Ramble On

I came upon this quote by Sinclair Ferguson:

True faith takes its character and quality from its object and not from itself. Faith gets a man out of himself and into Christ… Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!

My pastor Andrew Kamm asked me to write a few words to expand upon with Ferguson is saying.  To do that, we’ll need to talk about justification.

Justification is the legal declaration from God that announces that a sinner is righteous in God’s sight. Justification includes the forgiveness of sins and the crediting (or “imputing”) of Christ’s righteousness. This can be done on the basis of substitution and is often called, “The Great Exchange”.  2 Cor. 5:21 explains it this way: “For our sake He [God] made Him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” Christ took all of our sins and we get all of His righteousness.

We receive this justification not by any work we do but we receive justification by faith. Luther’s rediscovery and powerful articulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone – that sinners are justified by God through faith – is at the very heart of Protestant Christianity.

But with justification by faith there is an important distinction to be made.  To put it in technical language, faith is the instrument, not the grounds of our justification.  Faith is the open hand by which we receive justification not the reason we can be justified.  This may seem like a subtle point, but it is important: to confuse the instrument and grounds of justification will drive us to despair by placing ourselves back on the treadmill of good works.

The grounds of our justification is the perfect and finished work of Christ.  We can be justified because Christ accomplished redemption.  Faith is what unites us to Christ and His perfect work, not what makes His work perfect for us. If you walked on a frozen lake and you didn’t fall in, the reason was not the strength or quality of your trusting that the ice will hold you but rather the fact that there are ten feet of solid frozen ice under you. Christ is mighty to save on His own account.

Ferguson reminds us that our faith is not placed in our experience of God but it is placed in God Himself.  Though our experience of God and the strength of our own faith changes throughout the days, weeks, and years, God Himself does not.  We look to the object of our faith to overcome all of our own shortcomings.  Faith allows us to take our eyes of ourselves – our lies, our evil, our ugliness – and to look at God – His truth, His goodness, His beauty.

I can think of two applications that should flow from this great truth:

1. To all of those who struggle with faith – take heart!  The weakest faith clings to the strongest savior!
2. The prayer of the exasperated father, “I believe, help my unbelief!” (Mk. 9:24), should be our response when we recognize our faith is failing.  It is the prayer of the converted – it is addressed to God Himself and recognizes Him as not only the giver of faith but as the one who maintains it in us.  Here is a great hymn to help us in our prayer in worship:

From time to time I post pithy quotes on The City – a social media network that our church uses.  Recently I posted:

Reception of Christ is a consequence, not a condition, of salvation.

This is from an article by grammarian Daniel Wallace which questioned if “Behold! I stand at the door and knock.” from Rev. 3:20 is to be understood as an invitation from Christ for salvation.  You can read the article linked above, but the short answer is no, it is not an invitation to salvation.  Wallace in a footnote contends that no such invitation to “receive Christ into one’s heart” exists in Scripture.

The problem with pithy quotes is that much of the context is lost.  So let me define what is being said by defining what is not being said. What is not being said by the above quote is that somehow faith is unnecessary – quite the opposite!  Faith in Christ is the necessary consequence of salvation.  If you are saved, you will believe in Christ.  Some will read that “will” as “must” and then assume that such a faith is our work.  Nothing of the sort.  Rather, personal faith in Christ will always come about as a result of Christ’s salvation of that person.  Always.

It is totally accurate to say both, “I chose God” and, “God chose me”.  The question this quote is asking is: which one comes first?  I believe that the Biblical answer is, “God chose me”.

(As it’s late and I need to get up early tomorrow for my bi-annual workout, I’m going to assert a bunch of things without necessarily proving them fully.)

Phil asked for some proof, specifically any verses that might support this.  These are a few that popped into my mind.

1. Rom. 4:4-5 – “God justifies the ungodly”.  This is the scandal of the gospel of grace.  God justifies (declares righteous and holy) those who are in fact ungodly.  He can do this because of substitutionary death of Jesus (Rom. 3:21-26, God is both the “just” and “justifier”).
2. Rom. 5:8 – “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”.  God’s action in salvation proceeds any action of ours in cleaning up our own act.

Furthermore, there are some verses that, in my opinion, absolutely necessitate this view:

1. Eph. 2:1-3 – “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…” Dead men don’t dance.  Dead men can’t exercise faith.  Dead men don’t have a will, much less a free one.  Before being born again (“regenerated”) spiritually we had all the properties of a corpse.
2. John 6:44 – “No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Some understand this as an only an influence or suggestion from the Father – that this drawing might work in converting someone and it might not.  The context of John 6 makes it clear that the Father is not frustrated in the salvation of sinners.  Not only is it true that all who come to Jesus are saved but also that all who the Father draws come to Jesus (see John 6:37-40).

In fancy terms this is the Reformed ordo salutis – that is, the order of salvation.  Reformed folk will tell you that regeneration proceeds faith.  That is, you were born again before you exercised any hearty trust in Christ.  That means that your reception of Christ is a consequence, not a condition, of salvation.

To better retain the things I read I’m getting back into the blogging habit.  On Mondays I aim to blog through the three forms of unity starting with the Belgic Confession of Faith.

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COWPER’S GRAVE

I.
It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying;
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying;
Yet let the grief and humbleness as low as silence languish:
Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

II.
O poets, from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing!
O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

III.
And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory,
And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted,

IV.
He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,
And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration;
Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken,
Named softly as the household name of one whom God hath taken.

V.
With quiet sadness and no gloom I learn to think upon him,
With meekness that is gratefulness to God whose heaven hath won him,
Who suffered once the madness-cloud to His own love to blind him,
But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him;

VI.
And wrought within his shattered brain such quick poetic senses
As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences:
The pulse of dew upon the grass kept his within its number,
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.

VII.
Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home-caresses,
Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses:
The very world, by God’s constraint, from falsehood’s ways removing,
Its women and its men became, beside him, true and loving.

VIII.
And though, in blindness, he remained unconscious of that guiding,
And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,
He testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,
—Nor man nor nature satisfies whom only God created.

IX.
Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses
And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses,—
That turns his fevered eyes around—“My mother! where’s my mother?”—
As if such tender words and deeds could come from any other!—

X.
The fever gone, with leaps of heart he sees her bending o’er him,
Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him!
Thus woke the poet from the dream his life’s long fever gave him,
Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes which closed in death to save him.

XI.
Thus? oh, not thus! no type of earth can image that awaking,
Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking,
Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted,
But felt those eyes alone, and knew—“My Saviour! not deserted!”

XII.
Deserted! Who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested,
Upon the Victim’s hidden face no love was manifested?
What frantic hands outstretched have e’er the atoning drops averted?
What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be deserted?

XIII.
Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather;
And Adam’s sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father:
Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry His universe hath shaken—
It went up single, echoless, “My God, I am forsaken!”

XIV.
It went up from the Holy’s lips amid His lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation!
That earth’s worst phrenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope’s fruition,
And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see his rapture in a vision.

—–

Jesus cries, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” so that no one else would ever have to.

My small group at church is currently going through the book of Hebrews.  Hebrews presents Jesus Christ as the supreme revelation of God with a special focus on showing how Christ is superior to the Old Testament covenant of works – that is, the law.  I thought I’d write up a few of my thoughts and notes as I read through the book.

Hebrews 1:1-4 (ESV):

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

The author contrasts several ways in which Christ as the revelation of God is superior to the Old Testament revelation.

Since the author uses the phrase, “our fathers” we know that the author and the audience somehow identify as Hebrew. The author’s reliance upon the LXX (the Septuagint; the Greek translation of the Old Testament) possibly identifies the audience as Hellenistic Jews.

The author’s use of “these last days” shows us that Christ’s death and resurrection mark the beginning of the “last days” – that is to say, we are currently in the last days. Hebrews 9:26 reads, “But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” 1 Peter 1:20 reads, “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you”. Finally, in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 he identifies the pouring out of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost with the “last days” prophesied in Joel.

Kim Riddlebarger has a sermon series on Hebrews and in his sermon on these verses he identifies seven characteristics of Jesus that these four verses describe:

1. Jesus Christ is the heir of all things (Psalm 2:8; cf. Matt 21:38)
2. Jesus is the creator of all things (cf. John 1:3, Col. 1:16)
3. Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God (cf. 2 Cor. 3)
4. Jesus is the exact imprint of his nature
5. Jesus sustains all things
6. Jesus sits down at the right hand of the Majest on high (unlike the continuing Aaronic sacrifices, Jesus’ sacrifice is once and for all)
7. Jesus has inherited a better name than the angels (He alone sits at God’s right hand which means he possesses the authority of God)

From these attributes we can see that Jesus is certainly superior to angels (mediators of the Old Testament covenant and law). This superiority the author will elaborate further in the rest of chapter 1.

Tesseract is a program that does OCR – optical character recognition. The goal is to take a picture of text and transform it into text; e.g. you scan a page of a book and it will turn it into editable text. Note, Tesseract does not do layout analysis so a two column layout might confuse Tesseract. Also, the input image must be within certain parameters and Tesseract will not convert it for you nor will it complain too much if you give it a bad image; it will just fail to output the text.

To actually use Tesseract, you’re going to want to install ImageMagick to get the command line utility `convert`. The best way to do this is with homebrew which in my experience has been a thousand times better than MacPorts. Basically, homebrew does not clobber the system stuff, does not install to /opt/ or any other weird place, and does recognize system compilers and X libraries and things like that…

Anyways, let’s start:

1) Install imagemagick

brew install imagemagick

Imagemagick has jpeg, libtiff, little-cms, jasper as dependencies, but all of these are also in homebrew and will install automatically.

2) Install tesseract

brew install tesseract

Tesserat depends on libtiff, which should have been installed when you installed imagemagick. Pretty straight forward.

After these two steps you should have the `tesseract` command-line program and the `convert` command line program.

3) Acquire an image

I just copied a selection from a PDF that I was reading for class. This PDF is a scanned book and had two columns (both pages). I saved it as a PNG with 200 DPI. (I also read a tip to save the PNGs without an Alpha layer – I’m pretty sure TIFFs don’t support Alpha channels so I think that will just go away in the conversion process anyways.) The image is below:

4) Convert the image to a TIFF

It doesn’t really matter what file format you capture your image in, but it has to be high-res enough – the 200-300 DPI range should do. If your source image is not within that range, you will have to resample the image at a higher DPI. Anyways, this is where ImageMagick comes in:

convert -density 200 -units PixelsPerInch -type Grayscale +compress test.png test_input.tif

Now, the -density and -units is telling ImageMagick we want the output file to be 200 DPI. These must be there even if your input file is 200 DPI – when I ran it without these options I got a file that had a much lower DPI (72 I think) which Tesseract cannot use. The -type Grayscale makes sure to remove colors from output image. Tesseract doesn’t really handle colors too well, but handles black and white great. And since the image is pretty much just black text on white paper this isn’t a problem. The +compress option must be there as well – I’m still reading up on ImageMagick and don’t know a whole lot about the TIFF format but without it tesseract will not be able to open/process the input image file. For whatever reason WordPress did not like the TIFF file so there is no thumbnail.

5) Run tesseract

I ran tesseract with the following command:

tesseract test_input2.tif output2 -l eng

The -l option specifies a language, and, if you installed through homebrew, there will be a number of language data training packs installed in the correct place. Tesseract may default to English but I like being explicit. Here is the text output:

Certainly theology needs empirical facts and scientific theoretical
insights. The social scientists offer help. Yet they do not accomplish
what l must now attempt. My main question is where and how the
church must stand to be the witnssing church; that is, what must be
the relation between the culture that is the church (and the larger
Christian and biblical metaculture the church represents) and those
cultures the church indwells, evangelizx, serves? Answering will
require all the resources that Christian theology can bring to bear, and
not a little help from such as Berger and Bellah as well. Already they
have showed us, willy»nilly that theology is required for the task: they
make such ample (and often skillful) use of it, themselves!

So, a few basic mistakes will be caught by a spell-checker. There is a lowercase L instead of “I”. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results.

Tesseract works great; fussing with the input image is the most difficult part. But some reminders: the input must be a TIFF (and .tif at that), must be grayscale, and have between 200 – 300 DPI.

OCRopus and many other frontends solve many of these problems by using the tesseract engine with a GUI. OCRopus is not on homebrew, and only one of the dependencies for OCRopus (iulib) is not on homebrew. I’ll start working on a homebrew formula for iulib and the OCRopus and write it up in a new post. Also, there is a perl module called Image::OCR::Tesseract that I’ll be testing on my system and maybe extending.

Math::Primality is my one and only CPAN module, a result of my Google Summer of Code work almost two years ago. I was surprised about 10 months ago to get an email requesting features – I can’t believe someone is actually using this stuff! Well, I’ve put it off for a while so this weekend instead of doing homework I finally knocked out a few things on my todo list.

The main feature is more test coverage. We implemented some optimizations – for numbers of certain sizes there are actually simpler conditions to check. This optimization results in a speedup but the test suite no longer actually exercised some of the more complex code. To fix this, I had to find specific numbers that would exercise each condition. I use Devel::Cover and prove to check exactly what code was being exercised:

1) cover -delete

Not strictly necessary, but it’ll delete any previous coverage statistics

2) PERL5OPT=-MDevel::Cover prove -Ilib t/*.t

This runs prove, adds the ‘lib’ directory to my search path, and tells it to run every test in the t/ directory. Including Devel::Cover will automatically generate the coverage statistics.

3) cover

This will take the output and generate some pretty HTML. Each line is annotated with coverage statistics, and each conditional statement is annotated with how many different combinations of statements it has been tested with.

I’ve also converted the README to POD because GitHub supports rendering POD inline. Finally, I’ve run the entire module through perltidy (configuration from http://www.leifove.com/2011/02/why-i-use-perltidy-or-why-coding-style.html) to beautify the setup.

Next steps: run Perl::Critic and convert the distribution to use Dist::Zila. After that, I will begin work on Math::Primality::AKS.

I finally got `perlbrew` installed. It’s a utility like `rvm` that allows you to manage multiple installations of perl without clobbering your system files. I followed the instructions from here: http://www.pythian.com/news/19971/guerilla-perl-installations/

1) Run curl -L http://xrl.us/perlbrewinstall | bash

Just a fancy way of getting the install script and running it.

2) Run /Users/bob/perl5/perlbrew/bin/perlbrew init

Your home directory will vary, but this will setup perlbrew to work with your shell. At the end of this process there will be instructions on adding this to your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

3) Add “source /Users/bob/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc” to the end of ~/.bash_profile

I don’t have a .bashrc, and I know there is some subtle difference between the two files but they are both run when you start a shell.

4) Run perlbrew install perl-5.12.3

There were actually two failing tests on my machine, so I had to run it with –force. Also, this command will not show the progress of the install, so if you want to follow along you’ll have to open up another terminal and tail the output of the build log.

5) perlbrew switch perl-5.12.3

This selects 5.12 as your current perl.

6) perlbrew install-cpanm

This will install CPANM. I recommend using it over regular CPAN and CPANPLUS.

7) cpanm Test::More

This installs Test::More. Note you don’t need to type `cpanm install Test::More` as this will install a module named “install”. I have yet to run into a module that will not install in cpanm but will install in CPAN.

I can now switch between my system CPAN (which is 5.10.0 on my Mac) and the 5.12.3 that I installed. Another good feature of perlbrew is that it does not require sudo permissions to install, and keeps all of the installed files in your home directory.

For my previous job I needed to setup a development environment on my mac which required some packages like PostgreSQL, ImageMagick, and some other packages. I started using MacPorts and eventually found a GUI for it called Porticus. I mostly used the command line `port` but every now and then Porticus was easier to manage.

The problem with MacPorts, at least the way I did it, was that I needed to run everything under `sudo`. Furthermore, MacPorts required me to install a new copy of X11 even though I had one from Apple.

Enter Homebrew.

I heard about Homebrew a while back and a previous coworkers nuked his MacPorts installation and switched over to Homebrew. So I finally took the plunge.

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Well, the bad news is that the “hard” deadline is coming up next Monday. The good news is that I’m making progress. I will not make my original goal of having a cross-compiled Parrot testing on RTEMS. What I do have currently is the “secret sauce” that allows the Parrot configuration to do a minimal cross-compilation. I’m currently working on getting 1) Parrot to build out of directory and 2) Parrot to target multiple platforms. If you haven’t been following, my patches allow Parrot’s configure script to run from a separate directory, run all tests outside the source directory, and generate all configure time files outside the source directory. I am currently working on fixing the Makefile so we can actually build i.e. run `make`. This is a pretty monumental problem as there are multiple problems – paths in the Makefile, perl scripts that run from the Makefile to generate more files, separate included Makefiles, and all Makefiles are actually templates that are created at configure time. My latest push allows us to run a few steps in the Makefile but there are still miles to go.