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January 09, 2005
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Daniel 7:13-14 / Colossians 2: 6-10
January 9th, 2005
It seems to me that Christmas flew by this year, barely stopping to say hello on December 25th. Here we are in the thick of a new year—2005, if you can imagine it. You can almost see time fly. This week on the plane back from seeing our daughter and her family in Annapolis I read much of Harold Bloom’s recent book, Where Shall Wisdom be Found? The title caught me as I browsed in Border’s Book Store in Annapolis.
I think a lot about the questions, “Where can I find wisdom?”, “How can I live my life as my Creator intended and help guide others in this way?” There are so many distractions. I look at the busyness of life, the focus on buying and selling, on maximizing our pleasure, on the trashing of the glory of our bodies, pop music & entertainment industries, on hiding the effects of over-indulgence and time on our bodies, on trying to find success—only to realize as I get older that success is a totally elusive goal.
I look at the confusion in the church, the cacophony of voices, the strutting, fretting, disagreements, disappointments and posturing. The church gives me a lot of almost sleepless nights. Where can wisdom be found? I need wisdom. Bloom wrote of the trickle down effect into society of great minds as found in the biblical Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in Plato, St. Augustine, Freud, Marcel Proust, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and others.
He suggested one idea I have found to be right. He recommended memorizing great literature and repeating it, letting it influence our minds. Psalm 119: 11 suggests the same idea: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.”
The reason why I began thinking about the Nicene Creed with you last year and continue now is that here is one of the great bequests of the past. It is worth fixing in our memory banks and trotting out to ponder. The Nicene Creed is a deep statement of what is most basic to your life and mine if we have trusted in Jesus Christ. It ponders God, the triune God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” If I am a Christian, the most important focus of my life is Jesus Christ. I’m tempted to major on many minor things, but Jesus is the major focus of my life. “My life is hid with Christ in God.” My life. Your life too if you are a Christian. I need to think of Jesus Christ often, and so do you, to look at Him, to turn Him over in our minds.
This morning before us is that small phrase in the Creed describing Jesus Christ, “true God from true God.” Or as an older form of the Creed has it, “very God of very God.” Why this repetition of phrases, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God?” What does each new phrase add to what we know of Jesus? While it may not add to what we know, when we probe to understand Jesus Christ as the Creed leads us, we come to realize that we can’t describe Him once over lightly. We are hunting for the wisdom of God when we stretch out these phrases probing someone indescribable and mull on these phrases as a means of focusing on Him.
I want us to focus on the Apostle Paul’s words in Colossians 2 this morning. The Creed tries to capture in a few words what Paul writes here. But first let’s look briefly at the Apostle Paul who wrote this remarkable passage.
His parents named him Saul, after Israel’s first king. His life began in a devout Jewish family in southern Turkey. He grew up in a province of the Roman Empire so he was a Roman citizen as well as a Jew. His religion was more important to him than his Roman citizenship, but he was proud to be a Roman citizen.
As a young man Saul was like some other young people I know for whom their faith is the most important thing in life. For some it’s a stage of life they pass through and then maybe become jaded at the disappointment that comes so often in the church. People disappoint us. Maybe we think too much about our disappointment. But for Paul it was no passing stage.
Somewhere along the line he learned a trade, making tents, but it was only because he had to earn a living. His greatest interests were God and his Jewish faith. He went from his home city of Tarsus to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel the Elder, heir to the great name of Rabbi Hillel who was Gamaliel’s grandfather. Gamaliel was the most highly esteemed rabbi of his day. He is quoted a number of times in the Mishnah, the core of the Jewish oral tradition. It was said of Gamaliel, “When he died, the honor of the Torah ceased, and purity and piety became extinct.”
Saul was Gamaliel’s prize student. He was probably in Jerusalem when Jesus was tried and crucified. Saul detested Jesus. In those early days he shared the opinion of the men who accused Jesus of blasphemy and breaking the Law of Moses.
So it must have been a great shock to the leading Jews of Jerusalem when Saul of Tarsus suddenly changed. Saul not only came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel, but he devoted his life to spreading this Good News, this Gospel as widely as he could. He even changed his name from Saul, the name of Israel’s first king to Paul, which means “small” in Latin.
From then on Paul was interested in three things: First, Jesus Christ. He wrote at one point, “I determined to know nothing . . . but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Second, how to bring every aspect of his life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, presenting Jesus Christ to other people so they would trust in him--in particular the kind of people he once despised, non-Jews.
I want to explore briefly each of these three new aspects of Paul’s life, but first it is important to realize that Paul did not just change one kind of “fanatical” interest for another. Very often the most intense “religionists” are converts.
I watch the Catholic TV station sometimes. I am interested to see the program where former Protestant ministers who have become Catholics try to persuade other Protestants who might be watching to “come home.” They are the most devoted to Mary who before spoke against the place Mary has come to have in the Catholic church. They are the most ardent in submission to the pope who before rejected papal authority. They become zealous in adoring the Eucharist who before spoke against the “bloody sacrifice of the Mass.” This was not Paul’s way.
Paul did not transpose his fanatical Pharisaic Judaism, which lashed out against Jewish converts to Christianity, into fanatical Christianity that lashed out against fellow Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. The pride that he had felt in being correct as a Pharisee didn’t change into pride in being correct as a Christian. His pride was subdued. He became modest in his view of himself. Jesus filled his mind and his heart. He diminished in importance to himself as Jesus Christ filled his focus. He was taught this by looking at Jesus who was so modest.
I wish with all my heart that this were the picture we Christians would present to the world. If only this is what the world would see because this is what we are—“crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live, yet not us, but Christ who lives in us.” What a difference it would make in the appeal of the Gospel. Paul believed it when he said of himself, “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”
It all has to do with Jesus Christ who is the center of everything. How is this so?
Paul described Jesus in a way that he knew that Jesus had been hinting at when He said modestly of Himself, “I am my Father are one.” And “If you knew me you would know my Father also” While this was the basic truth, Jesus left out all the amazing details of what this meant. Jesus didn’t spell out this unity of identity between Himself and the Father, but Paul dug deep into Jesus’ confession and saw what was going on.
Paul recognized the paradox that Jesus “though He was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself.” Yet at the same time, “In Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily;” and a few verses earlier, “in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Finally, “He is the head of all authority and power.” But who could see this as Jesus walked the dusty roads between Nazareth and Jerusalem?
He looked so ordinary. But does not true greatness always look ordinary? People create glamorous exterior ornamentations to give the impression of greatness. We go to fancy colleges & big name seminaries, concoct fancy titles, honorary degrees, and the like—all outward stuff. But God “looks on the heart.” God in becoming a human being did not festoon Jesus with outward signs people would associate with the idea of God. As God looks into our depths to see our hearts, so God filled the Man Jesus from the inside. “In him the fullness of Deity dwells bodily.”
Who can imagine the fullness of deity in a man? All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge—the reservoir from which was conceived quarks, DNA, galaxies, and all that is larger than large, and smaller than small in this intricate system around us? The epitome of authority and power in all the universe—not in the tiny atom that can explode, but in Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. All of this in the heart of someone who looked like an ordinary man. That’s pretty heavy-duty praise. But Paul was not praising Jesus. He was not just reaching for superlatives; he was simply describing Jesus.
Paul’s purpose in writing this was not merely to say the right things about Jesus. In Paul’s day people were used to Roman emperors saying all sorts of extravagant things about themselves. The miserable Emperor Caligula whose death Josephus described in its full, gory detail, proclaimed himself Divine. He was not satisfied that the Jews offered sacrifices in his behalf, he wanted sacrifices offered to him. As a result of his arrogant and evil life, Caligula suffered an ignoble death—which I’ve discovered was how ancient historians often depicted the end of proud, evil people.
Jesus too suffered an excruciating death, but it was not a miserable death. Indeed, it was, for all its pain, a glorious death so that we call the day Jesus died, Good Friday.
But Paul was not just trying to describe for us who and what Jesus is in order that we should hold correct ideas in our heads about Him. This is good, but it is about half of being a Christian.
Paul writes to us, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, being rooted and grounded in Him and being built up in the faith which you have been taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Here is what it means to be a Christian. It ends with continuous thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, a continuous sense of gratitude caps off the Christian life.
But who can possibly achieve this? Even so single-minded a fellow as the Apostle Paul confessed that in him there was an incessant warfare going on, the desires of the flesh against the desires of the spirit.
What Paul is telling us is that even though this warfare goes on inside all of us too, don’t give up on being a “working Christian.” How can we be and remain functioning Christians? How can we get out of the rut of talking about the faith, of wistfully thinking about it, singing about it, listening to sermons about it, and then returning to ordinary life full of blunders, of self-centeredness and the unhappiness that comes with a fixation on myself?
We begin by actually thinking about this Jesus in whom we say we believe. The Creed helps us in an odd sort of way. Memorizing Scripture that tells us of Him helps us. Take the time to memorize and think about these things so that other thoughts are crowded out. Then start deliberately to “walk,” to live, your thoughts “rooted and grounded” in Him. Each of us is rooted and grounded in something. Our natural rootedness is in ourselves. Our natural idea of who and what is most important is the one we see in the mirror when we wash our faces in the morning. Replace that one you see deliberately by thinking about Jesus. This is how the life in Christ must begin.
What fitting matters to think about as we ordain deacons this morning and again consecrate elders and deacons to serving in Jesus’ name! “Let this mind be in you which was in Jesus Christ . . . he emptied Himself and took the form of a servant and became obedient—even unto death on the cross.” Let this mind be in us, in me, in you. And then let’s see what God can make of this congregation, this session, this board of deacons in the days to come.
Let us determine to adopt three goals: First, to keep Jesus Christ before us personally. Second, to bring every aspect of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, to present Jesus Christ to other people so they will trust in him. I pray that our lives may be the greatest argument for trust in Jesus Christ, walking, living rooted and grounded in Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we have tried to see something of Jesus this morning. Help us to see Him and to keep on seeing Him, and to walk in Him, rooted and grounded in Him. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 9, 2005 09:30 AM