God’s chisel

There are things in our lives which we know are not really a part of God’s plan for us, but we hold onto them really tightly. The Bible tells us we are God’s masterpiece, and when we ask God to make us into an incredible original work we sometimes do not really want him to get rid of the things we need to lose.

Check out this skit from the skit guys (you may have to turn the sound up a bit).

Things are not easy when we ask to follow God, they may even get more difficult, but we know that God doesn’t make junk.

May you experience the freedom that comes from a God who works amazing things for, in, and through you.

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engaging young adults

Engaging young adults is not about giving them lots of coffee (or hot dogs, or burgers, or t-shirts, or giving them the right answers as if life ends with a final exam), it is about relating to them and showing them you care (I should know, I am one; 28, well educated, and not interested in fake people).

I was not really interested in church, until some great people from a church community REALLY showed interest in me.

Threads has done some interesting research into connecting with young adults, check it out.

h/t Blind Beggar

on the incarnation; ch 4

Today we pick up our series on St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation.

It seems strange in this time of Advent to think about Jesus’s death, but this chapter deals with just that subject. Athanasius told us the reasons God came down in human flesh, and reminds us that he did it to provide redemption AND to renew the knowledge of God in humankind. Both of these are displayed in his death on the cross as well.

Thus, then, God the Word, revealed himself to men through His works. We must next consider the end of His earthly life and the nature of His bodily death. This is, indeed, the very centre of our faith, and everywhere you hear men speak of it; by it, too, no less than by other acts, Christ is revealed as God and Son of God.

For Athanasius, the cross screams of God’s self revealing nature. He had to suffer a public execution because he could not die on his own (how could he get sick when he healed others?). He also could not avoid the plotting of the Jews, because he had come to defeat death, and to do that by absorbing it in himself. More than this, however, he could not avoid death, because he came to bring new life; the resurrection.

The supreme object of His coming was to bring about the resurrection of the body. This was to be the monument of his victory over death, the assurance to all that He had himself conquered corruption and that their own bodies also would eventually be incorrupt; and it was in token of that and as a pledge of the future resurrection that He kept His body incorrupt.

His death provided the evidence that the curse had been lifted (cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree), and to break down the dividing wall within humanity.

We see the fitness of his death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself. Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to myself.”

Through Jesus death on the cross, he defeated the ‘prince of the air’ because he was raised in the air on the cross to suffer and die. By this, he reopened the road to God through the heavens. Jesus did not need this new road, but we did.

No, it was we who needed it, we whom He Himself upbore in His own body–that body which He first offered to death on behalf of all, and then made through it a path to heaven.

In the incarnation, Jesus made himself corruptible, so that he could die, and through his death accomplish these amazing things.

The glory of it is staggering.

The logic of it, incomprehensible.

Even so, there are things that we ‘know’ to be true, or that we take on faith based on the say so of someone we really trust, even though our gut and everything in the world tells us the opposite.

I guess that is what faith is all about.

on the incarnation; ch 2 and 3

Last week, as we began our walk through St. Athanasius’s On The Incarnation, we saw that God created everything good, but by turning away from God, humankind became the source of their own corruption. Now, moving farther and farther away from God, they were in the process of destruction.

Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone.

This left God with a bit of a dilemma. God could not go back on his word so that humankind, though sinning against God, should not die; but it is equally unthinkable that we, who once shared the nature of the Word, should be destroyed and turn back into non-existence through corruption.

Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and besides that such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created man at all.

For Athanasius, God is in a bit of a pickle. In order to express his goodness, he has to do something about this incredible work of creation called humankind. He could not allow them to continue on the road they had chosen. But if he does not allow them to perish, to suffer the consequences of their actions, then he would be going back on his word; something God must not do so as to express his justice.

So, God seems to be stuck. He has to express his goodness by saving his creation which is being destroyed, but he also has to express his justice and allow it to be destroyed.

Repentance on the part of humankind would not solve the problem either. True repentance causes people to stop sinning, but it does not deal with the corruption that has come as a result of the sins.

[O]nce the transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.

What–or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things our of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father his consistence of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.

For this reason, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world.

So, according to Athanasius, Jesus, the Word, came into the world to do two things; to recreate in humankind the image of God, saving us from the corruption began in the garden, and to maintain the consistency of God’s character, to release him from this dilemma between grace and judgement.

This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.

Our corruption could not be erased other than through death, or else God’s character could not be maintained. For God said that if we ate of the fruit we would die. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the image of God was being restored in humankind.

[B]y the offering of His own body He abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching. Thus by his own power He restored the whole nature of man.

For Athanasius, this is not a single action, or an instantaneous renewal, just as the corruption was not an instantaneous destruction of the image of God.

For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.

This is, however, only one of the reasons why the Word became man, according to Athanasius. When God created humankind, he created them with the ability to know him. He made them in his image so that they might be able to “perceive the true image of God, the Word himself, and through him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their maker is for men the only really happen and blessed life.

But, humankind through away this ability to know God through this image.

Men, foolish as they are, thought little of the grace they had received, and turned away from God. They defiled their own soul so completely that they not only lost their apprehension of God, but invented for themselves other gods of various kinds.

As a safeguard against the absolute loss of apprehension of God, he filled the world with his works so that we might be able to perceive our God in them. On top of this he sent prophets, and gave them a law so that if they did not look around and see God, they would still be able to learn about him from the people who surrounded them.

Even though God had done all this, humankind still decided to turn away from God and ignore his gracious works. We were consistent in ’suppressing the truth in unrighteousness’ as the apostle Paul says, and were determined to forget about God and keep ourselves in ignorance.

So, in order to renew the knowledge of himself that was lost in the corruption of his image, God’s image came down in the form of Jesus Christ.

Wherefore, in all naturalness and fitness, desiring to do good to men, and Man He dwells, taking to Himself a body like the rest; and through His actions done in that body, as it were on their own level, he teaches those who would not learn by other means to know Himself, the Word of God, and through Him the Father.

For Athanasius, then, Jesus, the Word, the second person of the Trinity, was incarnated, took on human flesh, for two reasons. First, he had to do away with sin and death, which could only be done by dying the death himself and then coming back to life in the resurrection. Second, Jesus came to give us the knowledge of the Father himself. He came to renew the image of God in us, so that we might be able, once again, to enjoy knowing the Father.

on the incarnation; ch 1

In this chapter, St. Athanasius outlines the creation and fall of mankind. He makes it plain that we need to remember the creation is done by the same God, with the same agent, as that of salvation.

The renewal of creationhas been wrought by that self-same Word who made it in the beginning. There is no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.

For Athanasius we must begin with the creation and fall because they outline the reason for the incarnation. Without the fall, without the wilful disobedience of humanity, the incarnation would not have been necessary.

It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in human body.

For Athanasius, the incarnation was only necessary because of our sin. There have been some who have argued that the incarnation may have happened even if we did not sin. There would have been a necessity, not for Jesus to die for our sins, but to make himself fully known to us. However, this would not have been necessary. Before we walked away from God, he walked with us in the garden during the cool of the day. Adam and Eve lived directly in God’s presence.

The fall, for Athanasius, was a beginning of the reversal of what God had done in creation. When God created mankind, he did it with the intention that they would live forever with him (provided they followed his commandments). But in going against his will, we became enslaved to death, and started the process of becoming entirely corrupt. Our corruption severed the union we had with the Word; the Lord and giver of life. This left us in a very poor position.

This, then, was the plight of men. God had not only graciously made them out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on them His own life by the grace of the Word. Then, turning from eternal things to things corruptible, by counsel of the devil, they had become the cause of their own corruption in death; for, as I said before, though they were by nature subject to corruption, the grace of their union with the Word made them capable of escaping from the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created.

So, humankind, but not following the commands of God, seems to have thwarted the plan of God; to have people he created in his image live with him in sweet communion for all eternity. They, by their actions, had become the process of destruction of the very good work of creation.

This, according to Athanasius, is the result of the creation and the fall.