Idols to Ashes- Isaiah 44

Isaiah 44 contains one of Scripture’s most penetrating examinations of idolatry, partly because Isaiah does not approach the subject merely by prohibiting it. Instead, he studies it. He follows the process by which an idol comes into existence, examines the assumptions required to believe in it, and then exposes the remarkable contradiction at the center of the entire enterprise. The result is a passage that is theological, satirical, and surprisingly psychological.

The larger context matters. Isaiah 40–48 repeatedly contrasts Yahweh with the gods of the nations, particularly in anticipation of Israel’s deliverance from Babylon. The question is not simply whether Israel will avoid religious statues; the larger issue concerns the identity and sovereignty of God. Who governs history? Who announces what is to come? Who creates? Who saves? Who has the authority to call Israel His own?

Isaiah 44 answers those questions emphatically. The Lord identifies Himself as Israel’s King and Redeemer, “the first” and “the last,” declaring, “besides me there is no god” (44:6). What follows is therefore not an isolated lesson about pagan craftsmanship. Isaiah places two radically different claims to deity beside one another: the God who creates, speaks, knows, governs, and redeems, and the god who must first be manufactured before anyone can worship him.

That contrast is what makes Isaiah’s description of the idol-maker so devastating.

Beginning around verse 9, Isaiah slows the narrative down and allows us to watch idolatry being constructed.

A craftsman selects his material. Another man works with tools. Measurements are taken. Lines are drawn. Human features are incorporated into the design. The finished product is intentionally made “like the beauty of a man” so that it can occupy a house.

The irony is deliberate. Everything about the idol demonstrates dependence.

Someone must choose its material. Someone must design it. Someone must shape it. Someone must determine what it looks like. Someone must decide where it will stand.

Yet when the process is complete, the relationship is mysteriously reversed: the maker becomes the worshiper, and the object he has fashioned becomes his supposed deliverer.

Isaiah then pushes the absurdity further by tracing the material back to its source. The man cuts down a tree—or plants one and waits for the rain to nourish it—and eventually divides the wood according to its usefulness. Part becomes fuel. He burns it, warms himself, and prepares food over it.

The remainder becomes his god.

The point is sharper than simply saying that wooden idols are powerless. Isaiah wants us to notice that there is no ontological difference between the wood in the fireplace and the wood on the altar. The distinction exists entirely in the mind of the worshiper.

One portion produces heat because it burns.

The other supposedly produces salvation because the man has decided that it is sacred.

That is why his eventual prayer is so tragic:

“Deliver me, for you are my god!”

The craftsman has assigned ultimate significance to an object whose entire history he knows. He remembers the tree. He held the axe. He produced the shavings. He watched part of it burn. Nevertheless, he now petitions the remainder for deliverance.

Isaiah is diagnosing more than ignorance.

He is diagnosing self-deception.

Verse 20 may contain the key to the entire section:

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray.”

That description moves Isaiah's argument from the workshop into the human heart.

The idolater's fundamental problem is not a shortage of information. He possesses enough evidence to recognize the contradiction. What he lacks is the capacity—or perhaps the willingness—to follow that evidence to its conclusion.

Isaiah says that he cannot bring himself to ask:

“Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

This is an extraordinarily perceptive description of human behavior. We often imagine deception as something imposed upon us from outside, but Scripture recognizes a more complicated phenomenon: human beings can participate in maintaining their own illusions, particularly when those illusions protect something they deeply desire.

The idol is attractive precisely because it is manageable. It does not arrive with an independent will. It makes no demands except those its creator assigns to it. Its boundaries are predictable because the worshiper established them. In that sense, idolatry offers the appearance of transcendence without requiring surrender to anyone genuinely transcendent.

The idolater wants a god, but preferably one who remains under human management.

This helps explain why Isaiah 44 remains relevant even where carved images have largely disappeared.

A modern idol need not be an object of formal religious devotion. Biblically understood, idolatry occurs whenever something within creation is assigned a weight of meaning, security, identity, or hope that properly belongs to the Creator.

This is why perfectly legitimate things can acquire idolatrous functions.

Career, financial security, institutional success, reputation, political influence, family, athletic achievement, intellectual respectability, physical appearance, and even ministry are not intrinsically idolatrous. In fact, many are legitimate goods and may properly be received with gratitude.

The diagnostic question is not simply, Do I have this thing? or even, Do I enjoy this thing?

A better question is: What am I requiring this thing to provide?

If professional success must establish my worth, success has acquired a theological function.

If financial resources must guarantee that nothing beyond my control will threaten me, money has become more than stewardship; it has become a doctrine of providence.

If reputation must continually assure me that I am significant, public approval has begun functioning as justification.

If an institution's success determines whether I possess meaning or value, the institution has quietly become part of my identity in a way it was never designed to bear.

This is where Isaiah's image of the craftsman becomes remarkably contemporary. Human beings remain capable of constructing something, investing themselves in it, and eventually depending upon the very thing they constructed to tell them who they are.

We manufacture the object and then grant the object authority over us. The ancient craftsman did it with timber. Modern people generally use more sophisticated materials.

There may be another dimension to Isaiah's satire that deserves attention. The idol is not merely powerless; it is controllable.

The craftsman determines its dimensions, appearance, location, and ultimately its existence. This provides a revealing contrast with the God who speaks throughout Isaiah 44.

Yahweh cannot be constructed, domesticated, assigned or even summoned when we need it.

He does not derive His identity from Israel; Israel derives its identity from Him.

This explains the repeated language of creation in the chapter:

“Thus says the LORD, who made you, who formed you from the womb and will help you…”

The idol is something Israel forms. Israel is someone God formed.

Those two propositions represent fundamentally different religions.

One allows human beings to construct meaning and then sacralize their construction. The other requires them to receive their existence, identity, purpose, and redemption from outside themselves.

The biblical God is therefore more comforting than an idol, but He is also considerably more disruptive. An idol can be modified when our preferences change. The living God reserves the right to modify us.

If Isaiah 44 ended with the exposure of idolatry, it would be a brilliant critique of human foolishness. But the passage does not end there.

After describing the craftsman who cannot recognize the lie in his own hand, God addresses Israel again:

“Remember these things, O Jacob, and Israel, for you are my servant; I formed you; you are my servant; O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me.”

Then comes the remarkable statement of verse 22:

“I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

This changes the character of the passage. God's exposure of idolatry is not merely prosecutorial; it is redemptive.

He exposes the lie because He intends to recover the worshiper.

“Return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

The imperative rests upon divine action.

Israel's hope does not lie in becoming sufficiently perceptive to escape idolatry, nor in demonstrating enough religious discipline to earn restoration. God grounds the summons to return in what He Himself has done.

That pattern anticipates a gospel logic that runs throughout Scripture: divine grace does not merely reward repentance; grace creates the context in which genuine repentance becomes possible.

Perhaps Isaiah's most useful diagnostic question remains the simplest one:

“Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

I have often been amused that my I-phone is strangely IDOL- shaped

That question deserves more reflection than we usually give it.

Song Link: Idols to Ashes

Notes from past blog posts on Idols

‘Sensory Organ Malfunction Imagery’ is the Biblical language for idolatry. We become callous and hardened toward God because we are worshiping other things. As a result, we grow less sensitive to our God and His ways. He is foreign to us and He begins to fade. We do not hear Him, we do not see Him, and we do not speak of Him. When we do think of Him, it is often as an expedient. We feel the need to tag Him as a superstitious ritual in solving a mess. But there is no sense of His Lordship and no heart desire to seek Him.

Sadly, culture has taught us how to live without God. In our media-model culture, God is seldom referred to as a part of everyday life.
In stark contrast to men and women of the Scriptures, we sense only weakly the presence of the Creator. The saints of old had a daily awareness, but we are so immersed into the media view of world that we compartmentalize Him and allow Him to speak only on Sundays or in a Bible Study. We live with little or no sensitivity to God working in our life.
I like watching the TV show “24”, but there has never been one reference of a spiritual nature in the many seasons of that show. Entire ‘days’ of death and drama take place with no perception of the afterlife, no foundation for morals, no prayer, no Bible, no real hope. Where is spirituality? It is becoming more unnatural to see an active God in the moment-by-moment details of life. We definitely don’t talk that way. It has been said that worldliness is what any culture does to make sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange. We go into life as blind as the idol makers of Isaiah’s day. The gods we serve are empty of power and we curse the heavens because God won’t show Himself. Who moved?

WHAT WE REVERE WE RESEMBLE EITHER TO RUIN OR RESTORATION
G.K. Beale

“At the core, idolatry is trying to control life and manage life by trying to make God controllable: if you can get God to do what you want by getting his attention or through some sacrificial service, then perhaps life will turn out the way you want it to. This is one of the root beliefs of pagan religion. It is telling to ask how much pagan religion is still in the confines of the church.” Bill Delvaux


GOD MADE US TO ENJOY HIM, ACKNOWLEDGE HIM AND WORSHIP HIM.
HE GETS GLORY AND WE GET JOY.

"We are more spiritual than we even know.”

“I ordinarily begin speaking about sin to a young, urban, non-Christian like this:
Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry.” Tim Keller

As we list modern day idols, simple state what are the ‘good things’
that we have made into ‘god things”?


Questions to Help Us Identify Idols:
Most afraid of? What are you afraid of losing?
Long for most passionately?
Where do you go for comfort?
What media-advertisements pull your heart strings?
What do you complain about the most?
What angers you the most?
What makes you happiest?
How do you explain yourself to other people?
What has made you be angry at God?
What do you brag about?
What do you want to have? What one thing?
What do you sacrifice the most for?
Whose approval matters?
What comfort do you treasure?

The Words That Found Me- Closing August

I didn't set out to spend August collecting strange words.

Apparently, I did anyway.

Over the past several weeks, certain words have stopped me in my tracks—some old, some obscure, some familiar but carrying histories I had never really considered.

Septennium. 7/31
Vicissitude. 8/3
Serein. 8/6
Invidious. 8/20
Pandemonium. 8/27
Ambivalence. 7/29

That is a strange little vocabulary list. In some ways bizarre that they grabbed me- it's not like I was reading a dictionary!

I have written about most of them separately, without much thought that they belonged together. One came from reading. Another surfaced while thinking about getting older. Another helped me describe something I had experienced in leadership but never quite had a word for. Pandemonium sent me back to Milton and then forward again into the way a magnificent literary word eventually became our ordinary description for chaos.

But now, as August comes to an end, I wonder if the words were having a conversation with each other before I realized I was listening.

Maybe they even tell a story.

Septennium is about time.

Seven years. A measurement that seems arbitrary until you begin dividing a life by it. Childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, marriage, children, career, middle age, grandchildren—life somehow becomes easier to see when we stop measuring it only in birthdays and start noticing its seasons.

But time never stands still.

That brings me to vicissitude.

Life turns.

The word comes from the idea of succession and changing circumstances—the rising and falling, gaining and losing, arriving and departing that constitute an ordinary human life. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to establish permanence in a world that stubbornly refuses to provide it.

Jobs change. Bodies change. Families change. Friendships change. Institutions change. Dreams change.

And yet God does not.

Perhaps that is why His immutability has become more precious to me as I have grown older. When almost everything else is subject to vicissitude, there is profound comfort in knowing that the One holding the story is not.

Then there is ambivalence.

I used to think ambivalence meant that you couldn't make up your mind.

I don't anymore. Sometimes ambivalence is simply what happens when you have lived long enough to discover that two apparently contradictory things can both be true.

I can miss an earlier season of life without wanting to return to it. I can celebrate getting older and occasionally mourn being young.

Perhaps maturity is not finally resolving all those tensions. Perhaps it is learning to carry them faithfully.

Which brings me to invidious.

After years in leadership, I finally found a word for a particular kind of burden: those circumstances where no available choice leaves everyone satisfied. Sometimes every wire on the bomb looks important, but eventually somebody has to decide whether to clip the green one or the yellow one.

And if nothing explodes, most people will never know there was a bomb.

That is part of leadership, but it is also part of life.

I found out today- that particular post will be published in a CESA journal... look for ward to seeing it.

Wisdom does not always reveal the painless choice. Sometimes it simply gives us enough courage to make the necessary one and enough humility to live with its consequences.

Put enough of those decisions together, add deadlines, personalities, disappointments, responsibilities, surprises, failures, victories, traffic, bills, football games, family schedules, national news and whatever happened before breakfast—and eventually we arrive at another wonderful word:

Pandemonium.

Milton coined it as the capital of Hell in Paradise Lost—the place of all demons.

We turned it into a word for Tuesday morning.

There is something almost humorous about that linguistic journey, but perhaps something revealing as well. Human life can feel chaotic. Sometimes spectacularly so.

We would like the story to move neatly from Point A to Point B.

Instead, there are interruptions, reversals, detours and circumstances we never saw coming.

Septenniums filled with vicissitudes.

Vicissitudes producing ambivalence.

Ambivalence complicated by invidious choices.

All of it occasionally descending into pandemonium.

That would be a rather depressing vocabulary lesson if there weren't one word left.

Serein.

A gentle rain falling from what appears to be a clear evening sky.

Of all the words that found me this month, perhaps that is the one I want to keep closest.

Because grace often feels like serein. It arrives where circumstances don't seem capable of producing it.

And perhaps that is the connection I was looking for without knowing I was looking for one.

Life is not meant to be mastered.

We move through its septenniums and endure its vicissitudes. We learn to live honestly with ambivalence. We make invidious decisions when responsibility requires them. Occasionally we look around and wonder how everything became pandemonium.

But above all of it remains the God who does not change.

The same God who has been faithful in every season behind us is already present in every season ahead.

I don't know what words will find me next month.

I suspect there will be more turns. There will certainly be decisions. There may even be a little pandemonium.

But after sixty-two years, I am becoming less interested in demanding a clear sky.

I am learning instead to watch for the rain.

Sometimes grace falls like serein.

Note: all of this spilled over into my music as well

Check it out sometime: Jayopsis on SoundCloud

Pandemonium

Pandemonium 

We use the word casually now.

A school cafeteria gets too loud, an airport shuts down in bad weather, traffic snarls after an accident, or a crowd suddenly loses whatever fragile organization had been holding it together. We look at the confusion and say, “It was pandemonium.”

It is a wonderfully useful word. It sounds like what it means—noise, disorder, movement, competing voices, nobody quite in control. But that isn't what the word originally meant.

Before pandemonium became something that happens when a thousand people try to leave a stadium at once, Pandæmonium was a place.

On my kindle, I am re-reading sections Paradise Lost at 1:30 AM to help me sleep. It isn't working. But the poetry is amazing!

I once had a friend that said, "If you are having trouble sleeping, open your Bible and the devil will shut your eyes" .... all it does is get me stirring, I long for my brain to turn off at night but the older I get the less that happens.

Sometimes my spiritual insomnia is just a heart cry:

 "Arise, cry out in the night, as the watches of the night begin; pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to him for the lives of your children, " Lamentations 2:19

But here I am, getting too much blue light late at night and reading Milton.

Paradise Lost, published in 1667, is his epic poem that explores the cosmic conflict between good and evil, the Fall of Man, and the consequences of disobedience. 

I once heard that Milton was upset that readers were drawn to his portrayal of Satan in the poem Paradise Lost. While this isn’t directly confirmed, it’s widely discussed because Satan is depicted as a complex and charismatic character, leading some to view him as the tragic hero of the story. Writers like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley even suggested that Milton unintentionally sympathized with Satan due to how vividly he depicted him.

Though Milton, a devout Puritan, likely intended Satan to be the villain, his poetic skill made Satan an intriguing figure. This reaction might have troubled Milton, but it also shows how effectively he gave depth to even his most evil character. Ultimately, Satan’s temporary allure in the poem serves to underscore the destructive nature of sin and the triumph of God’s justice in the end.

PANDEMONIUM

Among its many vivid and memorable scenes is the description of Pandemonium, the capital of Hell. Milton not only creates a place of infernal grandeur but also coins a new term, "Pandemonium," which has since entered the English lexicon to describe chaos and disorder. The origin of this term reflects Milton’s genius for blending classical influences with Christian theology, inventing language that captures the epic scale of his narrative.

The word combines the Greek root "pan-" meaning "all" or "every," and "daemon," which means "demon" or "evil spirit." Thus, "Pandemonium" literally means "all demons" or "assembly of demons," and has come to signify any place or situation of wild disorder and confusion.

Pandemonium appears prominently in Book I of Paradise Lost. After Satan and his fellow fallen angels are cast into Hell, Satan rallies his troops and leads them to build a grand palace, which becomes the center of their new kingdom. Milton describes the construction of Pandemonium with a mix of awe and horror, emphasizing its vastness and the demonic energy that brings it into being. This palace is the infernal counterpart to Heaven’s courts, and Milton's depiction draws on architectural imagery reminiscent of classical epics and Renaissance art.

One of the most famous passages describing Pandemonium reads: "Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, / Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave; nor did there want / Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven." (Book I, lines 710-716)

Milton contrasts the beauty and harmony of Pandemonium’s architecture with the evil that it represents. The palace is both magnificent and grotesque, symbolizing the seductive allure of sin and rebellion. The grandeur of Pandemonium is undercut by the reality of its purpose: it is a place of darkness, deceit, and rebellion against God. 

Another notable passage comes when Satan surveys his kingdom and convenes his council: "A solemn council forthwith to be held / At Pandemonium, the high capital / Of Satan and his peers: their summons called / From every band and squared regiment / By place or choice the worthiest; they anon / With hundreds and with thousands trooping came / Attended: all access was thronged, the gates / And porches wide, but chief the spacious hall / (Though like a covered field, where champions bold / Wont ride in armed, and at the Soldan’s chair / Defied the best of Paynim chivalry / To mortal combat or career with lance), / Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air, / Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings." (Book I, lines 752-765)

The chaotic energy of Hell’s inhabitants and the demonic grandeur of their new capital underscore the disorder and confusion that Pandemonium represents. The chaotic gathering of demons mirrors the turmoil of Hell itself, reinforcing Milton's larger theme of the destructiveness of rebellion against divine order.

The term "Pandemonium" has evolved far beyond its original context in Paradise Lost. 

Today, it is commonly used to describe situations of wild chaos, disorder, or uproar. This reflects the inherent meaning of the word as Milton intended it: a place of tumult and rebellion, a kingdom of chaos ruled by Satan and his demons. 

I think I first heard the term at a wrestling match in the old Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham in the 1970's- Tojo Yamamoto hit his opponent with a chair and "PANDEMONIUM" broke out according to the exuberant announcer!

The concept of Pandemonium can also be applied to political scenarios where disorder and confusion reign, often due to power struggles, rebellion, or corruption. 

It resonates in everyday life, describing anything from the chaotic atmosphere of a busy marketplace to the frantic rush of commuters during rush hour. Additionally, it can be used metaphorically to describe internal chaos—moments of intense mental or emotional turmoil. 

Anxiety (and insomnia) is ultimately a seat near the palace of Satan.

What part of Pandemonium is dominating me right now?

DARK LIGHT

Milton also uses the concept of "darkness visible" or "dark light" as a way to describe the unique and paradoxical nature of Hell. This imagery reflects the inversion of divine light and the corrupted, fallen state of Satan and his followers. "Dark light" serves as a metaphor for the perversion of heavenly truth and goodness, highlighting the spiritual and moral blindness of the demonic realm.

The phrase "darkness visible" appears in Book I when Milton describes Hell after Satan and his followers are cast out of Heaven:

"No light, but rather darkness visible / Served only to discover sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell, hope never comes / That comes to all; but torture without end." (Book I, lines 62-66)

Milton paints Hell as a place where darkness paradoxically reveals the horrors within, a realm where there is no true light, only an oppressive, shadowy presence that allows the damned to see the misery around them. This "dark light" is not the absence of light, but a twisted version of it—a light that only serves to illuminate suffering and despair.

I wrote about this in length in a previous post: 2018 Spiritual Light and Darkness

This concept reflects the broader theme in Paradise Lost of Satan’s inversion of everything good and holy.

 While divine light represents God’s truth, wisdom, and goodness, the light in Hell is a corrupted version, symbolizing the fall from grace and the perversion of divine order. Milton’s depiction of "dark light" emphasizes that Hell is not just a place of physical torment but a spiritual condition—a state of existence cut off from God’s presence, where light no longer signifies hope or life but instead magnifies the darkness of separation from divine grace.

In the broader context of the poem, this imagery contributes to the portrayal of Satan as a figure who once basked in the true light of Heaven but now exists in a perverse and distorted reality. The light of Hell, like Satan’s once-glorious nature, has become twisted and corrupted, serving as a constant reminder of the fallen angels’ loss of heavenly splendor.

Ultimately, Pandemonium is more than just a place; it is a state of being—a symbol of the consequences of rejecting divine order and truth. However, the Bible provides a contrast to the darkness and confusion that Pandemonium represents. 

In Colossians 1:13, it is written, “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” Through Christ, believers are delivered from the chaos of sin and rebellion and brought into the Kingdom of Light, a place of order, peace, and redemption.

I just want to get some sleep......

other amazing lines in the poem:

When Satan first wakes up after being cast down: This passage captures Satan’s realization of his fall after he wakes up in Hell. He recognizes the shift from the glory of Heaven to the horrors of the infernal pit:

“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, / Said then the lost Archangel, this the seat / That we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom / For that celestial light? Be it so, since he / Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid / What shall be right: farthest from him is best, / Whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme / Above his equals. Farewell happy fields, / Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new possessor; one who brings / A mind not to be changed by place or time. / The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” (Book I, lines 242-255)

When Satan sees Man for the first time: This is from Book IV, when Satan first sees Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. His reaction is a mix of envy, bitterness, and inner torment as he witnesses their innocence and happiness:

“Aside the Devil turned / For envy, yet with jealous leer malign / Eyed them askance, and to himself thus plained: / ‘Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two / Imparadised in one another’s arms / The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill / Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust, / Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire, / Amongst our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.’” (Book IV, lines 502-511)

“Him thus intent Ithuriel with his spear / Touched lightly; for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial temper, but returns / To its own likeness, and a heaven-born face / Unveils its true nature. As when the night / Has dimmed the sky and obscured the stars, / A sudden light breaks through the clouds, and the sun / Reveals a brighter day than that before, / So when the angel touched the spirit of man, / He felt its true nature. A kind of joy / From the sight of these innocent beings arose, / And he knew he was a lost and fallen soul.” (Book IV, lines 497-509)

In this passage, Satan’s initial reaction is one of awe and wonder at the beauty and perfection of humanity, which contrasts sharply with his own fallen state. However, his admiration quickly turns to envy and hatred as he reflects on his own suffering and loss:

“So much the more / His hate, and the more to hate the more / His hate. Envy and pride, those twin-born foes, / The new-born ones, the powerful hands of heaven, / Moved him to wrath; and wrath, revenge, and spite / The measureless excess of his revenge, / And unapproachable of hope, thus spake: / ‘O hated, yoke of heaven, eternal, born / Of one who sits above the Heavens’ height, / And more to be despised, more to be cursed / The false exultation of their bliss, / My eyes will never see again. In shame / They shall suffer, in anguish and in sorrow / Forevermore, and I shall evermore / Be grieved and furious at my own expense.’” (Book IV, lines 511-522)

Satan’s famous rally of the troops to rebel: After gathering the fallen angels, Satan gives a rousing speech to incite them to continue their rebellion against God, emphasizing their power and determination despite their fall:

“What though the field be lost? / All is not lost—the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield: / And what is else not to be overcome? / That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power, / Who from the terror of this arm so late / Doubted his empire—that were low indeed, / That were an ignominy and shame beneath / This downfall; since by fate the strength of gods, / And this empyreal substance, cannot fail; / Since through experience of this great event / In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced, / We may with more successful hope resolve / To wage by force or guile eternal war / Irreconcilable to our grand foe, / Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.’” (Book I, lines 105-124)

And there is something deeply ironic about Pandemonium as well.

Satan has wanted freedom from God. He has rejected the hierarchy of Heaven and refused the place of a creature beneath his Creator. His famous determination is that it would be preferable to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Milton's Hell isn't interesting merely because it is frightening. What makes it fascinating is that the fallen creatures build something there. Rebellion has architecture.

That thought stayed with me because sin is often imagined primarily as destruction. Certainly it destroys, but human beings rarely experience their own rebellion that way. We build things with it. We construct explanations, identities, philosophies, defenses, ambitions, and entire little kingdoms in which our own desires make perfect sense.

We don't usually announce, “I would like to destroy the proper order of things.”

We say, “I should get to decide.”

That sounds considerably more reasonable. Until everyone says it. Then we have pandemonium.

Perhaps that is why the modern meaning of the word seems strangely appropriate. Over the centuries, Milton's proper name escaped the pages of Paradise Lost. Pandæmonium became pandemonium, and eventually the capital of Hell became our ordinary word for uproar, confusion, and chaos.

We lost the devil but kept the sound.

That line became important to me while working on the song.

We no longer need to picture fallen angels gathered beneath Satan's throne when we hear the word. We picture traffic. Crowds. Shouting. Confusion. A room in which everybody is talking and nobody is listening.

Yet I wonder whether the distance between those two meanings is really as great as it appears.

There is a theological problem beneath the noise.

Christian theology has always understood sin as something deeper than breaking individual rules. At its root is a disordering of what ought to be rightly ordered. The creature places himself where the Creator belongs. My desires become authoritative because they are my desires. My judgment becomes final because it is my judgment.

The throne doesn't have to be large - It just has to be mine.

That makes Milton's Pandæmonium uncomfortable, because it is much easier to read Paradise Lost while keeping Satan safely at literary distance. There he is: magnificent, proud, ruined, defiant. We can study his rebellion almost clinically.

Sadly- I know that voice.

I will decide what is right for me.

My life belongs to me.

These aren't the screams of demons in some distant infernal palace. They are remarkably ordinary sentences.

And if every person becomes sovereign, we eventually arrive at the modern meaning of Milton's old word: competing wills, competing truths, competing kingdoms, competing thrones. 

Counterfeit light may describe rebellion better than darkness does. Sin rarely presents itself to us as obviously evil. Pride can look like strength. Selfishness can masquerade as self-preservation. Vengeance can call itself justice. Greed can become ambition. Autonomy can call itself freedom.

So the imagery behind the song gradually became a mixture of Milton's infernal city and our modern one—ancient architecture dissolving into skyscrapers, fiery roads becoming highways, the throne of the rebel king becoming a million smaller thrones.

There is, however, an important place where the Christian story parts company with Satan's story.

We are rebels, but we are rebels to whom mercy is offered.

The gospel does not merely tell us that our little kingdoms are badly managed and that Christ can help us improve them. It announces another King altogether. Repentance therefore involves something far more profound than cleaning up the disorder.

It means surrendering the throne. That is difficult because the throne is exactly what we wanted.

We wanted sovereignty and received isolation. We wanted autonomy and discovered disorder. We wanted the freedom to define good for ourselves and found ourselves endlessly negotiating between millions of other people demanding the same privilege.

We wanted our kingdoms.

And we got them! And it is ........

click on title to listen...

Pandemonium

Verse 1
Heaven shook and the rebels fell,
Still dreaming of a throne in Hell.
So out of fire they raised a hall,
A kingdom for the proud who'd fall.
A crown was set, a council called,
Beneath the light that wasn't light—
And Milton gave that palace walls,
And gave the place a name that night.

Pre-Chorus
Better to reign, the boast had run,
Than bow the knee to anyone.
But look what kingdoms become
When every servant wants the throne.

Chorus
Pandemonium—
Every voice becomes its own,
Every heart demands a throne,
Every will says, "Mine alone,"
Till nothing can be ruled.
Pandemonium—
Freedom with no higher claim,
Fire with no warmth in the flame,
Hell was more than just a place—
It was what rebellion made.
Pandemonium.

Verse 2
The centuries rolled, the word came down,
Lost the devil, kept the sound.
Now it's traffic, crowds and stadiums,
Sirens, shouting, things gone wrong.
We say it laughing, shake our heads,
For noise that rises, order gone—
Never thinking underneath
An older meaning lingers on.

Pre-Chorus
For chaos isn't always loud,
Sometimes it wears a quiet crown.
A million kingdoms, side by side,
Each one saying, "I decide."

Chorus
Pandemonium—
Every voice becomes its own,
Every heart demands a throne,
Every will says, "Mine alone,"
Till nothing can be ruled.
Pandemonium—
Freedom with no higher claim,
Fire with no warmth in the flame,
Hell was more than just a place—
It was what rebellion made.
Pandemonium.

Bridge
I read the poem like ancient war,
Angels falling, Heaven's door,
Satan seated on his throne—
A ruined king who'd have his own.
Then somewhere in those burning lines
I recognized a voice like mine:
No hand above me, no command,
My life, my throne, my promised land.
And suddenly that distant room
Was closer than I wanted to assume.

Chorus
Pandemonium—
Not just fire beneath the ground,
Not just chaos, smoke and sound,
It's the kingdom I have found
Whenever I would rule.
Pandemonium—
Every heart can build a throne,
Every rebel wants his own,
Till the King we would not serve
Is the only King who saves.
From Pandemonium.

Outro
Milton gave the place a name,
We kept the word and lost the flame.
But every heart that wants the throne
Still builds a kingdom of its own.

Painfully Aware

Painfully Aware: The Ditches Along the Road of Sanctification

Billy Joel once sang about going to extremes—too high or too low, with apparently very little interest in occupying the territory in between—and, strange as it may be to begin a discussion of sanctification with Billy Joel, I have come to believe that he describes something recognizable about the Christian life.

Call me a joker, call me a fool 

Right at this moment I'm totally cool 

Clear as a crystal, sharp as a knife 

I feel like I'm in the prime of my life 

Sometimes it feels like I'm going too fast 

I don't know how long this feeling will last 

Maybe it's only tonight 

CHORUS 

Darling I don't know why I go to extremes 

Too high or too low there ain't no in-betweens 

And if I stand or I fall 

It's all or nothing at all 

Darling I don't know why I go to extremes 

“I Go to Extremes” Billy Joel

We are creatures of extremes.

Give us discipline and we can turn it into legalism; give us liberty and, with just a little time and ingenuity, we can turn that into license. We can make an idol out of obedience and then, having recognized the idol, run so hard in the opposite direction that we make an idol out of freedom. Somewhere between those two ditches lies the road on which Christians actually spend their lives, stumbling forward under the patient work of a God who seems considerably less hurried about our sanctification than we are.

It raises a question I have thought about many times: If I am a believer in Christ, why am I still here?

Why, upon conversion, did God not simply catapult me straight into heaven?

Obviously, there are several theological answers to that question, but part of the answer is sanctification—the long, mysterious and sometimes painful process by which those whom God has already justified are increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. We are not trying to become His children; in Christ, we are His children. We are not slowly accumulating enough righteousness to convince God to accept us; the righteousness we need has already been supplied by Another. Yet the God who declares His people righteous also refuses to leave them untouched, and so He begins the patient work of making us increasingly resemble what He has already declared us to be.

That distinction matters enormously.

The Road

Psalm 119 begins not with a description of a dramatic spiritual experience but with a road: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.”

A way. A walk.

There is movement in those words, but there is also duration. Nobody walks a road instantaneously.

We live, however, in what might be called a “How-To America,” where almost every difficulty is assumed to have a technique, a program or a set of steps capable of solving it. Christians are hardly immune to this impulse. We have books, conferences, podcasts, devotionals, music, programs and personalities, many of which are genuinely useful, but none of which can substitute for the ordinary, sometimes unspectacular work of having our minds and consciences continually brought under the Word of God.

Scripture is not merely information we collect about God. It is one of the principal instruments through which God steers us down this road.

Ephesians 2:8–10 gives us perhaps the clearest set of guardrails:

For by grace you have been saved through faith...not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Most Protestants know those verses well, but we have a habit of stopping before Paul finishes his sentence. Verse 10 follows immediately: we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

There is the road again.

We are not saved by our walking, but the saved are given somewhere to walk.

The order cannot be reversed without destroying the gospel. Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone—those great Reformation declarations remain as necessary now as they ever were. I should never imagine that God accepts me because of Christ and because I attend worship faithfully, study Scripture, participate in a men's group, give generously, behave morally or manage to avoid whatever sins happen to be particularly unpopular among Christians at the moment.

For justification, Christ plus nothing.

Yet grace does not merely forgive a man and leave him comfortably settled among the ruins. The Christ who justifies also sanctifies, and this is where the journey becomes both beautiful and difficult, because alongside the road are two remarkably inviting ditches.

The Ditch of Legalism

The ditch on one side is legalism, and it is particularly dangerous because the road into it often begins with something good.

A man begins taking holiness seriously. He becomes more disciplined, learns Scripture, abandons certain sins and develops convictions that perhaps he should have developed years earlier. His life really does begin to change.

Then, almost imperceptibly, his eyes move away from Christ and toward himself.

You are doing rather well.

And once I become impressed with my own progress, it does not take long before I begin inspecting everyone else's.

My convictions become standards; my standards acquire rules; my rules acquire exceptions and footnotes, and before long I have developed a rather sophisticated system for determining who is serious about Christ and who is not. Naturally, I tend to perform quite well under the system I designed.

Before long, I am trying to be everyone else's Holy Spirit.

I know this Pharisee rather well because I have played him many times.

Our culture makes the role particularly easy. We have constructed an enormous entertainment industry around criticism and opinion, and I have always enjoyed it. I used to be an O'Reilly junkie, and the attraction was not difficult to understand: somebody was wrong, somebody was right, and there was great satisfaction in watching the wrong person exposed.

The problem was that, over time, I began to love my arguments more than I loved people.

That realization is uncomfortable because legalism rarely announces itself as hatred. It usually arrives disguised as discernment, conviction or concern. In my own life, one of its clearest symptoms has been gossip and criticism—the strange ability to identify the ten percent that is wrong with another person while becoming almost incapable of seeing the ninety percent that is admirable.

I can call that discernment if I want.

Sometimes it is simply pride with a Bible verse attached to it.

Eventually, by grace, God pulls me out of that ditch. Unfortunately, sinners have an extraordinary capacity for overcorrection, and I have sometimes responded by crossing the entire road and landing in the ditch on the other side.

The Ditch of License

Christian liberty is a magnificent thing.

There is profound freedom in understanding that my standing before God does not rise and fall with yesterday's performance, that Christ's sacrifice was sufficient, and that I am not required to live beneath the crushing burden of continually trying to persuade God to keep loving me.

But just beyond liberty lies license, and the distance between them can be shorter than we imagine.

Paul understood the temptation perfectly. If grace abounds where sin increases, why not continue in sin? His response in Romans 6 is not a new legal code but an appeal to identity: How can we who died to sin still live in it?

License takes something gloriously true—I am forgiven—and employs it in the service of something terribly false—that therefore sin no longer matters.

I can walk deliberately into a situation, run toward a sin, eviscerate my conscience and afterward console myself with the words, “I am forgiven.”

The frightening thing is that the sentence itself is true.

The lie is in what I am using the truth to accomplish.

Grace was never given so that I could become comfortable with the very thing from which Christ came to rescue me. When Christian liberty becomes license, conscience gradually loses its sensitivity; what once troubled me becomes tolerable, what became tolerable becomes normal, and eventually my god begins to look suspiciously like my own comfort.

There is another irony here. The legalist does not love people well because he is too busy condemning them, but the person living in license may love them even less because he has ceased caring enough to tell the truth. Confrontation becomes uncomfortable. Moral clarity feels judgmental. Worse still, speaking honestly about another person's sin may expose something in me that I would prefer not to examine.

So I say nothing.

Legalism can make me confront everyone except myself; license can persuade me to confront no one, including myself.

Neither is love.

Somewhere Between the Ditches

And then, by God's grace, I find the road again.

This is where sanctification has become less theoretical for me, because the longer I live the Christian life, the less it resembles the clean upward trajectory I once imagined. There have been advances and retreats, seasons of remarkable clarity followed by stretches in which old sins appeared embarrassingly alive, moments when I thought I had learned something permanently only to discover that God apparently intended to teach it to me again.

Yet through all of it, there is Christ.

He directs me through His Word and by His Spirit, teaching me—slowly—to love Him more and myself less; to admire people rather than constantly evaluate them; to seek my own way less aggressively; to pour myself into relationships, particularly my wife and children; to laugh without guilt, grieve without despair, work without worshiping work, and occasionally become tired enough of this fallen world that heaven sounds less like an abstraction and more like home.

I still fall into the ditches.

God still pulls me out.

There are periods when sanctification feels like one step forward and two steps back, followed perhaps by three forward and five back, until I wonder whether there has been any movement at all. Then occasionally God allows the dust to settle long enough for me to look backward, and I discover that the road behind me is longer than I realized.

Certain sins that once seemed irresistible have lost some of their power. Things I once desperately wanted no longer appear quite so impressive. I have learned to distrust motives I once defended, forgive injuries I once rehearsed, appreciate people I once criticized and recognize temptations that years ago I would not even have identified as temptations.

None of this has happened as quickly as I would have preferred.

Perhaps that is part of the point.

The kingdom has been built in me and around me, often when I was barely aware that anything was happening and, in some cases, in spite of me rather than because of me. Looking backward, therefore, produces something very different from self-congratulation. If anything genuinely good has emerged from this long process, I know myself well enough by now to understand where the credit belongs.

Learning to Stay on the Road

There are practices that, over the years, have helped keep me between the ditches: devotion to Scripture and prayer; an unflinching commitment to worship even when I do not particularly feel like worshiping; continuing education; private fasting, sometimes from food and sometimes from the comforts and distractions that quietly begin owning too much of me; and also prudent feasting, because Christianity is not an exercise in perpetual deprivation and there are moments when the proper response to the King's generosity is simply to enjoy His gifts.

I need small-group accountability. I need to love my wife well. I need to keep pushing work down the priority list because, left unattended, work will climb back toward the top with remarkable speed. Most of all, I need to keep crying out for the Spirit of God because the older I become, the less confidence I have in my ability to manufacture holiness through determination.

Christ's language is better: abide in the vine.

Apart from Him, I can do nothing.

And perhaps another discipline belongs alongside all the others—patience.

We are accustomed to before-and-after pictures, thirty-day transformations and measurable results. Sanctification is generally less accommodating. God appears quite content to grow oak trees while I keep asking Him for squash.

Sanctification is measured in decades, not days.

At first that can sound discouraging because there is still so much road ahead and so much in me that needs to change. Increasingly, however, I find it comforting. God is not surprised that His work takes time. He knew what He was getting when He called me, and the slow pace of sanctification does not mean that He has abandoned the project.

So I continue walking—not in order to persuade Him to love me, but because in Christ He already does; not because my obedience will someday make me worthy, but because Christ is worthy; and not because I have finally discovered the technique by which a sinner can perfect himself, but because the God who began this work has promised to finish it.

I expect there are still many miles ahead, and, knowing myself, probably a few more trips into the ditches.

But there is grace there too.

And when the road finally ends, if I understand the gospel correctly, I will not arrive with an impressive account of how well I navigated it. I will arrive as a man who was carried, corrected, forgiven, disciplined, restored and kept by Christ.

Which leaves only one conclusion worth writing at the end of the story:

Soli Deo Gloria.

To God alone be the glory.

Song Link (click on title)

  Painfully Aware

Verse 1 I thought the farther down this road, The easier it would get, That years of walking close to You Would leave me less regret. But light has ways of finding things The darkness used to spare, And the closer that I walk with You, The more I'm made aware. Pre-Chorus Not condemned and not afraid, Not trying to repay A debt You finished long ago— Still, You won't leave me this way. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Verse 2 There's a ditch on either side of me, And I've fallen into both; I've worn the robes of righteousness And called my judgment growth. Then I've taken grace for license, Like forgiveness meant You didn't care, Till Your Word brought me back onto the road, Painfully aware. Pre-Chorus One step forward, two steps back, Some days that's how it seems; Then the dust clears from the road behind, And I see what You have done in me. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Bridge Painfully aware I cannot make me holy. Painfully aware My heart still wanders slowly. Painfully aware The flesh still loves its throne. Painfully aware— I never walk alone. You lift me from the ditch again, Brush the dust away, Point my wandering feet toward home And put me on the way. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Outro Not painfully condemned, Not painfully afraid— Just painfully aware Of how much I need Your grace.

Invidious: The Hidden Cost of Long-Term Leadership

Note: This post is a general piece on school leadership and does not reflect any recent event or any particular circumstance

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: invidious.

It is not a word we use often, but perhaps administrators should.

Invidious can describe a circumstance in which a person is required to make a choice that will almost inevitably produce resentment, criticism, or ill will. It is especially appropriate when the available choices are imperfect—when choosing one legitimate good means sacrificing another, or when responsibility requires a decision that someone else will experience as unfair, painful, or deeply disappointing.

The longer I have worked in administration, the more I have come to recognize these situations as an ordinary, though largely invisible, part of leadership. And after 35 years as a coach, teacher, and an administrator (for 25 of those years)- I can see physical, mental, and physical wear and tear even in my own life.

We often describe administrators as decision-makers, which is accurate but incomplete. Many administrative decisions are relatively uncomplicated: there is a policy, a precedent, a budget, a calendar, or a clearly preferable course of action. Those decisions consume time, but they do not necessarily consume much of us.

The decisions that remain with us are different.

They involve people we know. They contain incomplete information, competing obligations, institutional consequences, and relationships that may be altered permanently by whatever we decide. Often there is no clean answer—only a judgment about which consequence the institution can responsibly bear and which principle must take precedence.

Over a long career, those judgments accumulate.

And I am increasingly interested in what that accumulation does to the person making them.

"Diffusing Atomic Bombs"

There is a metaphor that has occurred to me repeatedly over the years. I often joke about it- how my day was basically diffusing bombs that were ticking......The daily grind of administration can often feel like that.

A situation arrives on your desk already armed- one you did not ask for- and many times one that has nothing to do with you: a personnel matter, an accusation, a student crisis, a parent conflict, a financial problem, an issue involving competing accounts of what happened. Perhaps it has been developing quietly for months before anyone brings it to you. By the time it reaches the administrator, however, there are consequences attached to almost every possible response.

There is a green wire and a yellow wire. You would prefer not to cut either. But there has to be an action or it will get out of control in a hurry.

So you gather information. You listen to people whose accounts do not entirely agree. You consider policy, precedent, mission, personalities, legal implications, institutional history, and the possibility that some important fact remains unknown to you. You consult people you trust. You try to separate what is urgent from what merely feels urgent.

Eventually, however, the responsibility cannot be delegated any further. Someone has to clip a wire.

You choose green. Then you wait. Nothing happens.

The organization continues functioning. Classes begin the next morning. Employees return to work. Students move through the hallways. Parents drop their children off.  What might have become a significant institutional problem simply disappears into the category of things that did not happen.

From an organizational standpoint, this is success. Psychologically, however, something more complicated may have occurred. Everyone else gets to forget the bomb because, in their experience, there never was one.

The administrator remembers holding the wire cutters- and thinks about it sometimes long into the lonely night.

I think this is an under examined aspect of long-term administrative leadership.

The psychological cost of leadership does not arise only from major crises. In fact, those may be easier to recognize because everyone agrees that they are stressful. The more subtle burden comes from the repeated exposure to lower-level conflict, consequential judgment, interpersonal tension, uncertainty, and anticipated reaction.

Any single episode may be manageable. The concern is cumulative exposure.

Over time, an administrator develops an extensive internal archive: conversations that went badly, employees who were terminated, parents who remained angry, students whose situations had no satisfying resolution, accusations that proved unfounded, accusations that did not, decisions made with insufficient information, and decisions that were correct but nevertheless damaged relationships.

Some of those memories remain unusually accessible.

Years later, we can sometimes remember exactly where we were sitting when we made the decision.

This is where ordinary reflection can gradually become something closer to chronic vigilance. An experienced administrator learns to anticipate consequences several moves ahead, which is one of the great advantages of experience. Yet the same capacity can have a psychological cost. We begin rehearsing not only what might happen, but how people might react if it does.

Before sending the email, we can already imagine the response. Before making the decision, we can already anticipate the meeting that will follow it. Before clipping the wire, we remember the last explosion. Experience makes us better at recognizing bombs.

It can also make us increasingly convinced that everything might be one.

This may help explain why some long-term administrators become jaded.

Cynicism is easy to condemn as a character problem, but I suspect that in many veteran leaders it begins as a form of psychological adaptation.

After enough conflict, skepticism can feel safer than trust. Emotional distance can feel more sustainable than continued investment. If caring deeply about every situation repeatedly produces distress, one predictable response is to care less.

The shift is rarely dramatic.

Another angry email arrives, and instead of wondering what is behind it, we think, Here we go again.

Another employee comes into the office with a concern, and before hearing the details we recognize a familiar pattern. and before we know it- this person, made in the image of God, who hasn't been through this before... isn't really heard.

Another parent insists that the situation is completely different from every previous situation, while years of experience suggest that it probably is not.

Sometimes that recognition is wisdom. Pattern recognition is one of the legitimate benefits of experience. But sometimes it is scar tissue masquerading as wisdom.

That distinction deserves our attention.

A healthy veteran administrator should be more difficult to manipulate than a novice, less easily destabilized by criticism, and more capable of recognizing recurring patterns of organizational behavior. But becoming less naïve should not require becoming less humane.

The challenge is to develop discernment without suspicion, resilience without emotional detachment, and compassion without fragility.

That is considerably harder than simply developing a thicker skin.

The Moral Residue of Necessary Decisions

There is another phenomenon that deserves attention: the emotional residue left by decisions that may have been correct but were nevertheless painful.

Not every difficult feeling following a decision is evidence that the decision was wrong.

Sometimes discomfort is telling us something important. Perhaps we acted too quickly, spoke too harshly, relied on incomplete information, protected the institution at someone's unnecessary expense, or allowed our own frustration to influence our judgment. Healthy leadership requires enough humility to examine those possibilities seriously.

But there are other occasions when the decision survives careful examination and still hurts.

A valued employee may no longer be effective in a particular role. A student consequence may be necessary even when we understand the circumstances that produced the behavior. A financial decision may protect the institution while eliminating something meaningful. A parent's disappointment may be entirely understandable even though granting the parent's request would create an inequity elsewhere.

In situations like these, two things can be true simultaneously:

The decision was responsible, and something valuable was lost.

Experienced administrators need a psychological framework capable of holding both truths.

Otherwise, we tend toward one of two unhealthy conclusions. We either assume that because someone was hurt, we must have done something wrong, or we defend ourselves against that possibility by minimizing the person's pain.

Neither response is particularly mature.

There is a third possibility: we can acknowledge the loss without repudiating the judgment.

We can grieve what the decision cost and still believe it was necessary.

The Danger of Carrying Both Sides of the Decision

Administrators also have to become increasingly precise about the boundaries of responsibility.

Leadership makes us responsible for our preparation, judgment, fairness, communication, use of authority, and willingness to correct mistakes. We should be accountable for whether we listened carefully, whether we applied principles consistently, whether we treated people with dignity, and whether our decisions can withstand honest scrutiny.

We are not, however, fully responsible for another adult's interpretation of those decisions. That distinction sounds obvious until one has spent years in leadership.

A person can sincerely believe that an administrator treated him unfairly while the administrator, after careful examination, remains convinced that the decision was fair. Someone can feel betrayed even when no betrayal occurred. Someone can be angry because a boundary was necessary rather than because the boundary was inappropriate. This is the cruel part of "Invidious".

If we are not careful, administrators begin carrying both sides of these encounters. We carry responsibility for making the decision, and then we also assume responsibility for resolving every emotional response the decision produces.

That is an unsustainable psychological arrangement.

We should listen to criticism. We should remain corrigible. We should apologize when warranted and repair what can be repaired.

But eventually we must allow other adults to own their reactions to our decisions.

Otherwise, administration becomes a form of permanent emotional indebtedness.

This is where I think our usual conversations about administrator self-care are inadequate.

Self-care is often reduced to vacation, exercise, sleep, hobbies, boundaries, and taking occasional time away from work. All of these are important, and chronic neglect of them eventually extracts a price.

But veteran administrators may require something deeper than recovery from fatigue.

We need practices that preserve the quality of the person who is making the decisions.

That means having trusted people outside the immediate emotional system of the problem—people who can tell us both when we are carrying guilt that does not belong to us and when we are rationalizing conduct that needs correction. Leaders need relationships in which their authority is largely irrelevant and where they do not have to manage the emotional temperature of the room.

We also need a disciplined distinction between reflection and rumination.

After a consequential decision, reflection asks useful questions: What did I know? What did I miss? Which principle governed my decision? Was I fair? What would I do differently? Is there anything I need to repair?

Those questions improve judgment.

Rumination asks the same questions repeatedly after they have stopped producing new information.

At some point, healthy leadership requires closure. Not certainty—we rarely get that—but a reasoned acceptance that, given what we knew at the time and the responsibility entrusted to us, we exercised our best judgment.

The case cannot remain permanently open in our heads.

We also need to monitor cynicism as carefully as we monitor exhaustion. When people increasingly appear to us as problems to be managed rather than human beings to be understood, when every complaint begins sounding identical, or when irritation becomes our default response to another person's distress, we should not automatically interpret that as veteran wisdom.

Sometimes it is fatigue asking for attention.

And perhaps most importantly, we need portions of life in which nobody hands us a bomb.

We need friendships, family, faith, recreation, solitude, laughter, physical activity, reading, travel, or whatever allows us to inhabit an identity larger than the administrative role. We need places where nobody requires a decision from us and where our value is not measured by our capacity to stabilize a system.

Those are not luxuries added to leadership after the important work is finished.

Over a long enough career, they may be part of what makes continued good judgment possible.

Remaining 'Christian' After Thousands of Decisions

The question facing a beginning administrator is often, How do I make good decisions?

After enough years, I think another question becomes equally important:

How do I remain a whole person after making thousands of them?

Because the bombs do accumulate.

For Christian administrators, there is another dimension of this work that cannot be separated from the psychological disciplines of healthy leadership: we were never intended to carry its weight entirely by ourselves. Dependence on Christ is more than seeking divine confirmation that we made the correct decision; it is the recognition that our judgment will always be limited, that we will sometimes get the green and yellow wires wrong, and that grace extends even to the person holding the wire cutters.

 Prayer creates a place where responsibility can be taken seriously without becoming an illusion of control, while forgiveness—both receiving it and extending it—keeps the inevitable wounds of leadership from hardening into resentment. The compassion of Christ also reminds us that the difficult employee, angry parent, struggling student, frustrated board member, and exhausted administrator are all more than the particular conflict in which we encounter one another. Just as importantly, Christian leadership was never meant to be practiced in isolation. 

A healthy administrative team can become a kind of sustaining community: people who share the weight of discernment, challenge one another's assumptions, pray together, absorb some of the emotional impact of difficult seasons, and occasionally remind one another that not every bomb belongs to one person. There is something profoundly protective about being able to walk into a trusted team, close the door, speak honestly about the weight of a situation, and know that others will help carry it—not by removing responsibility, but by refusing to let responsibility become isolation. Perhaps one of God's provisions for the long-term health of leaders is precisely this combination of grace above us, compassion within us, and faithful people beside us.

So do the criticisms, the confidential stories we cannot explain publicly, the people we could not satisfy, the situations in which there was no green wire that guaranteed a good outcome, and the occasions when we discovered afterward that yellow might have been better.

If we are not intentional, armor accumulates as well.

Some armor is necessary. Administrators cannot remain psychologically exposed to every criticism and survive indefinitely. But armor has an unfortunate characteristic: it protects us from being wounded by people while simultaneously making it more difficult to feel them.

The task, then, is not to remain unchanged by leadership. That is probably impossible.

Nor is the goal to reach the end of an administrative career having disappointed no one. Meaningful leadership under that standard would be equally impossible.

Perhaps the better measure is whether, after years of holding the wire cutters, we can still approach the next situation with curiosity rather than cynicism; whether we can still distinguish someone's anger from evidence of our wrongdoing; whether we can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing them to define us; whether we can make an unpopular decision without needing to make the disappointed person into an enemy.

And perhaps, after all the crises that did and did not happen, we can still say that we tried to see clearly, listen carefully, act justly, remain open to correction, and preserve the dignity of the people affected by our decisions.

Most people will never know about the bombs that did not explode.

And sadly, sometimes the bombs do go off- but I have also been around long enough that often those crises gain perspective over time. Romans 8:28 is not a flippant verse- it is not casual- God does indeed work miraculous good results in His good providence.

That is probably as it should be.

But those of us who have spent years clipping the wires should acknowledge that the work leaves a mark—and that caring for that mark is not weakness, indulgence, or an escape from leadership.

It is part of the work of remaining capable of leading well.

Crown, Crime, and Cross

This blog post was some reflection from an excellent sermon by Dr. Scott Redd at Briarwood on Psalm 51.......

“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…” — Matthew 1:6

There are verses in Scripture that seem almost incidental until, for some reason, one phrase catches the eye.

Matthew 1:6 is like that.

The first chapter of Matthew opens with a genealogy, and genealogies are easy to hurry through. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Perez, Hezron. The names proceed in solemn succession, carrying the story of Israel forward until Matthew reaches the great king:

“Jesse the father of David the king.”  He is David the king.

Then, in the same verse, Matthew writes something unexpected:

“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”- Not Bathsheba.

Matthew certainly knew her name. He had already named Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, and before the genealogy ends he will name Mary. Yet when he comes to Bathsheba, he identifies her through the man David had killed.

It is difficult not to hear an accusation in that wording.

David's crown remains. Matthew does not strip him of it. But neither does he permit the crown to conceal the crime. The genealogy remembers both.

To understand why those few words carry such weight, we have to return to the rooftop in Jerusalem.

Second Samuel 11 begins with a quiet observation:

“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab…”

The sentence is already suggestive. It is the season when kings go to war, but David does not go - he remains in Jerusalem.

One evening he rises from his couch and walks on the roof of the palace. From there he sees a woman bathing. David asks who she is, and the answer should have ended the matter.

“Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”

The reply places her within a web of relationships. She is not an anonymous woman on a rooftop below. She is Bathsheba. She is Eliam’s daughter. She is Uriah’s wife.

Yet he sends messengers. She is brought to him. He sleeps with her. Then she returns home.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

The biblical account is strikingly spare. There is no language of romance, no suggestion that we are meant to watch the beginning of a tragic love affair. The verbs keep returning to David: he saw, he asked, he sent, he took.

Then Bathsheba sends word back to the palace. “I am pregnant.”

Three words, and suddenly the private act has a public future.

At this point David has another choice. He could confess what he has done. Instead, he begins to construct a cover.

David sends for Uriah from the battlefield.

His plan is obvious. If Uriah goes home and sleeps with his wife, the pregnancy will explain itself. No scandal. No questions. No threat to the king’s reputation.

But Uriah does not go home. Uriah is a Hittite- an outsider- yet in this moment he appears more faithful to Israel’s life and obligations than Israel’s king.

When David asks why, Uriah gives an answer that should have shamed him:

“The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?”

David tries again. He keeps Uriah in Jerusalem and gets him drunk, hoping lowered inhibitions will accomplish what persuasion could not.

Still Uriah does not go home. The plan has failed twice- but David WILL NOT stop.

Instead, he writes a letter to Joab:

“Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die.”

And then comes one of the coldest details in the story - David gives the letter to Uriah.

Joab obeys. Uriah is placed where the fighting is fierce. Men die and Uriah dies with them.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

When the news reaches Jerusalem, David tells Joab not to be troubled. The sword devours one man and then another. Such things happen in war. That is how thoroughly David has begun to speak the language of his own concealment.

Bathsheba mourns her husband. When the period of mourning is over, David brings her into the palace. She becomes his wife. She bears his child.

From the outside, perhaps the whole thing can now be made to look respectable. A loyal soldier has died in battle. The king has taken responsibility for his widow. The child can be absorbed into the royal household.

Then the narrator gives us one sentence:

“But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.”

Everything David has worked to hide remains entirely visible to God.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

Not so in God's view......

This is where Psalm 51 becomes more than a general prayer of repentance.

David begins by using several different words:

“Blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.”

The English can sound repetitive, but the Hebrew vocabulary opens the confession outward.

The word often translated transgression, peshaʿ, carries the sense of rebellion or breach. David has not simply made a poor choice. He has violated the allegiance he owed to God.

The word translated iniquity, ʿavon, can carry the sense of guilt, perversity, or crookedness.

That word seems especially fitting for 2 Samuel 11 because nothing in the chapter stays simple. One wrong leads to another. Desire leads to taking. Taking leads to pregnancy. Pregnancy leads to deception. Deception fails, so David moves to manipulation. When manipulation fails, he arranges murder. Then murder itself has to be disguised.

The more David tries to straighten the situation, the more twisted it becomes.

Then there is the ordinary biblical word for sin, ḥaṭṭāʾt, related to the Hebrew root ḥṭʾ. In some contexts the root can carry the idea of failing or missing, which is why people often explain sin as “missing the mark.”

There is truth in that image, but David’s story will not let us make it too gentle.

He did not merely aim well and come up short.

He knew where the boundary was. More than once, someone or something reminded him of it.

Psalm 51 needs all of its vocabulary because David’s failure is not merely a missed target. It is rebellion, distortion, and sin braided together.

God sends Nathan the prophet.

Nathan does not confront David immediately. He tells him a story.

A rich man had many flocks and herds. A poor man had only one little ewe lamb. The lamb grew up with the poor man’s children. It ate from his table and lay in his arms.

When a traveler came to the rich man, the rich man did not take one of his own many animals. He took the poor man’s single lamb.

David is furious - The man deserves judgment.

For a few seconds, David sees his own actions clearly because he believes they belong to someone else.

Then Nathan says:

“You are the man.”

The parable has brought David outside himself.

Now God names what David has done. God had given him the kingdom. He had delivered him from Saul. He had given him wives, power, security, abundance. David was not a poor man desperate for something he lacked.

He was the rich man taking what belonged to another. And this is where the story becomes not only a story about lust and adultery but about power.

David is king. The servants who inquire about Bathsheba serve him. The messengers who bring her serve him. Uriah serves him. Joab serves him. The soldiers whose positions are manipulated serve him.

The whole machinery of David’s authority becomes useful to David’s appetite and then useful again to his concealment.

The shepherd-king who had once risked his life for the flock now uses the flock to protect himself.

Psalm 51 contains a line that can sound strange at first:

“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”

Clearly David sinned against more than God.

Uriah was wronged. Bathsheba was caught in the exercise of royal power and bore terrible consequences. Joab was drawn into murder. Other soldiers died because of David’s scheme. The kingdom itself was damaged by what the king had become.

David is not denying any of that.

He is recognizing that beneath every horizontal wrong was a deeper vertical rebellion. The king of Israel had acted as though he were answerable to no one.

The phrase “in your sight” is especially powerful because seeing begins the whole story.

David sees Bathsheba. After that, much of the chapter is about controlling what other people will see.

He tries to make Uriah’s return home create an acceptable explanation for the pregnancy. He uses the confusion of battle to hide a murder. He uses marriage to make scandal appear respectable.

David thinks the problem can be solved if he can manage appearances.

Psalm 51 is the prayer of a man who finally understands that he never managed God’s sight.

There was no hidden rooftop. Confession begins when David stops trying to control the story.

At first David asks God to blot out, wash, and cleanse.

Then his prayer deepens:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.”

The word create matters.

David has reached the point where he no longer sees his problem as merely an embarrassing action requiring forgiveness. Something within him has become disordered enough that he asks God not simply to improve him, but to create.

He needs more than better judgment the next time he stands on a rooftop - He needs a different heart.

That is one reason Psalm 51 remains so powerful. David is not bargaining with God. He does not appeal to his record, his victories, his psalms, his service to Israel, or his years of faithfulness.

Psalm 32 has long been read alongside Psalm 51. Its heading does not explicitly connect it to the Bathsheba episode, so we should not claim certainty where the text does not give it. But the language makes the connection compelling.

David writes:

“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.”

Then he remembers what concealment felt like:

“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away…”

And finally:

“I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity.”

That language echoes the entire plot of 2 Samuel 11.

All of this creates an obvious question.

How can this be the same David who is associated with the phrase “a man after God’s own heart”?

The answer cannot be that David’s conduct with Bathsheba somehow reflected the heart of God. Nathan’s confrontation rules that out completely.

The phrase first appears in 1 Samuel 13:14, in the context of God rejecting Saul and choosing a king according to his own purpose. Acts 13:22 later echoes the language when describing David as the man God raised up to carry out his will.

So we should be careful with the phrase. It does not mean David was consistently noble.

It certainly does not mean God found adultery, manipulation, and murder compatible with his character.

Rather, David is the king God chose, the king through whom God intended to advance his covenant purposes. And when David’s sin is finally exposed, one of the defining features of his story is that he does not remain forever at war with the truth. He grieves his sin the way God grieves all sin- and the proof of that grief is the cross of Christ.

Nathan’s response is astonishingly direct:

“The LORD also has put away your sin.”

David is forgiven - But forgiveness does not send him backward in time.

Uriah remains dead. The first child born to Bathsheba dies.

Violence spreads through David’s household. His family fractures. The sins of desire, power, and bloodshed that appear in David’s life reappear with terrible force among his sons.

The Bible does not confuse forgiveness with the erasure of consequences. That matters because cheap versions of grace always depend on making the sin smaller.

Scripture does the opposite.

It allows the full weight of David’s actions to remain visible while also insisting that God’s mercy remains real.

David is not restored because the crime was minor. He is restored because God is merciful.

After the death of the first child, 2 Samuel tells us that David comforts Bathsheba. In time she bears another son.

His name is Solomon.

And Scripture says:

“The LORD loved him.”

Solomon will inherit the throne.

The line of David will continue through the woman David first took as Uriah’s wife.

That does not mean the adultery and murder were secretly necessary pieces of God’s plan. Providence does not require us to call evil good.

The point is more profound. Human evil does not have the power to make redemption impossible.

God can take a history that has genuinely been damaged and continue to work within it without pretending the damage never occurred.

That becomes unmistakable centuries later when Matthew writes his genealogy.

YES- Matthew could have written, “David was the father of Solomon by Bathsheba.”

Instead:

“David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”

The victim remains in the family record. David is forgiven, but Uriah is not edited out of David’s redemption.

That may be one of the most important details in the whole story. Grace does not require historical dishonesty.

God does not restore David by rewriting 2 Samuel 11 into something less ugly than it was. Nor does Matthew need to protect David’s reputation.

The genealogy remembers the king and the man he wronged. It remembers the crown and the crime.

And then the genealogy keeps moving until it reaches Jesus.

Matthew begins his Gospel by calling Jesus the son of David.

Yet Jesus does not merely repeat David’s kingship. He reverses its deepest failure.

David uses royal power to take. Jesus uses royal power to give.

David remains in safety while others fight. Jesus enters the battle himself.

David arranges the death of a faithful servant so that the king might preserve himself.

Jesus gives himself so that his servants may live.

That contrast is where the story finally reaches the Cross.

David’s sin shows us what corrupted kingship can become: power turned inward, authority used for self-protection, another human life treated as expendable.

The Cross reveals a different King.

Jesus does not ask Uriah to carry his death sentence. He carries ours.

He does not withdraw the troops and leave a servant exposed. He stands exposed himself.

He does not preserve the crown by sacrificing the servant.

He accepts the Cross for the sake of the servants.

And this is why Matthew’s genealogy is already preaching the Gospel before Jesus has spoken a word.

The Messiah does not come at the end of an immaculate family line. He comes through a lineage marked by courage and cowardice, faith and betrayal, outsiders, broken families, sexual sin, violence, repentance, and grace.

He enters the real human story.

David remains one of Scripture’s great figures.

He remains the king to whom God made covenant promises.

Perhaps that is why Psalm 51 still feels so contemporary. We know the instinct to manage appearances, to explain ourselves, to control the version of the story other people receive. David knew that instinct too, and he had a kingdom’s resources with which to act on it.

The crown is still there.

So is the crime.

And beyond both of them stands the Cross.

Song Link: We All Alibi