Have you taken a close look at Revelation 18 lately? This key chapter from the last book of the Bible talks about the sorrow of the world’s kings and merchants who have not become children of God through repentance and trust in Christ. Specifically, it describes how they mourn the destruction of Babylon the great, symbol of all the world’s wealth, greed and pleasure.
 
“The kings of the earth who committed fornication with her and lived luxuriously with her will weep and lament for her … And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet … and bodies and souls men.” (Revelation 18:9a, 11-12a, 13b)
 
Does this make you even a little uncomfortable?
 
It does me. I certainly have more than my share of clothing stuffed in an eight-foot closet; in fact, in winter, it’s so jammed with heavy duds that it’s hard to get at anything. But my closet is nothing like the walk-in versions I admire in even low-end dwellings featured on HGTV. And I know a few women who have dedicated entire rooms to their wardrobes.
 
I hadn’t really thought about this until last night, when, trying to fall asleep, I took a virtual tour of the house I grew up in.
 
It was a magical house, an old brick Victorian with graceful rooms, lovely natural woodwork, elaborate newel posts, a mysterious basement, leaded-glass pocket doors, built-in cabinets and lots of closets – albeit very small closets, by today’s standards.
 
I pictured my mother’s. It was perhaps six feet wide. It housed all her cold- and warm-weather clothing very comfortably, leaving plenty of room for hiding Christmas presents every December.
 
My dad’s closet contained his entire collection of suits. Even though he was a civil engineer with his own company, and even though men of the ‘50s and ‘60s wore suits everywhere, even on vacation, he must not have had many; the closet was only about four feet wide.
 
The closets in my bedroom and my sisters’ featured pull-out poles, each accommodating no more than four feet of hangers.
 
Curious, I revisited the closets in various apartments I rented over the years. They weren’t much larger, although they became increasingly jammed. Somewhere along the line I picked up a used dresser to expand my storage possibilities.
 
Could an American adult survive with so little closet space today? I doubt it.

So what has happened to us over the last half century?
 
Perhaps the root of the problem is our nationwide abandonment of the Bible and its unmatched wisdom, thanks at least in part to the ‘60s-era destruction caused by Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her fellow atheists.
 
Consider how different our closets might look today if we’d only ignored Madalyn and instead listened to Jesus’ advice in Matthew 6:28-33:
 
“So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
 
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
 
Of course, it’s not just our wardrobes that would be entirely different if we Americans had clung to our Bibles instead of giving the thumbs up to rebels like Madalyn. But they’re certainly a good indicator of where we are as a nation, spiritually speaking.
 
They may also be a pretty good predictor of the devastation many Americans will experience, perhaps fairly soon. After all, one of these days, all the material things we so prize will vanish, along with the impressive closets that house them.
 
It could happen on the day that the angel proclaims, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird!” (Revelation 18:2)
 
If you’re not looking forward to that day, I hope you’ll take a few moments to consider how you might avoid it -- and instead assure yourself of joy forevermore.  

It's easy to become discouraged about what's happening in this country, to mourn the passing of what was once a very special nation rooted in the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

It helps to put things into the perspective of what was truly the most blessed nation of all time, ancient Israel. Anyone who has ever read through the Old Testament has no doubt seen the parallels between then and now. Consider just a few:

Then: They burned their sons and daughters as sacrifices to their gods. (See Deuteronomy 12:31, for instance.)

Now: We sacrifice our children to the god of this world, and the god of convenience, in federally funded abortion mills across the land.

Then: They worshipped useless idols. As Isaiah said (46:7), "They lift it to their shoulders, they carry it, they set it in its place, and it stands there; it cannot move from its place. If one cries to it, it does not answer or save him from his trouble."
 
Now: Instead of the living God, we worship our own useless idols. Whether that means celebrities or money, work or education, friends or family, patriotism or religious ritual, none of it is of any help in times of trouble. 

Then: They entered into ungodly alliances, trusting in other nations rather than the Lord God. Isaiah 31 says, "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, And rely on horses, Who trust in chariots because they are many, And in horsemen because they are very strong, but who do not look to the Holy One of Israel, Nor seek the Lord!"

Now: Trust in unholy alliances is rampant, starting with the UN. Check out the headlines of the day; really, only the names and the weapons of war have changed.

Then: They pursued sexual abominations. "Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die," says Romans 1, a New Testament book commenting on practices almost as old as man himself, "they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." 

Now: Where to begin? How about, as just one tiny example, what happens to Christian enterprises that have taken principled stands against such practices?

And that's just a peek into a few of the parallels. If you think what's happening today is sad beyond words, take comfort in the fact that God gave His chosen people the freedom to destroy their land. Fortunately, we know the ending and the news is good for those who repent and trust in Him!

In the 1980s and ‘90s, gardening was my life.

Throughout the growing season, I spent every spare moment on my garden – shopping, planting, weeding, fertilizing and watering deeply as the summer droughts began. I kept painstaking notes, recording weekly precipitation and temperatures and even forecasts, tracking what was blooming and what wasn’t, making copious notes about what days and weeks weren’t awash in quite enough color and would therefore require careful attention during the off-season.  

Perpetual bloom was my goal, and a feature in a gardening magazine would be my ultimate reward.

Once the ground was frozen, I would head for the nearest used book store to stock up on back issues of gardening magazines and the most luscious new volumes by the leading garden designers of the day. I’d then spend the winter poring over this material, consulting my mud-spattered journal to identify the worst gaps, turning to resources such as the AHS Horticultural Encyclopedia and Botanica’s Encyclopedia of Roses and – by the end of January – the flurry of plant catalogues that had found their way to our mailbox.

My designs were breathtaking, IMHO, and when I was young enough I actually executed a few of them. Roses have been my favorites since I bought my first Olympiad a quarter century ago; at one point, I had over 150 hybrid teas, floribundas, grandifloras, David Austins and old garden roses gracing our modest lot. (This was long before the Japanese beetles arrived here in the Midwest to make post-June rose care largely a matter of executing the nasty little critters en masse.) 

I wrote a bit about this obsession in Heaven Without Her (Thomas Nelson, 2008), describing my reaction to my mother’s annoying reminders about her God:  

“I refused to dwell on [the subject]. Instead, I would shift the focus to what I thought of as my religion – horticulture. My favorite garden writer, Allen Lacy, summed it up beautifully, in my not-so-humble opinion: 

“'I do believe that there is such a thing as a gardener’s eye and that it is a gift of what Christians call grace – a gift that comes from outside, that is apart from one’s own intentions, and that can never be entirely fathomed. Gardening is, in other words, something religious. And its religion involves a point in time, a moment of conversion that separates things into before and after … One was not a gardener … Then the gift comes, and one knows that one had been living in darkness, but that now there is suddenly a new world to see, a world whose beauties and wonders many lifetimes would not be sufficient to encompass.' (Allen Lacy, The Gardener’s Eye. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992, 3.)

“I can remember reading that passage to Mom one day in my kitchen, barely able to suppress my tears of joy over its beauty and power. Although I didn’t say it, my thoughts were running something like this: My religion – which is what it is, since Allen Lacy has said so – is so beautiful and life-affirming that it brings tears to one’s eyes. Whereas your religion is mean-spirited and discriminatory and altogether unfair. Besides, I have soil and a shovel and a credit card good at any nursery in town; you have this imaginary friend named God.

“Confused as I was in those days, I was quite sure that I was the winner in this little match up."

My life has changed radically since then. That’s partly because of the creakiness of age (what was I thinking when I converted all that land into flower beds?). But it’s mainly because of my realization that biblical Christianity is true, that this life is but a vapor, a preparation for an eternity in heaven or hell. 

Ironically, my garden ended up getting that once-coveted feature treatment in a local magazine. But by that time, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to help my writer girlfriend add to her portfolio of articles, and to share the gospel with the garden photographer the magazine sent over. 

I don’t spend too much time on my garden anymore. It’s overgrown with perennials begging for division and aggressive self-seeders like phlox and sweet autumn clematis.  The weeping pine has outgrown its allotted space and that cute dwarf chamaecyparis pisifera is now taller than I am. The doublefile viburnum have croaked, along with about a third of the more tender roses (although that first Olympiad lives on). I don’t hang out at my favorite nurseries too much anymore, and when new plants do find their way into a bed, I just toss the tags into a drawer; their CVs rarely make it into my dusty old journal.  

I now rejoice over the first hard frost.  

It’s amazing how, once one starts worshipping the Creator, almost every aspect of His creation takes on a new beauty – even the wild violets and ground ivy, which once sent me running for the Roundup, look pretty nice to me now (and the little dears eliminate the need for all that troublous mulching). So far, only the Japanese beetles and bindweed still alarm me, and I imagine that they, too, will one day become just another metaphor for His eternal power. 

I do hope this lack of earthly energy and interest won’t impact my heavenly prospects. I’ve already applied for a rose-tending post in Eden Restored. ​

Originally published 1/11/14

I recently finished a thoroughly secular novel that stunned me, towards the end, with a thoroughly Christian passage: 
 
“And suddenly the beating waves crashed through, drenching her with the realization, with terror, submerging her. Anguish and death –
 
“’I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it! I don’t want to die!’
 
“And the answer came – did her ears hear it, or her heart? She didn’t know.
 
“’This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.’
 
“He had died, so that she need never die. He had promised!
 
“’I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.’ The bread of the body, the wine of the soul. The wheat and grapes had had their roots in the earth, but they had grown up towards heaven. The white bread, the red wine; white as snow and red as fire – snow and fire, winter and summer, death and life, opposite and yet the same, part of eternity’s circle.
 
“But before the wheat becomes bread it must be ground, before the grapes become wine they must be crushed. They must be sacrificed, as Christ on the Cross was sacrificed.
 
“Winter must come, and death. But the seed lives, and rises again from the dark earth, from the grave. The only way to life is through the door of death.
 
“She knelt, hiding her streaming face in her arms, shaken by terrible weeping. Her legs were too weak to stand, but the Son of God, the Son of Man, came down to her from his altar, bringing her his divine gift of terror and beauty, his gift of sacrifice. And as she accepted his gift he entered into her, and she into him, he was everything …”
 
Would it surprise you to know that the novel containing this passage -- The Perennial Bachelor, by Anne Parrish -- was #8 on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list the year in which it was released?
 
Perhaps not, if I were to add that this book was published in 1925.
 
What’s astounding to me is that we are only 91 years removed from an America in which a novel could promote such biblical teaching and yet be wildly popular; an America in which such a novel would not be buried in the “Religion” section of your local bookstore, crowded out by books on eastern wisdom and the dangers of Christianity; an America in which “fundamentalist” described the majority of citizens, most of whom never doubted that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant word of God Himself.
 
What a tragedy that this America no longer seems to exist beyond a remnant of believers. What a shame that most citizens today invest their literary budgets on narcissistic novels, on blood-soaked thrillers, on pornography clothed in respectable covers, on a never-ending stream of self-help books promising to help them live longer, more prosperous, deliriously happy lives.
 
But I suppose Jesus warned us that this would be the case. “Enter by the narrow gate,” He is recorded as saying in Matthew 7, “for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”