Graham Shearer is a Christian minister and theologian. Originally from London, he lives in Belfast with his wife and their three children.
↓ ↓ ↓
If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
/ / / / / /
Earn interest on Gold:https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/
/ / / / / /
Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleSupport James’ Writing at: https://delingpole.substack.comSupport James monthly at: https://locals.com/member/JamesDelingpole?community_id=7720
Psalm 27 King James Bible Version The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.
Though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after.
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.
For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion.
In the secret tabernacle shall he hide me.
He shall set me up upon a rock.
And now shall my head be lifted up above my enemies round about.
Therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy.
I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord.
Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice.
Have mercy also on me and answer me.
When thou saidst, Seek ye my face, my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.
Hide not thy face far from me.
Put not thy servant away in anger.
Thou hast been my help.
Leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.
When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path because of mine enemies.
Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies, for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart.
Wait, I say, on the Lord.
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about my special Psalms guests, but I really am.
Welcome to the Psalms, Graeme Shearer.
Graeme, we've almost never met.
We did a sound test and that was it.
And I don't like to...
I don't want to do too much research on my guests.
I want to find out in conversation who they are and where they're coming from.
You've gamely agreed to talk about Psalm 27, which is, I think you'll agree, one of the classics.
I think it was the second psalm I learned, I think, after Psalm 23.
I think it's a key part of one's repertoire if one's going to learn the psalms.
But tell me about yourself first.
I recently finished a PhD in Theology and I'm now very, very blessed, very fortunate to be lecturing in Theology and literally in the last few days.
I'm from London but I live in Belfast in Northern Ireland and married with three children.
Yeah, my first degree was in history um about nearly 20 years ago now so uh have that kind of background um politics but does that mean that you um came to christianity later in life no i was brought up in a christian home i I would have said I became a Christian at about the age of 14.
I basically had never read the Gospels for myself.
As a kind of just as a text as a story, you know, I knew all the stories I knew of a Good Samaritan and David and Goliath and but never had kind of read it consecutively and one night just literally didn't have anything to read and so picked out my the Bible that I had to have for RE at school and started reading Matthew's Gospel and it all kind of all the stuff that I'd
imbibed every week at church just suddenly kind of came alive and clicked into place and I suppose really realised that it was about forgiveness rather than, you know, just exhorting me to be a better person and live a better life, which I knew I couldn't do.
I was suddenly realised, oh hang on a second, God's taken that into account and has offered me Jesus.
Yeah, although I would say That the forgiveness hard part is about the hardest part of being a Christian.
Forgiving other people.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
And realizing that you can only do that because you, you, you know, you have to realize how much you've been forgiven in order to bring yourself to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the Psalms, you're presumably familiar with the Psalter.
Yeah, I would actually say it's been interesting.
Over the last few years, like literally the last two or three years since the whole world went crazy, I've found that the Psalms have been much more of a part of my devotional life, as it were.
you know that sort of I think that the kind of raw existential quality that they have about them that you're you know whereas you can read a story about King David or you can about Jesus or the Apostle Paul but the Psalms really bring you know you have to think well actually do I want to say this Do I believe this?
Being an example, you know, it starts with this kind of big affirmation of fearlessness and you think, hang on a second, I often feel afraid and I'm often quite fearful.
So it challenges your sort of soul in a more direct way, I think, sometimes than other parts of the scriptures.
It's interesting you say that.
I think that, in my experience, I'm not an expert, but in my experience, the Psalms are a form of, they're like a mantra, a form of affirmation.
So if you repeat every day as I do, the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?
It sort of imprints in you.
This reinforces the sense that God is there for you and he is protecting you.
And I think the more you say it, the more you feel it.
So the psalms become part of your life.
I mentioned before we started that Psalm 27 is the motto of my university, Dominus Illuminatio Mea.
When I was at university, it didn't even occur to me that it was even a psalm.
I just thought it was some Latin quote.
I don't know whether there's anything sinister in that word illuminati-o.
I know it means just, you know, God is my light.
God illuminates me.
But yeah, there's one other thing I wanted to mention.
I don't know whether you saw it.
You probably, I hope you didn't.
There was a series on Netflix called Midnight Mass.
Did you see it?
No, no.
It started off very, Interesting, in that it's about a priest who comes to this parish, a remote parish on an island, I think probably somewhere on the east coast of America, and he revives
The dwindling faith of this sort of fishing community and miracles start happening.
And there was a key scene where it's an extended church service.
And you go through Psalm 27, he quotes quite a lot of it.
And I was thinking this is great.
This is showing the power of Christianity, that it's not just a kind of touchy-feely kumbaya thing, which is one of the things I loathe about what's happened to Christianity, the way it's been sort of turned into this weak as milk thing.
People are very good about sort of, you know, it's what somebody described as Jesus is my girlfriend kind of Christianity.
And what this series did or seemed to do was to be showing that Christianity is much more than that.
This supernatural stuff, which has been pretty much written out of Christianity in the last hundred years, is the essence of it.
It is powerful.
Anyway, it loses its way because it turns out that what the priest thinks is an angel that he's released from a cave in the Middle East is actually a vampire, and then it turns into a bog standard.
Spoiler alert!
Sorry, I've now ruined it!
But there is that line, I'll let you speak in a moment, there is that line in the psalm, which I love and at the same time freaks me out, where they came upon me to eat up my flesh.
It's what I call the zombie apocalypse moment in the psalm.
You texted me in that verse, when I suggested Psalm 27, you texted me in that verse and The more modern translation that I am used to doesn't have that idiom.
It says something like, to devour me, or something like that.
But it is in the original.
And I actually think it sheds a lot of light on how the psalmist should be understood, or at least one perspective on whatever should be understood.
But maybe we could come back to that at the end, because I think it's best...
I give the floor to you Graham, you take me through it.
Right, well, so, you know, obviously there are all sorts of, any text in scripture is, I mean any text, you know, obviously your background is English literature, you know, has a kind of
um a plenitude of meaning you know we could we could look at it from all sorts of different angles so i i this is just this is just kind of how i you know how i've worked through it um and it starts with psalm 27 starts with um this you know bold kind of affirmation of fearlessness you know the lord is my light and my salvation whom shall i fear um and then verses two and three you have these kind of um
You know, massive statements, even if this happens, you know, when the wicked come to eat me up, you know, as I said, they will be the ones who will stumble and fall or they stumble and fall.
You know, even when an army should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.
And, you know, you sort of think, oh, right, OK, David sounds, you know, a bit kind of A bit glib.
A bit glib, yeah.
I think, I think, I think someone, certainly given our conscience that you were saying about the way Christianity has been sort of presented, might sort of think, oh, this is, this is the sort of, these are the words of the comfortable, you know, and the complacent.
And I think it's, first of all, it's important to remember David is a man who, who couldn't be glib about these things.
You know, David was, Someone who, you know, faced armies against him.
These were real experiences for him.
His reign was one that started in civil war, ended in civil war.
His one son killed another son, then tried to usurp him, then another son tries to usurp his chosen heir.
You know, it's just bloodshed, conflict the whole time.
You know, there's a tradition that Psalm 27 is something he said maybe before he was anointed, before he was made king.
So maybe this is to do with Saul and him kind of chasing David around the kind of deserts of Israel, that kind of time.
But whatever, all through his life he had enemies, he had genuinely people who were out to physically kill him.
So, just to pause there, this is one of the psalms of David.
He definitely wrote this psalm, didn't he?
Well, the psalm begins, the Hebrew, which my pronunciation will not be very good, but it's Le David, and that kind of prefix, Le,
is translated can be translated of so I would say for me that points towards a Davidic authorship but there is you know one might debate kind of exactly what that text is trying to say but I think Davidic it's only marked out as a psalm
that has a particular reference to David rather than say Asaph or some of the other the other authors that we're we're given in the uh given in the Psalter um so you have this kind of this confident affirmation of fearlessness um and it's you know it's the Lord is my life is my salvation but I guess the question is why does um You know, belief in God.
Why does God make David fearless in a way that, you know, for many of us we've believed in God for a long time.
We've had, you know, and yet we've had times of great anxiety, great fear, fearfulness, you know, it doesn't seem that belief in God is just a kind of automatic antidote to fear.
And just to sort of put the idea in context for a moment, I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it, how fear is so You know, such a feature of human society, particularly at the moment, we've seen the way fear has been used.
You know, there's kind of official fears that you're kind of things you're allowed to be afraid of, you know, like viruses or climate change or, you know, Putin.
Nuclear war.
Yeah, Putin.
Yeah, but then I think there's also there's the kind of the dissident fears is the fears of those who don't buy into those narratives, the fears of, you know, CBDCs, and, you know, digital digital kind of grit, you know, prison camps, and all these kind of things.
And, and, you know, I think basically, you have a society at the moment where Anxiety is rife, you know, so to be able to say, I'm just not afraid, whom shall I fear?
What should I be afraid of?
Is a hugely bold statement.
Existentially, to be able to live without fear is a massive thing.
It's not just like, oh, well, that's nice for kind of weird religious people.
This is something that I think All sections of society live with fear in some way or another, whether those fears are justified, whether they're unjustified.
You know, rates of anxiety seem to be going up.
The way that society has become much more atomized, much more unstable.
We don't live in kind of extended families where we have a sense of ourselves.
All of that contributes to a sense of what's the future going to bring?
What's life going to be like?
And so we have this kind of anxiety.
And yet here we have in the Psalms, a sort of You know, bold affirmation of fearlessness.
So why is David sort of able to say this?
And I think the psalm leads us to verse four, verses four to six, as the kind of the foundation, the reason why verses one to three are true of David.
Why can David say this?
We can say it because he says, one thing have I desired of the Lord, The way I read this verse, this is the explanation, verses 4 to 6, the kind of explanation for the fearlessness of David in 1 to 3.
the beauty of the Lord and into inquire in his temple.
And it, you know, the way I read this verse, these are, this is the explanation, verses four to six, the kind of explanation for the fearlessness of David in one to three.
And it seems that really what David is, what gives David his kind of fearlessness, what gives David his confidence is that he is a man of one desire.
You know, that he, in the end, seeks after one thing.
And that is, he says, to dwell in the house of the Lord so that I can behold the beauty of the Lord, gaze upon the Lord.
And, you know, again, that is something that I think It probably won't resonate with lots of contemporary people.
To think of wanting to behold God as something that is beautiful, as someone who is beautiful, whatever we think about God, generally speaking, Beauty, extreme beauty is not a category we tend to, you know, tend to ascribe to God.
We might think about him as a kind of ruler, as a kind of governor, whatever kind of ideas come into play.
But for David, it's the beauty of the Lord that's kind of central to his understanding.
That's interesting to hear you say that, Graham, because I think maybe I've been dwelling with the Psalms for too long, because to me it just seems like, duh, that is the deal.
That when you read the Psalms every day, As, of course, monks would have done, medieval monks would have done.
They worked their way through the Psalter and they learned it by heart as part of their, you know, the first thing you did as a novice monk was to learn the Psalter.
And, you know, I think of Psalm 1.
It sort of sets out the terms of engagement.
This is the deal.
You think about, you know, blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly nor stood in the way of sinners.
I suppose what I'm asking you, if you're not doing that as a Christian, you're surely doing it wrong.
or will he exercise himself day and night?
I suppose what I'm asking you, if you're not doing that as a Christian, you're surely doing it wrong.
Yeah. - Yeah. - That we spend our days, I spend a lot of my day thinking about God and thinking about doing what he wants me to do and trying to work out what it is that he wants me to do.
And I'm sort of slightly concerned that you think that that is not a... Well, I suppose it's something, I think, obviously within secular society, within a kind of the unbelieving world, God is often either a kind of irrelevance or a kind of hostile, you know, it's sort of North Korea in the sky, as Christopher Hitchens used to talk about.
Yes.
A lot of Christians, while, you know, ultimately, you know, they want to be with God and they, you know, they love God for what he's done.
Often he's, I think, kind of, you know, we represent God to ourselves as someone who is kind of You know, a sort of maybe a strict disciplinarian, you know, just kind of all a moral kind of personal trainer.
Or we sort of, we focus on what God has done for us, you know, which is obviously, you know, giving us Jesus, save us from our sins and so on, giving us eternal life.
But God in himself, God, you know, God just sort of In his being, maybe we don't think about so much.
I think certainly from my background, from an evangelical background, that's often, you know, it's sort of what has God done and then what do we need to do kind of in response to that?
The reflection on God's eternal identity and eternal being is less instinctive now.
I think philosophically there's also been moves in the last few hundred years that have made that kind of idea less, kind of, we're less confident that actually that's possible to do than maybe we once were.
That's interesting.
I was going to say, do you think maybe that's because in my Since becoming a Christian, I've been acutely aware of the differences between the different factions of Christianity.
It's like the devil's just gone in there and gone, yeah, let me stir it up a bit.
Let's have these disagreements.
Let's get people burned at the stake.
I mean, can you imagine how Jesus would have felt about that?
That people would be arguing about putting people to death For things that I imagine Jesus would have considered to be kind of irrelevant?
Well, I mean, I suppose it's going to vary on a case-by-case basis.
I mean, you know, there's certainly, I think there are things that are issues of truth that are really, really significant and, you know, upon which eternal destiny hangs.
But I certainly think that a lot of contemporary divisions in the Church are Unless, you know, are lamentable, certainly.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that we want to you know, navigate between a kind of indifference to just kind of any, any claims of truth and you can say what you like and that's fine.
Versus a sort of, you know, I'm, I'm ready to go to war on, you know, every Joss and Tittle and Jesus speaks about the, the kind of what, what's the phrase, you know, the kind of profound things of the law and the minor things.
And I think we, you know, often we haven't discerned the difference between the two.
When do you think, I mean, I like the line to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
What?
When do you think we lost the ability to do that culturally?
Because, I mean, you look at the medieval cathedrals, they celebrate the beauty of the law.
I look at Coventry Cathedral, and it's quintessentially satanic.
It's not about beauty.
I think Basil Spence, the guy who got given the commission, was working for the other side.
And it gives me the creeps going into that place.
It's horrible.
I've never been to the city.
Don't, don't.
It's like going into a satanic mass.
It's just monstrous.
But so at some stage we lost our sense of the beauty of the Lord.
I think we lost a sense of nature as being able to transmit that that beauty to us you know and and you know some people would put that at kind of Descartes some people put it further back in kind of medieval moves and kind of medieval philosophy I think you know these things are rarely kind of it's rarely just sort of one particular move but gradually you know as we've gone on
I think we've kind of become hemmed in so that nature now is no longer a kind of you know a kind of mirror in which to behold behold the Lord's beauty.
It doesn't tell us anything about its maker, it's just a sort of A whirring machine that goes on that, you know, and our minds may or may not correspond with that reality.
Our minds may or may not give us access to what is really there.
It's just, you know, this is whatever happens to kind of flutter, skitter about between our ears.
Yeah.
The modern understanding of nature, maybe since the 1950s, it's almost in opposition to God and Christianity.
It's become this alternative religion, Gaia worship.
It's not that it's it's as though it's as though when we look now at.
At.
Beautiful landscapes and animals and stuff, we're invited to feel guilty about it.
We're invited to feel as though.
We're not better.
It wasn't created for us, for our pleasure.
It's something that we've just, through our selfishness and greed and refusal to amend our carbon guzzling lifestyles, we are destroying.
Which again is in opposition to what the Psalms tell us.
Psalm 8 makes it clear that God has given us dominion over this world.
And obviously we have a sort of The duties of stewardship as a sort of modern translation has it but nevertheless we are that we are the top dogs as we're made in God's image.
Whereas now it's not we when you look at a David Attenborough documentary and look at all those that wonderful wildlife photography and stuff.
We're not we're not encouraged to marvel at God's creation.
Are we?
No, and it's I mean, I think I think it goes back further than the 50s as I'm sure you would agree.
There's this sort of view of nature as a kind of great mechanism that just sort of obeys these laws and you get kind of deism in the late 18th century where God is the watchmaker who sets it all up and then lets it all run and then eventually you have no watchmaker at all.
On one hand you have this paradox, don't you?
So, yeah, I mean, I think on one hand you have to, on one hand you have this paradox, don't you?
On one hand you have human beings are kind of capable of solving all the world's problems and if only we could kind of get enough minds together in a particular city, we'd all come, they'd all come up with the perfect technological solution to it all.
Yeah, it's called the Tower of Babel.
Yeah, exactly.
You've got that but on the other hand you have yeah, you know, we're just we're just You know, one particular set of organism and there's no, you know, I mean, there's Peter Singer, isn't it?
The kind of speciesism, you know, why is it that a baby chimp is more valuable, less valuable than a baby human?
You know, all that kind of thing.
We share 95% of our DNA with a worm, so shouldn't they get priority over us on this sort of thing?
And bananas.
We share a lot of our DNA with a banana apparently as well, so maybe we should stop eating bananas.
And it's all, you know, it's interesting, I suppose, you know, beauty itself is kind of foreign to this, the notion of beauty itself, because, you know, what is beauty?
I mean, you may have a better definition than I do, but I would say it's something that you, You appreciate for itself rather than for its utility.
So beauty is not something you kind of, oh I love this painting because it increases the value of the room.
You don't really find the painting beautiful if that's why you bought it.
Beauty is something you're just drawn to for itself and I think increasingly that kind of mechanized view of the world, everything is explained in terms of its utility.
Everything is justified on utilitarian grounds and of course And that kind of technocratic, managerial way of looking at the world.
It's all a metric.
So nothing can justify itself simply for itself.
You know, I just do this for its own sake.
And so of course then we don't have a vision of eternal, ultimate, infinite beauty.
But we're all You know we all have that longing somewhere for for beauty somewhere you know we we live in this world of of means you know everything's a means to an end.
I'm doing I'm studying you know I'm studying not for the sake of knowledge and truth but because it'll get me a better job and I do the job because it'll get me a better house and I do that I live in the house because well you know it's a good investment and I can yes it's an And we never were able to articulate, well, what is the end of it all?
What's the purpose of it all?
And I think it's because, really, modern contemporary life, or however we've got here, we just can't answer that question.
We just don't have an end.
We don't have a purpose for what we're doing.
You know, you see it in politics, you see it in culture.
Why do human beings exist?
What are we for?
What is the thing we should be seeking after?
I mean, I think secular society has kind of given up asking that question even.
Yeah.
Because as soon as you ask that question, so much of how we operate is revealed to be futile, is revealed to be meaningless.
And the kind of infinite technocratic kind of managerialness, why is it there?
What purpose does it serve?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, thank you for encouraging me to dwell on that line to behold the beauty of the Lord and inquire in his temple.
You're absolutely right.
It's I mean, I see beauty as an expression of the divine.
I bore on about this that God is love.
God is beauty and God is truth.
And we know those things instinctively.
We have this direction finder.
Yeah.
Which naturally, and obviously there are snares that are put in our path to take away from this, but we know what the good stuff is.
Yeah.
We do.
Well, we want, you know, we want happiness, don't we?
We want to be happy.
And that's, you know, Christian theology down the ages has affirmed that You know, happiness, human, human, the end of humanity is to, is to, you know, find ultimate goodness, ultimate beauty.
And that is what human, nothing else is able to satisfy us other than that.
And I think if, you know, one thing I thought was helpful to touch upon is, you know, just why is God The one thing worth finding.
How do we articulate what it is about God that makes him unique in that sense?
And Augustine in his sermons on this passage has a, you know, has a kind of a bit of a mental exercise to help us kind of get our heads around this.
So he sort of says, you know, when you talk about like a good field or a good house or a good person, You've kind of added something to that field or that house or that person.
It's not intrinsic to being a field that it be a good field.
There's something that that field has about itself which makes it good.
It's very fertile, it's good for You know, running through as a young child if you're Theresa May or something like that, you know, there's something about it that's positive and that's good.
But it's not, but it's, as I say, fields themselves are not intrinsically good.
You can have bad fields, you can have bad houses, you know, bad people.
And so so what Augustine is saying that there's something there's something kind of that that those things on one hand there's a real property and not not that goodness is just kind of a you know a nothingness it's it there is something real we're saying something true about when we identify something is good but it's not found in those things which we Which we actually experience goodness through.
We experience goodness through people and places and so on.
And so therefore there must be something that is kind of good in itself.
That is just goodness itself.
That is the thing that all those other things kind of participate in and have a share of.
He says there is a simple good, sheer goodness itself, in virtue of which all things are good.
The good itself from which all good things derive their goodness.
And that goodness is God.
God does not take his goodness from anything else.
God simply is goodness itself.
God is beauty itself.
He is the one who has, who we enjoy, not because it kind of leads us on to a great, anything greater, anything beyond himself.
He is where all our longings and our desires terminate, because he is the very thing itself that all those other things have been leading us on towards.
I find that helpful to me, to think God is not just some other object in the universe.
Some people love their families.
Some people love their cars.
I love God, you know, and it's just sort of all on a par.
God, there's something transcendent about God that makes him uniquely suitable as the object of our desires.
Yes, it does.
Do you think a car can be good?
I look at an E-Type Jaguar, for example.
It is a thing of beauty.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Augustine would say, and this actually, I thought this would be an interesting kind of angle to go in.
Augustine, and again, this is bulk standard Christian kind of philosophy, Christian theology through the ages, that in the end, Being and goodness are convertible, not convertible in the sense of an E-type jack, but able to be, that being itself is good, that simply to exist is good.
And the reason for that is to say God is the creator of all things, God is the source of all things, God himself is goodness itself, is infinitely good, And therefore, existence itself is good.
There is, in the end, there is something, it is better for everything to exist and not to exist.
Now, of course, that raises the question of kind of evil.
And yes.
And of course, you know, what what Augustine was saying, again, this is sort of mainstream Christian theology, we say that when you see something that's evil, You're not seeing something, you're not seeing a kind of a separate opposite entity, you know, kind of goodness and evil kind of thing.
You're seeing a kind of falling away from the good.
So it's like a kind of, it's a glib example, but it's a bit like a hole in a sock.
The hole has a you know you can point out there's a hole in the sock but really what the hole is is a is an absence of sock you know and the hole depends upon the rest of the sock for its existence if you've no sock you've no you've no hole um and so what that's now you know we you'd want to pass that through i don't you know i'm sure there's a there's obviously a much longer conversation about all of that but the point of the hole the thrust of it all is to say that
I think this is what you were getting at with with some of the stuff about about kind of um the way environmentalism has gone is that actually existence itself is good and I think a lot of our contemporary society has a sort of a huge crisis of confidence about that that actually it would be better if Fewer human beings were, it would be, weren't here.
And you know, so much of the kind of contemporary thrust of deconstruction, you know, you'll be very familiar with that in literature, you know, the way, you know, you're just, you're always deconstructing There's never anything real to put your finger on.
It's all différance all the way down.
It's all just kind of misunderstanding all the way down.
It's just text.
Just kind of flimflam.
And I think that comes from a conviction, or at least a doubt, that existence itself is good.
That reality underneath it all is good.
Whereas what Christianity says and what David is experiencing here is to say actually fundamental reality, the one that stands behind it all, is not just kind of slightly good or better than on the whole it's good that it's there.
It's actually sheer goodness itself.
And so, you know, that just gives a kind of confidence to existence, let alone anything else.
I don't want to dwell on this for too long because it's a distraction, but presumably this is why Christianity puts a high premium on life and is Why suicides are not buried in consecrated ground because it's an affront to God's desire for us.
He's blessed us with life.
It's a gift.
Therefore, we should celebrate it.
Well, I mean, GK Chesterton has the line about You know, committing suicide, the murderer just commits, kills one man, whereas the suicide kills the whole world.
What suicide is doing is saying, actually I would rather the existence didn't, I'd rather not partake in existence itself.
And it's a kind of, Can I ask you a difficult question though?
I get all that.
Suppose you're a good Christian and tomorrow you are going to be fed by the evil people to the lions or burnt at the stake and you really don't want to go through that.
Would it be legitimate to kill yourself?
Well, it's interesting, Augustine, in the first book of City of God, he's writing about the sack of Rome.
And in the sack of Rome, a lot of Christians were, um, had all sorts of terrible things done to them, particularly, uh, you know, women were violated by, by the, the, um, uh, the tribesmen that came into Rome.
And he has a long discussion on why suicide is not a good option.
And, and, you know, it really does rest upon this, this idea that, um, you know, Because of the existence of God, because of the fundamental reality of God, that despair is never fully justified.
You know, without needing to, without being, you know, glib about our, or trite about kind of particular circumstances and what people are facing, there is always the thought that The one who is in control has put me in this situation.
And there is something about this reality, which the terrible though it is, I can endure through to the end.
And, you know, suicide is, you know, I'm not some, I'm not being, I don't want to obviously come suggest that there's any, you know,
that obviously people who are in this situation are in you know really difficult circumstances and and there are all sorts of you know despair is a terrible a terrible thing and it's something i've you know i've wrestled with that myself um but you know what the psalms are saying and what the bible is saying is is that even in those darkest even in those darkest moments The Lord is your light and your salvation, that there is something worth clinging on for, to endure.
And of course that's what the martyrs faced.
In the early centuries of the church, they had these terrible things done.
Some of the things the Romans came up with to do violence to people are quite extraordinary.
And more recently, the communists in Russia.
Some of the things that happened under Lenin.
And martyrdom in all ages has been expression of hope and expression of fearlessness in the face of these extraordinary violence, extraordinary despair.
And of course, I think that just just mentioning that shows us that really for this psalm to be understood it's not it's not David saying oh well you know I'll kind of always escape by the skin of skin of my teeth you know the fearlessness has to be fearlessness that
that endures even when, you know, your flesh is torn apart, your flesh is ripped open, you know, you do have to endure physical, the kind of the last gasp of physical endurance into death.
There's something about being able to dwell upon seeing the beauty of the Lord, which is secure, even in those circumstances.
OK, so we're only taking it kind of when he says, in the time of trouble, he shall hide me in his pavilion, in the secret of his tabernacle, shall he hide me?
So he's not really going to be hiding you in his place.
You know, they may still get you.
Well, I suppose, you know, there's two answers, two aspects of that, I think.
First of all, Um, you know, want to say that the goods of the goods of the soul, you know, outrank as it were goods of the body.
So I think, you know, right, we all we all the person who who You know, will tell a lie, you know, who will tell a lie rather than, you know, lose their job or whatever, you know, the person who can be bought in that way, the person who puts, you know, a bit of extra cash ahead of their integrity, we all naturally think, no, that's not the way human beings should be.
Immaterial goods are higher and greater than any material good, ultimately.
And then the other thing is, of course, that, you know, as we read this psalm in the light of all of the scriptures, that in the end, you know, human beings are body-soul composites.
We're made to be, you know, our bodies are not just kind of optional extras.
And so, yes, Things that involve the loss of physical life, the loss of physical health and comfort are dreadful things.
They are evil things.
But in the end, the Lord is able to redeem both the body and the soul.
That in the end, we don't have to choose between the two.
You know, and that's, you know, Jesus says, you know, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but he forfeits his soul?
You know, the reason for that is not because, oh, well, your body, your body doesn't matter, who cares kind of thing.
It's because Jesus can give you back your body, you know, Jesus can give your soul, will reunite your soul or your body in the resurrection, in the world to come.
But if you seek to preserve your body at the kind of expense of your soul, you forfeit your soul, you rank those physical things higher than those immaterial things, then in the end you lose both.
You lose your soul and your physical health as well, your physical life as well.
So the psalm starts off very bullishly, but as so often in the psalms, there is a sudden change of tone.
I mean, we get to the bit where he gets set up upon a rock and, and, and, um, But then, just a little bit later in the psalm, he starts having his doubts, doesn't he?
His sense of... Yeah, I think that's a really interesting transition.
So he He's basically saying that these armies can do what they like to me.
I behold the Lord.
The Lord is what I seek after.
If I have him, these armies can't take him away from me.
So I'm safe and secure.
If your treasure is something that's kind of, you know, Jesus talks about this, the moth and rust destroyer and thieves breaking the seal, you know, you're always living in fear.
So, you know, he sets that up.
But then in verse 7, you get this shift and The the psalm shifts from kind of the third person you know the lord's going to do this and the lord's going to do that to the to the second person he starts addressing the lord directly and I think basically it what happens is is you realize okay the place that the place of safety and that is the place of beauty Well, hang on a second.
I might not, you know, I might not deserve to go there.
I might get shut out of that.
I, you know, I can't take for granted that the Lord will kind of let me in.
His fear shifts from the external, you know, the external armies, the enemies and so on, to, well, hang on a second.
What does the Lord, this infinitely beautiful Lord, what does he think about me?
What does he think?
It becomes a, His fear becomes the fear of his soul in relation to a holy God, in relation to a beautiful God.
And so you have these You know, these kind of petitions, you know, be gracious to me and answer me.
Don't hide your face from me.
Don't forsake me.
And that shifts to the kind of the priority of his concern is to say, well, actually, I need my relationship with the Lord to be strong rather than What these enemies might do to me.
Yes, leave me not neither forsake me a God of my salvation.
It's it's a it's a complete change of of tone that he started off really confident.
Yeah, this is the deal and it's going to be great.
And then suddenly it's like well, hang on.
I'm I'm feeling a bit a bit shaky here.
And I'm not they face far from me put not their servant away in anger.
Yeah, sort of pleading.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think You know, certainly we're being taught here that, you know, when you realize that God is this infinite beauty, infinite being, infinite goodness, you can't just kind of stride in and sort of say, oh, well, you know, I'm glad I finally found someone I can get on with.
Sorted!
Resolved!
Bulletproof!
And I think verse 10, you know, is really where this kind of reaches its kind of psychological kind of depth, where you have, you know, when my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
And so on one hand, he's going through this kind of process of petition and pleading and so on, and verse 10 is It strikes me on one hand it's a statement of real kind of unworthiness.
He's saying that there's something about him that he thinks his mother and father might even turn away from.
And I find that very psychologically kind of insightful that, you know, we all have that sense that, you know, if our mum and dad, if our parents, Really knew who we were and knew what we were like and what we were like on the inside and really to the depths.
I think we all have something of a fear that left kind of exposed everyone who loves us would turn away from us.
Even those with whom we have the strongest bond, you know, the ones who we kind of related to at the earliest stages of our life.
And I think David is kind of facing that about himself.
He's facing the kind of very depths of his own anxiety, his own fears.
You know, you know, you have those dreams, don't you, sometimes when, you know, you're, you know, no one wants to, no one will open the door to you, no one will want to be with you.
And, and, and it's yet it's in that moment, in that kind of depth, that he affirms the Lord will take me up, the Lord will take me up.
And doesn't it, isn't it sort of echoed in in the Gospels where Christ says that if you want to follow me you've got you've got to be prepared to lose all your friends and all your Yeah.
Do you think that's what Jesus was referencing when he was talking about this?
Because he was steeped in the Psalms, wasn't he?
Yeah.
He was steeped in the scriptures.
His dad wrote them after all.
I think, yeah, I mean that, you know, those verses, I think that there is, yeah, there's The question of where do we find our ultimate security?
How do we reassure ourselves about who we are?
Often, you know, when someone criticizes you or you have a sort of moment of failure or something, you often, you know, you think, well, you know, so-and-so, he likes me, he still, he still thinks I'm a good, you know, my, you know, and, you know, often, you know, you know, my mum still, my mum still thinks I'm, thinks I'm great, kind of thing.
And Jesus is really saying there, you know, you have to get to a point where I, where the Lord is the one who you ultimately root that kind of psychological security, you root that acceptance in, rather than any other human relationship.
And so when those two come into conflict, which sometimes they, you know, I'm blessed and since my parents are Christians, but you know there are people who come from backgrounds where following Jesus does mean Turning away from family, turning away from parents, which can be incredibly kind of painful.
But Jesus, does that, you know, fearlessness ultimately can only flow from rooting your acceptance, rooting your psychological acceptance in me and who I am and my acceptance.
Yeah, I went riding the other day with this amazing girl who came from a Muslim background.
And I started chatting, as you do, about God.
And it turned out that she was a sort of born-again Christian.
Wow.
And she said that her parents hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about this.
Well, yeah.
I can imagine, in some contexts, lacking enthusiasm would be putting it mildly.
But I think What's extraordinary about verse 10 is that on one hand you have the fear of parental rejection, which I think is kind of, you know, for many of us is the sort of ultimate fear, you know, that you do something, you're revealed to have thought something, and your own parents are just like, you know, I have no son, I have no child, you're dead to me.
And yet, in the face of that fear, you have this affirmation, the Lord will take me up.
The one who is infinite beauty, the one who is the source of all things, he is the one who will accept me.
The verb is to gather.
I think it has the imagery of Taking up in your arms, you know, like, you know, I have a six year old, you know, I kind of, you know, I love to kind of wrap my arms around him.
That's what the Lord will do for us.
That, you know, the place where ultimate beauty is to be found is also the place where the door is always open.
The acceptance is always there.
Yeah, that's what yes fearlessness flows out from I was thinking about what you were saying then because like you I'm blessed in my parents.
They they they kind of pretty rock-solid.
It seems to me but and it seems to me that What we've all gone through these last three years, especially those of us who are awake, we've been sort of let down.
Some people have been let down by their husbands or wives.
Some people have been let down by their parents.
Some people have been let down by their friends.
And I was thinking, although I've been lucky in some areas, There are definitely people that I would have imagined would have been rock solid, that I would absolutely, well they still, you know, to use your phrase, well so-and-so still likes me, so-and-so.
Quite a lot of people that I really, really trusted to be stand-up, my stand-up guys, you know, what Jews would call a mensch, have just quit the field.
They've abandoned the foxhole next to me and they've scarpered.
They've scarpered to the rear and it's been quite dispiriting.
I mean, to quote Psalm 118, It is better to trust in the Lord than put any confidence in man.
It is better to trust in the Lord than put any confidence in princes.
Everyone's going to let you down.
Well, not everyone.
We've each found our exceptions and thank God for that.
But you're right that it does speak to a truth that God's the only really reliable one.
Yeah, and it's why if you, if you live in fear, or rather, if you live, kind of, if your acceptance, your sort of ultimate self acceptance is built on the acceptance of another human being, even your mother and father, you will always live in fear, because you will always have that thought of, well, but what if my mum and, you know, what if, what if I end up doing something that they can't accept?
I mean, You know, I recently reread 1984 and, you know, Orwell has, you know, it's Winston and, what's the girl, it's Julia, isn't it, the girl in 1984, you know, in the end they betray each other, you know, Orwell kind of presents, you know, Winston
is in Ramona One, and the spoiler alert, by the way, the rats are going to go on his face and he says, no, no, do it to her, do it to her, do it to her.
He wants her to suffer rather than him.
And it's the last betrayal.
And it's the last kind of sign that O'Brien and Big Brother have won.
And Orwell, I think there's lots of issues with Orwell's presentation.
He understands the fallibility of the human soul.
And as you say, you know, anyone can let you down.
There's nobody who can say, I will never let you down in any circumstances, whatever, unconditionally, because no one else is, no one is the author of their own circumstances.
No one can control, you know, has ultimate control over things.
Whereas the Lord can do that.
The Lord can say, I will accept you.
I will receive you no matter what, even when your mother and father forsake you, I will gather you in.
He can say that because no force, no torture, no O'Brien, no big brother can manipulate him, can control him, can have power over him.
We could go off on a whole sheep farm digression about Orwell.
I don't think he was as he has been sold to us and I think that the message of that book is essentially a nihilistic one.
It's predictive programming.
It's designed to prepare us for where we are now and not in a good way.
It's designed to ramp up despair.
It's definitely nihilistic.
I mean he has no No hope in it whatsoever.
I mean, I think comparing 1954 to Lewis's book, That Hideous Strength, which obviously was written in the same decade, you know, for all of Lewis's kind of, the eccentricities of Lewis's kind of decisions about the plot and everything,
What is unique about Lewis is that there's some sort of positive force that, you know, there's a goodness that Lewis kind of represents in contradistinction to the dystopian kind of picture of nice and the kind of demonically inspired bureaucrats and so on.
You know, Lewis has a sense that actually, ultimately, it is the angelic forces from the deep heavens that are the ones that win the victory.
And of course, that's exactly what Psalm 27 is talking about, is that in the end, goodness and beauty are going to be victorious.
Even over our own sense of unworthiness, even over our own, well, not even our own sense of unworthiness, even over our unworthiness itself, even over the truth about ourselves, which is that, left to ourselves, we would be, we would deserve to be put away in anger.
We would deserve to be forsaken, even by our closest intimates.
And yet the Lord's goodness and the Lord's power is able, through the Lord Jesus, to overcome even that.
Just as a digression, but you mentioned that hideous strength and there's a scene in the book, you may remember, where, what's the sort of the hero, the flawed hero called?
Ransom.
Stuttock or Ransom?
The guy that's come back from Venus is Ransom and then there's Stuttock who's the kind of sociologist who gets The guy who wants to join the inner circle?
Stuttock, Mark Stuttock.
So Mark Stuttock, as he's sort of lured into their web of intrigue and has to make these morally compromising decisions in order to advance, and there's one scene where they put him in a room Which is where everything is sort of asymmetrical and the paintings are not quite right and stuff.
And I think that's Lewis telling us that we know instinctively, it's a bit like atonal music and all the things and modernist literature and post-modernist literature.
It was all ultimately a war on beauty.
You look at the works of Bach and you look at the symmetry of it and then you look at Schoenberg or whatever or Stravinsky and it's designed to set your teeth on edge.
We like symmetry.
We like the golden mean.
There is a natural beauty which we instinctively understand and Lewis was showing us that this is how modernism and post-modernism work to unsettle us and take us away from God.
Yes, I mean, I think that Lewis is foresight in some of these things.
I mean, I can't remember the name of that room.
I can feel it begins with O, but yes, there's That scene is very, very powerful and it's the way it's like he can't even discern the reason why it's wrong.
You know, he's staring up at the wall, looking at these spots on the wall, trying to find if there's a pattern and he can't find one and that in and of itself is disturbing and subversive.
Can I just go and tell the children to go and stop that dog barking and be unhappy?
I think it's wrong that they're doing that.
Okay.
Ivo or Poppy. Ivo or
Poppy.
Ivo or Poppy.
Ivo or Poppy.
Ivo or Poppy. Ivo or Poppy. Ivo or Poppy. Ivo or Poppy.
You behold yourself.
Sorry, I don't like the sound of animals in distress.
Ad marker, yeah, I got it.
Yeah, all right.
So, So yes, we're talking about the asymmetrical room anyway, I think we've dealt with that.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Although it is Lewis's view, I think at that point in the novel Studdick has kind of begun to realize you know that something's up and he talks about how it's the notion of the good and the straight which kind of gets him through that room.
That it's his belief there is you know goodness is not just a kind of a mirage it's not just a sort of sentimental attachment to arbitrary things there is a there is a real goodness out there which is You know, which is different to all of this kind of weird off-kilter kind of stuff.
And I think we're seeing in a society like a loss of that conviction, which is why we, you know, nihilism seems so attractive.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so while we're in the psalm, we've got to, what will my father and mother say to me then that will take me up?
Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path because of mine enemies.
So that presumably means what?
Well, I think verses sort of 11 to 14, you sort of, you have the coming together of the two sort of moves of the psalm.
So on one hand, the safety in the temple, the safety in the place of beauty, and then the wrestling over, "Well, hang on, will I be accepted?" And after verse 10, and he affirms the Lord's exceptions, he goes...
It's interesting, it's very similar to verses one to three, but it's now in the second person.
It's It's not just, I'm not afraid, I'm, you know, I'm safe, whatever happens.
It's, Lord, you know, keep me in a safe place, teach me your way, lead me in a plain path.
Deliver me not.
So the fearlessness is not just a kind of automatic kind of thing.
It's something that comes from the hand of the Lord as we're asked, as David relates to the Lord as the one who accepts him, as the one who receives him.
And he says in verse 13, Well, I think the King James says, I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
It's the vision of verse four, the beauty of the Lord, which is what sustains him in this path that he has to go down, this fearful path, path of enemies and so on.
And so he then, you know, he then exhorts the You know, then in verse 14 he seems to turn to those around him and says, you know, wait on the Lord, be of good courage, wait of the Lord.
And I think if we could go back at this stage just as a sort of round things off to that thing about when enemies come to eat up my flesh, you know, what's happening there?
There's an amazing scene in John 18, I don't know if you're familiar with it, where it's something that kind of passes you by.
I only noticed it, you know, a couple of years ago.
I was looking at John 18.
There's this scene where Judas comes with the soldiers to arrest Jesus and We know from the word John uses to describe the detachment of soldiers, this is a big group of soldiers, you know, it's not just kind of two henchmen that Judas brought.
They brought like a big crowd of military men to arrest Jesus in this garden, who is unarmed, you know, he's not a physical threat.
And they ask, you know, who's Jesus of Nazareth?
Who are you?
And Jesus says, I am.
Which in John's Gospel is not just a kind of simple kind of identification.
It's an echo of the divine name in Exodus 3.
It's an echo of, you know, I am who I am.
So all the phrases in John's Gospel, I am the bread of life.
I am the divine.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Before Abraham was, I am.
I am is this kind of recurring motif in John's Gospel.
And what happens when Jesus says, I am, is John tells us that the soldiers fall to the ground.
And it's an extraordinary moment where just this unarmed man with two words flattens a bunch of professional Roman soldiers.
And it seems to me very, it seems to me that this is a expression of Psalm 27 verse 2.
You know, when my, when the wicked came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
And all through the Gospel accounts, this is true of John and the other three as well, it's made very clear that the reason Jesus goes to his death is not because he's too weak to fight, he's too powerless.
he's too powerless, it's very clear that he has, he says, I could call up armies of angels to rescue me.
He has no reason to fear in that sense of being overpowered.
And yet he does.
He goes with them.
The same soldiers that fall at his feet at the use of the divine name are the same ones that bound him and arrest him and take him off ultimately to be gruesome.
Good point.
You highlighted the devour my flesh kind of language and I thought that's an interesting phrase.
In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, it's just, again, it's the same phrase, eat my flesh.
And where else do you get that phrase?
And there's a few other places.
There's talk in Revelation at the end of time when the wicked's flesh are those that are eaten and so on.
But probably, you know, if you had to say, where is the, where does the Bible talk about eating someone's flesh?
You think about John 6, and John 6 is this long discourse after Jesus fed the 5,000, he's provided bread to the 5,000.
And he has this, you know, this, this phrase, I'll just, let me, let me turn it up so I get it right, because I think it's, it's significant.
He says, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." And so Jesus, you know, there's all sorts of debates exactly how that relates to say the Lord's Supper and so on.
But it's interesting when it's talking about the Lord's Supper in the Last Supper, Jesus talks about his body.
Yeah.
In John 6 he talks about flesh, it's this different word, it's sarkos.
You know, it seems to me that there's something going on here that, you know, why is it that we are able to be so fearless?
Why is it that we who really don't deserve to be accepted are able to have such confidence that we will be accepted and received into this place of infinite beauty and magnificence?
Well, it's because the one who really had no reason to fear gave his flesh up to be consumed.
He gave up his flesh so that we could receive him into ourselves, that we could consume him and therefore not have to be consumed ourselves.
He gave himself up for us so that we would never have to, we would never be forsaken.
He was broken so that we didn't need to be broken and therefore we can say even with my mother and father forsaken me, I will be received because Jesus decided at that moment in the garden and all through the process that he would go into that place of fear, go into that place of rejection in our place so that we would never have to.
And it's because of that that we can sing Psalms 27.
We can say all these things without that dreadful kind of thought of, well, who are you to be saying this?
Who are you to be so confident?
Who are you to think that you can just stride into the presence of the Lord?
Well, I can because I've received the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I've taken him into myself.
I've united myself with him so that his experience of death and destruction on the cross stands in for the one that I deserved.
And therefore I don't need to fear it anymore.
I now have a future of light and life of beholding infinite beauty.
Yes, you make me think that I ought to, I haven't taken communion recently, maybe I need to do that.
But do you think that another reason for this, you know, eat my flesh thing, It's a kind of an inversion or a sort of a parallel good version of the evil that we are constantly being shown in the Old Testament.
Whenever the children of Israel fall away from God, they're always putting their children in the fire.
They're always sacrificing their children.
And it's clear that that was what Isaac and Abraham was about.
It was about the rejection of this child sacrifice and cannibalism.
Yeah, I mean, I think Genesis 22 is, you know, there's this, we all have a sense, you know, that human life somehow is forfeit.
You know, when you look around the world, you sort of have this sense of, I mean, you know, you do sort of think, yeah, the world, The world, we were talking about it earlier, in some sense the world would be a better place if we weren't here.
You know, all the bloodshed and the evil would be, you know, there would be something, there is something that needs to be kind of cleansed about us.
And I think Genesis 22 is saying, you know, as you say, that's not going to happen through dreadful, you know, child immolation or whatever.
It's going to happen through, you know, the real Son of God, the true Son of God coming and offering himself in our place.
And, you know, he goes to the cross, not As a victim.
You know, I think this is one of the misunderstandings we sometimes have about the cross, is that he goes to the cross not as a victim, but as a victorious general who's winning his battle.
Because as he goes to the cross, he's disarming all the evil demonic forces who have this hold over us through our guilt and through our shame.
And he's saying, I'm, I'm taking all that away from you.
And the moment that the devil thinks that he has his man, you know, I've got him, he's on the cross.
It's that moment of his cosmic defeat.
And so, yeah, there's a, you know, the, you know, it's not that the pagan sacrifices took sin too seriously, took God too seriously.
It's that they, it's that They were not waiting on the Lord's sacrifice and therefore subverting it in an evil parody of what was going to one day come.
And, you know, I think, oh, sorry, it's got a got a phone call there.
You know, I think that's that that's the cross is such a.
You know, it would be Christianity would be so much more palatable if it wasn't for the cross, because it is this aspect.
And you see this in John 6 when he says, you know, eat my flesh, drink my blood.
The crowds are like, what are you talking about?
That's sick.
That's disgusting.
I don't want anything more to do with this guy.
And to sort of to say, well, actually, you need a human being to die in your place.
Oh, that's gross.
And yet, it does kind of echo with a sense of shame and guilt that we all do feel.
And it is the way that God has provided that we can have this entrance, this acceptance.
But it's not the sacrifice of an unwilling victim.
That's the key thing.
It's not the sacrifice of one who goes against his will, but the one who says, you know, I'm going to do this.
I've got the power to step out at any stage, but I'm going to do this for the sake of my people, for the sake of the ones that I love.
And I'm going to receive my body back from the Lord, restored, renewed, resurrected.
I'm putting my faith in my Father to do that for me.
I was just thinking when you were talking about how Jesus made the Romans fall over and there's so much, you know, he chose ultimately.
He only got crucified because he let them crucify him.
He could easily have stopped at any moment.
He is quite sparing with his superpowers, isn't he?
I mean, I'm thinking of the calming of the storm and walking on water.
But I mean, he could have done a lot cooler stuff than that.
Yeah, and that's quite minimalist.
You know, the coolest thing he does is die in our place.
Had the incarnation of God just been a demonstration of power, he wouldn't have needed to become a human being.
God could demonstrate his power, you know, without becoming human.
He needed to become human in order to suffer and die.
He needed to become human in order to race.
Off the bed.
Race.
Off.
Dog.
Bad dog.
So the whole...
The whole purpose of the Incarnation is, yes, we need to know that this man is true God.
We need to know this is God come in the flesh as our savior.
But the purpose of the Incarnation is not to kind of give a kind of pyrotechnic display of divine power.
It's to deal with that guilt and that shame that otherwise would mean that we couldn't access this place of beauty and joy and delight that David talks about in verse four.
Well, Graham, you've been fantastic.
Thank you for that exegesis, if that's the right word, on Psalm 27.
It's been a real joy.
Yeah, and I wish you all the best with your lecturing on this stuff.
Thank you.
I bet you've got some really arcane PhD.
Go on, tell me what it was.
It was on the doctrine of the Trinity and the relationship between the Father and the Son in eternity, and how theologians have understood that.
Well, that's a whole other podcast, isn't it?
I'm mystified by the Trinity.
Well, yeah.
As most Christians are, surely.
It is a mystery.
It's beyond human comprehension.
That was one thing I discovered.
And does the Trinity actually get mentioned in the Gospels?
Or is this a kind of afterthought by the
Well that's what some people claim is that it is a kind of imposition of foreign thinking, but I think when you think about the way the Gospels describe Jesus, John's Gospel being kind of classic, you know, the word was God, the word was with God, he was with God in the beginning, the way in which Jesus describes his relationship with the Father, he's come from heaven, he's come from above, his story does not begin with
His conception with the beginning of his human life that has a kind of an eternal history to it and so on.
When you think about the baptismal formula, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Matthew 28.
I'm happy that the Trinity is in the scriptures, but it's not distilled down for us in the way that later theologians have put the pieces together.
Yes, I have to say it's one of those areas of Christianity where I try not to spend too much time thinking about it because it sort of does your head in and... Yeah it's it's it's I mean I you know obviously I spent time I spent three years kind of uh studying it so so I think we you know there's an element you need to you need to someone needs to do that sort of stuff but you know Christianity is life
lived kind of through and in the Trinity more than you know it's like you know Lewis has that the kind of discussion of you know you when you pray you notice that you're kind of you're praying to someone you're praying with someone and you're praying kind of you know with there's someone sort of helping you to pray as well but all of the Christian life is done kind of in and with and through the Trinity and you don't have to have
Oh, I've got all the doctrine nailed down and I can explain it all.
It's more about living that life through the Lord Jesus in following Him, waiting upon Him and so on than it is about, you know, joining all the dots.
Well, OK, so given your hearing, now I know your area of expertise.
When I say my prayers, for example, if I pray to God, Jesus is included in that, right?
I'm not leaving him out.
And likewise, when I pray to Jesus, I can use them interchangeably.
Because I notice that some, particularly evangelical Christians, are very, very keen on the use of the word Jesus.
They're very, very keen that one should, you know, And obviously I think Jesus is great and all that but but I For me, it's not so Essential as it is I think for many evangelical Christians is that is that a fair comment?
I Mean, you know, I think Practice sort of language, you know Linguistic forms vary from subculture to subculture and so on generally You know, the kind of, I'm trying to think, you know, to, in, and with would be the kind of the traditional kind of formulation.
So to the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit.
So, but that's not, the whole point of the doctrine of the Trinity is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one God.
There's not three, it's not a kind of three-part team.
It's one God.
And so, and God, All three are the creator of the universe, the creator of us.
They all are that infinite beauty, that infinite goodness that we were talking about.
It's not that they kind of, well they're only good when all three are in the room, or they're only good, you know, one's better than the other.
Yeah, or Jesus does some things and God does some things.
Yeah, exactly.
But there is a sense, and again this is a kind of mystery, there's a sense in which it's the sun that becomes It's a son that dies on the cross in his humanity.
And so there's a sense in which the Son has kind of, you know, we are, through the Gospel, Paul talks about, you know, our adoption to Sonship, you know, that we kind of almost come in and take, stand in the place of the Son in the life of the Trinity.
Not that we become infinite and eternal, but there's some, through the Gospel, the Lord communicates His Sonship to us, His Eternal Sonship is communicated to us so that we become kind of, again Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity, we become kind of Little Christs, we become Little Sons, Human Finite Sons, individually and corporately as the Church.
And hence why I relate this back to Psalm 27, you know, hence why you can say, even when my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will take me in, because now God is my heavenly father.
God is the one who is the infinite perfect father.
So there's a sense in which we've kind of, we've been united with the Son in his humanity.
We've eaten his flesh and drunk his blood.
We've become kind of part of him in a kind of profound sense.
And yet in doing so, because he is one with the Father and the Spirit, We're united with them as well.
Jesus talks about the Father and the Son making their dwelling within us.
And, you know, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.
So it's not that the kind of Father's a bit further off and, oh, Jesus is really friendly, but the Father's kind of a bit cross or anything like that.
It's that You know, through the sun taking on flesh, he unites himself to us and thereby unites us to the Godhead, to the Father, Son and Spirit in eternity.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed that, Graham.
I'm really glad I could ask you that question at the end.
It's what I call the... it's like meeting... what I used to do in the old days when I met a doctor at a party and I said, Doctor, I've got this embarrassing spot, which... and you can answer my theological embarrassing spot questions.
Where can people find you, Graham, if at all, if you want them to find you?
Well, you know, I'm on Twitter, though I don't... well, X is now... I don't post on there... X, which is evil, by the way, isn't it?
Well, you know, it's an interesting name change, isn't it?
I don't post on there very often but, you know, I would have thought a Google or two will probably lead people to finding me in one way or another.
They don't have to find you.
It's only if you have any books to plug or anything.
Anything to plug at the moment.
That's good.
If I do, I'll let you know.
By the way, I do hope you've enjoyed watching this podcast, everyone.
I've had some amazing responses.
There was this man in Uganda who wrote me a letter.
Unfortunately, I couldn't reply to it because I didn't... It was one of those... There are so many different...
Forms where people can reply to you and I couldn't open the thing properly.
So pastor in Uganda I just want to say I did get your message and I really appreciate it and I've had I've had letters from America and I've also had I've had emails from from people say I'm not a Christian.
But I really found your Psalm podcast, I love your Psalms podcast.
So this is not just for Christians, this is for everyone, whether they're non-Christians, sort of people halfway on the way to becoming Christians, or for Christians.
What I would ask, if you've enjoyed this podcast, Please, please share it.
Tell your friends about it.
Because I don't know why it is that God made me particularly drawn to the Psalms.
But it was very, very clear to me that he wanted me to do a series about the Psalms.
And I put it off for a long time and I've really enjoyed doing it.
And I can't recommend the book of Psalms highly enough.
And I'm going to be talking to all sorts of interesting people, like Graham, about this.
So if you've enjoyed it, please, number one, share it.
And also, I would really appreciate your support.
I know some of you are really generous already.
This is my living.
If you want to support me doing what I do, then really I need you to stump up.
You can support me on Substack.
I've been getting a lot of people signing up to Substack recently, and I think it's a good place.
There's Locals and Patreon and Subscribestar as well, but I think Substack is probably the one.
You can also buy me a coffee, if you want.
And yeah, thank you for being a great audience.
Thank you again, Graham Shearer.
Thank you, David.
and others for writing the Book of Psalms and thank you God for giving me this, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, for giving me this mission.
