How Deep the Father’s Love

This hymn we played at church tonight really struck me.  I’m in awe of the juxtaposition of our total sinful guilt and our total redemption through Christ’s merit.

I’m also inspired that this hymn was written only fifteen years ago.  I had feared that we forgot how to write eloquent, deep, theologically complex songs a century or more ago.

How deep the Father’s love for us

How vast beyond all measure

That He should give his only Son

To make a wretch His treasure.

How great the pain of searing loss

The Father turns His face away

As wounds which mar the Chosen One

Bring many sons to glory.

Behold the man upon a cross

My sin upon His shoulders

Ashamed I hear my mocking voice

Call out among the scoffers.

It was my sin that held Him there

Until it was accomplished;

His dying breath has brought me life

I know that it is finished.

I will not boast in anything

No gifts, no pow’r, no wisdom

But I will boast in Jesus Christ

His death and resurrection.

Why should I gain from His reward?

I cannot give an answer.

But this I know with all my heart-

His wounds have paid my ransom.

Words and Music © 1995 Stuart Townend

The Dark Side

The Internet Has a Dark Side

On Friday NPR aired an interview with Leonard Kleinrock, the man who invented what would become the Internet on its 40th anniversary.  In the interview, Kleinrock expressed his surprise at how the network, originally trust-based and open, developed what NPR dubbed a “dark side.”

“[T]his open, trusted, available, shared environment, [was] the culture, the ethics of the early Internet. And then when we approach the late ’80s and the early ’90s and spam, and viruses, and pornography and eventually the identity theft and the fraud, and the botnets and the denial of service we see today[.]

Mr. Kleinrock’s innocence is charming, but I have to ask: What did he expect?  The internet was created and run by humans, who, as a general rule, will pervert everything they can to their own uses as soon as they can get away with it.  Look what we’ve done with our civil liberties.  How I mistreat the people closest to me.  How we crucified the one who came to save us from our sins.

When a close female relative of mine first got into gardening, she had very little success.  So little, in fact, that my brother and I joked that she had a “brown thumb” that killed everything she planted.

We’re all afflicted with a similar condition.  The power of self-improvement championed by Aristotle, the Renaissance and the Internet-bearing ’60s is an illusion.  We can’t do anything good on our own!  The more we try to improve our condition by our own power, through virtue, medicine, or the Internet, the more we’re tempted to forget how truly great is our need for grace.  In our self-embrace this Midas touch has begun to consume us, and against it all our striving would be losing without the incomparable grace of Christ.

And because of the unexpected, unsurpassed, unrequitable gift of God, we have hope far beyond our own power.

And so does my mom’s garden.

I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. John 15:5