“God Resting on the Seventh Day” (19th Century German Engraving) This is the account of the heavens and the earth in the day when they were created. Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha),…
Category: The cross
That which Flows
Sketch by Patrick Murphy: http://inspiredsketch.blogspot.com/ That which flows forever from the extremities and from the guts of the wounded cosmos sustains That which flows forever from the memory and from the friction of the nail against the flesh of love remains That which flowed with the anguished cries and with the salty sweat of a man…
Bloom without End
Photo by Carrie McKamey If you’ve followed The Voice of One at all, you know weakness is a theme that comes up regularly. I’m thinking about it again tonight. Weakness usually comes to mind when personal failures or shortcomings break out of me like a caged animal. Or when it seems my soul is surrounded…
Foreskins?!? Ewww…
It’s hard to forget the price David paid for his first wife, Michal: 200 Philistine foreskins. (Cue teenage girl saying, “Ewww! Gross!”). Now, there’s only one way a Philistine would part with his foreskin, and that’s if the whole man died. So David was giving Michal’s father, Saul, 200 dead soldiers. That meant Israel’s enemy…
The Hands of the Father–George MacDonald
What follows is an excerpt from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons The Hands of the Father “Father, into thy hand I commend my spirit.”—St Luke xxiii. 46. Neither St Matthew nor St Mark tells us of any words uttered by our Lord after the Eloi. They both, along with St Luke, tell us of a cry with a…
The Cross and the Departure of Glory
A deep sense of grief permeates Ezekiel’s account of the temple’s destruction. The loss felt by the Lord is poignantly expressed when He says, “Defile the temple, and fill the courts with the slain” (Ezek. 9:7). Defile the temple? Defile the place chosen out of all creation as a dwelling for God? Why should the…
Lord of the Dead and of the Living
Picture by Patrick Murphy Death and resurrection cannot be separated. This is so obvious it seems like a platitude. Often our words and thoughts divide these into separate categories. For the sake of clarity it’s sometimes helpful to consider them separately. But it’s disastrous in real life. Perhaps we are too used to treating death…
Give Me Your Worst
Sketch by Patrick Murphy “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). “Grace” is the Life which can suffer and die yet be raised again. Christ in us is grace. He can go through weaknesses, difficulties, persecutions, and the like (2 Cor. 12:10). Not only do these not…
Our Affection for Rubble
“Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has rejected you as king” (1 Sam. 15:23). Israel asked for a king and rejected the Lord as King (1 Sam. 8: 7). God gave them what they asked for. Saul embodied their rejection of the Lord as King. He too (though he denied…
Me and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
I woke up this morning in a grumpy funk. As I tried to finish waking in the shower, my head filled with visions of the whole family going out for muffins and coffee. Post-shower, I told my wife. She said she planned to work out. Could we do it mid-morning after the workout? Well, that…
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