Have You Been Taught, Delighted, and Changed by Sacred Scripture?

THIS IS the book of the commandments of God, and the law that is forever. All that keep it shall come to life; but they that have forsaken it, to death.” ~ Baruch 4:1

According to Augustine in On Christian Doctrine 4.12, one skilled in speech should so speak as to teach, to delight, and to change the lazy. The speech of Sacred Scripture does these three things in the fullest manner. For it firmly teaches with its eternal truth. Psalm 118.89: “Thy word, O Lord, stands firm for ever as heaven.” And it sweetly delights with its pleasantness. Psalm 118.103: “How sweet are Thy words to my mouth!” And it efficaciously changes with its authority. Jeremiah 23.29: “Are not my words as a fire, saith the Lord?”

Therefore in the text above Sacred Scripture is commended for three things. First, for the authority with which it changes: “This is the book of the commandments of God.” Second, for the eternal truth with which it instructs, when it says, “and the law that is forever.” Third, for the usefulness with which it entices, when it says, “All that keep it shall come to life.”

The authority of this Scripture is shown in three things. First, its origin, because God is its origin. Hence it says, “the commandments of God.” Baruch 3:37: “He found out all the way of knowledge.” Hebrews 2:3: “For it was first announced by the Lord and was confirmed unto us.” Such an author is infallibly to be believed, both on account of the condition of His nature, because He is truth; John 14:4: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” And on account of His fullness of knowledge; Romans 11:33: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God!” And also on account of the power of the words; Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and efficient and keener than any two-edged sword.”

Second, it is shown to be efficacious by the necessity with which it is imposed. Mark 16:16: “He who does not believe shall be condemned.” The truth of Sacred Scripture is proposed in the manner of a precept, hence the text says, “the commandments of God.” These commandments direct the intellect through faith: “You believe in God, believe also in me,” John 14:1; inform the affections with love: “This is my commandment, that you love one another,” John 15:12; and induce to action: “Do this and you shall live,” Luke 10:28.

Third, it is shown to be efficacious by the uniformity of its sayings, because all who teach the sacred doctrine teach the same thing. 1 Corinthians 15:11: “Whether then it is I or they, so we preach, and so you have believed.” And this is necessary because they all had one teacher. Matthew 23:8: “Your teacher is one.” And they had one spirit, “Have we not walked in the same spirit?” and one love from above, “Now the multitude of believers were of one heart and one soul” (Acts 4:32). Therefore, as a sign of the uniformity of doctrine, it says significantly, “This is the book.”

The truth of this teaching of Scripture is immutable and eternal, hence the words, “and the law that is for ever.” Luke 21:33: “Heaven and earth will pass away but my words shall not pass away.” This law will endure for ever because of three things: First, because of the power of the lawgiver. Isaiah 14:27: “For the Lord of hosts hath decreed, and who can disannul it.” Second, on account of His immutability. Malachi 3:6: “For I am the Lord and I change not”; Numbers 23:19: “God is not a man, that He should lie; nor like the son of man, that He should be changed.” Third, because of the truth of the law. Psalm 118:86: “All Thy commandments are faithful.” Proverbs 12:19: “The lip of truth shall be steadfast forever.” 3 Ezra 4:38: “Truth remains and gathers strength eternally.”

The usefulness of this Scripture is the greatest: “I am the Lord thy God that teach thee profitable things.” Hence our text continues: “All that keep it shall come to life.” Which indeed is threefold: First it is the life of grace, to which Sacred Scripture disposes. John 6:64: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For through this life the spirit lives in God. Galatians 2:20: “It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.” Second is the life of justice consisting in works, to which Sacred Scripture directs. Psalm 118:93: “Thy decrees I will never forget, for by them thou hast given me life.” Third is the life of glory which Sacred Scripture promises and to which it leads. John 6:69: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast words of everlasting life.” John 20:31: “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”

~St. Thomas Aquinas, “Commendation of and Division of Sacred Scripture”

Anno Domini 2019, October 23
Feast of St. James the Apostle, Brother of Our Lord

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What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 31, 2026

"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026

"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

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