Wisdom cannot solve this riddle. Wisdom can see as far as death and not beyond it. There comes a time, however, when wisdom has to resign its position. There comes a time when reason has to step down in favor of another wisdom, an unreasonable wisdom, an unreasonable wisdom that looks like foolishness. It’s an unheard of wisdom, yet the psalmist reaches for it. With harp in hand, he sings in v. 15, “God will ransom my life; he will snatch me from the grasp of death.”

The Resurrection of Jesus is the dawn of light on a new first day. It’s light that has survived the deepest darkness, light that has survived the longest, coldest night. And it’s light that continues to shove darkness aside.

In the New Testament, the divine image is linked to “knowledge” and to “true righteousness and holiness.” The Heidelberg Catechism follows this lead and links the divine image to an ability to “truly know God our creator, to love God with all our heart, and to live with God in eternal happiness.” Adding all this up, we come to a conclusion: the divine image is what makes us truly human. And, as Psalm 8 puts it, to be human is to be just “a little lower than heavenly beings.”

I think what we have in the double law of love is an invitation, permission, if you will. The law of love invites us to live a different kind of life, not the life of the everyday world around us, but a life abandoned to love, a life of breathless adoration of God, a life of self-forgetfulness for the sake of our neighbors.

The problem is Sin. The problem is a basic, unavoidable twist in the human soul, even in the very best human soul. And that twist is the source of untold misery: the misery of a Syrian toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the misery of young gymnasts sexually abused by their coaches and other adults, the misery of Egyptian Christians bombed and shot and fleeing for safety, the misery of the dying Great Barrier Reef. The problem is Sin, and its fallout is misery. And we have no solution.