Angelic Shift?

 "Conduct yourselves wisely...making good use of the times".

Colossians 4:5.

There's a cost to engaging with genuine mystery.

Just take a few moments to peek at the testimony of Job to see what it's really like to become entangled in all that's 'above and beyond' our smaller moments here. I often wonder if that's why the majority of modernists actively choose to evade the genuinely sublime and settle on the muddle that is 'contemporary culture'... Anything to drown out the 'dislocating' of the unpredictable.

What follows, however, when we lift the lid on all those moments when the threshold is well and truly crossed and the greater is allowed to address the smaller - when what Paul says is 'the mystery of the ages' crosses into our lives, embodied and shockingly 'made flesh' in numerous ways, but principally in the revelation of Jesus Christ?

If you've ever found yourself in a circumstance where you're facing someone or something you have been dreading... totally stuck because you know there's no way you can avoid what's about to unfold, then that's what happens when a person can no longer evade giving weight to the epiphany evidenced in the person of Jesus.

In his address to the Colossians, Paul conveys the fact that when we meet this living truth, we find a person in whom 'are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge' (Colossians 2:3). Paul tells us that he says this to make clear what counts, because the 'get-out' clause our de-fault smallness will be clamouring to employ here is what it defines as the "plausible" refutation of such a person. Yes, when confronted with truth, we will seek to take flight beneath the delusion that we really don't have to deal with this (2:4).

Christianity grew, thankfully, and continues because the reception of what counts provides a 'rooting' and establishing in the Creator and Redeemer of all that is visible and invisible, but we'd be mistaken to think that's the end of the value or the danger of handling such a far-reaching intervention in the 'norm'.

A very different 'captivity' lies in wait for those who wish to seek to codify the ramifications of this arrival, not on its own terms, but by those that we think are appropriate to our own definitions of what counts (even though, Paul warns, they drip with an 'empty deceit' (2:8).

The reason the Reformers of the 16th century set-out the "Solas" was because they were all too familiar with how 'philosophy' could and would rapidly overtake spirituality.

We readily tap-in to what Paul refers to as 'human tradition' to give a road-map to our encountering the eternal. 'Elemental' beguiling - what seems best to us - can readily replace the stark and over-whelming nature of God's supreme revelation in Christ by our devising of a 'window' where we can 'adjust' (distance) God to being someone not so close to who we are.

Paul tells us to stop right there - to see what has actually happened (2:9) -  that's the truth that now fills us (for it fills creation), severing us from 'natural' toning-down and taking us right in amongst the 'dead, yet raised' company set in place firmly by Christ's singular work in the death and the life evidenced at the Cross (2:11-15).

So, he says, the negation to a 'spirituality' of dos and don'ts, embroiled in externals (food, festivals and the like) cannot and must become the bench-mark that defines what is necessary, because they're brief illusions at best of the substance - the unchangeable, tangible depths that have been so richly bestowed by Christ.

The way of erroneous 'godliness' is to exclude on the basis of these impoverished shadows - a contrivance that delivers only an elite asceticism (separation) on the grounds of external requirements. Nothing, notes the Apostle,  could be further from the truth, even when our supposed 'better angels' whisper such aspirations.

The church which takes the route of such 'wholeness' has become diseased with a form of reason which centres upon the supposed piety of the present and thereby is no longer actually feeding on the actual truth - upon Christ Himself.

Christ executes us to such 'do not' folly because in the Cross, He shows all such elemental thinking, behaviour and adornment will perish, and that they thereby merely leave us floundering amidst the cycle of the here and now.

The believer is someone raised in the glorious renewal of God's beloved so that a new perspective can be discovered, sourced from the splendour of being 'hedged' around by Christ's full and complete redemption, leading to a fullness far beyond this present trouble. That's why we look beyond the poverty of abusive use of God's good work and desire for the image of the creator to renew us, lead us, deeper into such astonishing goodness.

In that place, notes Paul, we cannot help but praise in word and song, because the indwelling word brings a treasure we are just beginning to comprehend.