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Teaching Letters

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

An old, rich man with a cranky, miserable attitude visited a rabbi who lived a simple life.  They weren't together very long before the rabbi got a wonderful idea on how to illustrate to the man that his cranky attitude was wrong.  He led him over to his window and he said, "Now look out the window and tell me what you see."  As the man stood there, he said, "Well, I see some men and some women and I see a few children."  "Fine."  The rabbi then led him across the room to a mirror.  "Now, look and tell me what you see."  The man frowned and said, "Well, obviously I see myself."

"Interesting," the rabbi replied.  "In the window there is glass, in the mirror there is glass, but the glass of the mirror is backed by a layer of silver.  And no sooner is the silver added than you cease to see others, only yourself."

THE PROMISES OF GOD

The Word That Is Alive  John 1:1-18

Imagine the boldness needed for a simple person to walk onto the campus of say, Harvard University, and announce, "I know something that you don't know." That person would be greeted with scorn at worst, and skepticism at best. It just doesn't make sense that someone unknown could bring something new to a group of people who profess to know it all (or most of it, anyway).

Paul the Apostle had this experience in the city of Athens. In the highly-charged religious environment of the Mediterranean world, rife with the presence of Greek and Roman gods, Paul announced that the true God had come to earth (Acts 17:16-34). To tell this to a group of religious Greek philosophers was tantamount to calling them "uninformed." By doing so, Paul gained their attention and proceeded to tell them about Jesus, the logos of God, who had become the living Word of God.

To Greeks, the logos (word) was not a person. It was either the spoken word or, more importantly, the word of the mind, or the reason. And at a universal level, it was the reason that governed the universe and all that is in it. They prided themselves on possessing, and pursuing, the logos. For Jews, the logos was the word spoken by the prophets of God. For neither-Greek nor Jew-was the logos a person. Never had the "reason of the gods" for the Greeks or the "word of the Lord" for the Jews been perceived as a person. Paul, and later John the Apostle in John 1, knew and told something that had not been known or told before. One, the Word of God is God. Second, the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among men. Third, Jesus of Nazareth is that living Word of God.

You now know something that not everyone knows, and hopefully are like some to whom Paul spoke who embraced Christ (Acts 17:32-34). You are holding the written word of God in your hands; are you also holding the hand of the living Word of God?

God's Promise to You: "To obey my word is to obey my Son."

RELATIONAL SPIRITUALITY-PART 1

What Is Man, That You Take Thought of Him?

The God of the Bible is infinite, personal, and triune.  As a communion of three Persons, one of God's purposes in creating us is to display the glory of His being and attributes to intelligent moral creatures who are capable of responding to His relational initiatives.  In spite of human rebellion and sin against the Person and character of the Lord, Christ bore the awesome price of our guilt and inaugurated "a new and living way" (Hebrews 10:20) by which the barrier to personal relationship with God has been overcome.  Because the infinite and personal God loves us, He wants us to grow in an intimate relationship with Him; indeed, this is the purpose for which we were created-to know, love, enjoy, and honor the triune Lord of all creation.

Since God is a relational being, the two great commandments of loving Him and expressing this love for Him by loving others are also intensely relational.  We were created not only for fellowship and intimacy with God but also with each other.  The relational implications of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity are profound.  Since we were created in God's image and likeness, we too are relational beings.  The better we know God the better we know ourselves.  Augustine's prayer for this double knowledge ("May we know Thee, may we know ourselves") reflects the truth that our union with Christ is now overcoming the alienation with God, with ourselves, and with others that occurred at the fall.

Our Greatness and Smallness

Human nature is a web of contradictions: we are at once the grandeur and degradation of the created order; we bear the image of God, but we are ensnared in trespasses and sins; we are capable of harnessing the forces of nature, but unable to rule our tongue; we are the most wonderful and creative beings on this planet, but the most violent, cruel, and contemptible of earth's inhabitants. 

In his Pensées, Pascal described the dignity and puniness of humanity in these words: "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.  The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him.  A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.  But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."

The Glory of God

Psalm 8 explores these twin themes, sandwiching them between expressions of the majesty of the Creator of all biological and spiritual life: "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth" (vv. 1a, 9).  The living God has displayed His splendor above the heavens, and He has ordained praise from the heavenly host to the mouth of infants and nursing babes (vv. 1b-2).  When, after our Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the children cried out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," the chief priests and the scribes became indignant and Jesus quoted this passage to them (Matthew 21:15-16).  Their simple confession of trusting love
was enough to silence the scorn of His adversaries and "make the enemy and the revengeful cease" (v. 2b). 

In verses 3-4, David's meditation passes from the testimony of children to the eloquence of the cosmos: "When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; what is man, that You take thought of him?  And the son of man that You care for him?"  From the time David wrote those words until the invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century, only a few thousand stars were visible to the unaided eye, and the universe appeared far less impressive than we now know it to be.  Even until the second decade of our century, it was thought that the Milky Way galaxy was synonymous with the universe.  Now this alone would be awesome in its scope, since our spiral galaxy contains over two hundred billion stars and extends to a diameter of 100,000 light years (remember that a light second is over 186,000 miles; the 93 million miles between the sun and the earth is eight light minutes).  But more recent developments in astronomy have revealed that our galaxy is a member of a local cluster of some twenty galaxies, and that this local cluster is but one member of a massive supercluster of thousands of galaxies.  So many of these superclusters are known to exist that the number of galaxies is estimated at over a hundred billion. 

What is man, indeed!  The God who created these stars and calls them all by name (Isaiah 40:26) is unimaginably awesome; His wisdom, beauty, power, and dominion are beyond human comprehension.  And yet He has deigned to seek intimacy with the people on this puny planet and has given them great dignity and destiny: "Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and You crown him with glory and majesty!" (v. 5).  While these words are applicable to all people, they find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ as the quotation of this passage in Hebrews 2:6-8 makes clear. 

We were made to rule over the works of God's hands (Psalm 8:6-8), but we forfeited this dominion in the devastation of the fall ("but now we do not yet see all things subjected to him"; Hebrews 2:8b).  But all things will be subjected under the feet of Christ when He returns (1 Corinthians 15:24-28), and we will live and reign with Him (Romans 5:17; 2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 5:10; 20:6). 

As wonderful as our dominion over nature will be, our true cause of rejoicing should be in the fact that, if we have placed our trust in Jesus Christ, our names are recorded in heaven (Luke 10:20).  "What is man, that You take thought of him?  And the son of man, that You care for him?"  The infinite ruler of all creation really does take thought of us and cares for us, and He has proved it by the indescribable gift of His Son (2 Corinthians 9:15; 1 John 4:9-10).  In the words of C. S. Lewis, glory means "good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things.  The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last."  Let us exult in hope of the glory of God!

The Inside Gatefold

PAID IN FULL

One day during the Great Depression, police hauled a frightened old man be­fore the magistrate in a New York City night court. They charged him with petty larceny; he was starving and had stolen a loaf of bread. By coincidence, the mayor himself, Fiorello LaGuardia, was presiding over the court that night. LaGuardia sometimes sat in for judges as a way of keeping close to the citizens of the city. LaGuardia fined the old man . "The law is the law, and cannot be broken," the mayor pointed out. At the same time, he took a bill out of his own wallet and told the man he would pay his fine for him. Then LaGuardia turned to the others in the courtroom and "cited" each of them for living in a city that did not reach out and help its poor and elderly, tempting them unduly to steal. The mayor fined everyone in the audience 50 cents each, passed around his famous fedora to collect the fines, and turned over its contents to the amazed defendant. The hat contained almost . The old man left the court­room with tears in his eyes.

God provided a solution to our problem, and freely offers it to us as a gift. Christ's death paid for everyone's sin, but each individual must decide if he wants Christ's payment or if he plans to pay the debt himself. Each person must personally receive this gift, and when he does, the payment that it provides is credited to his account. God can then reckon that person's debt of sin as "PAID IN FULL."

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