Summertime

Summer can be a great time for lawyers, law students, and law professors. Courts’ dockets slow down, clients go on vacation, and classes are not in session. I spent last week at Boy Scout summer camp with my wife, two of my four children, and assorted teenagers. Without newspapers, TV, computers, or cell phone coverage, I was forced to focus on the basics of life: eating, sleeping, not capsizing my canoe in the rapids. We also spent time each evening in worship and Bible study, focusing on the essentials in our spiritual life.

It is of course possible, in the busy tides of life, to lose our focus. The fourth and fifth chapters of the Book of Revelation can help us get centered again. John describes a scene of heavenly worship, where the twenty-four elders surround the throne in heaven. “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power,” they say, as they fall down and cast down their crowns (Rev. 4:10-11). On the throne, at the center of their continual worship, is “a Lamb standing, as if slain” (5:6). How incongruous! The focus of all heaven’s worship is a bloody (“as if slain”) baby sheep. He is, of course, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the Lamb of God, bloody because He sacrificed himself for us. He is at the same time “the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah” (5:5). So our focus and our worship are centered on the Great Paradox Himself, the Lion and the Lamb. Have a great summer.

~ Associate Dean Doug Cook, Regent University School of Law