August 28, 2005

JESUS REVEALS THE FATHER

Colossians 1:15-20; 2:9

Text: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:9, NASB).

Introduction:

A former student shared the sad story of his father, a dedicated lay leader of an evangelical church, who in mid-life set out to read the Bible through for the first time. He was first surprised, then shocked, and finally outraged by the frequency and ferocity of divinely initiated and sanctioned violence in the Old Testament. About half-way through the book of Job, he shut his Bible never to open it again and has not set foot inside a church since.

That man’s name is Legion. True, not all who have had a similar experience leave the church or abandon the faith but many lose all disposition to read the Old Testament given the portrait it paints of a God who is not only creator, redeemer , and deliverer but a vengeful, despotic, and even genocidal deity.

In a wilderness of conflicting and sometimes violence concepts of God, where do we go to see what God is really like? Paul gives us an answer that though succinct is so profound we are still trying to wrap our minds around it: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:9, NASB). “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God” can be seen in all its radiant splendor “in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). As Philip Yancey rightly points out, “To see what God is like, simply look at Jesus.”

Let us lovingly turn this superlative diamond of divine revelation and marvel at some of the brilliant shafts of light that are refracted through it.

I. The Supremacy of Christ (Col. 1:18).

The equilibrium of the physical world is periodically interrupted by what physicist James Clerk Maxwell called Singular Points. A tiny seed-crystal dropped into a saturate solution will turn the whole mass into a similar crystalline form. A drop in temperature of one degree can cause the waters of a mighty ocean to freeze over. Splitting one atom may precipitate an explosive chain reaction of unimaginable force. Likewise, says Maxwell, in human affairs "there are unpredictable moments when a small force may produce, not a commensurate small result, but one of far greater magnitude, the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the whole world a-fighting."

Human history moves along lines of relative continuities and stabilities until a singular point emerges. After that, a sea-change in thinking and behavior occurs. It may be triggered by an event as seemingly insignificant as taming fire, fashioning a wheel, smelting iron, reducing language to writing, developing moveable type, or harnessing electricity. It may be focused in a person such as Abraham, Plato, Copernicus, Luther, Marx, or Einstein. When that event occurs or person emerges, no matter how unremarkable at the time, everything changes. Nothing will ever again be the same. In commenting on Maxwell's doctrine of singular points, Lewis Mumford asks: "What informed Roman observer as late as the second century A.D., could have believed that his great empire would be taken over, from top to bottom, by the followers of an obscure Galilean prophet, hardly known by name to the educated?"

The birth of Jesus was more than just one singular point among many. It was so uniquely singular that it has become the axial point of all human history. It signaled that moment when divinity intersected humanity in a way analogous to what physicists describe as the point of absolute singularity from which the universe emerged. This is the truth that John proclaims when he begins his gospel by linking these two points of singularity: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him" (John 1:1-4, emphasis added).

He who was present and active at the event-moment of the `big bang' and who directed all subsequent stages of creation, has become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). John goes even further and asserts that “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, has made him known” (1:18).

There was no one of antiquity venerated more highly by the Jews than Moses. Yet the author of Hebrews states unequivocally that there was a qualitative difference between Moses and Jesus: "Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses.” After acknowledging that “Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,” he goes on to say that “Christ is faithful as a son over God’s house” (Heb. 3:3-6). Jesus outranks not only Moses and Joshua but even the angels: "So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs" (Heb. 1:4; see 1:5-14; 3:1; 4:8-10; 5:4-6).

The Gospel writers’ conviction regarding the supremacy of the revelation of God in Christ is nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the transfiguration narrative. Appearing with Jesus on the mountain in full view of Peter, James, and John, were the two greatest men in Israel's religious history: Moses the primal revealer of God's law and Elijah the prototypical prophetic spokesman for God. Yet only Jesus "was transfigured before them." It was not to these two heroic figures of the Old Covenant that the heavenly voice was directed but to Jesus: "This is My beloved Son, listen to Him." After that, "[the disciples] looked around and saw no one with them anymore, except Jesus only " (Mark 9:2-8). This is one of the clearest texts indicating the conviction of the early church that there was a qualitative difference between all who had gone before and Jesus. Though they would continue to honor the patriarchs and prophets of old as authentic bearers of divine revelation, their primal allegiance would be to Jesus who is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:1-3).

II. The Lowliness of the Word Made Flesh (Col. 2:9).

No phrase of worship and adoration is more often upon Muslim’s lips than Ahkbar Allah , `God is Great!’ Christianity’s core confession of faith is quite different: `God is small.’ Every Christmas believers stand in awe and wonder over how the great God of the universe revealed Himself concretely as a weak and vulnerable baby in its mother’s arms. Where is God most evident for Christians? Not in whirling galaxies or exploding super-novas but in an infant whose name, given by prophetic revelation, is “`Immanuel’—which means, `God is with us’” (Matt. 1:23; Isa. 7:14).

In his soaring Christ Hymn, Paul wrote of Jesus,
Being in very nature God, [he]
did not consider equality with God
something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness (Phil. 2:6-7).

A little girl stopped her bed-time prayer in mid-sentence and said wistfully, “Mommy, I sure wish God had skin on His face.” The good news is that at a point of time in human history, the Sovereign Lord of the universe did put skin on his face, the skin of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the astonishing faith-claim that lies at the very heart of the Christian Gospel . When Philip asked, "Show us the Father," Jesus responded, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:8-9, NASB). The author of Hebrews adds, “Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature" (Heb. 1:3).

These and many other texts reveal an insight about Jesus everywhere taken for granted by New Testament authors: namely, Jesus was not one prophet of Israel among many. He was not another voice crying in the wilderness or rabbi offering a fresh reading of Moses. The new wine could not be contained in the old wineskins. The new piece of cloth could not be stitched onto the old (Mark 2:21-22). In His person, message and mission, Jesus represented nothing less than an exhilarating and yet disturbing new revelation. He interpreted His people’s Holy Scriptures in ways that that infuriated His Jewish contemporaries and yet so excited those who believed He was the Messiah of God that they set in motion the greatest and most transformative religious movement in world history.

For reasons I can no longer recall, I had a visceral fear of my maternal grandmother. When I would see her old Model A Ford kicking up dust in our country home driveway, I would run into the house screaming, “Grandma’s coming! Grandma’s coming!” and dive under my bed.

I inherited a similar fear of God. In my early teens I experienced a transformative personal encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ that was followed by an infusion of sanctifying “power from on high” (Acts 1:5). Shortly thereafter, however, I descended into the black hole of soul-darkness. Because of involuntary thoughts in which I cursed the Holy Spirit, I was convinced that I had committed the unpardonable sin. I was sure that I would “never be forgiven,” for I was “guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29). For weeks I was caught in the grip of paralyzing depression that only lifted when another involuntary thought streaked like a blazing meteor across the screen of my mind. It was a scriptural promise first given to Joshua but later transposed into the words of Jesus: “I will never leave you, nor forsake you” (Josh. 1:5; Heb. 13:5). I reasoned that since I had not left Jesus, He promised He would not leave me. Whatever was going on in my fevered brain did not constitute the unpardonable sin.

Slowly the depression lifted and I regained my emotional equilibrium. Yet it would be years before I could speak of the Holy Spirit without a cold chill down my spine, so great was my fear of blaspheming His holy name. The God of my youth was not my deliverer but the one from whom I needed to be delivered!

Kathleen Norris, best-selling Christian author, had a similar experience. Largely due to the influence of a grandmother whom she describes as personifying hard-edged fundamentalism and who told her scary stories about the end of the world, Kathleen developed a terrifying image of what she calls `the Monster God.’ In reoccurring dreams that persisted well into adulthood, she would see herself lying on “a beach unable to move as a giant whale swam toward me, meaning to rape and crush me. I suspected that this whale was my true image of God, a legacy of my childhood.”

The fear Kathleen felt in reference to God was by no means atypical. The deeply ingrained perception of the Old Testament presided over by an angry and judgmental God as opposed to the New Testament’s loving and merciful Jesus reflects the dichotomy between God and Jesus that exists in so many people’s minds. As one little girl put it after hearing a Sunday School lesson on the substitutionary death of Christ, “I don’t like God, but I love Jesus.”

III . An Astonishing Claim: God Is Like Christ (Col. 1:15, 19; 2:9)

It was at a pastor’s retreat early in my pastoral ministry that I made the most profound theological discovery of my life. I heard Dr. Reuben Welch, long-time professor and chaplain at Point Loma Nazarene University, say something that snapped my mind to full attention. It was a simple but profound statement: “God is like Christ.” He went on to say that “God is the kind of father who could have a son like Jesus.” For days afterwards I was in a state of euphoria. I seemed to float a few inches off the ground as I tried to wrap my mind around that inexhaustibly significant claim. Gradually, the great gulf between a severe God and a loving Christ was bridged in my thinking. Though transformations rarely occurs in an instant, that historic pastor’s retreat marked the beginning of a new awakening to the centrality of Christ in both my mental portrait of God and in the way I would read the Bible.

From that time on, the bedrock of my theology and ministry has been the group of texts that embody the most radical revelation in the history of religions: namely, that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God,” that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus],” that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,” and that Jesus is “the exact representation of [God’s] being” (Col. 1:15, 19; 2 Cor. 5:19; Heb. 1:3). The conviction that God is like Christ has become the bedrock of my theology and devotion ever since. No longer do I, like Adam, flee in fear from God’s approaching footsteps. Rather, I joyfully accept the invitation extended by the author of Hebrews: “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb. 4:16).

When Paul got his first glimpse of “the glory of God in the face of Christ“ (2 Cor. 4:6), the light of that revelation was so shattering that it knocked him off his horse. Though his physical eyes were temporarily blinded by the radiant splendor of that vision, his inner eyes exploded with light. Through the lens of Christ crucified and now raised up by God, he could see into the very heart of God in a way not possible in his old legalistic and self-righteous frame of mind. He saw, for the first time, that the awesome and gracious God of Israel, majestic in holiness and mighty in power, was now embodied in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth. “In Christ,” Paul exults, “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9).

Paul’s conversion was not so much of the heart as of the head. His heart had always been centered on doing the will of God, never more than when he was obsessively persecuting the earliest followers of Jesus. He confessed, “I was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth” (Acts 26:9). In the shattering light of his encounter with the living Christ, however, he saw that the One who had been discredited and crucified by men had been raised up by God, and thus vindicated as the true Messiah. Paul capsuled his new Confession of Faith in his letter to the Romans: “[Jesus] was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead” (1:4). Now that Paul looked at God through the prism of the Christ-event, he saw that the great artesian well from which all of God’s attributes flow is the “love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19). “Because of his great love for us,” he exults, “God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (Eph. 2:4-5).

In light of his new understanding of God, implicit in the Old Testament but now made explicit in Jesus, Paul exults, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). For Paul there was no news greater than the “good news” that God is like Christ.

No longer would Christians define God as the "Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," as important as they were in salvation history, but as the "God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort" (2 Cor. 1:3). While the New Testament never says in so many words that Jesus is `godly,' it bears glad witness in many places and varied ways that God is `Christly.' In his Nazarene Theological Seminary inaugural address, Wesleyan theologian Thomas A. Noble rightly suggested that the starting point in forming a truly Christian understanding of the Bible is not what it teaches about God in general but what Jesus reveals about God in particular. “Theology is . . . only truly theocentric if it is Christocentric . It is not . . . theism with Christology tacked on. There is no knowledge of God except `through the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the Image of God,’ no knowledge of the Father except through the Son, so that our theology then must be Christonormative .”

What Jesus introduced was an entirely new way of looking at God. God does not hate sinners or despise foreigners, much less does He desire their annihilation. He loves them with boundless and unconditional self-giving love. He bestows his gracious "sun" of life and “rain" of favor upon the just and the unjust, upon those who love him and those who hate him (Matt. 5:45-46). His love is "perfect" (1John 4:18): that is, it is all-encompassing, whole, complete, life-giving, life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and life-affirming for all humankind. Reflecting the creative and redemptive heart of God, Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10).

Conclusion:

Born into a wealthy high-caste priestly Hindu family, Krister Sairsingh as a boy was fascinated with people who claimed to be holy. His uncle was such a man. Shortly after his wife conceived their only child, he took a vow of silence and celibacy. Through meditation and the practice of yoga, he entered a trancelike state. Krister and his cousin Rabi would gaze into his face looking for some response, a word or even a smile. But not once did he smile or speak. He stared straight ahead as if they were not there. He died without Rabi ever having heard his father’s voice.

Though raised with a tolerant acceptance of all religions, believing that they all represented valid if imperfect paths to spirituality, his friends and family took it for granted that only Hinduism, with its ancient disciplines of yoga and bhakti, opened up the way to spiritual perfection and divine self-realization. Only the great gurus and swamis of the Hindu tradition attained that perfect God-consciousness which is the true end of religion.

Yet, there was an Achilles heel in his religion: the more earnestly he sought for holiness and divine self-realization, the more unattainable it seemed. Like Paul, in his “inner being,” he delighted in the pursuit of holiness. Yet he constantly confronted “another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind.” Through a series of events that underscored his helplessness to attain holiness through his ancestral religion, he began to cry out, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:22-24).
Krister had a bizarre experience towards the end of his final year of high school. He was sitting on his bed preparing for final examinations when he felt a slap on his face. Some invisible force was strangling him. Since he could not speak, he began to chant sacred Hindu mantras in his mind, but that brought no relief. He believed he had offended Shiva, the great god of life and death, when he danced before his image that morning. Now Shiva was trying to kill him. Somehow, after a fearful struggle, he broke free but the experience terrified him. He lived in dread of another attack, fearful of dying.

The next morning he shared what happened to him with an Indian classmate, a former Hindu who had become a Christian. His friend told him that there was a direct link between the gods he worshiped and the crushing oppression he had felt. The worship of idols made him vulnerable to demonic attack. He suggested that Krister consider Jesus. That sounded harmless enough, since Hinduism was tolerant if condescending toward other religions.

Krister began to read the Gospel accounts of Jesus to learn more about Him. Two things struck him immediately about Jesus: His claims that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18)—thus power over Shiva and all his Hindu gods and that he had the power to forgive sins (Mk 2:1-11). The law of Karma dictated that sins committed in this life would have to be paid for in some future life, thus ruling out the possibility of forgiveness. The prospect of reincarnation filled him with dread.

One night, after reading the account of Jesus’ death and resurrection in John’s Gospel , Krister asked Jesus to forgive his sins, set him free from the bondage of karma and demonic oppression, and become the Lord of his life. He felt that something profound had occurred but wasn’t sure what it was. He found out the next morning when he walked into the puja room. The images of the gods on the altar appeared empty and lifeless and no longer held any attraction to him.

Krister closed the door to the puja room. No longer was he terrorized by its gods. He now belonged to Christ. From then on, his devotion and affections would be set upon Him . He had a deep assurance that “the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor 5:17b).