Nearly a century before Rome would fall the tremors of discontent were already eroding the empire. Antioch, which is situated just 12 miles from the Syrian border, was one of the first cities to fall into violence as Rome attempted to crush a government protest. In his anthology on the collapse of the empire, historian Edward Gibbon observes:

That proud capital was degraded from the rank of a city… stripped of its lands, its privileges, and its revenues, was subjected… The baths, the circus, and the theaters were shut and, that every source of plenty and pleasure might at the same time be intercepted, the distribution of corn was abolished.

The noblest and most wealthy of the citizens of Antioch appeared before them in chains; [their houses] were exposed to sale, their wives and children were suddenly reduced from affluence and luxury to the most abject distress.

“Let us not then grieve, beloved, let us not despond on account of the present tribulation, but let us admire the well-devised plan of God’s wisdom,” counseled Antioch’s Priest, John Chrysostom. The dust had hardly settled—and the city’s fate was generations from being known—but the saint turned to Ecclesiastes to shepherd his city:

[Why] does he say? “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter.” Because, at the former place, insolence is bred, at the latter, sobriety. And when a person goes to the banquet of one more opulent, he will no longer behold his own house with the same pleasure, but he comes back to his wife in a discontented mood; and in discontent he partakes of his own table.

All this Solomon perceived when he said, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of drinking.” From the one grows listlessness, from the other an earnest anxiety. From the one, contempt; from the other, fear; a fear which conducts us to the practice of every virtue.

Chrysostom’s calling to be humbly shaped by God—in the midst of suffering—transcended the causes and events of suffering. Though he spoke against injustice, the saint was nearly consumed with the ways in which God would use his city’s suffering for good.

Humanity was not created to experience the weight of suffering—it is an effect of evil running rampant in our world. But even in our pain we are met by a God who knows the sting of suffering and will be faithful to bring his justice and peace to our world.

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 7 (Listen – 3:37)
2 Timothy 3 (Listen – 2:21)

All of man’s labor is for nothing more than to fill his stomach—yet his appetite is never satisfied! — Ecclesiastes 6.7

Though he had been without food for 40 days, Jesus refused to turn stones to bread. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The offer had been made: quench your material longings by your own ability. Jesus’ reply? In the end, that wouldn’t satisfy my deepest longings. 

We spend our days, the writer of Ecclesiastes says, trying to satisfy our appetites for more. Money, power, control, sex, food, status—every longing promises to be satisfied by the next acquisition—every longing proves insatiable.

The Divine Comedy chronicles penalties for each earthly sin as acts of contrapasso—to suffer the opposite. Rather than divine retribution, every circle of Dante’s Inferno is “the fulfillment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life,” explains scholar Peter Brand.

The gluttons, Dante writes, writhe in a cesspool of waste from their endless consumption. As Virgil guides Dante he explains the gluttons’ damnation; “What these shades could not satisfy in life, in death, they shall be denied for eternity.”

Where Dante imagined the result of chasing earthly appetites to their end, modern writers like David Foster Wallace chronicled its present cultural symptoms. Upon his death in 2008 the New York Times celebrated Wallace’s writings as “a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification.”

A recently republished interview reveals Wallace’s candid reflections on one of his most successful books:

A lot of the impetus for writing “Infinite Jest” was just the fact that I was about 30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30, and we’d all, you know, been grotesquely over-educated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad.

I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be… a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible, which ends up being sort of empty and low-calorie.

Greed is timeless, our appetites limitless. Yet we are not left alone. Jesus was strong enough to defeat broken appetites in the desert and loving enough to forgive us for the times we have fallen in the wilderness of our own desires. “On Christ the solid rock I stand,” penned Edward Mote in 1834, “All other ground is sinking sand.”

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 6 (Listen – 1:44)
2 Timothy 2 (Listen – 3:17)

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. — Ecclesiastes 5.10

“In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million—and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough,” writes Sam Polk in the New York Times. “I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.”

Polk’s story reads like a modern-day reenactment of Ecclesiastes. “I said in my heart,” the author of the ancient book of wisdom confesses, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” The pursuits of money, power, and pleasure feel so wonderful in the short-term—and our society is engineered to deliver such rewards, on demand, to anyone willing to chase after them with reckless abandon. Polk confesses:

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan—Per Se, Le Bernardin… I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game… The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Ecclesiastes concludes, “But behold, this also was vanity.” Polk, following in the footsteps of many before him, would discover this for himself:

In the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth… They were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had. From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes.

The calling of Scripture is to see wealth and power, in Polk’s words, with new eyes. Those whose view of vocation has been redeemed, Ecclesiastes says, “eat and drink, and find enjoyment in all their hard work on earth during the few days of their life which God has given them, for this is their reward.”

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 5 (Listen – 2:50)
2 Timothy 1 (Listen – 2:37)

One of the benefits of a Scripture reading plan is that it engages our minds with places of God’s word where we might not regularly venture. This week we arrived at a passage in 1 Timothy instructing believers to pray for political leaders as well as those under their care:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions. — 1 Timothy 2.1–2

As our editorial team and a small group of readers gave insight into the passage I became convicted about my own prayer life, writing:

Where we know victims by name we can bring them before God. Where we know of great needs, pain, or injustice without knowing any of the victims or leaders serving them, by name, we can repent.

Modern reporting offers Christians today an unprecedented opportunity. When we pray for global situations we can begin with specific names—even if we know just one person from an article—and radiate our prayers out to every individual, family, and nation involved.

As we pray for families whose lives have been shattered by the Zika virus we can begin with Zulmarys Molina, a mother from Puerto Rica, who was infected by Zika early in her pregnancy. Though her baby’s head is growing far below average she has decided not to abort her daughter, no matter what. Her most recent ultrasound was earlier this week.

We can also pray for Rossandra Oliveira, the Brazilian government official who manages mosquito control for a city of over 400,000. “In 19 years of working in environmental control I’ve never seen so much disorganization as I’m seeing now,” said Oliveira. The official and her team of 149 health inspectors are tragically under-resourced.

It’s not until we enter into understanding someone’s story that we fully understand how to pray for them. Ghaith, a 22-year-old former law student from Damascus, explains the refugee crisis like this:

I made it, while thousands of others didn’t. Some died on the way, some died in Syria. Every day, you hear about people drowning. Just think about how much every Syrian is suffering inside Syria to endure the suffering of this trip.

In Greece, someone asked me, “Why take the chance?” I said, “In Syria, there’s a hundred-per-cent chance that you’re going to die. If the chance of making it to Europe is even one per cent, then that means there is a one-per-cent chance of your leading an actual life.”

Variations of this story are repeated by over a dozen others in The Washington Post’s photo essay Refuge: 18 Stories from the Syrian Exodus.

Human beings, crafted in God’s image, are at the heart of every crisis in our world today. Christians have the privilege of naming people in our prayers for healing and justice. Their faces and stories reorient how we view even the most remote of events. Take 11-year-old Dasani whose family is crushed under the burden of poverty and homelessness in New York City; “I wanna go somewhere where it’s quiet.” Or Malik Jalal whose first-person account is shockingly titled I’m On The Kill List. This Is What It Feels Like To Be Hunted By Drones.

Our prayers are not limited by the spotlight of media—there are millions in Africa, China, and the Middle East who are persecuted, oppressed, and slaughtered every year—but through the media we have the opportunity to access stories beyond our comfort zone. We have the privilege of carrying the voices of the hurting to the good and faithful father who will one day make all things new, the suffering servant who knows the depth of their pain, the powerful spirit who walks with them each and every step of the way.

Weekend Reading List

• Zulmarys Molina: Zika virus: Will this baby be OK? By Elizabeth Cohen for CNN.
• Rossandra Oliveira: In Fight Against Zika Virus, Brazil Battles Neglect, Cash Crunch. By Joshua Goodman and Mauricio Savarese for the Associated Press.
• Ghaith: Ten Borders. By Nicholas Schmidle for The New Yorker.
• Refuge: 18 Stories from the Syrian Exodus. By Kevin Sullivan for The Washington Post.
• Malik Jalal: I’m On The Kill List. This Is What It Feels Like To Be Hunted By Drones. Malik Jalal for the Independent.
• Dasani: Invisible Child.

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 2 (Listen – 4:03)
1 Timothy 4 (Listen – 2:05)

This Weekend’s Readings
Ecclesiastes 3 (Listen – 3:02) 1 Timothy 5 (Listen – 3:22)
Ecclesiastes 4 (Listen – 2:18) 1 Timothy 6 (Listen – 3:16)

By A.W. Tozer (1897-1963)

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. — 1 Timothy 3.16

The most profound mystery of human flaw is how the creator could join Himself to the creature. How the “Word,” meaning Christ, could be made “flesh,” meaning the creature, is one of the most amazing mysteries to contemplate.

I often think of the wise words of John Wesley: “Distinguish the act from the method by which the act is performed and do not reject the fact because you do not know how it was done.” In coming to the mystery of that which is Christ incarnate, we reverently bow our heads and confess, “It is so, God, but we don’t know how.” I will not reject the fact because I do not know the operation by which it was brought to pass.

God, who once dwelt only intermittently with men, suddenly came and “the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.” He now dwelt with men in person, and they called His name Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”

I want you to take note of three prepositions here. Notice when He appeared as man, He appeared to dwell with men in person and to be united to men, then ultimately to dwell in men forever. So it is “with men” and “to men” and “in men” that He came to dwell.

I think of how easy it might have been for God to keep silent. In fact, there are many who feel that God is doing just that now. I shudder to think of His silent voice, the incommunicable heart of God, His mind inexpressible. This is not the true picture of God, for God is always speaking. His voice rises above the din and clatter of the world around us.

It is not that God is not speaking or communicating to us. Rather, we have allowed ourselves to get back into such a hole that all we hear is the noise around us. Only after all of that noise has spent itself do we begin to hear in the silence of our heart that still, small, most mighty voice of God speaking to us.

*Abridged from A.W. Tozer’s And He Dwelt Among Us, chapter five: The Mystery of The Word Made Flesh.

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 1 (Listen – 2:21)
1 Timothy 3 (Listen – 2:10)