Tag: Grill a Christian

Grill a Christian: Question 4: Why was the Bible written?

grillwhybible

Somehow I jumped from question 3 to 5. Here’s 4.

“Why were the books of the Bible written? I know that some of them are letters so I get that, but what of the ones that are written as novels and accounts of Jesus life and the stories of the Old Testament? The authors didn’t know their work would go into the Bible so why did they record it? Was it like a diary? A ledger? Letters?”

I think one of the super important things about the Bible is something you’ve absolutely nailed in your question — that its a collection of books. Each book has a different purpose, is a different genre, each is written at a different time in the unfolding of God’s story, and each is written in a different way (so, some books are histories that accumulate over time via different people who compile them, some are autobiographical, some are recordings of sermons or messages brought to God’s people by leaders, prophets, and later, Apostles).

Genesis-Deuteronomy = the ‘Law’/legal code of Israel, but it’s not just their law it’s their history — the reason to keep the law. It tells the story of Israel being created out of all the other nations (and connected to all the other nations, and the story of all the other nations being connected to God from Adam, and how Israel was meant to ‘bless them’ (from Genesis chapter 12 — this might help answer your later question, Israel was meant to follow in Adam’s footsteps, being God’s representatives/making him known to all the nations, and all the nations were meant to keep their connection to the God who made them through Israel, but they walked away. That’s the story the earliest books of the Bible tells — of our shared humanity, but Israel’s role in God’s plans, and how they’re to carry them out by being different.

Those books are a mix of oral history and autobiography/sermons written by Moses, except they go a bit after his death, and there are times where you can see people adding little historical notes like “and this is still there to this day” so that you know they were ‘edited’ or at least kept current so that readers knew their connection to the story in later generations.

Joshua-2 Chronicles records Israel’s history as a nation, from the time they settle in the land that is now a pretty contested part of the middle east, to the time they’re taken into exile. These are written by many many people, probably as official court historians/record keepers. They’re largely narrative based.

Then there’s the wisdom literature — Job, Proverbs, Psalms, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes — these are like many other ancient forms of wisdom literature that explore the big questions about life, the universe, and everything. They are an interesting mix — especially Psalms and Proverbs — Proverbs has some Egyptian wisdom, some Jewish thought, and shows how Israel should be relating to the world (including the wisdom of the nations), by starting their search for wisdom with understanding how incomprehensibly big God is (so the Proverbs talk about ‘the fear of the Lord’).

The rest of the Old Testament are ‘the prophets’ accounts of the preaching/teaching of different people who spoke to Israel about how they were going wrong by wandering away from God and turning to idols. These guys either wrote stuff down (and sometimes describe themselves as writing things down), or their messages were recorded.

The prophets and the Psalms reflect backwards on the history, and look forward to Israel living the way they were meant to, not turning to idols, for the sake of themselves, the nations, and God’s plan/story which was heading towards Jesus.

I suspect they recorded their messages because they were part of a culture that recorded its history (from the time of Moses), and they saw themselves standing in this tradition of God revealing himself, in terms of what type of text their recordings were, they read like they could be a bit of a diary, or letters to their school of followers, and at times a collection of sermons/speeches they were giving. Some of them record history — like speeches from the national leaders/spokespeople they’re interacting with. I think there are two reasons they might have written things down, depending on how much they knew they were speaking directly for God, and so writing ‘the Bible’ and how much they knew they were saying important things to call Israel back to what they knew to be true. So:

1. To record their words as God’s word, or,

2. To have a record of their words as important messages that would be held up against what happened to Israel in order to see how accurate they were as prophets. Prophecy has always, in some sense, been tested by its accuracy, and the reason these ones lasted is that they proved accurate both in terms of Israel’s exile, and, for Christians, the coming of Jesus.

In the New Testament, there’s Gospels — which are biographies/histories of Jesus with a particular theological agenda and an audience the writer is trying to persuade about Jesus. So. Mark is written to a Roman audience, it seems, and tends to emphasise details that Romans would find significant, Matthew is written to a largely Jewish audience, Luke is written, it seems, to a Greek/Roman/Jewish mixed bag and its largely an attempt to give a robust history of Jesus and the Church (centered on Paul’s missions), because Luke’s sequel, Acts, was probably part of the same volume originally but split over two scrolls. John is written a little later than the other three Gospels, and seems to answer a bunch of big theological questions about who God is, who Jesus was, etc, to help the early church appreciate the connection with the Old Testament, and potentially to answer some things people were teaching about Jesus that weren’t consistent with the other Gospels.

Then the rest of the New Testament is letters to churches or people. They’re a bit like the prophets in that they reflect on who God is, and how he goes about saving, and deal with figuring out what beliefs this creates in terms of different situations and tendencies, and how we’re to live in response.

There are a couple of books that are often treated as tricky (and they are) which are harder to categorise because they use an apocalyptic genre so are full of symbolism — Daniel and Revelation. I tend to think Daniel is much like the other prophets in that it is meant to teach God’s people about real power by assessing a situation where they are under the power of an oppressor, and Revelation is actually primarily a letter, so it has to be addressing real, specific, concerns for the people receiving it in order to be useful (and so, circulated), and it also has to make sense to them. We lose the meaning of these books if we try to decode the symbolism to make it primarily about distant future events for the recipients or current events for us.

What’s cool about the Bible is that we don’t entirely have to figure out this question apart from God’s answer, which we find when Jesus uses the Bible in all its diversity, to point people to himself as the climax of the story. He’s talking to a couple of his followers before they realise it’s him, after he’s been raised from the dead, in the midst of their disappointment because they don’t think a crucified guy can possibly come from God.

“How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”

Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.He told them,“This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations,beginning at Jerusalem.You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” — Luke 24:25-27, 44-49

So despite all this diversity, and all the specific situations that were being addressed (and are still addressed) in terms of who we are and how we go about life in God’s world, and what that means for our relationship with God, the Bible from start to finish is actually about God, not us. It tells his story, about his love for people as it is ultimately revealed in his chosen king. It’s the story of God coming to dwell with his people — regaining the paradise lost in the first chapter, first in Jesus himself, and then when this promise Jesus makes is fulfilled as God’s Spirit, his life-giving breath comes to live in people again.

January 21, 2016

Grill a Christian: Where are God and Jesus?

Where are God and Jesus?

Cool question.

The Father is what is technically called ‘omnipresent’ — God is infinite, he must be, because all things are contained within God, he’s not a limited being within the universe who is measurably more powerful than everything else, he’s infinitely more powerful than everything else, and infinitely bigger than the universe. I just had this thought recently. If the universe, by all our human measurements, seems so vast and constantly expanding that it is limitless, or infinite, the gap between the size of space and time, which I believe to be finite, and God, who I believe to be the infinite source of these things, is actually infinite. The cosmos is contained in God, he is the source and grounds of its being, and the source of life and breath for all beings living in it. This has basically been what people have, across most religions, and as far back as human history has been recorded, believed about at least some part of what it means to be God (some religions have had other gods existing within the universe, or underneath a chief God). It’s consistent with what the Bible says about God, some of my favourite bits that talk about his vastness come in Job, and the Psalms.

This is what Paul says about God when he’s telling a bunch of religious philosopher/theologians who were the gatekeepers of the pantheon of Greek gods about Jesus.

““The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” — Acts 17:25-28

The Bible suggests, I think, that this omnipresence is true for Father, Son, and Spirit, prior to when Jesus becomes human. There’s a substantial change made to God’s nature that begins in what is called ‘the incarnation’ — God becoming human — which is what makes Christmas really worth celebrating. Here’s something from Colossians 1, which is what Paul says about Jesus and his relationship to the universe before he became a man, but also how God the father positions him in the universe as a result of him becoming human (a bit like Philippians 2). The bit about all things being created and held together in him is important for building that idea of ‘infiniteness’… and the ‘firstborn’ bit is a stepping out of the infiniteness. The whole being the image of something invisible is playing with this idea I think.

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” — Colossians 1:15-20

So, Jesus becoming human is a stepping down from this sort of infinite nature into a specific, and limited, form. It means Jesus now occupies a place, physically, in a way he did not. He shares something of our nature for the rest of eternity, which is part of how he now operates on our behalf, a bit like our lawyer, in heaven. The Bible says he ‘intercedes’ for us (see Romans 8, which picks up a bit of the answer to your earlier question about ‘the flesh’). The first chapter of John’s Gospel, which we’ll look at in term 1 next year, has a really cool way of describing what’s happening here. Jesus goes from being the ‘divine word’ that spoke creation into being, to being flesh. Stepping into the world. In this description where the ‘word became flesh’ — the ‘substance’ of God the father’s creativity, the means by which he acts stuff out — or at least has historically in the Bible, has at least in this sense, changed form from ‘eternal’ and limitless, to being a living, breathing, human (but still a fully divine human), this change is permanent. Jesus takes this same body with him when he goes. If you think about Jesus being a ‘spoken word’, God the father being the ‘speaker’ and the Spirit being the breath that gives volume and a ‘channel’ for that word to be heard, that’s probably the best analogy out there for how the Trinity thing works when God does stuff). There’s a bit in Hebrews (another book of the New Testament, and also the name the people of God in the Old Testament, Israel, and the language they speak), where the person who wrote Hebrews (we don’t actually know exactly who it was), plays with this idea of God’s ‘speech’ now being caught up in Jesus becoming human. This is from Hebrews 1, the first three verses:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. — Hebrews 1:1-3

God’s ‘speech’ — the way he made the world, and revealed himself to his people — which was presumably always this person of the Trinity in action, because it’s not like Jesus suddenly came in as a substitute who’d been warming the bench when he became a baby — this person of God and his actions are now concentrated in the human person of Jesus.

That’s part of what’s amazing, moving from infinite — which is utterly inconceivable to our heads — to finite, just like us. In the ‘incarnation’ something about the son’s nature changes, in that he now has a human body for the rest of eternity, the story in the New Testament goes that Jesus was raised, and then ascended to heaven, where he reigns. Still embodied, still with the scars of the crucifixion that he shows to his disciples — changed by the experience of taking on our humanity in order to save us, but now ruling in heaven again.

So, where is that exactly? I think heaven is a place beyond the boundaries of this universe but within the ‘infinity’ that is God, and the future picture is of heaven becoming, like Jesus, ‘Incarnate’ — becoming a merging of these places, a creative act by God similar to the way he created earth the first time, by his imagination and will. That’s where Jesus is. There’s some stuff in the Bible that suggests that Jesus, from this point/place is essentially omnipresent again, while being embodied and present in this place. He’s also eternally connected to the omnipotent Father, and with him the source of the Spirit (and eternally connected to the Spirit too). Jesus hears our prayers from earth, he is ‘present’ in us, by God’s Spirit, when we ‘gather in his name’, and he continues to be eternally one with Father and Spirit in whatever communicative network/connection thing is involved in being one God in three persons… he’s also ‘in us’ the Church, as we are ‘in him’ — Paul writes a bunch of letters that talk about us being ‘in Christ’ and about Christ being ‘in us by the Spirit’, and about us being the ‘body of Jesus’. If someone said to Paul “where is Jesus body?” Which was probably a question Christians got asked all the time in the early days of Christianity, I think he’d say “in his church”…

I’m comfortable with not fully being able to explain how all this works because I’m trying to put human words, which are finite and often sort of inexact, to things that are literally out of this world. There are some philosopher/theologians who say that any language we use to speak of God is using analogy because we’re grasping at what he’s like with our relatively tiny brains. I like that.

I hope this helps. Sorry if the answer is bigger than you thought. But the TL:DR; version… God (the Father) is everywhere, the Son is in heaven, and the Spirit (though you didn’t ask about the Spirit) is orchestrating the connections between Father, Son, and the people God (as Trinity) made, love, and in some cases, save. All life, whether its the life of people who follow Jesus, or reject him, is a good gift from God because it happens within the universe that happens within God. That line from Acts 17 “in him all things live, and breathe, and have their being” is one of my absolute favourites in the whole Bible. It actually explains a heap of other tricky questions you haven’t asked yet about death, suffering, etc… God is good because he gives life, and life is good. Bits of life suck because we broke God’s world. But God is good to every person because existence by its nature, ‘breath’ even, is divine.

December 20, 2015

Grill a Christian: What does it mean to be ‘ruled by the flesh’?

ruledbytheflesh

Question: What does it mean in Romans ‘governed by flesh’?

What Paul means is basically that our natural humanity, from birth, is caught between two poles that are in conflict with themselves.

The first is that we’re made in the Image of God, and so know what we ought to do, and sometimes do it, the second is that our humanity, our ‘flesh’ has been corrupted by humanity’s rejection of God’s image and desire to craft our own images, or ourselves as images of our own God (sometimes we just want to be God).

So our two natures — or these two aspects of our nature are sort of playing out, in different proportions, in everything we do. As humans, but we’re also always progressing towards being completely consistent based on what we worship — if we become worshippers of the Living God, as we see him revealed in Jesus, Paul says we are ultimately transformed into the image of his son, if, instead of God, we do what Paul talks about in chapter 1 — worshipping created things that can’t bring life — idolatry, which leads to all sorts of bad actions (sin) — we transform into dead people. Our flesh, without God, points us towards death, because often we put ourselves in the centre and worship ourselves. You could say every person ends up with this happening, we all become shaped by the ‘image of God’ we pursue, the question is whether it’s the real God, or a god we make up.

So, whatever we are, before this transformation is complete, is a product of these aspects of our humanity. The good stuff we do is often from mixed motives, like, “maybe someone will notice what a good thing I’m doing” or “aren’t I better than that other person who couldn’t be bothered doing this” — for Paul it’s convenient to describe this as a flesh v Spirit thing, because what he looks forward to is these two parts of our nature being perfectly aligned, rather than in conflict.

The other thing in Romans is that part of the process of becoming like Jesus — our picture of the real God, is that we get a third part to our humanity, a greater part, God dwelling in us, completing us, by his Spirit. This isn’t like a magical thing you feel, it plays out in a reorienting of our lives so that we do Christlike things more over time. We see the Spirit by its fruit — the lives we live reflect the transformation brought about by whatever we’re worshipping. But as a result of the new bit of our humanity, the Holy Spirit, that happens when we follow Jesus, we re-orient our lives both back towards the image of God part that was always part of us, and now also to the image of Jesus, which has become the pattern for future us both in terms of how we live and our eternal connection to God, our ‘fleshy’ lives change too, hopefully, over time and towards eternity, our actions are less and less mixed motived and more and more an outworking of this transformation, but that never fully happens until heaven. I always feel a little bit like this sounds like science fiction, but the ultimate post death reality, if Jesus really was raised from the dead is that we are raised with new ‘flesh’ untarnished by our shared disobedience.

So governed by the flesh, to answer your question, is a description of us putting the ‘not image of God’ part of ourselves in charge at the expense of our image of God part. It’s about us choosing to live how we want while suppressing whatever quiet voice (and as you suppress it it becomes quieter) is in the back of our head saying ‘you were made for more, you were made for better than this’…

December 8, 2015

Grill a Christian: Question 2. How does heaven work?

Question: “How do we know that we can remain good in heaven? Free will isn’t taken from us, so we can still make mistakes? Once in heaven can people be sent away? What makes living there different to here? And what will we do in heaven? No one will need anything.”

These are great questions. I think the big difference the Bible promises between us and our will now, and us and our will for eternity is that our character is perfected. It’s not that we won’t have free will, it’s that our free will won’t be lead astray by our self-serving nature (free will is a sort of paradox anyway, because God is also totally sovereign and working through every moment of our existence, because he is the ground of our being — as in, we exist ‘in him’). When you have perfect freedom, in the context of perfect love, where there is no crying, or mourning, nor pain, nor the ‘old order of things’ (which is what Revelation 21 suggests the new creation looks like), our mistakes won’t be mistakes, they’ll be exercises of our free will that don’t cost anyone anything. It’s perfect rest and recreation, for eternity. I find this question hard to answer because I find eternity quite hard to fathom. I think there are a few things that the Bible suggests are true about eternity that probably help answer the questions here, even if somewhat indirectly.

1. Heaven is earth. Perfected. Renovated. We’re not living on clouds, God’s good world is being refreshed, renovated, and renewed for his people to enjoy the way we were made to. So, whatever good stuff you do now, you’ll do then too. This is a little speculative, but I suspect we’ll not just have the world to explore, but the cosmos.

2. God will remain infinitely amazing, and we will be finite creatures moving towards the horizon of eternity (so becoming more and more infinite I guess, and knowing more and more about the love of God, and who the God who made the world is, and what God is like). He doesn’t stop being creator, and we don’t stop being creatures — we don’t become omni-anything in the new creation, we as creatures have a beginning, but as ‘new creations’ we have no end, while God has neither beginning nor end. So we, I think, will grow in the knowledge of God for eternity. I suspect this means we’ll also grow in the knowledge of our own capacity and what being loved by God frees us to do, so we’ll, I think, become more creative (like God), and thus capable of creating more wondrous things over time. I’m fairly sure the imagination continues to exist in heaven, and we’ll continue imagining and creating things, like we were made to. Otherwise heaven will be not as much fun as earth.

3. Nobody will ‘need anything’, sure, but wants are actually valid, even if parents try to tell you only to worry about things you need, not things you want. And we’ll still want to know God, still want to love, still want to create, we’ll still want to do all the things we were made to do as people made in God’s image, and we’ll be free-er than ever to embrace our (new-created) humanity in a way we’re unable to now because sin gets in the way, so does death. The stuff you can’t imagine achieving in your life time will no longer be impossible. I like to think we’ll have an eternity to explore the far flung reaches of the universe, and that God might well keep expanding the universe into eternity, so we’ll never run out of new things to play with.

4. People can’t be sent away. Probably the best passage to read to answer these questions (as well as Revelation 21-22) is Romans 8. It’s close to my favourite passage in the Bible.

This bit is the best bit:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. — Romans 8:28-30

Question: How will we know the Joy? If in this life it’s kind of like ‘you can’t know joy without pain, happy with out sad, bad without good’ how will we know that we are experience Pure Joy in heaven? Will people become complacent or tired?

I think we’ll know joy because we’ll remember life now. I hope we won’t become complacent or tired because one way heaven is described is as perfect rest, where work and play are unfrustrated by our shortcomings. So work exists in the Bible before sin, but exists as a sort of unfettered playful creativity with the good things God made.

CS Lewis writes some cool stuff about the fleeting sense of joy we experience here in this world and the overwhelming joy we’ll experience, by comparison, in the new creation. Especially in the Weight of Glory (and also in Surprised By Joy). Some bits are about Greek poetry and stuff, which was what he lectured in at university, but you can skip that pretty easily and still get something out of this. I think. Here are some great bits from the Weight of Glory.

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited…

…Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire.And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.” …If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple…

…At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind, and still more the body, receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body.

November 21, 2015

Grill a Christian: Question 1. Why did God make us?

Question: Why did God create us, and does the answer ‘so we might glorify and love him,’ mean God is selfish?

God created us because he is, by nature, a creator of life. I believe the catechism answer is true, but a little limited, because it focuses on our response not on God’s free action in creating. I think it’s wrong to think of God as creating us outside himself for the purpose of having little minions who worship him. We exist ‘within’ God’s infinite being, and he gives us life and breath, and being, and love.

In one sense, this question is like asking why Shakespeare wrote the characters he created into existence. How could he not when he had such magnificent stories to tell. How much more must God be compelled to create when he wanted to create the Gospel story (Revelation talks about the lamb slain before the creation of the world — the Gospel was always God’s plan).

As a little side note on this one — I don’t think sin was always on God’s agenda, but I think resurrection and glorification was — I think Adam and Eve were meant to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ and expand God’s perfect garden throughout his good world. I think the serpent was always on the agenda. And my super speculative thoughts here are that if Adam and Eve had turned their backs on the serpent, he would’ve done what Satan orchestrated with Jesus — he would have killed them. Eventually. And resurrection and glorification would’ve been how God defeated Satan. That’s the sense, I think, of how the verse from Revelation can work without God orchestrating the Fall (though I ultimately don’t think he was surprised by the Fall). This opens up a bunch of other questions about God’s knowledge. Which would be a tangent from a tangent…

Let’s assume that God is love. Like the Bible says. That he acts, makes, and creates, out of love. This love is directed, at first, within the Trinity, but it pours out from that. Creation is an act of love, an act of love overflowing — creating more things for the infinite/eternal triune God to direct his infinite love towards. It’s also, if Colossians 1 is a good summary, a gift from Father to Son, an inheritance, which, because God’s love is an overflowing or abundant love, overflows to those parts of his creation redeemed by Jesus, and united in the love of God. Creation is also an act of the Son, the ‘word’ who was with God in the beginning as God spoke the beginning, and the cosmos, into existence.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. — Colossians 1:15-16

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. — John 1:1-4

Creation is not an act by which God the Father glorifies himself, but by which God the Father glorifies and celebrates the Son, and by which God the Son glorifies and shows his love for the father, and by which the Holy Spirit glues both together. Creation is a Trinitarian love story, and an outpouring of that to us. So when Jesus prays that we might share in the love of the father and son we’re being brought into this eternal, infinite love story not just as spectators to God’s ‘cosmic love story’ but as actors in it. With parts to play as we celebrate and experience the overflowing of this love… Here’s a thing Jesus prays about us which is incredibly profound — that we might share in the unity of the Trinity, becoming one as they are one. God’s creative act is generous and other-seeking, and inclusive, rather than self-seeking. It is also measured in that it never forces this conclusion — this drawing together — on anybody who doesn’t want it.

As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. — John 17:18-23

Also, because God is not a ‘self’ in an individualistic sense, but is found in the perfect interwoven, overlapping nature of the Trinity (there’s a Greek word that captures this best ‘perichoresis’, which means interpenetrating), the pursuit of glorification isn’t the same as when we seek glorification. And God’s non-self-seeking nature is on display in how he extends the invitation for us to participate in his divine, eternal life, by completely ‘un-selfing’ — at the Cross. There is no Christian God apart from the God whose nature and love is on display at the Cross. God the father is ‘cross-shaped’ as much as God the son is crucified, as much as God the Spirit is — perhaps especially in his desire to completely throw light on Father and Son — cross-shaped. There is no self seeking part of who God is. Because we know God best as we meet him in Jesus, and we know Jesus best as we see him nailed to the cross. That’s what ‘glory’ looks like.

Ulitmately, God is a story-teller. A creator. This is part of who he is. We know this because what we know most about God is that he creates and reveals (we know this from the world, and his word — and his ‘Word’ who the written word points to).

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. — Hebrews 1:1-3

He creates things that reflect who he is, and because of who he is that can’t really produce anything but glorification or contempt. The world God made is a finite thing made by an infinite thing to reveal something of the infinite. Things we make, and stories we tell, serve a similar function for us, they’re an outpouring of who we are in an attempt to make ourselves known (even to ourselves, if we never share them beyond ourself), an attempt to capture and reveal something of ourself in a moment in time. Jesus as ‘word’ and ‘image’ written into creation is the ultimate version of what God always does when he creates, a pointer to who he is. It’s also worth saying that an infinite, creative, mind could create an infinite number of possibilities, God didn’t have to make what he made. But he loves what he made so much that he wrote himself into creation, in a finite way that actually forever changed the nature of Jesus such that, even now, he is embodied in a glorious, resurrected body as a taste of the future work of re-creation God will do when we are resurrected to share in his next creative project, the New Creation, with him.

November 20, 2015

Grill a Christian… answering questions about Christianity for those who want answers

Do you have any questions you’ve been super keen to ask a Christian? Any question? But never known who to ask, or how to ask it without someone not taking it seriously? Send them my way.

I’d love to have a crack at answering them. In this little “Grill A Christian” thing, I’m going to take a stab at answering some questions that a few people newish to thinking about God have asked me, but I’m open to answering more. Maybe it’ll help you believe something, maybe it’ll help you understand why or how people can believe in something that seems like a fairy tale or an exercise of the imagination to you… Who knows.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much I can no longer really describe in accurate terms what I thought when I became a Christian (In a nutshell: I was a kid, I grew up being taught about Jesus, and at some point I decided I owned it. Then I started questioning the beliefs I had as a child, then I came up with answers to those questions that satisfied my adult brain, while looking at better stories that account for our humanity and our world). I can, however, describe in accurate terms what excites me about seeing the world through a Christian lens, and what excites me about the God revealed simultaneously in his word and in his world. I’ve often wondered how to reconcile the two — how the thinking that comes through probing and questioning as an adult might connect with someone just starting out on the journey. Is there anything I can say that isn’t the product of a massive gap that has been created by my own wanderings and musings?

Here is the working assumption that underpins this exercise, and, hopefully, my answers.

God is big, and our ability to understand him is small, and the process will take forever. Which is what we’ve got if we grab onto him as he shows himself in Jesus.

One of the profound truths I believe about God is that in order for him, an infinite ground of all being in the universe to make himself known to any finite creature in the universe he needs to step down to us. Finite creatures can’t touch the infinite, the infinite can reach down though. And that’s precisely how God works. Whatever we do as our appreciation of God grows with time, and by his Spirit, we need to be able to look backwards to where we came from, so that we too can reach back and grab people as they reach out for God. Plus. Christianity at its heart is a story that is both simple and rich. When Paul speaks to the leading religious philosophers and theologians of his day, the council of the Areopagus in Athens, he takes the small ideas of God they’re working with, and blows their mind. Paul is a guy who knows who God is from a lifetime of being schooled in the Old Testament, and, it seems, from having read Greek and Roman philosophy and poetry about gods. He replaces the small, human, finite, understanding they have of God with something much bigger. I think that’s our job as people searching for truth. Paul was being grilled — questioned — by this council. He went willingly into the breach to answer the questions of these smart guys, and this is what he said (and many of them laughed at him).

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” — Acts 17:24-31

The thing is, while all this talk of infinity might blow our minds… You don’t need a sophisticated faith, you don’t need to grasp the ungraspable. You need to grasp that moment in history where God became finite, and knowable. There is no God in the universe who is not exactly like the crucified Jesus. That is God in his majesty and love on display. That is his invisible qualities and character revealed. It’s the pinnacle of God’s creative work, and our destructive work, on display. The thing God says about what the whole world is meant to do as we understand more of it (like via science or history), is true, perhaps truest for that moment in history where he stepped into the creation and revealed himself in the most profound way.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. — Romans 1:20

Jesus takes those invisible qualities and makes them visible. The Gospel is the story of God making the unknowable, the invisible and infinite, knowable in the visible and finite person of Jesus. This is the story the world was built to tell, or to host, as God’s revealing canvas for his act of self-revealing in Jesus.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.For God was pleased to have all his fullnessdwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. — Colossians 1:20

You don’t need to grasp anything else to ‘get God’… you need to come running to the God who reaches down with the excitement of a child. I love this picture from Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13, of love and reaching for knowledge being two sides of the same coin, but being something that starts when we ‘think like a child’… there’s a richness that comes from staring at the same truth for a long time. A richness I hope to keep cultivating for eternity. Like a farmer who keeps investing gleanings and stubble back into the earth to create richer soil, and thus, better fruit. What we look forward to is our picture of the God we know in our infancy, or as we meet him for the first time, becoming more and more complete, in this process that stretches infinitely into the future.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. — 1 Corinthians 13:9-13

Which all brings me to this new thing I’ll post here from time to time. One of the fun parts of being a pastor, and a Christian who is quite public about their faith online, is that I get questions from people. I love questions. Often I’ve just answered a person, and later thought “wow, that answer might be useful to store somewhere”… well. No longer. Now I’m, with the permission of the questioners, going to start sharing questions and answers from people so I don’t lose them, and in case others are asking similar questions.

You can ask questions too! Grill me. No doubt some of my answers will be wrong, heretical, or stupid. That’s part of the process of working towards truth. So feel free to join in the discussion by providing your own answers…

I’ll post up the first question tomorrow, and go from there.

November 19, 2015