day no. 15,324: fertility and authority

1 Timothy 2:11-15
Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

The essence of femininity is fertility. 
The essence of masculinity is authority. 

Authority flows to men who take responsibility
Fertility flows from women who have their period. 

Femininity is received through menstruation.
Masculinity is achieved through initiation.

A girl becomes a woman by going through puberty. 
A boy becomes a man by going through a rite of passage.

A girl becomes a woman, like it or not, once the way of women is upon her.
A boy becomes a man, like it or not, only if another man authenticates his manhood.

Femininity can be inferred;

Masculinity must be conferred.

day no. 15,323 continued... the plague was stayed

Numbers 25:7-9
When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

Epidemics can evaporate. Plagues can be stayed.

In the days of Phinehas, a plague broke out in Israel as a result of their rampant immorality. Many were saddened by it and many participated in it, but only Phinehas stood up and did something directly about it. He confronted it by confronting the sin behind it.

Psalm 106:28-31
They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor,
and ate the sacrifices of the dead.
Thus they provoked him to anger with their inventions:
and the plague brake in upon them.
Then stood up Phinehas, and executed judgment:
and so the plague was stayed.
And that was counted unto him for righteousness
unto all generations for evermore.

A moral stand can prove more deadly to a disease than a medical break through. An advance in moral responsibility may be more helpful to a society than an advance in science... Phinehas stood up and the plague was stayed.


Not only does this highlight the moral component of sin and its attending consequences, but it also points out that plagues can, like a mist, be here one moment and gone the next. No disease can withstand the sovereign hand of God. In all our panic math, have we factored for that? A plague ravaged twenty-four thousand Israelites in a very short time and then in an instance, it was defeated. It did not continue to live on any surface in all Israel. The sick recovered. The disease died. 

May God grant us a Phinehas to atone for our sins by boldly confronting our sins and its consequences and may God in kind delete COVID from the face of the earth.

day no. 15,323: more whole than if never broken

"One of the first things we see is that God loves to unite by dividing. He creates our beautiful world by dividing the land from the sea. He creates our earth by dividing the waters below from the waters above. He made the earth fruitful by dividing the inanimate world from the animate world, bringing forth the latter out of the former. He placed the sun and moon in the sky, thus dividing the day from the night. God is not fragmenting the world, shattering it to pieces; rather, He is tying everything together in a Trinitarian complex, binding everything together by means of thoughtful division. This is not the kind of division that sin brought to our race—the division of malice and hostility, of relationships fragmenting. No. This is the division of fruitfulness. The Lord created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and as Adam looked around, he should have seen that he was the only thing that was undivided. Everything else that God had broken in two He had pronounced good. But Adam stood, solitary, alone, and unbroken, and God said that it was not good that man should be alone. And so God determined to complete him, and He did this by placing Adam into a profound deathsleep, and He then divided Him, taking a rib from his side. From that rib, God fashioned the first woman, our mother Eve, or, as she was known to Adam, Ishah. God made the one into two in order, by His glorious wisdom, to restore them in a deeper and more fulfilling unity by making the two into one. If He had not made the one into two, He would not have been able to make the two into one.

This is God’s way. He takes something in His hands, He blesses it, breaks it, and the result is life for the world. This pattern was disrupted by sin, but sin has not overcome it or erased it. Even when the Lord Jesus was on the eve of His betrayal, He still followed this same pattern. He took the bread that was His body, blessed it, and broke it. And in that breaking, we who were scattered all over the world in countless little pieces were gathered back into Christ. By bring this kind of fruitful division, the division of sacrifice, to one, the many are made one. He was broken so that we who were broken might be made whole." -- Douglas Wilson, Bone of My Bones

God's design for the world is to bring it back together after breaking it. In other words, the whole world will be more whole by being broken than if it had never been divided. The unity produced by bringing the pieces back together is more whole than the pieces were prior to being separated.

The story God is writing is better than the one we'd assume. We would write Eden and leave well enough alone, but God wrote a story where the new Eden, brought back together after the brokenness of sin, will be better for having been broken apart. His story is better and the unity produced by His division is better than the unity of our singular focus.

day no. 15,322: withered words

"The only difference between salad and garbage is timing." - Douglas Wilson, Bone of My Bones

Lettuce left alone becomes litter. At one point and time what was edible is at another point and time inedible. A comment made at one time may be helpful, made at another unhelpful. For a man to offer advise when his wife is advising him of her frustration is not helpful. It is making garbage out of a salad. If the man hears her, he gains the opportunity to later advise and have his helpfulness received as salad, not withered words.

day no. 15,321: active impatience required

"But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT. He must be personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, The Romance of Orthodoxy

A patient is a passive participant in his situation, a sinner an active one. As such, a patient must sit back and let the physicians do their work while the sinner must get up to do the work of repentance.

Sinners must be impatient if they want to change their situation.

Sick people must be patient if they want to change theirs.

If we are only sick, passive patience is preferable.

But if we are sinners, active impatience is required.

day no. 15,320: processing or panicking

Most of our days are spent asking one of two questions:

What just happened?
What's going to happen?

We spend our time looking back, trying to figure out what's going on and how to make sense of what happened to us before.

Or we spend our time looking ahead, wondering what's going to happen and how we will deal with whichever way it ends up playing out.

As such, we are often filled either with regret and remorse or with anxiety and unbelief. Our time is consumed either processing or panicking. We are working through whatever happened before or working to avoid whatever we dread is coming next.

So we are at any given point and time always between one of these two realities. We live in the time between what happened? and what's going to happen?

But God does not call us to dwell on the past or to panic about the future.

Philippians 3:13-16
One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained

We let the past rest on the bosom of Christ and we set the future aside to His wisdom and in the meantime, we run. We hold on to what we have (forgiveness and hope) which allows us to let go of our perseverating over yesterday or tomorrow. Forgiveness leaves the past behind and hope leaves the future ahead and allows us to live today by grace through faith in Christ alone.

day no. 15,319: grace inspires godliness not gaudiness

"Grace is the mother and nurse of holiness, and not the apologist of sin." - C.H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening

Grace inspires godliness not gaudiness.

Grace does not wear sin like a designer label; it covers it up like a coffin. Grace bears with sin; it does not wear it boldly like a bare midriff for that would be evidence of ingratitude, not grace.