‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
83rd teaching
9.1.2014
“In the Beginning”
Review:
So we recently closed up a
subsection of Christology known as the Nature of Christ, last time with a study
entitled “to Walk as He Walked”, taking a look at Christ’s Humanity as an
example of how to live. That study concluded the section: the Nature of Christ.
Since we finished another sub-section of Christology, let’s take a step back
for a moment and see where we’re at.
If you remember, we began Christology by asking
the question “Who is Jesus Christ?” That first section served as our
introduction to Christology. We looked at things such as how Christology
developed as a branch of theology through the centuries, whether Jesus was a
Liar, Lunatic, Legend or actually Lord, and considered the historicity of
Christ. That concluded that first section “Who is Jesus Christ?”
Secondly, we began to study His nature. Now the
section “the Nature of Christ” had two parts, since Jesus Himself has two
natures: His complete divine nature and His complete human nature. We began
first with “Christology from Above”, approaching the study of His natures by
first addressing His Deity. We had three sessions on that subject: two
doctrinal and one applicational. After that, we turned to “Christology from
Below”, a study of His humanity—with two doctrinal sections and one
applicational. We completed it last time with the study “to Walk as He Walked”.
Our goal was to take this tremendous idea, this great theological truth, this
doctrine of Christ’s humanity coupled with His deity and apply it to our daily
lives. We saw that Christ is not only a moral exemplar, but since He is also
the greatest and only perfect human to have ever lived, His humanity gives us a
standard to live out the human experience by: He is the ultimate Super-man, the
human exemplar. What we did then was consider seven aspects of His humanity
which provide us with some example to follow, seven parts of Christ’s humanness
that provide examples for us. Can anyone remember any of those seven aspects of
His humanity?
(A: body, mind, limitations, temptations, will,
language and death)
End
of Review
Now
since we’ve finished a section, logically we’re beginning a new section
tonight. Having asked first who this
Jesus is, and having discovered secondly
the truths of His two natures, that He is the God-Man, we enter into a third section entitled “the Life of
Christ”.
That phrase maybe conjured up in your
mind images of a middle-eastern desert and an old, dusty, Aladdin-looking city
you can guess as Jerusalem. You maybe thought of a man in robes talking to
other men in robes, the sermons and parables of Christ, the miracles of the
healing the blind, the mute and the possessed during His ministry, or perhaps
you thought of Jesus’ incarnation, there as a baby in that manger, or of Him as
adult sitting with the children or holding a lamb like the Good Shepherd, or
maybe you thought of His betrayal, trial, crucifixion, or resurrection. But the
truth is that “the Life of Christ” goes further back than each of those things.
The events that mark the life of
Christ in our minds are events that He lived out and accomplished here on earth
after His incarnation, but being born
to the virgin in Bethlehem is not the beginning of Christ’s story. It’s almost
as if it was merely a parenthesis, a footnote, albeit one of utmost importance,
in an unending story unlike any other. 33 years is incomparably short in the
face of infinity. For a mere 33 years was all that Jesus of Nazareth lived out
on this earth in the 1st century before His crucifixion,
resurrection and ascension into heaven, and 33 years is practically nothing in
light of the eternal Son of God’s never-ending existence. What the Son is doing
right now, today, and what He did before the incarnation are still real things,
real events, real works, and His life spanned on well before His birth to the
virgin and it spans on well after His resurrection, from eternity-past on forever
into eternity-future. The psalmist wrote in Psalm 90:2, “Even from
everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”
So, necessarily, if we’re to consider
the Life of Christ, we must begin before the cross, before the first of His
miracles or sermons, before His childhood or incarnation and virgin-birth. We
must go back further than the manger, further than the Old Testament saints,
further than the prophets and their prophecies of the coming Messiah, further
than Israel, further than Moses, than Abraham, than Adam, further than that
even to a time before anyone knew He was coming as the Messiah, for we go
backward in time to when there was no one at all, no one even to count time,
except for God Himself.
Our study of the Life of Christ begins
before the world began, before time began, before people began. Therefore, our study tonight is entitled: “In the
Beginning”. When you begin something, it’s always best to start at the
beginning, and we’re doing just that: going back to the very first beginning of
all beginnings at the beginning of the universe, time, space and history.
This section which we call “the Life
of Christ” begins with what’s known as the Pre-incarnate State. Those are
keywords for this new section: the Pre-incarnate State, what the existence of
the Son of God was like before He was
born to the virgin and before He took
on humanity.
Now immediately we’re presented with
an incredible problem. Before we get anything further, we’ve got to address it.
We have to admit from the beginning that what we’re considering tonight is an
inhuman mystery, a profound existence that we can hardly understand. You may
think the Trinity is incomprehensible. You may think that the hypostatic union
of two natures in one Person is confusingly profound. And well they are, but
can our finite minds even fathom infinity before creation, eternity? Try to
think of it, and you’re probably still thinking in the wrong terms. For you
might think of infinity as the huge empty expanse of the universe, but you’re
still thinking of “space”. But the creation of the universe was ex nihilo, out of nothing, if you
remember, and that means there was no space before God made it. No time. No
matter. No space. Nothing but infinite eternity in God’s everlasting changeless
existence. Can we even begin to fathom that?
Even the span of God’s existence is
incomprehensible. We can say that God has lived since the eternal past, without
beginning, from everlasting to everlasting as Scripture says, but dare we even
imagine such a thing? Can we? Our finite minds are woefully inadequate tools in
trying to grasp the nature of the infinite, not to mention a transcendent Life
that spans the infinite, the Mind that thought from eternity, the Heart that loved
from eternity, the Fellowship that existed in perfect harmony.
Like the Holy Trinity and the
Incarnation and the Hypostatic Union, the Pre-incarnate State of Christ, His
pre-existence before creation, is just something that we leave to God, and
stand humbled before, which we believe because the Bible teaches it, and we are
free to try to wrestle with it, grapple with it philosophically, but we shall
never fully understand it with the minds we have today. I don’t suggest to you
that at the end of this session you shall understand what God’s life was like,
or what He was doing, or even how anyone can do anything in a state of perfect,
changeless infinite existence, but that’s simply what it was like. And this
thing among many, many, many other things is what makes Him God and what ought
to fill our minds with the desire to worship.
And it doesn’t help that the Bible
itself never really clearly illustrates in detail what the pre-incarnate state
of the Son of God was like. The purposes of the Bible are to communicate the
divine plan of redemption, reveal the Son of God and salvation to mankind and
instruct believers on how to follow Him. The Bible is not a textbook on the
nature of metaphysics, on infinity, on philosophy, on what existence was like
before the universe existed. There are a handful of passages on the
pre-incarnate state of Christ, and these alone shall have to suffice. I don’t
think God would ever fault us for a little conjecture and imagination, but we
can’t be totally sure about a great many things about the existence of God
before the existence of anything else.
Note only that this is something which
makes Jesus Christ stand above and apart from all the gods that man has
invented through history. Read the Greek writings, read the Roman’s, read
Native American folktales and Japanese and Chinese legends, read the literature
on the Norse deities and the Egyptian pantheons and you’ll find that in each
case, the gods and goddesses arise out of the universe, out of matter, or they
are equated with matter and creation itself. They either begin out of something
else that came before them, or they assume to be something created which has
simply always been around. For example, the Greeks believed that Chaos, a big
empty void, was the first thing here and that it always existed, and that out
of it the gods came. They believed, then, that an empty universe, space, itself
was eternal.
Not so with Jehovah. The Godhead
existed from eternity past and there was nothing before Him. He has no beginning.
Perhaps the simple fact that you don’t really see anything like this truth in
pagan religions is because it is simply too wild of a truth to be invented. Who
could imagine someone that has no beginning? Truth is stranger than fiction.
And the truth of God’s infinite existence is outstandingly foreign to our
finite minds.
So, that being said—it’s almost as if
to say there’s nothing we could possibly learn tonight, but there is—let’s jump
in to the beginning of the Life of Christ, with the subject of the
Pre-incarnate State, by turning to the classic passage on the concept: John 1.
Many of you are familiar with this
passage, especially those of you who were with us when we picked it apart in
groups to search for scriptural proofs for the deity of Christ, if you
remember. However, John chapter 1 is an invaluable source of insight into the
realms of infinity, what it was like before the universe began. Besides that,
John 1 is foundational for Christology, the Life of Christ, the Incarnation,
and many other Christian doctrines. We should know it like the proverbial backs
of our hands.
But wait a minute, let’s try to read
it with fresh eyes. We can easily skim over what’s being said here without
taking in the audacity and the unparalleled scope of these statements, just
because we’ve heard them before. We read that the Word was with God and the
Word was God and we immediately say to ourselves “Well, it’s Jesus Christ of
course”. But we only say that because we’ve read on before. We got to the end
of the book, and we’re cheating John’s prologue out of the shock of its opening
statements.
Listen, what John writes down here is
something the world never saw before. It is different even from the other
gospels, as you probably know. Matthew opens with Jesus’ family tree, His human
beginnings. Mark opens with Jesus’ baptism, the beginning of His earthly
ministry. And Luke opens with the announcement of John the Baptist’s birth, the
beginning of the life of the herald of Christ. But John goes further back than
any of Jesus’ human beginnings. He goes back to the beginning. It’s been said
that Matthew, Mark and Luke start with history, but John starts with mystery.
And what he writes down is something
the world could hardly even anticipate. It’s one thing to trace back Jesus of
Nazareth’s genealogy, or the start of His ministry, or the birth of the one who
would announce Him to the world. It’s entirely something else to show Him to
predate all other life. As we shall see, even John’s choice of words probably
sent shivers through the current minds in philosophy and religion. This, John’s
prologue, is just that different from anything else.
Read John 1:1-18.
1:1,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Okay, so we’ve got an incredibly
familiar passage here. But let’s see what’s actually happening in this opening
verse and what John is saying.
He’s given us three statements:
1. In the beginning was the Word.
The words en arche, “in the beginning”, means the first starting point, the
first moment in a series of moments, really the first moment in time. His
Jewish readings would undoubtedly say “alright, this sounds like something we
know all about”, since it really perfectly echoes the first verse of Genesis, and the Hebrew word bereshith, “In the beginning”, i.e. the
first place and time. The Hebrews would have read John’s gospel and thought
“right on”, since it takes you right back to Genesis 1:1.
But notice what’s being said here,
don’t miss it, that even in the first moment we read that the Word was already
there. Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning… God.” Hebrew theology
held that God predated the universe, creating it, but existing before it, from
eternity everlasting. Now, John takes that same phrase “in the beginning” and
says “the Word”.
That sort of throws a wrench into the
whole thing. The Jews were devoutly monotheistic in the 1st century.
And rightfully so, those of you who are with us on Sundays at Calvary Chapel
know that a large part of Israel and Judah’s downfalls as nations was because
of the rampant, unchecked idolatry they had allowed to saturate their lands.
God judged them, allowed them to be conquered by invading forces and they were
carried away to Assyria and Babylon as punishment. In a sense, the drastic cure
for their idolatry was to exile them from the lands they had corrupted and take
them into lands that were so infested with false gods that they would yearn for
the one true God again. And when they came back from exile in Babylon, the Jews
never again so ran to worship idols. They had had enough of idols and false
gods.
But since they so clung to there being
only one God now, John’s words may have thrown them for a loop. They knew that
in the beginning was God, but now in the beginning was this thing John calls
the Word, too? So there was more than just God before creation? I mean, what is
the Word anyways?
Again, don’t immediately jump to the
conclusion that the Word is Jesus just because you’ve read the book. Follow the
thoughts step by step until you get there, as if you’re reading this for the
first time.
In his first of three statements here
in v.1, John said “in the beginning
was the Word” which perked up the interest of the Jews since it borrowed
phrasing right out of Genesis. But John’s use of the word “Word” would have
also pricked up the ears of any Greek readers, too. He’s not only got the
Hebrew reader’s attention, but now he has the attention of the Greek thinkers
and philosophers. What an opening sentence!
The word that John uses for “Word” is
of course Logos. Next to Agape, the Greek word Logos might be one of the most
well-known Greek words in modern Christian culture. But what does it mean?
Turns out, this is a hot word to use
in the 1st century. This is a popular word. This is a word that the
great thinkers puzzled about, that the Greeks would muse about and discuss. The
Greeks were geniuses and they loved them some philosophy. So immediately, when
John uses it, the Greeks, like the Jews, would have said “right on, we know
what you’re talking about”. It’s genius on John’s part, too, really. John uses
phraseology from Genesis to grab the Jewish attention, and then in the same
sentence he borrows Greek terminology to grab the pagan attention as well.
By the time John’s gospel hit the
scene, the Greeks had already had a long philosophical history with the word Logos, beginning with Heraclitus of
Ephesus. He is depicted as “the weeping philosopher”, crying over the world. This
guy was born before Socrates around the year 535 BC, many years before Christ
was born and Christianity shook the world. Apparently, Plato would later
summarize the teachings of Heraclitus in the famous phrase “no man ever steps
in the same river twice”. He believed in an ever-changing universe, but he was
the first to mention Logos as a
technical term, something which the philosophers after him would interpret and
reinterpret.
Some philosophers, with Aristotle,
used the term Logos to mean a
“reasoned discourse”, or a rational speech, communication in the ordinary
sense. But the Greeks already had the word lexis
to mean “word”, so Logos meant
something more than just ordinary words. The stoic philosophers would take the
term Logos to mean the divine
principle in the universe that gives it order and reason and life.
Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium took
the Logos to mean the active reason
or rationality pervading the universe and giving it life. He thought of it as
material and used it in the sense of our modern idea of “Nature” or what we
sometimes call “Mother Nature”.
A Jewish philosopher living during the
1st century would get the furthest: Philo of Alexandria even took
the Logos to mean the bond of
everything, holding all things together in the universe. He even called the Logos the first-born of God.
Thus when John throws down his
prologue, the Greeks had already thought through this concept of a divine
organizing principle in the universe, and Philo of Alexandria had already
equated the Logos with the divine.
Now John nails all these ideas down and presents them not as speculation but as
revealed fact. The thing that the philosophers had groped for in the dark for
centuries turns out to be very near the actual truth. This Logos was indeed there in the beginning, a phrase the Jews would
have recognized, and a technical term the Greeks would have recognized.
But hang on! The Jews would have said
to John “But there was only God in the beginning”. And the Greeks would have
said to John “We’ve heard this before, what else have you got?”
John
answers both groups in his next two statements. So first he said “In the
beginning was the Word”. Next, John’s words surpass the Jewish theology and the
Greek philosophy of His day.
2. And the Word was with God
Note that this second statement speaks
of distinctiveness. John says that the Logos
was with God, distinct, something that could be pointed out as separate from
God. So far, the Word could still be just a principle or a kind of force in the
universe, like the Greeks believed.
But with John’s third statement:
3. And the Word was God
John completes the thought. So we’re
told three things here: the eternity of the Word, “In the beginning” the Word
was already there; the community of the Word, it was “with God”; and the deity
of the Word, “the Word was God”.
So now we’ve gone beyond the Greek
philosophers. The furthest that any of them had gotten was describing the Logos in terms of organizing the
universe, creating the universe, giving it life and reason and rhyme, a
principle within the universe. John takes that thought and surpasses it. The Logos is God, the one who first created
the universe, organized it, gave it life and reason and rhyme.
And John goes beyond the Jewish
theology of creation, too. He says that the Word was with God, separate and
distinct from God, but at the same time, this Logos and Theos are one
and the same. One flows from the other.
No doubt, God touched the minds of
many Jews who read John’s words for the first time, and suddenly it clicked. In
the Genesis creation account, they
had read that God spoke in order to create the universe. He spoke words, there was the Logos right there the whole time, right
in front of their faces. But it was not until John’s prologue that it suddenly
became clear.
v.2,
“He was in the beginning with God.”
So far, John has pointed out the
eternity of the Logos, the community
of the Logos as being with God, and the deity of the Logos as being God. He’s told us three
things about the Logos, now here’s a
fourth. John uses the word He for the
first time in reference to the Logos.
He does not equate the Logos with a
force or energy or rational principle, something like mathematics or the laws
of nature or “Mother Nature”. He calls the Logos
a He.
That speaks of personality. See how this lays down such a foundation for Christian
doctrine? You’ve got the first echoes of the Trinity here. So the Logos was eternal, the Logos communed with God and the Logos was God, and the Logos is not an it, but a He, there with
God as God in the beginning. Wrap your mind around that.
Note that God did not begin when the
world began, nor does it tell us that God Himself had a beginning and when that
might have been. The Bible makes it clear that God is timeless and eternal,
everlasting, without beginning or end. And here, we are merely told that at the
beginning of all things, the Logos
was already there existing before all the beginnings began.
What was that existence like? Not much
is said. We’re told that the Word was with God and was God. So that existence
was a kind of perfect unity, perfect fellowship. This verse identifies two
persons, “He was in the beginning with
God”, and we know from other Scriptures that there were three persons in
that timeless existence: Father, Son and Spirit.
Genesis
1:1,2 and 3, “In the beginning God
created… and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters… then
God said, ‘Let there be light’…” Already in Genesis you’ve got God the
eternal father, the Holy Spirit of God hovering, and then God speaking: the Logos, the living Word.
Remember also that God said in Genesis 1:26, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…”
Let me ask you, is God schizophrenic?
Does he have a bad case of multiple personalities? Or are there legitimately
three Persons existing in perfect unity in One essence in God? Proof texts for
the Trinity right there in Genesis and right here in John.
But listen, that allows for true love
to have existed from eternity on. Only of the Christian God can it truly be
said that He is love, because the Persons of the Trinity could love each other
and exist in perfect fellowship and harmony, the Father loving the Son in the
Spirit, since the infinite past. God could love before there was anything to
love. God could love before He made any creatures at all, since He could love
each of the Persons within the Trinity.
Can Allah be true love? Can it be said
that Allah is love? How about the Jewish concept of the single Person of
Yahweh? No, they can’t be true love, because before they created any creatures,
for the infinite-past, who could they love? Allah could only love himself. The
Jewish idea of the single-Person God could only love himself. That’s not true
love. That’s narcissism. But the Christian truth holds that love existed in
perfect, uninterrupted communion and community for infinity before the world
was made. Therefore, only the Christian three-fold God is love.
Now it says here in John’s prologue that
the word was with God. The Greek word
used for with is the word pros, and if you look it up, you’ll find
that in addition to meaning just with,
it also means towards. The word pros indicates an “extension toward a
goal, with implied interaction”. A word-study I read said the word pros naturally suggests the cycle of
initiation and response. Again, a
community existed before the universe in the form of the Persons of the
Godhead.
That may be the closest thing to
understanding what God’s eternal existence was like before creation. God was with
God. The Father was with the Son. Together, they had an infinite purpose to
create and love creatures as an overflow of their own love, a purpose outside
of time to create within time.
That’s the sense of v.3, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that
was made.”
What a peculiar passage? Who talks
like that? John phrases the same idea first in a positive sense and then in a
negative sense: “All things were made through Him” positive, and then to
reinforce the statement and eliminate any loopholes, he says “without Him
nothing was made that was made”.
In other words, there is no thing
outside of God that the Logos did not
create. Again, harkening back to Genesis, God spoke to create everything. The Logos is the creative agent of God, the
one who did the actual creating.
Proverbs
8:22, the personification of Wisdom is speaking: “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of
old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there
was ever an earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there
were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled,
before the hills, I was brought forth; while as yet He had not made the earth
or the fields, or the primal dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I
was there, when He drew a circle on the face of the deep, when He established
the clouds above, when He strengthened the fountains of the deep, when He
assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters would not transgress His
command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside
Him, as a master craftsman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always
before Him, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons
of men.”
In the past, we talked about how this
personification of Wisdom in proverbs is really a picture of Jesus Christ, here
in terms of the Logos, the creative
agent, the divine principle as the Greeks would say. And here in Proverbs in an
insight into the Pre-incarnate Life of Christ: He was daily the Father’s
delight, rejoicing always before Him. The Father and the Son existed eternally
in perfect happiness.
But the thing that threw a wrench into
both the Jewish mindset and the Greek philosophy is down in John 1:14. At this point, maybe you
could get some of the Hebrews to agree with you, John. They could perhaps see
the parallels between John’s prologue and the first chapter of Genesis. They
could agree with John on this Logos
being the creative agent, the Word of God. And even the Greeks could probably
agree with you too. Many of them never got so far as equating with the Logos with a person, but hey, that’s not
too outlandish.
The real heart-attack happens in v.14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” The Jews could say
“you had me, but that’s going too far to say that God became flesh”? And the
Greeks could say “I get you so far, but are you saying that the Logos became a
man”? That’s a lot to swallow, and don’t miss it yourself.
And John says “we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father…”
John is saying he has seen the glory of God. Why use the term Logos? It was a hot-word at the time, we
know that. But it’s incredibly appropriate to describe Jesus Christ. For how
can we know what a person intends and what a person feels and thinks unless
they speak? When someone speaks to you, you get to know them far more than if
they just remained silent. When someone speaks, you get to understand their
background, their culture, their education, their upbringing, their intentions
and their purposes. But if you met someone for the first time and they never
said a word to you, what could you possibly know about them other than what
they look like.
So then, the Logos became flesh and the Man known as Jesus Christ. Jesus would
later say “He that has seen Me has seen
the Father”. Hebrews 1 says that
God has spoken to us in these last days in His Son. Jesus is the Word, the One
that reveals what God is like. Jesus coming to earth is exactly as if God spoke
to you and I telling us what He is like, what He feels and thinks, and what He
cares about and cares to do. Jesus as the revealer of the Father is clear from
Him being called the Logos, the Word.
But John is saying “This infinite and
eternal Logos, we saw him. I saw
him.” That’s far more than just saying “we’ve found the Messiah”. He was saying
he met a man who he believed was the original, divine agent of creation in
human flesh.
John equates the most-transcendent of
thoughts: God, pre-existing and pre-dating all other life-forms, the most
foreign and mysterious and astounding life-form of them all, infinite mind and
love and life, and says that He became just like you and I: He came into the
world hungry and naked, able to experience pain and weariness, with a human
body of real flesh. The first Life of all came down and became just like you
and I? Don’t lose your wonder over such a shocking statement. As I said earlier
there is nothing like this anywhere else.
It’s an unspeakable crime on our part
that we can sit through a sermon or read a passage on the infinite span of
God’s life, or of an innocent Man being brutally tortured and killed, and then
rising from the dead, and not even bat an eye simply because we’ve heard it all
before. The great enemy of wonder is tradition. Don’t let repetition
ruin this awesome mystery for you. The transcendent divine Logos became flesh just like you and me!
But as John Lennox said “I can make it
worse for you.” Because oh it’s true that even the Greeks had some concepts of
Zeus or Apollo coming down in the shape of men, in Zeus’ case mostly to woo
women. But even more shocking than the transcendent God becoming flesh is the
whole reason why He did it. The Logos didn’t become incarnated flesh and
live among us simply to check out the babes. But think, that’s the furthest that pagan religion had gotten in grasping with
an idea of an incarnated god?
With intense irony John the apostle writes
“He was in the world, and the world was
made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His
own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right
to become children of God, to those who believe in His name…”
Why did the Logos take on flesh? Why did He go to the crucifixion willingly?
Why was He born to die? “Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them
second birth!” He was made flesh so that He might make us children of God,
redeem us, save us from our sins. The eternal Heart beat so full of infinite
love that the Logos of God took on
flesh so that He might die to save us from eternal separation from Him, to
satisfy His own wrath against us. Of all the nearly incomprehensible statements
we’ve confronted tonight, this is one of the most mind-boggling: how and why
the perfect Logos should interrupt
the divine happiness and fellowship to take on flesh and die for creatures who
spite Him and deny Him and show themselves to be rebels against Him at every
turn. Of all the mysteries of John’s prologue, the depth of God’s love may be
the deepest.
So in closing, note several things.
Note the facts of John’s prologue. He laid out five facts in the first three
verses: the eternity of the Logos,
the community of the Logos, the deity
of Logos, the personality of the Logos, and the creativity of the Logos. Before He was ever called Jesus
Christ, He was the Word existing before the beginning, experiencing perfect
love and fellowship in the Trinity with God, existing as God Himself, as a unique
and distinct Person and He was the creative agent during creation.
What was the Pre-incarnate State like
before the creation? It was perfect joy, happiness and fellowship. Later on, in
John 17, the apostle records the
words of Jesus’ prayer to the Father, in which for a brief instant He mentions
His own pre-incarnate state: “And now, O
Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You
before the world was.”
What the Bible says is that matter
isn’t primary, the universe isn’t primary, and humanity isn’t primary.
Aristotle believed that the world existed from eternity, but Aristotle and the
Greek philosophers have been dead with many of their disproven philosophies for
many centuries now. Like we discussed in our last study, the German philosopher
Nietzsche apparently thought that humanity would just go on forever, getting
better and better.
And though you’re young and full of
life, you might think that you will simply go on forever yourself, until a
moment of lucid rationality reminds you that someday you yourself will go the
way of your fathers, and join the dead philosophers and become history just the
same.
Each of these things were created: the
world, the universe, our race and ourselves. But the things that are infinite
are God, joy, happiness, community, fellowship, purpose and meaning. The Logos was primary, that is meaning,
purpose and communication. In a sense, these are the most important things in
life, the things which are eternal. This world is passing away. All the matter
and space before us now will be destroyed to pave the way for a new creation.
Only the fellowship, the purpose and the meaning in this life now will
translate into the next. You can’t take anything else with you. As C.T. Studd said:
“Only one life, ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
So then, there was meaning in the Logos before the worlds. Let me ask you:
what is the meaning not of life, but of your
life?
Consider that humanity has always had
a love of story-telling. No matter how far back into human history you go, it
seems as if human cultures have always revolved around stories. I heard in a
podcast a while back that some anthropologists are even suggesting that
storytelling begins not in childhood but in earliest infancy, when a baby
learns about cause and effect, the basis of any narrative: “I cry and I get
fed” or “I cry and I get my diaper changed”. Babies learn that their actions
can produce a desired effect, and that may be one of the earliest things any
human being can learn, and it is the essence of what makes up a story: this
happens then this happens until there’s a conclusion.
Now consider how many stories there
are that contain some concept of “destiny”. Whether it’s the cliché of “the
chosen one” or the hero or heroine “fulfilling their destiny”, from Star Wars
to Lord of the Rings, stories are full of this concept of “destiny”. What I want
to ask is why? Why tell so many
stories that are about destiny?
I think it’s because we all want our
lives to mean something. Everyone does. In the face of an indifferent and even
hostile universe, in the face of the steady march of time that brings our own
deaths ever closer, in the face of the dread obscurity of being forgotten in
history, we as human beings fundamentally think in terms of our lives meaning
something. That translates into our stories. We admire the hero who saves the
world. They did something. Their lives are meaningful.
But what about ours? What does your
life mean? What will it mean when all is said and done? Will you have saved the
world? Probably not. Will you have saved a very small part of it, will you have
gone on into the next life, into your reward, holding the hand of someone else
and leading them along with you? Could be, and I hope so.
We’ve been placed here each of us with
our own personal “destiny”, and the time has come to quit mucking about the
power-converters of Tatooine and screwin’ around in the pubs of Hobbiton, and
get on with the story. There’s an empire to be overthrown. There’s a ring to be
cast back into the fire.
God has put you here in this specific
time in history and in this specific place in the world as “the chosen one” for
whatever task is yours. Should you fail to undertake that task, nobody will
ever be able to do it, not exactly like God, the Author of Life, had planned
for you to do it.
Imagine if there were more saints who
did not seek out their destinies and fulfill them. Imagine is the Bible was
full of such people who lived carefree of what God would have them accomplish.
Where would be believing Abraham, who became the father of God’s people? Where
would be Moses the deliverer, who conquered his courage and demanded that the pharaoh
let God’s people go? Where would be the warrior Joshua, who in the face of
overwhelming odds marched into the promised land and took it from the heathen
hordes? Where would be the prophet Samuel, who even as I child replied to the
voice of God saying “Here I am”? Where would be the shepherd David, who went
from a humble beginning to become the greatest king of Israel? Where would be
wise Solomon, who so enriched his kingdom that silver became as common as
stones in Jerusalem? Where would be all the prophets of the Lord, who went
boldly before the rebellious masses and proclaimed the message of repentance?
Where would be the disciples, the apostles, Peter and John and Barnabas and
Paul, a mere handful, a rag-tag group of uneducated and ineloquent fisherman,
tax-collectors and nobodies who surrendered to the Spirit of God and changed
the world in their time?
What task you have from God, that task
is yours. And whether that’s to affect the culture around you, to lead your
friends or family to the Lord, to confront the evil and heresy of modern
America, to enter the mission field abroad, to work and create great things
that glorify our Creator, to be the believer, the deliverer, the warrior, the
shepherd, the prophet or the apostle, I don’t know… that’s up to you to search
it out. Like the hero in any story, you’ve got to find that out for yourself,
for the Christian it’s by seeking God. That’s no passive thing. Are you praying
about it? Are you looking into the Word of God and allowing Him to speak into
your life?
Realize, getting a job, getting a car,
getting married, buying a house… those are good and decent things. But that’s
not your destiny. That’s not the end of your story. It may be hardly even a few
chapters in. Guys, I’ve got a job and a car and I’m married and I’ve bought a
house, and I know this isn’t it. Obviously, being married is a huge part of my
destiny and my wife’s. But this isn’t all that I’m supposed to be doing for the
next 30 or 40 years I’ve got left, working to pay for a house. That’s it?
That’s just the American dream? What about the divine dream? What about what the
infinite and unsleeping Mind dreamt for you to accomplish for Him?
I want you to start actively seeking
God on this. That’s not a passive thing. That’s not “oh, I go to church on
Sundays” type of a thing. It’s more than that. Seeking out the Lord on His will
for your life, for your destiny, is a much deeper and more concerned approach
then just doing what many of us are probably doing…
“Ticking away the moments that make up
a dull day, fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way. Kicking around on a
piece of ground in your home town, waiting for someone or something to show you
the way. Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain. You are
young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you
find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the
starting gun. And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking,
racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative
way, but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. Every
year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to
naught or half a page of scribbled lines, hanging on in quiet desperation is
the English way. The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more
to say…”
Pink Flyod’s lyrics for “Time” are in
many ways the unspoken anthem of our modern age… the credo of our young lives, wasting
the time away, going with the flow and seeing what pops up here or there, what
job to work at next, where to live next, where to go to school next, blah,
blah, blah… ordinary and mundane! Too mundane for the Redeemed, the citizens of
another world. It’s too mundane to live as if we were as dead as the
unbelievers around us, seeking out security in this world, when we’ve been made
alive to start living for the next. If we lazily sleep our way through this
life in total ignorance of our true purpose here, we shall someday wake up and
find that it’s all over, and our chance has passed us by.
Ephesians
5:14, “Awake, you who sleep, arise
from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
Long did the prophet cry to the
fathers of Israel: “Awake, awake! Rise up, Jerusalem… Awake, awake, Zion,
clothe yourself with strength! …Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the
glory of the LORD rises upon you.”
There is work to be done. There is
ministry to do. There are gaps in the strength of the church to be filled.
There are everywhere around us people dying of thirst for living water.
You want to throw away the life that
God has given you, throw away the life that Jesus died for, purchased with His
own blood, by wasting it on the pale pleasures of this world, on the thieves of
time: the internet and television and games and entertainment, or even on the
pursuits of career and security, as we literally “enjoy” ourselves into
uselessness?
“Oh, he’s anti-internet!”
I am not. But look at what we’ve
become addicted to: cat videos, buzz-feeds, an endless amount of pictures and
puns, or even more twisted things?
This is not the Christian life that
Jesus Christ was violently nailed to a tree for. The Christian life was not to
be marked by indifference and lethargy and apathy and ineffectiveness. This is
not the way we were intended to live, with an over-obsession with the things of
this world, even as all the energy and youth and destiny and time, the precious
time that God gives us slowly slips away.
It is time to rise up. It’s time to wake
up, wake up, wake up all believers.
Romans
13:11, “And do this, knowing the
time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is
nearer than when we first believed.”
Time is running out.
Look for the meaning God gave to your
life. Do great things for God. You were put here to do just that. If you don’t,
nobody else will. Nobody else can do what God put you here to do. I encourage you, begin to seek God for your
destiny.
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