Faith is what reason is standing on while it asserts its own self-sufficiency.

Little children do not doubt their parents’ authority.  They do not question their parents’ wisdom.  They do not set themselves up as rivals to their parents in the courts of moral and practical adjudication.  They complain, sulk, resent and sometimes weep, but never with an accompanying demand or even desire for independence. Their love for and faith in and reliance upon their parents have yet to be contested by their love for and faith in and reliance upon themselves.

Unless you become as little children…

…as we have forgiven our debtors (or in Luke, for we also forgive our debtors) – this elaboration of the petition has always invited reflection.  Enjoined by Jesus of his followers during the ministry, it must be apprehended within the eternal illumination provided by the atonement: our sins are forgiven by grace through faith. 

So why this added allusion to reciprocity?  Most commentators have argued that forgiveness of others here shouldn’t be understood as a condition of our own forgiveness, but rather as evidence for it, the natural and evident outgrowth, so to say, of our true and sincere apprehension of the magnitude of our own debt, our own inability to pay, and of our gratitude to Christ.

Maybe so.

But as far as I can see, Jesus was instructing us to ask God daily for continued responsibility in our own spiritual growth.  Let our own freedom remain operative and efficacious, let us be participant with You in our own destiny.  Continue to treat us as maturing children, rather than obedient servants.

 The prayer for avoidance of temptation follows immediately because the Christian’s greatest vulnerability is to the siren song of green pastures, still waters.

Worldly wisdom learns primarily from its mistakes, from experiencing the consequences of its willful activities and adapting accordingly.

Spiritual wisdom – knowing God better and better – does, too, but also and often primarily from its misfortunes.

God allowed Job’s tribulations to deepen his spiritual understanding.

My life and my time are spiritual synonyms.  Devoting hours to the service of others is self-sacrificial.

What died on the cross, once and forever, was the Son, the element of the eternally preexistent Godhead that personified Its immutability.   It was the Son who cried out My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?  This was not a cry of confusion, because the Son, in unthinkable eternity, had agreed to the sacrifice; but rather a cry of allusion to the Spirit-inspired prophesy (Psalm 22) of the Godhead’s reconstitution.  Jesus was raised from the dead to replace the Son at the Father’s right hand.

And that reveals the second thing abandoned by the Ur-Father through the incarnation: His own moral authority.

For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son…(He) has given him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.

That which was represented by the Son in the primordial Godhead – in Yahweh – was not a Son of Man.

The wages of sin is death, was Yahweh’s determination, made actual, inflexible and binding, by the Son.  When Jesus assumed the place of the Son in the Godhead, human sympathy became determinative in divine judgment.

God’s failures in creation were due to His own divine intractability, we may say, to His own perfection, and that perfection’s incompatibility with sin, with disobedience.  Only by sacrificing His own perfection, only by relinquishing His own imperturbable judgment, could He coexist with His creation.

He condescended to our weakness by sacrificing His own nature, and incorporating ours.

Certain things we can say were lost to Yahweh forever, when that which is represented by the Son was lost through becoming incarnate in Jesus –responsibilities which were the Son’s alone, exclusively the Son’s eternal aegis.

The first is Yahweh’s creative power. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

 In the beginning was the Word (the Son)… All things were made through Him (the Son), and without Him, nothing was made that was made.

When the Son became incarnate in Jesus, God’s ability to create ex nihilo – to create anew – was sacrificed.  There would no longer be anything new under the sun.  Henceforth, Jesus could only work through the materials already at hand, under its already established conditions, its laws, its already innate possibilities.

As many have pointed out, the miracles of Jesus are either concentrations or accelerations of phenomena found naturally occurring – healing, multiplication – or else manipulation of natural forces.  He commands nature; he doesn’t replace or add to it.

And so when elsewhere he advises his followers that in times to come they will do greater miracles than he has performed, he was simply prophetic of the future opening of nature’s wonders and inner workings, its existent possibilities.  The extraction of megatons of power from a few molecules, after all, is simply making potency actual; it’s not creation.

Noah, Babel, Eden itself – these are mythic images of failure and new creation.  That is no longer possible; the possibility was sacrificed.  God and Jesus must make do with the one that surrounds us. 

That’s what the incarnation cost God.  That’s why the decision was terrible: it was irrevocable.

Two kingdoms are at war.  The ruler of the first kingdom – call it Heaven – is offered the opportunity for an exchange by the ruler of the second kingdom – call it Hell.  If Heaven’s king will send his son – his only son – into Hell’s keeping, Hell’s king will in return release the thousand Heavenly citizens he holds in captivity.

This would be a terrible decision for Heaven’s king, knowing that his son would be abused and tortured, and then killed.  A thousand saved for one lost, yes, but the one lost is his son!  His only son!  The king would be forever bereft, his lineage shattered, his heartbreak coexistent with the rest of his life, however long that might be.

But suppose Hell’s terms were more lenient.  Suppose the thousand would be released in exchange for only a defined period of the son’s captivity –  for three days, say, or three years.  The absence would be painful, but at its conclusion, the son would be returned, with no lasting harm.  The royal family would again be intact, its lineage preserved.

Still a grave and difficult decision, but no longer a terrible one, a hellish one, at least for a noble king.   In the end, the princely son would be restored, forever to be praised, along with his father, by their grateful citizens.

These latter, therefore, cannot have been the terms of the Atonement.  The Father gave the Son, He didn’t loan Him.  Unlike Abraham, His filial sacrifice was eternal.  The Son was lost to the Father forever.

The Father/the Son: these are images representing elements of the primordial Godhead, elements of what was once called Yahweh. 

The question is: what was lost to the Ur-Father forever, to gain our salvation?

God doesn’t specially honor scholarship: that would be absurd.  The treasures we are advised to lay up in heaven must be available to everyone.   

But that isn’t to denigrate Christian scholarship.  It’s only to say that the esteem God grants it is due to its activity, not its product; to the time spent at it, alone, with Him. 

Time alone with God = Diamond

Communion = Gold

Feeding on the word = Silver

Ministry = Pearl