I have many “favorite quotes” from David Powlison. His concrete imagery locks onto your imagination and leads you forward. But this little paragraph was especially moving and brought me to tears. So I won’t keep it to myself.

The line of the seed of the woman is a very thin line—a spider thread. It’s a spider thread trying to hang on while a torrent of the seed of the serpent rushes through—a world in darkness raging. Even when God rescues Noah as a righteous man, it turns out that the majority of Noah’s sons are not part of the line of light; it’s such a thin line. And there are times during the kingdom of Israel where even the last heir to David almost gets killed. The line was hanging by a thread. In the Old Testament, you get a picture of history where darkness reigns. The nations, the Gentiles, are under the power of the evil one. There’s just a thin little thread of light running through history. That’s all.

Then Jesus Christ comes, and the light explodes. — David Powlison, Dissecting the Heart

A spider thread of hope. That’s what God works with. We often nod at metaphors and then move on, but don’t let this one slip past. Extend it.

Since the inception of the human race, there was hope in glory, in faithfulness, in communion with God. It all rested on a divine word. Would we listen and follow, or turn away in treason? That hope was a spider thread: light, airy, a gift from God to his people. But we gave it up at the garden. We went our own way. Why didn’t divine scissors snip the thread? Why did God speak again when we deserved silence?

The thread of hope would pass through Eve’s womb. Her line, God said, would crush the head of the one who wanted our hope-thread snipped: Satan.

The thread held up through many horrors: the first murder, where blood spoke from the soil (Gen. 4:10). And the murders multiplied . . . lights of God’s image bearers put out through Lamech, who bragged about his own death-dealing vengeance. The disease of sin spread like fire through dry leaves, until God said of all men, “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). Why did God not cut the thread then, when all was black and bitter?

Noah, God said, was a righteous man. He carried on the thread of hope in his sons. But not long after the world was saved from water, Noah drank himself into a stupor, which led to his son Ham being cursed. The curse was great, since Ham would become the father of the Canaanites, whose debauchery, violence, and filicide grew so ugly that they would be wiped out of the land by their brethren. The line of Noah almost fell away entirely. Only one of his sons would take the thread from their father and walk forward, passing it along to Abraham—who tried to pawn off his wife to save his own skin, twice—to Isaac, to Jacob—who stole his brother’s birthright and inheritance before raising a family of twelve sons with four warring wives. Again, why did God not cut the thread?

And then we come to David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14), whose adultery and murderous instigation somehow don’t sever the thread of hope. And yet at one point the last heir of David, Solomon, almost gets killed (1 Kgs. 1:12) by his brother Adonijah, who tries to steal the throne.

What is all of this? This wild narrative of hopeless hopefuls? It’s so bleak. “There’s just a thin little thread of light running through history,” Powlison says. “That’s all.”

A spider thread of hope. A thin little thread of light.

Christ Comes

“Then Christ comes, and the light explodes.” Imagine that little silken thread, sagging in the haze and gloom of death and faithless ruin . . . illumined only by grace, almost breaking and fading into nothing.

But then, with the cry of an infant in the Bethlehem dark, photons burst from the fibers. The spider thread widens and expands, taking over everything. It becomes a sun, an aura of holy life, “the light of the world” (John 8:12).

The only hope we ever had was in divine rescue and divine promise.

And then you see it: the spider thread of hope, all along, was held together by the Son of God. He is the thread. The only hope we ever had was in divine rescue and divine promise. The thin little thread of light was not just helping us hold on; it was bearing us up. Nothing, in the end, could have broken the thread because no one can challenge the Son, not even death itself. The thread always holds because the Son always stays.

Powlison always had a way with words. I keep many of those words in my memory. But these words, in particular, have altered my spirit so that I can never look at a spider web the same way again.

The spider thread of hope, so dim in the Old Testament, explodes in Jesus Christ. And that light will never be extinguished.

Be careful how you look at spider threads. They seem so weak, so easy to toss into the wind. And yet it was a spider thread that led us through the darkest of days into the breaking dawn of Jesus.

Preorders Open Now