“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . you are with me.” These words from Psalm 23 were some of the first I committed to memory as a new Christian. But they took on a transformative power after my mom died unexpectedly and tragically when she was 52. God used the pain of death to push words I’d known in my head down 18 inches into the wild country of my heart. I’d known Psalm 23 like an island on a map that I’d never visited. Her death was like being shipwrecked and vomited out of the storm onto that island. Death, for me, was familiar as charted but bigger and more intimidating in person. I’m not the first to encounter a gap between a theological truth I know in my head and the kind of knowledge that takes on flesh through personal experience. We see this gap highlighted at the moment of Peter’s restoration when he said, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (John 21:17). But though he knew Jesus’s love intellectually, Peter would come to know it more deeply, in ways that cut him, commissioned him, and ultimately kept him until death. Surgeon’s Searching Questions At an intellectual level, Peter’s theology in that moment was correct. Jesus, being God, knew everything. Peter also knew Jesus was full of grace (1:14). But there’s a difference between having head knowledge about Jesus’s grace and personally experiencing it. So Jesus three times asks whether or not Peter loves him (21:15–17)—the same number of times Peter had denied him (Luke 22:61). The Savior’s goal was to press the truth of his knowledge and love into the depths of Peter’s being and transform him. Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls. Peter would’ve seen Jesus heal and forgive sinners dozens of times. He had an intellectual grasp of Jesus’s power, but he also knew his own brokenness. Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls. Peter’s thrice denial wasn’t just shameful; it was embarrassing, especially when you consider that one of his questioners was a young servant girl (v. 56). Shame and self-doubt were sure to plague Peter after his denial, but these cancers wouldn’t go unaddressed by the Savior. Each reiteration of Jesus’s question cut Peter deeper. Cuts to Heal The questions hurt him (John 21:17), but cuts from Jesus’s deep and precise scalpel were necessary to remove Peter’s doubt, guilt, and embarrassment. Peter doesn’t hesitate to answer Jesus’s threefold questions about his love. He knows that Jesus knows he loves him. But by asking searching questions that exposed Peter’s shame and guilt, Jesus moved the apostle from mere head knowledge of his love and grace to personal knowledge. Jesus drives Peter to the end of his self-assurance and into a deeper assurance of Jesus’s grip on him. And a depth of grace Peter previously hadn’t known would transform his ability to lead others and help them drink from Christ’s depths as well. Wounded Healer’s Commissioning Until we’ve feasted deeply on Jesus’s grace, it’s impossible for us to feed others (2 Cor. 1:4). This was Jesus’s purpose in his relentless questions about Peter’s love. He peeled back Peter’s wounds layer by layer and then applied his healing medicine so he might release Peter to feed and take care of others. Hurt and grieved but cured, Peter was then well positioned to take that cure to others. Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers. Restored, Peter wasn’t the same. His knowledge of Jesus’s grace had moved from propositional truth to personal experience. Yes, the Lord “[knows] everything” (John 21:17), but that knowledge includes tailor-made prescriptions to heal sin-sick souls like Peter, you, and me. “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply,” A. W. Tozer once quipped. Jesus grieved Peter not for the pain’s sake—he’s no sadist—but for transformation’s sake. Peter had seen him go to the cross, die, and rise in triumph. Jesus was wounded so Peter could be healed. Now he wounds Peter so he can heal others. Love That Keeps Like Jacob before him (Gen. 32:25), Peter would always walk with a tender limp. After all, the apostle’s failure of nerve was documented and passed down through history. But grace is funny like that. It doesn’t deny or gloss over our failures; it shines brightest against them (Rom. 5:20). Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers. If the early church was built and led by men like Peter, this should give us all hope today. Peter’s denial wasn’t the final word on his life. Neither was his love of Jesus. Instead, it was the love of the One who restored him that kept him and keeps the church to the end. Because of his own fickle will, Peter denied Jesus, but a day would come when he’d die the death of a martyr (John 21:18–19) and then hear those longed-for words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:23). Yet even in death, it wouldn’t be Peter’s failures, or his faithfulness, that kept him. No, what kept Peter was the truth of Jesus’s grace that over the course of the apostle’s life transformed from a mere intellectual statement to his lived reality.

“Dad, which one’s the bad guy?” My 8-year-old daughter was trying to make sense of the news story we were watching. A typical cops-and-robbers tale was unfolding on the screen, and she needed help sorting out which team to root for. I started to answer her but hesitated. What should I say? On the one hand, I knew what she was asking: Which person had broken the law? On the other hand, as a Christian, I knew the answer was more complex than simply “The bad guy is the one in the ski mask, pumpkin.” Perhaps this was a moment to take her deeper into how God sees goodness and badness. As a father of five, I’m increasingly concerned about my kids’ behavior. Not their bad behavior. Their good behavior. Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have obedient children than hellions. And thanks be to God, mine are (mostly) the former. But the longer I parent, the more I ask myself this question: What if my children’s biggest obstacle to faith isn’t their badness but their “goodness”? What if my children’s biggest obstacle to faith isn’t their badness but their ‘goodness’? My hunch is that if you’re a parent, you probably care that your children don’t grow up to be monsters. You’re likely raising them in an environment you believe will help them flourish into happy, obedient, hopefully Jesus-loving adults. In the process, you might already be enjoying some of the benefits of your parenting decisions: They are largely obedient. They aren’t spray-painting overpasses. If so, congratulations! However, we must be clear-eyed about the unique threat this poses: “Good kids” can easily miss their need for God’s grace. The Only People Jesus Came For In Luke 5, Jesus is at a house party thrown by his most recent convert, Levi the tax collector. As it was with tax collectors, the usual riffraff was also in attendance. Seeing this, the Pharisees asked Jesus why he was keeping company with such nasty folks. He stunned them with his answer: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (vv. 31–32). If I may paraphrase, Jesus just said, “I’ve only come for the bad guys.” This is good news. If you can see you’re a sinner, then you can have Jesus as Savior. But when there’s less visible “bad” to see, there’s new work to be done in our parenting—work that can help expose your child’s need for the Great Physician. I want to share three lessons my wife and I teach our kids to show them their need for Jesus. 1. Teach your kids the difference between ‘inside bad’ and ‘outside bad.’ We need to teach our children that sin doesn’t always look like we think. In our family, we use the terms “inside bad” and “outside bad” to explain this. “Outside bad” is the sin we can see: hurting people, cheating, lying, stealing . . . nightly news stuff. The apostle Paul tells us as much in his vice list in Galatians 5:20–21. Here’s a selection of behaviors Paul warns will keep us out of God’s kingdom: sorcery, fits of anger, drunkenness, orgies. All obvious, external, and public. But we often miss that in the same list, sprinkled among those outward sins, are all sorts of inward attitudes that are just as evil: idolatry, envy, jealousy. You can see sorcery. You can’t see jealousy. Jealousy happens in the heart. And it’s that invisible quality that makes this “inside bad” so dangerous. If we want our kids to run to the cross, we must first teach them that bad doesn’t always look bad. It may look like singing passionately in church while wanting people to be impressed with your voice. It may look like giving a friend a gift but only so you’ll get one back in return. This can play out a thousand ways, and it’s our job to give our children a category to see it. 2. Teach your kids to repent of their bad motives. If it’s true that good deeds done from a bad heart pose dangers just like bad deeds do, this should change the way we teach our kids to repent. Tim Keller helped me see this in technicolor when he once remarked, “Irreligious people repent of nothing. Religious people repent of their sins. But Christians repent of their righteousness.” Perhaps the most important thing we can do as parents is to expand our children’s view of repentance. We aren’t called to turn away just from our bad actions but also from the bad reasons we do our good actions. If they’re done to make much of ourselves instead of God, our “good” deeds can keep us from him. A great passage that has helped our kids see this is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9–14. Read it with your children over a meal and ask them a set of simple questions about it: Who did more good things in the story, the Pharisee or the tax collector? Who went home justified? Why do you think God accepted the tax collector but not the pharisee? Did the Pharisee’s “goodness” help him or hurt him before God? As odd as it sounds, if your child’s “good” behavior is being done from a posture of selfishness, your child still needs to repent. Let’s teach our children this early. It’ll serve them well as they grow. 3. Teach your kids by confessing your ‘inside bad’ and ‘outside bad.’ As good as good instruction is, it’s much more powerful if it’s modeled. What an opportunity you have as a parent not simply to live uprightly before your children but to actively, regularly, and earnestly repent of your failings, especially your “inside” ones. If we want our kids to run to the cross, we must first teach them that ‘bad’ doesn’t always look bad. My wife is a gold medalist in this. Countless times, I’ve watched her confess her hidden sin to our kids, even when they were obviously much more at fault, simply because she had the wrong heart posture in her disciplining. Each time she does, she erodes our little ones’ narrative that God cares most about what they do on the outside. And each time, she gets a chance to show them how everyone needs the cross, even the mom who often looks like she has it all together. It’s true, Jesus only came to save bad guys. Let’s lovingly help our little ones discover that includes them. The sooner they see this, the more willing they’ll be to let the Great Physician do his work.

The study of Scripture’s grand narrative isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s a transformative one. In this roundtable discussion, Kendra Dahl sits down with biblical theology experts Benjamin L. Gladd, Courtney Doctor, and Elizabeth Woodson to discuss how a Christ-centered understanding of Scripture illuminates our study of theology and our lives as Christians. They discuss the following: How discovering biblical theology affected their lives How the storyline of Scripture underpins theological categories The importance of recognizing allusions to the Old Testament throughout the New Testament Recommended resources for further study of the Bible’s overarching narrative Mentioned on the Show: From Garden to Glory: How Understanding God’s Story Changes Yours by Courtney Doctor From Beginning to Forever: A Study of the Grand Narrative of Scripture by Elizabeth Woodson The Story Retold: A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament by G. K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd From Adam to Israel: A Biblical Theology of the People of God by Benjamin L. Gladd Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament by G. K. Beale, Benjamin L. Gladd, Andrew David Naselli Even Better Than Eden: Nine Ways the Bible’s Story Changes Everything About Your Story by Nancy Guthrie Far as the Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption by Michael D. Williams

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday vowed to carry out “full force” strikes against Hezbollah until it ceases firing rockets across the border, dimming hopes for a cease-fire proposal.…

In this dirty business, you run the risk of becoming boring—repeating yourself every week, becoming a curio shelf of obsessions and tics. Yet sometimes you don’t get a choice, because the news is…

The recent debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and the former President Donald Trump focused relatively little on foreign affairs. This was probably a good thing, as when the conversation finally…

The U.S. National Hurricane Center reports that fast-moving Hurricane Helene made landfall late Thursday, hitting northwestern Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm expected to bring damaging winds and…

Dark matter comes to us!

Foreign Affairs The Domino Theory Refuses to Fall The theory behind the Vietnam disaster is still current among policymakers. Credit: image via Shutterstock The recent debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and the former President Donald Trump focused relatively little on foreign affairs. This was probably a good thing, as when the conversation finally did turn to foreign policy, both candidates reiterated an inherited and widespread belief that protecting vital U.S. interests depends on the perception that America is willing to wage war no matter how minor the interests, powerful the adversary, or distant the battlefield. This shibboleth of the foreign policy elite is a version of the “domino theory,” which stipulated 50 years ago that if Vietnam fell to communism, other, more strategically significant states would soon follow. The experience of the Vietnam War and its aftermath should have disabused Americans of this superstition. Policymakers, afraid to lose face by admitting victory was impossible, pointlessly wreaked destruction on Southeast Asia. Vietnam ultimately fell to communism and the United States was humbled, yet the other “dominoes”—Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.—didn’t fall. Instead, Vietnam soon found itself at war with communist Cambodia and China. Over subsequent decades, Vietnam developed normal diplomatic relations and strong economic ties with the United States, and is now considered by Washington to be an important partner to counterbalance China. The lure of domino theory, however, remains deeply ingrained among the foreign policy elite and the commentariat. Two examples from last week’s debate demonstrate its persistence. The first came when former president Trump criticized the Biden administration for the Afghanistan withdrawal—something Trump himself had promised as president—calling it “the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” and claiming the withdrawal was “why Russia attacked Ukraine.” The second example was when Harris, for her part, claimed that had Trump been president when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he would have appeased and emboldened Putin out of his desire for “friendship.” Harris asserted that “Putin’s agenda is not just about Ukraine,” and, remarkably, that had Trump been in office, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe…starting with Poland.” Politicians’ interests are primarily domestic, not international, in nature. There is little patience for foreign policy views more complicated than aphorisms that can fit on a cocktail napkin, like “peace through strength,” or “appeasement emboldens aggressors.” These often misleading axioms are received from their advisors and policy-planners, who have both ideological and careerist motivations to maintain a U.S. foreign policy of global hegemony, what Stephen Walt has called “a full employment policy for the foreign policy elite.” For their part, commentators and media figures transform these myths into pearls of conventional wisdom, amplifying self-serving rationales for American primacy. Dissenting views are increasingly either crowded out, deemed ignorant, or simply shouted down. A recent example is former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s new cover article in Foreign Affairs. Despite being one of the principals responsible for the disastrous Iraq War as a member of the Bush administration, Rice has lost no prestige or credibility on Olympus. Instead, she is given top billing in America’s most prestigious foreign policy magazine to warn against “the perils of isolationism.” According to Rice, unless the United States accepts the humble and selfless task of dominating the world, China and Russia will launch wars of conquest, “illegitimate” regimes will “sustain” themselves (i.e., remain un-invaded or un-couped by the U.S.), Saudi Arabia and Israel will never become pals, America’s economy will tank, and pirates will terrorize the seas. This is all nearly as scary as Saddam’s WMDs. Strategy is all about distinguishing vital from superfluous ends in order to apply the limited means at hand toward what is most valued. Among most of those who direct or influence our foreign policy, however, strategy is instead equated with drawing implausible causal connections between disparate and unrelated phenomena, making everything a priority and setting no price too high. There is plenty of scholarship disputing this ideology. “Dominoes” rarely fall and capable states rarely bandwagon with aggressors out of fear of abandonment by allies. States don’t judge the credibility of others’ commitments by past actions under separate circumstances, but according to their perceived capabilities and interests. As scholars from Paul Kennedy to Robert Gilpin have noted, diplomatic compromise—often smeared as “appeasement”—is often a successful strategy, cutting deals with rivals to avoid a worse outcome. For example, the United States and United Kingdom, previously enemies, avoided war and began their transatlantic love affair after the latter “appeased” the former by accepting their hegemony in the Western Hemisphere at the end of the 19th century. As Upton Sinclair once said, however, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” If your theory of international politics says you must be willing to fight for anything, anywhere, against anyone, you will probably be compelled to fight for everything, everywhere, against everyone. Looking at the scope of the United States’ present international military entanglements, it appears that the domino theory is alive and well. As the United States and its allies stare down the prospect of a direct conflict with Russia, Iran, or China (or perhaps all three at once), it’s time to ditch our national superstition about falling dominoes and instead reappraise what really matters most both at home and abroad. The post The Domino Theory Refuses to Fall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Oiler Debacle Shows How the Navy Is Running Aground The Navy is dysfunctional. Is there anything that can be done about it? And when? Credit: image via Shutterstock In this dirty business, you run the risk of becoming boring—repeating yourself every week, becoming a curio shelf of obsessions and tics. Yet sometimes you don’t get a choice, because the news is itself boring and repetitious, a dull student’s punishment on the blackboard of reality. In my own case, I’ve been banging the gong of the abject condition of These States’ seapower for some weeks, both in terms of the Formosa war everyone seems to be itching to have and our abandonment of the Red Sea to the irrepressible Houthis. On the cover of our current print issue, there’s a survey of the shabby state of our merchant fleet from your humble correspondent. I’m getting stale! And I don’t like it. I have beautiful thoughts I’d like to share about architectural history, mushroom-hunting, and how men’s pants should be cut. I’ve got an original insight on an intertext between Hobbes and Fortescue that could change the reading of Leviathan and modern political science forever. I wish I could tell you about piano concerts, the Yankees, or my favorite German restaurant. I am like you; I have a rich inner life; I’d like to hold your eye up to the keyhole of my consciousness and shriek, Look! Look inside! Look at these beautiful things! But, instead, we’ve got to stick to the sorry state of American seapower, because this week the Navy crashed a ship. The maritime press puts it more delicately—“ran aground,” they write—but I am not a mariner. If I were to hop a curb in my trusty Mazda and tear enough of the bottom off that it fills with water and has to get a tow to the nearest garage, I would feel justified in saying that I crashed the car.  I would also feel extremely bummed, as I must imagine our naval brass do. The ship in question, the USS Big Horn, was the oiler accompanying the USS Abraham Lincoln’s carrier group in its long schlep to the Pacific from the Persian Gulf region, where we’ve been idly mustering naval forces for about a year on the apparent theory that we might want to get into it with the Islamic Republic. (As mentioned, the actually existing American maritime interest in the Middle East, keeping the Red Sea shipping lanes open, has been left to the ineffectual attentions of the French and the British.) The Navy has 17 oilers, which are responsible for making sure ships in a given group stay fueled. These are bad tidings; for one thing, the Abraham Lincoln and co.’s schlep gets much trickier without fuel. For another, the Navy is already on the verge of retiring an oiler and 16 other support ships because of the shortage of mariners who can operate and service them. The details of the Big Horn’s little accident have yet to be disclosed, so we will keep our inexpert speculations about causes private. I do not think, however, that it is controversial to say that crashing large, irreplaceable ships is undesirable and ought to be unusual. Yet it seems to be the latest instantiation of a long pattern. The hapless state of the Navy and its support services is not news. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) released a report in 2021, following a spate of high-profile naval mishaps, in which he detailed the shabbiness of training, discipline, and physical maintenance in this sorry epigone of the Great White Fleet. The Maritime Administration began to trumpet the shortage of civilian mariners available to help with sealift in case of war in 2017; it has been too embarrassed or incompetent to conduct any surveys since. The supposedly revolutionary program of the Obama administration, replacing our aging frigates with “littoral combat ships,” has gone badly awry; we can’t retire the widely hated LCS quickly enough, and the replacement frigates are running about six years behind schedule.  What does it all mean, Mr. Natural? It don’t mean—well, there are actually a few points to be made here. You’ll forgive me if they are things you have read before here or elsewhere, but, as I said, sometimes life’s problems are evident and unchanging. First, anyone who thinks we are going to fight a serious naval war in the next five years is a boob, and possibly a danger to himself or others. Forget the never-arriving 400-ship fleet; we can’t even keep the ships we have manned, operational, and not crashed. If policymakers think Taiwan is important for American security, they’d be better off cutting Palmer Luckey a personal check for $500 million (Memo: “Figure it out!”) and giving him a one-way ticket to Taipei. Second, the grotesque bloat of the military–industrial complex needs actually serious attention. The proportion of funding that has gone to R&D has plummeted, while the part devoted to the obscure liturgies and rights of contract leveraging continues apace. If an enterprising congressman who isn’t worried about getting on the board of a Big Five contractor is reading this—you have your brief. Contracting reform is basically virgin territory. The post Oiler Debacle Shows How the Navy Is Running Aground appeared first on The American Conservative.