DECEMBER 2011
OUR WORLD TODAY
Am I a heretic?
I am always thinking. Often I muse on bible passages that puzzle me, which has given me the incentive to slowly change my focus from Scriptures alone to combining it with the Created word, a fusing of Spirit–inspired writings with God’s direct revelation in creation. Not surprisingly this has led to different ideas.
It all started with that famous text “God loves the world, the cosmos, so much that he offers his only begotten son as a ransom to wrest it out of the grip of the Great Deceiver”. In the concept of cosmos I include everything we can see, probe, think, paint, compose in music or prose or poetry, build theories upon and write philosophical treatises about.
For me that definition of cosmos and the coming of the cosmic Kingdom are at the core of my quest for salvation. For that end God has given the Scriptures to provide us with “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in our pilgrimage from where we are to the coming Kingdom. Actually Romans 1:20 suggests to me that even without Christ and the Bible, a person on Judgement Day, just by seeing creation as a miracle and honouring its maker, might plead that as sufficient ground for salvation, because billions never have heard true gospel preaching, and a gracious God will make allowances for that.
Colossians 1:15-20 is for me one of the most poignant passages of Scripture, because it described that Jesus sees Himself as the first-born of the entire creation. First-born means that He was indeed the first human being and existed before anything else. He almost always calls Himself “the Son of Man”, Humanity Personified. In His very humanness, in His ultimate loving kinship with all his fellow creatures, Jesus is, simultaneously, the image of the invisible God. He makes God’s love visible so that we can fully experience this love. We, women and men, are made “in his image”: we physically look like Jesus, who, as God, has entered into His creation, and so affirms that God, we and the earth belong together. Forever.
As the first human creature ever He created the entire cosmos, all that lives, moves and has its being. He created this by Him and for Him. That to me explains why we, his brothers and sisters, his look-alikes, are also so immensely creative, evident in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hildegard van Bingen, Rembrandt, Bach, van Gogh, as well as such eminent scholars as Luther, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Bavinck, Louise Pasteur, Barbara W. Tuchman, Einstein, and such technical giants as Steve Jobs.
Jesus has gone for me and for his creation through death, where He too has been the first, because nothing in my life happens which He Himself has not first experienced: pain, loneliness, sickness, deep sorrow, and even my death. God, for my salvation, has deemed it necessary that in the life of the man Jesus his total fullness is present, so that we too and everything else, have been reconciled, have been set aright. In his glorified human existence he is our Mediator with the Father. That’s how I read Colossians 1:15-20.
I believe that we are under-selling ourselves, a typical Calvinistic trait. After all Psalm 8 calls us “little less than a god,” and Psalm 82:6 suggest that “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High.”
Since Jesus created it all, any act to harm creation is an assault on the holiness of Jesus. I see The Lord’s Prayer as an eschatological instrument, centering on The Kingdom – the New Creation – to Come. Therefore to “Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,” must be seen in that light as well, asking Jesus to be merciful when we sin against God’s beloved creation, harm its holiness, and asking us not to point fingers to others who do the same.
I also see Revelation 22:2 that way. The statement that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations”, has long been a puzzle to me. Global Warming is a direct result of our machinery spewing Carbon Dioxide. The leaves of the tree are the healing agents there. Creation has her own mechanism for restoration, now overwhelmed by the immense amounts of man-made Green House Gases. Once the carbon-based poisons are eliminated – which will be in the New Creation – the leaves of the trees will do the rest.
At Christmas we celebrate Christ’ second birth: His first-birth took place ‘in the beginning.’
Is this comprehensive approach to the gospel really a heresy?
Bert’s new books, The Shortest Day, and Day without End, are available by contacting Bert@hielema.ca