AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

Young children all respond to some form of the Word of God that speaks of God’s innocence, but in addition to a unique Word of God that speaks of the perfect idea God has of that child. When Jesus chastises in His harshest language the one who first scandalizes a child, it is the second Word He has in focus.

Spiritual innocence is a precious and life-giving thing, but, like mother’s milk, it’s meant for a season. It’s an innocence of understanding and, except for the precious few or for those who depart early for heaven, as experience and the understanding of it grows spiritual innocence fades in proportion. This is one of the laws of spiritual nature.

But the Word of God spoken uniquely and privately to each child is that child’s most precious inheritance, and the one who steals from it both reduces the child and devastates the Father. Hence Jesus’ condemnation.

The Bible is not the Word of God. It is chief among the written communications inspired by God, but it is not the Word of God. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and Jesus Christ is a person.

The living reality of the Word of God is the personal communication between Jesus Christ and oneself, and that communication is unique. It is Love’s own portrait of the self-revelation God intends in the creation of each individual.

In the beginning was the Word. In whatever way God exists, the perfect idea of each individual exists, has always existed in the mind of God.

And the Word was with God. Each idea was God’s comfort and treasure, until introduced into creation.

And the Word was God. The perfection of each created thing, most generously in God’s created children, is part of God’s self-revelation.

Although it isn’t easy, we must always try to remember that Jesus was the Son of God incarnated, and therefore required to use the poor human invention of language to communicate. Remembering that, we might expect that His recorded words conceal depths of meaning, and that to wring them of only their surface meaning would be as childish as boasting familiarity with the universe, having examined diagrams of the night sky.

When Jesus speaks of this age or this generation, He is not joining the ranks of cultural historians, demarcating units of years and giving them names: the Industrial Age, the Pre-Columbian era, the Boomer Generation. We must always try to remember that Jesus was the Son of God incarnated, come to inform us of things we could not otherwise encompass.

One thing we know, as a starting point. God does not speak to nations or generations or ‘ages’. None of those has ears. God speaks – Jesus speaks – to individuals. Christ’s Spirit does not inhabit groups or even couples. There is no ‘soul’ of any historical movement or party or century. God’s transactions are utterly individual and unique: When you pray, go into a private place and close the door.

So, the present age is individual and unique, as is the age to come.

Learning to follow Christ is not a matter of following a certain set of rules. One of the great signs that someone is following Christ is a confusion as to his own motivations. He is being shaken free from a primitive, worldly model of understanding. He is being shaken free from the world altogether.

This is another implication of the reality that faith is a response, not an attitude or recognition. It’s a response of one’s being at a level deeper than thought or self-awareness. Everyone is a Christian long before they take a vow or pledge an allegiance. Those activities are fruits and flowers; what they emerge from is faith.

That’s why we should never applaud ourselves for having ‘come to Christ.’ Jesus said, “You didn’t choose me, I chose you.”

The second way the practice of obedience strengthens faith flows readily from our image of gravitational attraction. Each step towards Christ decreases the pull of everything in conflict with Christ. The manifestation of this movement in actual life is a growing indifference to the things of the world, most notably to the opinion of others.

Our Lord is quite clear about this. Think of the Beatitudes as rules for obedience to Christ, and notice how the list concludes: Do these things, and the world will hate you. What the world will hate is losing you, or more exactly, of losing your devotion, of losing your commitment, of losing your love. There is none more vindictive than the one no longer desired…again, that’s why the demons are outraged.

As we practice obedience to Christ, the things of the world begin to grow strangely dim, in the poetic image. All that is given priority over Christ fades first, then all that is not of Christ. And we must not shy from the truth here. We must not say, All the things and people I love most dearly will become even more dear to me. No, they probably will not. Unless you [are willing to] hate your father and mother… Many or even most will begin to lose their interest and attractiveness to you, even the things the world tells you are loveliest. Even the things your own heart tells you are fair and true, or at least do no harm. The fact is, the discipline of obedience will reveal what is fair and true for you, and what isn’t. Outside of Christ, you are the worst judge of your own values. Inside of Christ, Christ will judge.

That is the consuming fire.

The practice of obedience to the words of Jesus strengthens faith in two ways. The first is that it increases one’s discernment of God’s will. As our Lord puts it, If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether [my] teaching is from God…Or again, If you abide in my word…you will know the truth…

Discernment of God’s will is something completely different from theoretical knowledge of God. Discernment is the spiritual outcome of obedience, not of study – unless the studying itself is a practice of obedience. Everywhere in the Christian life the rule is the same: like produces like. The practice of obedience is an activity of faith, and its progeny is greater faith: deeper, wider, higher, of eternity. No amount of study, however prodigious, can increase faith even one iota, unless that study is itself faithful.

A wise parent gives her child the keys to the car only once she is confident in the child’s ability to drive. Similarly God rewards discernment only to those who have proven they will make good use of it.

The first pillar of salvation is the belief that Jesus, the man, is Lord. The second is related to the first. It is the practice of obedience to Jesus, and it is related to the crucial belief in the sense that it facilitates the power of that belief, the strengthening of one’s faith.

I say the practice of obedience because its rewards are gradual and cumulative rather than immediate. We likened the strengthening of faith to the increased gravitational pull of Christ vis-a-vis the pulls competing with His, and we said that each step taken closer to Christ affects their relative strengths. Keeping to that image, those steps constitute the practice of obedience.

To switch to a different image, growth in faith may be likened to growth in bodily strength. The body grows stronger slowly and cumulatively, in response to a practice of obedience to a training program. A training program holds out the promise of increased strength, but the only way of testing that promise is to follow the program. Just so, the Christian promise is that growth in faith results from following a program of obedience to the discipline of Christ, but the only way of testing the promise is adherence. The results cannot be seen prior to the practice. We live by faith, not by sight, is Paul’s way of describing the Christian life, the life of steady growth in Christ.

In the Christian life, the evidence awaits the verdict.

But what is this belief that’s a pillar of salvation?

This could be considered as a question of philosophy – of ontology or linguistic analysis – or a question of psychology or etymology, or in other ways as well. We’re only going to consider it within the realm of the pragmatic question of how to live in relationship to Christ. That is, having discovered belief in Jesus as Lord to be a pillar of salvation, we move on to what that discovery amounts to.

With that said, it is obvious that such a belief does not consist in words floating around somewhere, in one’s head, for example, or one’s ‘mind’, or anywhere else. Nor is it simply a potential or disposition for vocalization under certain circumstances. Christian belief isn’t simply something said, whether potentially or actually, whether aloud or to oneself. A human monster could say the appropriate words while doing monstrous things, could even sincerely ‘think’ them. Even the devils believe, as James puts it.

Salvific belief, meaning the attitude towards the sovereignty of Christ that sets a person on the road of salvation, is a dynamic attitude, one connected with behavior, but also one that admits of degrees. Degrees of what? Degrees of strength. But strength is something that doesn’t have meaning in a contextual vacuum. Having strong muscles describes the muscles in the context of weight resistance. Just so, having strong beliefs describes something in a context. What is the context? It’s the context of the other dynamic attitudes of the individual, the other attitudes connected to behavior, the desires, the hungers, the fears, even the other beliefs.

My belief in Jesus as my Lord refers to my dynamic attitude towards His sovereignty over my life, over the uses to which I put my time and energy. At least for most of us, it is an attitude at least occasionally in conflict with other dynamic attitudes, and it is in the context of such conflicts that its strength becomes apparent. We might usefully compare it to the gravitational pull on my being towards the leadership of another. At a great distance from that source, the pull is weak, and easily overcome by pulls from other sources. But with each step I take closer to the source, its pull becomes stronger, and the influence of the others correspondingly weaker.

This is the road of salvation, one voluntary step after another towards that source. An observer might say His faith is growing, but experientially, it is the weakening of the other influences. For a few – the truly blessed – the steps are not difficult; but for many, they can be very hard, especially at the beginning, most especially the first. That’s why the experience of conversion can seem so shattering to those whose lives have never offered the least resistance to the other sources.

A poet might describe it as inner demons shrieking in agony.

There are two fundamental pillars of salvation. The first is a belief. What is the belief? Paul tells us very succinctly that it is the sincere belief that Jesus is Lord (Romans 10:9). That sounds very simple, doesn’t it? Almost too simple to be true? It’s like believing that so-and-so is President, or that Columbus sailed the seas in 1492.

But a little reflection reveals that the belief isn’t quite so simple as that. Jesus after all was a man just like us, someone with a heartbeat and personal memories and bodily needs, someone who grew from a baby through childhood into young manhood, and then was killed. And what Paul is saying, succinctly, is that we must believe that Jesus, that man, was brought back to life and glorified in His flesh, and has now taken the place of the Son of God as the substance of the creative power of love, as the source of all coherence and meaning, and as the wellspring of everlasting life for every human being ever born. That man, Jesus. Not some unknowable Spirit. That particular man. The one with the heartbeat and childhood memories of Mary and Joseph.

When we put it that way, it seems like something that’s impossible even to understand, much less believe. And of course that’s right. The ‘belief’ cannot be arrived at or ‘proven’ by any line of rational thought, whether empirical like the scientist’s or theoretical like the metaphysician’s. Whatever this ‘belief’ is, it is disconnected from our understanding. We either have it – however tentatively – or we don’t; we’ve either been given it, or we haven’t (yet).

Let me put this another way. At the height of our loftiest speculation about God, it is possible I suppose to arrive at some conception of those qualities mentioned above: the creative power of love, the source of coherence, and so on. But that’s not what we’re asked to believe. What we’re asked to believe is that Jesus is all those things.

The man, Jesus.

In the most elevated conception, God in the Old Testament is a god of justice, of mercy, and of condescension. These are the qualities of the ideal ruler; a conception of the best that the best of human beings can imagine, the deepest that the deepest of human beings can fathom. It is a noble, virtuous, compelling conception, forever worthy of respect. It is the conception of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and John the Baptist. But it is not the Truth, as revealed by Jesus.

John’s gospel records Jesus’ new commandment to his followers, that they love one another as he has loved them. And why? John’s first epistle tells us: because God is love. We are to  be like God – “Be perfect” – and to be like God is to be like love.

But the wellspring of this staggering thought, Jesus Himself, didn’t offer it in English or Greek. It would have been in a Hebraic tongue, and the word he would have used has the root meaning of to give. The quality being described is a giving nature.

To give someone something is to remove it from one’s own benefit or use or advantage and bestow that benefit on someone else.

So when John tells us that God in this degree loved the world that he gave his son to it, he’s describing the depth of God’s giving nature, and he’s saying that it is bottomless, even to the limit of God’s own self, even to death. Jesus Himself said the same thing: Greater love than this does not exist, than to give one’s own life. That is the limit of love, to have nothing left of oneself.

Jesus provides us with the full revelation of love on the Cross. And God is love.