« September 2004 | Main | November 2004 »
October 31, 2004
Jesus, Only Son of God
Jesus, Only Son of God
Daniel 7: 9-14 / Matthew 3: 13-17
NT: Matthew 3: 13-17
October 31st, 2004
Today is Reformation Sunday. Reformation Sunday doesn’t celebrate an event in Jesus’ life. It remembers a reform within a movement that began with Jesus and grew in ways beyond the wildest imagination of the Apostle Paul.
The Church began as what is often referred to as “a Galilean affair.” It was a few men who left everything to literally walk with Jesus along the dusty roads of Palestine toward a goal they didn’t understand. Then Jesus was crucified. Three days later as they were numbly contemplating their loss Jesus came back to life. They realized that God had introduced something different and new to life. It did not end with death. Furthermore, God dealt with the fundamental flaw in humanity, sin. How? He provided a way to be forgiven, through trust in this Jesus who died and came alive again.
Fifty days after Jesus was crucified something happened in Jerusalem that catapulted this Good News worldwide. This took place at the Jewish feast of Pentecost. Word about the purpose of Jesus’ death and resurrection infiltrated many sectors of the known world as devout Jews in Jerusalem heard the Gospel, believed it, were baptized, and took the word back home when the Pentecost celebration was over.
The long story of this thing Jesus began is mind-boggling. It got involved with the Roman government in the fourth century after a Roman emperor became a Christian. It grew into a culture transforming movement, but in the process culture transformed the Christian faith as well. Wealth and power came to the Church, and its best-known struggles during the heart of the Middle Ages were with kings over the question, “who’s the boss.” The simple Gospel got lost.
On Reformation Sunday we remember the recovery of the great truth that became lost in the shuffle of Church history. We are approved by God only because of His grace displayed to us in Jesus Christ. Grace is favor God gives without regard to the merit of those who receive it.
This morning I ask you to think with me about this Jesus who brought this grace to us. He is the focus of the Gospel, the Good News of God’s grace. The Scriptures teach us this Jesus Christ was both Son of God and son of man.
I suspect not many of us have thought about the implications of how God poured out this favor through Someone who was both Son of God and son of man. Perhaps it’s not necessary to think about it. What’s important is simply that it is true. I heard on the radio this past week that the Red Sox out-fielder whose home runs were a great factor in their World Series success said that they played better when they didn’t think about it. They just played the game. Perhaps we would do better not to think too much about the mysteries of our faith, about how God did things, and just live it.
But when we read the Bible we see things written there that we do think about, and should think about. Otherwise, why were they written? The Bible tells us Jesus was Son of God and son of man.
The Nicene Creed affirms that the one Lord, Jesus Christ was the only-begotten Son of God. The version of the Creed in our Hymn Book reads, “only Son of God.” But the Greek in which it was first written says monogenes, “only born;” not just “only.” And the Latin into which it was first translated says unigenitus, “Only born,” rather than simply “only” (unicus).
This was to distinguish between Jesus Christ as Son of God and what the Old Testament refers to in a few places as sons of God. In Genesis 6 and Job 2, and elsewhere, we read the term “sons of God,” bene elohim. But none of these sons of God were born. They were angelic beings God created; none of them were born. I don’t know how angels multiply, or even if they do. The Creed refers to One who was uniquely Son of God, capital S, who also was born to a human mother.
When we say Son of God we refer to Jesus’ identity as God, as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. When we say “son of man,” we affirm that He was really a flesh and blood human being—just the same as you and me.
I want to speak of these two titles, Son of God and son of man, in a way I hope you find of use not only in understanding your faith, but also in living your faith. Christianity is essentially a life to be lived.
Perhaps you have seen the recent CNN broadcast on Christianity in America. Conservative Evangelical Christianity, that largely holds to the heritage given to us by Jesus’ apostles and the earliest Christians, has become a massive cultural force in our country. The great ideas at the heart of Evangelical Christianity are the truths I believe. But I feel a sense of dread when great truths are popularized and merge with a cultural movement. The influence passes both ways, from culture to faith, and from faith to culture. If you and I want to live out the kind of life that responds to the grace of God we must stop and think about what’s going on around us.
Jesus warned about a broad way that leads to destruction. He didn’t thereby blow a cloud of suspicion over all popular movements that draw masses of people. Indeed, He invited a lot of people to Himself when He said, “Come to me ALL you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” But He also informed us that this business of coming to Him requires walking after Him carrying something heavy and cross-shaped on our back. You have a cross to carry, and so do I. Those who are caught up in movements must still face themselves in the quiet moments and ask themselves, “am I walking, carrying my cross behind Jesus or just following the crowd that says ‘Jesus’ a lot?”
“Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it by Himself. Nobody else could walk it form Him. He had to walk it by Himself.” And you and I need to be aware that it is a lonesome valley for us too when we really walk the Jesus way.
When we think of Jesus as son of man we see One like ourselves. Son of man was an apocalyptic title used, as we shall see, in the Old Testament. Apocalyptic terms referred to times yet to come when mysterious purposes of God would burst on the world. Often they referred to what the seers and prophets believed were the end times, when the world as we know it would be destroyed. But the prophets who used the term “son of man,” specifically had in mind a real person and not some angelic being as the term “sons of God” suggested.
We read from the prophet Daniel this mysterious vision that ends with the coming of “one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
This comes after a mysterious description of a little horn that came up from the midst of ten horns on a fearful beast. As you may suppose, very different spins are put on this little horn. This little horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things. Some early Protestant Christians who were hostile to the Catholic Church thought it referred to the Catholic Church. I think it may refer to a Greek king in the second century before Christ that tried to destroy the Jews. His name was Antiochus Epiphanes. He thought he was an appearance of God, which is what “Epiphanes” means. This little horn comes up from the midst of ten horns on the fearful beast that tried to stamp out the people and the family line into which God’s promised Messiah would be born.
The vision moves from topic to topic quickly, but then introduces us to “one that was ancient of days [whose] raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool . . . a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him . . . and the books were opened.”
We read of one “like a son of man [coming] to the Ancient of Days [to whom was given] dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him . . . an everlasting kingdom which shall not pass away.”
How similar this picture is to the picture John describes in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. He heard a voice behind him, a loud voice like a trumpet. When he turned to see the source of the voice he saw seven gold lamp-stands—that stood for seven churches in Asia Minor. In the midst of these lamp-stands he saw “one like a son of man . . . his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow, his eyes were like a flame of fire.” And we know that John is seeing a vision of Jesus Christ in an exalted state because this son of man says to him, “I died, and behold I am alive for ever more.”
These two mysterious visions connect directly with what we read of Jesus when He was baptized by His cousin John, just before beginning the three years of work before His suffering and death. A voice boomed loud from the heavens as Jesus emerged from the water, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus spoke of Himself when He said, “the foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay His head.”
The grand purposes of God come together from three angles. First, there is the foretelling of a son of man, a unique human being to come, by an Old Testament prophet. Second, there is the event when God the Father speaks of this unique One, who called Himself, “son of man,” saying, “This is my beloved Son.” Third, there is the vision by the Apostle John when he sees the heavenly image of this beloved Son receiving the worship described in the Book of Daniel.
When the Creed leads us to see that the One Lord, Jesus Christ was God’s only Son, it points us to see this connection between the prophet’s vision of the “son of man” and the man of whom the voice said, “This is my beloved son,” and then this glorious and exalted Being who stands up from the midst of the seven churches.
Why did the early Church leaders describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son of God?” In coming weeks we’ll see how they described Jesus in even more precise detail. But here they referred to His being born because there were some Christian teachers who said Jesus only seemed to be a man. They represented a distinct strain in early Christian thinking about Jesus. One fellow taught that Jesus came through the Virgin Mary as water comes through a pipe, without being affected by His mother’s nature at all (Tatian). Another man proposed that Jesus was plunked down on earth as a man at the time of His baptism, and wasn’t even born at all (Marcion).
In fact, the tendency among devout Christians is to minimize the man-ness of Jesus and accentuate His God-ness. We feel irreverent in thinking too much about Jesus as a man. We scarcely dare thinking of how fully Jesus knew the limitations we have as people. Could He really be tempted to sin? Did He know as little about the future as we do? In Paul’s letter to the Philippians we read, “He emptied Himself.” Emptied Himself of what, we wonder? And it’s healthy to wonder these things. Undoubtedly we’re often wrong in our ideas, but we do no wrong to try to understand things the Bible doesn’t explain.
But we are to understand that despite what we can’t understand, we are to know for sure that the Jesus Christ our Lord was born to a human mother just as we all were. And so He can understand fully the joys and sorrows of life that pull and tug at us.
But there was an even greater reason why Jesus was born as we are. Jesus, who was fully human, but never sinned, was able to give us the remarkable gift of taking on Himself the complete sum of all our sin because He was a man.
If each of us owed the bank a debt way beyond what we could pay and someone came along and signed his name to our debt, so that we were debt-free, we would appreciate that person, don’t you think? This Jesus did for us.
If the Son of God had not become man, He would have had a category problem in caring for the debt-load of sin. It took a person to take on Himself the sins of people. Presumably an angel could absorb the sins of angels. But it took a human being to do this for us human beings. Jesus, who freely chose never to sin, lovingly chose to accept the blame for the sins we freely choose to commit. This is the benefit to us of Jesus being “son of man.” He could absorb our debt.
But He was also Son of God, which means that we see how fully committed God was to this plan to rescue our troubled world. We think of God as transcendent, as standing apart from this world, even though we feel His influence within it. But the Gospel teaches us that God did not stand aloof, but entered human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
When you and I look up at a night sky and realize that our planet is a very tiny spot in our solar system, and that there is so much vastness beyond, it can seem ridiculous to think the Creator of all this was interested in such a tiny thing as our planet. But this is just what we do believe. And believing this, rather than moving us to pride at our importance, moves us to gratitude. This moves me to want to live deliberately and thankfully, trying to follow the ways of the son of man, who was the Son of God.
I can relate to Jesus as a fellow human being. Jesus’ life is worthy of the closest inspection. He lived as it is best and wisest to live. But He is more than an example—I could never emulate fully. In accepting the blame for my sin and yours, He gave us a gift that only God could give, free and complete forgiveness of our sin. And with this forgiveness God gives us hope. And where there’s hope, there’s life.
This is why it is useful to realize that this Jesus about whom we hear so much was born as we were. And that He was Deity as well as humanity. Why all this? Because we are precious to God. I hope you have responded to this great love of God, and thankfully trusted in Jesus as your Savior and Lord—and then deliberately set out on the life-long business of patterning your life after the life of Jesus.
Let us pray: O Lord, our God, thank You for Jesus Christ, Your only begotten Son, whom we thankfully trust, and desire to follow in the way we live. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2004
We Believe In One Lord, Jesus Christ
We Believe In One Lord, Jesus Christ
Psalm 2 / Genesis 18: 1-8
Matthew 16: 13-20
October 24th, 2004
When we speak of Jesus, we sometimes call Him just “Jesus;” or “Jesus of Nazareth,” or “Jesus Christ,” and sometimes the longer name, “the Lord Jesus Christ.” When we say “Jesus of Nazareth,” it’s because Jesus was a popular name, Joshua or Yeshuah in Hebrew. It’s a particular Jesus we have in mind. The Gospels distinguish between the Yeshuah—the Jesus who died for our sins, the Son of Mary who grew up in Nazareth, and every other Yeshuah –Jesus of that day.
Some who say “Jesus Christ” may think that “Christ” was in some way Jesus’ last name. But “Christ” was really a title. More properly we should say, “Jesus, The Christ.” Because “Christ” was a Greek term corresponding to the Hebrew term “Messiah,” or anointed one. Calling Jesus “the Christ,” means He was The Messiah, the specially anointed One promised often in the Old Testament.
Very often those who feel a strong love for Jesus call Him “The Lord Jesus Christ.” It feels good to say that if you love Him. The words belong together. But I wonder if it’s clear to us all what we mean when we call Him “Lord.” Calling Jesus “Lord” is not like referring to “Lord Peter Wimsey,” Dorothy Sayers’ fictional detective, or to “Sir Walter Raleigh.” These are just titles of nobility.
When we call Jesus, “Lord,” we’re using His proper name. The special name for God the ancient people of Israel used was “Adonai” which means “Lord.” Actually God’s name was too sacred to say. The most devout Jews called God’s name “ha Shem,” which means “the Name,” instead of saying Lord or pronouncing the four letters which spelled Yahweh or Yahoo.
When we call Jesus Christ “Lord,” we’re referring to the name of God that fits Jesus as well as it fits God the Father. We should always use that name reverently.
You remember in the Christmas story that the angels announced to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ, the Lord.” This baby is the Savior, the Christ. This baby is “Lord.”
What?! These Jewish shepherds were excited. They ran to Bethlehem as fast as they could. Why were they so excited? Because though they might not have known very much about the terms Savior or Christ, they knew that “Lord” was the name of God. What would Lord-God look like as a baby?
The shepherds ran to see what God looked like—as a baby. I wonder what they expected Him to look like. When they got there surely they didn’t gawk the way we stare at a sideshow. What a shock it must have been to feel the reverence that took them over in that cattle stall. They looked into the feed trough, with hay sticking out of it and saw a little baby all wrapped up to keep warm. This was the Lord-God the angels told them about?!!
The manger scenes we see at Christmas depict sheep and oxen sitting near by. This is how animals kneel. The shepherds too must have knelt down. Their hearts were hushed, aware of the contradiction that the baby Lord-God should be so humbly laid. They left that cattle stall and told everyone what they had seen. And all who heard them wondered at what the shepherds told them, even though shepherds as a class of people were held in general contempt.
At the time of the Council of Nicea, 1700 years ago, these early Christians thought it was of first importance to clarify who this Jesus was. An influential elder named Arius, from the great church in Alexandria, Egypt was teaching that Jesus was someone very special, but He was not actually Lord-God as the Gospels said. Arius said Jesus was divine, meaning there was something extraordinary about Him. He said God was somehow uniquely with Jesus as He had never been with any one before. But he balked at saying He was “Lord” as God told Moses in the Old Testament that His name was “Lord.”
In a later sermon I hope to clarify some of the complexity of this controversy. But I believe the problem for Arius was, in a nutshell, the issue many people have today. No one can understand that a baby human being was God. It’s a mystery. Some people believe it is nonsense.
If God became a baby, who was running the universe then? It is the kind of question people wonder about at Jesus’ crucifixion. Did God die when Jesus died on the cross? Well, yes and no. As Samuel Wesley put it, “’tis mystery the immortal dies.” The doctrine of the Trinity tries to address these mysterious questions. Jesus was God, and the Father is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but there are not three Gods, just one. God was still managing the universe when the Son of God became a baby in the Virgin Mary. God was still in control when Jesus died on the cross. It is a mysterious matter that defies our ability to explain. But we can get some inklings of the purpose of this, even if we can’t understand it.
James S. Stewart, the pastor of North Morningside Church in Edinburgh in the middle of last century, remarked in one of his sermons that “It is the glory and doom of man to have been made for fellowship with God. Of all the faculties and capacities which he possesses, incomparably the greatest is his capacity for God . . . Reconciliation with God is therefore the cardinal issue, far and away the most crucial problem, confronting the soul of man today.”
Alienation is the great problem in the world. Look at the mess we’re in! There’s hostility, alienation all over. Iraq seethes with alienation. We live in social, cultural disintegration. Alienation is writ large over the world, over nations, communities, churches, and families. The cure to alienation is reconciliation. How can we be reconciled? To whom should we be reconciled?
Reconciliation between people who are estranged is very hard to achieve. Think of people with whom you once were close, perhaps a former boyfriend or girlfriend, perhaps a husband or wife, a teammate, a classmate, a colleague at work, a former friend at church. Something happened. There was a moment of sharp disagreement, a harsh word was spoken. You can’t forget. Perhaps it was unfaithfulness. She cheated on you.
Maybe it was something even worse than this. In some societies bearing a grudge when someone offends you is like wearing a badge of honor. Revenge is seen as a sacred duty.
Alienation between people is the cause of the great and enduring sorrow. In a family alienation is dreadfully painful. I conducted a funeral once where a son and his father were bitter enemies. The son told me so with tearless eyes when the funeral of his dad was over. I didn’t know what to say.
The slaughter of little children in the school in Beslan, in Russia, a few weeks ago was a vengeful act intended to produce the greatest sorrow. The alienation between the Chechnan Republic and Russia is deep. It is so deep that ordinary men who love their own children slaughtered the children of other parents who they knew loved these children. This would cause the bitterest pain of all. The cycle of alienation can fuel generations’ worth of violence that becomes part of the culture of a people.
The root of all this alienation is found in peoples’ alienation from God. Sin is the cause. Sin separates us from God, making Him seem repulsive. Sin is a disease that makes us yearn for what is ugly and perverse while being disgusted with what is good. The ultimate expression of sin is disgust with God who is seen as a competitor with myself as “god.”
It was this cycle of alienation that God stooped to conquer when He sent His Son to be born so humbly in Bethlehem. Jesus, the Son of God, was born and became human in order to put a human face to our alienation from God—and that, in order to put in human terms how to be reconciled to God.
When God was born in Bethlehem, He came face to face with us in the gentlest, most tactful way possible. He did not confront us in power that would overwhelm us but as a baby to disarm us.
As a rule the best way to try to end alienation is to go to the person who offended you unaggressively and say something like, “I want to restore what we lost.” Perhaps you bring a meaningful gift, a book on a theme beloved to the one to whom you want to be reconciled. You bring something that cost you something to break through the barrier of mistrust.
If you and I are alienated and we come face to face so that you can look into my eyes and I can see into yours too, there is a chance for reconciliation. Our eyes are the windows of our souls.
Well, when God, whose name is Lord, longed for reconciliation with us who had hurt Him, he stooped to become the most humble kind of human being, a baby, to get us to look into His eyes. God gave the costliest gift to us, wrapped in the most disarming form, a baby. And God wasn’t fussy about how we accepted this gift.
Remember that baby Jesus had a stable for his first crib because nobody would give up his room in the inn for Mary even though she was about to give birth. What discourtesy is found in Luke’s words, “She laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn!” Of course, they didn’t realize Mary was about to give birth to God. They thought it was any old baby that this poor country girl would bear. I remember that Jesus later would teach us that whatever we do to the least of people we do unto Him. His mother looked like “the least” kind of person.
When God sent His Son to reconcile us to Himself, He did not take offense at this lack of hospitality.
The Apostle Paul wrote of Jesus, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” This reconciliation began when He received human discourtesy at the time of His birth. It continued as “He came to His own people and they didn’t receive Him.” It reached its climax when Jesus hung from the cross.
The Apostle John tells us what this God-man says to us, “Look, I stand at your heart’s door and knock. If you will hear me and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you.” Why does the Bible say this? It seems it is saying something similar to when Mary and Joseph knocked on the innkeeper’s door asking for a room where Jesus could be born. In the Christmas carol we sing so fondly, “Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” But the grown-up Jesus says, “Let me come in and eat with you.”
How courteous that God should come to us requesting that we invite Him in, as though we’re doing Him the honor. God’s humility before us is one of the most striking things about the Gospel.
Many people today still don’t know it is God who is knocking on their heart’s door. The gnawing they feel, the restlessness, the purposelessness of life are like the insistent sound of God knocking softly at the door of your heart and mine.
The purpose of the Creed in saying, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,” is to clarify just who this One is who knocks at our heart’s door. It is God reaching out to you as He does to others, personally, to reconcile the world to Himself one person at a time.
The question then becomes, have we responded to God’s gentle request, “May I be born in you? May I come eat with you?” In one way it is very simple to respond. All we must do is say, “Yes, Lord-God-Jesus, here’s a bed to be born in; you are welcome at my dining room table.”
But Jesus doesn’t come in to us only to let us maintain all our other alienations. Our rejection of God often looks like the rejection of other people. Our refusal to forgive them is part of our refusal to accept that we need, desperately need, God’s forgiveness of our sin.
If you accept God’s offer of reconciliation to Himself, He draws you to be reconciled to those you have pushed away from you.
You can’t love God if you don’t love your brother or sister. Reconciliation is a package deal. A Christianity that keeps compartments, one for God and another for people, is schizophrenic.
For this reconciliation to God and each other to happen we have to offer back to God our will, the seat of our affections. Because when God reconciled us to Himself, He also gave us the ministry of reconciliation. It is a deliberate act. I urge you give Him your heart. You wonder how to give Him your heart? Begin by saying it, “Lord, take my heart and make it your throne.” There is great power in the words we say when we don’t know what words to say.
Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the third century, thought about all this and wrote, “God became like us in order that we might become like Him.”
I pray that we all do accept and believe with all our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord. And I pray that we may all allow the reconciliation to happen that was the purpose of this vast act of Godly kindness. Trust that God was born in Bethlehem, and died on the cross to reconcile you to Him. Trusting this is so, let yourself be reconciled to others. It will be for you a sign of your reconciliation to God. Then deliberately start to act out your reconciliation. Say at the start of each day, “Lord, my life is yours today to use as you will.” Then remember throughout the day whose you are. Remember God has summoned you to join Him in the ministry of reconciliation, saying to the world in deed and word, ‘Be reconciled to God.”
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the gift of Your holy Child Jesus, born as we were born to restore us to fellowship with You. Grant us grace to live as we believe. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2004
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
Genesis 7: 11-17 / Acts 17: 22-28
October 17th, 2004
There is a passage of Scripture we often remember at funerals. The Apostle Paul wrote, “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” This is a comfort at death.
But we seldom think of unseen things as actual things God created. The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” My unchallenged assumption when I thought of God as the creator of things seen and unseen was that He created things big enough to see and things too small to see. He created large dinosaurs and tiny atoms. The Creed was saying, as the lovely hymns puts it, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” But it was material things, none the less.
But the Creed describes God as the Creator of things not just large and small but visible and invisible.
But when the 318 early Church leaders got together in AD 325 to think about God, other things than size were on their mind in describing God this way. They faced the challenge of influential people who had a low view of the material world. They believed that spirit was good and matter was evil. They believed the God of the Old Testament, the one who created the earth, was not the good God. The good God was the Father of the Lord Jesus. He was the God who would rescue them from the evil world of matter, and deliver them to the good spiritual realm.
In answer to these anti-materialists, the Nicene Creed affirmed that the one God, the only God there is, created everything, both the material world that we can see and the spiritual world that we can’t see. It was a way of affirming that the material world as well as the unseen spiritual world was good. After finishing creating the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us that God saw that it was very good.
Nowadays there are not too many people who think of material things as evil. In fact, we find an opposite challenge. Nowadays material things are the whole picture. We hear the joke, “The one who ends up with the most toys wins.” It’s a self-conscious taunt at ourselves, at the materialism that holds nearly everyone in its grasp. What’s really important? It’s how much you’ve got. It’s material security. We worry about Social Security being around still by AD 2030. Who worries about the future of unseen things like goodness and love?
In Fosdick’s hymn that for some reason is very popular we sing, “Shame our wanton selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.” Rich in things and poor in soul. We believe in the material things God has made. Our problem is in taking seriously the spiritual realm.
What we think of as the spiritual realm we may think of as the domain of competing religions. I had two good-looking young Mormon fellows come by our house last week. They looked at me with what seemed an element of pity when I told them I was Presbyterian. I didn’t tell them I am pastor of the white church up on the hill over yonder. They were confident they had a better take than Presbyterians do on the unseen things.
Islam is the fastest growing religion of all. You and I may think of the radicals, the terrorists like Osama ben Laden when we think of Islam, but a fast-growing multitude of people have a finer view of Islam and are converting from Christianity and other religions to it.
On the Purdue campus I’ve seen two Hare Krishna folk handing out literature by Stanley Coulter Hall. These are Hindu evangelists. The spiritual realm, the unseen arena has a lot of competitors. In fact, there are so many of them that religion nowadays can seem an entirely made up kind of thing, a cultural thing.
It wasn’t quite this way in Paul’s day. Then religions mostly didn’t compete for converts. The Jews tried to make converts because they believe in one God, the Creator of all people. Jesus told His followers to proclaim the good news everywhere that this God loved them. But back then most religions were territorial. To convert someone to your religion was like a Boilermaker driving down to Bloomington trying to make converts of Indiana Hoosiers.
The Apostle Paul referred to the unseen realm when he wrote of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”
Elsewhere he referred to the “principalities and powers,” as having gone disastrously wrong. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
Something went disastrously wrong in the unseen realm. The prophet Isaiah wrote of the King of Babylon words that earlier Christians believed described the fall of part of the invisible part of God’s creation. “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.”
What is this realm of principalities and powers, of the world rulers of this present darkness? Who was this Day Star, son of Dawn? The old King James Version translated the Hebrew word helel in Isaiah 14: 12, “Lucifer,” which it got from the old Latin Vulgate translation. Lucifer comes from the word “light,” lux.
Isaiah described the fall of the highest angel that God created. And when he fell, he brought into God’s creation a wickedness that was almost as strong as the goodness God created. Pride made Lucifer fall. He preferred to reign in hell rather than to serve in heaven, as Milton put it. “To wage by force or guile eternal war, Irreconcilable to our grand Foe, Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.”
And so we have cruelty, and the abuse of women and children, and genocide, and war, and every evil. But we soon lose sight of the fact that every evil is the twisting of something good. God created the unseen hosts, the realm of angels, as ministering spirits. They were entirely good. But they fell through pride, and thus turned what was good on its head, and evil entered our world. Many of us moderns are too sophisticated to believe this kind of thing. As C.S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters, the enemy has won a great battle with us when we do not even think he exists. He can wreck his havoc unseen, unrecognized. Who can doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in our world?
But I believe that when we say we believe in God, the Creator of all things unseen, there is yet a region of this part of His creation that is unsullied. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” The word for “word,” logos, really needs several words to get at what it means. Logos doesn’t just mean “word,” as we commonly use this term. God, as it were, brimmed with thought, energy, and power. The creation of everything was God’s deliberate unleashing of His logos, energy, and power.
People were made in the image of God. And we reflect this creative impulse of God. Everything we “create” begins with an idea, with something reflecting the logos. Leonardo da Vinci thought about flying machines and boats that could travel beneath the water. He imagined what later technicians achieved as the Wright brothers got flying machines off the ground. He imagined the submarines that have become so much a part of oceanographic research and one of the most frightening instruments of modern warfare. Ideas precede the development of industry. Ideas in the minds of artists find form in great statues, paintings, and music. We know a little bit about how “idea” comes before creation.
But we have thought of this primarily in terms of the material effects produced by ideas. But isn’t it so that it is ideas that are the behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in our world? When you are gripped by an idea, your life finds a focus, and you can do wonderful things. Without ideas, material things lie unused. Without ideas, great purposes are left unachieved. Iron ore rests peacefully in the rocks until someone gets the idea of smelting iron ore. Steam blows happily through a hole in a teakettle until someone gets the idea of harnessing that steam as a source of energy. But it’s not only in manufacturing things that the ideas work.
Think of how your spirits rise when you are encouraged, and then how different is the texture of your life. Hope is a powerful unseen part of creation. God created hope. God is the God of all hope, Paul writes. People who are discouraged may live wasted lives, all their gifts and talents unused. But when a discouraged person hears a word that lifts her spirits, how different her life becomes! God created encouragement. It’s part of the logos, the Word that was in the beginning with God. God created love. Love makes a mother care for her baby, sacrificing her sleep, sacrificing energy that might be put into moneymaking work. What a creative force love is!
When Paul wrote of the “fruit of the Spirit,” –love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self control, he referred to unseen things God created. Perhaps you have not thought of the fruit of the spirit in this way. But God created these unseen things that we think of as “qualities.” There would be no love if God did not overflow love from His logos.
And so there is this unseen realm very different from the “principalities and powers, the spirituals hosts of wickedness” that wage war against the soul. And this unseen realm moves in the world with a resistless force. Because in every war, heroic acts of goodness spring up all over as well as desperate acts of wickedness. The ones who abused Iraqi prisoners make the headlines first. But we also learn of soldiers who befriend, and help, and even sacrifice their lives for the sake of Iraqi people. These stories come out much later. What is the source of this good? Who is the source of this good? It is God, the Creator of all things, the seen and the unseen.
The reason why Jesus left us the example of submitting His will to the will of the Father, was so that we could let the God who created us direct the workings of that inner part of us that move us to every action. When we intentionally submit our wills to the will of God, God shapes the ideas that make us act. We become, then, part of God’s on-going creative energy, rendering good out of evil, light out of darkness.
When the will of God directs medical research, unborn children are never at risk. When the will of God directs our community development, the poor never suffer. When God’s ideas shape our ideas, we move on the “formless void” and become agents of God’s bringing joy out of sorrow, healing out of suffering, blessing out of cursing. All of this is part of God’s unseen work of creation.
We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” In what things do you and I place most value? For what do we strive? If we believe the unseen things are eternal, and the things we can see are passing, how should we then live? Think on these things, and let them guide us to live with eyes set on what is enduring, rather than on what will pass away.
O Lord God, creator of all things, things we can see and things we cannot see, of things that pass away and of things that endure, help us to fix our minds on things that endure, and so to live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2004
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
Genesis 1: 1-5 / Revelation 4: 1-11
October 10th, 2004
I wonder what the folk who composed the Nicene Creed would have thought if they knew how a cell breaks down proteins that are damaged or have outlived their usefulness. Two Israelis and an American won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this past week because they discovered what God did when He said, “let there be cells,” and complicated organisms composed of cells and the world within each one came into existence. Whenever I pick up tidbits of insight about how nature works, I have a sense not only of looking back down the tunnel of time to a distant moment of creation, but of how God is still involved in the workings of this world.
Is it any wonder that Paul wrote, “ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Since the beginning of time people looked at nature, at the wonders of conception and birth, of planting and harvest, of the cycle of the year, of the interacting parts of the body and found their minds drawn beyond what they could see. They not only looked up, but they looked around and felt God’s invisible presence. This presence radiated uncanny power holding things together. It bespoke Deity, a Being altogether other than humanity.
Paul could not see into the intricacies of a cell, but he could see enough. He saw what most of us who are not scientists can see, that the world is a very amazing organism. The world swirls with life. Within the world we now know are billions of tiny worlds teeming with life—indeed, of life within life. In an atom is a universe.
The world has wonders that defy the microscope to see, intricacies revealing an imagination that not only plans tiny intricacies, but sustains their role in the whole. When I catch word of bits and pieces of the intricacies of creation I ponder the interconnectedness of all this.
I think of the words of Scripture, speaking of the Son of God, “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will . . . to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” The mystery of God’s wisdom and insight holds things together, not as a kind of glue, but somehow personally in the One we call the Second Person of the Trinity. Folks, this is mystery. We’re out of our league here.
This holding things together has to do with more than the pieces of created matter. “Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet” in the affairs of this world. The chaos you and I now see, of terrorism, of rampaging diseases destroying millions of people, of genocides, of injustices, of the out-of-control whirl of sex and violence that dominates in our country are like spasms that God permits a momentary fling. But as He holds together what seems to us the delicate balance of nature, He is holding together as well the delicate balance of humanity, that special part of creation made in His image.
I chose Revelation 4 for our New Testament reading this morning because here we see something of the grandeur of the One who holds all things together whom we so easily call the Lord Jesus. We think of the Incarnate Son who was born to Mary, a tiny baby, who lived as we do. John describes this same one in another way. He was given a rare glimpse into what to us seems the future, but in truth it is a description of the eternal governing center of the universe. This passage ends by exclaiming, “Thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.” From the end, so to speak, he looks to the beginning, and all time flashes in between.
He saw a throne with Someone sitting on it he couldn’t find words to describe. He gives the names of precious stones that radiate light. This one was altogether Light. The light this one gives off is like an over-arching rainbow made of emerald. Round the throne are these twenty-four elders, which may refer to “lieutenants” of God, angels we would say, that superintend His work. From the throne there come flashes of lightning, voices and peals of thunder, and before the throne are seven torches of fire. In front of it is a sea of glass, like crystal. What’s going on? Something defying description is going on.
Here the Scriptures reach into the meager fund of human words to describe something beyond words. It seems to me that the opening lines of Genesis are in the same category.
They are full of wonder. It is not clear exactly how to translate the first verse. Is it as our translation has it, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” even though there is no word “the” before the word “beginning” in the Hebrew text? Or is it, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void.” We get the sense in of staring into mystery. To read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” supports the idea of creation out of nothing.” And I believe with wiser people than myself that God did create everything out of nothing. But the opening lines of Genesis don’t say this explicitly.
Then, on the first day God said, “Let there be light,” and there was evening and there was morning, one day. But there was yet no sun. That would come on the fourth day, after there were plants and trees. What was the light of the first day? It wasn’t the light you and I know. And to whom did God say, “Let there be light?”
I wondered if God’s speech here was a deep sound that brought order to the formless void. It was the kind of sound described in Revelation 4. The voice was like a trumpet blast, peals of thunder. What is described in Revelation 4 was already there in Genesis 1. And I wonder if the light that God said should come into being was the beginning of order overtaking the formless void. You and I can’t imagine this formless void because everything we have seen has form. Even mud we know is a mix of dirt and water.
Do you not sense as I do that we have been shown mystery here? We are beyond where words can go. Before God brought order to this something it was tohuvevohu, formless, shapeless, undefined. A brooding darkness with no contrasting light anywhere was on the surface of the abyss.
It is language that suggests the very opposite of the intricate world you and I know a tiny bit about. There was nothing intricate then. There was a formless something that words cannot describe. Words describe things that we can identify—clouds, water, dirt, rock, animals. But how do you describe what was before there were words, or anything identifiable with words?
Since the middle of the 19th century, when Charles Darwin published his book, The Origin of Species, the question of how God created the earth has generated much discussion among Christians. Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary disagreed with Darwin on all counts. But his son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, and B.B. Warfield had no difficulty accommodating Darwin’s “facts” to the “facts” of Scripture. Most Christians in our country who thought about these things hovered between the opinions on this matter that their cherished teachers taught. All wanted to be faithful to scripture, and all recognized that they had to accommodate details unraveling in science that went far beyond the summary statements of the Bible.
A famous trial that took place in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, has set the pace for much discussion about creation vs evolution ever since. A young physics teacher, John Scopes, assigned reading from a textbook, A Civic Biology that taught evolution. This violated a Tennessee law against teaching evolution. The trial that followed caught the public imagination thanks to the help of plays like “Inherit the Wind,” performed by some of America’s greatest actors, and two movies that first featured Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow, and then Kirk Douglas in the same role.
People who believe that God created everything precisely as Genesis 1 and 2 describe were caricatured as dim-wits, and all who thought that God may have unfolded the world as we now see it gradually were type-cast by their opponents as atheists.
Today thoughtful and devout Christians stand on both sides of this divide. They concur actually on more than one thing, that God is the Author of creation. Even those who hold to literally twenty-four hour days of creation believe that the signs of development within species are the result of valid science. And those who believe more generally in development are no less sure that God has moved it along.
I am not equipped to argue the intricacies of this debate. But I get the impression that behind the discussion is the concern that the idea of natural selection ultimately means denying God as the Creator. Some Christians eminent in biological science do not see it this way. Kenneth Miller of Brown University has written a thoughtful book arguing just the opposite.
My own experience has been that people I have prayed with and worshiped with, who have witnessed of their faith in Jesus Christ so that others came to believe in Him, believe that God has gradually unfolded the world as we now see it. And other people I have prayed with and worshipped with, and who have witnessed to their faith in Jesus Christ so that others have come to believe in Him believe in a young earth, and that God created things specifically as they are.
I think of the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, written long before any of this discussion took place between thoughtful Christians, “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”
To be faithful can often seem to be a matter of taking sides on issues that none of us knows about in detail. And thus we may dim the fact that all we can affirm for sure, and that by faith, is that “we believe in one God, the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth.” When we say “heaven” we know we mean far more than we can see through telescopes, of what is beyond the galaxies, of the place where God uniquely dwells. And when we say earth we know that we understand only fragments of its complexity. And God does not hold us accountable to be certain of things that are beyond us. All He holds us accountable for is to believe that He exists and that He faithfully rewards those who seek Him.
Back in 1909, the Dutch pastor, politician, and scholar, Abraham Kuyper delivered six lectures at Princeton University that explained the Reformed outlook on life as applied to several important categories. The fourth of these had to do with Calvinism and Science.
And the fourth point of this lecture stressed that there is no conflict between faith and science. “Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.”
Kuyper argued that the real collision is between “normalists” and “abnormalists.” The normalists believe in untethered evolution, leading anywhere it goes, with moral views, and ideas about Deity that go along with it. Process theology is a development of what Kuyper called "normalism." God is developing as things develop. The present degradation in morals that is justified as “the community standard,” is all right because change is inevitable and where it goes we’re bound to accept because there is nothing else than what happens.
Abnormalists believe something has gone wrong, and that God has intervened. Sin entered the story of the world, but it did not and does not have the last word. Kuyper accepted the science of his day that argued that the world has developed since God began the process, but it is all still governed by God’s inscrutable decrees. God is still in control. God’s special acts of intervention are seen in the “miracle of regeneration” that can change the human heart, in the miracle of Scripture, by which He teaches us His will, by the miracle of the Incarnation, when God took on our flesh in the greatest interruption of the result of sin. The Son of God violated nature, as people thought, in coming alive after being brutally killed.
The resurrection really happened. And it was abnormal as we think of what is normal.
Trusting in God’s hand on every aspect of life, we dare to unloose every fetter and explore God’s creation for all we’re worth. The only bias we have is something inescapable, that it all didn't just happen at random. God created everything that we can explore. So that good, hard science is a great act of faith itself. You who explore the mysteries of life honor God as much as any of us who study the Scriptures. Because in each, God has shown us something of Himself.
As Calvin put it, the Scriptures give us in a nutshell what God wrote in creation. The big topic of the Bible and of all creation is God.
I told our son as I saw his mind developing with great questions in college that if we love God, we honor Him by exploring every avenue of creation. Because we believe God created all things, it is a great joy to discover what He made. It is an act of faith, in fact, that I believe God appreciates. Because, after all, we believe God is our Father, a personal God, and not a distant Creator. We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Love Him with all of your mind, all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your strength. And do not fear that in loving Him with all your mind that you can go wrong, if in all your ways you acknowledge Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, we trust in you. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)