It’s time for a little update, not much, but I am no longer new to blogging. I have been at it a few years. Not that I have gained any particular stature. I simply can’t claim to be new at it. I still write as part of my profession, but blogging is more interesting. Blogging is my way of sharpening ideas and fleshing them out. It’s a journey, and I know I don’t always “get it right”, but I take it seriously.
I have been on a journey for truth since I emerged from the haze and confusion of adolescence, much of it self-induced. Stepping out of that myopic existence I began to get an inkling that a world of truth lay in front of me to encounter, and so I set off. I didn’t realize, then, how much faith is required to seek truth.
I have been listening to Pensées by Blaise Pascal, who has become a favorite philosopher, theologian, and thinker for me. I resonate with his sentiments about reason and intuition in particular. He was brilliant in science, mathematics, and theology – way ahead of his time. He lived during the initial headwind of the Enlightenment. He was a contemporary of René Descartes, yet he was able to remain objective. He wasn’t swept up in the current of the Enlightenment. He managed to remain aloof from it.
I am inspired to think of death today from my reading of Pensées. Death is the great equalizer. It will come to all of us. The longest-lived among human beings may live to be 110. Most of us will not see 100 … or even 90; and many of us will not see 80 or 70 or even 60. Try as we might, we do not control our fate. We will die, and that reality is inescapable.
Pascal talks about the people who distract themselves from the reality of death. I suppose it’s natural to want to ignore something that is inescapable. We can’t add a day to our lives by worrying and being anxious about it. Yet, anxiety about death is also natural for the same reason – we dread it, but we can’t avoid it.
I imagine that my cat has never thought a day in its life about the fact that he will die, but I have rationality, consciousness, and awareness of myself that my cat does not seem to have, certainly not in the same measure. To the extent that we have that ability, it seems to me that ignoring the reality death that we can certainly grasp is to be something less than human. Two ignore the reality of death is beneath us. It denies the difference between us and other animals.
The proverbial deer standing frozen in the headlights of a hurtling vehicle has little idea of the imminent impact those headlights impend. Like the deer we might shut our minds off in the grim headlights of death … but we know better.
Not that we should have any pride in the fact that we have greater capacity than the other animals. It wasn’t anything we did. It simply is what it is.
Thus, to live into our capacity seems only fitting. Our anxiety about death is fitting for creatures with rationality, consciousness, and awareness of themselves.
I was first impressed about this humanly poignant characteristic – preoccupation with death – in college as an English Literature major. Death was the subject of many a novel, many a sonnet, and many other forms of literature. The desire to escape the inevitability of death runs strong in the creative and artistic mind living into the fullness of what it means to be human.
It was in a class on William Shakespeare, focusing on the sonnets, that the reality of this preoccupation about death in some of the greatest works of literature crept into my own awareness. In that same time period, I must have been reading Ecclesiastes, because I associate Ecclesiastes 3:11 with that time in my life. Indeed, it has become my favorite verse in the Bible:
“For God has made everything beautiful in its time, and eternity has been set in the heart of man, but not so that he could see the beginning from the end.”
We do live in a world full of beauty, even if the world is also full of pain, struggle, and anxiety. The contrast does not escape us. And in that world of beauty and pain, we become aware of our finitude.
To put it in biblical fashion, we are like a mist. We are like a flower that blooms one day and dies the next. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “Everything is meaningless in a world like that.”
In that sense, we are no better off than the animals. From dust we were born and to dust we will return. We end up in the ground just like they do.
Everything that we accomplish fades into other people’s memories when we die. Most if not all of it will be long forgotten in a few generations. The things we accumulate that do not rust or rot while we live will be left to rust or rot for someone else. In more modern, poetic terms, no one tows a Cadillac to the grave.
And yet, the very fact that we wrestle with the poignance of death is something that arouses hope. Why do we even care? Why does it even enter our mind to be anxious about it? Why aren’t we, like my cat or a deer in the headlights – clueless about any of it? The fact that we think about it and long for a different reality suggests the possibility of such a reality.
According to Britannica, Blaise Pascal was a french mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who lived in the 17th century (1623-1662). He died young but he accomplished much. He revolutionized multiple scientific and mathematical fields1.
As a teenager, his essay on conic sections became known as Pascal’s Theorem in projective geometry. He invented mechanical calculators. He didn’t invent Pascal’s triangle, a three-sided arrangement of integers such that every number equals the sum of two diagonal numbers above it, but he found novel uses for it, including calculating probabilities. He also laid the groundwork for modern probability theory2.
Pascal did pioneering work in the physical sciences, laying the foundations for hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. Because of this work, a unit of pressure is named after him. Pascal’s Law – that pressure applied to a confined fluid is transmitted undiminished in all directions – underpins modern hydraulics. Experiments with vacuums and fluids led him to develop the syringe and the hydraulic press.
Blaise Pascal is known as much for his philosophy and theology as he is for his mathematics and science. Pascal’s Wager is a brilliant critique of atheism based on probability theory. Many people misunderstood Pascal’s Wager to be an apologetic argument for the existence of God. Pascal believed in God, of course, but he doubted the ability of finite human beings to prove the existence of God with logic and reason.
Pascal maintains that people perceive the existence of God on an intuitive level. He would argue that we use our reason to support or deny that intuition, but the reasoning power of a finite being is insufficient to establish proof.
Pascal did not eschew the reasoning capabilities of human beings. He used his own brilliant mind in the advancement of science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Rather, he was mindful of our limitations as finite beings.
All of this is nothing, however, but setting the stage for my own summary of a point Pascal makes in his work Pensees. The fact that Pascal had a brilliant mind is not proof of the existence of God to be inferred from the fact that he believed in God. Pascal would be the first person to deny that kind of proof, yet Pascal had confidence in the existence of God.
Blaise Pascal says that we cannot find happiness within us as the Stoics suggest. Neither can we find happiness outside of ourselves in amusements, nature, or anything else. These things are fleeting – temporal. We can only find true and lasting happiness in God, who is both within us and outside us.
God makes himself available to us in “the inner man” (my words), and He makes himself available to be known in and through the world He created. God is neither part of us nor part of the world. He is not contained in us nor contained in the world. Yet he is present; He is transcendent in everything.
Blaise Pascal talks about the fact that the Bible reveals a God who hides himself. Pascal says we have no obligation to provide proof of such a God, because such a God is revealed as one who hides himself. What proof can we then give? To undertake such proof is to deny such a God, says Pascal. To accept that God is hidden is to affirm Him.
Yet, Pascal spoke about God, as I do. I also have come to the same place Pascal reached in my own thinking, which perhaps is why I resonate with him as much as I do.
He is not completely hidden, of course, to the extent that men like Blaise Pascal – and many other people before him and since him – are convinced that such a God exists. Such a God however cannot be known by proofs that finite beings demand.
As I think about these things, it occurs to me that a hidden God will remain hidden to the man who demands and requires proof. What proof should such a God give? What proof should a finite man require?
The God of the Bible is revealed as not being such a God. Such a God does not reveal himself to a man who makes demands.
Indeed, we make no demands on nature. We seek only to discover, to understand. We don’t make any demands on gravity. We don’t create the natural laws, neither do we control what they should be or how they should prove themselves to us. Such a task would be a fool’s errand, and we would know nothing to undertake it. Why would we then make similar demands of God?
Indeed, if God exists, and I believe He does, we can only undertake to learn who God is on His own terms, just as we learn what nature is on its terms.
Neither should we expect God, who created nature, to be revealed in the same way nature is revealed to us. A God who creates nature is a God who is “other” than nature. Such a God must “stand apart” from nature in order to create it. Such a God must have agency. Such a God must have capacity to determine to create or not to create. Such a God does not exist according to a law like gravity. Such a God may only be known in a way that corresponds to who such a God must be to have created this universe.
Skeptics say that people have created God in their own image. The person of intuition and faith says that we know God because He has created us in His image. He has created us with capacities that are like Him, that allow us to know Him as He is.
Not that we have the same capacities as God. We don’t because we are created beings. We can only have some aspect of God’s capacities and not all of them. We sense, though, that we do have some divine-like aspects because we can think. We can perceive. We can reason. We are self-aware. We understand things like beauty and love, science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology.
These capacities are not the same as the capacity of a thing like gravity. It may be more like a thing like dark matter or dark energy, but only in the sense that we do not understand those things. Yet we know they exist because we see evidence that they exist, and so we may know that God exists because we see evidence that He exists. We know He exists, however, in a way that is different from the way the universe exists – as different as a created thing is from the creator of that thing.
God is hidden to those who set the parameters on where God should be found. God is hidden to those who assume that God is found in the same way that a thing like gravity is found. God is hidden to those who demand that God be known in the way they want to know Him.
As creatures made in the image of God, who have some capacity to know God and be like Him, perhaps, it shouldn’t be surprising that we attempt to be like Him in the way of making such demands. To demand that the world bow down to us, that even God bow down to our demands for proof, is the natural danger of God making a creature in His own image.
And so God hides himself of necessity because such a creature would be a danger to any universe God created. Indeed, if God is true to Himself, He could not allow such a thing. He must, of necessity, be hidden to such a creature so that only a creature who is willing to humble itself, to set aside its desire to be like God, may know Him – a creature who is willing to know God on God’s own terms, and to know God for who He really is and not for what such a creature wishes him to be.
It seems to me it could be no other way: that God would have to hide Himself so that He would be discovered and known by those people willing to know Him on His own terms, to know Him for who He really is and not for who they wish He was – a god they can control.
We cannot anymore demand that our spouse be the person we want them to be and make them to be it, than we can demand that God be the god we want Him to be and make Him dance to the tune of the music we play. It is a fool’s errand even to conceive of it and to entertain it. Such a god that we can manipulate and control would not be the true God.
So the fact that God is hidden is not surprising. The fact that God is hidden is expressly disclosed throughout the Bible. It is not hidden to us that God is a hidden God.
What proof, therefore, should we give of such a God?
Perhaps, the only proof we can give is the hope that such a God can be found, and indeed, that some people have found Him – that He has revealed Himself to people to whom He desires to reveal Himself because they desire to know Him as He truly is.
And so we can offer this proof: that the one who seeks God, the one who seeks to know God as He reveals Himself to be, the one who seeks God with his whole heart and his whole being, yielding all that he wishes to demand to such a God, that such a person can and will know Him, as the Bible says, and that such a God who is approached that way promises to be found.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Blaise Pascal, Brittanica.com, Lucien Jerphagnon, May 1, 2026 ↩︎
Lesslie Newbigin says that scripture is missional. Among other things, that means Scripture has a movement to it. It begins with two people, Adam and Eve, who initially walk with God in the garden created for them, but they are naive. They are duped into not trusting God. They are exiled from the garden and are instructed to multiply and populate the earth.
Scripture tracks the story of God’s plan to redeem Adam and Eve. It progresses through God’s interaction with their children, their children’s children, and their descendants along a missional path.
God works through Noah, Abraham, and Moses to move his plans along. All the milestones along the path are missional in the direction of God’s established before the foundations of the earth.
They coalesce in the incarnation, where Jesus picks up all the missional threads, fulfilling them in himself and carrying them forward in his life. He proclaims the presence and the future coming of the kingdom of God. He gives himself up to death, and he rises again to defeat sin and death. Jesus takes his seat at the right hand of the Father after commissioning his followers to carry his message and to the ends of the earth as his ambassadors.
From the promise to Eve that her seed will crush the serpent, to the rainbow covenant to Noah, to promise to Abraham to bless all the nations of the earth through his descendants, the missional progression of God’s plan in Revelation: in the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven and in God establishing His habitation among His people in a new heavens and new earth.
In that final chapter in which God’s plans come to fruition, all God’s people are gathered in one great assembly of people. They are from every nation, tribe, and tongue. (Rev. 7:9)
In this progression, God doesn’t move; people do. God doesn’t change; people do. The mission doesn’t change from beginning to end, but people change in relation to their understanding and involvement as the mission unfolds.
Another way of characterizing the missional character of Scripture from beginning to end is with the word, migration. Scripture is about the migration of people from the garden to the New Jerusalem.
I have been listening to Pensées, by Blaise Pascal on Audible Chapter 45, Section 610 has given me some food for thought that inspires this blog post. Pascal’s analysis may not be politically correct in the 21st Century, but he makes a sound point when we give him some grace.
Leading up to Section 610, Pascal makes the claim that anyone who understands the Jewish religion by its “course of forms” will misunderstand it. He interprets the Law by the prophets who “made it plain enough that they did not interpret the Law according to the letter.”
This distinction is not novel. Paul makes the same point in all of his writings. The Law was temporary. (Galatians 3:19) It was a tutor. (Gal. 3:24) Paul says the Law is just a shadow – specifically that the religious rules about food, drink, festivals, etc. are a shadow of the substance which is in Christ. (Colossians 2:16-17) Jesus, himself, said the religious leaders search Scripture for clues about eternal life, but Scripture bears witness to him. (John 5:39-40; see also Luke 24:27)
Pascal says the Messiah according to “carnal Jews” was to be “a great temporal prince.” They expected a good fortune for them in this life when the Messiah came. In the same vein, Pascal says, “Jesus Christ according to carnal Christians has come to dispense us the love of God and to give us sacraments that should do everything to benefit us without our help.” In other words, “carnal Christians” are also just looking for benefits from God.
Pascal concludes, “Such is not the Christian religion, nor the Jewish.” He says, “True Christians and true Jews have always expected a Messiah that would make them love God and, by that love, triumph over their enemies.” (607) He puts “true Christians” and “true Jews” on the same level. They desire and seek to know and love God for who He is – and not for what He can provide them.
Pascal says, “The carnal Jews hold a midway place before Christians and heathens. The heathens know not God and love the world only. The Jews know the true God and love the world only. Christians know the true God and love not the world. Jews and heathens love the same good. Jews and Christians know the same God. The Jews were of two kinds: the first had only heathen affections; the other had Christian affections.” (608)
Pascal says, among the Christians, the coarser-minded are the Jews of the new law. The carnal Jews looked for a carnal Messiah. The “coarser Christians” believe that the Messiah has dispensed them the love of God. True Jews and true Christians worship a Messiah who makes them love God.” (609) The difference is in desiring the good things God can give them versus desiring God who is good. In these ways, Pascal claims that true Christians are like true Jews, and “coarser Christians” are like the carnal Jews.
And this is where we get to the point. Pascal says that true Jews and true Christians have the same religion. The religion of the Jews seemed to consist of the fatherhood of Abraham, circumcision, sacrifices, ceremonies, the Ark of the Covenant, the temple, Jerusalem, and the Law of Moses. But, Pascal says the true religion of the Jews “consisted of none of those things, but only in the love of God.”
Pip: If you’ve ever wondered whether the Bible has anything to say about the immigration debate, Kevin Drendel has been following the threads of the biblical fabric on the theme of immigration since 2014 — and the answer turns out to be: quite a lot, and none of it comfortable.
Mara: This episode covers three territories: migration and exile in the biblical narrative, what it means to hold citizenship in heaven over any earthly nation, and how the command to love your neighbor keeps expanding past every boundary we try to draw around it.
Pip: Let’s start with the biblical record on refugees — because it turns out the shepherd-king himself was one.
David, Ruth, and the Refugee Thread in Scripture
Mara: The anchor post here traces a thread running from the exile of Adam and Eve all the way to Revelation 7:9 — and one vivid stop along the way is David, a man on the run from a king who wanted him dead.
Pip: David dodging spears, hiding in the wilderness, and eventually crossing into enemy Philistine territory — David was not always the quintessential insider, the golden boy of the faith. He was once a refugee.
Mara: In that dilemma, “David thought to himself, ‘One of these days I will be destroyed by the hand of Saul. The best thing I can do is to escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will give up searching for me anywhere in Israel, and I will slip out of his hand.'”
Pip: Some commentators criticize that David’s move as a failure of faith. They have a point — but what would any of us would do if people in power were hunting us down.
Mara: That’s where the law-versus-grace tension surfaces. David’s asylum claim, by modern legal standards, would likely be denied — his persecution wasn’t tied to race, religion, or membership in a protected group. Many real refugees today face the same wall: fleeing cartels or generalized violence, with no qualifying category under current law – no clear path to safety, security, and a permanent home.
Pip: And the number of refugees in the world are not small. Over 123 million people displaced globally, 1 in every 67 people on earth, with the average refugee spending about 17 years inrefugee camps.
Mara: The post on Ruth develops the same thread from a different angle. Ruth is a Moabite — a foreigner — who embodies every category of vulnerability Scripture pairs together: widow, orphan, and foreigner. And God chose her story, not an Israelite’s, to sit at the center of His redemption narrative.
Pip: Ruth ends up in the royal lineage that runs straight to David and then to Jesus. The foreigner isn’t a footnote; she’s load-bearing.
Mara: The post on Moses and identity adds another layer. Moses names his firstborn son Gershom — meaning “foreigner in a foreign land” — because that is how he understood himself, raised Egyptian but Hebrew by birth. That outsider identity becomes the foundation for the Mosaic law’s repeated command: love the foreigner, because you were foreigners in Egypt.
Pip: And then People from Beyond closes the loop. Abraham himself is called a Hebrew, meaning “one from beyond” — a man who never owned the land he lived in – though it was the land God promised him – because he knew it was not his ultimate destination.
Mara: David says it plainly near the end of his life, in 1 Chronicles: “We are foreigners and strangers in your sight. Our days on earth are like a shadow.” The displacement isn’t incidental to the story. It is the story.
Pip: Which raises the question of what that identity is supposed to do to us — and that’s where citizenship comes in.
Heaven’s Citizens, Earth’s Sojourners
Mara: The post on foreigners, neighbors, and citizens opens with a single line from Leviticus 24: “You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born.” The post observes that Law is not meant to be merely punitive — if the law binds the foreigner, the same law also shields the foreigner.
Pip: Equal protection as a theological claim, not just a civic one.
Mara: Philippians 3:20 puts it plainly: “Our citizenship is in heaven.” The post on Jubilee and kingdom identity traces how that reorientation was built into the Mosaic law from the start — the Jubilee instructions in Leviticus 25 remind Israel they are temporary dwellers – tenants, not owners, because “the land is mine,” says the Lord.
Pip: And the post on the New Testament theme of embracing citizenship in heaven makes it personal — through the story of a woman who grew up a Christian minority in India, felt the sting of foreignness again as an immigrant in the United States, and found in that double displacement a clarifying gift.
Mara: Her experience reframes minority status not as a problem to solve but as the natural condition of anyone whose primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world. The danger, as that post frames it, is belonging too comfortably to any earthly nation.
Pip: That’s the tension that keeps appearing in Scripture — and the neighbor question is where it gets practical.
The Boundary That Keeps Moving
Mara: The post on insider logic opens with the backstory to the Good Samaritan. Second Temple Jews read “love your neighbor as yourself” as applying to fellow Hebrews — the qualifying phrase “among your people” in Leviticus 19:18 gave them cover.
Pip: Sixteen verses later, the same chapter extends the same love to foreigners. They just stopped reading.
Mara: Jesus removes any remaining ambiguity in Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies.” The post calls this the perfection of love — a progression that starts with self and family, moves outward to neighbors and strangers, and doesn’t stop until it reaches enemies.
Pip: Our natural inclination is to draw the circle tight. The Bible keeps redrawing it larger.
Mara: And that’s the throughline across everything here — from David in the wilderness to Ruth in the fields to the command to love without limit. The question isn’t whether God cares about the foreigner. The question is whether we’re reading closely enough to notice.
Pip: Displacement, identity, the boundary of neighbor love — these aren’t separate topics. They’re the same argument made from every angle of Scripture.
Mara: And the posts keep returning to the same pressure point: how we treat the vulnerable stranger is a litmus test for who we actually think we are before God. This theme runs throughout the Bible, from Adam and Eve to Revelation.
Pip: More to come from Navigating by Faith — next time, we’ll see where the thread leads.
Navigating by Faith 