Revelation

Of all things, I have been drawn of late to study John’s Revelation.  The book has scared me since my early Sunday School days, and every time I’ve read it since—even Peterson’s The Message—it strikes me as bizarre, ungracious and brutal.  This time, I have been reading it with Darrell Johnson’s help (Discipleship on the Edge) and at last the utter Christ-centeredness that you would expect from John shines through.  Darrell has done a fantastic service to believers everywhere.  Note what Jesus says of himself to the seven churches.  Each affirmation is so profoundly personal to each particular struggle of the individual church.  Each is strong, simple, and so much bigger than our Western minds.  Jesus is the center of all creation, always has been and always will be.  One day we will all see it.

“The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands” (2:1).

“The first and the last, who was dead, and has come to life” (2:8).

“The One who has the sharp two-edged sword” (2:12).

“The Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and His feet are like burnished bronze” (2:18).

“He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars” (3:1)

“He who is holy, who is true, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, and who shuts and no one opens” (3:7).

“The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning [arche, source and meaning] of the creation of God” (3:14).

The seven stars represent the whole of creation.  The seven spirits represent the complete anointing of Jesus in the Spirit.  He is the one and only person in Biblical history who received the Holy Spirit as an abiding, immeasurable gift.  The seven lampstands represent the whole church.

Take some time and reflect on what we are being told about Jesus here.  The One who is at the center of the cosmos and the church; the One who is the source and meaning of all things, the One who died and rose again; the One anointed with the Holy Spirit; the One who sees and discerns; the Truth; the Father’s Son; the true witness; the One who opens doors than none can shut; this One is in our midst. There is a reason that again and again John simply says, “Look!”  “Behold!”  No doubt, we, like the individuals and the churches in John’s day, face serious turmoil, especially in our darkness.  John’s answer is to shine the light on Jesus.  He is where the buck stops.  Jesus is where all pretentious arguments cease.  Before Him everyone will know that He knows that we know that He knows.  Jesus has overcome.  His victory is eating its way through the (and our) darkness. Meantime: “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).  

Back

Folks,

Thanks for your patience.  I am making my way back from a long journey of writing and completely refurbishing our house.  There are several things in the works, which I will be writing about soon.  The main project has been my book The Shack Revisited, which I am pleased to tell you will be available around the world in October, published through Faith Words, a division of Hachette.  Meantime, it was published in Brazil by Sextante Press in September, and in four months reached number 11 on the non-fiction, best-seller list.  Not sure how to handle that, but, 'Thank you, Holy Spirit, we will have more please' is definitely in order.  It is clear that the spiritual climate around the world is changing.  People are tired of the emptiness of religion, and they are open and hungry for the truth.  What could be more beautiful?  The ancient gospel is being recovered and people are ready to hear it.

Over the last year I have been reading and re-reading a good bit of the great George MacDonald.  His book, Unspoken Sermons, which has been republished by Regent College Publishing as Christ in Creation: Unspoken Sermons of George MacDonald, edited by Roland Hein (available on Amazon), is so beautiful it is beyond words.  I read several of these sermons years ago, perhaps all of them, but I was not ready to appreciate what our brother was saying.  He grew up in harsh world of Calvinist Scotland, with an exceptionally loving father and and equally harsh school master.  His life long question related to holding together the love of Jesus' Father with what is called 'the justice of God.'  Unlike most of those of the growing liberal persuasion in his day, MacDonald was not willing to throw out the hard passages of Scripture to fit the softer God of the day.  So what you find in MacDonald is an extraordinary vision of the Father heart of God—the best I have ever read anywhere—with an equally extraordinary vision of the fact that this Father will never let us off with anything—again, the best I have ever read anywhere.  We must be clean, MacDonald would say, else we would never enjoy our Father and life in his house, and what Father would want that for his children?  Who really wants to go to heaven only to hide from the Father?  That is a rather honest and huge question.  What emerges in MacDonald's thought, through some 50 plus novels, fairy tales, sermons, lectures etc, is a picture of the self-sacrificing nature of the blessed Trinity for our benefit, and a sacrificing love that demands that we have not a feather of evil in us so that we can enjoy forever the life of the Father, Son and Spirit.

"All that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind must be destroyed."

For MacDonald, judgment is not vindictive punishment for sin, the overflowing wrath of a disapproving deity, but a discerning, and a dividing of our false selves from who we are in Christ, so that we may live.  All that is alien in us to the trinitarian life of God has to be removed.  The judgment of God is the same as his mercy, love and goodness.  For what merciful God would ever allow us to be miserable in our darkness?  "If a man refuse to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would not be love if it left him there."  Jesus alone (not the church) is able to discern the demarcation between what we have become in our darkness and sin, and who we are in him, and he will strike his mark in patience, tenderness and grace.  No doubt it will hurt, but it is a good hurt, a redemptive hurt, a burning unto real purification and life.  So MacDonald does not throw out hell as an anachronistic bit of religious superstition; he gathers it into his vision of the determined Father heart of God.  It is redemptive.  We will be ready for the glory given to us in Jesus.  Thus we must be discerned in utter love—and righteousness, holiness, justice, mercy, truth.  We will be brought to the place where we run to Papa and beg him to judge us to the core of our being, for nothing will be more precious to us than life his house, life with Jesus and in the free-flowing fellowship of the Spirit.

How we get there from here lands us in the center of the ministry and the mystery of the Holy Spirit, the lover or our souls.    

A Word from John McLeod Campbell

My friend John MacMurray emailed these quotes from John Mcleod Campbell's The Nature of the Atonement.   

"If the atonement is rightly conceived of as a development of the incarnation, the relation of the atonement to the incarnation is indissoluble; and in a clear apprehension of the incarnation must be felt to be so. Further, if the eternal life given to us in Christ is that divine life in humanity in which Christ made atonement for our sins, then the connection between the atonement and our participation in the life of Christ is not arbitrary, but natural: and thus the incarnation, the atonement, and man's participation in the divine nature, offer to our faith one purpose of divine love, reaching its fulfillment by a path which is determined by what God is and what he wills that man should be.

"Yet I cannot forget that there are earnest and deep thinking minds in whose case the faith of the incarnation and their acceptance of it as the fundamental grace of God to man to the light of which all that concerns God's relation to man is to be taken, has issued, not in the recognition of the atonement as a development of the incarnation, but on the contrary, regard the atonement as in the light of the incarnation alike uncalled for and inconceivable."

"So soon as the incarnation... is accepted as itself the light to which the subject of the atonement must be taken, we are prepared to find that all conceptions of the atonement, which accord not with the love of the Father of spirits to mend his offspring manifested in the incarnation, will be rejected."

And We Wonder Why We Are Nuts

Here are two quotes from Jonathan Edwards, that go a long way toward explaining our craziness.  

“The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”— Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust), vol. 2, p. 9.

“The apostle tells us that ‘God is love’; and therefore, seeing he is an infinite being, it follows that he is an infinite fountain of love. Seeing he is an all-sufficient being, it follows that he is a full and overflowing, and inexhaustible fountain of love. And in that he is an unchangeable and eternal being, he is an unchangeable and eternal fountain of love.”—Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, reprinted 1982), p. 327.

Placing these quotes together allows us to peer inside the tortured human psyche, writhing in the pain of two worlds, two Gods, two visions.  Edwards puts Picasso into words.  

'Thank you Lord Jesus Christ for coming into our traumatic darkness to show us the truth.  As believable as it is to us in our terrible confusion, you have made it plain that there is no angry archer behind your back, only your Father who loves us out of his love for you and the Holy Spirit.  He will never be satisfied until we are delivered from the trauma of the false god and free to give ourselves to the blessed Trinity and life in Papa's house.'

"If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." (John 14:9)  

A Ken Blue Gem

My friend Ken Blue and I were having a fantastic conversation about election and how Jesus was chosen first and we in him before the foundation of the world. He summed up the conversation with one of his great lines.

"Predestination means that you were eternally found in Jesus before you were ever lost in Adam."

I See Trees of Green...

My friend Debbie Sawzak of Toronto sent me this gem she had written. I asked her permission to share it on my blog.

On my way into Brampton for the "Insurgency" the other night, I was listening to instrumental music that seemed to make the world around me into a movie. So I decided to have a good look at what was passing by, and enjoy it as something of which I was a little moving part. The thought struck me—perhaps as a result of having listened to Gunton on creation, having read Capon on the theme of what we are here for, and edited a chapter of Baxter’s book in which he goes on about the great dance and God’s delight in it—how intensely the triune God loves the world, not as an abstract entity but as a concrete, living ensemble of particular people and things. When you love someone, whether a spouse, child, or dear friend of long standing, you love them moving, sitting still, asleep, doing stuff; you love the way their hand looks holding a pen, the way they pedal a bicycle, the way they look up from a book when they hear something outside. There are instants when you just watch them and they don’t know it, and part of the sheer pleasure you have in doing so is linked to their unconsciousness of you in that moment. And I thought, as my eyes and ears took in everything around me, that it is probably the same for God: that he loves this elderly Asian lady, not just in general, but loves her specifically as she bobs up and down pulling that little bungee-corded cart of groceries behind her across the crosswalk, loves those two young twenty-something guys and the way they sit on that bench waiting for the bus, one leaning back with his legs sprawled in front of him and the other bent over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He loves how that girl strides along with her backpack on her back, her thumbs hooked in the straps. He takes a particular secret delight in enjoying them while they are paying no special attention to him, the way we do with those we love when they are absorbed in something.

And not only people, either: he loves how that tree sways and is moved differently but seamlessly by the swaying from the tip down to the lowest branch, how the four legs of that dog running along the sidewalk are so nimble and coordinated, how that bird alights flawlessly on the knife-edge of the top of that sign and manages to keep its perch there while a heavy truck whooshes by, how the clouds change shape and colour ever so slightly as the air moves them high above us. And not only things he’s made, either, but things we’ve made out of the things he’s made: he loves the way those words look as they scroll across that digital sign, the arrangement of bricks outlining and accenting the windows of that building, the distinctive ringing made by the bell on that boy’s bike as his thumb presses the lever and the little hammer strikes the metal numerous times a second, the way the red, green, and yellow lights control the traffic so that two lanes of cars start moving at once and turn left in a single smooth arc. He thinks, “Man, this is cool. I’m so glad this is here!” Of course, he also sees a whole lot of shabby and horrible and wrecked things that cause him sorrow, more sorrow and grief than we can possibly imagine. But this grief is also just as much part and proof of his loving, and he doesn’t give up.

I thought about how this material world is home for us, precious and familiar, and how it has become home for God too, precious and familiar, because he has been actively present in it all along, has even been here in the Son in the same flesh as ours by which we experience all these things.

All these thoughts drew praise from my heart.

Debbie

The Meaning of the Trinity

Here is a quote from Professor Thomas F. Torrance on the meaning of the Trinity. Every word and phrase merits careful reflection.

The Trinity “means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in his aloofness or shut up in his solitariness, but on the contrary, the God who will not be without us whom he has created for fellowship with himself, the God who is free to go outside of himself, to share in the life of his creatures and enable them to share in his own eternal Life and Love. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in his grace and outgoing love he freely and joyously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate himself to us, and to be received and be known by us. Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that God does not surrender his transcendence in condescending to be one with us in Jesus Christ, but it does mean that the more we are allowed to know God in himself in this way the more wonderful we know him to be, a God who infinitely exceeds all our thoughts and words about him, but who in spite of that reveals himself tenderly and intimately to us through his Son and his Spirit.” —Thomas F. Torrance