Glory in the Face

In the process of establishing the United States of America, the Founding Fathers appointed five men to serve on a committee, which they named The Committee of Five. (Keeping things simple seemed to be a good idea, in the beginning.) Thomas Jefferson was one of the five, and the other four said that he would be the one who would write The Declaration of Independence. And he did. It began with a number of truths that he declared to be “self-evident; the first one being “that all men are created equal."

One day in the 1970’s, in a Queen’s University course on Old English Literature (Chaucer in particular), I got a higher grade than almost all of my class-mates by submitting a very brief essay that clearly conveyed to the professor that I had nothing intelligent to write about “The Significance of Colour in The Canterbury Tales.”

Sometimes, there is a knack to learning how to do some tricky thing. Riding a unicycle. “Solving” a Rubik’s Cube. Juggling tennis balls. Those sorts of things. How much the knack means to a person depends on how much that person would like to do that trick. So then if a person was convinced that the best of all possible knacks is the knack of becoming strong enough to face anything, what should that person be focussed on? What might that person give more effort and time to.

In writing Glory in the Face, I was not the least bit shy about my indebtedness to my Dead Men of the 17th and 18th centuries: John Owen (1616-1683) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). In fact, I dedicated the book to “the memory and continuing fruitfulness” of both of them. The fruit they bore in my life was both exegetical—helping me to understand 2 Corinthians 3 and 4—and practical—guiding me in how to go about growing in the capacity to “see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

An obvious question to ask on every portage: "How did this pack get so heavy?"

Someone reading “Glory in the Face” might be persuaded that a parade is an instructive picture of the life of a follower of Christ. But Charles Spurgeon, one of my “Final Five Dead Men,” might have disapproved of the metaphor.