Against all the protestations of shame, your past does not define you.
What you have been is not coterminous with who you are. Or will be.
This, at least, is YHWH’s promise to his despondent exiles in Babylon.
‘Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,’ says the Lord. (Isaiah 54:1 ESV)
If there is a greater shame than childlessness in the Bible’s Old Testament, it is difficult to say what that should be. Perhaps only having borne children and lost them could compete with never having children at all, so deep does this feature of the cultural realia reach into the Bible’s sacred literature.
In the turn-tables book of Isaiah, YHWH is having none of it.
She who has not split the air with the shrieks of childbirth will find recompense in shouts of joy, late coming.
All of human experience argues that only what has been shall ever be. Again, YHWH is having none of this curiously persuasive logic. He is the Creator of new things, things unspoken, things unimagined, deepest longings too savage and powerful for words. He meets them, satisfies them, creates them, endorses them, then liberates his own to become them.
The Bible’s ‘religion’ is no tame creed.
It is wild, counterintuitive, impossible, then real. Life with YHWH knows no bounds save those that loving providence establishes.
As the barren woman restored in a moment to fecundity finds children streaming to her that she did not bear, so YHWH’s future comes in spades from angles never contemplated. Yet her children are hers, his gift, stomped down, compressed, overflowing.
She forgets to miss the biological progeny of her dashed dream, so occupied with this tumbling, laughing harvest of children unforeseen. They laugh noisily. Only her delight is louder.
Its 333 pages and high-quality paper stock make it an admirably heavy work, a full five pounds in the lifting.
from the heart and with affection rather than from the discipline and precision one expects of the historian. This is not a criticism of Kinzer’s formidable work but rather an attempt to define its genre. Those who come to Kinzer’s writing—as this reviewer did—through his superb treatment of the Nicaraguan conflicts (The Blood of Brothers) will anticipate the bent of Kinzer’s method.
Put simply, Ortberg is a very fine thinker and a remarkably intelligent writer.
Canter Bridge 