Singing & Slaying: Ten Quotes: God Rest Ye Merry by Douglas Wilson

Just in time for Advent and Christmas here are ten quotes from Douglas Wilson's book God Rest Ye Merry.

Bethlehem was the opening gambit in the last campaign of a long war.

Our good God, our overflowing God, our God of yes and amen, has always been able to promise far more than we are able to believe. I am not here speaking of unbelief, or of hard hearts, which is another problem. I am speaking here of true and sincere faith, a God-given faith, but one which is still infinite, and which God loves to bury under an avalanche of promises. We serve and worship the God who overwhelms, who delights to overwhelm.

The one who took the position of a servant was given authority over all.

Mary overcame in the way women are called to conquer-by giving birth to conquerors, or by giving birth to daughters who will give birth to conquerors. And this explains how the Magnificat [Luke 1:46-55] can have been composed by a woman and still be so gloriously militant. Godly child-bearing is militant.

Man in his sinful condition does not want to be saved. That is part of what it means to be a sinner. This means that man wants, by various strategies, to put himself out of God's reach.

We are told to clothe ourselves with humility and tender mercies. When Jesus told His disciples to follow Him, the cross is certainly in view. But we do not just follow him to the cross-we must also follow Him to the manger. We must become little children.

There is a vast difference between narrow partisanship and a broad political worldview. Many Christians in their attempts to keep the former out of their spiritual lives, have also found themselves excluding the latter. This is a drastic mistake. In doing this, they have found themselves without a consistent biblical worldview at all--because all worldviews are inescapably political. If you are resolved to be apolitical, you are resolved to abandon the world, to write it off.

The sun has risen. Christ has come. He is the king. The light covers the world. A return to heathen midnight is an impossibility. Those who walk in darkness now are doing so in a world diffused with light. This is hard to do--you have to remain blind, or hide in root cellars. There are ways to stay out of the sunlight, but they are difficult to accomplish.

We should strive over time to have our celebration of Easter far surpass the glory of Christmas...and we shouldn't try to fix this by reducing what we do at Christmas.

"Penitential" seasons can be put to a genuinely good use if they are a time when serious, once-for-all mortification of particular sins occurs-if real sins and real bad habits are uprooted from your life.

And One:

From the very start, from the very beginning, the life of Jesus presented a potent threat to the status quo. This threat was not the result of Herod's paranoia--Herod knew what many Christians do not. The birth of this child meant that the old way of ruling mankind was doomed. The transition from the old way of rule to the new way of rule was not going to be simple or easy, but it was going to happen.