Engaging The Powers The Christian Life As Spiritual Warfare

For this reason, “truth,” “righteousness,” “the gospel of peace,” “salvation” and “the word of God” are all portrayed as various aspects of “the whole armor of God” used by the Christian to ward off demonic attacks (Eph 6:14-17). Moreover, faith itself is portrayed as a “shield” by which we “quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one” (6:16).41 With all this armor, Christians are to “stand firm” and to “keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints” (6:13-14, 18). The first charge (histemi) is to “hold your ground against” an assailing force,42 while the second is to be ever watchful of an ever present enemy. The battle motif here is thick, and this is not some rare battle Paul is talking about. He is talking about the whole of the Christian life.

Finally, while Paul does not specifically mention prayer as part of the Christian’s “armor,” in this context it is most certainly seen as a warfare strategy, just as it was in the teaching of Jesus. Immediately after mentioning “the word of God” as “the sword of the Spirit” Paul adds, “Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication” (6:18). As if this were not enough, he adds further, “To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.” The injunction to “keep alert” while we pray is yet another clear indication that prayer is here portrayed as something a soldier does. It is, in short, an act of war.43

The same theme is found elsewhere. Using similar terminology, Paul reminds the Thessalonians to put on “the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (1 Thess 5:8), for they are “children of light and children of the day” and “are not of the night or of the darkness” (5:5). Paul tells the Roman Christians to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom 13:12), the Ephesians to “take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them . . . by the light” (Eph 5:11, 13), and the Corinthians not to participate in evil, for “what fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar?” (2 Cor 6:14-15).44

Paul’s language of “light” and “darkness” in these three passages is reminiscent not only of John but also of the Qumran community, which (in good apocalyptic fashion) perceived the entire world as caught up in a cosmic struggle between light and darkness.45 Paul’s use of this terminology, then, as well as his explicit identification of darkness with Belial and his further reference to military armor, are more indications of just how thoroughly his view of the Christian life was colored by the warfare motif.

Reflecting the same outlook, Paul tells Timothy to “share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus” and reminds him that “no one serving in the army gets entangled in everyday affairs; the soldier’s aim is to please the enlisting officer” (2 Tim 2:3-4). So too he refers, quite incidentally, to Epaphroditus and to Archippus as “fellow soldier” (Phil 2:25; Philem 2; cf. 1 Cor 9:7).

Thus the Christian life is for Paul a life of spiritual military service. It is about being a good soldier (2 Tim 2:4), about “fighting the good fight” (1 Tim 1:18; 6:12), about “waging war” (2 Cor 10:3), and about “struggling” with a cosmic enemy (Eph 6:12). Given his view of the everpresent reality of Satan and his kingdom, and given his understanding of what Christ was about and what the church is supposed to be about, it is hard to see how he could have viewed the Christian life differently.46

At the very least, it should be evident that any perspective which would construe the spiritual warfare motif as being incidental to the New Testament is seriously mistaken. Whether the motivation be to minimize the “mythological” elements of the New Testament or to maximize the classical-philosophical model of the sovereignty of God by downplaying indications of a genuine and pervasive battle, the attempt to sidestep the centrality of the warfare motif fails. As was the case with the life and teachings of Jesus, God’s conflict and victory over Satan lies at the heart of the proclamation that the early Christians brought to the world.

The reality of the battle. The ongoing war that the early Christians understood they still had to participate in constituted the only “problem of evil” they knew or cared about. It was the problem of living out the kingdom of God in a world under siege from the kingdom of Satan. It was not an intellectual problem but an existential and spiritual problem. It was a problem to resolve by spiritual activism, not by intellectual contemplation and pious resignation.

These authors never pondered “why bad things happen to good people,” for they lived with a warfare worldview that expected bad things to happen to good people. If the world is as thoroughly saturated with evil forces as they envisaged, then nightmarish suffering would not come as a great surprise. They understood (because Jesus taught) that, if the Lord of all creation suffered at the hands of these evil forces, they could hardly expect to fare better (Jn 15:20-21; cf. 1 Cor 2:8). The New Testament tells “good people” to expect bad things!

We must once again note that all of this presupposes that the war between God and Satan, the war in which humanity itself is centrally caught up, is a very real war. That is, it presupposes, at the very least, that God genuinely has to fight Satan. To suggest, as the classical-philosophical tradition tends to argue, that the forces of evil always play into the hand of God, that God is secretly in control of the activity of Satan and demons, and thus that these evil forces always end up carrying out God’s sovereign purposes is to undermine completely the reality of this war and render wholly unintelligible the driving motif of the entire New Testament. What is more, it is to generate an unsolvable problem, for now we cannot rationally avoid the heinous conclusion that God is ultimately responsible for what Satan, his demons and evil people do.

But how do these rebel creatures get their power to rebel? And if God does not control them, what guarantee is there that God shall ultimately defeat them? We have hovered around the New Testament’s answer to this question several times in the last few chapters, but we do well to conclude this study by examining in more detail what the New Testament says regarding the origin and ultimate demise of Satan and his rebel kingdom.

The catastrophic fall. From what has been said, one cannot deny that the warfare motif of the New Testament presupposes a dualistic worldview of sorts. At the very least, there is clearly a God/non-God duality of power. In other words, significant powers exist with some measure of autonomy over against God, with whom God must therefore work or against whom God must genuinely fight.

But this dualism, as intense as it is, never crosses over into metaphysical dualism in the New Testament. That is, never does the New Testament come close to affirming that the forces that oppose God are metaphysically ultimate, such as later Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism affirmed. Rather, the powers that oppose God are uniformly understood to be created by God. They are not eternal, and they are not infinite. Hence while they can and do genuinely oppose God and wreak destruction throughout his cosmos, they never pose a threat of overthrowing God. But if the cosmic powers were all created by God, and if God is perfectly good, how is it that these created powers now are evil? Unlike much of the apocalyptic literature of their day, the New Testament authors never offer extravagant speculations to answer this question. Indeed, these authors reflect almost no concern about this question at all. In my view, their relative silence on this matter is not due to their thinking that an answer to this question was irrelevant, or to their thinking that there was no answer. Rather, it is due to the fact that they considered the answer to this question obvious.

While the apocalyptic literature offers no agreed upon answer to when and why evil forces “fell,” all the apocalyptic authors who deal with the issue agree that the evil forces did fall. These powers chose to rebel against their Creator and to throw off his plans and his lordship.47 The Old Testament view that sin is the result of free decisions of human beings to rebel against their Creator is applied to cosmic beings to explain their sinfulness. Indeed, as we have seen, the Old Testament itself occasionally approaches this insight (Gen 6:1-4; Ps 82; Is 14:12-14; Ezek 28:1-19; cf. chapter five). Like human beings, cosmic beings are free; thus for these authors, the sinfulness of cosmic beings is in principle no more inexplicable than is human sinfulness. For Jews who believed that God was both perfectly holy while also being the Creator of all that exists, it is hard to see how they could have reached any other conclusion.

This is, I submit, a fundamental assumption of the New Testament. The origin of evil among the cosmic powers is much like the origin of evil among human beings. Neither they nor their apocalyptic counterparts ever saw the need to explain freedom itself any further. For them, freedom itself was an “ultimate explanation.” These Jews possessed no metaphysical proclivity to investigate the matter further (even if such an investigation were metaphysically possible).48 They knew only that they and all humans were free to choose to obey or to disobey God, and that if they disobeyed God this was not God’s fault. They understood cosmic powers in the same fashion.

In the New Testament we therefore find no discourses on the freedom of cosmic powers, any more than we find discourses on the freedom of human beings. But we do find much that presupposes that humans are free, and some passages that presuppose that cosmic powers are free. For example, Jude 6 refers to “the angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling.” These, the author says, are now “kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great Day.” Then, Jude adds,

Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet in the same way these dreamers [viz., godless people] also defile the flesh, reject authority, and slander the glorious ones. (Jude 7-8)

It is impossible to determine whether Jude is tapping into some strand of the Watcher tradition—hence referring to the “fall” of Genesis 6—or whether he has some other angelic rebellion in mind. At the very least, his reference to these angels not keeping “their own position” and abandoning “their proper dwelling” suggests that he has in mind something like the Old Testament view of gods given authority over nations, or the apocalyptic conception of angels given charge over various aspects of nature.

In any event, what is important for us to note is that Jude assumes that the fall and punishment of these angels is directly parallel to the fall and punishment of sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah and with ungodly people in Jude’s own day. Like these latter examples, the angels freely rebelled against God and were morally responsible for their evil decisions. As we have seen a number of times, for ancient Jewish authors in general, things “in the heavenlies” were not seen as being all that different from things here on earth. Hence the freedom and moral responsibility that characterized humans were also seen as characterizing angels.

This same understanding is reflected in 2 Peter 2. Here Peter is arguing that ungodly people (specifically, teachers of heresy) will certainly be punished, while godly people shall certainly be rescued from condemnation. To make this point he says:

For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell [Tartarus] and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment; and if he did not spare the ancient world . . . when he brought a flood on a world of the ungodly; . . . and if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction; . . . and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the lawless . . . then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. (2 Pet 2:4-9)

Again, we cannot say with any confidence what specific event Peter has in mind when he speaks of the condemnation of sinning angels. He may be tapping into the Watcher tradition, or perhaps he has in mind a precreation fall. In any case, this issue is irrelevant to the more fundamental point we are making: Peter reflects the New Testament assumption that angels can and do sin, just as people can and do sin; and angels, like people, are morally responsible for their sinning. They are therefore punished, just as rebellious people are. When they sin, in other words, they are not carrying out some preordained plan of God. Rather, they are rebelling against God’s preordained plan.

A similar conception lies behind Paul’s instruction to Timothy not to make a recent convert an overseer “or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim 3:6). The implication seems to be that conceit had something to do with the devil’s fall (perhaps recalling Is 14:13-14) and that those who become conceited as the devil did can fall into a similar condemnation.49 The willful fall of Satan and his angels is also assumed in Jesus’ teaching that those whom he does not know on the judgment day are “cursed” and will depart “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25:41). This passage not only assumes that Satan and his angels are, like people, morally responsible for their fall, but also, interestingly enough, that hell was intended for (“prepared for”) them, not for humans.

Thus hell is first and foremost the destiny of God’s cosmic enemies, not us. If humans go there, it is because they have willfully aligned themselves with the ones for whom it was prepared. As was the case in examining Christ’s work on the cross, we once again get the distinct impression that humans have been caught up in cosmic events that are far beyond the domain of human history. We are blessed or cursed by how we align ourselves in the fight between two cosmic kingdoms. We either share in Christ’s victory, or we share in Satan’s defeat. But we are, in either case, always only the secondary participants, never the main players.

Behind the whole conception is the understanding that these two kingdoms are divided for moral (not metaphysical) reasons. Their separation and their subsequent warring are not “in the eternal nature of things.” The war is not coeternal with God, nor was it created by God. Rather, it is the result of a catastrophic misuse of freedom given to Satan “and his angels.” Because it was a moral decision, Jesus is implying, it shall be punished. This is what hell is for.

The ultimate victory of God. From the perspective of the New Testament, there is no possibility that the enemies of God shall escape this destiny. God has ordained temporal parameters around the freedom of angelic and human creatures, just as God has ordained parameters around the scope of this freedom. Hence the ability of any within the angelic or human society of God’s creation to rebel freely against God shall someday come to an end. Apparently out of integrity for the gift of freedom he has given, God endures for a time the wrath of these destructive rebels. To do otherwise would undoubtedly render the gift of freedom disingenuous.50 While the gift of life God gives to those who choose him is eternal, the gift of freedom to choose against him is apparently not. Hence there shall come a time, Scripture declares, when God shall conclude this cosmic epoch by fully manifesting throughout his cosmos the victory that he has already won through his Son.

This declaration is at the same time a proclamation of heaven to the elect and a warning of hell to the reprobate. To those who have used their freedom to enter into a covenantal relationship with their Creator, the New Testament’s eschatology is rapturous joy. The nightmare of the war shall finally be over. Love shall finally reign throughout God’s creation. There shall be no more sin, no more pain, no more tears, hunger or death. The creation shall be all that God created it to be, all that he has fought for it to be, and all that he died for it to be. All who suffered life as a nightmare, such as the young Zosia, shall be vindicated. In a way we can scarcely begin to imagine, the sufferings of this nightmare, the Lord promises, will be dwarfed by the joy of creation’s fulfillment when he in all his love and glory shall reign (Rom 8:18-25; 2 Cor 4:17-18; 1 Pet 1:6-9).

But we must not think that God’s victory concerns only human welfare. To the contrary, as Christ’s work was cosmic before it was anthropological, so too the biblical proclamation of God’s ultimate victory concerns the cosmos as a whole before it centers on us. The whole creation now travails under the curse of the illegitimate tyrant who has seized it, and the whole creation shall ultimately benefit when this “god of the world” is toppled and creation is freed.

Hence when the Lord has finally destroyed this anticreation tyrannical Leviathan, he shall “restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21 NIV). When he finally vanquishes his cosmic nemesis Yamm, there shall be “no longer any sea” in the kingdom (Rev 21:1 NIV). In sharp contrast to the war that has been raging for eons, God shall at this time “gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10), so that his presence may fill “all in all” (Eph 1:23; cf. 4:10). Again, among the benefactors of this cosmic restoration are all those humans who have simply said “yes” to the gracious invitation to accept his love and fight on his side.

But what then is to become of those angelic hosts who have fought against God’s plan from the start, and of all those humans who have willingly been co-opted in this futile attempt at a cosmic mutiny? The manifestation of Christ’s victory shall at the same time be the manifestation of their defeat. When light shall be fully manifested, darkness must thereby be brought to nothing. When love shall reign universal, there shall be no longer any place among the living for hatred, apathy, greed, jealousy or any such disposition. When divine justice shall rule, all that is wrong, all that will not be reconciled, shall be punished. In short, when God’s presence and glory shall fill “all in all,” there simply shall be no place in the kingdom for anything or anyone that continues to resist him.

This is the central point of Scripture’s teaching on hell. Scripture’s teaching does not seek to satisfy some morbid curiosity we might have about the details of this “place” by giving us a literal snapshot of it, though many church fathers and leading figures in the church (e.g., Tertullian, Aquinas) unfortunately took at least some of the remarkably wide variety of graphic apocalyptic images literally. The point of the New Testament’s teaching is rather to express the certainty, universality, severity and finality of God’s victory over the evil one, and in the strongest possible terms to warn those of us who can yet do something about it that aligning with the evil one will have nightmarish consequences. In rejecting God, one is rejecting all that is love, life, joy, goodness and peace. How could existence without these be anything less than a nightmare? Indeed, as some of the images of damnation in Scripture make clear, it is a stretch even to call it “existence.”

One set of warnings in the Bible describes hell as almost the complete absence of being. For example, Scripture describes the fate of Satan, his legions and all those humans who have aligned themselves with him as being cast into a cosmic version of the dump outside Jerusalem in the valley of Hinnom (Gehenna).51 These are now unsalvageable broken vessels who do not and will not do what they were created to do. They are, therefore, total waste, refuse. Whereas they once had the possibility of sharing in God’s triune life throughout eternity, they are tragically now good for nothing, fit only for destruction.

All such rebels, therefore, shall be brought to nothing (Mt 10:28; Mk 1:24; 1 Cor 1:19; 3:17; 6:13; 15:24-26; 2 Thess 2:8; Phil 1:28; Heb 2:14; 10:39; Jas 4:12; 2 Pet 2:12; 3:10-11; Jude 10). Under the weight of God’s justice, they shall all “perish” (apollymi, Lk 13:3; Jn 3:16; 10:28; 1 Cor 1:18; 2 Cor 2:15; 4:3; Rom 2:12; 2 Thess 2:10; 2 Pet 3:9). They are like chaff that is burned up in a fire that cannot be quenched (Mt 3:12; 13:30; cf. Is 1:31). Similarly, in the light of God’s universal rule, Scripture declares that these rebels shall “be no more. . . . like smoke they vanish away. . . . the posterity of the wicked shall be cut off” (Ps 37:10, 20, 38). They “shall be as though they had never been” (Obad 16) and “like a dream when one awakes” (Ps 73:20).52

Along slightly different lines, having rejected the Author of life itself, these defeated rebels can now be compared to dead, rotting, worminfested corpses (Rom 6:21, 23; Jas 1:15; Is 66:24; Mk 9:48). From yet a slightly different angle, these raging rebels can be compared to people who are thrown out of the banquet, cast “into the outer darkness” (Mt 8:12; 22:13; 25:30).

The central point of all such graphic images is clear: there is no place for the wicked, angelic or human, in the kingdom of God. When the light and life of God’s triune love and life shines sovereignly over the whole of creation, all that is darkness, all that is against love and all that is against life must (to mix metaphors) be vanquished, extinguished, destroyed, burned up and relegated to the garbage dump “in the outer darkness.” Again, this is not said to satisfy all our questions about the “topography” or “temperature” of Gehenna (hell) but to warn all who can still change to do so if they need to. The message is: all enemies of God, angelic and human, shall certainly be defeated, they shall certainly be justly judged; and this judgment shall certainly be nightmarish for them. To describe it as endless fiery torment is not to exaggerate its terror (Rev 14:9-11; 20:10; cf. Mt 25:41, 46; Lk 16:24).53 In choosing against God, Satan and all who follow him are forever choosing against life and love. Nothing could possibly be worse.

The most fundamental point in the last five chapters is that the New Testament is thoroughly conditioned by a warfare worldview. In this view the whole of the cosmos is understood to be caught up in a fierce battle between two rival kingdoms. This view entails that the earth has, quite literally, become a fierce war zone and a desecrated battlefield.

In chapters six through eight we saw that Jesus entered this war zone to set up the rightful rule of God over against the illegitimate rule of Satan. Jesus’ healings, miracles, exorcisms, resurrection, as well as much of his teaching, make sense only as various aspects of a unified ministry within the context of this worldview.54 In chapter nine we saw that within this apocalyptic context the early church understood the central significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. The cross and resurrection were, above all else, the act by which God vanquished his archenemy. Our salvation is at once the liberating result of this conquest and one further means by which God is reclaiming the earth for his glory.

There are, however, still battles to fight. As we have seen in this present chapter, what has in principle been achieved has not yet in fact been manifested, for the fatally wounded kingdom of darkness still reigns upon the earth. Despite Christ’s victory, the New Testament continues to define the Christian life in warfare terms. The outcome of the war is settled, but there are still important battles to be fought. Fighting them is what the Christian life is all about. As Wingren puts it, “It is impossible for man in the days of . . . the Church, to have to do with God without at the same time, in some way, having to do with the Devil. These two . . . fill all existence.”55 The confidence and hope of the believer in all of this is that Christ has once and for all time vanquished the enemy, and that someday this victory over Satan and the cessation of all the evil that flows from him shall be perfectly manifested.

The warfare worldview and the problem of evil. The centrality of this warfare motif is the single most important observation to be made as one approaches “the problem of evil.” How one tries to resolve this problem depends entirely upon how one frames the problem. And how one frames the problem is decisively colored by the kind of world, the kind of God and the kind of evil that one thinks needs explaining. A young Jewish girl being tortured by a group of men means something completely different in a worldview in which it is believed that God’s will is always perfectly carried out than it does in a worldview in which it is believed that God’s will is often thwarted by evil cosmic forces.

It is all a matter of where one starts: do we start with a view of God as being at war with evil or with a view of God as controlling evil? Do we start with a view of the world as a hostage to an evil cosmic force or with a view of the world as one in which God’s will is perfectly carried out? Do we start with a view of evil as a hostile alien intrusion into God’s cosmos or with a view of evil as always and everywhere secretly fulfilling God’s sovereign, always beneficent, purposes?

The central thrust of this work has been to argue that if we model our approach to the problem of evil after the New Testament, we must in every instance opt for the former, not the latter, starting points. When we do this, we find that we are freed from ceaselessly inquiring into supposed divine reasons behind the world’s nightmares, and freed and empowered to rise up and combat these nightmarish features of existence as what God is unequivocally against. In other words, when we accept the warfare worldview of Scripture, the intellectual problem of evil is transformed into the practical problem of evil, just as it was in the New Testament.

In this worldview, the only “reason” why Zosia is tortured is because free beings, human and angelic, can will such atrocities. While the sovereign God can and will strive to bring some good out of the horrifying demonic event (Rom 8:28), the evil event itself exists only because free beings who are against God have willed it. The “ultimate reason” for this ghoulish torment lies there. If the words “good” and “loving” mean anything as applied to God, if Scripture’s testimony regarding the perfect character of God and the antidemonic ministry of Jesus mean anything, and if God’s power is to be construed as supremely admirable, as truly transcendent, not simply as coercive after the impoverished image of fallen human ideals of power, then we simply cannot suppose that it is ultimately God himself who is secretly willing Zosia’s nightmare for some supposed “higher” reason.

Coping with evil. Where does all this leave us in terms of our coping with the atrocities of our world? Whatever else may be said about the classical-philosophical blueprint model of God’s providence, it does provide the believer with a certain kind of security that the warfare worldview seems to lack—so long as one steers clear of concrete atrocities. A certain peace comes, for many at least, in resigning oneself to whatever (one believes) the hand of God might bring to one. Herein lies the appeal of the sort of traditional hymns spoken of in chapter one.

If, however, we can no longer find solace in the conviction that a mysterious providential plan governs every event in world history, in what can our hearts find hope? If Zosia’s torment is truly as gratuitous and barbaric as it appears, must we not despair?

It is, I think, undeniable that the warfare worldview on one level depicts a scarier world than the providential blueprint worldview, for the simple reason that opening one’s eyes to the reality of war is indeed scary. At the same time, this prospect strikes some of us as less scary than the prospect of living in an actual spiritual war but being ignorant of this fact. It certainly seems less scary than living in a cosmos that is being coercively run by a supreme being who secretly wills the torture of little girls —“for his glory.”

Yet even if we were to concede that the genuine contingency and real battles of the warfare worldview present a world that is scarier than the divine blueprint worldview, it would not follow that this worldview is less hopeful than the blueprint model. Precisely the opposite is the case, I would argue. The warfare worldview of the New Testament offers more hope, precisely because it unabashedly acknowledges the dismal and demonic state of the world in its present war-torn condition.

The hope that the New Testament offers is not the hope that God has a higher, all-encompassing plan that secretly governs every event, including the evil intentions of malicious angelic and human beings, and that somehow renders these evil wills “good” at a higher level. To my way of thinking, at least, that supposition generates a truly hopeless position. For if God’s will is already being done as Zosia’s eye sockets are bleeding, what have we to look forward to? If justice is, on some secret transcendental plane, already being served, what do we have to look forward to? If God is already vindicated because “the big picture” justifies Zosia’s torment “for the good of the whole,” then we really have no reason to hope that things will fare better for Zosia or ourselves in the world to come.

In direct contrast to all this, the ultimate hope that the New Testament offers is eschatological. As sure as the Lord came the first time to defeat his cosmic enemy and our oppressor in principle, just as certainly he shall return again to defeat him in fact. Because sickness, disease, war, death, sorrow and tears are not God’s will, and because God is ultimately sovereign, we can have a confident assurance that someday, when his foes are ultimately vanquished, God will end all sorrow, and every evil which causes such sorrow, and will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Rev 20:4). Precisely because our present suffering is not God’s will—however much he can now use it for our ultimate good—we can have an assurance that it shall not always be this way.

Indeed, Paul has the inspired audacity to proclaim that, when the kingdom has finally fully come, the glory and joy that we shall know will render all the sufferings of this present world insignificant. Whatever else this may mean, it means that God will somehow make it up to Zosia, and to her mother.

With such a promise, given in the vicinity of Zosia’s childhood screams, I close with the simple prayer that characterized the faith communities of New Testament times:

Maranatha: Our Lord, come! (1 Cor 16:22)