by John Mason | Mar 7, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
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 strategy: And 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
by John Mason | Feb 28, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
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
by John Mason | Feb 21, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
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 1:15: Jesus 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
by John Mason | Feb 14, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
‘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
by John Mason | Feb 7, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
Many people reckon church is irrelevant. Indeed, recent research indicates that the majority of people who call themselves Christians think church is unimportant. In fact, they often attend church because of family, because they like the preacher or the music, or because it is good for social networking.
But God doesn’t want us to ‘date’ church – attending when we feel like it. The Letters of Paul the Apostle show us that it was his constant ambition to be involved in the growth of vital churches.
Today and over the coming weeks, I plan to touch on key themes in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians with the title, ‘Life to the Full’. In the first section of chapter 1, Paul identifies features of a church that exemplifies his dream.
Thanksgiving. He begins by telling his Colossian readers how much he thanks God for them. Significantly he doesn’t thank God that they were ‘religious’. Rather, he speaks about them as being characterized by faith, love, and hope.
He writes of their faith in Christ Jesus. The order of the words is significant, Christ Jesus, or King Jesus, indicating that from the first, the followers of Jesus Christ acknowledged him as the Lord, God’s anointed king. People often say they believe in God, but true Christianity is Christ-centered.
Another mark was their love for all the saints. Their faith was not simply individualistic and personal but flowed over into relationships with everyone who shared a common confession in Christ Jesus. They not only knew one another’s names but were committed to serving one another’s spiritual and practical needs. They were God’s new society, bound together across the differences of racial and cultural backgrounds, slaves and free. Vital churches are God’s new society.
A third feature of the church in Colossae was hope. There is something unexpected about the way Paul writes of this; the Colossian’s faith and love spring out of the hope laid up for us in heaven. Furthermore, this hope is not a blind optimism, a leap in the dark. Faith and love spring from the certainty of the return of Jesus Christ, which is a central part of the gospel Paul goes on to write about. It suggests that we need to learn to live now in the light of the age to come.
The themes of truth and growth bubble through these verses. In an age where truth is denied, it is striking the way that Paul speaks of God’s good news (gospel) as the truth. The gospel, he says, is the word of the truth. He could have left out any reference to the words the truth, but he doesn’t. Here is something to challenge and encourage us. Significantly, Paul continues to comment that the gospel is expanding all over the world.
It’s worth pausing to consider the point that God’s gospel is true. As others have noted, the gospel is true in a counter-intuitive sense: the statements it makes about God and men and women are beyond human invention and imagination. Furthermore, it is true in an historical sense: the eye-witness accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were not a set of myths or lies. They are trustworthy facts. The Christian message is also true in the experiential sense: when we put our trust in Jesus Christ who is at the center of the gospel message, we discover that our faith is not a hoax but a genuine experience.
Growth. Because the gospel is the truth, the church in Colossae had formed and was growing. People had heard and responded to the message in all its truth, preached by pastor Epaphras. And we should also note that God’s Spirit was at work: He (Epaphras) is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit (Colossians 1:8). The work of God’s Spirit is essential if people are to hear and gladly respond to God’s gospel when it is verbalized to them. In 1 Corinthians 12:3b Paul writes: … no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.
So often we forget this necessary work of the Spirit of God in the miracle of conversion – yes, conversion is a miracle. It is the greater work that Jesus spoke about in John 14:12 when he told his disciples that they would be doing greater works than the miracles he performed.
Good churches develop where God’s Word is faithfully announced and lived out – churches where God’s Spirit of love is also at work. For, by God’s grace, the Spirit is at work drawing people of all ages to a genuine faith in Christ, a love for one another (not just their friends), inspired by the hope of the coming reign of Christ. Where lives are being transformed in this way, churches grow in maturity and in number, with their impact spilling over into the wider community and beyond.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
by John Mason | Jan 31, 2018 | Word on Wednesday
No, I am not using the word ‘tush’ in its more recent use, as a reference to the human posterior. Rather I am speaking of a much earlier English usage of ‘tush’ developed from Middle English where it was an exclamation of disdain, dismissal or contempt.
Interestingly, in the 16th century William Tyndale translated Genesis 3:4 into English with these words: Then said the serpent unto the woman, tush, you shall not die. And Melvyn Bragg in his William Tyndale (SPCK: London, 2017, p.61) observes, ‘How wicked, how lovely, how remarkable is that ‘tush’.
He contrasts it with the plainer words of the King James (1611) Version: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. ‘Nothing like as vivid or subtly complex in its mix of snake-charm flattery and a lie. ‘Tush’ is a sad loss,’ Bragg comments (M Bragg, p.61).
I draw attention to ‘tush’, because understood this way it delightfully and aptly captures the disdain and the dismissal of the voices today that oppose the God of the Bible.
Consider for a moment the intent of the ancient serpent. In Genesis 3:1 we read: …The serpent said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” ‘Did God really say, any tree?’ he asked.
His words went beyond what God had said. The command related to one tree only – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent’s strategy was to sow doubt. He deftly and subtly did this by misquoting God’s command, altering the focus of the command from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to any tree. The deception was carefully scripted, tempting Eve to think that God must be a spoil-sport, someone who couldn’t be really trusted as having her best interests at heart. She was now open to questioning the rightness of God’s command.
The forces of evil use the same ploy today to undermine our relationship with God and our trust in him. ‘Tush,’ he says. ‘A life of Christian morality. How dull and boring.’
Initially the woman correctly repeated God’s command as referring to just one particular tree. But then she incorrectly added to God’s command: “…Nor shall you touch it, or you shall die”. God had not said, “You mustn’t touch it…”
Clearly Eve is tempted to think that God’s command is restrictive – something she doesn’t like at all. She has become like the sulky teenager who doesn’t like being told by her parents that she has to be home by a certain time.
Wickedness was at work in that conversation. The prince of this world had laid the groundwork for Eve to doubt God’s command and no longer truly trust him. But we see the wickedness of the deception even more with the falsehood that so smoothly slipped from the tempter’s lips. “You won’t die,…” he said. ‘Tush. That’s just hell-fire and brimstone talk. Don’t believe it’.
In one sentence, the wily tempter had undermined God’s command and with it the truth of God’s goodness. He also questioned God’s justice – that God would condemn the woman to death if she disobeyed.
It was the opening ploy in a strategy to deface and destroy humanity as the image of God.
The forces of evil continue to adopt this and other strategies today. By altering God’s words, by taking them out of context (as happened with the temptations of Jesus), doubts are sowed in our minds about God’s goodness and justice – and indeed about his very existence.
When we pause and consider these matters, we begin to see how easily we too can be duped into a false understanding of God and the reality of the deeper truths of the universe.
If we choose to live without God, the day will come when he will inform us that he will respect our choice. He will let us go to live in an eternity without him – a world without goodness and truth, without justice and love, a world without hope, a world where there is only despair.
Let’s pray for the discernment, the wisdom and the strength ourselves to reject the dismissive ‘tush’ of the world around us. Let’s also pray that the Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy, will open the eyes of the blind and give us the words to draw our family and friends to the word of the truth, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com
