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I have been pondering recently the fact that we seem to take the measure of darn near everything we do and most of what we feel. And I am wondering whether this obsession of sorts with measurement tends to confine rather than liberate. We learn the importance of dimensions very early in life, measuring length, width, height, depth, area and volume. All these measurements are valuable tools that provide knowledge and the ability to assess ourselves and the world around us. Time is not really a dimension, yet we think of time as dimensional because we can measure its passage. But if all we really embrace is the measurable dimension of time, are we missing a vast universe before time and beyond time? Of course, we know this, and we have words to acknowledge it, like eternity and forever. The OED has its own definition of time as the “indefinite progress of existence and events.” It seems to me, though, that if we ignore the immeasurable as beyond our understanding and therefore of little use to us in life’s journey, we may also miss God.

Consider, for example, our story of Jesus Messiah. Two thousand years ago, as we measure time, a child was born, a son, to Mary in Bethlehem. We know this happened because Luke researched the story carefully and wrote it down. This child was very special, a savior, the Messiah, according to the angels who announced the birth. The child grew to become an itinerant preacher, steeped in knowledge of Scripture and able to perform miraculous healings. The entire story is well within our grasp of understanding because it is told in the familiar dimensions of time and space. As Christians we can even make the leap of faith that this Jesus was somehow the son of God incarnated to be with us to teach us God’s saving grace.

All this learning, though, is only the half the story. The disciple John would have us know that Jesus was with God in the beginning (ie, before time). And “through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (Jn. 1: 2-3). John reports an argumentative exchange in the temple courts between Jesus and a group of Pharisees in which Jesus begins to assert his identity as one who has come from God the Father, not on his own, but because “God sent me.” (Jn. 8: 42). When the Pharisees ask Jesus if he thinks he is greater than their father, Abraham, Jesus replies, “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am!”, invoking his oneness with God and the eternity of his being. (Jn. 8:58; see also God’s “I am” assertion Ex. 3:14). Further, on the night before his death, Jesus asked God to glorify him “with the glory I had with you before the world began.” (Jn. 17:5. Also 17:24)

Both Peter and Paul shared John’s convictions on this matter. Peter asserted that God chose Christ before the creation of the world (1Pe. 1:20). Paul asserted that God promised eternal life before the beginning of time ( Titus 1:2), and “this grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.” (1Ti 1:9). These three men demonstrated by their writings that they shared a deep understanding of the immeasurable universe occupied by God before time and beyond time, as well as in time. This understanding liberated them from the confines of what was measurable. Through Jesus, God has acquainted us not only with God’s power and grace, but also with the “indefinite,” eternity, the forever, far beyond our comprehension but well within our capacity to embrace, all perhaps that we may make use of the measurable without being imprisoned by it.

Thanks be to God.

“Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” ¹ It is Christmas Eve, and I am musing over Scripture, allowing visiting family members a break from their host. I am reliving the day centuries ago when God broke into human life as one of us. Was this event really the great gift of a savior prophesied by Isaiah, Micah, and Malachi? God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth did make clear to all who would hear him that he came not to judge us but to save us. ( see Jn. 12: 44-47 for example). Clearly, though, he was not the savior envisioned by the prophets Isaiah, Micah and Malachi, who saw God providing a great and powerful political ruler to subdue their enemies and reunify the nation.

Reliving the Christmas story tonight is to relive the mystery of just what God was up to in Bethlehem. God came as an anonymous child of a young, unmarried woman in the poorest, most humble setting with no home nor any societal status. It would appear further that God would have us know little or nothing of the child’s family, his education or upbringing. If this child were to become the “King of Kings” in later life, would not his early history have been written? Would not every detail of such a singularly important person be of interest. We know more about Abraham, Moses and David than we do of Jesus. Why was God content with this?

In my musings I am thinking that maybe God was up to something far less momentous than we credit God with. C.S. Lewis observed that God incarnated His Godself in human form to better communicate with humanity. ² Essentially, all of God’s efforts to speak directly, issue laws, select kings, and inspire prophets seemed ineffective, so God decided to become man. Well, we can see after a couple of thousand years that this amazing effort has not been all that effective either.

I wonder, maybe God incarnated His Godself to get closer to us to better understand us, to learn first hand the human condition of life, its fragility, its pain and suffering as well as its pleasures and joys. Through simple acts of healing God as man could experience the human joy of giving to another and seeing as a human the relief of a disease cured. God chose to experience the riskiest beginning to life and the most painful torture in death, maybe so God would know the worst of life. Perhaps God chose to be an itinerant preacher without sin to learn what happens to a man who would urge, even berate, those whose positions of power would be threatened.

It seems to me as I revisit Christmas, that God came not to judge us, but perhaps simply to be among us to experience all the vagaries of this creation…to get closer to us to better understand how the human experience of birth, life and death influences human behavior, and perhaps also to better enable God to train us to be saints in God’s eternal kingdom. It seems to me that the God who loves me and you would do just that. Thanks be to God.

Merry Christmas!

1. Isaiah 7:14 The Hebrew is clearly translated “young woman”, while the Greek translated the Hebrew as “virgin”. The important part of the verse is the prophesy that God would be with us in a son to be born.
2. Lewis lays out his thinking in his chapter “The Perfect Penitent” in Mere Christianity.

As we prepare for our annual celebration of God’s great and astonishing act of reconciliation with humankind, we might take a few moments to consider a most astonishing event that occurred in the summer of 1741, in London, when an unremarkable son of wealth, Charles Jennens, wrote to a friend, saying, “Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion week. I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah…”. ¹ Highly unlikely, at best.

George Frideric Handel composed opera to Italian and German librettos. He was uncomfortable with the English language. He was a man well past his prime and out of step with the changing tastes of London theater goers. He had never written a sacred oratorio; for he was a man of the theatre, and in Puritan England of the mid-eighteenth century before the Great Awakening, singing Scripture as public entertainment would risk the serious charge of blasphemy. Though he was not bankrupt, his financial health had waned. He had recently recovered from a serious illness. Handel found himself bereft of opportunity, and he never composed without a performance in mind.

Then, over the transom, so to speak, utterly unexpected, came an invitation from the English Lord Lieutenant of Dublin to participate in a series of oratorio concerts to benefit local charities. Dublin was the second largest city in the British Isles with 60,000 inhabitants. Handel realized that he could use several recent secular works, and for the sacred component, he took up Jennens libretto. But the libretto had no familiar drama in the theatrical sense, no warring factions, no named protagonist or villain, nor a coherent narrative. Jennens had delivered Handel 57 passages of Scripture loosely telescoping a thousand years of history, written in English.

However, from the moment Handel took up the pen on August 22, 1741, he completed the entire score in an astonishing 22 days. Handel’s manuscript comprised 259 pages and nearly 200,000 notes, a pace of about 15 notes per minute for three weeks of 10 hour days, replete with erasures, blots and emendations. Handel borrowed from no one else but himself, and then in only four of his twenty choruses. There is no historical evidence that he was divinely inspired, but it strains all credulity to believe otherwise. ² Indeed there is ample evidence that he was captured and inspired by the sacred nature of the subject matter he had undertaken to score. From his devout Lutheran tradition he challenged both the popular deist theology of the day and the puritanical condemnation of praising God in the public square.

Handel’s Messiah is not just about the birth of Jesus or the resurrection of Christ, but rather the grand scope of God’s presence in the world and plan for God’s people as spoken by the prophets Isaiah, Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah and the psalmists; as reported by the gospel writers; as witnessed by Paul, and as revealed by John. Jennens’ libretto covers the gamut, and Handel’s score warms the heart, lifts the soul, crushes in judgment, weeps in sorrow, celebrates victory and ends in joy, filling one’s spirit with God’s Peace. Messiah is a two hour tour de force, a spiritual masterpiece of music and Scripture of which there is no equal, the crowning achievement of perhaps history’s greatest composer.³ It remains an enduring gift of revealed biblical truth in the postmodern age.

Thanks be to God.

Merry Christmas!

1. Letter from Jennens to his friend Edward Holdsworth on July 10, 1741,
   quoted in Christopher Hogwood’s biography, Handel: New York, Thames & Hudson, 2007, 167 (words spelled as written)
2. No serious biographer will assert that God’s hand was on Handel’s pen, but my own research leads me to the conclusion that the circumstantial evidence would suggest otherwise.
3. Though both Mozart and Haydn paid Handel the compliment of imitation, it was Beethoven who asserted more than once, “Handel was the greatest composer that every lived.” See Hogwood, Handel, 248.

Author’s Note: Annually, on a mid-December Sunday afternoon my wife and I can be found at Harris Theatre in Chicago’s Millennium Park, center orchestra, about 10 rows back on the aisle, to once again experience the majesty and mystery of Messiah performed by the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, an institution celebrating its 150th year, formed following the great fire of 1871, and performing Messiah every Advent since 1879.

In our language, advent means the arrival of a notable person or thing, and in our religion it means the coming or second coming of Christ. For the Jews of the OT anticipating the destruction of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon, their prophets foresaw a time of suffering wrought by an angry God whose covenants they disobeyed openly with abandon. These same prophets also foresaw a time of reconciliation with their God. Isaiah is most often quoted in regard to the coming of Jesus Messiah, but there were many oracles of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others that were written down and preserved in Scripture.

The one I like best comes from Jeremiah. “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another , or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” (Jer. 31: 31-34)

This oracle of Jeremiah is the only reference in the OT to a new covenant, though Ezekiel does foresee a new heart and spirt. (Ezek. 11:19-20). But there was considerable inconsistency regarding the manner in which God would once again embrace his people of Judah and Israel. Jeremiah says the Lord promises “a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” Jer. 33: 15. God would install a new king to overcome the great powers and rule with justice. After all, if God were to once again embrace God’s people, someone would have to emerge to make this happen.

And then there is the matter of time, a dimension that confines and defines us humans, but is of no matter to God. For Jeremiah, the advent was some 600 human years down the line, and after all that, what arrived was God incarnate in an itinerant country preacher.

All right. If you are waiting for the punch line, there isn’t one. I don’t know what all this means for you or us in our time. But I am thinking that for me, it means that instead of waiting for God to arrive; ie., to come to me in some form and at some time I can envision with my severely limited human capability; I should instead set myself about finding God where God is here and now in our world.

The OED defines ‘thanksgiving’ as “the expression of gratitude, especially to God.” Certainly the word compels an object of the preposition “to” or “for”, but I wonder whether God is that object in the minds of most Americans. Yes, most of us our thankful for our many blessings as broad as freedom and as narrow and essential as food on the table. Yesterday marked our annual day of reflecting on and enjoying these blessings. In my own reflection, I have two serious questions for consideration.

First, in our act of being thankful for our blessings, is there an object to which we direct our thankfulness? How many Americans held hands, said grace at their meal, and thanked God for these blessings? How many attended a worship service in their community as a collective act of gratitude to God? The OED defines our Thanksgiving as “an annual national holiday marked by religious observances and a traditional meal.” How dated is this notion? It seems to me from my observations that the objects of our gratitude are each other, our spouse, our family members, our community, and maybe, but less likely, our nation. We are social beings, and a principal source of our well being are those closest to us whom we know, love and trust. As we express our gratitude, is God relevant? Does God play a role. Is God even in the conversation? I wonder.

Second, consider the objects for which we express our thanks. What are we thankful for? Are they not all temporal realities that provide us comfort, pleasure, and well-being—the many blessings of prosperity, good health, safe travel, family and friends? These daily realities of life are foremost in our thinking and in our expressions of gratitude. And even if we reach out to God in thankfulness, it is for these blessings that we count.

It seems to me, then, that our Thanksgiving today is once again confirmation of our notion of salvation quite similar to the Israelites of old. Salvation is first and foremost the deliverance from harm, ruin or loss into the land of milk and honey in this life (See OED). For the Israelites, it was God who provided this salvation from enemies, disease and drought; though in the latter days God was nowhere to be found. Here we are again. We are thinking small in our Thanksgiving, and we err in leaving God out of the conversation.

I leave Thanksgiving and turn to Advent with a stunningly relevant paragraph from C.S. Lewis’ most famous sermon: “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”¹ Indeed.

1. “The Weight of Glory”, delivered June 8, 1941 at Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. See 2 Cor. 4:16-18.

The German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rightly observed that God’s relationship with humanity as recorded in Old Testament Scripture had nothing whatsoever to do with saving the human soul. Righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth was the focus. It is not with the beyond that we should be concerned but rather with this created world to be preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled and restored.¹ Salvation in the OT had a very worldly kind of rescue or liberation in mind (see Ex. 15:2).²
Moreover, God’s salvation of the Israelites was axiomatic. Salvation as the forgiveness of sin was inseparable from the behavior of the community as a whole embracing God’s broader purpose of righteousness and justice in God’s earthly kingdom. When the people followed God’s law, worshiping God exclusively, all went well with them in this world. God would vanquish their enemies before them and deliver the land God had promised. God was with the people in this world and by extension in the realm occupied by their ancestors.

So, what happens when the community becomes distant from God under corrupt kings, against whom God had warned? (1 Sam.8: 4-18) God spoke through the Psalmists and the Prophets, disdaining perfunctory sacrifices as disingenuous exercise (Ps 40:6; Isa 1:11-15), and instead calling for behavior consistent with God’s will for God’s earthly kingdom (Mic. 6:6-8). But the religious structure continued with its priestly traditions, jealously guarding its powerful role in the community. What hope was there for the average citizen to seek salvation, seeing God’s absence all around him? All he could do was wait for God’s return. The writer of Hebrews put it best. “Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.” (Heb. 10:11)

And what of us today? Have our Christian traditions become either mindless rote or diluted doctrine such that God’s axiom of salvation seems less real because we know in our hearts that we are not living as close to God’s will as we might? Do we not see the absence of God all around us?

I think Paul’s admonition to his Roman audience was good advice. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). I am comforted by the knowledge that the will of God is well documented in Scripture, is unchanging, and easy to grasp. Love God for all God is and has created. Love our neighbor. Do justice. Be kind. And walk with humility before God and our fellow citizen.
God’s salvation in the resurrection of the spirit is, after all, axiomatic. (Mk. 12:27)

1. Letters and Papers From Prison, New York, Touchstone, 1953, p. 286
2. Plantinga, Thompson, Lundberg, Christian Theology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 316

For the past two weeks I have been immersed in contemplation of one simple, straightforward passage in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus is in the temple the week before his execution, interacting with Sadducees who tried to trick him into an explanation of what happens to a woman who was married to seven brothers, each of whom died leaving the next brother to marry her in the levirate tradition because she was childless. Not believing in resurrection, the Sadducees ask, “in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

Jesus berates them for their failure to understand either Scripture or the power of God. He asserts simply that when they rise from the dead, they don’t marry because they are like angels in heaven. Then further, “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.” (Mk. 12: 26:27) The reference to Exodus 3:15 is Jesus’ way of stating matter-of-factly that your ancestors who have died are alive with God.

This story told by Mark in his gospel also appears in the other two synoptic gospels (Mt. 22:23-33 and Lk. 20:27-40). Commentators have slightly different interpretations and emphases. Jesus is speaking of immortality more than resurrection. Jesus is forecasting his own resurrection. Paul had his own take on the matter which he detailed in Chapter 15 of his first letter to the Corinthians.

I wonder though, in our efforts to describe the fine points of Jesus’ message in this passage, do we miss the essence? What struck me was Jesus’ simply matter-of-fact manner as though he were teaching a well known math axiom to young children. “You don’t understand Scripture, nor do you understand the power of God. Look, when you go to heaven you are like the angels. You know about angels, right? Everybody knows about angels. You are alive with God. Didn’t God tell Moses that?” Jesus’ simple response brought the heavenly and spiritual reality into the mundane.

Have I been missing something all these years? Is the reality of eternal life so obvious as a matter of history as well as faith? Jesus seemed to think so. Yet while the reality of eternal life with God is fully grounded in Jewish faith and the history of the Israelites, there is scant mention in Scripture. In the early days, Enoch “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.” (Gen. 5:24) Centuries later, God took Elijah up in a whirlwind before many witnesses (2Kgs. 2:11). And in the time of torture in the second century BCE, it was recorded that those of faith “believe that they, like our patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, do not die to God, but live to God.” (4 Macc. 7:19). In addition, Jesus had, by the power of God, resurrected Lazarus from the dead (Jn. 11: 38-44), and had brought back to life Jairus’s daughter (Mk. 5: 35-43) and a widow’s son (Lk. 7:11-15). The power of God can bring us from death to life, from life to heaven uncorrupted (Enoch, Elijah, Jesus) or out of our body in death to an eternal existence with God to be revealed to us as we pass through the veil.

So, if eternal life is so well grounded in Israelite tradition and faith, how does one account for the fact that this reality is not more present in Scripture? Did the law and Jewish religious structure make attainment of eternal life with God seem unattainable? And what of the church? Some thoughts on these questions next week.

Christians have much to say about forgiveness as an act of moral virtue consistent with and perhaps utterly imperative to embracing Jesus’ call to love one another. We are taught that forgiveness involves an empathetic outreach of reconciliation, graciousness and love. There is solid support for this teaching in New Testament scripture which I will reference below.

In the Lord’s Prayer, however, the request of God that Jesus taught (and we translate as the verb ‘forgive’) is a much simpler, more practical act that augers for peaceful coexistence in community. The Greek aphiemi used in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke means variously to dismiss or release someone from a place, from a moral or legal obligation or consequence. It contemplates an action of cancelation, remittance or pardon. There is no empathy in the term, no generosity, no grace, no mercy, no outreach of reconciliation. Simply, let it be. Let it pass. Move on. Don’t hold a grudge. Drop your complaint of others while asking God to drop God’s many potential complaints against you. Another Greek verb of release is apoluo which we also translate as to forgive. This verb occurs in Luke 6:37 as part of Jesus’ admonition against judging others: “Forgive and you will be forgiven”.

Yet we all have to deal with anger which is often fully justified when we are harmed by the actions of others. The old adage, hell has no fury like a woman scorned ¹, is real life anger personified. Forgive? Never! It seems to me that God understands our anger. Real events can cause anger and an angry reaction, even as Jesus disrupted the money changers in the temple (Mt. 21:12). What Jesus seems to have been teaching his disciples about prayer is to set aside your claims against others, releasing them and yourself from this disturbance of your peace, and God will pardon you as well for your shortcomings.

Now, the Christian view of forgiveness seems to be wholly empathetic, wrapped in love, generosity, grace and even mercy. Paul pleads with the Ephesians to put away all their anger and wrangling and malice toward one another, “and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you”(Eph.4:32). Here the Greek verb for Paul is charito, which is to freely and graciously bestow the favor of kindness to another. See also 2Cor.2:7,10) Forgiveness in these contexts is quite different, akin to the notion of Christian charity, one to another.

So, of course, we should each endeavor to follow Paul’s advice in our community relationships. Yet it seems to me that Jesus does not require such perfection in our behavior as a condition precedent to approaching God in prayer. I think maybe all God asks of us is to release any complaints we have of others as we approach God to release any complaint God may have with us for our sins. Not so hard, really. And a lot healthier way to live.

1. William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, a play, 1697

If you are like me and attend churches of different denominations from time to time, you know to be alert to the recitation of our Lord’s Prayer. The only action line of promise on our part is to forgive the debts, sins or trespasses of others as we ask God to forgive ours. The Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans forgive those who trespass against us, while the Methodists forgive those who sin against us and ask for a like forgiveness. Traditional Presbyterians and Congregationalists tend to favor the forgiveness of debts as they forgive their debtors.

The phraseology of each liturgical practice has support in Scripture. Matthew uses the forgiveness of debts and debtors (Mt. 6:12), a very Jewish notion consistent with the law laid down by Moses (Dt. 15: 1-11). Essential to the community of God’s people was the practice of extinguishing debts every seven years coupled with kindness to the poor. We ask God to forgive our debt to God (sin) which we can never repay, just like we forgive others in accordance with the law. Luke avoids the need for interpretation by replacing the word “debts” with “sins” (Lk. 11:4), but acknowledges that we will forgive only those “indebted” to us. My commentaries don’t make note of this lack of reciprocity. Yet Luke wrote Greek, and the Greek is clear. The words and meaning for sin and debt are quite different. Now it may be that because only God and God’s Son can forgive sin, it is inappropriate for humans to pledge to do so. Modern denominations that use the term sin, provide this reciprocity by a pledge to forgive those who sin against us, thus forgiving the person, not the sin itself. The Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians avoid all this messiness by ignoring the text of the Prayer in Matthew and Luke, and instead use the admonition added by the evangelist in Matthew following the Prayer to forgive the trespasses of others so that God will forgive yours (Mt. 6: 14-15).

The only trouble with this language is that a trespass is an unwarranted or unlawful intrusion on the person or property of another. I don’t know about you, but I need a lot more forgiveness from God than my minor sins of trespass. So I think, for me at least, asking God to forgive my sins as I forgive those who sin against me, covers all the bases. And this thought leads to a consideration of the verb “to forgive” as used in these passages of Scripture. How hard is it to forgive? Not as hard as one might think. More on this next week.

The following are thoughts of our nation on a Labor Day weekend following a summer of fires in the West, hurricane winds in the South, floods in the East, and a government run amok, printing phony wealth, deserting allies and dishonoring patriotic service. Good grief!

First thought: Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand….¹

Are we coming unglued, or are we no better or worse off than when Yeats wrote these words following World War I, or in 1941 or the late 1960’s? And yet it does seem to me that the physics of discontent and discord may indeed overwhelm the core of order and civility if no one is really in control.

Second thought: God is in control.

One thoughtful fellow whose “musings” I read regularly finds comfort in his understanding from Scripture that God is in control. Human leaders are free to choose, but their choices are directed by God—a biblical truth notwithstanding the logical contradiction.² Indeed, Scripture assures us, “God is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes” Dan. 4: 25b. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God, Ro. 13:1. All power exercised by humans on earth comes from God. When Pilate warned Jesus that he had power to release Jesus or crucify him, Jesus replied, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above,” Jn. 19:11. Is God then directing us toward chaos?

Third thought: God is in charge, but not yet taking control

Since God incarnated part of Godself in Jesus, ascended Jesus back to God, and brought us the Holy Spirit to assist us, God seems to have taken somewhat of a back seat position. While God gives us direction and comfort through the actions of the Spirit, and surely intervenes in personal circumstances, for which there is much evidence, God seems to be abiding all manner of human behavior and consequence within the structures God has created. Biblical scholar N.T. Wright reflected on the Ro. 13.1, quoted above, in his commentary on the Epistle, “The authorities are part of the present world order, the good and wise structure of God’s original creation.” Karl Barth, in his commentary on Romans, engaged in a complex analysis of Paul’s thinking on the subject, concluding that all revolt against unjust rulers simply results in a new set of cracked vessels in control. No one can play God because no one is God except God.

The real contradiction then is perhaps the vary notion of free choice among flawed humanity. We are so weak and given to sin in our mortal state, that we are incapable of making a free choice consistent with the sovereign will of God. Therefore, we are destined to bumble about until the Second Coming when God actually takes control. In the meantime, since all collective action necessarily corrupts in compound fashion, our only viable recourse is our personal behavior. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Ro. 12:21), and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Ro. 13:9). I take comfort in the knowledge through faith that God is in charge if not yet opting to take control, abiding the widening gyre.

1. Yeats, William Butler, The Second Coming, 1919
2. Roper, David, E-Musings, A Ministry of Idaho Mountain Ministries, Sept. 1, 2021