One More Thought

"Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me; and to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show the salvation" (Psalm 50:23) God speaks through this psalm. The speech is about salvation and condemnation. He began by declaring the arrival of his words. The declaration is made on high and low, to all his creature, and to judge. The speech first set right the relation with Man, which is that of a judge indifferent to Man's offering and sacrifice. He is judge, and he judges, based on Man's offering of thanks to him, and action to others.  In accepting this speech, one accepts that God will judge, deciding on saving or condemning a person. The lacunae here is what if a person gives thanks to God for having the chance to slaughter his neighbour? As ratio ultima , God can continue to expose the malice in this person, and stop listening, instead of stop talking. However, this does not deny the fact that the condemned believed in the relation between his salvation and his a...

Last night, until this morning, I was emotionally unrest. I spend all morning, since around 3 to 10:30 am, reading Dragon Ball. At first I just wanted to feel the thrill I had as a kid. Half way through this hours-long reading, I realise that time has passed, and that time passed was not just my teen age, but also an era for the world, a world of hope. I was lucky to witness that world, and I have the destiny to witness this world.  Witnessing, by imagination provoked by information delivered and unfiltered on social media, the demise of Hong Kong and the growing threat to Taiwan, is a test. Witness it as a IR research from Taiwan is even harder. One has to keep the distance to think and research, but that distance is somehow inhumane. It is, or should be, natural human instinct to feel sorry and anger when seeing the others' suffering. It is, or should be, natural human instinct to want to react, for ending the suffering of others. It seems, however, scholars should not do so. At ...

Psalm 50: 'These things hast thou done, and I kept silence [...] Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver'. The eternal question of the justice of God is why he keeps silence in face of evil. Hong Kong protesters had suffered this, while they started with songs singing hallelujah to the Lord. Gang rapes and secret execution in mass has torn their heart into pieces. And they are not alone in unanswered persecutions in the world. Where is God, all ask all the time.  The Psalm speaks in God's voice to the sinners and the righteous. It is itself a 'preview' of the answer demanded. Interestingly, it comes in the form of a provocation. God provokingly asked the sinner: what about this?  Such a provocation did not even link the sinners to their victims. It separates sinners from the righteous. Victims has no clear place. But sinners do. Through the provocation, God declared already his judgment. Tearing the sinners to p...

Psalm 49: 'But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave; for he shall receive me'. Wealth redeems not. God does. The psalm announces the authority of God over Death. The ultimate forces. Interestingly their realms seems to have only the grave as border. Death takes all alive, to grave. God takes from Grave. We the living face only Death, or nothing. In this sense, wealth is enjoyable only when we face nothing. The pleasure of wealth belongs to those under the illusion of eternal life. Yet it started with God taking one from the grave. In this sense, one does not know eternal life unless seeing death. Eternal, therefore, does not reach to the past, and eternal life actually means not really temporal unlimitedness, but the overcoming of Death.  The realisation of the meaningless of wealth, or the might of Death, renders sorrow to all that lives. The joy in God is therefore not so much joy, but the power that sustains us through this life, with an understanding of the s...

Psalm 47: 'For the Lord most high is terrible, he is a great King over all the earth'. Two psalms successively chant the grandeur of God. He rules over All-under-Heaven. As the proclamation of right lays the foundation for conflict, the Chinese belief in the Son-of-Heaven as the rightful ruler over the whole ecumene could not perform what the invisible God could do. Invisibility protect the potential yet to be revealed in the future, and in return requires faith in the invisible lord. This is the logic that sustains the faith of the believers, in the darkest hours, and the most testing times. To subdue a community founded on such faith, the authority of this Earth would have to continue convincing the believers that the invisible one does not exist, by staying invisible. That is the meaning of persecution, a provocation to the invisible one, as 'I dare you to show yourself'. The prosecution address not the prosecuted, but the savior of the prosecuted. In this sense, dic...

Psalm 46 'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.' The secrecy of Christian life is in its name: one live such life only when one remembers Christ. Christ therefore binds our selves with him. In this sense, one allows Christ to put the yoke on oneself. To refuse or evade such yoke, which one is free to do, is to stop being Christian. Once on accept Christ, meaning his yoke, one finds comfort in promises such as this: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. This reverse in state of being still amaze me. A maze amazes. Reversion is the basic structural principle of maze. That which cannot reverse does not amaze. Although it does lead to the next point.