day no. 15,729: no tension between friends

“The New Testament is latent in the Old Testament and the Old Testament is patent in the New Testament.” -- St. Augustine of Hippo

The New Testament is implied in the Old the same way the man is implied in the boy. The fact that the boy grew up into the man is not surprising. It was all there before, but now it is grown into its full form. The New Testament is present in seed form in the Old.

The Old Testament is obvious in the New the same way the man has the same eyes he had as a boy. In his grown face you can see his younger self.  The Old Testament is present in quotation in the New. 

Matthew 5:17
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

"Nothing is more patently taught in the pages of the New Testament than the continuing and abiding authority of the Old. This passage is one such place, but there are many more." 
-- Douglas Wilson, Not as the Scribes: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount

All that to say, you cannot pit the Old against the New. You can speak of them uniquely the way you can speak of a boy who became a man, but you cannot discuss them as separate people. The man and the boy are the same person, but in different forms. The New was there in the Old and the Old is here in the New. There is no tension to resolve because there is no tension between good friends.

"The Bible teaches that grace and law are found in the Old Testament, and grace and law are found in the New." -- Douglas Wilson, Not as the Scribes: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount

day no. 15,728: the most pathetic people in the world

While reading Douglas Wilson's Not as the Scribes: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, I came across this,

“The formal Christian is a man who knows enough about Christianity to spoil the world for him . . . . He has enough ‘Christianity’ to spoil everything else, but not enough to give him real happiness, peace and joy and abundance of life. I think such people are the most pathetic people in the world. Our Lord certainly says they are the most useless people in the world. They do not function as worldings or as Christians. They are nothing, neither salt nor light, neither one thing nor the other.” -- Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Christianity a la carte is just enough to ruin your appetite, but not enough to satisfy your hunger. It is useless. It does not save you from the allure of the world or the wrath of God. It does not possess potency enough to quicken, only dispassion enough to kill. A la carte Christianity is an inoculation. It gives you just enough of something to keep you from getting all of it. It introduces a synthetic, controlled version for the sake of preventing the invasion of the pure, dangerous version.

Titus 1:15-16

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

day no. 15,727: the Founder of the feast

"'We all want to be happy, blessed, and we are tempted to make that state of blessing our goal. But the spiritual irony is that such blessings are reserved for those who want something else more. And as Jesus puts it here, that something else is righteousness. We are required by God to hunger and thirst." -- Douglas Wilson, Not as the Scribes

Happiness is reserved for those who want something more than happiness. In other words, happiness cannot be acquired as an end in itself. It cannot be grabbed or held that way. If you chase happy, you won't have it. If you find yourself happy, you can't keep it by trying to keep it. Blessedness is obtained by aiming at righteousness. Those who know that they lack righteousness will have it. Those who know they can't acquire happiness will have it. The hungry are the only ones who can be full and the thirsty the only ones who can be quenched. You cannot be sated or slaked by chasing food or drink. Satisfaction is found in the Founder of the feast.

day no. 15,726: the fluctuation of faith and feelings

"One must train the habit of Faith... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.

This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. 

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?"
-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Feelings, moods and emotions change. Faith cannot be rooted in them for the simple reason that nothing can be rooted in them. They are not anchored down. They are not fixed points or consistent coordinates. They cannot be counted upon to be present two minutes from now, how much less to hold the weight of an entire belief system like "til death you do part" together?

At some point, every person needs to tell their emotions to "hit the showers." As Lewis points out, if you don't or refuse to, you cannot be a sound Christian... or a sound anything for that matter. You cannot commit to any position because you cannot count on your mood to last.

Most people lose their faith because they can't remember where they left it. They set it down and never picked it up again. But their feelings followed them around, speaking up when tired, or when late for something, or when hungry or lonely or the like.

Faith must be pursued.

Feelings pursue you.

Feelings drift.

Faith anchors. 

Faith takes effort.

Feelings do not.

day no. 15,725: the pluck and the pick

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
-- William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets (94)

There are few things uglier than beauty gone bad. An ugly expression on a beautiful face reads particularly unsightly. It does not befit its setting like a kidney stone in place of a diamond. Rotten flowers smell worse than thriving weeds.

Proverbs 25:26

Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain

is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.

Good things gone bad are worse than those that were bad from the beginning. A spoiled spring is worse than soiled swamp. The swamp water was never good for drinking, whereas the fetid fountain once was. The end is the same, worthless water, but the one embodies the forfeiture of worth.

1 Peter 3:4
Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

Women were made to be beautiful and to pursue it with proportion. The amount of time and effort put into plucking eyebrows in order to be on fleek should not be disproportionate to the time spent picking out the speck from one's eye underneath. While applying eye shadow to the lid, one must be sure to let light in through the iris. 

Proverbs 31:29-31
Many daughters have done virtuously,
but thou excellest them all.
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain:
but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands;
and let her own works praise her in the gates.

A woman's good works should match her good fortune in being God's handiwork. If His hands have made such beauty for her, she must work hard to keep pace. Beauty is grace in that you can be praised for something you did not do and good works also acquire praise for the one who makes them possible. But the woman of God thanks her Creator for her outward appearance and demonstrates her gratitude by using it to cultivate faith and good works.

day no. 15,724: good lost and evil got

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began.

O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees
In Paradise, of operation blest
To Sapience, hitherto obscur'd, infam'd,
And thy fair Fruit let hang
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Sapience is a word for wisdom that derives its meaning from a word associated with tasting and in French can even mean, "having good taste." Here, Milton cleverly asserts it into the story at a point where the tasting the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was likened by the serpent to obtaining wisdom. But what they gained in grabbing that fruit, while new, was not wisdom. In other words, Satan can make sin look tasty, but he cannot make it less poisonous.

O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give eare
To that false Worm, of whomsoever taught
To counterfet Mans voice, true in our Fall,
False in our promis'd Rising; since our Eyes
Op'nd we find indeed, and find we know
Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

The tasting of the fruit led to new knowledge of good and evil; good lost and evil got. They did not know the presence of evil before and they had never misplaced good. Now, as a result of eating the forbidden fruit, they gained a new knowledge of good and evil. They would now know good only from afar and evil only to well from within. This gain incarnates well the sentiment, "subtraction by addition."

day no. 15,723: from beg to blame

Thus it shall befall
Him who to worth in Women overtrusting
Lets her Will rule; restraint she will not brook,
And left to her self, if evil thence ensue,
Shee first his weak indulgence will accuse.
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Eve began by begging Adam's indulgence and ended by blaming it.

Proverbs 31:1-3
The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.
What, my son? and what, the son of my womb?
and what, the son of my vows?
Give not thy strength unto women,
nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings

What we observe in Eve's blame and Lemuel's mother's advice is that women want men to lead all the way up to and including the ability to resist their pleas. While women want to be desired and to aspire to move men through their wiles, they cannot respect a man who gives into them. All that to say, when they win, they end up with men they cannot respect. When a woman wins that way, she loses the strength of her man as an asset since it was surrendered. She cannot trust him to protect her from danger if he cannot protect himself from her.

It is in everyone's best interest to follow God's ordained order of headship, initiative, leadership, insight and organization. May God make us men and women strong enough to be strong in our assigned positions and strong enough not to begrudge others pursuing theirs: neither condescending or flattering the other post nor shirking our own.