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