delight,” so that “the joy and pleasure in beholding would be too strong for a frail nature.” According to Edwards, it isn’t God’s terribleness that would incinerate us. It is the joy that would erupt within us that we cannot handle.
Dane Ortlund quoting Jonathan Edwards:
[It is the] sight of the divine beauty of Christ that bows the wills and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men, and be more than they can endure; but the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were, by an omnipotent power.
Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop thinking about it.
One day, when we wake up in resurrection morning, we will be fully holy and fully conformed to Jesus. We will no longer have the appetite for sin because it’s power will have been completely broken and thoroughly removed from us. All the lingering pain, hatred, lust, or bitterness that we know so well in this life will be rolled off our backs permanently. We will be free, perfect, and truly sanctified inside out. All our yearning for holiness will be filled.
Christian, look to that day. Trudge on.
I couldn’t shake the Divergent trilogy off my head. It’s been almost a week since I read the entire series. There was something about Tris’ reaction to the vastness of the world that amazes me.
When she first flew on a plane, she was astounded by the realization that she actually lived in a very small place and there is a big, big world outside the only world she knew all her life. Continue reading A Big, Big World
Here’s the problem I learned with my search for “the one”: I was looking for wholeness in all the wrong places. There isn’t a human being on the planet who has the capacity to complete me and make me whole. By putting all my hope for a “happily ever after” in a spouse, I made singleness my problem and marriage the solution. Yet this is not what God intended.
Jojo Agot 