Our Father's World

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.  – Galatians 4:1-2

With regard to these verses commentaries focus on the distinction between Israel – the called of God, under the law and the called and chosen under the New Covenant in Christ.  I was immediately reminded of one of my top five most-quoted passages, Ephesians 4:11-16, and in particular verse 13 which asserts that God gives us leaders and teachers … until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.   We can understand the historic perspective, but we should also see the personal application.  Individually, we start out in Christ needing a lot of help, a lot of support, teaching, and discipline.  We are, in effect, “under the law” for a time until our ability to communicate with God develops and matures.  Even after we have grown in the faith, there are often times when we need others to come alongside to encourage or correct us.  Sometimes I need a rebuke or reproof as 2 Timothy 3:16 says. 

We see something else inherent in this passage, though.  We have been adopted by the Father who “is the owner of everything”, and, that, as Paul points out, makes us the “owners” of everything as well.  Man was created and commissioned to rule in this world.  Adam lost his position through sin, and so we all have suffered in our fallen state.  We have been rained on where we should have reigned.  In Christ, our enslavement and servitude to the elements and powers of this world come to an end. 

I don’t know about me.  I believe there are saints who have overcome and matured in this life to the point that they rule and reign in this life.  I may have to wait until the next one – which is all right.  I don’t mind being in school all my life.  It seems to me that too much authority and power is kind of dangerous both for myself and for those around me.  Nevertheless, I think we need to realize we are part of the hierarchy, part of the ruling family, whether we are responsible for running much of the show or not. 

We all have spheres of authority, influence, and control.  Like the servants who were entrusted the talents, it may be small or large.  We are obligated to care for that with which the Lord has entrusted us to His glory and in His honor.  My wife always considered the condition of her house, her car, her lawn, whatever, as a reflection on Christ.  She kept things neat and orderly, clean and in good repair because a) she’s German; and b) it’s all the Lord’s stuff.  I believe that she was right in that we owe it to God to do the best we can where we have been placed. 

I also think it is a mistake to be silent and passive concerning the issues of the day.  This is especially true when it comes to children and education, but we ought also to stand up to oppression in every area where we can make our voices heard.  This is our Father’s world.  It’s never going to be utopia, Disneyland, or heaven, but it’s His, and we should live, work, and speak with that in our minds.   

Practicing Perfection

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  -- Matthew 5:48

Perfect is a challenge.  The underlying word, though, is one with which Raccoons might be familiar:  τελειο, which comes from τελος – that is, telos, which refers to an end or a goal.  We should not think of degrees of excellence but of fitness.  If you have one lock that you really need to open and you have ten keys on your key ring, the one you want is the perfect one, the τελειο. 

My goal in life is to be the right one when I am needed.  It’s like the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan.  The priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side of the road were concerned with being “perfect” in the sense of being clean and inoffensive – not bad things in themselves.  The Samaritan, on the other hand, was the τελειο for the man who had been beaten and robbed.  We don’t know much about him other than what he did for a stranger.  Jesus did not relate this parable to endorse the Samaritan’s lifestyle or to condemn our efforts to keep ourselves pure and unspotted by worldly thinking and the corruption that accompanies it. 

Perfect may be translated as mature or complete.  Sometimes I think telling someone to be perfect can be a little like telling a small child to “grow up”.  On the other hand, if a man is over twenty-one but still irresponsible, spoiled and self-centered, telling him it is time to grow up is appropriate.  Even a child can act his age.  He can be perfect at that point.  And so may we be perfect. 

Our lock and key analogy, while helpful, is limited.  Our destiny is not static but dynamic and evolving.  Every time our “keyness” fits the situation, the door is opened to a new level of changes and challenges where the old “perfection” is no longer “perfect”.  We are always moving toward the goal of attaining (here’s that verse again)  … to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:13).  

This is the ultimate Telos, the Attractor which draws our history and history in general.  So we are to continue … to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:15-16). 

That will be just perfect.

    

Zen and the Art of Weeding the Garden

One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. Job 1:6

Jesus gives us the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. It isn't an intricately detailed story. There is a field plowed, prepared and sown with good wheat seed. For a time nothing but wheat is seen. The plants begin to mature, and, to the distress of those who will harvest, the field is seen bringing forth a great many noxious and worthless weeds along with the stalks of wheat. The servants ask the master what they should do. He replies that all should be left to grow until the harvest, at which time the weeds can be separated from the wheat without loss.

What Jesus isn't doing in this parable is justifying the presence of the apparently unredeemable in the world. He isn't explaining to us in any comprehensive sense the why of evil. Instead, He says, the nature of a thing will be revealed in its time, and it will be dealt with in its time. God does not label every seed that comes into the world that we might know its true nature from the start. He does not automatically yank someone out when they go bad, even when they are beyond the point of no return.

To uproot a weed — whether it is an individual, an institution, or a nation — means the destruction of much that surrounds it. It means the loss of souls, who, for various reasons, have had their lives become entangled with the roots of the tare in their midst. The very fabric of reality is light woven over a background of darkness; it is pools and eddies of order amidst chaos and destruction. It is wheat among the weeds.

With any event or circumstance, it is hard to determine its true nature. Whose son is it? Does it have the nature of the Good? Even if it has walked in the presence of God, we cannot know into what it might mature or what motivates it.

I understand the people who want to see a utopia, a heaven on earth — all that we-are-the-world-and-I'd-like-to-teach-it-to-sing-jeremiah-was-a-bullfrog stuff sounds pretty good. But we are not going to get rid of the agents of evil. We could kill them all off, but that's been tried before, and a good number of the people you get to do the killing are just as evil in some ways as the ones they kill off. The Revolution always looks great on paper, but uprooting tares is a nasty, bloodly business, and, in the end, most of the wheat is lost. The field is barren. The weeds always come back.

Can weeds be turned into wheat? I don't know. I do know if the wheat keeps turned to the sun and grows, it may well overshadow and stunt the invaders. It becomes an internal battle — to overcome evil with good, to be completely focused on the Son and filled with His light, to grow in grace and goodness. When we, as the sons of God, reach our fullness and maturity then begins the harvest and the separation.

I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been before God. (Tao Te Ching)

Sounding

For it says:

When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity;

He gave gifts to people.

But what does "He ascended" mean except that He descended to the lower parts of the earth? The One who descended is the same as the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. And He personally gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God's Son, [growing] into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ's fullness. — Ephesians 4:8-13

Ascending doesn't happen without descending. There is no rising apart from being down. There is no exaltation that is not proceeded by humbling. The concept of ascending and descending as two aspects of a single, full process is familiar to all reader of One Cosmos. His thirty-three year stay on earth was, for Jesus, just the passing through, as a cliffdiver must pass through a medium or two on his way from the heights to the bottom in order to rise in triumph.

The dive Christ made into hell opened a way out of it for those who would follow Him. We'll have to cast aside the cliffdiver image. Once the dive is made, it is a long climb back to the top of the cliff. For our Last Adam, the Ascension is a given. He must rise. For Him, the plunge was the hard part.

This is the essence of the gospel. When you are at the bottom, there is no where to descend to. The only way out is up. I have struggled with "crucifying the flesh", with putting self to death — admittedly with little success. Oh, wait, doesn't it say somewhere something about my being "dead in trepasses and sin"? For us the hard part is not getting to the bottom, it is realizing we are already there. The triumphant ascension of Christ from the abyss of death did not liberate only the physical dead. Some teach that Jesus moved paradise from a compartment in sheol (hell, the grave) to heaven. It seems to me to be a poetic depiction of all spiritually dead humanity being set free from their chains. As we need to realize we are dead apart from Christ, we also need to realize that we are, with Christ, risen indeed.

I think I understand this but I may not be able to say what I know.

Christ rose to "fill all things". He "fills" all in a sort of topdown way, having ascended back to heaven. He is in all and through all, as we noted in an earlier verse from this same chapter. He is readily available to us — something that was not the case before the Cross.

Let's go back to the idea of a being rising bouyantly above a water surface, breaking through the surface tension, shattering perhaps an otherwise calm layer of reality, throwing bits of it here and there like a leaping dolphin. Imagine that being growing ever larger as it rises. Now much more of the surface is disrupted and disturbed. Now it seems to be a mountain pushing ever higher and wider. Water runs off the sides in great frothing rivers. There is no longer a body of water, no longer depths, rather the depths have become heights.

That is less a picture of Christ than it is a picture of His Church. As Christ descended, so His fullness descends giving us a matrix into which we are able to, and may, ascend in order to fill.

Mostly we have not attained that mature stature. God knows that. We don't grow simply in numbers to fill the matrix. We grow into unity — each of us — and all of us. Christ provides the template into which we are to grow, and He provides, through all the gifts He liberated, the means for us to grow.

What are those 'gifts'? Our brothers and sisters — some of whom are apostles, others are prophets. Some bring us good news and words of encouragement in dark times, others teach us who we are and how to live, or they stand watching over us to lead us, to give us direction and to battle the rulers of the darkness on our behalf while we grow.

And you and I, we are gifts to someone else, or to one another.

Happy Return

You ascended to the heights, taking away captives; You received gifts among people, even from the rebellious, so that the LORD God might live there. – Psalm 68:18

Here is how Paul quotes that verse in Ephesians 4:8, “When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people”.

I did not read Gagdad Bob’s incredibly powerful post on Holy Saturday until this morning, but it coincides with the fact that I started reading Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell last night.

I think I miss the evident for the obvious. Which is the forest – evident or obvious? How many trees does it take to make a forest? If a tree is a fact, is the forest an interpretation or an extrapolation? While talking to my wife yesterday, it occurred to me that a phrase in the Epistle to the Ephesians was of far greater significance than I could understand. He says, “Till we come … to a perfect man, to the measure of stature of the fullness of Christ” – that is to say until we reach maturity as measured by comparison to Christ. The Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ must come of age. He calls us to take His yoke upon us, but we cannot be unequally yoked.

Most of my relatives are not tall people. We range from short to average. Dad was about 5’7” and his nephew Clifford was about the same, maybe 5’6”. They had a neighbor named Tom who was well over six feet tall but slightly blunt on top. The three of them were cutting some logs together. When they carried the logs out on their shoulders, Dad took one end, Clifford took the other, and they suggested Tom get in the middle. Tom thought those logs were a little heavy. If you’ve ever seen a “Ma and Pa Kettle” movie with Marjorie Main, you might recall Pa’s rather mismatched team hitched to his wagon. In that case, it’s the little horse that has to work much harder to do what the big horse does.

The gospel is the “death, burial, and resurrection” of Christ. As we just celebrated, He liberated and despoiled hell – or as one local preacher puts it: Jesus razed hell. After descending to liberate and deliver, the Lord ascended to pour out the Holy Spirit with His myriad of gifts upon us. These gifts are not baubles for our adornment or playthings for our amusement; they are the means of our growth in wisdom, maturity and beauty.

The Lord has “ascended”. In this case, the obvious is that Jesus is no longer in this world, in the stream of time. He is, as it were, hidden from the Bride. He has given us the Comforter, the “earnest of our inheritance”, but He has left us in time while He waits in eternity – already perfect and unchanging, “the same yesterday, today, and forever”.

And then there is the evident. For what is He waiting?

For us, the Bride, to grow up.