Key to Colossians

Our pastor has been preaching through the book of Colossians for some time now and he's done a great job. Most recently he has been preaching on the family (chapter 3), which involves some pretty significant challenges to our culture. Naturally enough, there have been many questions and much discussion about counter-cultural picture of the home described there. Last night, Daniel (the pastor) wanted to pause from the verse by verse exposition in order to read the book as a whole, thus giving us an opportunity to step back and see the letter as a whole, and how this teaching fits into the bigger picture.

It occurred to me when Daniel read Colossians, and was reinforced in my own reading of the text this morning, that the linchpin to the whole discussion seems to be 3:1-4. The whole book is a call to change our perspective, our way of thinking, our worldview, from the sinful pattern of this world to the eternal pattern of Christ. We have changed our primary citizenship from the City of Man to the Kingdom of God, which has broken upon this world in a preliminary way in the Church and awaits full realization at the end. I think this is signaled in 1:13: "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves..."

So all the discussion about marriage, the roles of men and women, the ideals of parenting, etc. are aspects of this more general call to change our perspective, to put off old patterns and put on new ones. I think that's the bigger picture, of which this is a smaller part - though a difficult one for many. It seems to me that one result is that is that we are defining our terms or thinking in a conceptual framework that is still anchored in the Old Way. So words like submission necessarily imply inferiority and headship implies arrogance and misuse of power. We have to re-orient our minds on the pattern of Christ in order to understand to really get this kingdom teaching.

Kierkegaard's Wound

One of the interesting paradoxes about pursuing holiness is that the more one advances in holiness, the more one feels the weight of sin and dependence upon God. People who are not serious about moral and righteous living often have a high esteem of themselves and of their virtue, while often those who really are more virtuous feel less so, because they are more aware of and more sensitive to the depths of sin in the heart of every person.

In a book I'm reading for a seminar, C Stephen Evans says: "Kierkegaard speaks of this split between what one is and what one knows one should be as a wound, and says that it is the mark of the truly moral or ethical person to 'keep the wound open.' and not bandage it with superficial palliatives."

In other words, it is painful to recognize sin within us - it hurts. And we live in a culture that wants to psychologize and medicate any kind of pain (even good pain) and convince us that we are really OK and good - it wants to kill the vestiges of sin by telling us there is no such thing. So we are taught to put band-aids on this wound, and to kill the pain through endless rounds of business and distractions that never give us time to rest and feel the pain of our sinfulness.

So Kierkegaard (who primarily wrote against the shallow superficiality of cultural Christianity in his day) is wise to warn us to "keep the wound open." That way we are wary of pride and constantly reminded of our dependence upon God's grace.

Calvin on knowledge of God

A thought for the day:

Like Augustine before him, John Calvin talked about the pursuit of happiness as the beginning point for the knowledge of God. Calvin, however, kind of went through the back door in saying we need to first come to grips with our deep unhappiness, with the ruin wrought by sin in our lives and in the world. Calvin:

Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own
unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God. Thus, from the feeling
of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and - what is more - depravity
and corruption, we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full
abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone. To
this extent we are prompted by our own ills to contemplate the good things of
God; and we cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become
displeased with ourselves.

In other words, we must first deal with the reality that things are not the way they are supposed to be; that something deep and fundamental is wrong about ourselves. We must be honest with ourselves. In so doing, we can begin to find God as He redeems and makes whole what is broken.

Quoted in David Clyde Jones: Biblical Christian Ethics.