The biggest active volcano on our planet began erupting last Sunday. Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano had not erupted since 1984, according to the US Geological Survey. However, people on the Big Island had feared this moment for decades since Mauna Loa had been overdue for an eruption after its longest quiet period on record.

Volcanologists have not predicted thus far how long the eruption will last or where the lava might travel, so authorities have opened shelters on the island as a precaution. While the lava is so far contained within the summit and does not yet threaten Hawaiians living downslope, volcanic gases and fine ash may drift their way.

Focus on the Family sign vandalized

If you’re not on the Big Island, this does not mean you’re exempt from Mother Nature.

The Storm Prediction Center is warning of a “significant severe-weather event” later today across parts of the lower Mississippi River Valley. Tornadoes, damaging straight-line winds, and large hail are possible. Nighttime tornadoes are especially a threat for this evening. A strong Pacific storm system will also begin impacting the states of Washington and Oregon tonight with heavy rain and snow along with strong winds.

In other news, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has confirmed that a person killed in a shooting Saturday night was twelve years old. In all, Metro Atlanta police departments responded to fifteen shootings and stabbings over the Thanksgiving weekend. And a sign outside the Focus on the Family facility in Colorado was vandalized on Thanksgiving Day in response to the Club Q mass shooting that left five people dead and seventeen wounded. Graffiti was left at their facility reading, “Their blood is on your hands five lives taken.”

A key leader on our ministry team lost a family member the day before Thanksgiving. A very dear friend had surgery yesterday. You can add your own stories of challenges this morning.

A theological weathervane

We focused in yesterday’s Daily Article on the fact of God’s unconditional love as demonstrated in the Christmas gift of his Son. As I noted, the Father sent his Son not because we are lovable but because he is love (1 John 4:8). We can do nothing to earn his love, which means we can do nothing to lose it.

Circumstances do not change his character. As God declares in his word, “I the Lᴏʀᴅ do not change” (Malachi 3:6). Scripture says of our Savior, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

A farmer mounted a weathervane atop a barn with the words “GOD IS LOVE.” A pastor walking by thought them inappropriate, believing that the farmer meant to say God’s love changes with the shifting winds. His companion disagreed, suggesting that no matter which way the wind blows God is still love.

But the fact that God’s character does not change may not mean all that we think it does.

“So this is what God’s really like”

In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis chronicled his personal heartache when his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, died of bone cancer. At one point he wrote, “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”

When the volcano erupts and lava is headed our way, where is our God? When storms are coming and tornadoes are roaring, what good is prayer? When friends lose loved ones, why intercede to the God who could have prevented their deaths?

The holidays bring these questions into sharp relief. My father died ten days before Christmas in 1979; the Christmas season has been forever different as a result. Many of you have similar stories.

At such times, you have a binary choice to make: you can interpret God’s character through the prism of your circumstances, or you can interpret your circumstances through the prism of God’s character.

“Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”

When we do the latter, everything changes. Like physical eyeglasses that focus the way we see the world, these spiritual eyeglasses help us see what we could not see before.

When we believe no matter which way the wind blows that “God is love,” we learn that we can see his presence with us in the hardest places and times of life. We experience personally his promise, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” (Isaiah 43:2). We discover that we can say with David, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4).

And we trust that he is redeeming our pain in ways we may not understand on this side of glory, so we rest in the fact that one day “I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Charles Spurgeon commented: “Satan may plot to enslave us, but if the Lord is on our side, whom shall we fear? The world, with its temptations, may seek to ensnare us, but mightier is he who is for us than all they who be against us. The machinations of our own deceitful hearts may harass and annoy us, but he who hath begun the good work in us will carry it on and perfect it to the end.

“The foes of God and the enemies of man may gather their hosts together and come with concentrated fury against us, but if God acquitteth, who is he that condemneth? Not more free is the eagle which mounts to his rocky eyrie, and afterwards outsoars the clouds, than the soul which Christ hath delivered.”

According to Spurgeon, our response should be one of grateful obedience: “I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds. Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”

Would you make his prayer yours today?

Denison Forum

My wife and I started Season 5 of The Crown over the weekend. Like most viewers, we were surprised to learn that the Sunday Times took a poll in 1991 suggesting that half of the British public wanted Queen Elizabeth II to abdicate in favor of Prince Charles. In response, Charles met with Prime Minister John Major to persuade him to encourage the queen to step down.

Except nothing I just wrote is really true.

According to the Washington Post, the poll was taken in January 1990, not August 1991. It did reveal that nearly half of the public said the queen should consider abdicating in favor of Charles. But the Post reports that “importantly, they said she should consider ‘eventually,’ not necessarily at that very moment. The ‘eventually’ has been left out in the show.” And according to Major, the meeting with Charles portrayed in the show never happened, calling it a “barrel-load of nonsense.”

To continue with royal “news”: a new biography of King Charles III claims that the monarch once “destroyed a sink because he lost a cufflink down the drain.” But as we learn from The Crown, claiming something is true doesn’t make it true.

These stories do raise a personal question: Aren’t you glad no one is publishing a tell-all exposé of your life? That no one knows the secrets you’re keeping from the rest of us?

Actually, someone does.

“HAPPY BIRT, JESUS”

As we move into the Christmas season, this Washington Post headline caught my eye: “A decade’s worth of photos capture Christmas in America, from the joyful to the bleak.” Photographer Jesse Rieser traveled to eighteen states from Oregon to Florida to capture images of Christmas across the country.

The book he published as a result shows us an inflatable Santa Claus looming four stories over a Christmas tree lot, a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex dressed in a Santa costume, and a display of soldiers guarding Santa and his reindeer called “Protecting Dreams.”

Rieser titled his book Christmas in America: Happy Birthday, Jesus. According to the Post, the title originated from “one of Rieser’s favorite photos.” In it, neon red lights spell “HAPPY BIRT, JESUS” over the roof of a white garage, with the missing four letters laying atop the shingles. This is the only reference to our Lord in the Post story.

If you were to publish images of Christmas from Scripture, what verse would be on the cover? My answer is a text that will revolutionize the Christmas season for everyone who takes it to mind and heart today.

“The Lamb slain from the creation of the world”

A preacher once told the story of a mother on her deathbed. Her husband stood on one side, their estranged son on the other. In her last act, she took the hand of the angry father and the hand of the wayward child and brought them together over her body.

In the same way, he said, Jesus on the cross took the hand of a wrathful Father and the hand of sinful humanity and brought them together over his body.

But that’s not what happened.

Recall the most famous verse in Scripture: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This familiar declaration reminds us of the why behind the what of Christmas and supplies a vital corrective to the way many in our culture view our Father.

In short: Christmas was God’s idea. Jesus was “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 NIV). As Jesus explained, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

From his conception to his crucifixion, Jesus’ incarnation was his Father’s plan for our salvation.

“No creature is hidden from his sight”

Why does the God of the universe love us so much that he sent his Son to die so we could live eternally with him?

Is it because we deserve such love? Categorically not. Unlike a tell-all biographer exposing (or fabricating) the royal family’s secrets, the omniscient God of the universe knows the absolute truth about every single one of us: “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13).

Your Father knows not only the deepest secrets of your past—he knows the most grievous sins and failures that are in your future. And yet, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He did this because “God is love” (1 John 4:8). He loves us because it is his unchanging nature to love us. Stated bluntly, he cannot not love us, no matter who we are or what we have done.

Jesus made this fact clear in John 17 when he prayed “that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (v. 23, my emphasis). The Greek is literally translated “and loved them as much as you loved me.”

Think of it: your Father loves you as much as he loves his “one and only Son” (John 3:16 NIV).

“Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!”

Here’s the point: if we had to earn God’s love, we could lose his love. If the Christmas gift of our Father was given on the basis of merit, none of us could receive it or hope to retain it. But because God “is” love, there is absolutely nothing we can do to make him love us any more or any less than he already does.

So, as we step into the Christmas season, let’s make time every day to remember the why of Christmas. Let’s reflect on the unchanging, unconditional love of our Father for us. Let’s respond with the grateful worship of our souls. And let’s pay forward this gift by sharing it with everyone we can.

In response to “the surpassing grace of God,” Paul exclaimed, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:14–15).

Do his words express your heart today?

Denison Forum

For more than fifty years, Bob Vogelbaugh has made sure that his Moline, Illinois, community is well fed on Thanksgiving Day.

The former grocery store owner started this tradition in 1970 to include some of his customers who were going to be alone on Thanksgiving Day. What began as a small gathering inside his grocery store has grown to fill an entire food court in an area mall. He and his volunteers served more than 3,200 people this year.

“It’s not a charity dinner,” he said. “It’s just a Thanksgiving gathering of friends and people you don’t know and some people have become friends through this over the years.”

“It will not always be like this”

A pastor was famous for beginning every Sunday service with an invocation focused on thanksgiving. He would give thanks to God for events across the week, occurrences in the life of the church, and even the good weather.

However, one Sunday morning the congregation gathered in the midst of a terrible blizzard. The roads were icy; most people could not even make it to church. As the pastor stepped to the pulpit to offer his customary invocation, the few members in attendance wondered to themselves what reasons he could possibly find to give thanks on this miserable day.

The pastor began his prayer by describing the weather in all its ferocity. Then he paused and prayed, “And, dear Lord, we thank you that it is not always like this.”

November saw thirty-three mass shootings; there have been 606 so far this year. A new report warns that the threat of a measles outbreak is growing due to a significant decline in vaccination rates among children worldwide. Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are likely to escalate after Thanksgiving holiday gatherings. And a writer for the liberal magazine The Nation published an article on Thanksgiving Day titled, “We’re Thankful for Our Abortions.”

But it will not always be like this.

“The marriage supper of the Lamb”

Bob Vogelbaugh’s wonderful Thanksgiving tradition foreshadows the thanksgiving dinner of all dinners. One day, those who know Christ as their Lord will hear these words: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).

This amazing invitation is best understood in its cultural context.

In Jesus’ day, what we would call an engagement began when a marriage contract was signed by the parents of the bride and the bridegroom. This was the period Joseph and Mary were in when she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18; Luke 2:5).

A year later, the bridegroom, accompanied by his male friends, went to the house of the bride at midnight, forming a torchlight parade through the streets. The bride and her maidens would join the parade, arriving at the bridegroom’s home. This is the background for Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1–13).

The third phase was the marriage supper itself, which could go on for days, as we see with the wedding in Cana (John 2:1–2).

In Revelation 19, the Lamb (Jesus) and his bride (the Church) are in this third phase. The first occurs when we place our faith in Christ as our Lord. The second symbolizes the return of our Lord to take us to his home in paradise (John 14:1–4). The third symbolizes our eternal celebration and worship in heaven, where we are gathered with “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9).

John described our eternal destination this way: “I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’” (Revelation 21:3–4).

“Standing at the throne of the spotless Lamb”

Like the pastor who began every Sunday service with gratitude, you and I can begin every day by giving thanks for all Jesus has done for us, all he is doing for us, and all he will do for us. And when we remember our future destiny, we are emboldened to trust our Lord in the midst of present challenges.

Consider this moving example.

St. Paul Le-Bao Tinh was born in 1793 in Vietnam. He became a Christian, then an ascetic monk, then a missionary. When persecution against Christians broke out in 1841, he was arrested and spent the next seven years in prison in Hanoi. While incarcerated, he wrote to a seminary student:

“The prison here is a true image of everlasting hell: to cruel tortures of every kind—shackles, iron chains, manacles—are added hatred, vengeance, calumnies, obscene speech, quarrels, evil acts, swearing, curses, as well as anguish and grief.” Then he added: “But the God who once freed the three children from the fiery furnace is with me always.”

He asked his reader, “Come to my aid with your prayers, that I may have the strength to fight according to the law and indeed to fight the good fight and to fight until the end and so finish the race.”

He concluded: “We may not see each other again in this life, but we will have the happiness of seeing each other again in the world to come, when, standing at the throne of the spotless Lamb, we will together join in singing his praises and exult forever in the joy of our triumph. Amen.”

Whatever you are facing today, remember: It will not always be like this. One day we will “exult forever in the joy of our triumph” with our Lord.

Why is this promise relevant to your soul today?

Denison Forum