FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Scripture References: John 1:1-8; Colossians 1:15-17

Christ’s Relationship to/with God

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“In the beginning,” whenever that was. Remember, since the Bible relates to man in relationship to God and vice-versa, time (from man’s perspective) also began. These three words throw us back to Genesis 1:1. As the Bible opens its account of God’s creative work, so the Beloved Apostle John begins his account of the beginning of God’s redemptive work in Christ. Revelation 13:8 speaks of Christ as slain before the foundation of the world. So, in effect, the redemptive work fixed in eternity was wrought out in time that we might believe in Him who was slain for our sins.

John personified the “Word” (logos). This means the open, spoken manifestation of the speaker. And “in the beginning” gives us a clue as to John’s selection of the “Word.” In Genesis 1, each new phase of God’s creative work is introduced with “God said.” There is His open, spoken manifestation. So, as in the beginning God spoke the universe into being, in Christ, God spoke His final word of revelation, redemption, in the very person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

“Was” is the word expressing essential, and in this case, eternal being. It may read “always was.” There had never been a time when Christ did not exist. Like God the Father, He is eternal in nature and being.

Furthermore, Christ always was “with God.” Literally, He was “face-to-face with God.” In ancient times, let us say, a person entertained two rulers. One was tall, the other was short. The host had to seat the shorter one on pillows so that when they looked at one another, it was on an even line. Neither looked up or down at the other. We would say that they saw eye to eye. This expressed equality. To express it, the same phrase was used as here. So in essence we can say, “the Word [always] was [equal] with God.” There is no difference in equality in the Godhead.

Likewise, literally translated, the final phrase should read, “and the Word [Christ] always was God Himself.” For “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Thus in one concise sentence, John answered the Gnostics, then and now, by declaring the coeternity, coequality, and coexistence of Christ with God the Father.

Now let us turn to Colossians 1:15 where Paul said that Christ “is the image of the invisible God.” The word “image” here means “exact manifestation.” This does not mean that God is visible but has not been seen. It means that He cannot be seen with the natural eye. “God is Spirit,” stated Jesus (John 4:24). And a spiritual being cannot be seen by the natural eye. This is the reason for the incarnation: So that Jesus could say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Let me try to explain this in this way. With my wife, I bare three relationships with her. I am her husband, the father of her child, and her pastor. I am not three distinct people. I am only one person, but I bare three relationships to her. Now please understand this with this analogy, there is no human example can adequately illustrate the Godhead in its trinitarian form, this only shows how it is possible to be one, yet bear three relationships to another. In Jesus Christ, God revealed Himself as our Redeemer.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture References: John 1:1-8; Colossians 1:15-17

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth.”

Never were more majestic words ever put down on paper. Never was so much grand truth stated in so few words. They introduce the simplest and profoundest of the Gospels. The purpose of this Gospel is “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31).

Jesus had a message for His contemporaries. But does He have a message for us in this modern space-fairing age? The purpose of this message is to show that He does.

In order to understand any book one must know at least a little something of its background. John wrote this Gospel while in Ephesus. Primarily, its message was directed toward the Greeks.

In the first century A.D., there appeared a philosophy known as Gnosticism. Its name comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge.” Gnostics held that people were saved by advancing in knowledge.

However, Gnostics faced a problem in explaining the origin of the universe. They believed and said that God is absolutely good, and matter is absolutely evil. How, then, could such an absolutely good God create such an absolutely evil universe? To their own satisfaction, at least, they imagined a series of beings coming out of God in descending order, each having less deity than the one above it. The lowest one had enough deity to create, but so little as to be able to create evil matter.

Coming in to contact with Christianity, Gnostics identified Christ as that lowest being. Thus they saw Him as a created being, a demigod, almost (but not quite) a demon since He created evil matter.

Furthermore, the Gnostics divided into two groups concerning Jesus Christ. The Docetic Gnostics (from dokeō, “I seem”) said that Christ did not have a real flesh-and-blood body. He only seemed to have one. They denied the humanity of Christ. The Cerinthian Gnostics (from their leader Cerinthus) held that Christ neither was born, nor did He die. Deity came upon Jesus at His baptism and left Him on the cross. So they denied the deity of Jesus. These views cut through the heart of Christian theology. It is as great a heresy to deny Christ’s humanity as to deny Jesus’ deity. So both Paul, in Colossians, and John, in his Gospel and 1 John, wrote to refute this heresy.

Gnostics are still with us, for anyone who denies either Jesus’ deity or Christ’s humanity is a neo-Gnostic. It is our purpose, therefore, to look at Jesus Christ in three relationships: to God, to the natural order, and to us.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. – Galatians 5:1.

There is probably no word in the Christian vocabulary that has been more misunderstood or abused than this one word, freedom (unless perchance, it’s the word love). What did Paul mean by freedom? First, he was not talking about political freedom. However much we Americans may believe on the basis of natural law that God has endowed all persons with certain inalienable rights, including that of political liberty, Paul provided no basis for the kind of philosophy articulated in our Declaration of Independence. Even less was Paul referring to that freedom in a psychological sense. Emotional and mental health is a desirable goal, and certain therapeutic techniques developed in the modern world may be quite compatible with New Testament Christianity. However, Christian freedom is not “an innate quality or state of being which the individual discovers (or recovers) by sorting out past experiences and relationships. It is a gift bestowed as a result of Good Friday and Easter.”

Finally, Paul did not expound through Christian freedom the right to advocate theological anarchy within the confines of the believing community. A church that is unable to define and maintain the doctrinal boundaries of its own fellowship or, even worse, that no longer thinks this is a task worth doing, is a church that has lost its soul. The proclamation of the whole counsel of God involves identifying and saying no to those forms of teaching that, if carried out consistently, would threaten the truth of divine revelation itself. This is one of the most serious issues facing the contemporary and modern church today. We can err deeply by either drawing the boundaries too tightly or by refusing to draw them at all. On the one hand, we lapse into legalism, as many today do; on the other, into relativism, as many more in this age do.

We will not go astray if we remember that for Paul, Christian liberty was always grounded on the believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ on the one hand and with the community of faith on the other as led and directed by the Holy Spirit. Outside of Jesus Christ, human existence is characterized as bondage, and slavery, bondage to the law, bondage to the evil elements dominating the world, bondage to sin, the flesh, and the devil. God sent his Son into the world to shatter the dominion of these slaveholders. Now God has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers to awaken them to new life and liberation found only in Christ.

When the Galatians first received the Spirit of God, they also received the gift of freedom, as Paul made clear in 2 Corinthians 3:17, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” When Paul listed the various graces included in the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23), freedom was not included among these desirable virtues. This is because freedom is already presupposed in each one of them. Thus the fruit of the Spirit is freedom, freedom to love, to exude joy, to manifest peace, to display patience, and so on. It is “for freedom” that Christ has set us free. This means that Christian liberty is freedom for others, freedom that finds its true expression not in theological privatism (“I am free to believe anything I choose”) or spiritual narcissism (“I am free to be myself no matter what”) but rather freedom to love and serve one another in the context of the Body of Christ.

Evidently one of the major problems among the churches of Galatia was that believers there did not know what to do with their Christ-won freedom. Some were using their liberty as a pretext for license, to the gratification of their sinful nature. Others were “Lone-Ranger” Christians, having forgotten the mandate to bear one another’s burdens. Still others had fallen into discord and faction, backbiting and self-promotion. Thus in these closing two chapters Paul summoned the Galatians to a mature use of their spiritual birthright, reminding them that it is love, the love of Christ shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, that brings liberty to its fullest expression.

It is in that love, and in the love of Christ alone that we can stand firm in our freedom.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible®, NASB © 2020 by The Lockman Foundation.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.