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Glory . . .?

There are times in life when we can feel cut off from God, sometimes because of feelings of failure or unworthiness, sometimes because of feelings of ignorance or unbelief. How important it is for us to continue to read and reflect on God’s written self-revelation – for that is what the Bible is.

In Colossians 1:25-27 we read Paul’s testimony: I became a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Paul’s words reflect the way God reveals his plans. Typically prophets first declared God’s promises concerning his plans for the redemption of a fallen humanity. However the timing and the ‘who’ of the plans were kept under wraps. ‘But now’, Paul says, ‘God has revealed his plans – to include non-Jewish peoples with Jewish people in the benefits of the salvation found in Christ Jesus.

There is a generosity and simplicity in Paul’s words as he sets out the meaning of our faith: Christ in you, the hope of glory. On the one hand we enjoy a present experience: Christ in you. On the other hand there is a future reality: the hope of glory.

For many the Christian faith is a moral code they must struggle to observe. Their faith is legalistic and tedious. But Paul tells us that the essence of Christianity is found in a relationship with the One who is at the heart of the universe. It’s about knowing Christ and having his Spirit live within us. ‘God in the soul of men and women,’ is how one ancient writer put it.

The tragedy is that many expect too little from Christianity. If we don’t know anything about a living relationship with Jesus, we have a faith in name only. It’s the heart experience of knowing Jesus Christ personally that we need to pray for.

And, coupled with this present experience of the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in our lives, there is something else: …the hope of glory. There’s a future expectation.

Blessing though the presence of Christ is in our lives now, this is only a foretaste of something far greater that God has in store for us. Christianity is not just a present experience but a future hope – glory.

Death casts a long shadow over life. Indeed, many of God’s people in the Middle East, in Southern Sudan, in Nigeria and many other places, face the reality of death from one day to the next.

Glory. Paul is telling us here in summary form what we find more developed elsewhere. In Romans 3:23 we learn that all humanity has lost its pre-fallen glory. But in Romans 8:18, 21, Paul speaks of the glorious destiny God has planned for his people through the work of the incarnate Son of God. The good things that we experience of Christ living in us now are a tiny glimpse of what it will be like when we live with God. The best is yet to be.

There will be times when we will feel disappointed with the way life treats us now. We might feel that God has let us down. But if we think this way, we accuse God falsely. He doesn’t promise us that life will be a bed of roses. There will be difficulties and disappointments.

What the gospel message offers us here and now is not transformed outward circumstances, but rather transformed inner spiritual resourcesChrist in you. That’s what the gospel is about now, says Paul. Outwardly our bodies are wasting away, he writes elsewhere. Inwardly we are being renewed, day by day.

Yes, there is a better world of which the Bible speaks, a world free from pain and frustration, a world in which there is no loneliness or grief. But we need to understand that is a future world, a world that at the moment we see by faith, not by sight.

That said, the hope of glory is not some vague, wistful, ‘maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t’. Paul speaks of a sure, confident, guaranteed kind of hope. And hope, by definition, is unrealized in the present.

To forget this is to invite a tragic, despairing disillusionment. The tragedy for many is that they expect too little from Christianity. The tragedy for others is that they expect too much.

Jonathan Edwards once wrote, Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.

© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com

Alienation . . .?

Despite extraordinary advances in science and technology, we are still incapable of making a just and lasting peace for all peoples of all nations. Peace at the best of times is an uncertain affair. It seems the only way we can ensure it, is through more laws, greater security and the loss of more personal freedoms.

Commenting on why he had written The Lord of the Flies, William Golding said: “I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into.”

Alienation is a good word to describe our situation. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul the Apostle speaks of our hostile, alienating attitude towards God. In Colossians 1:21 we read: And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, as was shown by your evil deeds, …

The evil deeds are the outcomes of the hostility, the enmity within us towards God. They are not the cause of the breakdown of our relationship with God. Our evil deeds spring from our hostile attitude towards God; we might say he is real, but we don’t want him to come too close. And the outcome is that our world consistently demonstrates the tragic results of our attitude to God. Injustice and greed, hatred and conflict, pain and death, mar the harmony and joy that God had intended. ‘Sin’ – our refusal to honor God or give him thanks – not only causes separation between us and God and so with one another, but also means as Paul says Ephesians 2:12, that we live without God in the world – something we see in our culture today.

The question becomes: ‘If there is a God who is all-powerful and good, will he do something about the mess?’

When evil first entered the world creating enmity between us and God, God could have written us off as a failure and started again. But that would have been an admission of failure.

Instead, as the narrative of the Bible unfolds, we learn that God resolved to implement a more costly strategy. Rather than abandoning this evil and ungrateful world, he himself came to the rescue. He needed to adopt a plan to destroy the enmity without destroying us. Only by doing this would a just and lasting peace be possible.

Colossians 1:21-23 provides an insight into God’s strategyAnd you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, as was shown by your evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, …

God’s strategy was neither political nor military, nor was it educational. Rather he chose a path of self-sacrifice. From the standpoint of God’s perfect righteousness, a just and lasting peace could only be made possible through the voluntary sacrifice of someone who was perfect.

Suppose a family member has profoundly and unjustly hurt us. One day we learn that they are in really serious trouble and we know that we alone have the resources to help them. We could tell them to go to hell – and forget them. But what if within us there was still a love for them? We would need to find a way within ourselves so that we could justly absorb the pain, the hurt, and the anger boiling up within us at the very thought of them, enabling us to reach out and help them.

The extraordinary news is that through the death of the Lord Jesus, who was both truly God and truly man, God provided the perfect means by which he could reconcile us to himself. When Jesus died, God in his love absorbed within himself the just pain and anger we have caused within him. When we bow our proud heads and truly ask Jesus Christ for his forgiveness, God can justly declare us to be at one, to be at peace, with him. Indeed, as FF Bruce (Colossians: 1984) observes, ‘… peace, to be worthy of the name, must be founded on righteousness’ (p.77).

Our response? In her Christmas broadcast in December 2012, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II said: “This is the time of year when we remember that God sent his only son ‘to serve, not to be served’… The carol, In The Bleak Midwinter, ends by asking a question of all of us who know the Christmas story, of God giving himself to us in humble service: “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wise man, I would do my part”. The carol gives the answer “Yet what I can I give him – give him my heart”.”

© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com

Unity . . . ?

In his book, The Holy Trinity (P&R Publishing: 2004), Robert Letham observes that since the 1970s the western world has developed ‘a generally pessimistic view of human progress… The modern world’s reliance on reason has been replaced by a preference for emotion… The cardinal fault in interpersonal relations now is to hurt someone’s feelings… (p.449).

‘In the vanguard of this new world order,’ Letham continues, ‘are not so much scientists as literary critics. Its root feature is the view that the world is without objective meaning or absolute truth…’ (p.453).

Yet there is an irony: ‘Postmodernism asks us to accept for itself what it denies to everything and to everyone else. It denies and deconstructs absolute truth claims, yet its own claims are absolute, excluded from the relativism that it foists on the assertions of others…’ (p.453).

Further, Letham observes, ‘In terms of instability and diversity, the postmodern world of constant flux is seeing insecurity, breakdown, and the rise of various forms of terrorism. As diversity rules, subgroups are divided against each other… A cult of the victim develops, and responsibility declines. This is a recipe for social breakdown, instability, and the unravelling of any cohesion that once existed’ (p.453).

Letham comments: ‘The problem with Enlightenment rationalism was that it sought unity without diversity. Its glorification of human reason led it to impose order and unity. But set free from the authority of the Word of God, it failed to recognize the diversity that God had placed in creation. Fragmentation was built into its program… Christianity maintains unity in diversity and diversity in unity. God, our Creator, is triune. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are in eternal and undivided union as one triune God…’ (p.454).

How then can we live and proclaim God’s good news in today’s world?

We need to draw on the riches of God’s nature and love. Consider for example, what Paul tells us about Jesus Christ in Colossians 1:18-20: He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Too often events around us reveal the tragic results of human attitudes – the massacre at the school in Florida, for example. Self-interest and hatred, pain and death spoil our world. Alienation is a useful word to describe what is happening. But Paul the Apostle speaks, not just of alienation in our human relationships but of our alienation from God.

It’s important that we think this through. God had created us in his image to love him, to honor him and to enjoy him, but we turned our backs on him. We wanted to play ‘god’. God could have written us off and started afresh. But that would have been an admission of defeat by God. It would have implied that he didn’t have the power to overcome the evil that had brought this tragedy about.

However we learn from the biblical narrative that from before time began, God had planned a solution: he would implement a rescue strategy. He would rescue men and women from the consequences of their folly by addressing his own perfect righteousness. He would bring about peace by putting the enmity to death without destroying the enemy. In words that we can only begin to understand and appreciate, Paul tells us that God in Jesus Christ made peace possible when Jesus died on the cross.

In these verses Paul is telling us that Jesus Christ and God are one; God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus. In some extraordinary and incomprehensible way, the cross of Christ involved the complexity of persons that constitute the Trinity, the Godhead. In voluntary obedience to God’s plan and empowered by God’s Spirit, Jesus Christ absorbed within himself the pain and the just anger that our rejection had awakened within God.

As Robert Letham points out, ‘The Trinitarian love is pure and just, good and kind. The persons are distinct, and the union is undivided. There is no conquest of unity by diversity, nor of diversity by unity. The three are one, and the one is three. Here is the theological heart of the Christian faith, and this should be our focus in the postmodern world.

‘In missions of all kinds, it is imperative that we operate with a consistently biblical, Trinitarian doctrine of creation, salvation and the future. The centrality of the Holy Trinity is not only vital to worship and prayer, but also in evangelism to individuals and cultures. At the heart of all this is the way we treat other people, for if God is relational and we are made in his image, at the center of the Christian faith is the way we deal with other human beings who share this image’ (p.456f).

© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com

Diversity . . . ?

The world-views of the western world have experienced dramatic shifts over the last century. For example, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Gödel’s mathematics, science and math have shown, at the extreme edges, the limitations of human logic.

Further, the atrocities and horrors of war last century exposed humanity’s inability to bring about a world of lasting justice and peace. This was only reinforced with the authoritarianism in the forms of such ideologies as Fascism and Communism.

And now in this second decade of a new millennium, there is a distrust of the absolute claims of religion, including Christianity. In a post-modern climate, no group can claim that it has the truth, for it is said objective truth does not exist. The outcome, as we see around us, is diversity and fragmentation. Life, its meaning and values, is defined by self-interest more than anything.

However as Robert Letham observes: ‘Postmodernism cannot stand the test of everyday life. It does not work and it will not work. It fails the test of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who insisted that language and philosophy must have a “cash value” in terms of the real world in which we go about our business from day to day. To do that we must assume that there is an objective world and act accordingly… Wittgenstein… compared such a situation to someone buying several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true!’ (R Letham, The Holy Trinity, P&R Publishing: 2004, p.452f).

How can we live in a world of diversity where is there is no unifying principle – where everyone is pursuing their own agenda, and ethical principles are framed by ‘my rights’?

God. Letham rightly observes that the God of the Bible is triune: one God in three persons, unity in diversity and diversity in unity. When we think about it, professing Christians everywhere need to recover this fundamental understanding of God so that we can proclaim and live out the self-giving love of the One God who exists in Trinity and who delights in giving love and life.

It is therefore worth considering one of the great statements concerning Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament. In Colossians 1:15 we read: Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God.

Here Paul restates words that we read in his earlier Letter (2 Corinthians 4:4) that may reflect his conversion experience on the Road to Damascus: Christ Jesus is the image of God. To say this is to say that Christ Jesus perfectly and visibly reveals the nature and being of God. When asked when he would show his disciples the Father, Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).    

To speak of Jesus Christ as the image of God takes us back to Genesis 1:26f where we read that men and women are ‘created’ in the image of God. And while that image has been defaced through the fall (Genesis 3), it is still true that we remain God’s image-bearers, albeit for the present distorted ones.

That said, Paul’s words in Colossians 1:15Jesus Christ is the image of God, the firstborn of all creation, are significant. The force of the genitive, of creation, is better translated before creation, indicating that the Son of God is not a created being. Rather as we read in the following lines: In him (Christ Jesus) all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him (1:16).

The Son of God, existing before all things, has the privilege of first-place over the creation he was instrumental in bringing about. It was for him and through him that creation came into being.

It is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God who put the show together. He is the One who actually did the creating. He also sustains the universe: he is before all things and in him all things hold together. In Jesus all things cohere. I draw my next breath because Jesus sustains the world.

One of the interesting things that recent science indicates is that the universe fits into a single huge pattern. The same laws that control the fall of an apple control the orbit of the moon. The same equation that describes the behavior of an atom can explain the inferno of the sun. Jesus, we can say, is the logic, the intelligence, the wisdom, who gives the universe its rationality. And that of course is why science is a Christian occupation.

What does it mean? To understand that God is more than one (more of the Holy Spirit later), is most important for understanding ourselves, our worship and prayer and our lifestyle. To know that there is a distinction of persons in the Godhead, that in their unity and diversity they love one another, will also effect our relationships – something that is central in reaching a society that in its drive for diversity has lost its unity.

© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com

Fullness

‘Valentine’s Day’. All of us like to think that we can find a way to experience life to the full. In the minds of many, a special relationship celebrated or affirmed on Valentine’s Day is important, if not essential. Well, so the retail world marketing wants us to think!

The quest for life in its fullness is not new. In the first century Roman world people often looked for solutions in spiritual experiences. Such ideas began to take root within the life of the early churches, the church in Colossae for example. While there doesn’t seem to be a specific group of false-teachers there, Paul the Apostle clearly saw the need to challenge a false understanding of fullness that went beyond the central truth of God’s mercy that they had embraced (Colossians 1:6).

Cultural influences. From comments Paul makes through his Letter, we learn that the Colossian Christians wanted a knowledge and experience of God that went beyond God’s gospel. In fact, evidence points to the influences of early forms of Gnosticism – the ‘inside’ knowledge of the deep mysteries of God acquired by a select group. In the Colossian church there was also the influence of a Jewish mysticism, known as the Merkabah mysticism. This offered to carry its adherents, because of their strict observance of the law, as if in a chariot into the very presence of God.

In contrast to this, Paul prays that the Colossian Christians may be filled with the knowledge of his (God’s) will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that they might live lives worthy of the Lord.

One of the surprising things here is that Paul prays first and foremost for their growth in spiritual maturity. At the end of Jesus’ ministry we find twelve disciples (and one of them a traitor) and about one hundred others. Churches may be filled with thousands, but there may only be one true disciple.

Paul prays that the Colossians will grow in their thinking— so, knowledge, wisdom, understanding (1:9). He also prays for growth in lifestyle: living a life …pleasing …bearing fruit … (1:10). He prays for maturing of Christian minds so that there might be maturity in behavior.

Paul prays that his readers will be filled with a knowledge of God’s will that comes through an ever-increasing understanding of God who has revealed himself through the Bible.

Usually we think that the will of God has to do primarily with what work we do, whom we marry and where we live. Yes, God is concerned about these matters – but not nearly as much as with our understanding of him, what we are like, how we live, and how we relate with one another.

Paul is saying that spirituality is a process that involves growth, and the key to that growth is not faith, but understanding. Church-goers are sometimes accused of having no brains. Paul disagrees. He is saying, by implication, that when we go to church, whenever we pray, we should not leave our brains behind. Rather, use them. We need to understand the mind and character of God better so that we might live lives more worthy of him.

Paul knows that we can’t do this simply by our own efforts, so he prays: May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy,… (1:11). God is committed to empowering our wills to live out what we learn.

Which brings us the outcomes Paul is praying for: That you may bear fruit in every good work.

If there is no discernable difference between our lives and the lives of those around us, we need to ask ourselves what kind of Christians we are. We are to grow in our knowledge of God, so that we can discern God’s mind in the complexities of life.

Further, Paul prays that we may be strengthened to display great endurance and patience… He prays that God’s people will have the capacity to survive stressful times with joy, overcome insult with composure, and most of all, know that God can be trusted to be working out his all-wise and all-good purposes even in the toughest times.

He also prays that God’s people will joyfully give thanks to the Father… God has transferred us from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of his beloved Son. We have been brought under the rule of the greatest and kindest of all kings, a king who is committed to our good – now and for eternity. Our only true response must be one of joy and gratitude.

Yet, so often reading the Scriptures and prayer falls out of our life – until a crisis occurs.

Today is Ash Wednesday the first day of the season of Lent. You may want to commit to a daily pattern between now and Easter of reading one of the Gospels and making time to pray.

As we get to know God and his mind, so our lives are changed and we will increasingly bear the fruit of knowing and living life to the full.

© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com