While the topic of this post is probably worthy of a book (which I probably would have to devote huge amounts of time to) I wanted to touch on the idea of God’s eternal nature.  Often I hear, and just moments ago I heard it again, that our lives are like the lifespan of a gnat compared to the timeline of God.  Does God exist only inside of the time-space continuum?  Does God have to sit and wait?  Instead I believe God looks over all of time and space at once (and as Norm Geisler says in his Encyclopedia of Christian Apologets, He knows every alternative futures as well).

God is eternal in history and future (to force a time vocabulary onto a non-time based God) as recorded in Psalm 90:1-3.  If He has no beginning and has no end why would you take the powerful nature of God
and try to describe it in finite terms?  Considering the discussion of time my 9th grade history teacher drew a long line across two very wide dry-erase boards and then took a piece of paper and scratched a minuscule slice out of the black ink on the baord and said, “That is the length of your life.”  He then proceeded to tell us that the line didn’t start and stop on the board, but instead he explained that it went from end to end infinitely.  Why would a secular teacher (who did not like Christianity) explain infinity better than a pastor in a sermon [I was listening to Joshua Harris in this MP3 message]?
Describing the beginning and end of God in a sermon illustration was not his point, his point was to describe the finite nature of our lives.  However, it rings in my ears when I hear people describe our lives in comparison to God.  The importance, as J. Harris explained later, is that we recognize the eternal nature of God and our residence in Him!  In God you have eternal life, and that life is not bound by the time space continuum.  You attempt to use the word eternal because it is a finite way to describe that which is infinite.  Infinity itself is still a concept we try to grasp as humans because we want to think of infinity as being still within the constraints of knowledge.  Is the pursuit of the infinite outside of God silly?  Certainly, but if God was before the world and will certainly be after the world we should be resting in His eternal hands - trusting that we are not like gnats, nor are we like any other creating thing because our identity is within Him, the uncreated one.

I was chatting with my Uncle Eric earlier today and had asked him where he got his deep insights into God’s word and he wrote some tidbits of wisdom into the IM window and I just had to share:

“Part of it is that I just read an awful lot. I also try to place myself in the place and culture and circumstance of a passage and let that tell me what areas I am just ignorant of and where I need to do more research. Until my knowledge of a situation can actually animate the characters and speak the words, I know I haven’t got the right information on the background. All too often we let our modern American preconceptions animate the characters and their motives.”

And later in the conversation:

“The thing lacking in our protestant hermeneutic is historical imagination. I don’t mean the wild, guessing kind. I mean the ability to drop ourselves into a situation and imagineer it into reality so that some interpretations are rejected out of hand, and others are cultivated until the real one is coaxed out.”

Good stuff, I thought. In short we need to think about what we do know so that we can begin to dig deeper into what we don’t know.

Hebrews 8:1-3

1 Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens,
2 a minister in the sanctuary and in the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man.
3 For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices; so it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer.

This passage was part of the material that was covered in tonight’s Bible study that is taught by Elder Mike Doyle. This passage is in the greater context of Jesus’ Christ being qualified to be a priest due to His purity and perfection. That’s what the ’such a high priest’ is in reference to. However, the passage is building on the platform of Christ’s high priesthood and emphasizing Christ’s current position on the seat next the God the Father’s throne. What is Christ doing on that throne? He’s ministering to us. Ephesians 1:3 says that we’re given every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places with Christ. Christ’s blessing ministry is ongoing in the life of believers due to the once and for all work on the Cross.

While there is a huge amount that can be gleaned from this passage the point that got me thinking was that Christ is offering to each and every believer every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. We often focus on earthly wealth or earthly knowledge or earthly blessing. Do you walk in belief of your heavenly blessings right now? Christ is ministring them freely and abundantly. Have I been walking as though I have every spiritual blessing in my walk? No, the answer is that I haven’t been. However, I am now. I’m resting in the fact that I have been given those with my position in Christ.

Reductionism is the concept of taking a biblical doctrine and reducing, summarizing or ‘boiling the doctrine down’ to one finite statement that could very well be an oversimplification.  Worse than that reductionism may be ignoring the entire counsel of the Word of God in favor of one passage.  One premium example of this would be the polarized views of Calvinism or Armenianism.  Both of these views (when taken to their logical extreme) can be examples of reductionism.  The scriptures put a great amount of tension on the subject of God’s undeniable sovereignty and man’s undeniable responsibility for sin and other actions.  Are these two different ideas mutually exclusive?  No.  The scriptures present a paradox wherein God is sovereign and man is resonsible for his actions.  This isn’t inconsistency, its the complication of mankind being created in God’s image and therefore having a will and God’s being God and not having any of His power lessened by man’s ability to desire and will various things.

Reductionism is what fans the flames of fanaticism or doctrinal narrowness in areas where the scripture presents a message that is more broad.  Baptism’s relationship to salvation is a good example of people reducing all theology down to a few passages even though other passages in no way require water baptism.  Or furthermore the idea that tongues is a heavenly prayer language… their is only one text that could be gone to for proof text and that is not what the context of that passage in I Corinthians 13 is even referring to.  Reductionism is what allows bad theology to stay bad and what keeps believers blind.

When you study a doctrine make sure that you review what the whole word of God says about that doctrine and in the correct context.

The series of First and Second Peter is going on at church.  Its only on its second week but the content in the introduction alone is worth checking out.  Listen to the MP3’s, or subscribe to the podcast, here.