The
Supremacy of Christ
Colossians 1:15-20
I:
-- “Doesn’t revelation occur today?
Surely revelation is ongoing.”
I hear this all the time. It’s
not so much a question as an assertion, a vehement assertion.
Someone is maintaining that it would be arbitrary to restrict
revelation to a First Century figure like Jesus, and spiritually harmful
as well. It’s spiritually
harmful in that just as God spoke through Abraham, through Moses, the
prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus of Nazareth, surely the living God
continues to speak – through humanism, the Enlightenment, through
feminism, the Green Earth movement, and so on.
People who challenge me on this issue insist that unless revelation
occurs today God is dead, or at least inert.
Such people I startle by agreeing with them: unless revelation
occurs today, God is indeed inert if not dead.
Revelation, according to the logic of scripture, occurs when
God-in-person acts upon us and then illumines us concerning the truth and
meaning of his action. He
delivers his people from slavery through the
Red Sea
, and then illumines them through his servants, the prophets, as to what
it all means and what its consequences are for his people.
He raises his Son from the dead, and then informs the apostles
throughout the “Forty Days” what the event of the resurrection means
concerning both them and their Lord.
In
light of the scriptural understanding of revelation, does revelation occur
today? Certainly.
For God still acts and illumines today.
Even tonight don’t we expect him to seize someone here, shake
her, startle her, and send her home with new understanding, newly
captivated by truth?
Is there a preacher among us who doesn’t expect all this and more
to happen next Sunday morning at
11:00
?
As I said a minute ago, I agree with my interlocutor (regardless of
her motivation) that revelation occurs today.
At the same time, I suspect her motivation.
For in putting the matter as she has, she wants to deny the
supremacy (and therefore the sufficiency) of Jesus Christ.
She wants to say that Jesus Christ can be superseded.
She wants to say that revelation, in terms of its content, advances
beyond Christ. She wants to
deny that the God who is sole creator of heaven and earth has rendered
himself incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and done this precisely for the
purpose of reconciling and restoring his creation, gone awry through the
sin of humankind.
Since there can be no advance beyond God (by definition; to suggest
anything else is absurd), and since God has incarnated himself in the
Nazarene, then the so-called advance of “on-going revelation” is
impossible. When the
hymn-writer cries, “What more can he say than to you he has said?”,
the only answer possible is “Nothing”.
God can’t ‘say’ anything more than he has said and done in
that Nazarene whose life is identical with God’s life.
There’s no advance on the conclusive, definitive act of God.
For this reason Paul doesn’t hesitate to declare that Jesus
Christ is “the image of the invisible God”.
To speak of him as “image” is to say that God’s being and
nature are perfectly revealed in him.
Jesus Christ, as the eikon
or image of God, mirrors God’s word and work, will and way.
Yet as the image of God, Jesus Christ is more than this; in him
God’s word and work, will and way are operative.
In everyday life, “mirror image” is merely a reflection of
substance, never substance itself. When
you and I look into the mirror we do not
see ourselves; we see only a reflection of ourselves.
Strictly speaking, we see only a reflection of ourselves in place of ourselves, instead
of ourselves. If we reach
out and poke what we see in the mirror, does our face feel pain?
Of course not. Then
what we see isn’t ourselves but only a reflection.
How different it is with that image of God which Jesus Christ is.
He isn’t merely a reflection of the Father lacking the Father’s
substance; he isn’t a reflection of God that we apprehend instead of
apprehending God. As eikon,
image, Jesus Christ is God-with-us operative.
In light of this, there can be no advance beyond him.
“Surely revelation is ongoing” – no, it isn’t ongoing if
“ongoing” means that our Lord can be superseded.
To think we can advance beyond him is to fall short of him.
To add to him is to subtract from him.
To augment him is to diminish him.
All whom the Incarnate One has seized and brought to faith in him
know this. And who better than
Thomas Cranmer, author of the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer? I used
to chuckle at the prayer of consecration for Holy Communion that Cranmer
has penned wherein he speaks of Christ’s atoning death: “…who made
there, by his one oblation (i.e., sacrifice) of himself once offered, a
full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the
sins of the whole world….” It
seemed unnecessarily redundant. Why
did Cranmer have to say the same thing three times over?
I don’t chuckle any longer, since too many people seem to have
overlooked the crucial point Cranmer is concerned to make.
Listen to the cumulative force of it all.
“Who offered there, in
that place.” Jesus Christ is
the venue of sacrifice. Everywhere
in the older testament the altar is the venue of sacrifice, the place
where God meets with sinful people without having to annihilate them.
(Never let the word “altar” be heard in a Reformed Church
except in reference to Christ alone.)
“ Who offered there”;
plainly Christ is priest.
“Who offered there himself”: Christ is himself the sacrifice
that he offers. Our Lord is
simultaneously sacrifice, priest and altar, the place where sinners can
meet with God and survive God’s holiness.
Jesus Christ needs no supplementation whatever.
His one oblation of himself once offered – adequately,
definitively, conclusively – it cannot
be repeated. The newer
testament rings with the consensual apostolic recognition and affirmation
and confession of Jesus Christ in this regard.
He, he alone, is the image of the invisible God.
In him God-with-us is savingly operative.
II:
-- There’s more to be said.
Anyone who hears the expression “image of God” immediately
recalls Genesis 1. Humankind
is made in the image of God. Here,
of course, “image” assumes a different meaning.
You and I can’t be God operative;
can’t be God at all. Still,
as made in the image of God we are summoned, in our obedience to God, in
our daily “doing”, to be God’s faithful, cheerful, human covenant
partner. As his human covenant
partner we are created to reflect his faithfulness, patience, integrity,
constancy.
Created in the image of God though we are, however, the Fall means
we are now hideously deformed. Nothing
about us resembles the image in which we were created.
The image is so thoroughly defaced as to be unrecognizable.
To be sure, we haven’t ceased to be human.
The Fall has defaced the image.
It hasn’t effaced the image, even though the image that remains
is wholly unrecognizable. Because
the fallen human remains human we can still think: the structure of reason
remains unimpaired. But the
integrity of reason is devastated. Now
reason – perfectly logical still – serves to excuse sin when sin is
conscious and rationalize sin when sin is unconscious.
Sinners haven’t ceased to be human, and therefore we can still
love. Regrettably, however,
what we should love we now hate; and what we ought to hate (sin) we have
come to love.
Sinners haven’t ceased to be human, and therefore we can still
will. But will what?
We can will only our disobedience; we can never will ourselves out
of our disobedience. The will
can still will, but now it never wills, because it cannot will, God’s
righteousness.
Sinners were created in the image of God.
We can’t sin this image away.
Yet thanks to our sin, the image is nowhere recognizable in us.
We remain human, even though our humanness is nowhere evident.
Fallen human beings are incapable of informing themselves as to
what it is to be human.
“Surely not!” someone objects.
“Surely our humanness is evident everywhere and is described by
biologists and social scientists, as well as novelists who probe the
human.” Let me say right now
that I esteem the work of the life scientists and the social scientists,
plus any and all who shed light of any kind on human conundrums.
I teach a course called “Theology of the Human Person”.
Because it’s a course in theology (albeit theological
anthropology) and I’m a theologian, students frequently assume I dismiss
any non-theological discipline as worthless.
I don’t. Since we
humans are embodied, inescapably embodied, I want to know what the
biologists are saying. Since
we humans are embedded in societies, I listen to the social sciences.
From time to time I startle students with such questions as
“What’s the suicide rate in
Canada
? What is the socio-economic
profile of the convict? What are the three most commonly prescribed
anti-depressant medications?” (I
want students to know that jokes about Prozac are never funny to the
people who need Prozac. And
since more people in any one congregation are using Prozac or Zoloft or
Paxil or similar anti-depressant than is commonly thought, no such joke
should appear in any sermon.) “What’s
the average age of onset for bi-polar mood disorder?”
I want the students to know that I deem such knowledge important,
especially if the theology student plans on being a pastor.
I remain convinced that the social sciences have much to tell us
about the human situation.
As much as the social sciences can do for us, however, they appear
clumsy compared to literature. The
best social scientist wields a clumsy, blunt instrument compared to the
skilful novelist. The able
novelist has in her hand a dissecting knife that exposes inherent human
complexity as well as self-willed self-contradiction, not to mention
fortuitous victimization. What’s
more, the able novelist lays bare the manner in which complexity,
complication and contradiction are multi-faceted and inter-related.
The result is a profundity and a subtlety that the social sciences
can’t approach. Still,
life-scientist and social scientist and novelist (or poet) together
describe the human situation.
But none of them, nor all of them together, describes the human
condition. The human condition
is much deeper, and much more perverse, than the human situation.
The human situation is that level or dimension of human existence
accessible to human wisdom. The
human condition, on the other hand, is known only to God, and thereafter
to those whom God’s Spirit renders beneficiaries of the gospel.
The human condition, in other words, pertains to the Fall; it
pertains to our sinnership. Human
wisdom, however genuinely wise, knows nothing of this.
Since sin is the contradiction of what God created us to be, we
must come to know God’s intention for us if we are to understand our
predicament as sinners. We
were created in the image of God. Jesus
Christ is the image of God. Therefore
we must look to him if we are to understand ourselves, how perversely we
have falsified ourselves, and what our glorious destiny is by God’s
appointment. In a word, only
Jesus Christ can inform us as to what it is to be a human being.
In Genesis 1 we are told that we were created on the same “day”
as the animals. They are our
cousins (albeit not our brothers and sisters).
Since God loves all that he has made, he loves the animals as much
as he loves us. Then wherein
do we differ from them? While
God loves them and us, God speaks to us alone.
Having spoken to us, he expects us to speak to him in return; to
respond. Because he speaks to
us we are response-able, able to respond.
And because we are response-able, we are response-ible; we must
respond. Our capacity to
answer renders us answerable to him, accountable.
The tragedy, of course, is that as sinners we do respond, and our
response isn’t fit to print. “Shut up.
I didn’t ask to hear from you.
Buzz off. Mind your own
business. Leave me alone.”
Since God gives us what we want (contrary to what most people
think), what we want he ensures we are going to have.
We don’t want intimacy with him?
Then we are going to have estrangement.
We disdain right-relationship with him?
Then we shall remain sunk in unrighteousness.
In the words of Paul’s letter to
Ephesus
, we are “…strangers to the covenants of promise, have no hope, and
are without God in the world.” In
case we don’t get the point he amplifies this two chapters later where
he speaks of humankind: “[living] in the futility of their minds, they
are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God
because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.
They have become callous and given themselves up to licentiousness,
greedy to practise every kind of uncleanness.”
In less prissy language the apostle is saying that as a sinner I am
a person of beclouded wits, ungodly, a numbskull, spiritually insensitive,
vicious and a dirty old man. That’s
the human condition.
We learn of it not by looking in on ourselves; we learn of it only
by looking away from ourselves to Jesus Christ, for he exemplifies before
us what it is to be a human being created in the image of God.
We are meant to be the faithful, obedient, righteous, glad, eager,
cheerful, human covenant partner of the Holy One of Israel.
Not only does Jesus Christ exhibit all this before us, as image of
our humanness he renders all this operative within us as he brings us to
faith in him. “He”,
says Paul, is the image of the invisible God.”
III:
-- The apostle tells us as well that our
Lord is the “first-born of all creation, for in him all things were
created, in heaven and on earth, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and
for him. He is before all
things, and in him all things hold together.”
All things on earth and in
heaven? Yes, contrary to
what most people think, heaven is part of the creation.
Specifically, heaven is that aspect of the creation that isn’t
visible, that remains much more mysterious.
Invisible and mysterious though it might be, it is creaturely and
not divine. Heaven, in other
words, is the utmost mysterious depth of the visible creation.
When Paul speaks of Christ as “first-born” he isn’t referring
to temporal priority (as if Jesus of Nazareth had been born before
anything else came to be – an absurdity.)
He’s speaking, rather, of logical priority: Christ is the one by
whose agency the whole creation – earth and heaven – was fashioned.
“First-born” means even more.
In the ancient world the first-born in the family inherited
everything the head of the family owned.
To say that Christ is the “first-born” is to say that he is the
sole inheritor of the creation. Not
only is he the agent in its coming-to-be, he also has exclusive rights to
it. He is the heir of the
entire universe. The cosmos is
his by right, and rightly he claims what’s his.
He made it and he owns it. Therefore
he is nowhere an intruder in it. He
is lord of all of it.
From another perspective, as agent Christ is the ground of
creation; as “first-born”, he is the goal of creation.
Christ is creation’s ground and goal; he is its “whence” and
“whither”. He
“book-ends” the creation. He
fashioned it in accordance with his purposes, and he remains its hidden
truth and meaning. He
guarantees the “open secret” of the universe as his possession and
himself as its truth; he guarantees that all this, known to believers now
but disputed by everyone else, will one day be rendered indisputable.
Many
Christians in the ancient city of
Colosse
, however, thought otherwise. They
had become infected with the heresy of gnosticism.
The Gnostics thought themselves to have special knowledge,
privileged knowledge. They
were “in the know” whereas “ordinary”
Christians weren’t. The
“knowledge” of which the Gnostics boasted was actually a Platonic
corruption of Christian doctrine. Gnosticism
maintained that matter was evil, inherently evil.
Because matter was evil, God couldn’t have created it.
Then who had? The demi-urge
had. The demi-urge was the
agent of creation, even as the demi-urge was considerably less than God.
Since God had nothing to do with matter, God had nothing to do with
the human body. And since all
human beings are embodied, God had nothing to do with human history.
History can’t be the theatre of God’s revelation.
Then the Incarnation couldn’t have occurred for two reasons: one,
Incarnation is an event within history, and God scorns history; two,
Incarnation entails embodiment, and God scorns bodiliness.
Since Incarnation is impossible, Jesus of Nazareth can’t be God
incarnate; history isn’t important to God; and therefore history isn’t
important to Christians. Then
what is important to Christians, according to Gnosticism?
Gnosis is. Gnosis is
knowledge, privileged information. Christians,
according to the Gnostic heresy, are those who have come to understand
that God acts on people only in the sphere of the intellect, the mind.
God equips his people with special insight and privileged
information – thoroughly imbued with the presuppositions of Plato.
It’s important that Christians have the right information, said
the Gnostics; it’s not important that Christians act, act in history,
“do the truth”, in John’s
splendid phrase. It’s not
important, said the Gnostics, that Christians regard history as the
theatre of their obedience, since history is never the theatre of God’s
revelation. Obedience to God
doesn’t entail our doing,
according to the Gnostics; obedience to God entails only our thinking
(even as their thinking was skewed).
Paul wrote his Colossian letter in order to address the Gnostic
heresy that had made inroads in the congregation there.
Paul insists that Christ, and Christ alone (forget the demi-urge)
is God’s agent in creation just because Christ is
God. Paul insists that as
the (visible) image of the invisible God, Jesus Christ is
God incarnate. (Just in case
the Gnostics are slow to get the point, Paul repeats himself in Colossians
2: “In Christ the whole fullness of
deity dwells bodily.)
Therefore Paul plainly maintains that matter isn’t evil,
bodiliness is important, history matters, history is the theatre both of
God’s revelation and of the Christian’s activity.
It’s gathered up in one point: Christian obedience isn’t a
matter of acquiring abstract notions (wrong notions in any case);
Christian obedience is a matter of concrete doing.
Doing
what?
IV:
-- Paul gives us a clue where he’s going
when he tells us, “In him [Christ] all things were created, in heaven
and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and
for him.”
Exactly
what are the principalities, powers, thrones, dominions, authorities?
For centuries many Christians have equated these with angels, now
fallen, and therefore demons. To
be sure, scripture speaks of the demons, demons whom Christ has to subdue.
Scripture speaks also, however, of the principalities,
principalities whom Christ’s cross has reconciled.
(Please note that while the demons are exorcised, the powers are
reconciled to Christ.) The
demons and the principalities or powers plainly aren’t the same.
The demons are the demons and I shall say no more about them
tonight.
The principalities and powers, on the other hand, are very
different. Paul speaks of them
again in Romans 8. He uses
much the same vocabulary in 1st Corinthians 2.
In 1st Corinthians 2 he speaks of “the rulers of this
age”. The rulers of this age
aren’t individual humans. They
are institutions, social entities, identical with the powers.
The rulers of this age, he tells us, “crucified the Lord of
glory”.
To be sure, we can name the individuals most immediately involved
in the crucifixion: Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, and so on.
At the same time, these individuals represent, exemplify the force
of, those powers that they happen to speak for: Pilate, Roman
jurisprudence; Caiaphas, religious institutions; Herod, civil government
amidst occupation.
Admittedly, the powers can work evil: they crucified the Lord of
glory. But they aren’t
inherently evil, since God created them.
The powers (principalities) are the link between God’s love and
visible human activity and experience.
The powers are meant to be sinews, the ligatures that keep all the
dimensions and aspects of human existence together, and keep it all
together in God’s love.
Law,
for instance, is meant to do this. Law
conserves social order and fosters social intercourse.
Social order and social intercourse are impossible without law.
Therefore law as a power, a principality, has a divinely mandated
role as a sinew of God’s love for his creation.
The economic order has a similar role.
While it’s true that we humans don’t live by bread alone,
without bread we don’t live at all.
Since God wills our bodily life, God wills the economic order.
Education is a crucial principality.
We can’t love God with our mind as long as we are ignorant.
Therefore the apparatus needed to educate citizens is divinely
mandated, and it too is another sinew of God’s love holding his people
together.
Think of health care. In
view of our Lord’s concern for healing throughout his earthly ministry
we had better not say that God is indifferent to human health.
Then no Christian should doubt the importance of the apparatus
required to foster human health. And
no Christian should doubt the divine mandate of this particular
principality and its role as a sinew of God’s love.
Christians,
however, are aware of the Fall. We
know that since the Fall affects the entire creation, the powers are
fallen too. As fallen the powers, the authorities, no longer fulfil their
mandate unambiguously.
Civil
government, for instance, is divinely-mandated to prevent social
dissolution and secure justice. However
bad the governments might be that we are acquainted with, there is
something that would be worse by far: no government at all.
No government at all would guarantee chaos.
Human existence is impossible amidst social chaos.
When threatened with social chaos, people immediately grasp the
remedy which is most ready-to-hand: tyranny.
Life under a tyrant may be thoroughly miserable, but at least life
under a tyrant is possible. Still,
tyranny is tyranny and we rightly loathe it.
And however bad governments might be in
Ottawa
or Queen's Park, they are preferable to Saddam Hussein, preferable to
Moamar Khadafi, preferable to Josef Stalin or Chairman Mao.
Yet because the principalities and powers are fallen, governments
work evil as well. Most
important, because government, by definition, has a monopoly on power, the
fallen principality of government is always in danger of doing what is
unspeakably evil, what is out-and-out murderous.
In fact governments do. And
therefore it is always the task of the Christian and the church to recall
this principality to its vocation in Christ, through whom and for whom it
was made.
Boards of education are mandated to educate, divinely mandated to
educate, since God doesn’t wish ignorance to thrive.
Boards of education do educate -- to some extent.
I myself have profited immensely from the educational resources of
our society. At the same time,
boards of education do a great deal besides fulfil their mandate to
educate. They provide, for
instance, a political stepping-stone for those whose real concern isn't
education at all but rather political self-promotion.
Most important: educators -- history tells us over and over --
educators, when pressed, turn education into propaganda.
Propaganda is falsehood disseminated for the purpose of achieving a
social end. We can never
inspect too closely everything that our children bring home from school.
Let’s not forget that in Nazi Germany schoolteachers had the
highest proportion of Nazi party-members in their ranks of any social
group.
The health care system is mandated to keep people healthy.
It does. A cardiologist
brought my mother back from the edge of death, and the hospital harboured
her for 75 consecutive days. For
this I was billed no more than my income tax.
Yet the health care system lends itself to games of political
football, and as the football game intensifies less health care is
delivered, even as misappropriation, corruption and scandal proliferate.
Because the powers are fallen they don’t accomplish unambiguously
that for which they were created. They
are now compromised, to say the least, in their acting as links between
God’s love and different aspects of the created order.
Worse yet, Paul tells us in Galatians 4 that the powers, now in
revolt against God, deify themselves.
They claim an allegiance and adulation from humans that God never
mandated them to have. Fallen,
the sinews of God’s love have perverted themselves into idols, lethal
idols.
Not only do the powers revolt against God; in their hostility to
God they set themselves against one another.
They savage each other. Education
blames business for everything that’s wrong in the society.
Business blames the criminal justice system.
The criminal justice system blames health care.
They slander and falsify each other.
This being the case, why doesn’t the creation spiral down into
chaos? Paul tells us why:
Christ is supreme – and therefore sufficient for the task of preserving
the cosmos. “In Christ”, Paul announces in defiance of powers run
amok, “In Christ all things hold together.”
Colossians
1:17
assures us that however fast, however violently, the world spins
(metaphorically speaking), it can never fly apart.
“In him all things hold
together.” Why doesn’t the
creation fly apart (metaphorically speaking)?
Why doesn’t human existence become impossible?
Why don’t the countless competing special-interest groups, each
with its “selfist” savagery, fragment the world hopelessly?
Just because in him, in
our Lord, all things hold together. What
he creates he maintains; what he upholds he causes to cohere.
“Hold together” is a term taken from the Stoic philosophy of
the ancient Greeks. But
whereas the ancient Greek philosophers said that a philosophical principle
upheld the cosmos, Christians knew it to be a person, the living person of
the Lord Jesus Christ. He
grips the creation with a hand large enough to comprehend the totality of
the world.
V:
-- Having declared the supremacy of Christ
as creation’s agent and creation’s preserver, Paul declares the
supremacy of Christ as the church’s Lord.
“He is the head of the body, the church; he is the first-born
from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.”
Let
us be sure to note that our Lord is head
of his own body. Strictly
speaking the church is the earthly-historical manifestation of Christ’s
glorified body. We are called
to be the earthly-historical manifestation of his glorified body,
functioning as his hands and feet throughout the world, particularly where
there is suffering, ignorance and spiritual destitution.
In all of this he remains head.
Jesus Christ is Lord of the church as surely as he is Lord of the
cosmos. We must never
think that he transfuses himself into
the church so as to become the essence of the church.
To say the least, he is sinless while the church is not.
Let us always remember that the church is Christ’s body sheerly
by grace; of itself the church is a fallen principality as nasty as any
other.
When Paul speaks of Christ as head of the body he doesn’t mean
what the ancient Stoics meant. The
ancient Stoics spoke of a divine power that inheres the universe, thereby
divinising the universe. For
the past 250 years the Romantic Movement in the West has spouted the same
notion of a divine power or essence inhering the universe, with the
result, of course, that the universe is divinised.
The New Age movement says as much today.
We must always be aware that if the universe and all its aspects
are divinised, then there is nothing in the universe whose essence isn’t
God. If there’s nothing
whose essence isn’t God, then sin and evil are no more.
Now you understand why the New Age movement and Romanticism are
ceaselessly popular: they define sin out of existence.
Having sounded the warning that must be heard we may cheerfully go
on to relish the force of Paul’s pronouncement concerning the church,
the body of Christ. Christ is
present to the church at all times and in all circumstances.
His risen life always and everywhere animates it.
Since the church alone acts in his name and on his behalf, the
church does what no other institution, aggregation, group or party can
ever do.
Christ ever remains Lord of his people, indisputably.
Still, they are his people
unquestionably. In
Romans 8 Paul tells us that Jesus Christ is “the first-born among many
brethren”. To be sure, he
can be first-born among many brethren only because he is first-born from
the dead. Still, because he’s precisely this he is “elder brother”
to all of us who once were “dead in trespasses and sins” and who are
now, by his mercy, the beneficiaries of his resurrection.
What’s the result of Christ’s being both first-born of all
creation and also first-born from the dead?
The result is that he is pre-eminent.
Pre-eminent in the church, yes; but no less pre-eminent in the
world (even though the world isn’t aware of it.)
Pre-eminent in the church for the sake of the church’s making
known his pre-eminence in the world.
VI:
-- All of which brings me to my last point.
In the last portion our text announces that all things have been
reconciled to Christ, just because he has made his peace with all things
through the blood of his cross. Since
Christ has reconciled all things to himself, therefore the church,
Christ’s body, is summoned to announce his victory over the rebellious
principalities. Since Christ
has reconciled all things to himself, the church is summoned to inform the
powers that their effort at contradicting their mandate has been defeated.
The powers have been stripped of their capacity to damage the
creation ultimately. Since
Christ has made his peace with the cosmos through the blood of the cross,
the capacity of the principalities to function as they were meant to
function has been restored.
Then the church must rebuke the principalities today; rebuke them
and testify to them what their mandate is, how it has been restored, and
why their revolt is futile. The
church must testify on behalf of Christ to the principalities and hold
them to account, correcting them relentlessly.
If we think, for instance, that Egerton Ryerson’s vision for
public education now resembles a nightmare in some respects, then we are
summoned to call public education to account, to recall it to its
vocation, to inform if of its shabbiness where it is shabby and to declare
its glorious place in God’s economy.
The Gnostics in Colosse, we saw minutes ago, thought differently.
The Gnostics maintained, erroneously, that history, so far beneath
the purity of God, couldn’t be the theatre of God’s activity and
therefore couldn’t be the theatre of the church’s obedience.
The Gnostics were wrong. History
is the sphere of the church’s obedience.
And since Christ has reconciled all things to himself – thrones,
dominions, principalities, authorities – the body of Christ had better
not think it knows better than the head and retreat into privatized
abstractions where its religious head-games are a substitute for concrete,
earthly obedience.
There is no excuse for discouragement or inertia or despair among
Christians in this matter. If
we lack zeal in rebuking the powers, we haven’t yet discerned their
corruption. If we lack
confidence in addressing the powers, we are denying that Christ has
reconciled them to himself, however much we pretend to believe the gospel.
Earlier in the sermon I mentioned that “heaven” means (at least
in many places in scripture) that aspect of the creation we don’t see,
the aspect that underlies the creation we do see.
“Heaven and earth”, then, are the entire creation in all its
aspects. In Ephesians
3:10
Paul announces the goal of his ministry; his goal is that “through
the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.”
All of this occurs, of course, just because Jesus Christ,
first-born of all creation, first-born from the dead, is supreme now,
sufficient, and will be eternally.
Victor
Shepherd
August 2005
