Purpose

Matthew 14:23 “After dismissing the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. Well into the night, he was there alone."

The trenches are messy, dangerous, and inhumane but unavoidable in warfare.
I think since WWI most people know what I mean by “the trenches”. Down in the thick of the fight, hand to hand combat, with the chaos and the carnage of battle. It’s where dreadful things happen; where weapons are used that

Someone once said that in the life of every problem there’s a time when it’s big enough to see, yet small enough to solve.

This is a pretty accurate view, I believe, of the internal mandate of the church -that of building up the body to full maturity, to a global “unity of the Faith”, and away from infantile doctrines (Ephesians 4:13-14).

This is what I call “up-river thinking” - solving problems when they become visible, but are still small.

We have, however, developed a down-river

Psalm 127:1 "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain."

This one's a little more philosophical; ontological, to be precise. This Psalm starts off with a very typical theological argument, everything is dependent on God; but the more you consider this argument the more profound it gets, because there's a glitch in the Matrix:

Isaiah 7:10–14

1 Timothy 1:12-16-