It’s Personal – Revelation 1
April 17, 2012
Jesus says “I am the first and the last’ in Revelation 1:17. This could be drawn out in a number of ways. However, the scriptures start in Genesis with the creation, to which John’s gospel comments, “he was with God in the beginning. through him all things were made.” So there is the Beginning. Revelation ends with a description and a promise of the New Heaven and a New Earth. (Genesis speaks of the creation of heaven and earth.) There is the end.
From a materialistic standpoint, the universe is a great moving consequence of an explosion – it is something that works out according to the laws of physics. Personality can be explained as a perception built up from complex electro-chemical processes. In this view, everything is impersonal.
From the Bible’s stand point, we see that before and after these material forces is Someone – before the big explosion that brought about the world, there was love among the Father, Son and Spirit. In the End, there will be no need for sun and stars because the light of these persons will be all that is needed.
Whatever these statements mean when they are translated from poetry to history, they do mean that the universe is deeply personal. The world of God is personal. The church is personally attended to by the “one like a son of man” (chapter 1). This creator speaks, thunders, writes letters, gives promises, shares visions and promises a banquet. These are all personal.
At the center of all things, according to the scriptures, God, in three persons, who lives, creates, intervenes, saves and attends in love.
That’s pretty neat.
The Other Book – Romans 1:20
November 4, 2010
tossing the Confession over the wall
About the Knowledge of God – Moreover, we know God by two means, first, by the creation, preservation, and government of this whole world. For it is before our eyes as a most beautiful Book in which all creatures, from the least to the greatest, are as certain letters and marks through which the invisible things of God can be examined and understood, certainly His eternal power and His divinity as the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. This knowledge is sufficient for convicting any given people and rendering them inexcusable. But He also bears His very self to us, much more clearly and openly, in His holy and divine Word; indeed, as much as is expedient in this life for His glory and for the salvation of His own people. (Belgic Confession, Article 2)
Once yearly I name a Theologian of the Year on Halloween/Reformation Sunday. This year it was Guido De Bres, primary author of the Belgic Confession. The above quotation is from Article 2 of that confession, which first came to light when, presumably, De Bres tossed it over the fence of the castle of Doornik on November 2, 1562 (45 years and 2 days after Luther posted his 95 Theses.) De Bres was trained as a painter of stained glass, came to be a preacher in the underground reformed church in the Netherlands, at the time under the government of Spain. As remarkable as the line about the world and it’s creatures being like marks in a book, it is more remarkable to know that De Bres had to preach in secret, under constant threat of arrest, and finally died by the hand of the Inquisition.
So as Bobby McFerrin might have said, “Do Theology; Be Happy!”
FR
Wisdom at a Funeral
May 20, 2010
At a recent funeral, conducted with people who are not actively part of the church community, I decided to start with a passage from Ecclesiastes and speak of the ability to enjoy simple gifts. This is the passage:
Eccles. 2:24-26
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, [25] for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? [26] For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
Interestingly this lead to a pleasant conversation at the graveside by a friend of the family regarding work, possessions and taking time for rest and for God.
The gifts God gives are spiritual in nature (wisdom, knowledge and joy) and the material things of life are a “Heaping up” of stuff that we can not keep. It reminds me of the comment I once heard by a Mennonite believer who was a truck driver by trade,
“I’ve never seen a trailer on a hearse.”
Incognito – UP
March 5, 2010
On the Image of God – Genesis 1:26-27
October 31, 2009
Last month I went to Sandwich, Illinois for a class in how to carve people’s faces. That was a lot of fun, and I spent 6 hours making eyes and noses and mouths. Now the trick will be to put them together in the right places.
In the evening there was a class called Drawing for Wood Carvers. Carvers usually work from a drawing or a picture. I like to carve things from my own life, but it is hard for me to draw those things. So I thought the class was a good idea.
In the picture you see, we were supposed to draw in about 20 minutes a picture of a teen aged girl sitting in a chair. What we soon learned is that we had to keep looking at the model and then back to our drawing. If I drew what I thought was there, or what I remembered, the picture would be wrong.
Drawing is about seeing first. You notice shapes, sizes, light and darkness and try to reproduce that in your picture.
My picture was not bad for a non-artist. I had to apologize to the model, because she looked a lot younger in real life than she did in my picture.
Why am I telling you this? Because, God created human beings in his image and likeness. So you and I are like a pencil drawing of God. This girl is not made of paper and pencil, she was a living person. God is not made of skin and muscle us, he is a Spirit and does not have a body like a human being. Yet we are, somehow made in God’s image.
What does this mean to be made in God’s image?
It means that we will have to keep looking carefully at God through the Word of God to see what this means. We can not look to human opinions, but we have to look and keep looking to God to see what this means.
Students in Gateway are reading a book called “Bible Doctrine” by Dr. Wayne Grudem. In this book he says that we should not worry about coming up with a specific detailed definition of what it means to be made in God’s image. In stead he says,
“[Genesis] only needs to affirm that man is like God, and the rest of Scripture fill is more details to explain this…..the more we know about God and man the more similarities we will recognize and the more fully we will understand what Scripture means when it says that man is in the image of God.” (p. 190)
What Dr. Grudem is saying is that like an artist drawing a picture, we need to keep looking up to God. We need to keep reading the Word of God, in order to understand what it means to be in God’s image.
God Created – Psalm 24:1,2
September 2, 2009
We are hoping to explore a few passages that show the implication of the idea of Creation. This week it will be
Psalm 24:1-2
A Psalm of David.
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,
the world and those who dwell therein,
[2] for he has founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.
We have two verses exhibiting synonymous parallelism. 1a and 1b asserts the Lord’s ownership of all things and all that lives based on Creation. These statements are parallel but they do not merely repeat. The verses progress from the idea of things to living things. Isn’t it a different thing to say that mountains, rain, clouds, rivers and so forth belong to God, than to say you and I and everyone else belong to God? The implication to ownership of the earth is profound, as is the implications to nations and races, individuals and groups.
Why does God have all this ownership? Becasue he is the founder. He has established its very structures.
What would be different if the world created and established itself? What if people were truly, in the biological sense, self-made?
FR
Proverbs 8 – some preaching
August 26, 2009
Some excerpts from Sunday past:
Proverbs 8:22-26
” The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
[23] Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
[24] When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
[25] Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
[26] before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
v. 22-26 says that God possessed Wisdom before there was a single speck of matter. These descriptions, including dust in verse 26 remind us of Genesis 1 which tells us that the world did not exist apart from God. God brought it all into existence. Even the dust from which Adam and Eve were formed came into existence by God.
As old as the universe may be, wisdom is older. Whether you hold to a young earth, or whether you think the earth is millions of years old, wisdom predated everything.
This flips Naturalistic Materialism on its head. For those who see everything inn the light of evolution say that knowledge and wisdom are also things that evolved with the universe. And as CS Lewis noted, if they evolved from an imperfect world, they too would have to be imperfect. In other words, Naturalism can not support the idea of truth – or it redefines it to mean “what we know today, imperfectly.” So is it any wonder that we live in a world that affirms evolution as the full explanation of life but denies truth?
Proverbs 8:27-31
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
[28] when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
[29] when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
[30] then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
[31] rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.
v. 27-31 says that Wisdom was present in the creation of the world. Again one thinks of Genesis 1 when reading these verses. When God was separating sky from sea and land from water, and day from night, Wisdom was there.
The question is what was wisdom doing?
V.30is hard to translate. The NIV and ESV support the most widely accepted version and the one that I think makes the most sense. If you study this passage you will find that Wisdom might be considered a Craftsman, and observer or a happy infant delighting in its father’s work.
What I believe is that Wisdom was the means by which God created. In Proverbs 3 this is stated in non-poetic language.
“By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundation,
By understanding he set the heavens in place;
By his knowledge the deeps were divided,
And the clouds let drop the dew.”
God created things in order – some obvious like day and night, and summer and winter. Other obscure – like genetics that we are only starting to understand. But there is reasonableness. The times of sunrise and sunset, the movement of the tides, the phases of the moon can all be predicted. God does not have gravity go up on Monday and down on Tuesday. Gravity always goes down. You do not weigh 100 pounds today and 200 tomorrow. It is always better to eat fruits and vegetables than a bag of potato chips.
The point Proverbs is making: Since we live in a Wise World, created by a Wise God, we should choose wise paths.
This is not, by the way, hard an un-fun. For look at what Wisdom was doing in creation: She was rejoicing and delighting in the ways of God. The bible speaks of the whales of the sea playing and making sport – they seem to have fun in God’s world. Certainly monkeys know how to have fun. So God has made his world delightful, beautiful, surprising and enthralling. You can immerse yourself in gardening, bird watching, cloud watching, star gazing, hunting, cooking, painting, hiking, discovering and all other things we have to do with the created world with great joy and wonder at the beauty and complexity of it all.
So the Chapter concludes: Choose Wisdom and you choose life. For Wisdom is the very pattern used by the Creator when he founded the earth.
God created by Wisdom: Let’s live by Wisdom.
Proverbs 8 – a pre-view
August 18, 2009
So Proverbs 8 has been fascinating, confusing and controversial for centuries. Is it, as Christians have said, a prediction of the coming Christ. (see 8:22ff). Would then it mean that Wisdom/Christ was created? Is this even a legitimate question? What is the relationship of wisdom to the created order? Will this sense of order prevail under the current view of the chaotic and haphazard origin of life?
So dear read, it is time for us to take a Fresh Read – do you remember the concept. With the aid of tools (your English bible is a tool after all) we will read and discover for ourselves from the text. We will take a Fresh not a Rehashed view of the text.
What will we find? Well you tell me! Later I will tell you what i have found.
