Tag Archives: Death

Shakespeare Sonnet 1

26 Friday Jul 2019

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[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

[3] But, as the riper should by time decease,

[4] His tender heir might bear his memory.

[5] But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

[6] Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

[7] Making a famine where abundance lies,

[8] Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

[9] Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

[10] And only herald to the gaudy spring

[11] Within thine own bud buriest thy content

[12] And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

[13] Pity the world, or else this glutton be—

[14] To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

The sonnet fits perfectly into three quatrains and a couplet. The argument fits into the form with the first line of each quatrain a topic sentence and the couplet a conclusion.

The poem is a request that the recipient of the poem (a person of endless speculation) would have children. By having children you achieve a kind of immorality and bless the world. But selfishness is a gluttony where you spend yourself upon yourself in death.

The first stanza sets out the primary argument of the poem: have children! Shakespeare gives two reasons: It is a good to the world for the best to have children; and, it is a good to you to have one who carries on your memory:

[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

[3] But, as the riper should by time decease,

[4] His tender heir might bear his memory.

The argument skillfully weaves the two argument into one.

The Perpetuation of Beauty

The first argument appears in lines 1-2.

[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

There are two elements to this argument: (a) origin, and (b) desire.

Origin of Beauty

This argument would be easily missed, because it is a concept so foreign to our “modern is best” understanding. We are anxious over the newest; we think the present is best and the future is better. We have a Hegelian progress of history (I don’t mean in some technical Hegelian manner, but as a general understanding) in which the present is better than the past.

This understandings of the progress of history is precisely the opposite of pre-Hegelian forebears. The earth at the first was pristine: It was best at first. This concept appears worldview which would have been available to Shakespeare. First, the Bible begins with the Garden of Eden. The original world was pristine. But world was altered, through the Fall of Adam into sin; and then, through the devastation of the Flood.

Second, classical mythology understands the history of the world to have progressed through a series of ages beginning with the Golden Age:

First of all [110] the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods [115] without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, [120] rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods. 

 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days. (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914). “Then” a second, silver age of men were found upon the earth:

then they who dwell on Olympus made a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body nor in spirit. 

 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days. (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914).

Thus, when we think of a great good like beauty, we think of it as an artifact of the pristine world. Beauty was something in the world from an earlier age and now descended to us. The ancient was not a place of foolish superstition and bad science, it was an age of greater truth and beauty. We are not the accumulation of wisdom but the running down of the world.

With that idea in mind, consider the second line of the sonnet

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

The rose of beauty can be lost — indeed, it will be lost if we are not careful to preserve it.

This idea, when it exists in our present age, exists in our understanding of non-human nature. This curious, but not necessarily without foundation. Remember that the Greek concept of a Golden Age comes from a Pagan conception of the universe without a Creator-Creature divide. Moreover, the relationship of human beings to the created order is fundamentally different. The concept of the “image of God” does not appear in the same way in pagan anthropology.

On that issue, the best starting place would be Peter Jone’s, The Other Worldview.

The concept of a pristine earlier age does exist in environmentalism. There is an ecological understanding of the human beings as the agent of defection, the means of devastation. The absence of human activity is good; the presence of human activity is what makes the world worse.

The Desire for Beauty

Beauty — with truth — is also an object of desire and the charm and foundation of life. Keats in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn famously wrote:

When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Christianity would posit this triad, the true, the beautiful and the good.

We desire the best creatures to reproduce (increase) so that beauty will continue in the world.  We – the rest of the world – desire all of the best creatures to fill the world. There is a faint echo of a biblical theme. Prosperity is always marked as “increase”:

Psalm 115:14 (KJV): The Lord shall increase you more and more,

You and your children.

“Fairest” is the praise of Canticles 1.8, 5.9, 6.1. But this is mixed with a Roman theme of an heir to bear one’s memory.

The Beautiful Should Desire the Continuation of Beauty: Memory as Immortality

The movement of lines 2-4 take this public theme of all the world desires the perpetuating of this beauty to this continuing the beauty is a private benefit of one’s memory.

The trick in the argument is the world “But” at the beginning of line 3. The But shifts the argument to a second theme. We don’t know the rhetorical trick because the But is followed by a parenthetical which distracts us.

A second But turns the private argument on its head. But you are so concerned with yourself that you do not even consider your memory.

This stanza says you have no sense of time. A theme Shakespeare will repeatedly consider is the ever present fact of death.

Stanza Two: The effect upon you for your folly

You are consuming your beauty and youth while not even considering the effect this will have upon yourself and upon others:

5] But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

[6] Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

[7] Making a famine where abundance lies,

[8] Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

You are making a famine of yourself.

Ironically, the poet cares for the subject than the subject does to his or her self.

The final stanza moves from argument to rebuke:

9] Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

[10] And only herald to the gaudy spring

[11] Within thine own bud buriest thy content

[12] And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

You are the spring of the world, but you do not care. You the Spring of the world. Your stinginess, your “niggarding” is a waste.

The beauty of your life and body can only be preserved by having a child.

One theory of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare was the front for Edward DeVere. If so, this poem makes sense as a complaint to Elizabeth Queen.

 

I am unaware of anyone advancing that theory and it may be just nonsense — but then most of the speculation on the “reality” behind the sonnets is nonsense. All or anyone of the sonnets could be fabrications of his imagination. Shakespeare was at the very least inventive.

The couplet draws these themes together into a rebuke

13] Pity the world, or else this glutton be—

[14] To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

It also multiples implications by the sheer compression of the languag.

You are a glutton who eats what is due another by dying- because you will die. You could do us good, but you will not.

The grave is a glutton and eats people. You are a glutton to yourself by giving yourself to the grave.

Selfishness is death in life and a severer death of being forgotten after death.

Housman, When I watch the living meet

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

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Number XII, A Shopshire Lad

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.

Rhyme: The stanzas rhyme A-B/A-B, which is a typical “ballad” form.

Meter: The meter is interesting. Other common ballad structure would be iambic lines of 8-6-8-6 syllables, such as number XVIII

Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave

Or, number II, 8-8-8-8

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough

Each of these forms give a different feel. Number XII uses 7 syllable lines. This forces the first syllable to be accented. The effect is to give the feel a forced march: the step is quite, the pace insistent.

This matches the imagery of the first stanza: There is a march along the street “the moving pageant file”. The poet is watching a parade pass-by: the whole world is marching from this world into the next.

Basic theme: Be mindful of death, because it is coming and will bring all this life to naught.

Perspective: The poet writes in the first person. He realizes himself to be temporarily alive. He thinks of what will happen when he (and everyone else) dies.

Imagery:

Parade:

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street

A lodger:

Where I lodge a little while,

Heat/inside a hot house:

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,

Dust/Lodging

Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

The imagery is interesting, because it picks up on the imagery of the parade and heat. The parade could easily be on a dirt street — the poem was published in 1896. The combination of dirt, heat and parade naturally suggest “dust”. Dust alludes to “dust-to-dust”. Here is the selection from the Book of Common Prayer, which Housman would have heard:

Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the Body by some standing by, the Minister shall say,

Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
Nation:

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;

Passions:
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

Love, marriage, sleep, death:

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.
Observations:

The heat, passions and pageantry of life, and even more the brevity of it all, are contrasted with the silence and endlessness of death. He makes the observation that while he lives, he must come to the realization that he will die and all this will be nothing, will be silent, will be unknown to the citizens of that “nation”. Even the most profound of relationships, marriage, will have no effect upon one after death.

What does not happen here is the most interesting: Housman draws no conclusion, he merely observes. He has no answer to death.

There is an implicit argument for stoicism:

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
[The] Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

If I am feeling passion (hate and lust); remember, these passions will soon become nothing. The effect of such a realization would be to deflate the importance of the present passion. If I am filled with hate, right now, remember this “revenge [will be] forgot.” If I am filled with sexual desire (lust), even that — even if there is a marriage — that will have no effect upon in the very near future.

The poem merely counsels, at most, resignation and detachment from the present loves and hates. In this sounds a stoic theme (such this from book 4 of Aurelius’ Meditations):

It is a vulgar, but still a useful help towards contempt of death, to pass in review those who have tenaciously stuck to life. What more then have they gained than those who have died early? Certainly they lie in their tombs somewhere at last, Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or any one else like them, who have carried out many to be buried, and then were carried out themselves. Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

It is very difficult for this resignation to bring one to any action. Yes, it may alleviate at times the pain of some current event: who cares, I’ll soon be dead. But that also has a tendency to drain lovely things of their beauty:

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.

This offers a freedom from fear of vengeance,

There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

But it also robs us love. It is good to contrast this with Shakespeare’s sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.).

The Spiritual Chymist, Meditation LIX

25 Friday May 2018

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Upon Going to Bed

How like is the frail life of Man to a day, as well for the inequality of its length, as the mixture that it has both of clouds and sunshine? What a kind of exact parallel are sleep and death: the one being a state of ligation of the senses; and the other, the privation of them? And how near a kin is the grave to the end, when the Scripture calls it by the same name?

When the clothes that do cover us do the like office the mould [of the grave], that must be cast spread over us. When therefore the day and the labors which Man goes forth unto are ended and the darkness of night dispose unto rest; what though can any better take into his bosom to lie down with? 

Then to think that death, like the beasts of the forest may creep forth to seek its prey, and that when it comes there is no resistance to be made or delay to be obtained. It spares no rank of men, but flies to the rich as well as the poor, the prince as well as the peasant. The glass that has the king’s face painted on it is not the less brittle; neither are kings, that God’s image represented in them, less moral. And whether it comes in at the window or at the door, whether in some common or in some unwonted manner, who can tell?

Many oft times fall asleep in this world and awake in the other, and have no sums at all to acquaint them whither they are going. And yet though every man’s condition be thus uncertain, and that his breath in his nostrils, where there is as much room for it go out as to come in; how few do make their night’s repose to serve as memorial for their last rest? Or their bed to stand for a model of their coffin? 

Some pervert the night, which was ordained to be a cessation of the evils of labor, to make it a season for their activity in the evils of sin. They devise (as the prophet says) inquiry upon their beds, when the morning is light they practice it, because it is in they power of their hand. [Micah 2:1] 

Others are easily brought asleep, by the riot and intemperance of the day, owning their unhappy rest not to the dew of nature but unto the gross and foul vapors of sin, which more darken and eclipse their reason than their sleep. Their dreams having more of it in them than their discourse. 

Others again by their youth and health seem to be seated in such an elevation above death; as that they cannot look down from their bed into the grave without growing dizzy, such a steep precipice they apprehend between life and death. Though this distemper does not arise from the distance between the two terms, but from the imbecility of their sense, which cannot bear the least thoughts of a separation form those delights and pleasures to which their souls are firmly wedded. 

When therefore most of men are such unthrifts [wasters] of time, and like carless navigators keep no journal or diary of their motions, and other occurrences that fall out. What need have others to make the prayer of Moses the man of God, their prayer?  So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. [Ps. 90:12] He who was learned in all the sciences of the Egyptians [Acts 7:22] desires to be taught this point of arithmetic of God: so to number, as not to mistake or make any error in the account of life, in setting down days for minutes and years for days. 

A man would think that a little arithmetic would serve to cast up so small a number as the days of him, whose days are as the days of a hireling, few and evil. [Job 7:1] And yet it is such a mystery that Moses begs of God to be instructed in it, as that which is the chief and only knowledge. Yea, God himself earnestly wishes this wishes this wisdom to Israel, his People, O that they were wise; that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end! 

Can we then render the night more senseless? Or keep the bed unspooled from those impurities that are neither few nor small, then by practicing duly this divine art of numbering our days; which is not done by speculation, or prying into the time or manner of our death: but by meditating and thinking with ourselves what our days are, and for what end our life is given to us; by reckoning our day by our work, and not by our time; by what we do, and not by what we are: By remembering that we are in a continual progress to the chambers of death; no man’s life being so long at the evening as it was in the morning.

Night and day are as two axes at the root of our life, when one is lifted up, the other is down, without rest: every day a chip flies off, and every night a chip, and so at length we are hewn down and fall at the grave’s mouth. O what a wide difference is there between those that lie down with these considerations in their bosoms, and others, who pass their time in pleasures, and allow not the leasts portion fit to think what issues are that a day or night may bring forth? 

How free are their conversations from those sensualities and lusts, which others commit in the day, and lie down with the guilt of them in the night? How profitably do they improve their time who count only the present to be theirs, and the future to be God’s? above those, that fancy youth and strength to be a security of succeeding proportions of their life? 

Yea, how comfortable is the date of those who are in daily preparation for it, as well as in expectation of it; above what it is to others, who are surprised by it in the midst of those delights in which they promised themselves a continuance for many years?

In what a differing frame and figure does it appear to the one and to the other? The one behold it as a bridge lying under their feet to pass them over the Jordan of this life, into the Canaan of eternal blessedness; and the other as a torrent roaring and frighting them with its hasty downfall: Gladly, therefore would I counsel Christians, who enter the Church Militant by a mystical death, being buried with Christ by baptism; and cannot pass into the Triumphant but by a natural death, to duly bear daily in their minds, the cogitations of their inevitable end, as the best means to allay the fear of death, in what dress soever it comes, and to make it an inlet into happiness whensoever it comes. 

As Joseph of Arimathea [Matt. 27:57-60] made his sepulcher in his garden, that in the midst of his delights he might think of death; so let us in our chamber make such schemes and representations of death to ourselves as may make it familiar to us in the emblems of it, and then it will be less ghastly when we behold its true visage.

That shortly (as St. Peter says) we must put off this our Tabernacle. [2 Pet. 1:14] I, and think again, what a likeness there is between our night-clothes and our grave-clothes, between the bed and the tomb. What little distance there is between life and death, the one being as an eye open, and the other as an eye shut. In the twinkling of an eye we will be living and dead men. [1 Cor. 15:52]

O what ardors of lusts would such thoughts chill and damp? What sorrows for sins past? What diligence for time to come to watch against the first stirrings of sin would such thoughts beget? It being the property of sin to divert us rather from looking upon our end, then embolden us to defy it. 

Lord then make me to know my end

And the measure of my days, 

That I in my own generation serve the will of God

And then fall asleep as David did

And not as others

Who fall asleep before they have done their work,

And put off their bodies before they have put off their sins.

A Pilgrim’s Song, Horatius Bonar

24 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Horatius Bonar, Hymns, Singing, Singing, Uncategorized

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(I have a lovely little volume from 1871 which fits in my pocket. Hymns of Faith and Hope by Horatius Bonar, D.D. This week two friends lost someone they loved (an aged mother for one, a young wife for the other). As I was reading through these hymns, I came upon three which made a pointed impression upon me. Christianity is a great answer to death (that is, death is not the final word). Anyway, here is one)

 

A few more years shall roll

A few more seasons come,

And we shall be with those that rest

Asleep within the tomb.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that great day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

A few more suns shall set

O’er these dark hills of time,

And we shall be where suns are not,

A far serener clime.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that blest day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

 

A few more storms shall beat

On this wild rocky shore,

And we shall be where tempests cease,

And surges swell no more.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that calm day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

 

A few more struggles here,

A few more partings o’er,

A few more toils, a few more tears,

And we shall weep no more.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that bright day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

 

A few more Sabbaths here

Shall cheer us on our way,

And we shall reach the endless rest,

The eternal Sabbath day.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that sweet day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

 

‘Tis but a little while,

And He shall come again,

Who died that we might live, who lives

That we with Him may reign.

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that glad day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood

And take my sins away!

The Spiritual Chymist, Meditation XXXIV

09 Friday Dec 2016

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The previous post in this series may be found here.

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MEDITATION XXXIV
Upon the Putting Out of a Candle

Light and darkness are in Scripture the two most usual expressions by which happiness and misery are set forth unto us. Hell and Heaven which will one day divide the whole world between them and become the sole mansions of endless woe and blessedness are described: the one to be a place of outward darkness, and the other an inheritance of light.

But it is observable also that as the happiness of worldly men and believes is wholly differing; so the light to which the one and the other is resembled is wholly discrepant. The happiness of the wicked worldling is compared to a candle which is a feeble and dim light, which consumes itself by burning, always put out by every small puff of wind. But the prosperity and happiness of the righteous is not, lucerna in domo, a candle in a house; but sol in Coelo, as the sun in heaven which though it may be clouded or eclipsed yet can never be extinguished or interrupted in its course, but that it will shine more and more onto the perfect day till it comes to the fullness of bliss and glory in heaven.

May we not then rather bemoan, than envy, the best condition of worldly man, who comes out of a dark womb into a dark world, and has no healing beams of the Son of Righteousness arising upon him to enlighten his paths or to direct his steps. What if he some few strictures of light which the creatures, that are no better than a rush candle, to seem to refresh him with, and in the confidence which he walks for a time — yet alas! How suddenly do the damps of affliction make such a light to burn blue and to expire and leave him as lost in the pitchy shades of anguish and despair? How do the terrors of darkness multiply upon him every moment all those evils that a restless fancy can suggest? He sees nothing and yet he speaks of ghastly shapes that stand before him: He cannot tell who hurts him, and yet he complains of the stinging of serpents, of the torments of fiery flames, or the wracking of his limbs.

If he have cordials put into his mouth, he spits them out again as if they were the gall of asps. Of if he have food ministered unto him, he wholly rejects it as that which will help to lengthen his miserable life. And yet die he dares not, lest worse things befall him.

If death approach, he then cries out as Crisorius in Gregory, a truce, a respect Lord until the morning. So great are his straits as that he knows now what to choose or where to fly. O that I could then affect some fond [foolish] worldlings with the vanity and sickness of their condition, who have nothing to secure them from an endless night of darkness but the wan and pale light of a few earthly comforts, which are ofttimes far shorter than their lives, but never can be one moment longer.

Have you no wisdom to consider that your life is but a span and that all your delights are not so much? Have you never read of a state of blessedness in which it is said that there shall be no night, and they need no candle, neither the light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light, and they shall reign for ever and ever? Or are you so regardless of the future as that you will resolvedly hazard what can never fall out for the present satisfaction of some inordinate desires? Do you not fear the threatening of him who said, The candle of the wicked shall be put out.

O then while it si called today makes David’s prayer from your heart, say,
Lord lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us,
Thou shalt put gladness in my heart more than in the time my corn and wine increased.

She hath exchanged earth for heaven

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Thomas Brooks, Uncategorized

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(Thomas Brooks writing to a friend on the loss of his wife):

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I could heartily wish that you and all others concerned in this sad loss, were more taken up in minding the happy exchange that she hath made, than with your present loss.

She hath exchanged earth for heaven,

a wilderness for a paradise,

a prison for a palace,

a house made with hands for one eternal in the heavens, 2 Cor. 5:1, 2.

She hath exchanged imperfection for perfection,

sighing for singing,

mourning for rejoicing,

prayers for praises,

the society of sinful mortals for the company of God, Christ, angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect, Heb. 12:22–24;

an imperfect transient enjoyment of God for a more clear, full, perfect, and permanent enjoyment of God.

She hath exchanged pain for ease,

sickness for health,

a bed of weakness for a bed of spices,

a complete blessedness.

She hath exchanged her brass for silver,

her counters for gold,

and her earthly contentments for heavenly enjoyments.

Thomas Brooks, The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 1, “A String of Pearls” (1657) (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; G. Herbert, 1866), 401.

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Art, Ecclesiastes

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Robert Frost & Ecclesiastes 3:

 Apple Picking

MY long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.


The poem is about the approach of death: the ladder has gone through the tree points toward heaven. There is work which has not been finished. There is a strangeness he cannot shake. There is exhaustion with his work. There is a sleep coming, but he doesn’t know what it is. 

This poem was written well before Frost died. It is not really about the approach of his own death, but rather the question raised in Ecclesiastes 3:

 18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.

20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.

21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? http://esv.to/Eccles3.18-22

What Zombies Mean and Why They Matter

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Culture

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Sometime in 2011 the total number of film plots with the keyword “zombie” passed the number of film plots with the keyword “cowboy,” according to the Internet Movie Database. One might argue that the zombie has become the great American archetype of the postmodern era, as the cowboy was the American archetype a century ago. With the release of Brad Pitt’s $200 million zombie epic World War Z, what used to be the stuff of low-budget shockers has entered the American cultural mainstream. Therein lies a lesson.

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Dying cultures are the living dead. Half of the world’s 6,000 languages will disappear by the end of this century. They are zombie cultures. But we Americans are gestating a zombie culture inside what used to be a “country with the soul of a church,” as G.K. Chesterton put it. The hedonistic narcissism that took over popular culture during the 1960s produced a spiritual deadening like nothing in American history. That’s why we are so fascinated with zombies. We identify with them.

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We have dismissed the Jewish and Christian hope of eternal life as superstition offensive to reason, but instead, we find ourselves trapped in a recurring nightmare. We know that we will die, but (as Woody Allen said) we don’t want to be there when it happens. We act as if exercise, antioxidants and Botox will keep the reaper away, but we know that our flesh one day must putrefy nonetheless. The more we try to ignore death, the more it fascinates us. The more we tell ourselves that mortality doesn’t apply to us, the more it surrounds us. And the more we try to fight off the fear, the more we feel like the beleaguered survivors resisting the zombie herd.

There is far more and all of it interesting: Spengler on the Zombie Apocalypse

On the Death of an Infant: “She is not lost to you who is found to Christ.”

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Charles Hodge, Charles Spurgeon, Galatians, John MacArthur, Ministry, Samuel Rutherford

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This is from a short address I gave on what happens when babies die?

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What happens when an infant dies? That child stands before the Lord with glory and honor as a joint heir of Christ. How can I say this? Because God is good and Christ died for sinners. The 19th Century Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge explained in his Systematic Theology: “[A]ccording to the common doctrine of evangelical Protestants [] all who die in infancy are saved.”
Hodge explains that the death of Christ, according to Romans 5:18-19, undoes the work of death wrought by Adam:
We have no right to put any limit on these general terms, except what the Bible itself places on them. The Scriptures nowhere exclude any class of infants, baptized or unbaptized, born in Christian or in heathen lands, from the benefits of the redemption of Christ.
In short, Jesus saves infants.
This doctrine is quite dear to me. At nine months of age, my first son died. He had a seizure late at night, then his heart stopped and his breathing stopped. He died while his mother held him. The paramedics came, and despite their best efforts, his heart would not start again. A few hours later, as the sun came-up, a man came to our house and laid a sheet on the floor of my son’s bedroom. He took the body of myson, laid him in the middle of the cloth and wrapped him like a package and then carried him away.

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God really did kill people

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Theology

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But God really did kill people. In fact, the Bible is full of stories about God taking the lives of men and women. Yet for some reason we don’t like to talk about these stories. When was the last time you heard a sermon about killing people (talk about a great way to shrink your church)? When was the last time you sang the hymn “We Praise Thee For Thy Killings” (FYI: I don’t believe such a hymn exists)? I read to my little girls out of several different children’s Bibles. We read about David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion’s Den, and Jonah and the Giant Fish. But all the stories of divine killing have been censored out of the children’s Bibles. Why? Why do we have such an aversion to these types of stories? Why do we get queasy, uncomfortable, and somewhat apologetic at the idea of God killing someone? I suspect it’s because these stories don’t jive with the sanitized version of God we have created. We put bumper stickers on our cars that say, “Smile, Jesus Loves You”. We don’t have any use for stickers that say, “Watch Out, God Might Kill You”. We could sing of his love forever, not his wrath.

Altrogge, Stephen (2014-01-03). Untamable God: Encountering the One Who Is Bigger, Better, and More Dangerous Than You Could Possibly Imagine (p. 59). Blazing Center Books. Kindle Edition.