Arrival

There are very few things more enjoyable than when you've invested deeply into a book, a play, a film, or some other creative endeavour, and you reach that final act, and the conclusion is so much more than you anticipated, full of wonder and unexpected yet welcome resolution that leaves you feeling delighted and truly satisfied.

The same is true in theology. One of the reasons that Christianity's message is so rich is because it states that all of the work, the hardship, the suffering, from changing darkness into splendour, misery into joy, death into life, is worth it... because of the ending. The end of the story is garbed in a magnificence we can barely comprehend, so good theology is something which allows us to glimpse that splendour whilst we're still amidst the "not yet" days of getting there.

Back in the 2nd century, an early Christian writer named Irenaeus wrote a five-part refutation of a troubling bunch of "spiritual" interlopers known as the Valentians. They deemed themselves to be the 'progressive' believers of their day, because they taught that what really mattered was how the genuinely 'spiritual' transcended such quaint things like Jesus being a real man, or scripture giving real revelation. For them, it was all a matter of what was going on in their own heads coming first so they could 'evolve' to becoming higher beings, and anyone who said otherwise was to be pitied as a lesser mortal.

For four books, the Christian writer shows how they had got it all badly wrong because they were looking for and placing the spiritual in the wrong place. If history shows us anything, he states, it's that God is all about the here and now, and if you negate that, you are going to have no road map into what truly counts.

It's in the fifth and final book, however, that Irenaeus gets us to encounter the symphony in all its brilliance, so let me just touch on a few highlights of this masterpiece, the wisdom of which is beckoning us today.

"If this flesh is not saved, the Lord did not redeem us by His blood (Colossians 1:14), and we do not commune in that same body and blood at His table".

It's so refreshing when you have a writer that can encompass the magnitude of what's involved in the drama of heaven and earth by focusing our attention on the key place, the pivotal point or in this case the person at the centre of it all.

The writer, in effect, is telling us that the present is not about us attaining our best life now. What counts isn't a contorting of ourselves into a contrived spirituality that sees eternal existence as merely the shedding of the 'peripheral' to better express the 'spiritual' being I have already become (which, in our mind, already fully transcends the trite constraints of the material realm / associated doctrinal teachings, and any redemption of that).

We are only saved, body and soul, by the flesh - the life, death and resurrection, of another. We are made partakers of a nature that has passed through the deepest waters of severance and death and are sustained by that victorious nature in our own living and dying. That is the absolute necessity to deal with our alienation from God by our sin.

"Now", the writer states, "the fruit, the labour of God's Spirit is  the salvation of all flesh". What it all comes to is that in the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God has brought about something that undoes our poverty and places us back on the road to paradise - a conclusion in a real realm of total completion in a real, material world.
As we are now nourished and sustained by the creation in a very necessary way, so the outpouring of the life of Jesus has amounted to a complete provision for us to live and thrive in the full renewal of that creation.

This is what Paul addresses in his statements on redemption is Romans chapter 8. It is as we unpack this that we begin to stagger beneath the full ramifications of what this will mean.

A final quote from Irenaeus - and this is a doozy:

"God required His firstborn to descend into His creation and be held by it, and in turn for creation to hold the Word and ascend to Him, thus surpassing the angels and coming into the image and likeness of God".

Let that get into your very bones!

It's easy in these days of such troubles for us to loose sight of what's being stated here, but this is phenomenally awesome.

The Creation is secured in the future it was intended (when it was made good in the beginning) because God has lowered Himself into the very midst of its broken state to raise it into Himself to secure its mature splendour forever.

That is astonishing.

It is exactly why Christianity counts.

Spirituality isn't about becoming 'higher' beings, loosing identity in some cosmic consciousness where what happens here amounts, effectively, to zero. It's about all of this becoming dressed with the full significance that creation was intended to carry from the moment it was begun.

There are all manner of approaches to spirituality today that will 'fit' with us - our lifestyle, our needs, our ambitions. Here we see the one truth which counts - creation was made to fulfil the profound intention of the community of the Godhead - to create a realm that would be sustained and thrive forever because of the radiance and splendour of the love they know.

We're currently living in the preparation stage of that work, but it is so encouraging to know that even now, we can witness and encounter a glimpse of the wonder that is coming, and that can sustain us in our present trials and frustrations.

Don't settle for anything that subtracts from God's great purposes for those He has pursued with love that is stronger than death.

The Lord Jesus has taken creation to the throne, and will make it eternally 'good' - a home we will always enjoy.

That's surely worth a thought or two today.