This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 26 April 2009 on 1 John 3:4-10.
I’m going to start by reading you a number of statements. After each one, I want you to put up your hand if you agree with what I say. Okay? Hands up if you agree.
1. Becoming a Christian means you don’t have any fun in life.
2. All Christians are ‘loving people’ all the time.
3. Bad things don’t happen to truly godly people.
4. Christian churches are places where you can trust everyone you meet.
5. Christians never have any struggles and always feel close to God.
Well done, folks. Each one of these statements is wrong for different reasons. Of course Christians can have fun – as Christians we are people with a deep joy inside us and it should show in how we celebrate the fact that Jesus is alive and our living King and Saviour. Christians are not always ‘loving people’ – sometimes we get it wrong and act towards others in ways we shouldn’t. There’s little much clearer in the Bible than its teaching that bad things will happen to good, godly people. Just look at Jesus. He truly was godly – in fact he was God – but they crucified him. Look also at Job, Joseph, David, Daniel, Peter, Paul – there’s hardly a believer in the Old or New Testaments about whom we don’t read undergoing periods of pain and suffering. Christian churches are not always places where you can trust everyone you meet. They should be – but I’m sorry to say they aren’t. For example, there are churches where false and damaging teaching is taught. It would be wrong to trust those teachers, even if they stand up and the front and claim they are preaching God’s word.
But it’s the last statement we’re going to concentrate on tonight. It is simply not the case that Christians do not struggle in their faith and always feel close to God. Life is a struggle for the Christian as much as for anyone else!
As I said, we’re going to concentrate on verses 4-10 of the passage tonight. Last week we say how the passage teaches that God is our Father who loves us and adopts us as his children. We also saw how we will one day ‘grow up’ to be something so amazing that John can’t really tell us what it will be because it will be so wonderful and so much more than we could ever appreciate in this life. We also saw that though the future is sparklingly bright for the Christian, the present is also good because we are God’s children, and since we are we need to live as God’s children and keep ourselves pure. We also saw that the way John envisages us doing that is not by our own efforts but by looking to Christ, by confessing our sins to him, by trusting in him and believing that ‘the blood of Jesus purifies us from every sin’ (as chapter 1, verse 7 says).
Tonight’s verses follow on from this statement that God’s children purify themselves and I think verses 4-10 tell us about three distinct – though linked – struggles that we all go through in our Christian lives. They are our struggle against sin, our struggle with the devil, and our struggle to be people of love, to do good and be righteous in how we live our lives. And as I said, these three struggles though distinct are nevertheless closely linked.
The first struggle the passage talks about is the struggle with sin.
John begins, in verse 4, almost with a definition of what sin is. ‘Everyone who sins breaks the law ... sin is lawlessness.’
Most of you will know that when I left school I studied law. One of the hardest subjects you study as part of the degree is called jurisprudence which basically means the philosophy of law – or in simple terms, what is the purpose of the law. What’s it for? As you might imagine, there are many different theories about this but almost every one agrees on one thing – the purpose of the law is to help groups of people live together in peace and harmony. The law is a series of rules designed to make life better for every one, and help people to get on with other. You might even say that the purpose of the law is to produce right conduct and where there is no right conduct to both punish the wrongdoer and give justice to those who have suffered from wrong conduct.
That might help us understand what John means here in verse 4. Sin is lawlessness. The particular Greek construction used here means the terms are interchangeable: sin is lawlessness, and lawlessness is sin. Sin is breaking the rules, flouting the law. Sin is anything that goes against the law including wrong thoughts, words and wrong behaviour. But at its heart, sin is anything that goes against right conduct designed to help people live in harmony with each other and with God.
The law John is speaking about here is not Roman law – the law of the state though – it’s God’s law he means, God’s rules of right and wrong. Not so much the particularly Jewish laws about kosher food, or Sabbath observance, but the moral principles shared by every society in the world – God’s law condemning dishonesty, pride, hypocrisy, anger, violence and so on.
And it’s in breaking this law and committing sins that is the first of the Christian struggles identified in the passage.
John isn’t mealy mouthed about it – he ‘shoots from the hip’ as the saying goes. He gives his readers it straight.
You are God’s children, he’s just told them. Jesus Christ is your big brother and as you’re all in the one family, you’ll keep yourself pure just as he is pure. That’s what John expects of Christians. We’ve to be pure. He is also very realistic and knows that we fail to do that – and we looked at that last week – the importance of coming to Christ for forgiveness and restoration to purity through his blood.
I hope you can follow John’s train of thought here in verses 5 and 6 and again in verse 9. You know, he says to the readers, you know that when Christ appeared he took away your sins. This is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s words about Jesus quoted in John’s Gospel – ‘Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ He took away your sins, and there was no sin in him, so no one who is in union with him, who lives in him, who abides in him, and has his Spirit living inside him or her, keeps on sinning. And he even goes as far as to say in verse 6 that any who does ‘keep on sinning’ has not really met Jesus or trusted in him.
These are strong words that John says. And I don’t want to minimise the forcefulness of what he says. Christians – you and I – should have nothing to do with sin. If we are in union with Christ, joined to Christ by faith, then sinning should never happen. There’s never a good excuse for sinning. It’s never ‘okay’. It’s always serious, it’s always wrong, and it always hurts our relationship with God. But at the same time there is always forgiveness, pardon and restoration available to a sinner who truly comes again in repentance and faith to Jesus for the first time or the millionth time.
However, at the same time I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression. Notice that John does not say that a true Christian never sins. John knows very well that Christians sin. As we’ve seen before, he actually says in chapter 1 of this same letter that if we say we don’t sin we make God out to be a liar and the truth is not in us! What John says – and it’s well brought out in the TNIV we’re looking at – is that real Christians don’t keep on sinning. Other translations say things like ‘No one who lives in him makes a practise of sin’. In other words, Christians don’t go on and on sinning continuously. Yes, there are sins we might struggle with for years – maybe even our whole life – that’s not what John means. He means that if a person goes on and on sinning and it doesn’t bother him or her – if you can sin and not feel guilty about it, then you might ask yourself how real your relationship with Jesus Christ really is.
The point is reiterated in verse 9. ‘Those who are born of God will not continue to sin because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.’ In other words, we are God’s children, so we will act in a different way - we will act like God is our Father and his ‘seed’ is in us. This is a metaphor which means God’s life changing, life growing power is inside us - and we know this probably refers to the Holy Spirit who lives in us. John’s point is basically that when Christians sin they are acting ‘out of character’, which is the opposite to the situation for the people of the world. They are sinners by nature; when they sin, it’s no more than them acting in character. But for Christians to sin is unnatural because they have a new nature and a new life as God’s children.
Nevertheless, although the Christian has a new nature whose inclination is not to sin, we have not totally got rid of our old selves. And so, our struggle with sin remains very real. It exists and we shouldn’t minimise it, and though it should be fought against, it shouldn’t consume our lives with guilt either. We need to cling to verses like Romans 8:1: ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus’ and remember they were written to sinners, not to perfect stained-glass saints.
Also remember that the best way of combating it is not by trying to live a stricter and stricter moral life, keeping yourself out of harms way, out of the way of temptation. That’s almost the worst thing you could do. I know – I’ve been there. When I was younger I was like a young Pharisee. I would avoid sins by avoiding certain places, by avoiding certain activities, by avoiding certain people, by cutting myself off more and more from the world around me. The trouble is that the more and more effort you put into overcoming sin through your own moral efforts, the less and less you look to Jesus and the less and less you are living under the gospel. You are actually going backwards and living under the law. The way to tackle sin is yes to break bad habits of actually committing sins (the Bible says we are to put sin to death – we are to murder sin in our lives) but alongside that we need to keep the cross of Christ and the forgiveness we find there firmly in view. Whether it’s a law of nature for all of us or not, I don’t know. But I do know that I find it much much easier to do something because I want to than if I have to. By that I mean, paradoxically, it’s actually easier not to sin once you realise you are living to please God because you want to and not because you have to.
If I can use a sporting analogy – have you noticed how well the Scottish football team or Rugby team play when there’s nothing at stake? You know how it is, they’ll get beaten by Peru and draw with Iran and then when they’re out of the World Cup, they’ll beat Brazil or Holland. It’s because the pressures off, isn’t it? There’s no weight of expectation. The team can go out and just play for fun, and guess what – suddenly they are playing like world beaters and it is fun!
That’s a bit like the struggle against sin. If we live fearing God won’t accept us because we’ve sinned again and again, if we live guilt-ridden lives that focus only inward on how bad we are, if we are always disappointed with ourselves, then we end up failing more and the pressure becomes too great. But once we know we’ve already ‘qualified for the next round’ (because unlike the Scotland team, we are ‘more than conquerors’ and our name is already on the trophy so to speak), we can play for fun and actually sin less.
So that’s the first struggle – the struggle against sin.
The second struggle is our struggle against the devil.
The Bible is very clear that the devil exists. I know that nowadays there are many people who scoff at such things. Some of them are even in the churches. But as we are Christians who take the Bible seriously, we’re faced with clear teaching in passage after passage – from Genesis to Revelation in fact – that the devil is very real. The Bible is sketchy about his origins. It seems he was one of God’s angels who rebelled against God and was thrown out of heaven. He is known as ‘the Prince of the air’ or ‘the Prince of this world’ which could mean that he was originally meant to help God rule on earth, but decided instead to take over and rule himself without reference to God. What we do know is that he is the implacable enemy of God, he is opposed to Christ and he is the enemy of Christ’s people.
This passage teaches us a couple of things about the devil. In verse 8 it says that the devil has been sinning from the beginning. He is in fact the worst sinner of all because he is the first sinner, he is totally evil and he is never going to change. He is going to be sent to hell one day forever.
The devil is not just a mere personification of evil, he is an evil being – a fallen and depraved angel – who is determined to wreck as much of God’s creation and as many lives as he can before his time runs out.
Our struggle as Christians against the devil is two-fold I think. First, it is clear that the devil will try to get us to commit sins. He will tempt us. The very first time we encounter this figure in the Old Testament is in the Garden of Eden when he appears in the guise of a snake, tempting Eve to disobey God. We also know that the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry. He comes to tempt us too. In fact several times in the New Testament, he is called ‘the Tempter.’
Each one of us will be tempted in different ways, but all of us will be tempted in some way. I know that’s the case for me anyway. The devil always seems to come to me in areas where he knows he can get at me. And it will be the same for each one here. I suppose it’s in the nature of ‘temptation’ that it is only felt in areas of our life where we are actually susceptible to temptation.
The other struggle we have as Christians against the devil is in his primary role of being the Accuser. In fact that’s what the devil means. In Hebrew his title is satan, in Greek diabolos from where we get ‘devil’ and both mean ‘the accuser’. It could mean that, as one commentator puts it, he was indeed God’s appointed Accuser – the chief prosecutor in heaven – and he got so caught up in wanting to find things to report to God that he ended up encouraging heavenly beings to disobey God so he could accuse them.
Whereas the devil’s role as tempter is uppermost when he’s trying to get us to sin, his primary function as accuser comes to the fore when we have sinned. That’s when the devil comes and really goes to work on us.
You probably know how it is when you realise you have committed a sin? You get that feeling inside - the feeling of guilt. Now, let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that feeling. Guilt is supposed to be there when we do things wrong. God put it there in that part of our mind or our spirit that we call conscience. Feeling guilty when we sin is not the devil’s work. No, he moves in after that. Maybe we’ve realised we’ve sinned, we come to God and confess our sin and ask him to forgive us, or we go to the person we’ve sinned against and say sorry. Then the devil goes to work on you.
Because according to God’s Word, when we confess our sins, God forgives us. We start off again with a clean slate and are to move forward with God again. But the devil comes along and whispers in your ear: ‘You’re not really forgiven. There’s no way God is going to forgive you this time. You’d be as well giving up now. You’ve had it.’ Or he comes and says: ‘Call yourself a Christian? How could you do what you’ve done if that’s the case? You’re a sham. You’re no more a Christian than all those other hypocrites.’ Make no mistake those accusations from the devil are very real and they are very powerful. They get to us deep inside, don’t they?
The devil’s accusations can be like having a monkey on your back. They stop you in your tracks - they make you change your focus from looking outward to Christ to looking inward into yourself. They can make you feel so much false guilt that you become totally paralysed and ineffective as a Christian.
Both of these works of the devil are a real struggle for every Christian at times I think, maybe even a lot of the time!
I have to say verse 8b is one my favourite verses in the whole Bible. It’s a verse it’s worth memorising and coming back to again and again when the devil is tempting or accusing you. ‘The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.’ There’s a whole sermon in those words. All I will say tonight is that we need to remember that Christ has already destroyed the devil’s work and defeated the devil through his death on the cross.
So, when the devil comes to us as tempter, we can say to him - Christ has defeated you and so sin has no power over me. I have died with Christ through trusting in his work on the cross. As Paul wrote in Romans 6:11: ‘Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.’ If we’re dead as far as sin is concerned, we are free from sin. We don’t have to give into temptation, not through looking towards our own efforts, but in looking at the cross.
Similarly, when the devil comes as accuser, we need to remind ourselves that we are saved through Christ’s work and that work is complete. We do not need to fear. ‘It is finished, it is accomplished’ was Christ’s shout of victory on the cross. The devil can have no hold over any child of God any more. The penalty for my sins has already been paid in full by Jesus Christ; God cannot punish me for sins for which Christ has already been punished.
As an old hymn by Augustus Toplady puts it:
‘If Thou hast my discharge procured,And freely in my room enduredThe whole of wrath divine:Payment God cannot twice demand,First at my wounded Surety's hand,And then again at mine.’
As it was in the Garden of Eden, Satan can only have a hold over us if we let him, not as of right. So when we struggle with the devil’s words in our ear we need to remember that Jesus has already destroyed his works, and put the apostle James’s advice in practice: ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.’ (James 4:7-8).
Very briefly I want to look at the third struggle Christians face - the struggle to love, to do good and be righteous.
There are a couple of verses in the passage that touch on this struggle. In verse 7, ‘Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.’ And again in verse 10, ‘Those who do not do what is right are not God’s children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.’
The first two struggles we’ve looked at have been against one thing and another - the struggle against sin and against the devil. The third kind of struggle is very different. It’s a positive struggle if I can put it that way: the struggle to do the right things, to love other people.
Maybe you’ve heard the scientific principle that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’? Basically it means that in the world around us, the scientific laws mean that any empty space gets filled in very quickly. A vacuum is a space where there’s no air. As soon as that space is opened, air rushes in to fill the gap. A similar principle means that if you clear a piece of ground, before long weeds will grow there. If you dig a hole in a field, it will soon fill up with mud or water. A clean shelf soon gathers dust.
The same thing is true of our lives. We cannot live empty lives. We will fill our time with something. The only question is what things will we spend our time doing. If we’re going to try to do better in our struggles against sin and against the devil, we need to spend time doing positively good things. No-action neutrality is not an option.
The positive things we are to do are good things. We are to love others and show it in our words and actions. We are to do what is right - in other words act in ways that the Bible calls righteous. We are to be kind and generous, we are to do good. In Galatians 5:22, the apostle Paul says that we are to have the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ in our lives, which are: ‘Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’ He also gives a picture of the kinds of things we are to fill our lives with in Philippians 4:8: ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’
If only it was as simple as just getting on with doing that. But the fact is that we often find it a struggle to do those positive good, loving things we want to do. All the struggles we have looked at are related to each other. We find it hard to live righteous lives because we find it all too easy to sin (to live unrighteous lives). Finding it hard to do good is the flip side of struggling with sin.
That means that both struggles are intimately connected. They’re like a see-saw that goes up and down. When doing good increases, sin decreases; when sin increases, doing good decreases. It also means that one of the important ways to combat sin is to do good.
Fortunately, Christianity isn’t about following a set of rigid rules that constitute ‘doing good’ or that equal ‘love’. So I can’t stand here and tell you what to do different tomorrow, or next week, or from now on. Because each one of us is different. Christianity is about relationships - with God and with other people. Christianity is about great principles that stand immoveable. But how you put the principles into practice can be done in hundreds of different ways.
The thing to grasp, the thing to actually act on is to consciously try to love more and do good more often. If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living inside you. He will tell you what putting it into practice means for you. Listen to that still small voice that is prompting you to speak to that person you ignore every day on the way to work, or send a cheque to that charity, or write that letter, or visit that friend you haven’t seen in ages, or pray more, or whatever it is.
The main thing is to live as righteous children of God. Not in a legalistic way because we are not under law but under grace. Not for fear of hell, because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not even just because it’s the right thing to do, though God delights in our obedience. But if we centre our lives on love - love for God and love for our brothers and sisters and our neighbours, then may, just maybe, we will live as God’s children should and show the devil and the world who our Father really is and live lives that are offerings of thanks to him for all he’s done for us.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Sunday, 26 April 2009
Children of God
This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 19 April 2009 on 1 John 3:1-3.
I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.
Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.
If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:
· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.
So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.
There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.
As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’
In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’
In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’
However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).
So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.
We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)
The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:
‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)
Later on in this Letter, John writes:
‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)
I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.
It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?
The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’
But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?
The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’
All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.
The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.
John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’
The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.
Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.
I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?
Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’
We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.
That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.
There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.
I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.
This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:
‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’
That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.
The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.
As John taught in his Gospel:
‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)
A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.
Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.
Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.
As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:
‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’
John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.
The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:
‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)
The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.
It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.
You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.
That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.
I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.
You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.
John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.
On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:
‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’
So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.
John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.
John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.
After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’
And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.
It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.
Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.
As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:
‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).
I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.
Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.
If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:
· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.
So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.
There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.
As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’
In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’
In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’
However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).
So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.
We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)
The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:
‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)
Later on in this Letter, John writes:
‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)
I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.
It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?
The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’
But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?
The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’
All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.
The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.
John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’
The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.
Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.
I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?
Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’
We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.
That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.
There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.
I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.
This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:
‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’
That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.
The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.
As John taught in his Gospel:
‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)
A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.
Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.
Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.
As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:
‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’
John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.
The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:
‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)
The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.
It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.
You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.
That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.
I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.
You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.
John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.
On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:
‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’
So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.
John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.
John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.
After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’
And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.
It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.
Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.
As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:
‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).
Monday, 20 April 2009
What St Paul Really Said
What St Paul Really Said
by Tom Wright
Lion Publishing
When I began reading What St Paul Really Said I was determined not to like it. In fact I was resolute that I was going to hate it, find it heretical, say so in a scathing review and then chuck it in the nearest bin.
The truth was a bit different. Not quite a Damascus road experience, but I finished the book convinced that far from being the heretic that some have caricatured the author as, Tom Wright has more in common with the spirit of the Reformers than some of his opponents, even if he fails to always come to the right conclusions. His sole concern, it seems to me, is to find out what the Scriptures say, over against any traditions, even those of evangelicalism. However, that does not settle the question of whether he does, in fact, succeed in finding out what the Scriptures say and in showing that his view is the correct one and the more traditional interpretations of say Romans and Galatians are in error.
"What St Paul Really Said" is his popular-level treatment of Paul's place in Christian theology. It is an engaging read, extremely well-written and easy to read. In fact, it is a fine example of how interesting prose by theologians should and could be.
I am not convinced by everything he says. In fact, I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions - he does not always give enough credit to 'old perspective' Reformed theology, its emphases, and the arguments of its greatest theologians. Justification is certainly not just about ecclesiology it is also about soteriology and I think Wright vastly overplays his hand in that regard. It is about salvation, about how I as a sinner can stand before a holy God, not just about me as a Gentile being allowed to eat with Jews as a member of the covenant people.
On the other hand, I think Wright is on to something when he emphasises those aspects of justication that Reformed and Lutheran theology has traditionally downplayed. To put it another way, I think the Old Perspective is fundamentally right on the substantial points regarding justification, but the New Perspective has valuable insights to offer regarding the implications of the doctrine of justification for the Church's and the individual Christian's life. Our fellowship with other Christians, our being the church, our being the covenant people of God is, after all, on the basis of this justification we have received through faith.
I got the impression Wright has an at times unhealthy fascination with the 'newness' of his project and this may be one of his weaknesses.
Even so, this work really demands to be read by any evangelicals serious about New Testament theology, particularly the New Perspective on Paul, because I believe there are insights here that are valuable and can be taken on board by evangelicals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Thoroughly recommended reading for the thinking, if discerning, Christian.
by Tom Wright
Lion Publishing
When I began reading What St Paul Really Said I was determined not to like it. In fact I was resolute that I was going to hate it, find it heretical, say so in a scathing review and then chuck it in the nearest bin.
The truth was a bit different. Not quite a Damascus road experience, but I finished the book convinced that far from being the heretic that some have caricatured the author as, Tom Wright has more in common with the spirit of the Reformers than some of his opponents, even if he fails to always come to the right conclusions. His sole concern, it seems to me, is to find out what the Scriptures say, over against any traditions, even those of evangelicalism. However, that does not settle the question of whether he does, in fact, succeed in finding out what the Scriptures say and in showing that his view is the correct one and the more traditional interpretations of say Romans and Galatians are in error.
"What St Paul Really Said" is his popular-level treatment of Paul's place in Christian theology. It is an engaging read, extremely well-written and easy to read. In fact, it is a fine example of how interesting prose by theologians should and could be.
I am not convinced by everything he says. In fact, I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions - he does not always give enough credit to 'old perspective' Reformed theology, its emphases, and the arguments of its greatest theologians. Justification is certainly not just about ecclesiology it is also about soteriology and I think Wright vastly overplays his hand in that regard. It is about salvation, about how I as a sinner can stand before a holy God, not just about me as a Gentile being allowed to eat with Jews as a member of the covenant people.
On the other hand, I think Wright is on to something when he emphasises those aspects of justication that Reformed and Lutheran theology has traditionally downplayed. To put it another way, I think the Old Perspective is fundamentally right on the substantial points regarding justification, but the New Perspective has valuable insights to offer regarding the implications of the doctrine of justification for the Church's and the individual Christian's life. Our fellowship with other Christians, our being the church, our being the covenant people of God is, after all, on the basis of this justification we have received through faith.
I got the impression Wright has an at times unhealthy fascination with the 'newness' of his project and this may be one of his weaknesses.
Even so, this work really demands to be read by any evangelicals serious about New Testament theology, particularly the New Perspective on Paul, because I believe there are insights here that are valuable and can be taken on board by evangelicals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Thoroughly recommended reading for the thinking, if discerning, Christian.
Monday, 13 April 2009
Television and Me
This article originally appeared as the editorial in the parish magazine for Spring 2009. Subsequent to publication, readers may be relieved to note that we now have purchased a television and a TV Licence.
Have you ever tried living without a television? It's interesting that since I got married in January, Laura and I have been living without a television in our flat. Before that, at home, we have televisions in the kitchen, the living room and I had one in my bedroom as well. I have to admit I haven't gone completely "cold turkey" as we do watch some TV using the BBC's iPlayer on the internet (and by the way, no you don't need a TV licence to watch programmes using iPlayer - we checked!).
We are planning to get a television (and licence!) in a few weeks, but this time without a TV helped me realise how much more time there is for other things when the "goggle box" isn't there, dominating our time. There's time for talking to each other, listening to music, reading books, playing games, writing, cooking, doing things around the house that need done, chatting to friends, and of course praying and reading the Bible.
I'm not against the television. I think it is a wonderful invention that we take for granted. There are so many different sights and experiences most of us simply would not have in life if it weren't for TV. A lot of what I've learned in terms of general knowledge and things has come to me through watching TV. It is a great educational and entertainment tool when used well. But we need to make sure the TV is only that - a tool - a servant and not our master.
When things on the TV come before more important things - like friends and family, our spiritual and physical health and wellbeing, not to mention God and our life as Christians, then we need to rethink our priorities, don't we?
Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:15-16: "Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil."
We are to life careful lives - by which Paul doesn't mean cautious lives, but lives that aren't careless. We are to live deliberately, making the most of every opportunity. It means we should think about what we are doing, about how we are living and about what we spend our time doing. We have to use our time wisely, because Christ is Lord of all our lives and that includes how we spend or waste our time.
Again, Paul encourages us, this time in Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
I’ve always thought it a good idea to watch the programmes you want and then turn the TV off rather than “channel hopping” as it’s called – which basically means switching from one channel to another until you find one that has something on it you are prepared to watch. I wonder, if you didn’t know something was on and you come across it by accident, how much do you really want to watch it?
Everyone will have their own views on this subject of course and there are no right and wrong answers. I just wonder if it might do some good if we watched the telly a little bit less and did something else – almost anything else! – a little bit more?
Have you ever tried living without a television? It's interesting that since I got married in January, Laura and I have been living without a television in our flat. Before that, at home, we have televisions in the kitchen, the living room and I had one in my bedroom as well. I have to admit I haven't gone completely "cold turkey" as we do watch some TV using the BBC's iPlayer on the internet (and by the way, no you don't need a TV licence to watch programmes using iPlayer - we checked!).
We are planning to get a television (and licence!) in a few weeks, but this time without a TV helped me realise how much more time there is for other things when the "goggle box" isn't there, dominating our time. There's time for talking to each other, listening to music, reading books, playing games, writing, cooking, doing things around the house that need done, chatting to friends, and of course praying and reading the Bible.
I'm not against the television. I think it is a wonderful invention that we take for granted. There are so many different sights and experiences most of us simply would not have in life if it weren't for TV. A lot of what I've learned in terms of general knowledge and things has come to me through watching TV. It is a great educational and entertainment tool when used well. But we need to make sure the TV is only that - a tool - a servant and not our master.
When things on the TV come before more important things - like friends and family, our spiritual and physical health and wellbeing, not to mention God and our life as Christians, then we need to rethink our priorities, don't we?
Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:15-16: "Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil."
We are to life careful lives - by which Paul doesn't mean cautious lives, but lives that aren't careless. We are to live deliberately, making the most of every opportunity. It means we should think about what we are doing, about how we are living and about what we spend our time doing. We have to use our time wisely, because Christ is Lord of all our lives and that includes how we spend or waste our time.
Again, Paul encourages us, this time in Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
I’ve always thought it a good idea to watch the programmes you want and then turn the TV off rather than “channel hopping” as it’s called – which basically means switching from one channel to another until you find one that has something on it you are prepared to watch. I wonder, if you didn’t know something was on and you come across it by accident, how much do you really want to watch it?
Everyone will have their own views on this subject of course and there are no right and wrong answers. I just wonder if it might do some good if we watched the telly a little bit less and did something else – almost anything else! – a little bit more?
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Marriage
I have not contributed much to my blog in the past few months since I've been in the middle of preparations for my wedding to Laura.
The wedding took place at St Silas Church Glasgow on 31 January and the new Mrs Miller and I are just back from a really lovely honeymoon in the picturesque village of New Lanark on the banks of the Clyde.
The wedding took place at St Silas Church Glasgow on 31 January and the new Mrs Miller and I are just back from a really lovely honeymoon in the picturesque village of New Lanark on the banks of the Clyde.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Looking Back, Looking Forward
This article was the editorial in our parish magaazine for December 2008.
I look back on these ten years with a lot of affection and satisfaction if I'm honest. I am also aware that I am far from being the only person who could say this of their work in our congregation. There are many people who could do the same: who could look back over ten, twenty, thirty, in some cases fifty or sixty years of service in Bridgeton St Francis-in-the-East. And they could also look back with affection and a lot of satisfaction. Sometimes, it’s no bad thing to do that.
We always have to strike a balance between taking enough satisfaction in our work that we are encouraged to go on with it and keep on labouring for Christ, in what can sometimes be a difficult and unappreciative world; and on the other hand, we have to make sure we are not getting so proud of ourselves that we take our eyes off Jesus and pride in ourselves.
This year has been the most significant year in my time as magazine editor. Not only in my personal life, but also in the church's life, I feel 2008 has been a significant year. We are beginning, as a congregation, to look at how we need to do things differently in the future, how we might need to change, in order to have a future as a congregation at all.
I know that by nature I am not particularly comfortable with change, with doing things in new ways. That takes me out of my comfort zone. So when someone like me realises that we need to change, I am convinced that is the Holy Spirit at work - because embracing change does not come naturally to me at all.
You know what the Bible says about God sometimes really makes us have to think hard. On the one hand, the Bible teaches that God does not change. In James 1:17 it says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” He can be relied on, because he never changes - he is always truthful, faithful, loving and so forth. But on the other hand, the Bible also teaches that God does "new things". In Isaiah 43:19 – “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
As we come up to Christmas, aren't we glad that the unchangeable God does do new things? Though promised for centuries to his people Israel, it wasn't until that first Christmas, that God did a new thing and sent his Son, his chosen Redeemer King, the Messiah to come to earth to save us. The true meaning of Christmas is that has come to us – has become a human being in Jesus, and has come to save us.
In 2009, I pray that we will rely on God who does not change and also look to him to do new and exciting things with us and through us. I know that 2009 is going to see big changes for me personally as I get married in January. But I also pray that it will be a year in which we as a congregation embrace and celebrate change and welcome the opportunity to do things differently and to grow in maturity, spirituality and in numbers.
I also pray that if you do not know him already, that this Christmas will be a time of God doing new things in your life and that you will come to accept that the baby born in Bethlehem is indeed “your Saviour…Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10).
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Jesus is Lord
The following was a series of Bible readings and reflections at the evening service on 7 September 2008.
First Reading: Luke 2:8-16
We probably read this passage every year at Christmas, but probably don’t think much about Jesus’ birth at other times of year. That’s a pity really, because the fact that Jesus came to earth, born as a human being, is something we should celebrate all year round. The verse I want us to focus on tonight is verse 11: “This very day in David's town your Saviour was born—Christ the Lord!”
He was Christ the Lord from his birth. Even as a baby lying in that manger, he was King of kings and Lord of lords. The wise men knew that Jesus’ birth was the birth of a king. After all when they travelled from the east and arrived in Palestine they went to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem and asked “Where is the baby born to be the king of the Jews? We saw his star when it came up in the east, and we have come to worship him.” (Matthew 2:2)
They may have originally been seeking the birth of a "just another" royal baby. But the message of the angels to the shepherds recorded by Luke means more than this. By telling them that the birth is of “your Saviour, Christ the Lord” this means not only that the people’s Saviour has come and he is God’s long promised anointed King, the Messiah, but he is the Lord. I believe that by calling him “Christ the Lord” the angels were saying that this baby is God, the LORD, of the Old Testament, now come to earth in flesh and blood.
You probably know that wherever the covenant name of God, Yahweh, appeared in the Old Testament, the Jews would not pronounce it, but substituted the word “Adonai” which means “Lord” each time the name “Yahweh” appears. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint used the Greek word “Kurios” which also means “Lord”. And this is also what you find in most English translations of the Old Testament. So we usually have “The LORD is my shepherd” rather than “Yahweh is my shepherd”. Anyway, the point is that when Luke wrote his gospel in Greek, he was well aware of the Greek Old Testament, and when he wrote: “Your Saviour is born, Christ the Kurios” – Christ the Lord – I believe he was saying that “the LORD” – Yahweh, the God of Israel – was born in Bethlehem.
That is what the apostles taught about this child when he grew up. That is what they believed and confessed before men. That this king – who lived as a humble carpenter’s son and became an itinerant rabbi – was no less than God, the Creator and ruler of the universe.
But they also taught that he was born as a servant – one who came to help and look after the needs of others. That is part of the glory and strangeness of the Christian gospel.
Jesus is Lord – Yahweh born on earth as a human baby, but born as a Servant to help people.
Second Reading: Matthew 27:11-14, 27-31
The King grew up, lived the life God called him to live as a teacher, a healer, a prophet, a royal Son obedient to his Father. But then it all seems to go wrong, doesn’t it? His words and actions challenge the religious leaders of Israel. His message of truth and love, salvation by grace through faith, and living a peaceful life of love and caring for others is radical and challenging to the hypocrisy and legalism of the religious leaders. So, the king is rejected by the people who should be loyal to him. He is put on trial by officials of an earthly empire with blasphemous emperors as its head who claimed to be gods. And he is put to death for crimes he did not commit. The crucifixion of Christ is no less than regicide – the murder of a king. The notice that the Roman soldiers put above his head was true though they didn’t know it: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”.
The wonderful thing is that it is through his death, through the King laying down his life because he loves his people so much, that the salvation he proclaimed and the destruction of evil that he stood for are actually accomplished. The Lord sacrifices himself, he becomes the suffering servant portrayed in Isaiah 53 (reading from verses 3 to 10):
“We despised him and rejected him; he endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at him – we ignored him as if he were nothing. But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received. All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the LORD made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved. He was treated harshly, but endured it humbly; he never said a word. Like a lamb about to be slaughtered, like a sheep about to be sheared, he never said a word. He was arrested and sentenced and led off to die, and no one cared about his fate. He was put to death for the sins of our people. He was placed in a grave with those who are evil, he was buried with the rich, even though he had never committed a crime or ever told a lie. The LORD says, ‘It was my will that he should suffer; his death was a sacrifice to bring forgiveness. And so he will see his descendants; he will live a long life, and through him my purpose will succeed’."
Jesus is Lord – the Lord who became a sacrificial lamb to take away the sins of the world and saves his people through his death on the cross.
Third Reading: John 20:24-29
Sometimes I think that we glory so much in the cross of Christ that we are in danger of downplaying the importance of the resurrection. But the truth is that without the resurrection, the cross doesn’t have any good news in it. It is once Christ is risen that we can really know that his sacrifice was accepted by God the Father and our sins have been taken away.
And I think it is in the resurrection that Christ reveals more clearly than anywhere else that the claims that he is indeed the Son of God are true. Who else but God can rise from the dead? The disciples seem to have grasped this very quickly. Once they encounter the risen Christ, they are changed men. Before the crucifixion they ran away in fear and hid themselves. After the resurrection, they know absolutely in their hearts that Jesus is the Lord and so they preach him fearlessly and in public, facing persecution, imprisonment and martyrdom with courage. The risen Jesus changes people.
This is particularly true of the apostle Thomas in this passage we read. Thomas is a fascinating character. From what we read of him in the gospels he seems to be a bit of an enigma, he was a pessimistic man and a skeptic, but he was also one of the most loyal followers of Christ. When Christ decided to go to Jerusalem for the last time, Thomas showed both sides of his character in his remark to the other disciples: “Let us go along with the Teacher, so that we may die with him.”
But he is changed when he meets the risen Christ face-to-face. He changes from doubting the resurrection to confessing Christ as his Lord and his God.
Jesus is Lord – our King has conquered death and lives forever, able to change our lives and help us grow in faith, hope and love.
Fourth Reading: Philippians 2:5-11
Today, Christians all over the world proclaim that Jesus is Lord. But we’re the only ones who do – even though there are millions of us. But most people deny Jesus is Lord. Paul tells us in this passage that it will not always be so. One day, everyone will have to confess that Jesus is Lord, even those who have to acknowledge it only when he comes again to judge them.
The fact is that Jesus is Lord, whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we like it or not. Jesus is Lord, and for two thousand years the world has hated, mocked and derided that proclamation. Christ is King, higher than any earthly monarch, higher than any spiritual teacher or religion, higher than Satan and the powers of evil.
This was the message that shook imperial Rome to its foundations. This is the message that godless dictators down through the years have tried to stamp out. Jesus is Lord and so no man or woman is Lord. No one else has the same authority. He is higher than anyone else.
He is Lord of all and that means as his followers, he is Lord of our lives. Lord of our time and money, Lord of our friendships and relationships, Lord of our work and leisure, Lord of our pleasures and dislikes. If we are to be faithful to our King, we must obey our King. And I know how hard that can be. I find it hard in my own life certainly. But I know in my heart that Jesus is Lord and deep down I want him to be in charge. I fail him, but I don’t reject him. I think that’s what living as a Christian is like.
Jesus is Lord – one day everyone will acknowledge him. Until then it is our duty and delight as Christians to follow him in faith and obedience.
Fifth Reading: Revelation 19:11-21
I have to admit that I find the Book of Revelation both to be one of the most difficult books of the Bible to understand and one of the most encouraging in the bits I do understand. And I think this passage in Revelation 19 falls into the latter category. It is a glorious picture of Christ as a warrior king, mighty in battle, defeating his enemies and securing victory for his kingdom and the children of his kingdom. He leads a mighty army of heaven’s angels in this vision, riding on a white horse. Everything about this vision says majesty, glory, power and victory for Christ, who is given various titles here that tell us about him.
He is called “Faithful and True” because he has always been faithful both to his Father and to his people. Never disappointing us, never leaving us or failing to do what we need him to do for us. And he is true because he only speaks the truth. He never lies or deceives. He is the greatest prophet who communicates God’s will to us in his teaching.
His eyes are like fire because he sees everything and knows everything. He wears many crowns because he is Lord of all things, all peoples and all times. His robe is covered in blood to show he is the sacrificial lamb, the Saviour of the world.
He is the Word of God. He is the divine Word through which God creates and sustains the universe.
And he is King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the overlord of every other earthly or heavenly or spiritual power. He is the supreme lord and master of all of creation.
And he is the victorious leader of the forces of righteousness which do battle with Satan and his forces and destroy them.
Jesus is Lord – he is Lord of all things, the King to whom everyone and everything else must bow down in worship and one day render total obedience. The amazing thing is that he is also our brother and our friend, the humble carpenter from Nazareth is no less than King of kings and Lord of lords forever.
First Reading: Luke 2:8-16
We probably read this passage every year at Christmas, but probably don’t think much about Jesus’ birth at other times of year. That’s a pity really, because the fact that Jesus came to earth, born as a human being, is something we should celebrate all year round. The verse I want us to focus on tonight is verse 11: “This very day in David's town your Saviour was born—Christ the Lord!”
He was Christ the Lord from his birth. Even as a baby lying in that manger, he was King of kings and Lord of lords. The wise men knew that Jesus’ birth was the birth of a king. After all when they travelled from the east and arrived in Palestine they went to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem and asked “Where is the baby born to be the king of the Jews? We saw his star when it came up in the east, and we have come to worship him.” (Matthew 2:2)
They may have originally been seeking the birth of a "just another" royal baby. But the message of the angels to the shepherds recorded by Luke means more than this. By telling them that the birth is of “your Saviour, Christ the Lord” this means not only that the people’s Saviour has come and he is God’s long promised anointed King, the Messiah, but he is the Lord. I believe that by calling him “Christ the Lord” the angels were saying that this baby is God, the LORD, of the Old Testament, now come to earth in flesh and blood.
You probably know that wherever the covenant name of God, Yahweh, appeared in the Old Testament, the Jews would not pronounce it, but substituted the word “Adonai” which means “Lord” each time the name “Yahweh” appears. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint used the Greek word “Kurios” which also means “Lord”. And this is also what you find in most English translations of the Old Testament. So we usually have “The LORD is my shepherd” rather than “Yahweh is my shepherd”. Anyway, the point is that when Luke wrote his gospel in Greek, he was well aware of the Greek Old Testament, and when he wrote: “Your Saviour is born, Christ the Kurios” – Christ the Lord – I believe he was saying that “the LORD” – Yahweh, the God of Israel – was born in Bethlehem.
That is what the apostles taught about this child when he grew up. That is what they believed and confessed before men. That this king – who lived as a humble carpenter’s son and became an itinerant rabbi – was no less than God, the Creator and ruler of the universe.
But they also taught that he was born as a servant – one who came to help and look after the needs of others. That is part of the glory and strangeness of the Christian gospel.
Jesus is Lord – Yahweh born on earth as a human baby, but born as a Servant to help people.
Second Reading: Matthew 27:11-14, 27-31
The King grew up, lived the life God called him to live as a teacher, a healer, a prophet, a royal Son obedient to his Father. But then it all seems to go wrong, doesn’t it? His words and actions challenge the religious leaders of Israel. His message of truth and love, salvation by grace through faith, and living a peaceful life of love and caring for others is radical and challenging to the hypocrisy and legalism of the religious leaders. So, the king is rejected by the people who should be loyal to him. He is put on trial by officials of an earthly empire with blasphemous emperors as its head who claimed to be gods. And he is put to death for crimes he did not commit. The crucifixion of Christ is no less than regicide – the murder of a king. The notice that the Roman soldiers put above his head was true though they didn’t know it: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”.
The wonderful thing is that it is through his death, through the King laying down his life because he loves his people so much, that the salvation he proclaimed and the destruction of evil that he stood for are actually accomplished. The Lord sacrifices himself, he becomes the suffering servant portrayed in Isaiah 53 (reading from verses 3 to 10):
“We despised him and rejected him; he endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at him – we ignored him as if he were nothing. But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received. All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the LORD made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved. He was treated harshly, but endured it humbly; he never said a word. Like a lamb about to be slaughtered, like a sheep about to be sheared, he never said a word. He was arrested and sentenced and led off to die, and no one cared about his fate. He was put to death for the sins of our people. He was placed in a grave with those who are evil, he was buried with the rich, even though he had never committed a crime or ever told a lie. The LORD says, ‘It was my will that he should suffer; his death was a sacrifice to bring forgiveness. And so he will see his descendants; he will live a long life, and through him my purpose will succeed’."
Jesus is Lord – the Lord who became a sacrificial lamb to take away the sins of the world and saves his people through his death on the cross.
Third Reading: John 20:24-29
Sometimes I think that we glory so much in the cross of Christ that we are in danger of downplaying the importance of the resurrection. But the truth is that without the resurrection, the cross doesn’t have any good news in it. It is once Christ is risen that we can really know that his sacrifice was accepted by God the Father and our sins have been taken away.
And I think it is in the resurrection that Christ reveals more clearly than anywhere else that the claims that he is indeed the Son of God are true. Who else but God can rise from the dead? The disciples seem to have grasped this very quickly. Once they encounter the risen Christ, they are changed men. Before the crucifixion they ran away in fear and hid themselves. After the resurrection, they know absolutely in their hearts that Jesus is the Lord and so they preach him fearlessly and in public, facing persecution, imprisonment and martyrdom with courage. The risen Jesus changes people.
This is particularly true of the apostle Thomas in this passage we read. Thomas is a fascinating character. From what we read of him in the gospels he seems to be a bit of an enigma, he was a pessimistic man and a skeptic, but he was also one of the most loyal followers of Christ. When Christ decided to go to Jerusalem for the last time, Thomas showed both sides of his character in his remark to the other disciples: “Let us go along with the Teacher, so that we may die with him.”
But he is changed when he meets the risen Christ face-to-face. He changes from doubting the resurrection to confessing Christ as his Lord and his God.
Jesus is Lord – our King has conquered death and lives forever, able to change our lives and help us grow in faith, hope and love.
Fourth Reading: Philippians 2:5-11
Today, Christians all over the world proclaim that Jesus is Lord. But we’re the only ones who do – even though there are millions of us. But most people deny Jesus is Lord. Paul tells us in this passage that it will not always be so. One day, everyone will have to confess that Jesus is Lord, even those who have to acknowledge it only when he comes again to judge them.
The fact is that Jesus is Lord, whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we like it or not. Jesus is Lord, and for two thousand years the world has hated, mocked and derided that proclamation. Christ is King, higher than any earthly monarch, higher than any spiritual teacher or religion, higher than Satan and the powers of evil.
This was the message that shook imperial Rome to its foundations. This is the message that godless dictators down through the years have tried to stamp out. Jesus is Lord and so no man or woman is Lord. No one else has the same authority. He is higher than anyone else.
He is Lord of all and that means as his followers, he is Lord of our lives. Lord of our time and money, Lord of our friendships and relationships, Lord of our work and leisure, Lord of our pleasures and dislikes. If we are to be faithful to our King, we must obey our King. And I know how hard that can be. I find it hard in my own life certainly. But I know in my heart that Jesus is Lord and deep down I want him to be in charge. I fail him, but I don’t reject him. I think that’s what living as a Christian is like.
Jesus is Lord – one day everyone will acknowledge him. Until then it is our duty and delight as Christians to follow him in faith and obedience.
Fifth Reading: Revelation 19:11-21
I have to admit that I find the Book of Revelation both to be one of the most difficult books of the Bible to understand and one of the most encouraging in the bits I do understand. And I think this passage in Revelation 19 falls into the latter category. It is a glorious picture of Christ as a warrior king, mighty in battle, defeating his enemies and securing victory for his kingdom and the children of his kingdom. He leads a mighty army of heaven’s angels in this vision, riding on a white horse. Everything about this vision says majesty, glory, power and victory for Christ, who is given various titles here that tell us about him.
He is called “Faithful and True” because he has always been faithful both to his Father and to his people. Never disappointing us, never leaving us or failing to do what we need him to do for us. And he is true because he only speaks the truth. He never lies or deceives. He is the greatest prophet who communicates God’s will to us in his teaching.
His eyes are like fire because he sees everything and knows everything. He wears many crowns because he is Lord of all things, all peoples and all times. His robe is covered in blood to show he is the sacrificial lamb, the Saviour of the world.
He is the Word of God. He is the divine Word through which God creates and sustains the universe.
And he is King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the overlord of every other earthly or heavenly or spiritual power. He is the supreme lord and master of all of creation.
And he is the victorious leader of the forces of righteousness which do battle with Satan and his forces and destroy them.
Jesus is Lord – he is Lord of all things, the King to whom everyone and everything else must bow down in worship and one day render total obedience. The amazing thing is that he is also our brother and our friend, the humble carpenter from Nazareth is no less than King of kings and Lord of lords forever.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Team Spirit
This was the magazine editorial in the parish magazine for September 2008.
Did you watch any of the Beijing Olympics? While I was watching some of it on the television I thought about how people from all the nations gather together in one place for the games. And I thought about how many different types of people you see among the competitors. Athletes are as different from each other as people can get. You have the height of the basketball players, the bulk and strength of the weightlifters, the speed of the sprinters, the endurance of the long distance runners and cyclists, the grace of the gymnasts, the skill of the archers and shooters. All very different and yet all coming together in one place for a specific purpose – in the name of sport.
I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between the Olympics and the Church. The Church is also made up of people from every nation and it includes all kinds of different people, different talents, different personalities, but different people who all come together with a common purpose: to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and to love and live for him in this world.
That’s both a comforting and a challenging thought isn’t it? The comfort is that no matter who you are or what you are like, Jesus is calling you to come and follow him as one of his disciples. No matter who you are, you can have a place in Christ’s royal family through faith in him. He said himself: “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” (John 6:37)
But there’s a huge challenge for us to consider too. The challenge is that Christ wants every member of his church to use their gifts and talents to play their part. There are no passengers on the ship of faith, only crew members. Problems start when some members don’t play the part Christ wants them to play and think the church is a cruise ship where they only need to be entertained as spectators. Actually the church is more like a warship in enemy waters and everyone should be at battle stations. Where some members don’t play their part in the life and witness of the church, this leads to other members doing more than they should or things that should be happening not getting done. That isn’t right and it isn’t healthy.
Paul describes the church as being like a body sometimes. In Romans 12:4-6 he says:
“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given
us.”
If parts of your body stop doing the job they should, you will either not be able to do all the things you could do if they were working, or you will get sick, or in the case of vital organs stopping working, you will die.
I honestly believe that the same dangers are facing our church now. I think we are all deeply concerned by the need for our church to grow. How many of us have looked forward ten years and wondered if things keep going as they are now, will there still be enough members to keep the church going? Today we have 96 members, most of whom are over 60 years of age and many of whom are over 70 years of age. Even if all are spared, how many will not be physically able to do the work that needs to be done over the next decade?
If we want to see our church grow we need to have a healthy body. We need everyone to play their part. And we need to do more to encourage more young adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s to come to church.
That is a huge and magnificent challenge. If we meet it, we all deserve gold medals. But that’s what God wants to give us:
“To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 9:22-25).
Did you watch any of the Beijing Olympics? While I was watching some of it on the television I thought about how people from all the nations gather together in one place for the games. And I thought about how many different types of people you see among the competitors. Athletes are as different from each other as people can get. You have the height of the basketball players, the bulk and strength of the weightlifters, the speed of the sprinters, the endurance of the long distance runners and cyclists, the grace of the gymnasts, the skill of the archers and shooters. All very different and yet all coming together in one place for a specific purpose – in the name of sport.
I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between the Olympics and the Church. The Church is also made up of people from every nation and it includes all kinds of different people, different talents, different personalities, but different people who all come together with a common purpose: to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and to love and live for him in this world.
That’s both a comforting and a challenging thought isn’t it? The comfort is that no matter who you are or what you are like, Jesus is calling you to come and follow him as one of his disciples. No matter who you are, you can have a place in Christ’s royal family through faith in him. He said himself: “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” (John 6:37)
But there’s a huge challenge for us to consider too. The challenge is that Christ wants every member of his church to use their gifts and talents to play their part. There are no passengers on the ship of faith, only crew members. Problems start when some members don’t play the part Christ wants them to play and think the church is a cruise ship where they only need to be entertained as spectators. Actually the church is more like a warship in enemy waters and everyone should be at battle stations. Where some members don’t play their part in the life and witness of the church, this leads to other members doing more than they should or things that should be happening not getting done. That isn’t right and it isn’t healthy.
Paul describes the church as being like a body sometimes. In Romans 12:4-6 he says:
“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given
us.”
If parts of your body stop doing the job they should, you will either not be able to do all the things you could do if they were working, or you will get sick, or in the case of vital organs stopping working, you will die.
I honestly believe that the same dangers are facing our church now. I think we are all deeply concerned by the need for our church to grow. How many of us have looked forward ten years and wondered if things keep going as they are now, will there still be enough members to keep the church going? Today we have 96 members, most of whom are over 60 years of age and many of whom are over 70 years of age. Even if all are spared, how many will not be physically able to do the work that needs to be done over the next decade?
If we want to see our church grow we need to have a healthy body. We need everyone to play their part. And we need to do more to encourage more young adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s to come to church.
That is a huge and magnificent challenge. If we meet it, we all deserve gold medals. But that’s what God wants to give us:
“To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 9:22-25).
Friday, 29 August 2008
Creation Controversy: The Rival Interpretations of Genesis One
For the past 150 years, Genesis One has been one of the most hotly debated and controversial chapters in the Bible. Until the 19th century, the Bible’s account of creation was pretty much taken as a straightforward description of historical events (though there were always a few theologians who did not read Genesis in this way). But since the development of the modern sciences of geology, biology and astronomy, Genesis One has been at the centre of what is still an ongoing controversy. Unfortunately discussion of what Genesis One means can leave Christians embroiled in arguments and can even cause divisions between Christians. But it needn’t be like that. It should be possible for Christians to show maturity and recognise that sometimes people will come to different conclusions on a subject and that it is okay to disagree sometimes without things turning nasty.
In this paper we will review four main ways in which Bible-believing Christians have interpreted Genesis One, and say a little bit about the strengths and weaknesses of each interpretation. Then in the final section we will look at a few things every Christian can agree on (whichever view of Genesis One we take) regarding the difference that believing God created this world makes to us and about how we live our lives in the 21st century.
Well, maybe the first thing to point out is that there are good reasons people take different views of Genesis One, not only because the text itself is capable of being taken in different ways, but also – and some might say more importantly – because some interpretations seem to take better account of interpreted information gathered from the natural world. In other words, some interpretations fit more comfortably than others with what natural science tells us about the age of the earth, the size and age of outer space, and the way natural processes and natural laws operate.
Some interpretations, if true, demand that we re-look at what science tells us and change how we interpret the scientific evidence. Those interpretations do not fit well with what science tells us. Some people think the most likely interpretation is the one that is the simplest and most straightforward when we look only at Bible; others are convinced that as the same God who gave us the Bible also created the world we see and so we should expect what the Bible tells us and what our observations of the world around us tell us to be in harmony. They would say that all truth is God’s truth whether we find it in the Bible or in a mathematical formula. If that is so then the most obvious interpretation of the creation account might not be the best one.
I should also say that I am not going to deal specifically with the subject of evolution. A lot of what I say might touch on this question, but I am not specifically addressing this subject. In particular, it should be noted that it is possible to deny that evolution is true and yet not accept Genesis One is a literal account of creation, and it is also possible - though I would argue inconsistent - to accept evolution is true and accept that Genesis One is true.
The Literal Interpretation
Okay so the first interpretation we’re going to look at is usually known as the Literal interpretation. This view is in many ways the most straightforward interpretation of the biblical text but it is the hardest to reconcile modern science – in fact it cannot really be reconciled with what modern science tells us about the age of the earth and the processes that led from the first moment of the Big Bang through to life on earth as we know it. The literal interpretation says that the account of creation we find in Genesis 1 is to be taken exactly as we find it – as a historical description of what actually happened during the first week of time. It states that God created the entire universe, the earth, the sun and moon, all the plants and animals and human beings in the space of six ordinary days of exactly or approximately 24 hours duration.
This view has several strengths and should not be dismissed as unthinking fundamentalist ranting. The literal interpretation is, I think, the most straightforward reading of Genesis 1. It takes the passage at face value – which is actually a good rule of interpretation. Unless we have good reason to think otherwise, the plain meaning of a passage in the Bible is probably correct. The chapter mentions “days” and those days have mornings and evenings. And they go together to form what appears to be an ordinary week of seven days as we know it. Would anyone, would the original recipients of the Book of Genesis, interpret this account in any way other than that they are ordinary days and it is an ordinary week that it took God to create everything?
Furthermore, later on in Exodus 20 when Moses received the Ten Commandments, this view is backed up by what we find there (Exodus 20:8-11):
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God…For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
As I said this interpretation should not be dismissed lightly. It is the predominant interpretation of Genesis One for over 1800 years of church history, from the early church through till the 19th century. That itself should make us pause for thought before we cast this interpretation aside.
That said, there are problems with the “literal 24 hour day” view. One of the main ones is that though it is very straightforward in its interpretation of the Bible, it is far from straightforward in its interpretation of science (or more generally, of how we perceive the universe around us). There are many different, independent scientific tests and observations that all tell us the universe is something of the order of 12 billion years old. The literal view of Genesis 1, even making generous allowances, struggles to come up with a figure of more than 20,000 years for the age of the universe. Obviously this is a huge difference. The literalists answer this in one of two ways. Either scientific measurement is way out in its estimation of the age of the universe or the universe was made with the appearance of age and maturity so that what we observe appears to be older than it really is. For example if a scientist met Adam a minute after he was created, since Adam was created as a fully mature adult male, the scientist might conclude that Adam was 20 or 30 years old and so the apparently “observable” facts might not be in accordance with true age. Similar arguments apply to the fossils, the age of the stars and so on, to explain away what scientific investigation seems to tell us. But, it must be pointed out that though these are ingenious explanations, they require quite a degree of speculation that goes well beyond what the Bible explicitly says! So maybe the literal view is not really much more literal overall than other views. It is just literal in terms of the length of the days in Genesis One.
That leads on to a second problem with the literal view. The problem is that the Genesis account – though supposed to be straightforward history – obviously contains a number of figurative elements within it, on any reading of the text – and so is simply not straightforward history. For example, the account talks about God “resting” on the seventh day when he had finished his work. Clearly this is figurative, because elsewhere Scripture teaches that God is an all powerful being who never grows weary.
Isaiah 40:28: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.”
Psalm 121:2-4: “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip— he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
So not everything in Genesis One and Two can be taken absolutely literally. This raises the question of what other parts of the narrative may be figurative or semi-poetic rather than literal.
A third problem with the literal view is what it implies about the character of God. If God created a universe with the apparent age of 12 billion years – I mean one in which every measurement we can make indicates it is a very old universe – yet he created it no more than 20,000 years ago (which is what the literal view demands we accept), then why did God do that? Does the Bible indicate that God sets out to deceive people? Or does it indicate he is open and transparent in his character and honest in his actions? Proponents of the literal view would counter that it is possible for us to be wrong in our interpretation of scientific data. However, if science is wrong, then it is very, very wrong. Science says the universe is about 60,000 times older than the young earth, literal creationist view. Many people find that hard to accept and point out that young earth creationism has its own set of presuppositions that are themselves not derived purely from the Bible.
So that’s the literal view – which we could sum up as the simplest interpretation, but the most difficult to reconcile with science.
The Gap Theory
The second interpretation is known as the Gap Theory. There are very few people who still accept this interpretation, though it was fairly popular in the 19th century. In fact it was first put forward by the famous Scottish minister, Thomas Chalmers. Basically the Gap theory teaches that there is a gap in time – a huge gap of millions of years – between the first and second verses of Genesis 1. So, the original creation, millions and millions of years ago is described in verse 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Within that verse, the Gap theory puts the Big Bang, the origin of life on earth, the dinosaurs and so on. It then assumes there was a cataclysmic event that destroyed the world. Some say it was a spiritual event such as the fall of Satan and the evil spirits from heaven. Others say it was the meteor that destroyed almost all life on earth including the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Others say a combination of the spiritual and the physical. But the earth was destroyed. According to the Gap theory, the six days of creation in Genesis One are really six days of “re-creation” or reconstruction during which geology settled down, the heavenly bodies became visible again and the plant and animal kingdoms were restored.
The Gap theory says verse two should be translated as: “And the earth became formless and desolate” rather than “And the earth was formless and desolate.” It also refers to verse 28, which in the King James Bible is translated: “God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Replenish can mean to re-fill or re-stock something that was full and is now empty. The Gap theory seized on this word to imply that the creation account is a refilling of the earth with life, which implies that life previously had filled the world.
The Gap theory has serious problems too and is not very widely supported today. Most Old Testament scholars say that verse 2 cannot properly be translated “And the earth became formless and void.” Which itself deals a severe blow to the theory. And then secondly, the Hebrew word translated “replenish” simply means “to fill” not necessarily to “refill”. More significantly, there is absolutely nothing in Genesis or anywhere else in the Bible to suggest that Satan’s fall had such a catastrophic effect on earth as the Gap theory requires. There is also not an inkling from the text itself that there is meant to be a gap between verses 1 and 2 of Genesis One.
I think that the Gap theory is ingenious, very very clever indeed, but I leave it to you to decide whether it is really something we learn from the Bible or something we need to read into the Bible in order to find it there.
The Day-Age Interpretation
The third interpretation is usually called the Day-Age theory. This also has its origin in a 19th century Scottish theologian, called Hugh Miller. The Day-Age theory remains fairly popular to this day as a way of reconciling Genesis One to the claims of modern science.
The Day-Age theory points out that the Hebrew word “Yom” (Day) can be used to mean a long, unspecified period of time, and not necessarily a period of 24 hours. Just like the English word “day” does not always refer to a period of 24 hours. For example in the expressions “This would never have happened in my day” or “In this day and age, you would think that people could do such and such…” There are clearly places in the Old Testament where Yom is obviously not referring to a 24-hour day. In this sense, the Day-Age theory is technically a possible interpretation of Genesis One.
However, again there are problems with this view. The fact that the seven days are presented to us as a week of days and the fact that each day has a morning and an evening strongly suggests that ordinary days are in view here and not long unspecified periods of time. It has also been pointed out that had Moses intended to be clear that he meant the six creation periods were long epochs of millions of years each, then there is another Hebrew word that he could have used for this. In addition, the day-age theory is itself contrary to science and so in that sense does not solve the problem. Because it would mean that there were millions of years (day three) when plants existed before the sun was created on day four!
Defenders of the day-age theory have answers to some of these criticisms but they are not very convincing. For example, some day-agers maintain that the sun was created on day one and only appeared visible in the sky when clouds cleared on day four.
The Framework Hypothesis
The fourth theory is usually known as the framework hypothesis or the framework interpretation. The framework view says that Genesis One is a literary construction – a narrative device – a semi-poetic hymn – designed to present God’s creative acts as a week of ordinary days, but that this creation week should not be taken as a literal week. The framework hypothesis says in effect that Genesis One is like an art gallery showing a series of pictures, each portraying a creative act of God, and together forming a comparison between God’s work of creation and our weekly pattern of work and rest.
It should be noted that the pictures are of real, historical events, but they remain distinct from the events themselves. Just as a passport photograph of a person is a true depiction of the person, but the picture is not the person, and is neither the same size nor shape as the person, so the days of Genesis One, the framework view says, are depictions of creation on the scale of a week of days, rather than descriptions of actual days.
Another important aspect of the framework view is that it sees the arrangement of the six days in topical order rather than in chronological order. It places the six days of creation in two groups of three days each, and it claims this is how Moses intended the week to be read. Days One to Three depict the creation of what have been called three “creation kingdoms” – the sky, the air and sea, and the land. Days Four to Six depict the creation of what have been called three “creation kings” to rule the kingdoms – the sun and moon to rule the sky, the fish to rule the sea and the birds to rule the air, and animals to rule the land. Day Six also features the creation of God’s overlords, human beings, to oversee and rule all the rest of creation for God.
According to this view, the fact that light and darkness are created on day one, but the sun and moon on day four does not matter. Because the days may be describing things that took place at the same time from two different perspectives.
The framework view claims to be an interpretation of Genesis that is derived from the text itself, in fact that is demanded by the text itself. But since this view also realises that Genesis One is a pre-scientific text and one that was written with theological concerns in mind and not scientific concerns, it leaves us free to accept Genesis One as true in what it actually states and also accept what science tells us is true. At least, it means there is more room for agreement between theology and science than the literal view would allow. According to the framework theory, Genesis One answers why questions; science is free to answer how and when questions.
The main criticism of this view is that it does not regard Genesis One as being a straightforward, linear, historical account of a series of successive acts by God. But the fact is that every theory is faced with issues of when to be literal and when to be figurative. No one interprets Genesis One and Two completely literally throughout, because that would mean that Genesis One and Two contradict each other, and we know that all Scripture is inspired by God and that the Holy Spirit cannot have inspired two contradictory creation accounts. What I mean by here is that in Genesis One, the animals are created before man, and man and woman are created at the same time; but in Genesis Two, if we take it all literally, the man is created first, then the animals, and finally woman. So some of these narratives must be interpreted figuratively. It seems to me, the framework hypothesis makes a good case for saying that the week of days is a way of presenting creation history to us in a way that every reader of the Bible, of all cultures and all ages and all levels of intelligence can read and understand.
The Meaning of Creation
With what has just been said very much in mind, I want to move on from the different theories and interpretations that people take on Genesis One to discuss that all interpretations agree on and that challenge how we live our lives.
There are four things:
1. The universe was created on purpose by a personal, loving God.
2. Creation is not a god to be worshipped.
3. God has given creation to human beings to act as stewards who care for it, look after it and use it to do good.
4. Human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God and therefore we all have an inherent dignity and worth that should be respected and nourished by others in this life.
Okay, I’ll just go over these very briefly.
The universe was deliberately and carefully created by a personal, loving God. The universe is not the accidental result of a series of random events: it has all been fearfully and wonderfully made.
Whatever view we take of how and how quickly and when God accomplished his creation, we must make an absolute stand before the world that our God – the God that the Bible says loves and cares for all of us, and who is deeply concerned with each one of us and our lives – he is the one who is the Maker of heaven and earth. He made it. It did not just happen by accident. And as such, it means that life is not meaningless. The world, life, everything has a purpose and a reason because ultimately God, the God of love, is behind it all working to accomplish his plans and purposes. And central to what God does is his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps we find the most all-encompassing vision of what that ultimate plan and purpose is in Paul’s words in Colossians 1:15-20:
Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God. He is the first-born Son, superior to all created things. For through him God created everything in heaven and on earth…God created the whole universe through him and for him…Through the Son…God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself. God made peace through his Son’s sacrificial death on the cross and so brought back to himself all things, both on earth and in heaven.
So creation has a purpose. And creation – indeed the whole of history – is heading towards a goal that God had in mind from the very beginning. And that purpose is to bring all things in heaven and on earth – in other words all created things – under Christ’s rule and headship.
Second, in our time, we need to remember that creation is not a god. This was in many ways the point that Moses wanted to Israelites to grasp when they first read Genesis One. Many of other nations around Israel worshipped gods of nature, gods of fertility, gods of the sun and moon and so forth. But Genesis One proclaims against all kinds of paganism that Yahweh, the God of Israel is the maker of the land and sea, the maker of the sun and moon, and so all these things are not things to be worshipped. Many pagan cultures worshipped the stars. Modern day astrology is a remnant of these ancient religions. By stark contrast, Genesis One is almost dismissive of such ideas with it’s short pithy sentence: “He also made the stars” as if the creation of outer space were nothing for our God – and of course the whole work of creation is but a trifle for the Almighty God we serve.
We need to stand against pagan ideas of worshipping nature, or getting involved in astrology, new age religion, white magic, witchcraft, and so on. Creation is not god, it is but the work of the one true God’s hands to achieve his purposes and plans. We are to worship him and look after creation for him, not worship it.
Thirdly, God has given creation to human beings to act as stewards who care for it,
look after it and use it to do good. You see, just as worshipping creation is wrong, so is abusing creation. Too often in history Christians have lined up with those who want to make a fast profit by exploiting natural resources, polluting the planet, and ruining the environment. And that was wrong – that was bad stewardship – and Christians need to be open and honest about the mistakes the Church made in the past.
Our duty is to look after the planet for God. This means, in my view, that green issues (for want of a better phrase) should matter to Christians. You might have heard of the three R’s in this area: reduce, re-use and recycle. We should try to reduce the amount of materials we use, re-use things when we can rather than buying into the “throw away” culture all around us, and recycle things like glass, paper and plastics. The more we can do the better in this area. In our generation, loving our neighbour means we are called, I believe, helping to make sure that pollution and global warming are kept under control and natural resources are used carefully and for the benefit of everyone and not just a few.
Fourthly, human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God and therefore we all have an inherent dignity and worth that should be respected and nourished by others in this life.
In a world where bureaucracy can make us feel like we’re just a number in a computer, just an entry in a database; in a world where sometimes human life seems cheap and people slaughter each other in never ending, senseless wars; in a world where human beings seem to come second to abstract concepts like “the economy”, where we are daily de-sensitised to human suffering and the evil that men do, and in a world where many people tell us that we are all just animals controlled by our genes, living meaningless lives before a death that has nothing beyond it – in this world, the Bible thunders forth its message that cuts through all the nonsense, all the rubbish and states that we do matter.
We are important after all. We are not just resources or statistics. We are people, people who share the personhood of God. We are special. We are human beings. We are created in the image of God. We have the worth and dignity that comes from being God-ordained Lords of creation and spiritual beings capable of a loving relationship with each other and with our Creator.
It means that human life is not cheap. It is valuable. It is priceless. And it should be cared for, protected, nourished and cherished everywhere.
Tomorrow, I want you to try to think about just for a split second about each person you come into contact with. And I want you to say to yourself, “This person is a human being created in the image of God.” And at the end of the day, look back and see if you felt differently about them, if it changes your perception of other people. I think that’s how Jesus always reacted to people – even those whom respectable society had no time for (like tax collectors and prostitutes) and even those with whom he disagreed totally like the Pharisees. He always treated them as real people, and not just potential converts, or de-personalised “sinners”.
There’s an old hymn that sums up so many truths about creation and I want to end by reading it. It goes like this:
This is my Father’s world,
and to my listening ears all nature sings,
and round me rings
the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world:
I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees,
of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world,
the birds their carols raise,
the morning light, the lily white,
declare their maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world:
he shines in all that’s fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.
This is my Father’s world.
O let me ne’er forget
that though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world:
why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King; let the heavens ring!
God reigns; let the earth be glad!
This is our Father’s world. He made it and he made us. Let us rejoice in that fact. Let our view of creation affect us and how we live. Let it change us and everyone around us. And let it be a foretaste of the new creation that one day Christ will rule over forever.
In this paper we will review four main ways in which Bible-believing Christians have interpreted Genesis One, and say a little bit about the strengths and weaknesses of each interpretation. Then in the final section we will look at a few things every Christian can agree on (whichever view of Genesis One we take) regarding the difference that believing God created this world makes to us and about how we live our lives in the 21st century.
Well, maybe the first thing to point out is that there are good reasons people take different views of Genesis One, not only because the text itself is capable of being taken in different ways, but also – and some might say more importantly – because some interpretations seem to take better account of interpreted information gathered from the natural world. In other words, some interpretations fit more comfortably than others with what natural science tells us about the age of the earth, the size and age of outer space, and the way natural processes and natural laws operate.
Some interpretations, if true, demand that we re-look at what science tells us and change how we interpret the scientific evidence. Those interpretations do not fit well with what science tells us. Some people think the most likely interpretation is the one that is the simplest and most straightforward when we look only at Bible; others are convinced that as the same God who gave us the Bible also created the world we see and so we should expect what the Bible tells us and what our observations of the world around us tell us to be in harmony. They would say that all truth is God’s truth whether we find it in the Bible or in a mathematical formula. If that is so then the most obvious interpretation of the creation account might not be the best one.
I should also say that I am not going to deal specifically with the subject of evolution. A lot of what I say might touch on this question, but I am not specifically addressing this subject. In particular, it should be noted that it is possible to deny that evolution is true and yet not accept Genesis One is a literal account of creation, and it is also possible - though I would argue inconsistent - to accept evolution is true and accept that Genesis One is true.
The Literal Interpretation
Okay so the first interpretation we’re going to look at is usually known as the Literal interpretation. This view is in many ways the most straightforward interpretation of the biblical text but it is the hardest to reconcile modern science – in fact it cannot really be reconciled with what modern science tells us about the age of the earth and the processes that led from the first moment of the Big Bang through to life on earth as we know it. The literal interpretation says that the account of creation we find in Genesis 1 is to be taken exactly as we find it – as a historical description of what actually happened during the first week of time. It states that God created the entire universe, the earth, the sun and moon, all the plants and animals and human beings in the space of six ordinary days of exactly or approximately 24 hours duration.
This view has several strengths and should not be dismissed as unthinking fundamentalist ranting. The literal interpretation is, I think, the most straightforward reading of Genesis 1. It takes the passage at face value – which is actually a good rule of interpretation. Unless we have good reason to think otherwise, the plain meaning of a passage in the Bible is probably correct. The chapter mentions “days” and those days have mornings and evenings. And they go together to form what appears to be an ordinary week of seven days as we know it. Would anyone, would the original recipients of the Book of Genesis, interpret this account in any way other than that they are ordinary days and it is an ordinary week that it took God to create everything?
Furthermore, later on in Exodus 20 when Moses received the Ten Commandments, this view is backed up by what we find there (Exodus 20:8-11):
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God…For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
As I said this interpretation should not be dismissed lightly. It is the predominant interpretation of Genesis One for over 1800 years of church history, from the early church through till the 19th century. That itself should make us pause for thought before we cast this interpretation aside.
That said, there are problems with the “literal 24 hour day” view. One of the main ones is that though it is very straightforward in its interpretation of the Bible, it is far from straightforward in its interpretation of science (or more generally, of how we perceive the universe around us). There are many different, independent scientific tests and observations that all tell us the universe is something of the order of 12 billion years old. The literal view of Genesis 1, even making generous allowances, struggles to come up with a figure of more than 20,000 years for the age of the universe. Obviously this is a huge difference. The literalists answer this in one of two ways. Either scientific measurement is way out in its estimation of the age of the universe or the universe was made with the appearance of age and maturity so that what we observe appears to be older than it really is. For example if a scientist met Adam a minute after he was created, since Adam was created as a fully mature adult male, the scientist might conclude that Adam was 20 or 30 years old and so the apparently “observable” facts might not be in accordance with true age. Similar arguments apply to the fossils, the age of the stars and so on, to explain away what scientific investigation seems to tell us. But, it must be pointed out that though these are ingenious explanations, they require quite a degree of speculation that goes well beyond what the Bible explicitly says! So maybe the literal view is not really much more literal overall than other views. It is just literal in terms of the length of the days in Genesis One.
That leads on to a second problem with the literal view. The problem is that the Genesis account – though supposed to be straightforward history – obviously contains a number of figurative elements within it, on any reading of the text – and so is simply not straightforward history. For example, the account talks about God “resting” on the seventh day when he had finished his work. Clearly this is figurative, because elsewhere Scripture teaches that God is an all powerful being who never grows weary.
Isaiah 40:28: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.”
Psalm 121:2-4: “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip— he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
So not everything in Genesis One and Two can be taken absolutely literally. This raises the question of what other parts of the narrative may be figurative or semi-poetic rather than literal.
A third problem with the literal view is what it implies about the character of God. If God created a universe with the apparent age of 12 billion years – I mean one in which every measurement we can make indicates it is a very old universe – yet he created it no more than 20,000 years ago (which is what the literal view demands we accept), then why did God do that? Does the Bible indicate that God sets out to deceive people? Or does it indicate he is open and transparent in his character and honest in his actions? Proponents of the literal view would counter that it is possible for us to be wrong in our interpretation of scientific data. However, if science is wrong, then it is very, very wrong. Science says the universe is about 60,000 times older than the young earth, literal creationist view. Many people find that hard to accept and point out that young earth creationism has its own set of presuppositions that are themselves not derived purely from the Bible.
So that’s the literal view – which we could sum up as the simplest interpretation, but the most difficult to reconcile with science.
The Gap Theory
The second interpretation is known as the Gap Theory. There are very few people who still accept this interpretation, though it was fairly popular in the 19th century. In fact it was first put forward by the famous Scottish minister, Thomas Chalmers. Basically the Gap theory teaches that there is a gap in time – a huge gap of millions of years – between the first and second verses of Genesis 1. So, the original creation, millions and millions of years ago is described in verse 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Within that verse, the Gap theory puts the Big Bang, the origin of life on earth, the dinosaurs and so on. It then assumes there was a cataclysmic event that destroyed the world. Some say it was a spiritual event such as the fall of Satan and the evil spirits from heaven. Others say it was the meteor that destroyed almost all life on earth including the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Others say a combination of the spiritual and the physical. But the earth was destroyed. According to the Gap theory, the six days of creation in Genesis One are really six days of “re-creation” or reconstruction during which geology settled down, the heavenly bodies became visible again and the plant and animal kingdoms were restored.
The Gap theory says verse two should be translated as: “And the earth became formless and desolate” rather than “And the earth was formless and desolate.” It also refers to verse 28, which in the King James Bible is translated: “God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Replenish can mean to re-fill or re-stock something that was full and is now empty. The Gap theory seized on this word to imply that the creation account is a refilling of the earth with life, which implies that life previously had filled the world.
The Gap theory has serious problems too and is not very widely supported today. Most Old Testament scholars say that verse 2 cannot properly be translated “And the earth became formless and void.” Which itself deals a severe blow to the theory. And then secondly, the Hebrew word translated “replenish” simply means “to fill” not necessarily to “refill”. More significantly, there is absolutely nothing in Genesis or anywhere else in the Bible to suggest that Satan’s fall had such a catastrophic effect on earth as the Gap theory requires. There is also not an inkling from the text itself that there is meant to be a gap between verses 1 and 2 of Genesis One.
I think that the Gap theory is ingenious, very very clever indeed, but I leave it to you to decide whether it is really something we learn from the Bible or something we need to read into the Bible in order to find it there.
The Day-Age Interpretation
The third interpretation is usually called the Day-Age theory. This also has its origin in a 19th century Scottish theologian, called Hugh Miller. The Day-Age theory remains fairly popular to this day as a way of reconciling Genesis One to the claims of modern science.
The Day-Age theory points out that the Hebrew word “Yom” (Day) can be used to mean a long, unspecified period of time, and not necessarily a period of 24 hours. Just like the English word “day” does not always refer to a period of 24 hours. For example in the expressions “This would never have happened in my day” or “In this day and age, you would think that people could do such and such…” There are clearly places in the Old Testament where Yom is obviously not referring to a 24-hour day. In this sense, the Day-Age theory is technically a possible interpretation of Genesis One.
However, again there are problems with this view. The fact that the seven days are presented to us as a week of days and the fact that each day has a morning and an evening strongly suggests that ordinary days are in view here and not long unspecified periods of time. It has also been pointed out that had Moses intended to be clear that he meant the six creation periods were long epochs of millions of years each, then there is another Hebrew word that he could have used for this. In addition, the day-age theory is itself contrary to science and so in that sense does not solve the problem. Because it would mean that there were millions of years (day three) when plants existed before the sun was created on day four!
Defenders of the day-age theory have answers to some of these criticisms but they are not very convincing. For example, some day-agers maintain that the sun was created on day one and only appeared visible in the sky when clouds cleared on day four.
The Framework Hypothesis
The fourth theory is usually known as the framework hypothesis or the framework interpretation. The framework view says that Genesis One is a literary construction – a narrative device – a semi-poetic hymn – designed to present God’s creative acts as a week of ordinary days, but that this creation week should not be taken as a literal week. The framework hypothesis says in effect that Genesis One is like an art gallery showing a series of pictures, each portraying a creative act of God, and together forming a comparison between God’s work of creation and our weekly pattern of work and rest.
It should be noted that the pictures are of real, historical events, but they remain distinct from the events themselves. Just as a passport photograph of a person is a true depiction of the person, but the picture is not the person, and is neither the same size nor shape as the person, so the days of Genesis One, the framework view says, are depictions of creation on the scale of a week of days, rather than descriptions of actual days.
Another important aspect of the framework view is that it sees the arrangement of the six days in topical order rather than in chronological order. It places the six days of creation in two groups of three days each, and it claims this is how Moses intended the week to be read. Days One to Three depict the creation of what have been called three “creation kingdoms” – the sky, the air and sea, and the land. Days Four to Six depict the creation of what have been called three “creation kings” to rule the kingdoms – the sun and moon to rule the sky, the fish to rule the sea and the birds to rule the air, and animals to rule the land. Day Six also features the creation of God’s overlords, human beings, to oversee and rule all the rest of creation for God.
According to this view, the fact that light and darkness are created on day one, but the sun and moon on day four does not matter. Because the days may be describing things that took place at the same time from two different perspectives.
The framework view claims to be an interpretation of Genesis that is derived from the text itself, in fact that is demanded by the text itself. But since this view also realises that Genesis One is a pre-scientific text and one that was written with theological concerns in mind and not scientific concerns, it leaves us free to accept Genesis One as true in what it actually states and also accept what science tells us is true. At least, it means there is more room for agreement between theology and science than the literal view would allow. According to the framework theory, Genesis One answers why questions; science is free to answer how and when questions.
The main criticism of this view is that it does not regard Genesis One as being a straightforward, linear, historical account of a series of successive acts by God. But the fact is that every theory is faced with issues of when to be literal and when to be figurative. No one interprets Genesis One and Two completely literally throughout, because that would mean that Genesis One and Two contradict each other, and we know that all Scripture is inspired by God and that the Holy Spirit cannot have inspired two contradictory creation accounts. What I mean by here is that in Genesis One, the animals are created before man, and man and woman are created at the same time; but in Genesis Two, if we take it all literally, the man is created first, then the animals, and finally woman. So some of these narratives must be interpreted figuratively. It seems to me, the framework hypothesis makes a good case for saying that the week of days is a way of presenting creation history to us in a way that every reader of the Bible, of all cultures and all ages and all levels of intelligence can read and understand.
The Meaning of Creation
With what has just been said very much in mind, I want to move on from the different theories and interpretations that people take on Genesis One to discuss that all interpretations agree on and that challenge how we live our lives.
There are four things:
1. The universe was created on purpose by a personal, loving God.
2. Creation is not a god to be worshipped.
3. God has given creation to human beings to act as stewards who care for it, look after it and use it to do good.
4. Human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God and therefore we all have an inherent dignity and worth that should be respected and nourished by others in this life.
Okay, I’ll just go over these very briefly.
The universe was deliberately and carefully created by a personal, loving God. The universe is not the accidental result of a series of random events: it has all been fearfully and wonderfully made.
Whatever view we take of how and how quickly and when God accomplished his creation, we must make an absolute stand before the world that our God – the God that the Bible says loves and cares for all of us, and who is deeply concerned with each one of us and our lives – he is the one who is the Maker of heaven and earth. He made it. It did not just happen by accident. And as such, it means that life is not meaningless. The world, life, everything has a purpose and a reason because ultimately God, the God of love, is behind it all working to accomplish his plans and purposes. And central to what God does is his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps we find the most all-encompassing vision of what that ultimate plan and purpose is in Paul’s words in Colossians 1:15-20:
Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God. He is the first-born Son, superior to all created things. For through him God created everything in heaven and on earth…God created the whole universe through him and for him…Through the Son…God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself. God made peace through his Son’s sacrificial death on the cross and so brought back to himself all things, both on earth and in heaven.
So creation has a purpose. And creation – indeed the whole of history – is heading towards a goal that God had in mind from the very beginning. And that purpose is to bring all things in heaven and on earth – in other words all created things – under Christ’s rule and headship.
Second, in our time, we need to remember that creation is not a god. This was in many ways the point that Moses wanted to Israelites to grasp when they first read Genesis One. Many of other nations around Israel worshipped gods of nature, gods of fertility, gods of the sun and moon and so forth. But Genesis One proclaims against all kinds of paganism that Yahweh, the God of Israel is the maker of the land and sea, the maker of the sun and moon, and so all these things are not things to be worshipped. Many pagan cultures worshipped the stars. Modern day astrology is a remnant of these ancient religions. By stark contrast, Genesis One is almost dismissive of such ideas with it’s short pithy sentence: “He also made the stars” as if the creation of outer space were nothing for our God – and of course the whole work of creation is but a trifle for the Almighty God we serve.
We need to stand against pagan ideas of worshipping nature, or getting involved in astrology, new age religion, white magic, witchcraft, and so on. Creation is not god, it is but the work of the one true God’s hands to achieve his purposes and plans. We are to worship him and look after creation for him, not worship it.
Thirdly, God has given creation to human beings to act as stewards who care for it,
look after it and use it to do good. You see, just as worshipping creation is wrong, so is abusing creation. Too often in history Christians have lined up with those who want to make a fast profit by exploiting natural resources, polluting the planet, and ruining the environment. And that was wrong – that was bad stewardship – and Christians need to be open and honest about the mistakes the Church made in the past.
Our duty is to look after the planet for God. This means, in my view, that green issues (for want of a better phrase) should matter to Christians. You might have heard of the three R’s in this area: reduce, re-use and recycle. We should try to reduce the amount of materials we use, re-use things when we can rather than buying into the “throw away” culture all around us, and recycle things like glass, paper and plastics. The more we can do the better in this area. In our generation, loving our neighbour means we are called, I believe, helping to make sure that pollution and global warming are kept under control and natural resources are used carefully and for the benefit of everyone and not just a few.
Fourthly, human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God and therefore we all have an inherent dignity and worth that should be respected and nourished by others in this life.
In a world where bureaucracy can make us feel like we’re just a number in a computer, just an entry in a database; in a world where sometimes human life seems cheap and people slaughter each other in never ending, senseless wars; in a world where human beings seem to come second to abstract concepts like “the economy”, where we are daily de-sensitised to human suffering and the evil that men do, and in a world where many people tell us that we are all just animals controlled by our genes, living meaningless lives before a death that has nothing beyond it – in this world, the Bible thunders forth its message that cuts through all the nonsense, all the rubbish and states that we do matter.
We are important after all. We are not just resources or statistics. We are people, people who share the personhood of God. We are special. We are human beings. We are created in the image of God. We have the worth and dignity that comes from being God-ordained Lords of creation and spiritual beings capable of a loving relationship with each other and with our Creator.
It means that human life is not cheap. It is valuable. It is priceless. And it should be cared for, protected, nourished and cherished everywhere.
Tomorrow, I want you to try to think about just for a split second about each person you come into contact with. And I want you to say to yourself, “This person is a human being created in the image of God.” And at the end of the day, look back and see if you felt differently about them, if it changes your perception of other people. I think that’s how Jesus always reacted to people – even those whom respectable society had no time for (like tax collectors and prostitutes) and even those with whom he disagreed totally like the Pharisees. He always treated them as real people, and not just potential converts, or de-personalised “sinners”.
There’s an old hymn that sums up so many truths about creation and I want to end by reading it. It goes like this:
This is my Father’s world,
and to my listening ears all nature sings,
and round me rings
the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world:
I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees,
of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world,
the birds their carols raise,
the morning light, the lily white,
declare their maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world:
he shines in all that’s fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.
This is my Father’s world.
O let me ne’er forget
that though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world:
why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King; let the heavens ring!
God reigns; let the earth be glad!
This is our Father’s world. He made it and he made us. Let us rejoice in that fact. Let our view of creation affect us and how we live. Let it change us and everyone around us. And let it be a foretaste of the new creation that one day Christ will rule over forever.
Saturday, 9 August 2008
An Engaging Aside
Normally, I deal only with biblical and theological matters on this blog, but I think a few personal entries are okay. And I can think of no better excuse for getting personal than to announce to anyone reading this that I got engaged to my girlfriend, Laura, on 6th August.
I really feel blessed by God to have had such a beautiful, loving, intelligent and funny Christian woman come into my life and I thank him for her on a daily basis.
I think deep down I've known I want to spend the rest of my life with her practically since we first met in February this year. The last six months has been such a wonderful time - even though there was deep sadness in it too when Laura's father died in May.
After preparing my proposal plan over the past couple of weeks, I summoned up my courage and asked her on Tuesday and I was both relieved and delighted when she was kind enough to accept my proposal.
The next few months look like being a busy and exciting time for both of us as we begin to make wedding plans.
I really feel blessed by God to have had such a beautiful, loving, intelligent and funny Christian woman come into my life and I thank him for her on a daily basis.
I think deep down I've known I want to spend the rest of my life with her practically since we first met in February this year. The last six months has been such a wonderful time - even though there was deep sadness in it too when Laura's father died in May.
After preparing my proposal plan over the past couple of weeks, I summoned up my courage and asked her on Tuesday and I was both relieved and delighted when she was kind enough to accept my proposal.
The next few months look like being a busy and exciting time for both of us as we begin to make wedding plans.
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