I was lucky to come out with anything
left, I guess.
At any rate, that might help with the
overhead.
I guess that's the point of the light,
so thanks.
The parallelism there, note how it goes on.
Who is first born?
Who is image first born proportion?
But I think, again, there might be reasons
to see this as sort of a smaller
transitional stanza.
Again, in the Greek text, all of these
lines begin with an and, and, and, and.
And a bit of, again, this inclusio we've
been talking about, the first line begins, and
he is, and the third line, and he
is.
And so here you have, again, these three
compact lines that seem to belong together as
well.
Now, in the overall structure of the hymn,
what clearly we have Paul doing, in quoting
this hymn, is celebrating the supremacy of Christ
in creation, and the new creation.
As Christ is the first born overall creation,
the one who is primary over creation, and
the instrument through which the original creation is
brought into being, so he has the primacy
and the supremacy in the new creation.
The one in whom, through his resurrection, hinted
at in the first born here from the
dead, of course, through that resurrection, he has
begun to establish the new creation.
And all of this, very high, very, what
we might even call, abstruse Christology, is, remember
in our context, directed toward the practical purpose
of giving the Colossians assurance about this realm
transfer that Paul has talked about in verses
13 through 14.
He has rescued us, he has transferred us
from the dominion of darkness into the new
kingdom of God's Son, and we can be
sure about that, we can rest confident in
it, we can know that it's taken place,
and that our new position is secure, because
God has done it in none other than
Jesus Christ, the Lord of the universe, the
one who is supreme over all the powers
of darkness, the one who is supreme over
all elements that we might encounter in our
lives, that the church will ever face.
It's a great, again, practical demonstration of why
theology is so important in the life of
the church.
It is that theology that gives us our
hope, that provides for the foundation that we
all need to stand on.
Well, let's look at some of the things
Paul says about the Son.
First of all, his role in creation.
He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn over all creation.
Image of the invisible God.
Let me just back up a moment and
talk about the issue of background here a
little bit, which is very significant in understanding
how this hymn is communicating its truth about
Christ.
I say it's very significant.
Most of us know, of course, that to
interpret the New Testament adequately, finally, we need
to have a little bit of insight into
the world of that day and how people
in that day used words and how they
communicated.
Just as in our day, we will frequently
bring in a whole cultural dynamic and background
and make it a point through a single
word.
Think of the way the little suffix gate
functions in our political discourse ever since Watergate.
Just the addition of that little suffix, four
letters, whether it's travelgate or Irancontragate or whatever
we want to add it to, those four
letters conjure up for us, who know American
history, some of us old enough to have
lived through that history, it conjures up a
whole image of political corruption and scandal and
cover-up and so forth that would be
very difficult to express without maybe a couple
of paragraphs even.
So when we read the New Testament, we
are reading writings from people who were so
steeped in the Old Testament, the Jewish world,
and of course also the Greco-Roman world
of that day, that they will very often
communicate something very significant by the choice of
a particular word or phrase.
And if we're not clued into that background,
we're going to miss some of the point.
Maybe not all of the point, but we're
going to miss some of the point.
So there is lively discussion about where this
hymn is drawing its language from.
And there are some rich possibilities.
Quickly, focusing on four items in the hymn
that are said about Christ that are probably
the most significant ones we need to look
at as far as background goes.
Image, we just looked at, firstborn overall creation,
the mediator of creation in verse 16, especially
this is emphasized, and then calling Christ the
beginning.
Where does this stuff come from, if anywhere?
Well, one, of course, immediate possibility when we
hear the word image is Genesis 1.
Now I know that all of you have
a disposition against Genesis 1.
Apparently none of you have read it.
If you've read it, you don't remember the
chapter, you're just not clued in.
But take a look at it sometime and
read it because there's some good stuff there.
And one of the things that you find
there, of course, is this great foundational theological
statement about God creating human beings in his
image.
And if you do just a quick word
study in the Old Testament and Jewish sources
as well, that's where the language of image
is more often used.
It's attached to creation.
It's attached to human beings as made in
the image of God.
So Jesus as second Adam, which, of course,
is a very significant Pauline theological development.
Even if Paul's not the author of the
hymn, it certainly might have been a reason
that led him to quote the hymn here,
if this is the idea.
I think there's something to that.
A second background we need to look at,
though, and this is particularly significant for the
title firstborn, because read in its context, by
itself, the language of Christ as the firstborn
of creation might sound like the light verse
of Arius.
It sounds at first like this hymn is
propagating a sub-Orthodox Christology.
Christ, well, apparently was not eternal.
There was a time when he was not,
to quote the famous language that surfaced at
the time of the Arian controversy.
He was born.
He came into existence.
The first to come into existence, but still,
apparently, you might assume from an initial reading
of this verse, a creature, one created by
God.
Yes, God in some sense, his son, but
nevertheless, a created being of some kind.
Well, when we look at the background again
carefully, I think some of that conclusion pretty
quickly falls to the ground.
And we realize that we have made the
mistake of reading the word as if we're
using it in 21st century English, rather than
it being used in 1st century Greek against
the context of the Old Testament, where the
language of firstborn is applied to the idea
of supremacy.
It comes from the literal sense of a
firstborn child who is the one who is
most prominent, who receives the inheritance.
It used to be, as we know, in
16th and 17th century England, someone had three
sons, and the first one got the estate,
and the second one became a soldier, and
the third one had nothing better to do
than become a pastor, which explains the state
of the church sometimes in those eras, I
think.
But this is the way it worked.
The firstborn is sort of the one in
many societies who is the one who is
prominent, the heir.
And so from that usage, you have clearly
in the Old Testament and Judaism, this movement
then to use firstborn simply as a metaphor
for the one who is the most prominent,
the one who is superior.
And this Messianic text, I think, Psalm 89,
illustrates this point very well.
David will be appointed as my firstborn, the
most exalted of the kings of the earth.
Nothing about David's birth order here, obviously, or
if the text ultimately is looking beyond David
to the greater son of David to come.
The point is supremacy.
And hence, the translation you might have seen
before you from the TNIV, the firstborn over
all creation, which I think is the translation
that rightly captures the semantic sense of firstborn
in its context here, you see.
I think that's quite an appropriate and indeed
preferable translation here then because of that background.
All right, but the third background here is
the concept of wisdom.
We can say an awful lot about this,
and it's become very popular of late because
feminist theologians have seized on wisdom, since it's
a feminine noun, to bring certain perspectives of
femaleness into conceptions of God, spirituality, religion, and
so forth.
We don't need to do all of that
stuff.
But there is no doubt that this idea
of wisdom, as it gets used in certain
Old Testament passages, and especially as it gets
developed in the Jewish writings post Old Testament
and pre-New Testament, very significant development.
By wisdom, the Lord laid the earth's foundations.
And often in these texts, wisdom is an
expression of God himself, you see.
It's a characteristic, an attribute of God.
But in some of these texts, the personification
becomes so strong that wisdom almost seems to
begin to be an entity in its own
right.
And this begins to happen again in the
Jewish world.
The Proverbs 8 passage, as many of you
will know, is a key passage in this
development.
And again, what you have here, as you
have so often in Proverbs, is a bold
and extensive personification.
We have to be careful about thinking that
the author of Proverbs here is in any
way suggested that wisdom is a person or
an apostasis or something.
I think it's just very bold, poetic language
here.
But nevertheless, it goes quite a ways toward
talking about wisdom almost as a kind of
independent entity, as you see.
Involved in the beginning, involved in creation and
so forth, you see.
Again, in the Jewish world, seen particularly in
the writings of Philo of Alexandria then, you
have this developed even further.
Note, again, some of the parallels between what
Philo says about wisdom and what our hymn
is saying about Christ.
Wisdom is the firstborn son.
Wisdom by whose agency the universe was completed.
Wisdom is the beginning and image and vision
of God.
I have to confess something to you here.
I, for some reason unknown to myself that
a psychiatrist might be able to uncover, have
been reluctant to jump on the wisdom bandwagon.
Because that's sort of what it is.
In the last 20 years, there's just been
an awful lot written about the figure of
wisdom and related idea of word or logos.
Again, in Philo, these are developed in parallel.
They're almost overlapping, wisdom and word.
Because an awful lot of scholars have seen
in this Jewish development a kind of background
and precedent for New Testament Christology.
For some reason, I've been very reluctant to
admit this influence.
I don't know why.
It's a peculiar thing, but there it is.
But I have to confess, as I've been
working on this again in recent days, in
writing the commentary, I'm very reluctantly being forced
to the conclusion that there is something to
this.
That the background is probably significant for this
hymn.
It's kind of a lesson to me and
all of us about putting ourselves significantly enough
into the text to let that text kind
of dismiss some of our prejudices, to allow
it to have its authority in having its
way with us, even when we're initially reluctant
to let that happen.
So that's kind of where I am by
the commentary when it comes out in a
year and a half or two to see
where I end up on this.
But at this point, I am inclined to
think that the figure of wisdom might indeed
be affording this hymn some of the language
it's using to talk about Christ.
Now, we have to be very careful not
to load too much into this.
On the one hand, the early Christian conception
of Christ can in no way be seen
as a kind of organic development from these
Jewish intermediary figures.
What is asserted about Christ in the New
Testament so distinctly differs from what any Jew
will say about these intermediary figures as to
be moving from one ballgame into another, as
it were.
It's just a whole different situation.
So I think we have to be very
careful about suggesting that somehow, well, yeah, it
was pretty easy for New Testament Christians to
begin thinking about Jesus in the way that
they do because they just sort of plugged
them into these ideas that were already out
there in Judaism about wisdom and logos and
so forth.
Now, I hear Richard Bauckham's little book, God
Crucified, is an excellent response to that in
which, again, he tries to show that the
early Christians were doing something unheard of in
the Jewish world in what they were saying
about the person of Jesus Christ in his
relationship to the Father.
The second note of caution is this.
James Dunn, in his work on Christology, has
strongly emphasized the wisdom influence here and makes
a very interesting argument.
He says that the language in the hymn
that is applied to Jesus, let's go back
to the hymn before we forget about it,
the language in this hymn applied to Jesus,
image of God, instrument of creation and so
forth, simply serves the purpose to identify Jesus
with the figure of wisdom.
So all of the specifics Dunn suggests that
are used here in the hymn simply serve
to make the point that Jesus is now
the one in whom we encounter what the
Jews used to think about as wisdom.
And Dunn then concludes, we illegitimately read into
this hymn concepts of pre-existence or incarnation
which just aren't here.
Because that's not what the language is doing.
The language is not here to say anything
ontologically, as it were, about Jesus' pre-existence
or incarnation.
The language here is simply used to associate
Jesus with wisdom.
Errand nonsense.
Think about it for a moment.
Think about the nature of the argument.
If I'm trying to make a case that
that X person, George Bush for instance, is
President of the United States, my argument might
go something like this.
The President of the United States is surrounded
by men in black suits with wires hanging
out of their ears.
The President of the United States drives around
in an armored limousine with flags on the
fenders.
And when the President of the United States
shows up, bands play Hail to the Chief.
George Bush is surrounded by men in black
suits with wires hanging out of their ears.
George Bush drives around in an armored limousine
with flags on the fenders.
George Bush, when he shows up in a
place, ends up having to hear Hail to
the Chief far more often than I'm sure
he would like.
Conclusion, George Bush is the President.
But does that mean that the specific things
attributed to George Bush are not in fact
true?
Does that mean that the specific points that
we have used to create the case that
George Bush is the President fall to the
ground?
Well, we say George Bush hears Hail to
the Chief when he arrives.
We don't really mean that that does happen.
That's just a way of saying he's President.
Well, if you're going to make the case
that those things show he's President, those things
have to be true.
Or the whole case falls to the ground.
Dunn's attempt to avoid the high Christology of
this passage with the assumption of Jesus' preexistence,
his incarnation, simply won't work.
And this is an abuse, not a use
of the background material.
All right, with some of that in view,
let's get back to the text.
Image of the Invisible God.
Well, I don't need to say much about
this because Tom Wells has already taken through
this so well.
Nice conjunction.
Of themes this morning.
God in himself is invisible.
Of course, teachings you have throughout Scripture.
In Christ, we see his image.
His exact image.
Not that in some ontological or physical sense,
of course, but that when we see Jesus,
we see who God is in his fullness.
Such an important point that Paul needed to
make to the Colossians.
One of the things this hymn is saying,
made clear down here, where Paul kind of
repeats the idea, all the fullness dwells in
Christ.
He's going to make the point again in
2.8.9, a key hinge passage which
we'll look at, I hope, tomorrow.
Maybe this evening, we'll see how our time
goes.
His point to the Colossians is to say
to them, don't go running around, dabbling in
these other religions and philosophies, mystery religions, the
folk religions, and so forth, to try to
find spiritual completion.
To try to find a bit more of
God.
All that you can possibly know about God
is found in Christ.
Once you see him, the image of the
invisible God, you've got the whole package.
This is the point he's making to the
Colossians, and a point that this hymn needs
to make very badly in our era of
pluralism, of quite extraordinary moves on the part
of evangelicals to, in a sense, dabble in
other religions.
To see what more we can learn about
God by pursuing this track or that track
or something of the sort.
My wife and I have photography as our
passion, and we are the sorts of photographers
that want sharp photographs.
If we'd lived in the Ansel Adams era,
we would have belonged to what they called
the F64 school back in those days.
The lens of a view of a camera
that was the smallest possible aperture, tiny, tiny
opening, that gives you incredible depth of field
from front to back.
So everything is detailed in your photograph.
That's why my wife and I strive for
that.
That's why we keep having to buy more
megapixels in our cameras and new lenses, because
when we print in our home computer darkroom,
we're able to print up to 24 by
17 inches is our enlargement size.
I want to be able to see every
blade of grass.
I want to see the detail.
I want to be able to look at
that and really see all the detail as
well as the general picture.
That's the idea of the image of invisible
God that we have here.
In Christ, we have not just sort of
a vague representation, a kind of blurry, impressionistic
view of God.
We have God in all of his detail
made known to us.
Don't go looking anywhere else for him.
Again, I'll just cite Tom here for that.
Firstborn overall creation we've talked about a bit,
supremacy.
The emphasis on creation now.
Note again a bit of a kind of
a chiasm or inclusio with the all things.
In him all things were created.
All things have been created through him and
for him.
Wonderful assertion.
Christ was the one through whom all things
were created.
He is the one in whom, going down
to 17, all things hold together.
And he is the one toward whom all
things are tending.
Beginning, end, and everything in between.
Again, it's an attempt to assert the absolute
supremacy of Christ in the universe.
In a cosmological sense, he was the one
who initiated creation.
He is the one to whom all creation
is moving.
He is its goal.
And in the meantime, when I turn a
switch and my electrical device works, the reason
it works is because of Christ.
All things are being held up, supported, continued
in their course by Christ as this universe
with God's sovereign intention runs its way.
Things in heaven and on earth.
Note how this was brought in here.
Some people even think this might have been
a Pauline addition to the original hymn.
Sometimes we'll quote a hymn or a poem
and we'll sort of take some liberties with
it to make sort of an application, you
know.
We'll quote it, but then we'll add some
language to sort of apply to our context.
Some people think Paul's doing that.
I'm not so sure about that.
What is clear, of course, is that there
is emphasis here on the supremacy of Christ
over the spiritual powers.
Things in heaven and earth.
Visible, invisible.
Thrones, powers, rulers, authorities.
These are different words used in the first
century context for the spiritual beings that all
people in the first century world had a
pretty robust belief in.
Not only that they existed, but that they
had significant influence in the affairs of human
beings in the course of world history.
This was standard belief at that time.
And the emphasis Paul gives this here and
elsewhere in Colossians certainly suggests that one element
of the Colossian false teaching was a tendency
to give too much credit to these figures.
Again, perhaps to suggest, well, you know, Christ
is good in his way.
Yeah, go to church and worship him.
But, you know, just to cover all your
bases, you better keep up with the mystery
religions too to make sure that some of
these other spiritual beings don't get mad at
you.
You know, make sure you cover everybody.
Remember Paul in Athens in Acts 17 walking
around and seeing all the different inscriptions to
all the different gods, you know, just to
make sure you've got your bases covered.
So maybe the Colossian Christians were falling into
that tendency.
And so Paul asserts the supremacy of Christ
with relationship to the power.
Something we're going to want to talk about
in terms of its ultimate theological significance.
Clearly, the reference here in verse 20 is
to spiritual beings, both good and evil angels
in this context, I think here.
A whole spectrum of spiritual authorities and powers.
But an interesting question is to ask whether
in using this language, Paul and other New
Testament scholars have taken baggage from their culture
in terms of these powers lying behind many
of the institutions of our world.
Certainly this was the belief of the first
century.
Not just that these were sort of individual,
personal beings up there, but that people encountered
their influence in the institutions, in the culture
that they were dealing with every day.
A number of modern interpreters have therefore taken
this background and suggested that in the New
Testament when we read language about powers and
authorities, these are references not only to personal
spiritual beings, but also references to human institutions
that in a sense reflect the authority and
work of these spiritual beings.
Now, this has been taken in all kinds
of directions.
This is a very popular interpretation, for instance,
among liberation theologians who claim that on the
basis of this language you have oppressive institutions
of various kinds that Christians must respond to
and must seek to be liberated from.
And that a key ingredient, perhaps the key
ingredient of the gospel is to bring liberation
to people from these powers that enslave them.
Whether it be a tyrannical government, an unjust
economic system or whatever.
And again, this is where great caution is
needed because this kind of interpretation of course
can open the door to almost any sort
of subjective application you want.
But I think there might be something to
it, granted the first century view of the
powers.
And maybe a good illustration from our history
would be the institution of slavery.
Was this perhaps to some degree an institution,
an economic factor that the powers have used
to distort the image of God in human
beings, to bring grief into human relationships, to
bring evil in various ways into the world.
And perhaps was it not then the not
only option but the obligation of Christians to
resist such an institution, recognizing it for what
it was.
I think there's something to that argument and
leads us to ask the question as 21st
century Christians, are there structures and institutions in
our world that have become co-opted by
the powers and that require our resistance?
I think it's fair to say that particularly
in North America, Evangelical Christians have often been
pretty good at personal holiness.
But often we have not been very good
at institutional holiness.
We have sought to resist evil persons, but
we have never even asked the question whether,
as Christians, not just because of a political
belief we happen to have, but as Christians,
granted our world view and granted our understanding
of how this world is working and the
warfare that Russ was talking about last night,
granted all of that, is it our obligation
to resist institutions and structures that appear to
have been co-opted by the powers in
their rebellion against God?
We'll come back to that.
I think there again might be something to
that.
Our intermediate stanza again asserts obviously the importance
of Christ in creation, but then in 18a
we have a significant move.
Here is where Paul now kind of develops
what's going to come after this, Christ's supremacy
in the new creation.
He is the head of the body, the
church.
Christ's body, this great Pauline concept of the
church as Christ's body, of which he is
the head.
He is the beginning, talking about God's new
creation work now, the firstborn from among the
dead, again reflecting that common New Testament teaching
that Jesus was the first to rise from
the dead.
The first to experience resurrection in its theological
sense.
What about Lazarus, you ask?
He was not resurrected.
He was revivified.
Lazarus was brought back to life only to
die again.
Biblical resurrection is always resurrection to eternal life,
an entrance into a new state of being
that will never be reversed.
Christ is the first to have experienced that
resurrection, and of course as the New Testament
teaches us, those who belong to him and
ultimately all human beings will experience such a
resurrection when Christ comes back in glory.
He has the supremacy therefore in everything.
Note again how often we have that language
of all and every.
Eight times in our passage I've highlighted them,
all, every, all things.
It's just like a drumbeat that runs through
this passage that we shouldn't miss as we
go.
Now I think it is quite fair to
say that as we move toward the end
of 18 and into 19 and 20, we
find less clearly hymnic structure, leading some to
think that if Paul is quoting a hymn
here, that at the end of it he's
either elaborated the hymn a great deal or
maybe dropped it all together to add some
of his own ideas.
I think there's fragments of the hymn still
here as I will argue in a moment,
but Paul is I think elaborating a bit
more here himself.
Why is it that Christ has this position
of supremacy in the community of God, in
the new creation?
Because God was pleased to have all his
fullness dwell in him.
This concept of fullness might have, the concept
of fullness plus dwelling, might have allusion to
the temple.
My colleague Greg Beale would certainly want me
to say that.
He's just written a book on the temple
and tracing it through biblical theology, a great
exercise in biblical theology by the way, a
great model of biblical theology.
And poor Greg has had the temple on
his head now for years.
He's just full of this stuff.
You can't talk to him without it.
This is a true story.
He went out and created a garden in
his backyard in the image of the temple.
That's true.
Visit his house sometimes.
We'll show it to you.
The man is obsessed.
But he does have a very valid point
about this great tradition in which God taking
up his residence in his creation, of course,
takes the form of a literal temple.
But now, of course, in the new covenant
era, God resides in Christ and derivatively in
his people.
Christ is the temple.
We are the temple.
This is where the whole thing goes.
And allusion to that might be present in
the language of fullness and dwelling.
If you look at the way some of
that language is used in the Old Testament.
Now, we come in verse 20 perhaps to
the most controversial element in this hymn.
The universality of the hymn is obvious, isn't
it?
And that universality appears to spill over in
the last verse into theologically questionable territory.
In Christ, God is reconciling all things to
himself.
Now, everywhere else where the word reconcile and
reconciliation appears in the New Testament, it refers
to a saving relationship with God the Father.
This text, therefore, from ancient times, I think
Origen perhaps was one of the first to
argue the point, but it's been argued many
times since, has become immensely popular of late
for obvious reasons.
This verse is cited to prove salvific universalism,
that ultimately all things, all human beings, all
fallen angels will be reconciled to God in
the sense that all will come into a
loving, positive, saving relationship with him ultimately.
That God, it's argued, cannot allow any part
of his creation to be apart, in a
sense, from his true saved family of people.
And again, this is a very congenial teaching
to our pluralistic and tolerant age.
The verse has been used in all kinds
of ways.
This is not the place to develop a
case against universalism from Scripture.
There are troubling verses that we have to
deal with.
Romans 5, Romans 11-32, this text, several
others, which do appear at first sight perhaps
to talk about salvific universalism.
We recognize, I think most of us who
want to take Scripture seriously, however, that these
verses must be put in the broader context
of teaching about the reality of judgment, the
reality of hell as a place where some
people will live for eternity, which appears, and
I think clearly is, irreconcilable with salvific universalism.
In our own passage of Colossians, if you
just flip over a chapter, Paul says some
other things about these powers that are mentioned
here again in verse 20.
And what he says about them there seems
to be incompatible also with salvific universalism.
Because in chapter 2, verses 14 and 15,
verse 15 in particular, we read that Christ
has disarmed the powers and authorities.
He's made a public spectacle of them, triumphing
over them by the cross.
This is an image of victory, perhaps even
violent victory, if I may pick up the
violence language that we've heard last night.
That appears to be inconsistent with the ultimate
salvation of these powers.
So it has been, I think, quite appropriate
to suggest that Paul must mean something else
here.
And particularly if he's quoting from a hymn,
he may be using some of the language
here in a bit of an unPauline way.
Sometimes that happens when you quote another source.
That source might use a particular word in
a way that's a bit different, of course
related to the way you use the word.
I don't think we can restrict all things
unless we want to do that throughout the
passage.
We don't want to do that, I don't
think.
We don't want to say, well, yeah, Christ
is the one through whom all Christians were
created or something.
No, I think all things have to be
all things.
And it's not all persons even here.
It's all things.
It's a neuter expression.
It's everything.
I'll come back to that in a moment.
But I think a more profitable angle is
to look at this word reconcile.
And note, as many scholars have seen, that
this word can mean not simply bring into
positive, loving relationship with, but can mean what
F.F. Bruce calls pacify.
And I think that is suggested in our
text also by making peace, which I am
quite convinced is an allusion to the great
Old Testament theme that God, when he establishes
his righteousness in the last day, is going
to establish shalom for the entire universe.
He's going to establish peace, which does not
mean saving relationship for everything to him.
It means that God is going to reassert
his sovereignty.
All things will be brought under his control
again.
It means that the universe will be put
back to the state God intended it to
be in, that there will be a shalom
that will rule this universe.
That's what Paul is talking about here, I
think.
And the implications are significant.
I might just end here.
I'm going to take a few extra minutes,
though, because I got on a few minutes
late.
So justice is being served here.
And I guess it's my discussion time anyway
that I'm eating into, isn't it?
So if I were holding you up for
lunch, I wouldn't do that, of course.
But I know better than to do that.
But this idea that in Christ, God has
acted to bring the universe back into the
state he intends it to be in.
This happened in principle, of course, at the
cross.
The blood of the cross is what Paul
refers to here.
But it, of course, is going to be
enacted gradually and especially climatically at the end
of history.
It is a sweeping claim about what God
is doing that should expand our horizons a
bit.
Now, do not misunderstand me.
The need to bring the message of the
gospel to human beings such that by God's
grace they respond and enter into a saving
relationship with God through Jesus Christ is clearly
the primary task of God's people in this
age.
So hear that, please.
But what I would like to suggest is
that sometimes in our evangelical movement, we have
been too restrictive in understanding the job God
has given us.
Yes, we need to save the souls of
human beings.
But along with that, I would suggest in
line with what God himself has in principle
done in Christ and proposes to do finally,
we also are to be agents of change
in the universe at large.
We are to not only end the estrangement
between human beings and God, we are to
do what we can to end the estrangement
of human beings from one another.
To end the estrangement of human beings from
spiritual forces of darkness.
To end the estrangement of human beings from
the environment they live in.
All of this it seems to me is
contained in the mandate in this text to
be agents of reconciliation in line with God's
purpose of reconciliation.
It means that we have here a mandate
not only for evangelism, and again, primarily that
needs to be our task, which we dare
never lose sight of, but it's also a
mandate to be agents of change in the
social world.
To bring social justice to bear in our
world, recognizing our best efforts will always fall
short.
The scripture is clear, I think, that only
God, through a new act in Jesus Christ,
is going to establish final peace.
But that is not to say we should
not seek, as I think we must, to
accomplish what we can toward that goal in
social action.
I would suggest the same thing, maybe more
controversially to some, in terms of our obligations
to the environment we live in.
The world God has created is a world
that he is planning on renewing.
He cares for the earth, the material things
around us, the air, the water, the trees.
And we have an obligation as Christians to
be stewards of that which God has given
us and that which he plans one day
to restore to its pristine glory.
I like to sometimes shake people up by
asking them to find a verse in the
New Testament that tells them that they are
going to spend eternity in heaven.
As many of you know, there is no
such verse.
Heaven is the abode of God in the
New Testament, but never the destiny of human
beings.
The destiny of human beings is to live
in renewed, resurrected, material bodies on a material,
renewed heaven and earth.
As I was telling Fred and Jim yesterday,
I've already staked out my territory in the
front range of the Rocky Mountains.
I'm going to spend eternity.
I've put my order in already.
So obviously we're in danger here of loading
too much into a single verse.
Of taking a single verse and trying to
make it say far more than it does
say.
And I'm aware that that is a danger.
But I would suggest that this verse, when
read in light of other New Testament verses
and in light of many Old Testament passages
about shalom and peace and so forth, that
what we're talking about in terms of God's
purposes to bring all things back to where
he wants them to be, is indeed his
purpose that he will accomplish through Christ and
his return, but is a purpose, therefore, that
we should not simply say, oh, God's going
to do it in his day, we don't
need to bother any more than we say
we don't need to evangelize because God has
chosen those who will be his and they're
elect and so God's going to bring it
to pass.
No, we don't say that.
We understand that to be misunderstanding of the
dynamic of sovereignty and human responsibility.
We understand that what God himself is intending
and will do, as he has promised us,
are things that we are to accomplish ourselves
and be involved in, in his great plan
for history.
God doesn't need us, but he's chosen to
use us by his grace.
And we need to be used, again, not
only as agents of evangelism, but as agents
of social change, as agents of appropriate environmental
stewardship, as agents proclaiming and bringing liberation to
human beings from these evil spiritual forces and
institutions and organizations that Paul might be hinting
at here as well.