The Leap

This sinner sat before his board of keys

And there he tapped to form some simple lines

That hopefully would make his reader smile

Or hold a pleasant picture in his mind.

So, tapping, tapping, out the stanzas stepped

Onto the cyber-page all black and bold

As each idea leapt from sinner’s brain—

From darkened depths to soil a field of white.

Oh why would such a wicked typist toil

To render written recipes just right?

Perhaps to purchase up some wrath’s release

Or earn a flagon in Valhalla’s halls?

No, sinner long ago had heard the truth:

The favor of the Reader’s not for sale;

It rather cost far more than we might pay

With wages earned a million lifetimes more.

So, happy to fulfill his given task,

So happy that One perfect paid the price,

This sinner tapped his midget masterpiece

And with it leapt into the arms of God.

MNA 9.29.13

Let All Things Now Living

(Original lyrics by Katherine K. Davis--1892-1980; New third stanza by Mark Aikins)

Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving
To God the creator triumphantly raise.
Who fashioned and made us, protected and stayed us,
Who still guides us on to the end of our days.
God's banners are o'er us, His light goes before us,
A pillar of fire shining forth in the night.
Till shadows have vanished and darkness is banished
As forward we travel from light into light.

His law he enforces, the stars in their courses
And sun in its orbit obediently shine;
The hills and the mountains, the rivers and fountains,
The deeps of the ocean proclaim him divine.
We too should be voicing our love and rejoicing;
With glad adoration a Song let us raise
Till all things now living unite in thanksgiving:
"To God in the highest, Hosanna and praise!

Yet God’s greatest treasure, the Gift beyond measure,
He gave when our Savior was sent from above;
Through earth’s humble portal, divine and yet mortal,
Christ came to poor sinners with grace and with love.
Amazing salvation, a brand new creation
To all who believe Him He’ll freely bestow;
Now His resurrection points us to perfection—
With joy let us serve and His love ever show!

Revival

Revival means to live again,

To leave one’s grave behind:

The buried past is left at last

For treasures newly mined.

From childish dreams to child-like faith

I’d bid my soul to wake;

From tiresome toys to endless joys

An upward trek I’d take.

Too long my thoughts have been entombed

In pyramids of pride,

And beauties fleetly seek to cheat

My heart and blindly guide.

This suffocating sepulcher

With golden idols filled

That ever try to satisfy

A lust that won’t be stilled,

Must be demolished and denied

For daybreak to arrive…

Death’s selfish night gives way to light

When sons of God revive.

Skyarid (fiction excerpt from The Gods of Heavenforge)

Four

Skyarid

Colin stood up and walked across the edge of the saw-toothed plateau with the confidence of a young god newly sprung from the head of Zeus. In a hazy, dusky corner of his mind he was still aware of who he was, or used to be, humanly speaking. But for some glorious reason, Dr. Dutko had had greatness thrust upon him.

The vision that began his new life had come to him in an instant of time beyond time. A miniscule moment that lay outside the realm of mere human experience. In that vision he had seen an entire alternate reality, a shining cosmic kingdom that consisted of worlds within worlds, pleasures beyond pleasures…treasures that fueled a furnace of deep desire within him that he never knew existed.

He turned his head with an easy fluidity and looked at the others: two men and a woman who had yet to awaken to their new lives. There they lay in the circular carven womb, and there, many yards beyond them, lay the coverings that now represented the former lives they had just shed.

Then there was the Voice in Colin’s head—thinking thoughts not his own. It was a thundering Voice but a kind one. The Voice had given him the vision of the shining kingdom as an unbelievable promise. Colin knew that the others would receive the same vision, the same promise; that all of them would vie for it…that all but one would die for it. Perhaps he himself would be the chosen one, perhaps he’d be one of the ones who died. Right now it didn’t matter.  Right now there was only hope and joy. Right now there was only desire—desire for the Power.

And here came, right on time, another team of suited people from Petra City. Colin knew they must be a rescue party, concerned for the welfare of the four poor victims who’d “escaped” from the hospital in the dome. Colin understood now that it was only by the blood of sacrifice that any of them could be saved. After all, the four of them had had to go through the blessed suffering of blood to achieve their own godhood.

It was amazing…his eyesight was so keen now that the expressions on the faces of the approaching team members were clearly visible, even at this distance. Obviously they had spied him standing here—standing here in this superheated wasteland void of breathable air—standing here without an environment suit. They were gaping in stunned wonder. Colin laughed with a spasm of spontaneous glee.

The wonder on their faces turned to mixed disbelief and fascination. Colin could hear their conversations—mostly ejaculations of astonishment. He supposed he and his three counterparts would have to become accustomed to this kind of reaction from the normal humans from whom the Skyarid demanded worship. What could one expect, he admitted, from people steeped so long in the lies of a supposedly “naturalistic universe”? Ah, well, they would learn to bow and obey…

And those who refused would render their service in far more painful ways.

Now the other three were sitting up and beginning to stretch their limbs like a trio of felines after a pleasant season of canary-filled dreams. Colin had heard their names…what were they? George…Deacon…and Cassandra—that was it. Actually, he did more than see them. He was touching them with his thoughts, sensing their very essence, feeling echoes of their emotions. This was another precious gift of the Skyarid of Power. And with the combination of Colin’s adoration with theirs, the satisfaction he felt was growing ever stronger and more intoxicating. The memory of the new-birth vision was still fresh in their minds, mirroring his own. The promise, the challenge, the mission the four of them had been given.

Confident, effortless, proud and obedient to the Voice, the other three arose and emerged from the carven womb with long, powerful strides. The four new god-lings stood abreast to face the rescue party that was drawing near, laboriously cresting the ridge. Many of the rescuers held scanning instruments that were undoubtedly registering bioscan readings none of them could comprehend. Others were beginning to crouch and aim their weapons, confused, frightened, unsure what to make of these clearly humanoid beings who needed no external life support in such a lethal environment.

Colin supposed he ought to be the first to speak: “Please, gentlemen, your weapons will not be necessary. We have no desire to engage in violence of any kind. To answer the question that is surely in all of your minds, we have no need of environment suits simply because we have undergone a miraculous change. All four of us now live with the energy of the Skyarid of Power.  We welcome you as the first human beings to visit the Skyarid’s temple—his very womb. As the Skyarid’s first servants, we four invite you to share in your new master’s happiness.”

Then all four of the servants chanted together: “Kneel down and worship him. Worship and serve the Skyarid of Power!”

The rescuers, bewildered, looked back and forth at one another. The four servants repeated: “Kneel down and worship him. Worship and serve the Skyarid of Power!”

One of the rescuers barked at the others: “Enough of this…stun them now!”

A second later, all twelve of the rescuers were on the ground, covered with blood.

Reddy for This?

At the edge of night I’m a sailor’s delight,

At the crack of morning, a sailor’s warning,

I’m ketchup on a burger, sauce on spaghetti,

A souped-up vehicle for Andretti.

Bell pepper on a salad as a break from green,

I’m the nails and lips of a beauty queen.

I’m a fox’s coat, though hounds can’t see me,

Valentines and roses that make her feel dreamy.

I’m what men see when their anger boils

And with sweat and tears in all their toils.

I’m a phone a CEO or “prez” kept handy,

Or an apple, especially dipped in candy.

Cherry lifesavers or cinnamon “hots,”

I’m in slasher films by buckets and pots.

In old brick walls and Mississippi clay,

I’m striped all over Independence Day

On sunburnt bodies at your nearest beach

And blushing faces when preachers preach,

In a jell-o mold, on MacDonald’s barn,

Rubber galoshes and mittens of yarn,

I’m the ruby slippers Dorothy clicked

And the velvet cake whose frosting you licked.

On the Coke can you ought to have recycled

And the comb atop every hen that’s cackled,

I’m the shirt of a doomed security guard

And the phone booth outside Scotland Yard.

I’m Elmo’s fur, Thing One and Thing Two,

And the sexy dress on You-know-who!

  

Poinsettias, tulips and a drink named “Bull,”

Fire trucks and hydrants forever full,

Strawberries, M&M’s, dying embers,

Cabooses almost no one remembers,

Radio Flyer childhood wagons

And the fiery eyes and breath of dragons,

Stop signs, double decker buses,

Lucy’s hair over which she fusses,

I’m a long carpet at a world premiere,

And butcher’s meat making vegans jeer.

The hood on a wee girl who met a wolf,

And the caps sports sport when playing golf,

I’m watermelon flesh so juicy sweet

And adorn an old Schwinn’s bicycle seat.

A good bet on the roulette wheel,

I’m on robes to whose wearers many kneel.

The very tallest trees are named for me,

And Communist flags fit me to a tee.

I’m the petticoat Rhett Butler bought for Mammy

And the Happy Meal box you bought in Miami.

I’m comedians Skelton, Buttons and Foxx,

And for Boston fans,

what else?

I’m the Sox.

The Power Everyone Needs

People are fascinated by the subject of power. Solar power, electric power, nuclear power, the power of nature, psychological and political power, mental and spiritual power…various kinds of power fire our imaginations and draw our attention like a magnet.

Often we long for powers we don’t have. Who hasn’t wished for the power to fly, or to overcome a bully, or to achieve some impossible dream? It is this kind of wishing that has led to the creation of many myths and comic book heroes like Zeus or Hercules or Superman—ultra-human figures who possess super-powers mere mortals can only dream of.

If the Bible is to be believed, there is an all-important super-human ability that every person desperately needs, but that very few people seem to want. And that is the power to please our Creator.

Have you ever had a beloved pet, child, or spouse who always seemed to live only to please you? Whenever you came home he or she would come running up to greet you with a lavish display of joy and affection. He or she would go out of their way to bring you satisfaction or pleasure, making you feel like a person of royal privilege. As fellow creatures we can have a profound, pleasing effect on one another even in spite of our many imperfections.

But the Scriptures teach us that the infinite Lord of Heaven and earth is of a completely different order of being from those He has created. When this God created the universe, all he made was according to a holy standard of perfection that we can’t begin to imagine—a creation totally free of death, disease, defects and disobedience. When God surveyed all He’d fashioned and produced at the dawn of creation, He pronounced it “very good.” He gave every living thing the capacity to please, and to go on pleasing, the One who had made it.

This capacity, however, wasn’t a power that couldn’t be lost or forfeited. There were at least two kinds of creatures—angels and humans—who could lose the power to please God. Both of these beings were given a freedom of choice whereby their original perfect standing with the Maker could be cast aside and forfeited. The ability to please a perfect Creator had to be maintained by a life of perfect obedience, devotion and trust.

Satan and his demon followers chose to rebel against God because of pride and arrogance, and they were cast out of Heaven. Our first parents Adam and Eve chose to disobey God’s law and were driven out of Paradise here on earth. By rejecting God’s standard of perfect obedience, they were in effect rejecting God Himself.

As human beings who are used to life in a fallen, sinful world, we find it natural to wonder, “Why is God so hard to please?” “Why can’t He relent and lower His standards so that pleasing Him would be do-able?” “If He is a God of love, why can’t He simply forgive and forget?”

One way to understand this is to see all of God’s attributes as integral parts of His being. Everything God is, He is perfectly and to the infinite degree. He cannot just love someone “a little” or “half-way” because He IS love. He cannot give people “more” or “less” justice, for His is PERFECT justice. One cannot please God “a little bit” or “a bit more”…it’s either totally pleasing to Him, or not at all!

For our Creator to be satisfied with less than total obedience, trust and devotion would be like you and me being able to live without food and air. To survive without food or air we’d have to cease being human, and to be pleased with less than perfection, God would have to cease being God.

Obviously, then, imperfect human beings lack the power to please God. Paul puts it this way in Romans 3: “There is no one righteous, not even one…all have turned aside and have together become worthless. There is none who understands, no one who seeks God. There is no one who does good, not even one…For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” It is not just that we CHOOSE not to please God. The fact is that we lack the power of doing so, as well as the desire to please Him.

This situation is compounded by the fact that a right standing with God is necessary in order for any of us to escape eternal punishment for our sins. The Bible insists that without holiness “no one will see the Lord” and that our God will “by no means clear the guilty.”

“But,” we might wonder, “isn’t it possible to perform some kind of extra-credit assignment to counteract the curse of my sins? Can’t I earn my way into God’s pleasure if I work very, very hard?”

The Bible leaves no doubt that this is a false hope. Even when we are born, it teaches we are ALREADY starting out with a huge load of guilt in our deficit column. Our first representatives Adam and Eve saddled us with “original sin”—a sin nature that is in itself repugnant and offensive to God. Because they used their free will to choose to reject God, you and I inherited a nature that makes us incapable of perfect obedience from the start!

This sinful nature makes lying, cheating, lusting and hating as natural to us as hunger and thirst. Even if I wanted to perform good deeds to outweigh the bad, the bad deeds I’ve already done are still on my record. And God’s perfect justice demands eternal punishment for lawbreakers, no matter how small the infraction. Remember, rejecting even ONE of God’s laws is the same as rejecting God Himself.

Wow! What a bleak picture! And so it would be…apart from God’s grace.

There is one, and ONLY one, human being who has the power to please God. In fact, He has always had it, He has kept and maintained it, and—best of all—He has earned the right to share that awesome power with helpless, hopeless sinners like you and I.

The good news is that Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the God-man, came down from Heaven as a human baby, so that He could live a life of perfect law-keeping—pleasing God the Father and making Him (Jesus) the perfect sin-bearing sacrifice for hell-deserving sinners. “Christ died once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

Before He went to the cross to fulfill His mission and die for our sins, Jesus told His disciples, “I will send you another Comforter to be with you.” This other Comforter is the Holy Spirit. This awesome Person of the Godhead comes to live in those who believe in the Person and finished work of Jesus Christ. He changes their hearts in an act of regeneration—new birth!—and brings new Christians both the desire and the power to please God, by the grace that is found in their Savior Jesus.

I hope that you, as you read this and the Spirit-inspired words of the Gospel, will see Jesus Christ as the true Lord and Savior of your soul. He lives and rules today at God the Father’s right hand. He calls all people everywhere to repent and trust in His power to save them from sin and its just punishment. O sinner, call on Him today for forgiveness and eternal life!

Only this crucified, risen, ascended Savior can give sinners the power to please their Creator and enjoy Him forever.

Where Love Falls Short (part one)

“The power of love is a curious thing. Makes a strong man weep, makes another man sing. Turns a hawk to a little white dove. More than a feeling—that’s the power of love.” Huey Lewis sang these words, echoing the sentiments of Paul, John, George and Ringo: “All you need is love… love is all you need.” A myriad of other songwriters and philosophers have likewise made a virtual religion out of this thing called “love.”

Maybe we hate to admit it, but trying to reduce all the facets and goals of our world down to a single essence—even love—can be a risky thing. The danger that all philosophers down through history have faced is the fallacy of reductionism. We all might hope and pray for a simple, easy answer to the problems and complexities of life, and many claim to have found one. But such a claim can render the philosopher blind to the factors that fail to fit into that simple system.

All of us long after this thing we call love; it is truly a universal human goal. But a longing, if it is strong enough, can cause a kind of blindness—even a kind of madness. Take a deep and prolonged thirst for water. If a man is thirsty enough, for long enough, he might lose his reason. He might begin seeing mirages in the desert. Or if he’s adrift on the ocean, he might begin drinking the salt water all around him that will only make him thirstier or sicker.

The perfect philosophy, or the perfect religion, would account for all the particulars of our existence—not just the ones that give us feelings of euphoria or satisfy our longings. The person who says “I simply have love as my religion” has, perhaps unknowingly, made love more than it is, and religion less than it is.

Let’s begin with the term “love” itself. Left to itself, this word is a chameleon, colored by a person’s upbringing, exposure to culture, history, literature and so on. Does the love devotee limit this virtue to other people, or does she include animals, plants and inanimate things? How is love to be shaded and distributed, from “I love this TV program,” to “I love my cat,” to “I love my brother, my buddy, my spouse…?”

What about loving mankind? One’s country? One’s enemy? Does one’s love of large groups of people take precedence over loving one’s own family or one’s close neighbors or one’s countrymen? The mere word “love” cannot, when left in isolation from values like justice, mercy, devotion, forgiveness, humility, authority, truth, give us sufficient answers to these questions. This is why I suggest that “love” is too small a term to sum up anyone’s view of reality.

Now let’s move on to “religion.” As I understand the term in its purest form, it differs from “philosophy” in that it moves beyond intellectual, rational principles about reality, into the realm of devotion and reverence toward an ultimate or supreme reality. A religion normally claims answers not only for the “here and now” but also of the “before and hereafter”…eternal answers. It claims to give satisfactory answers to universal questions of origins, purpose, and destiny.

In effect, the one who claims that “Love is my religion” would have to be saying that the simple term “love” is the universal answer to all of mankind’s questions: “Why and how did we originate? If God exists, what does He want from us? What are we doing here? Is there any meaning to life, to morality, to our labors, hopes and dreams? Is there life after death? How will it all end? Do we have any say in our future destiny?” Obviously, “religion” is too large a term for the word “love” to stand alone as a satisfactory answer to its questions.

Perhaps the love-religionist would wish to modify his claim to: “All I believe in is a loving God,” or “Love is my God.” Indeed, there would seem to be some Bible verses that point to love as being synonymous with the Deity: John the Apostle writes that “he who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Here we must take care not to jump to unwarranted conclusions. One may say “This chicken is our dinner,” for example, without saying that the chicken and the meal are synonyms for the same thing. There are parts of the animal that are decidedly not being served as food, and there are parts of the dinner that are unrelated to the bird in question. John’s point in saying “God is love” is that God is so much the embodiment of pure love, that no one who fails to love can claim an intimate relationship to Him. In our reading of the entirety of Scripture, it is clear that one could also make the statements: “God is holiness,” “God is joy,” “God is justice,” “God is wrath,” “God is truth,” etc., since He is the pure embodiment of all of those attributes as well. Those who claim to have a close bond with Him must also display holiness, joy, justice and all the rest, for their claim to be true.

How would a love-religionist deal with the brokenness of our world and the immorality and guilt of our human race? Sadly, there are broken, unloving and unlovely things and people all around us and, if we are honest, we find brokenness, hate and ugliness inside our own hearts and minds. Every human being who ever lived has had to face the fact that this world and the people in it are not what they ought to be. I might long after love, cry out for love, want to give love, even come to worship love as my god…but in my honest heart of hearts, I have to admit two painfully bitter truths about myself:

I am too selfish and too enslaved by my own desires to truly love as I ought.

AND

I am in no way deserving of the love I continually long after.

Only the most delusional person will make the claim that his or her love (given or received) is everything he or she longed or meant for it to be. Even the most sincere love we express or experience is riddled with imperfections like guilt, regret, dishonesty, selfishness, greed, lust, etc. There is a void that occurs in all human love—a gap that can’t be filled in with the simplistic old saw, “Nobody’s perfect.” Certainly, an imperfect love that is cracked and marred cannot occupy any pedestal we would wish to label “my God.”

This presents the love-worshiper with a “Catch-22” dilemma. If I were to respond, “Well, of course the world is broken and the people are unloving; that’s exactly why my devotion to love as the ideal is so necessary! Love is itself the answer to that brokenness. If we abandon all the religions out there and simply preach and demonstrate love, everything would eventually get better…wouldn’t it?”—if that was my response to a broken world and mankind, I’d be in for a big letdown. Even if I could convince every person in the world to agree with my viewpoint and make it everyone’s goal to love each other, all I’d succeed in doing would be to enlist billions of equally flawed and broken people to engage in a love equally flawed and broken.

(to be continued...)