Nose ring girl on Brooklyn-bound L:

“And he’s got bad clothes. Bad looks, bad clothes and bad personality. He’s gotta have at least one of the three… and / or money.”

Seriously people, who likes books? And yes I’m referring to those crappy things made of paper that are littering your shelves as we speak. The written word is good (I make a living at it, believe it or not), and the written word collected into “book” form is great as well. Awesome, in fact. A book (the bible) is God’s chosen method of revealing and describing himself to us. But books in their physical form are just lame.

Fact: My iPhone has enough storage in it to hold thousands of books, probably more books than I’ll ever read in my life. Also, my iPhone is pretty great. Just saying.

There are numerous usability problems with books. For instance, you can’t do anything else while you read one. You have to hold them open with two hands, or if it’s some hard cover book that’s designed to stay open you have to use both hands to hold it up. There’s no real comfortable position to sit and read a book, something eventually suffers, be it your eyes, your arms, your hands, your neck, or your back. Also, as I’ve already demonstrated, books take up way too much space. While I can appreciate the desire to show off a large book collection so that other people think you’re smart, that shelf space could be much better used to store other random useless crap.

Books are also really hard to share with people. I can’t “burn you a CD” of a book I’ve been enjoying, or make a “mixtape” of chapters or quotes on a particular topic. It’s hard to enjoy a single physical book concurrently with somebody because you either have to be reading it out loud (and doing all the voices, that is a must) or they try to read over your shoulder, and both scenarios impair your own ability to enjoy the book.

Books also don’t integrate with other informations very well. Books use stupid archaic things called “footnotes” where you get to waste hours of your time jumping around in an appendix and whatnot trying to figure out who or what the author is quoting or referencing. The internet does this so much better with hyperlinks. The internet also allows for multimedia when being referenced by text. Like embedding a relevant YouTube video after a paragraph of text — the written word alone could never have described accurately that video to be sufficient without it.

Other problems: books are heavy, books can burn, books are expensive, there are a lot of dumb books out there, some books are really good but have dumb parts, some books are really dumb but have good parts, some books are really ugly, and so forth.

I have zero misplaced nostalgia for the book form. I don’t like the feel of the paper, I don’t like to turn the pages, I don’t pine for the smell. People who say that are just saying that to sound like they’re true book lovers and are better than you. Or they’re telling the truth, who knows, but they’re so wrong.

So how shall we fix this?

Well.

A few things.

Audiobooks are great, but they aren’t for everyone and they aren’t for every topic. Sometimes you need to actually read the words to be able to comprehend or reference them well. That said, audiobooks are my absolute favorite way of consuming novels, and I have an audible.com subscription to prove it.

E-books are also the logical alternative, and what I want all my books to be within the next few years, only a few problems:

I want e-books on my iPhone. I think the Amazon Kindle is great and all, and I’ll break down and buy it if I have to, but I’d much prefer having everything on one device — particularly because the iPhone can lend itself to the further interactivity that I desire from books. Of course, the screen size could certainly limit the readability, so perhaps Kindle will be the way to go in the long run, but I’d like the have the choice. I’d like to own a book in the sense of me owning the right to one intellectual “copy” of it. That way I can share that copy, read it on my laptop, on my desktop, on my iPhone, on my Kindle, or print some pages and read those.

E-books lack some of the advantages of physical books like super visual book marks, highlighting, flipping through, and the sharing aspect. I think sharing is going to be super vital. Think of how many books you’ve borrowed compared to how many you’ve straight up bought or even bought for you. I know I’m a borrower.

My ultimate book would be in an audio / text hybrid form. Here’s how it would go:

I browse Amazon or even the author’s own website and find a book I want. I click buy. Let’s say it costs $30 or $40 for the “hybrid” format (audio books are typically rather expensive due to the low sales relative to the high production costs). That hybrid format is a single file “package” that I drag into iTunes among other books, some text only, some audio only, and others are hybrids — still others could even have illustrations.

Let’s say I’m curious, so I dive right in and start reading the book from iTunes. I can choose a full screen mode for a while, but then other things call me away and I keep it open in a small window and continue to skim it while I’m doing other things at the computer. But look at the time! It’s time to head out. My iPhone has been docked all this time, so it’s already been synced to the new addition to my library. I grab the iPhone, put on my Bluetooth stereo headset (this is the future, remember) and select the book in my library. Given the option to read the text or listen I click “listen.” A narrator picks up the book where I left off reading it on my screen. I walk to the subway and get on the train. All of a sudden something crazy insightful is said in the book. I click pause and pull up the book on the screen. The text is pulled up right to the point the narrator was speaking. I select the text that stuck out to me and click “highlight.” Then I push play again and resume my enjoyment of the book.

I get out of the train and meet my friend at my idyllic New York coffee shop. (Mule is never open these days. I don’t understand!!) We’re talking and I’m reminded of that hip cool phrase I highlighted earlier, so I pull up the book on my iPhone and click “show highlighted text.” Since I just bought this book I only have that one phrase, but the highlighted text repository makes it easy to find particular sections in a book without doing a lot of skimming to find them. My friend is naturally stunned by my insight and wants to know if I’m done reading the book. I’m not, but I was actually planning on reading something else this week and was following a bit of a rabbit trail with this book, so I offer to share. Mr. Friend person pulls out his iPhone and we pair them and I “loan” my book to him. The book is in a sort of “checked out” status now for me, on my phone and in iTunes, but since it’s actually my book I can always “recall” the book and get my rights back to read it.

I’m sure there are plenty more magical things I could do with these magical hybrid books, this is just scratching the surface, but all I’m saying is that these stupid paper books have been holding us back for too long — they were a wonderful, wonderful thing for civilization for the past few centuries, but it’s time to move on.

So. Guess what. I missed two separate airplane flights today. It’s basically the worst thing ever.

I was sick on Friday with a weird fever / headache / depression type thing. So I slept the whole day. I woke up at 5pm, did a modicum of work and then finally got up the gumption to run some last minute errands before the weekend.

When I got back, I played some grand theft auto, surfed the internets, watched some game videos (Star Wars retrospective, I blame this on you!), read a book and proceeded to not go to sleep or pack or do anything productive like that. I was in my pre-trip / post-sick funk. Finally around 4am I set an alarm and went to sleep. I woke to that alarm at 5ish (this is where things start to get hazy) and set another alarm for a half hour later. That was my undoing. I woke up around 8:20am in Manhattan, which was the exact time I was supposed to be boarding a plane at JFK.

Now, this is not the first time I have monumentally failed to catch a plane, but it certainly doesn’t get any easier to cope with. This is the kind of thing that I’d cry about if I were any good at crying. I felt like punching a wall, but remembered that the last time I did that it hurt, so I didn’t. I wanted to yell but didn’t. It’s such a helpless feeling. So I prayed, and God gave me peace. That was really cool. I was still really pissed about the whole situation, and desperately wishing I could go back in time, but I was aware that nothing could be done and that there was nobody to be mad at. Sometimes it kind of creeps me out when I’m “ok” about stuff like this happening, like I’m not really connected to what’s going on, but I guess it’s God’s grace in my life that He quickly gives me perspective on things. For some reason the thing that kept going through my head is that “God is good.”

After some careful consideration, I decided to spring for a separate one way ticket to get me to Spokane. I really wanted to see the fam, really wanted to see Rochelle and her peoples, and really wanted to get my ass kicked by Bloomsday. Obviously, the logical thing to do is when you’ve missed one flight that day is to go out of your way not to miss another. But not Paul, no sir. I took a nap until 12:30, packed my stuff in 20 minutes and took a leisurely half hour breakfast. I suppose I figured since I’d missed one flight, the odds were way in my favor on not missing a second one. Real genius at work here. But still, my flight was at 3:40pm and I left my apartment for the airport at 1:10pm. No sweat, right?

Wrong. It took me 2 hours to get to JFK thanks to a subway system in shambles and a million little things. A few other little things got me off the Air Train and to the check-in kiosk at 3:20. Unfortunately for me, the cutoff time is 30 minutes prior to the flight even without bags to check. Saderness. I talked to the ticket lady for about 10 minutes, not really expecting much, just kind of in denial about the whole thing. I replayed the whole day in my mind, and I felt like a total idiot, but again I knew that God is good. I guess that was the primary win of the day: God was able to remind that He is good and He is constant and He is faithful while I was busy making a mess of things. A help in that was Bob Kauflin’s new book “Worship Matters” that I was reading Friday night, during my leisurely breakfast and during my insanely long train ride.

So yeah, I missed two flights in one day. No Bloomsday for me. This is like the third or fourth year I’ve wished I was in that race, and something always comes up.

I think the real moral of the story here is that I’m just no good at this whole “life” thing. Paying bills, mailing things, taxes, planes, Bloomsday.

The ultimate expression of this is when I went to take my drivers test when I was 15 and failed on the second question. First question? Name. Second question? Birthday. I couldn’t remember my own birthday. Apparently it kicks you out of you don’t get that question wrong, and I certainly don’t blame it for doing so. Is there any better way to illustrate to you, dear reader, that I’m just not cut out for this whole life thing? Maybe I’ll go join the circus.

I’m listening to a John Piper message on our role as God’s midwife for the lost. I must say, while I find that term entirely appropriate for our role in spreading the gospel, it still seems a little awkward. I never really thought of “midwifery” as something I’d have to put much thought towards as a career, for obvious reasons. Anyways…

Shortly into the message, John Piper’s wonderful teaching of the bible sharpened a growing annoyance of mine into a full-blown pet peeve. He says that “a silent servanthood that never speaks the gospel contradicts love.”

See, my pet peeve is the phrase that is so often bandied about by well-meaning peoples:

“Preach the gospel and if necessary use words.”

Before I bore you with my thoughts on the topic, I found this great treatment by “the blue fish project” on the phrase through a little bit of googling. You really don’t need to go much further than that, but feel free to follow along anyways.

I usually hear this phrase used in my small group, and I must confess I’ve never really put enough thought into it before now to reject it when it comes up in those settings. It’s such an alluring phrase for many reasons, not the least of which is its fancy method of flipping things around. You think it’s going to tell you to preach the gospel out loud! Heaven forbid. So what a relief it is when the phrase reveals its true nefarious purpose of deemphasising the need for words in the preaching of the gospel.

Only one problem with that:

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’ But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?’ So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:14-17)

See, this implication that we can teach the gospel without words is a pesky lie taught to us by fear. It’s what the world desires of us. The sinner would love nothing more than a Christian that will “love” and “help” them without pointing out the uncomfortable fact that their sin condemns them. God reveals himself through his Word, Christ is the Word, Christ did a lot of talking, Paul urges Timothy to preach, and so forth. It is clear what God demands of us on this front — shouldn’t that be our guide on this topic, not our own feelings or the world’s feelings on this topic?

Naturally, preaching the gospel is a two-pronged thing, and our words must be congruent with our actions. As John Piper also states in his message: “An arrogant, self-exalting proclamation of Christ, with no sense of brokenness, contradicts the gospel.” That is incredibly true and I confess I fail at both of these vital aspects of expressing the gospel. I am rarely bold with my words, and my actions are often an offense to the gospel I profess, but it would be all the more sinful on my part to leave off the spoken truth of the gospel merely because I do not measure up. Part of the wonderful truth of the gospel is that Christ died on my behalf in spite of the fact and indeed precisely because of the fact that I do not and can not measure up.

I do not know for a fact that the phrase “Preach the gospel and if necessary use words” was thought up with some nefarious purpose. It could’ve very well been stated to counteract a tendency by some to preach the gospel through word only, while contradicting actively it with their actions. That said, I think it has been used with great ill effect through its subtle role of redefining our role as truth-bearers and letting us off the hook from the difficult, painful, uncomfortable task of actually opening our mouths and speaking the gospel.

Oh, and just side note, in case you missed it in the Romans 10 bit: neither our actions nor our speech are a guarantee or a power of salvation to the lost. “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” Good chooses to use us, but is not beholden to us. Like a midwife. People are born again through the word of God (1 Peter 1:23) and it is merely our privilege to bring that to them.

Except you, BSG. We love you.

Here’s the plot:

A bunch of conveniently distributed racial and personality stereotypes (or, even worse, anti-stereotypes) end up on a ship together for some dumb reason or another. There’s internal conflict. Strife even. Things are intense. So you know what they do? They travel to random planets hapazardly and do one of two things:

1.) Learn a valuable, Mr. Rogers-esque moral lesson from the planet’s inhabitants.
2.) Teach a valuable, Mr. Rogers-esque moral lesson to the planet’s inhabitants.

Sure, there are variations. For instance, a sinister external force (in desparate need of an Mr. Rogers-esque moral lesson) could be threatening the very livelihood of the planet’s indigenous inabitants. Or you know what else could be happening? Pollution. Evil, evil, pollution.

I get the impression that every single sci-fi writer ever went to like two classes his freshman year of college and then dropped out, and views it as his moral duty to sneak those invaluable lessons into every single episode he writes. Those classes went something like this:

1.) Americans are inherently bad, and should be stopped.
2.) Africa is inherently good, and shouldn’t be tampered with.

Or like this:

1.) Industry is bad.
2.) Making stuff with your hands and pooping in a hole is good.

Or like this:

1.) Religion that has an opinion about everybody is bad.
2.) Religion that is merely self-glorifying is good.

And so forth.

I don’t know about you, but I use Wikipedia all the time. My job as an Engadget editor frequently finds me in areas outside my expertise, and a quick Google search on practically any sort of topic brings a Wikipedia page quickly to the top, ready to answer my question.

Of course, deep down inside I know that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and therefore could be wildly inaccurate or even purposely misleading, but it’s such a convenient and ready source that it often ends up being my first and last source on many subjects. That’s usually enough to get by in my line of work — Wikipedia typically excels on nerdy topics like Battlestar Galactica and WXGA+ resolutions — but can be downright scary when looking for accurate, “unbiased” facts on historical events or figures.

Or the bible.

For instance, while working on this “God gives” blog post, I wanted to quickly verify exactly where Saul went wrong, when the anointing passed. No big deal, right? I googled for King Saul and landed on his Wikipedia page. What I found was scary, to say the least:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_the_King

The page ends up spending some large paragraphs questioning if Saul is indeed the son of Hannah, instead of Samuel. Which makes no sense, and has apparently been refuted quite soundly in academia. Much of the rest of the article is spent in wild conjecture of ancient and modern revisions to the text, and makes out the Bible to be some sort of weak suggestion of history, instead of the inspired Word of God.

I don’t expect Wikipedia to be perfect or to proclaim the scriptures as perfect truth, but I do expect the same academic rigor to be applied to bible and theology-related entries as have been applied to other aspects of “the free encyclopedia.” Like Star Trek, for instance.

Paul’s instruction for elders in Titus:

“He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.” (Titus 1:9)

The good news is that anyone can edit Wikipedia! That means me and you. So I’d like to take this opportunity to make a public request to Christian academia: are we guarding the truth of scripture as voraciously in the public forum of Wikipedia as we do in other contexts, or have we left it to be defined and attacked by others with more free time than us?

My good friend Toby Kurth, currently attending the Sovereign Grace Pastors College, recommended that we petition conservative seminaries (the liberal ones already seem to be quite active!) to make a class assignment out of refuting something biblical or theological on Wikipedia. A small army of bible-equipped students could do some serious damage here! I’m going to start writing some letters to seminary professors, and encourage you to do the same.

If you feel well enough equipped to jump into the fray and debate edits to Wikipedia articles (with love and patience, for much will be needed!) then I’d certainly encourage you to! I’m going to start compiling a list here of particularly egregious articles, please let me if you see anything out there.

Still working on this one:

So, I was listening to the very exciting book of the bible that is Numbers, and I learned something new about the Levites. I had always known that in vague language at least God calls them “His” and I even kind of remember the part about people having to redeem their first born chilluns, because they are the Lord’s, but I never really knew the full extent of this.

Apparently the Levites aren’t just God’s in the sense of “people set apart to do nifty things,” but actually His in the sense of “hey, that’s my toothbrush.” He doesn’t have them counted in the census, they don’t get a specific piece of land, etc. This truth just sort of slightly reorients the whole sacrifice system of Israel. Instead of this being something the Israelites are doing for themselves, it’s something God is doing for them, through His very own Levites.

Similarly, God owns the firstborn of everything, but again in the toothbrush sense. He demands the firstborn of every clean animal (cows and sheep and rams), which he naturally uses for what? Sacrifices on behalf of the people. The firstborns of the people are to be redeemed for 5 shekels — as in, after you have your first kid, you go hand over $500 at the temple to keep him. What’s that money for? Maintaining the Levites who serve the people by maintaining and protecting the tabernacle, and do all the sacrifice dirty work.

This of course isn’t an isolated incident for God. Major flood coming? (Due to the just wrath of God.) God provides a way for humanity to survive through Noah and the ark. Abraham is about to sacrifice his firstborn? (Hey, the firstborn is God’s!) God provides a ram. Israel is getting pwned by the Philistines? (Saul, the old king, is in active disobedience to God and lacking in faith.) David, God’s newly anointed king for Israel shows up and defeats Goliath. That’s totally a God thing.

Obviously, the ultimate expression of this is Jesus. In fact, all that other stuff was pretty much God’s way of prepping us for the arrival of Jesus and the gospel story. We are incapable of making reparations for our sins against God. Our sins deserve and require eternal separation from God and eternal punishment. But God sent His only son to earth to live a perfect life and pay the penalty for our sins. Sure, we can reject that payment on our behalf and pay the penalty ourselves by burning in hell, but why on earth would we ever want to?

“But this is not seemly, my lady. On thy knees? To me?”

“Oh my lord, you are not well.”

“Not well… what is sickness to the body of a kight errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls he shall rise again, and woe to the wicked! Sancho!”

“Here your grace!”

“My armor! My sword!”

Update: Yeah, I saw this musical on a high school drama club field trip, and have been a fan ever since. I listen to a recording of it now and then, and always start clapping like a little kid watching cartoons when it gets to this part.

Do Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow get back together at the end of “Picture,” or are they in a stalemate, forever waiting for the other one to make the first move? Those early 2000’s were confusing, tumultuous times.

Alrighty, I have a bunch to say here, I don’t have any cutesy bullet points in mind, and we’re probably not going to find a whole ton of specific application points by the time we’re through, but hopefully we (and I do mean we, I’m learning as I type) can learn a bit about God in the process!

So, here’s the verse that sparked this line of thought:

“And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.” (Exodus 20:26)

I can’t quite remember what made me think all of a sudden “there’s some study fodder there!” I do remember it was during a sermon, and that the verse and epiphany was fairly unrelated to what was being preached that exact second. (Sorry to whoever happened to be preaching that Sunday!)

My general history with this verse has been uneventful, other than the fact that it’s always stuck out to me. It’s kind of a “giggle verse.” You know, you laugh at it a bit, but I know I never thought to give it a second glance. Maybe you already wish I hadn’t. When I started reading all these rules for building the tabernacle and dressing the priests and doing sacrifices and such, I prayed that God would illuminate the text so that it didn’t just go in one ear and out the other. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16) and I was determined to get something out of these passages — and God came through.

Here’s the point of the verse, extremely paraphrased: if you’re going to climb up God’s altar, you best be wearing underwear.

Now, I’m sure these guys are all kicking themselves in heaven right now for being born into a fashion-backwards culture, but a few thousand years ago, guys wore dresses. That included the priests, and the basic premise of this verse is to avoid an upskirt situation on God’s altar. In other verses in Exodus / Leviticus (it all runs together) it mentions underwear for these dudes. Not sure why the priests need verses to figure out the underwear situation, but they’re there all the same.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, I think this is just one teensy tiny example of something that I am suddenly realize I take way too lightly:

Big point that is the point: God is awesome.

Before we go much further with this, I want to repent of a sub-conviction here: I say awesome too often and too lightly. It’s essentially an attribute of God, and I have a tendency to call my iPhone, quesadilla and indigestion (in that order) “awesome.” I don’t think it’s precisely blasphemy, but I’ve determined in my own life to cut back on that word and try just to use it to describe God for a year or so. God is awesome, and what he does is awesome, my iPhone is not.

But it is pretty cool… just saying.

So, God is awesome. We got that. But everybody knows that, right? Sure, I’ve been aware that God is awesome for a decent majority of my years on earth, but I can’t think of many times where I’ve thought of God as awesome with my heart, not just with my brain. I’ve bought into this commercialized God that is so accessible, loving, fluffy, patient, etc. that I forget to fear Him!

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10)

It doesn’t say that the fear of the Lord is one of those things to keep in mind, it says it’s the beginning of wisdom.

Now, I don’t think I have had this entirely wrong. Somewhere along the line it got trained in me that God is not some sort of vending machine in the sky, that you pray to for the goodies to fall out. But that’s something God is not, and I don’t know that my mind and heart have ever replaced that with who God actually is. I’ve used that vacuum of God definition in my brain to become lax in my prayers, because I don’t really expect much out of God — “he’s not a vending machine,” my subconcious thinks, “so why pray for blessings?”

Before I get too theoretical (or in lieu of), here’s my main main point: God is awesome, and He wants to be your friend, which proves His awesomeness all the more, even though it doesn’t need proving.

In fact, strike that. God is awesome, and he wants to adopt you as His child, which proves His awesomeness all the more, even though it doesn’t need proving, which is awesome. Awesome. Some people like to think of everybody as God’s child, but that simply isn’t true. Us being children of God came at a great cost, and again proves His awesome and amazing love towards us. (Thanks, Keith for that point.)

One of the best pictures of this is the prodigal son’s dad. This guy has a bunch of servants, is rich and probably a little along in years — and hey, he has a right to be pissed at his kid who ran off and squandered his inheritance. But what does he do? He runs to hug his son. Super undignified, which makes it all the greater of a reflection of this man’s character and stature, that he would humble himself to run out and hug his screw-up kid. (Luke 15:11-24)

That’s obviously the picture of God, who is awesome, on his throne, and eternally perfect and self-sufficient and awesome. These people he created hate Him, rebel against Him, sin against Him and abandon His presence. So what does he do? He sends his son Jesus (who is also the same singular eternal God as part of the trinity — which is awesome) to come and die the most horrific death in all of history for those stupid people. How awesome of a God is that?

I can’t believe how constantly I take that for granted, and just conceive of God as this lovable vague presence that wants to get to know me so we can hang out and drink Slurpees together in heaven. How dare I! This is THE AWESOME CREATOR GOD. He had / has absolutely zero need to prove his awesomeness by saving me and becoming accessible to me, and yet he did precisely because he is awesome.

“And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.” (Matthew 27:51)

That’s one of the awesome things that happened when Jesus died on the cross. A huge and heavy curtain — I believe it was about an inch thick — that separated the priest (the holiest man in Israel) from the holy of holies (God’s presence, and certain death except for one specific day of the year). The curtain being torn means that it’s not just one man once a year that can experience God’s presence, but instead all of us can have communion with God because we’ve been made holy by His son.

The problem, I believe, is that we modern day Christians have placed such huge emphasis on the accessability of God that we forget to revere him. To bring things around to that first verse, we walk right up the altar without wearing any underwear. Not that any particular reverence or cleanliness on our part is required, we come only clothed in Christ’s righteousness — but shouldn’t that prompt us to be all the more grateful and humble before God, ever aware and appreciative of the fact that the veil has been torn for us?

Let’s go back to the prodigal son example. He shows up at his father’s farm fairly aware of how little he deserves to be welcomed back. He doesn’t plan to walk up to his dad and assume he’s got it made, instead he plans to plead with his father to make him a servant. He’s broken, he knows he’s in the wrong, he knows he needs much grace from his father and he knows he deserves zero. He is making an extravagant request, and yet God wants to give him so much more than he is asking for.

Christ himself asks that we remember his death through communion. (Luke 22:19) His sacrificial death for us is to us a free gift, but he doesn’t want us to forget what it cost. Likewise, the enormous quantity of rules in the old testament — the upskirt one included — are meant to remind us how much cost, cleanliness and reverence is required to see God. And even after all the preperation the high priest would go through on the day of atonement, he still filled the holy of holies with smoke to act as a viel from actually seeing God and dying instantly. Christ covered that entire distance, and his death made me “holy as he is holy,” and therefore capaple of having the Holy Spirit dwell within me. Do I take that for granted?

Because I shouldn’t.