Glory to God in the Lowest, for God deliberately falls into the low places. Jesus is God, in the flesh. But in entering the world, He sets aside the rights of divinity. He must learn the alphabet. He cannot walk, He cannot crawl. He must be nursed. And swaddled. He has become the lowest. And He goes down, into ditches, into loneliness, into hunger. He knows betrayal. A feeding trough is His crib. …
Read MoreThe Bible begins and ends with a wedding: At the beginning, the marriage of our first parents; and at the end, the marriage of Christ and the Church, inaugurating the new creation.
In between these two weddings is the fall, and all the messed-up marriages, with rebellious children and false worship. The joy is gone; the wine seems to have run out, and what’s left isn’t sitting so well inside us.
The wine running out symbolizes the thorns creeping up from the ground, the betrayal of a friend, the death that comes to all in the end….
Read MoreWith God there are simultaneously exhibited power, wisdom, and goodness. His power and goodness [appear] in this, that of His own will He called into being and fashioned things having no previous existence; His wisdom [is shown] in His having made created things parts of one harmonious and consistent whole; and those things which, through His super-eminent kindness, receive growth and a long period of existence, do reflect the glory of the uncreated One, of that God who bestows what is good ungrudgingly.
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