Mosaic Music Festival. Restaurant Week. Good times. Suffering and Death.

Perhaps one day, old and decrepit, immobile and blind and deaf, imprisoned within our own minds, we might remember these as halcyon days when we could come and go as we pleased, to bop along at concerts and cheer and whoop at the good bits, to enjoy good food and the company of friends:



Tickets to Au Revoir Simone at Mosaic Music Festival 2010 thanks to Heineken Green Room membership. The club lights and the soundman's enthusiasm for turning up the bass was a contrast to their online image of red xylophones, casiotones, pale pink balloons in bare cream apartments with charmingly peeling paint, scrapbooks of pressed wild flowers, The Virgin Suicides, drawing in notebooks, old typewriters, synths, vintage dresses, and nordic sensibilities...from Brooklyn.

Sad Song, The Bird of Music

Or more delicate though similarly incongruous, a pair of real Norwegians in the Esplanade Concert Hall:


Kings of Convenience at Mosaic Music Festival 2010.


Erlend Øye during I'd Rather Dance doing his nerdy best in the non-mosh pit. His dance moves were even more aunty-ishly dorky (see vid evidence below).


Riot on an Empty Street, Homesick


Riot on an Empty Street, I'd Rather Dance





The Restaurant Week menu at Chiharu being a bit dismal, we went with the omakase course instead: Zensai (five kinds of appetisers of the day), Otsukuri (sashimi), Kurobata no wasabi shoyu yaki, Arani (chopped fish head in sweet sauce), Hiyashi tomato, Nigiri sushi, Vanilla ice-cream anzu soe (apricot syrup). The raw stuff was suitably fresh but nothing was terribly outstanding.




Well-executed menu during Restaurant Week at Absinthe: Tartare of Hokkaido Scallops, Wakame and Citrus Dressing; Braised Kurobuta Pork Belly, Star Aniseed Jus, Fennel Salad; French Duck Breast, Sauteed Potatoes; Grilled Pink Snapper, Salad of Baby Spinach and Spelt, Lobster Scented Hollandaise; Vanilla Creme Brulee, Raspberry Sorbet.



Surprisingly bad food at Ricciotti (China Square Central): the calamari rings on 5 out of 6 plates of antipasto were cold; 2 out of 3 people thought the spiciness of the red snapper overwhelmed any taste of the fish; 3 out of 3 people could not bear the saltiness of the tagliolini; 6 out of 6 people were greatly disappointed by the dry chocolate cake. Arguably, it was the 9 alcoholic units in one body and the paucity of Hokkien vocab in another that resulted in discussions about hanging bak kwa to fend off ghosts of Muslim and Jewish origin, the indignity of being mummified to be stared at by future generations, the time-zone FAIL of international IT support and the uses of vibrating mascara sticks and why such items were an essential part of one's gender-non-specific makeup collection.






Mostly tasty menu at The White Rabbit accompanied by a glass of Mumm champagne: Chestnut and sweet onion soup served with trumpette mushrooms and gruyere croutons; Roasted root winter vegetables served with poached egg and truffle vinaigrette (it took some time before any one could smell the truffle shaving); Grilled vegetable pasta sauteed with garlic and flambeed with vodka - the pasta itself was bland so each mouthful had to be accompanied by a slice of grilled veggie; Juicy tender chestnut stuffed farm chicken served with carrot puree, cabbage, bacon and thyme jus; good flavour pairing - white chocolate and coconut panna cotta served with a salad of pineapple and mangoes; Profiteroles with vanilla ice-cream and chocolate sauce. 100% of the people vowed to return with family and friends in tow, the mother of three lamented that it was too late to hold her wedding reception here.



More misses than hits again at The Prime Society: strangely bland truffled mushroom soup, 100% full blood Blackmore wagyu and yuzu carpaccio, tendon-y Gunpowered beef with a taste-edge of bak kwa, vanilla bavarois with strawberries and chocolate soil. A hunt for meal fulfilment and carbs had to be conducted after dinner.



Some of us needed to make a pitstop and refuel at shots. cafe after a leisurely afternoon on Ann Siang Hill checking out Style Nordic and Fred Perry, trawling through the massive closing down sale at Asylum, browsing Books Actually. The owner, a member of New Creation Church, was handing out a book by his pastor - Joseph Prince's Destined to Reign.

Discussions on motifs in current music and menus have been in heavy rotation these days - whether such repetition points to a lack of creativity or if it is a necessary center around which orbits a coherent universe.

Interestingly, it makes no difference to our relationship with God whether we are helplessly horizontal in bed waiting to be turned by the nurse or having a decent lie-in after a great night out with mates. In all circumstances we are meant to continually respond to him in repentance and trust and obedience.

In good times, all the good things we enjoy - the things that have been made by God, are meant to remind us of God's eternal power and his divine nature (Romans 1:20). But though we thus know God, we do not naturally honour him as God nor give thanks to him; instead we fools exchange the glory of the immortal God and instead worship the things he created (Romans 1:23). Though life is going swimmingly with no hint of God's judgement for our hard and impenitent heart, we are duly warned that if we continue to ignore God, we are storing up wrath for ourselves on the Last Day (Romans 2:5). Do we presume on the riches of God's kindness and forbearance and patience in not executing immediate judgement on us? God's kindness is meant to lead us to repentance (Romans 2:4) and should not be taken as licence to continue in rebellious sin.

In times of suffering and illness and death, we ought to respond too in repentance and faith in God. This is not to say that a specific suffering or sickness is necessarily due to a specific sin which we are meant to repent of:

1. Suffering and death is a result of sin in general and the attendant fallenness of this world and the humans therein. Rebellion against God and how he designed the world and the innate evil in all humans has resulted in the wrong use of all creation by all people, and suffering and pain is a natural consequence of such incorrect use. Death came into the world because of the rebellion of man (Genesis 3) as a right and just consequence of sinning against God. So we all deserve to live out the results of our choice to deny God as our lord - suffering and then death. When we see a sick person, or when we are in pain or troubled, or when we offer our condolences to the relatives of someone recently departed, we are to remember that something is very wrong with us and the world and we need to turn back to God. But we find we cannot do this on our own and need a saviour to save us from this tragic mess.

2. God tells us that some suffering is meant for the good of those who love God - "God disciplines us for our good that we may share in his holiness" for "without holiness no one will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:10,14). Suffering is never good in itself but right response to calamitous evils will work for our good in maturing us in our relationship with God, for suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope, and hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:3-4).

This is not to say that we live in a dualistic universe where God the Good and Satan the Evil battle it out day after day and sometimes, God manages to turn a bad situation into something good. Rather the Bible's view is that God is completely and utterly sovereign over everything in his creation.

And as to why God would allow suffering:

How can God allow suffering and evil in the world? from A Passion for Life on Vimeo.

4. Ultimately, there are many things we will not understand because we are not God. And we are wrong to assume that God owes us an explanation for everything. God has already told us what he is more concerned about: to be worshipped and trusted. (See the Book of Job.)

3. In fact, trouble will specially attend God's people. There will be opposition and persecution of those who are the children of God just because they are his children. After all, we follow in the footsteps of his Son, the rejected and crucified Messiah. So he said "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?" (Mark 8:34-38) and "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you...If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also." (John 15:18,20). And Paul warns us "...everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12).

So there is no biblical evidence for the teaching that that a prosperous, healthy life means we have God's favour and vice versa. God did not create a mechanistic universe that is mere cause and effect, he created a universe in which he himself is the only sovereign God in control of all things.

And when Jesus himself walked on the earth, he did not care for a healing ministry even though he could heal an entire catalogue of illnesses and even raise the dead. Rather, he was concerned about teaching about himself and what he would do to save them rather than healing in the here-and-now (see eg. Mark 1:15,21,35-39; 2:2,13; 3:14,22-23; 4:1; 6:1-2,34; 7:14; 8:31,34; 9:30-31; 10:1; 12:1,35). In fact:

There were some present at that very time who told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them,"Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."

And he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, 'Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?' And he answered him, 'Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'" (Luke 13:1-9)

Jesus' point was not so much that those who suffered were any more wicked than those who escaped such a fate. The assumption was that all deserved to die and that it was only God's mercy that kept them alive to give them time to repent.*

Do we see suffering, illness, pain and death? Are we experiencing great troubles and difficulties? Let these be sufficient warning of our destination in the forever if we do not acknowledge him as God now that we have been given the opportunity to bear the fruit of repentance.

There will indeed be a time when there will be no more sadness and grieving. On this Last Day, all the consequences of our rebellion against God and our abuse of his creation will be reversed, because of Jesus' prior payment for our sins by his death on the cross. But for those who did not, while it was not yet the Last Day, repent and turn back to God, this Last Day will be the first day of eternal suffering and death forever.

So in the unmerited favour of this now-but-not-yet time, let us be put on high alert by God's judgement on Job's "comforters". Their reductivist view that Job's secret unconfessed sins must have caused his sufferings was a great insult to God and presented a great temptation to Job: to confess sins that weren't there in order to try to retrieve his prosperity. If Job had succumbed, it would have meant that Job cared more for prosperity than for his integrity or for the Lord himself; and the Lord would have lost his wager. Their counsel, if followed, would have actually led Job away from the Lord; Job would have been reduced to being yet one more person interested in seeking God for merely personal gain.*

We have ample evidence from human history as recorded in the Bible to know that God is good and trustworthy and rightly desires to be worshipped by his creatures, whatever the circumstances of life. So we are without excuse if we do not repent from our self-centered wants of health and wealth and worldly success (even more so if our quest for more faith or deeper knowledge of God or even our "repentance" is with the aim of addressing these wants) or from demanding answers for our situation, and turn towards God and his desires that have already been clearly revealed in his Word.


*D.A. Carson's How Long, O Lord? is very good. John Piper and Justin Taylor, Suffering and the Sovereignty of God might also be worth a read.

Breakfast. Idolatry. Cupcakes. God's Faithfulness. God's Discipline.

One never quite acknowledges the presence of an idol in one's life until one rises in the morning to worship it, only to find it has been taken away in the night.

Humans were made for worship and so everyone worships something, even those who claim to be atheists. The sorrow and mourning with which one greets the disappearance of that which we worship and the resultant emptiness in our lives betray the identity of that god (some material thing, or a relationship, or a person, or even a talent or trait that we die die must have).

Surely it is useless to give one's all for a false god, a god who either promises much or whom we think promises much but cannot deliver. On the threshold of the Promised Land, the Book of Deuteronomy tells us that Moses reminded the Israelites of the faithfulness of God: how he had made a seemingly impossible promise to Abraham and Sarah, who were barren in their old age, that he would give them descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky (Genesis 22, Genesis 26) and how this had indeed been fulfilled (cf Deuteronomy 10:22). This was but a snapshot, a sample, of the overarching faithfulness of God who would go on to promise through various prophets (as recorded for us in the Old Testament) that he had seen the suffering and pain and death in this fallen world caused by the sin of man and that he could and was more than willing to save anyone who would avail himself/herself to his rescue. This rescue, the prophets said, would come through an anointed king who was God himself (Psalm 2), the Son of Man who would come to judge the world (Daniel 7), and also through a suffering servant of God (Isaiah 53).

When Jesus arrived, he proved to be able to do the things only God could do - not just healing the sick, lame, deaf, blind and casting out demons without any mumbo-jumbo, but also raising the dead, creating food and controlling "nature" (Mark 1:18-8:26). He acknowledged Peter's confession that he was the Christ, the promised anointed divine king, he said he was the Son of Man too but was also adamant that he was the suffering servant of God (Mark 8:27-31). All the promises of God, then, were focused in on one man, Jesus.

Our trust in God is no blind faith, since he has ensured sufficient evidence of his past acts of faithfulness and truthfulness. Jesus has shown that he is the cumulative fulfilment of God's promises and indeed that he is God himself.

The first commandment given to Moses was "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:2-3). A commandment to be obeyed, yet also a plain statement of fact (cf Deuteronomy 4:32-35). There is no other god to be worshipped besides the LORD.

So Jesus' commandment to those who would trust in him as Christ and Son of Man and Suffering Servant to "deny himself, take up his cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34) is also something to be obeyed, yet the first part also stems from a plain statement of fact: if God is God, there is no other to be worshipped and no other who can interpret reality and tell us of what is to come. Therefore, it is obvious that we must deny all attempts to interpret reality, all attempts to mold Jesus into the nice, hippie saviour we can be comfortable telling our friends about, all attempts to ascribe to God what he has never promised, all attempts to place importance on anything other than God and what God deems important (as expounded in Jesus' words and the gospel (Mark 8:35,38)).

All such delusional attempts will end in failure. Setting one's mind on anything but the things of God as revealed in Scripture has the stink of Satan about it (Mark 8:33). So unsurprisingly, the idolater will does this will lose his life and his soul and be rejected by Jesus when he comes again to judge the living and the dead (Mark 8:34-38).

But sadly, this doesn't stop us professing believers in Christ from wallowing, at times, in this carcinogenic sludge. Sure, one has the niggling feeling at times that perhaps one could be worshipping something other than the One True God (we speak of idols of the non-shiny kind of course, gold leaf being rather vulgar and crass these days cf a certain calf sculpture at the foot of Mount Sinai circa approximately 1,300 B.C.), but with a bit of stonewalling and a lot of dressing up with godly motives and reasons, the conscience soon had its naggy mouth taped over and we were free to enjoy the apparent pleasures offered by the aforementioned god. and the real extent of that cancer's hold on us.

In the cold light of day, our idolatry is starkly stupid. Did our idols create us that in their absence we perish? Would God have us waste our tears over the death of a folly, the removal of a trap of Satan? Do we forget that Moses said to the adulterous Israelites when the writing was still fresh on the covenantal stone:

Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!'" And the LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you. (Exodus 32:7-10)

Our worship of other gods is insulting to the One True God, and he who created us could have rightly destroyed us.

But if we are reading or typing this then he has not. Because in his immense grace and patience, God elects instead to forcibly remove the tumour, bit by bit. Yet we dare blame him for this and threaten to renounce our heavenly citizenship unless he reinstate the same, or even plead for him to take away our lifebreath now that we have no more reason to live.

Scripture about God disciplining us is "a word of encouragement" because it addresses us as God's children:

And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

"My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives." (Hebrews 12:5)

We are not to respond to God's discipline with resentment but instead be comforted(!) that God does this because he loves us:

My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline
or be weary of his reproof,
for the LORD reproves him whom he loves,
as a father the son in whom he delights. (Proverbs 3:11-12)

Moses reminded the Israelites of the same thing in Deuteronomy:

Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you. (Deuteronomy 8:5)

God's discipline is in fact further evidence of God's faithfulness, for what God who promised to rescue will allow his sheep to stray into the mouths of wolves:

I know, O LORD, that your rules are righteous,
and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. (Psalms 119:75)

The right response to discipline is not to chaff but to repent:

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. (Revelation 3:19)

We repent not by gritting our teeth and chanting "all things work for the good of those who love him" or "this is the best of all possible worlds", but by turning back to God.

Perhaps the dichotomy of mind and heart as is popular in many Christian circles which say that head knowledge must then become heart knowledge must be addressed. While the acknowledgement of mere factual information about God never saved anyone since even the demons acknowledge there is one God and shudder (James 2:19), disobedience and thus idolatry come from error and unbelief in the mind - not comprehending the goodness and faithfulness of God, not trusting that God is God, or that his words are true.

When we find ourselves in sin, or by the grace of God, disciplined for our idolatry, then we must take heed to examine again God's Word and the record of his deeds throughout the whole of human history. Obedience and trust in God isn't quite a matter of applying what we have learnt in bible study; rather it is deepening a relationship with a stable, dependable Father whose ways are not as capricious as humans whose moods vary according to the amount of sleep they've had the previous night, how well they have been fed, the ambient temperature of their environment and how boring the present company.

Thanks to Billy and Cindy Foote who kindly sent me their Not a god CD before mp3s were readily downloadable from the web:


You Are God Alone

You are not a god created by human hands
You are not a god dependent on any mortal man
You are not a god in need of anything we can give
By Your plan that's just the way it is

You are God alone, from before time began
You were on your throne, You were God alone
And right now, in the the good times and bad
You are on Your throne, You are God alone

You're Unchangeable, You're Unshakeable
You're Unstoppable, that's what You are

You're the only God whose power none can contend
You're the only God whose name and praise will never end
You're the only God who's worthy of everything we can give
You are God that's just the way it is