Sometimes I read something, or think about something, and know that I really want - occasionally even need - to blog it. Why this is blogged rather than journalled I think isn't because I think that my own little thoughts should be instructing and leading others, but more because there's something stake in the groundly about committing something that's true to six billion people (give or take those tribal languages which my blog hasn't quite been translated into yet..) It makes me a. think something through and b. holds me accountable for having believed it rather than being able to shove it out of my head when more it's more convenient.
So firstly, this is some truth:
15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,
16 for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
17 He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
This truth is brought to you from Colossians 1. I recognise if anyone happens to read this you will fall into one of two categories. One group of people are people who believe this kind of stuff and therefore possibly saw the first line and scrolled straight down to here as they already know it. The other are people who don't believe it and scrolled down to hear because they think it's poppycock. Whichever side of the fence you fall I would recommend going back over it - cos it's either true or false and nothing can be the same again either way. Anyway, I happen to believe it's true and am one of the people who perhaps just skim read it for this reason. However, what happens next really struck me....
21 This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. 22 Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
23 But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it.
This last bit is the point of this post and bless you for getting here. I think this is an astonishingly important thing for all people regardless of the fence issue - sometimes we need to continue believing truth. I am someone who responds well to affirmation and am fortunate to be in many situations where I continue to be affirmed. Yet it's not a very sustainable way of living. To be dependent on other people's feedback can make day to day life quite up and down.
I equally love and am challenged by the fact though that some things can remain true regardless of how I feel about them. We don't continually look for proof about gravity - we (well, "we") did our research, worked out it was a thing and then got on with doing life around around this principle. But these verses shove this stuff about God under the same umbrella that we'd use for science and whatnot. It's an unchanging, non-dependent, always and forever, Truth. It says that I, as a Christian, don't need to keep being assured by anecdotal or analytic evidence of how God views me. The end results of what he achieved by properly dying and properly coming back to life don't vary. What he did was objectively once and objectively for all - I am always included in the "everything" that he has made peace with. However I'm feeling and whatever my mood this will never change - in exactly the same way that I'm not suddenly going to float up to my ceiling just because I question the basic principles of physics.
I find "standing firm" really quite hard - maybe because I can be so changeable it is difficult to accept the same isn't true of all other things. Yet I'm struck today by the importance of telling myself truth and then living in light of that truth, regardless of feeling and regardless of what others might be or might not be telling me. If more frequently my knees stopped shaking and my mind stopped wavering, I think I might just realise quite how solid the ground beneath me really is.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Very interesting! Speaking as a reluctant-other-side-of-fence-sitting-scientist, I would hazard to suggest two differences between God and Gravity however.... Actually three; the third being that God is not alleged to drop apples on people. On second thoughts, if he is as described by non-fence-sitters, I guess he did do it, didn't he, ultimately speaking? Now, where was I?... Ah yes; first thing. The first logical difference is that scientists hold the theory of gravity only as the /closest/ thing to the truth about falling apples that we currently know about, not as The Truth The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth (so help me Newton?). Not so for the non-fence-sitters' understanding of God, at least as I understand it. Second difference, I would suggest, is that apples keep falling on my head and my toast keeps falling on the floor (butter-side down too). And much as I would like to try it, I've so far never floated even for a second outwith a body of water (though I have yet to get my hands on some fizzy lifting drink...). Nor have other people told me of such things (in sobriety). In short, very little has happened to me thus far to cause me to question this theory of Gravity. In my own experience and, I am lead to believe, that of those non-fence-sitters willing to talk to me, there are sometimes goings on in the world which do not fit (at least at first inspection) neatly under the God view and which therefore test their ability to stand firm in the God Truth. I'm not passing judgement (here) on whether your knees /should/ shake. My point is simply that it seems to me forgivable if 'Godly Knees' were to shake more often than 'Gravity Knees' do, given the goings on with toast etc versus suffering etc. Though, it seems that God might not see knees like I do? - I suppose you might argue that's why he wrote this passage...?
ReplyDelete