PART 1
How such Good News and still a possibility of a horrible destiny?
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Friday, December 27, 2019
Diana West's Must Read On Christianity and Communism and the Historical Roots of Our Current Great Political Divide
, Commentary @ The Epoch Times
CHRISTIANITY TODAY, THE MAGAZINE FOUNDED BY BILLY GRAHAM IN 1956, has called, in this week before Christmas, for President Donald Trump’s removal from office.
Franklin Graham quickly released a statement on Twitter in reply: “I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CYMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”
It is a beautiful statement; however, I never for a moment doubted that Billy Graham voted for President Trump. Graham’s vote for Trump was a given for important reasons and deep beliefs, which, independent of any election, are explored in “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”
The relevant chapter, reprinted below minus endnotes, follows an extensive analysis of James Comey’s lifelong homage to Marxist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the significant influence on his thinking, starting in his college days, when Comey describes himself as having been a communist. Comey moved to “whatever I am now,” as he put it to New York Magazine in 2003, but his affinity for Niebuhr remains unchanged to this day.
It should become clear that we are looking at a theological and political divide in American Protestantism that is an old story. What is especially relevant to the “red thread” is that so, too, is Donald Trump’s place in it.
Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham both were Trump family favorites. Donald Trump has spoken fondly of taking in Graham sermons with his revered father, Fred, who, Donald remembers, attended “the crusades” at Yankee Stadium. On the 2016 campaign trail at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971, Donald Trump recalled watching Jerry Falwell’s TV show, The Old-Time Gospel Hour. When Billy Graham died in 2018, Donald Trump attended his funeral; five living former presidents did not.
According to the New York Times, it was Peale’s church, Marble Collegiate, that the Trump family “gravitated to” in the 1960s. Peale and Donald would develop a warm friendship. Peale officiated at Donald and Ivana’s wedding (1977) and also at the wedding of Donald’s sister Maryanne. In 1988, Donald hosted Peale’s 90th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria. As the Washington Post put it, “The Trump and Peale clans have [a] history.”
It’s easy to imagine heavy Niebuhrian eye-rolling over this “history,” and not a little choking on the Chardonnay and canapés. Back in the day, things could even get confrontational, as in 1955, when Niebuhr and several fellow “progressives”-of-the-cloth launched a vicious attack in a national magazine on Peale and Graham both. Their attack drew a public rebuke from President Eisenhower’s pastor, the Rev. Edward L.R. Elson, who accused these pastoral critics “of ‘sneering’ and shallow thinking,” according to a news report.
Their differences were not theological only. In August 1948, Niebuhr was counseling Christians that the churches could not take a “negative attitude” toward communism. “Churches everywhere,” Niebuhr stated, “had to recognize our involvement in injustices and insecurities Communism seeks or promises to cure.” In January 1951, Peale was carrying a very different message to the faithful: “The future belongs to Christ not Communism.” These were Cold War battle cries across the pro-Communist/anti-Communist divide.
Trump’s connection to Peale, then, not only informs the Comey-Niebuhr/Trump-Peale divide, but also throws into relief the larger national cleavage between Global Elites and the America First “Deplorables.” This is another old war in America—the “internationalists” vs. the nationstaters; the “progressives” vs. the patriots; the socialistic vs. the nationalistic. Now that Donald Trump is president, the first to reach this highest office from the ranks of “America First,” this clash may never have been so highly charged.
For much of the 20th century, Norman Vincent Peale was the nationally renowned pastor of Marble Collegiate in Manhattan. In addition to uplifting, spellbinding sermons, Peale was known for being outspoken in his opposition to all varieties of collectivism, from the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he sermonized against as a dire threat to liberty, to Soviet communism.
“No one has more contempt for communism than I do,” he wrote in his 1952 mega-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking. In the late 1930s, he fought against the explosion of executive powers that undergirded Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” serving as secretary of a non-partisan group called the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government. This committee came together under newspaper editor Frank E. Gannett to oppose Roosevelt’s infamous Supreme Court packing plan and other executive branch encroachments that were destroying the Constitution’s “checks and balances.” The same concerns drove opposition to FDR’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, and the president’s landmark foreign aid proposal known as Lend Lease, which arrived as a bill in Congress at the beginning of 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor.
In most histories, Lend Lease is a barely noticed stepping-stone to America’s entry into World War II; at the time, however, the debate was loud and acrimonious. The vast war-making powers the bill gave the president galvanized its opponents in a quickly growing, grass-roots movement known as America First. Caricatured today, this anti-interventionist organization drew in a wide swath of Americans from both political parties, from all walks of life, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Gerald Ford to Kingman Brewster to Norman Thomas to Charles Lindbergh. Their main agenda was (1) steer clear of another European war and thereby save young American lives, (2) avoid building up one totalitarian monster (Stalin) to replace another (Hitler), and (3) ensure the government’s three branches survived the process “co-equal.” They failed on all counts.
Peale, as secretary of the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, strongly opposed Lend Lease on well-defined constitutional grounds. Lend Lease expanded presidential powers to a point where the chief executive could send military support of any kind to any country he deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.” There were no limits. No president had ever even sought such powers. But there was even more to Lend Lease than that—and here is where the red thread pokes up and down like a hem-stitch through the rest of the “American century.”
Lend Lease was not just anti-Constitutional; it was revolutionary. This will not surprise anyone who learns that the legislation’s godfathers were Armand Hammer, Harry Hopkins, and Harry Dexter White—all three men pro-Soviet to the core, all three men variously believed to be Soviet agents, although such shocking revelations came later. We may now regard Lend Lease as the founding document of the “new world order” that arose in the aftermath of World War II, its heaviest cornerstones laid by covert Soviet agents Alger Hiss at the United Nations and Harry Dexter White at the International Monetary Fund.
The sea change came in making “any country’s defense vital” to our own. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius wrote:
Norman Vincent Peale correctly warned that Lend Lease would give the president “the power to commit the American people to any war anywhere, and without action by Congress.” Lend Lease itself may have expired but its powers have lived on in an unconstrained Executive. Such “interdependence” is the basis of the “liberal postwar order,” and the “neoconservative” mission we have known in our time as “nation-building.”
What was once controversial draws little comment today. When a President of the United States declares the destinies of foreign peoples to be “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (FDR), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama), he is merely carrying out the “internationalism,” or “globalism” that has been the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy since FDR.
READ THE REST OF THIS BRILLIANT PIECE @ The Epoch Times and see again how deep and prolonged our current divide really is and how perfectly Trump fits in.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY, THE MAGAZINE FOUNDED BY BILLY GRAHAM IN 1956, has called, in this week before Christmas, for President Donald Trump’s removal from office.
Franklin Graham quickly released a statement on Twitter in reply: “I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CYMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”
Amen.I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CTMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 20, 2019
It is a beautiful statement; however, I never for a moment doubted that Billy Graham voted for President Trump. Graham’s vote for Trump was a given for important reasons and deep beliefs, which, independent of any election, are explored in “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”
The relevant chapter, reprinted below minus endnotes, follows an extensive analysis of James Comey’s lifelong homage to Marxist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the significant influence on his thinking, starting in his college days, when Comey describes himself as having been a communist. Comey moved to “whatever I am now,” as he put it to New York Magazine in 2003, but his affinity for Niebuhr remains unchanged to this day.
Chapter 16. The Longest War
It was the 1980s, and Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority organization were the perfect foils for James Comey to use in his senior honors thesis to extol the socialist teachings of his hero, Niebuhr (1892-1971). In a previous generation, Comey might have juxtaposed the evangelizing Billy Graham (1918-2018) with Niebuhr’s Bible-as-myth approach to “social action.” Earlier still, Comey might have compared the anti-New Deal, anti-Communist Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) with the socialist and “anti-anti-Communist” Niebuhr.It should become clear that we are looking at a theological and political divide in American Protestantism that is an old story. What is especially relevant to the “red thread” is that so, too, is Donald Trump’s place in it.
Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham both were Trump family favorites. Donald Trump has spoken fondly of taking in Graham sermons with his revered father, Fred, who, Donald remembers, attended “the crusades” at Yankee Stadium. On the 2016 campaign trail at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971, Donald Trump recalled watching Jerry Falwell’s TV show, The Old-Time Gospel Hour. When Billy Graham died in 2018, Donald Trump attended his funeral; five living former presidents did not.
According to the New York Times, it was Peale’s church, Marble Collegiate, that the Trump family “gravitated to” in the 1960s. Peale and Donald would develop a warm friendship. Peale officiated at Donald and Ivana’s wedding (1977) and also at the wedding of Donald’s sister Maryanne. In 1988, Donald hosted Peale’s 90th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria. As the Washington Post put it, “The Trump and Peale clans have [a] history.”
It’s easy to imagine heavy Niebuhrian eye-rolling over this “history,” and not a little choking on the Chardonnay and canapés. Back in the day, things could even get confrontational, as in 1955, when Niebuhr and several fellow “progressives”-of-the-cloth launched a vicious attack in a national magazine on Peale and Graham both. Their attack drew a public rebuke from President Eisenhower’s pastor, the Rev. Edward L.R. Elson, who accused these pastoral critics “of ‘sneering’ and shallow thinking,” according to a news report.
Their differences were not theological only. In August 1948, Niebuhr was counseling Christians that the churches could not take a “negative attitude” toward communism. “Churches everywhere,” Niebuhr stated, “had to recognize our involvement in injustices and insecurities Communism seeks or promises to cure.” In January 1951, Peale was carrying a very different message to the faithful: “The future belongs to Christ not Communism.” These were Cold War battle cries across the pro-Communist/anti-Communist divide.
Trump’s connection to Peale, then, not only informs the Comey-Niebuhr/Trump-Peale divide, but also throws into relief the larger national cleavage between Global Elites and the America First “Deplorables.” This is another old war in America—the “internationalists” vs. the nationstaters; the “progressives” vs. the patriots; the socialistic vs. the nationalistic. Now that Donald Trump is president, the first to reach this highest office from the ranks of “America First,” this clash may never have been so highly charged.
For much of the 20th century, Norman Vincent Peale was the nationally renowned pastor of Marble Collegiate in Manhattan. In addition to uplifting, spellbinding sermons, Peale was known for being outspoken in his opposition to all varieties of collectivism, from the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he sermonized against as a dire threat to liberty, to Soviet communism.
“No one has more contempt for communism than I do,” he wrote in his 1952 mega-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking. In the late 1930s, he fought against the explosion of executive powers that undergirded Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” serving as secretary of a non-partisan group called the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government. This committee came together under newspaper editor Frank E. Gannett to oppose Roosevelt’s infamous Supreme Court packing plan and other executive branch encroachments that were destroying the Constitution’s “checks and balances.” The same concerns drove opposition to FDR’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, and the president’s landmark foreign aid proposal known as Lend Lease, which arrived as a bill in Congress at the beginning of 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor.
In most histories, Lend Lease is a barely noticed stepping-stone to America’s entry into World War II; at the time, however, the debate was loud and acrimonious. The vast war-making powers the bill gave the president galvanized its opponents in a quickly growing, grass-roots movement known as America First. Caricatured today, this anti-interventionist organization drew in a wide swath of Americans from both political parties, from all walks of life, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Gerald Ford to Kingman Brewster to Norman Thomas to Charles Lindbergh. Their main agenda was (1) steer clear of another European war and thereby save young American lives, (2) avoid building up one totalitarian monster (Stalin) to replace another (Hitler), and (3) ensure the government’s three branches survived the process “co-equal.” They failed on all counts.
Peale, as secretary of the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, strongly opposed Lend Lease on well-defined constitutional grounds. Lend Lease expanded presidential powers to a point where the chief executive could send military support of any kind to any country he deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.” There were no limits. No president had ever even sought such powers. But there was even more to Lend Lease than that—and here is where the red thread pokes up and down like a hem-stitch through the rest of the “American century.”
Lend Lease was not just anti-Constitutional; it was revolutionary. This will not surprise anyone who learns that the legislation’s godfathers were Armand Hammer, Harry Hopkins, and Harry Dexter White—all three men pro-Soviet to the core, all three men variously believed to be Soviet agents, although such shocking revelations came later. We may now regard Lend Lease as the founding document of the “new world order” that arose in the aftermath of World War II, its heaviest cornerstones laid by covert Soviet agents Alger Hiss at the United Nations and Harry Dexter White at the International Monetary Fund.
The sea change came in making “any country’s defense vital” to our own. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius wrote:
To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world … [emphasis added].We did indeed adopt the Lend-Lease bill with those words (notwithstanding that a major recipient of Lend Lease was the Soviet Union—definitely not a “freedom-loving nation”). This makes March 11, 1941, the day the Lend-Lease bill passed, America’s Interdependence Day.
Norman Vincent Peale correctly warned that Lend Lease would give the president “the power to commit the American people to any war anywhere, and without action by Congress.” Lend Lease itself may have expired but its powers have lived on in an unconstrained Executive. Such “interdependence” is the basis of the “liberal postwar order,” and the “neoconservative” mission we have known in our time as “nation-building.”
What was once controversial draws little comment today. When a President of the United States declares the destinies of foreign peoples to be “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (FDR), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama), he is merely carrying out the “internationalism,” or “globalism” that has been the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy since FDR.
READ THE REST OF THIS BRILLIANT PIECE @ The Epoch Times and see again how deep and prolonged our current divide really is and how perfectly Trump fits in.
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Merry Christmas! The Good News In One Christmas Song With Kenny and Wynonna
IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS. Let him who has ears, hear.
Monday, December 23, 2019
Prime Minister Boris Johnson Salutes the Jews of Britain and Beyond
WHAT A WONDERFUL SALUTE. Yes, yes, I know it's for Hannaukah. But really, it's so much more.
Stuart Scheidermann
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Advent 3: That We May Believe
DON SURBER UPDATE: TRUTH ABOUT THE CHRISTIANITY TODAY ANTI TRUMP EDITORIAL
A WONDERFUL MESSAGE OF HOPE AMID ALL THE DISTRACTIONS AND FAKE CRAZINESS
.
You can read every fairy tale that was ever written, every mystery thriller, every ghost story, and you will never find anything so shocking, so strange, so weird and spellbinding as the story of the incarnation of the Son of God.
How dead we are! How callous and unfeeling to your glory and your story, O God! How often have I had to repent and say, “God, I am sorry that the stories men have made up stir my emotions, my awe and wonder and admiration and joy, more than your own true story.”
Perhaps the galactic movie thrillers of our day can do at least this good for us: they can humble us and bring us to repentance, by showing us that we really are capable of some of the wonder and awe and amazement that we so seldom feel when we contemplate the eternal God and the cosmic glory of Christ and a real living contact between them and us in Jesus of Nazareth.
When Jesus said, “For this purpose I have come into the world” (John 18:37), he said something as crazy and weird and strange and eerie as any statement in science fiction that you have ever read.
Oh, how I pray for a breaking forth of the Spirit of God upon me and upon you; for the Holy Spirit to break into my experience in a frightening way, to wake me up to the unimaginable reality of God.
One of these days lightning is going to fill the sky from the rising of the sun to its setting, and there is going to appear in the clouds the Son of Man with his mighty angels in flaming fire. And we will see him clearly. And whether from terror or sheer excitement, we will tremble and we will wonder how we ever lived so long with such a domesticated, harmless Christ.
These things are written — the whole Bible is written — that we might believe — that we might be stunned and awakened to the wonder — that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came into the world.
A WONDERFUL MESSAGE OF HOPE AMID ALL THE DISTRACTIONS AND FAKE CRAZINESS
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples,
which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you
may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by
believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30–31)
I feel so strongly that among those of us who have grown up in church
and who can recite the great doctrines of our faith in our sleep, and
yet who can yawn through the Apostles’ Creed — that among us something
must be done to help us once more feel the awe, the fear, the
astonishment, the wonder of the Son of God, begotten by the Father from
all eternity, reflecting all the glory of God, being the very image of
his person, through whom all things were created, upholding the universe
by the word of his power.
You can read every fairy tale that was ever written, every mystery thriller, every ghost story, and you will never find anything so shocking, so strange, so weird and spellbinding as the story of the incarnation of the Son of God.
How dead we are! How callous and unfeeling to your glory and your story, O God! How often have I had to repent and say, “God, I am sorry that the stories men have made up stir my emotions, my awe and wonder and admiration and joy, more than your own true story.”
Perhaps the galactic movie thrillers of our day can do at least this good for us: they can humble us and bring us to repentance, by showing us that we really are capable of some of the wonder and awe and amazement that we so seldom feel when we contemplate the eternal God and the cosmic glory of Christ and a real living contact between them and us in Jesus of Nazareth.
When Jesus said, “For this purpose I have come into the world” (John 18:37), he said something as crazy and weird and strange and eerie as any statement in science fiction that you have ever read.
Oh, how I pray for a breaking forth of the Spirit of God upon me and upon you; for the Holy Spirit to break into my experience in a frightening way, to wake me up to the unimaginable reality of God.
One of these days lightning is going to fill the sky from the rising of the sun to its setting, and there is going to appear in the clouds the Son of Man with his mighty angels in flaming fire. And we will see him clearly. And whether from terror or sheer excitement, we will tremble and we will wonder how we ever lived so long with such a domesticated, harmless Christ.
These things are written — the whole Bible is written — that we might believe — that we might be stunned and awakened to the wonder — that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came into the world.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Men Free Locked Bucks With Chainsaw
VIA VANDERLEUN, this video made my day.
Actually, in the course of rutting season, this happens more than I realized. My loggers said last year said they found two bucks locked, dead locked, in a pond on their farm.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Advent's Greatest Meditation: The Magnificat of Mary
My soul magnifies the Lord
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid;
For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is His name;
And His mercy is from generation to generation
on those who fear Him.
He has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.
He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of His mercy
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.
---Luke 1:46-55
The Magnificat is wonderful material for meditation on the Visitation, when the angel Gabriel informs Mary that she is to be the Mother of God, and tells her of her relative Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist.
After Mary gives her famous consent to becoming the Mother of God, -- “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38) -- she goes “with haste” (1:39) to help Elizabeth, who is delighted to see her. Mary then expresses her joy in the Magnificat.
Mary's joy can be our joy at Advent as we contemplate the birth of a promised and long-awaited Savior for mankind.
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid;
For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is His name;
And His mercy is from generation to generation
on those who fear Him.
He has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.
He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of His mercy
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.
---Luke 1:46-55
The Magnificat is wonderful material for meditation on the Visitation, when the angel Gabriel informs Mary that she is to be the Mother of God, and tells her of her relative Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist.
After Mary gives her famous consent to becoming the Mother of God, -- “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38) -- she goes “with haste” (1:39) to help Elizabeth, who is delighted to see her. Mary then expresses her joy in the Magnificat.
Mary's joy can be our joy at Advent as we contemplate the birth of a promised and long-awaited Savior for mankind.
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Monday, December 9, 2019
Second Week Advent--How Does Humility Lead in Conflict, Why Godly Conviction Is Not Arrogance
THIS HALF HOUR TALK BY PASTOR JOHN PIPER is well worth listening to. Maybe several times. It's the reality of the Gospel for those who follow Jesus Christ and are not afraid of joining in the sufferings and challenges of the Savior.
Humility serves OBJECTIVE, UNSHAKABLE reality. May we all submit to it humbly and proclaim it.
Humility is truly a gift and receives everything as a gift as a fruit of the Holy Spirit and the Gospel.
Monday, December 2, 2019
First Sunday Advent---Mary's Magnificent God
LISTEN
And where is God? Occupying himself with two obscure, humble women — one old and barren (Elizabeth), one young and a virgin (Mary). And Mary is so moved by this vision of God, the lover of the lowly, that she breaks out in song — a song that has come to be known as “The Magnificat.”
Mary and Elizabeth are wonderful heroines in Luke’s account. He loves the faith of these women. The thing that impresses him most, it appears, and the thing he wants to impress on Theophilus, his noble reader of his Gospel, is the lowliness and cheerful humility of Elizabeth and Mary as they submit to their magnificent God.
Elizabeth says (Luke 1:43), “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And Mary says (Luke 1:48), “He has looked on the humble estate of his servant.”
The only people whose soul can truly magnify the Lord are people like Elizabeth and Mary — people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.” (Luke 1:46–55)Mary sees clearly a most remarkable thing about God: He is about to change the course of all human history; the most important three decades in all of time are about to begin.
And where is God? Occupying himself with two obscure, humble women — one old and barren (Elizabeth), one young and a virgin (Mary). And Mary is so moved by this vision of God, the lover of the lowly, that she breaks out in song — a song that has come to be known as “The Magnificat.”
Mary and Elizabeth are wonderful heroines in Luke’s account. He loves the faith of these women. The thing that impresses him most, it appears, and the thing he wants to impress on Theophilus, his noble reader of his Gospel, is the lowliness and cheerful humility of Elizabeth and Mary as they submit to their magnificent God.
Elizabeth says (Luke 1:43), “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And Mary says (Luke 1:48), “He has looked on the humble estate of his servant.”
The only people whose soul can truly magnify the Lord are people like Elizabeth and Mary — people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God