The Gravity of Grace
Millions want to know God. Knowing God isn’t easy. There is so much around us and within to distract us, deflect us. That desire is still there, though. What is God like? How can we see God? How can we know God? Even a good Hindu like George Harrison can sing beautifully about wanting to know Krishna, his lord. Did you think he was singing about Jesus! Who else would we call lord?
That desire to know God comes from God, who calls everyone to know Him. Paul tells the believers in Rome that anyone can know God: look around, observe, think, reflect (Rom 1:19-20). He tells us that, instead, humanity subjected itself and creation to futility. When we consider creation, of which we are a part: solar system, universe, atoms, and those mysterious subatomic phenomena, we are perceiving the work of God in the Son—we are seeing the hands of Jesus at work long before he came among us. We didn’t know him, even John the Baptist did not know him (Jn 1:31, 33); God revealed the Son to us. The Son has always been, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Trinitarian mystery, that ground of love that I spoke about a few Sundays back.[1]
The question for millions is how to know God. We can know God by looking to Jesus, considering Jesus, “the visible likeness of the invisible God” (1:15). The word Paul uses is ikon. Outside the world of computing, we may think of an icon as one of those pictures in an Eastern Orthodox church. For Paul, the visible likeness, the ikon of God, was no static, inanimate painting but a person: alive, dynamic.
An ikon is an image. God created Adam, saying, “let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26). William Barclay calls our attention to the significance: we were meant to be fully in the likeness, the ikon of God; we chose another way, our own way.[2] We took our God-given freedom, and just see what we have done with it over these millennia of human history. Eve and Adam freely chose estrangement from God in satisfaction of their appetites. What enslaved them: their freedom, their will, or their appetite? All of the above. At the right time, God sent the Son, the ikon of God, to do the godly work of setting things right.
There is a book that didn’t make it into our Bible, called the Wisdom of Solomon. Paul knows it. In that book, the writer speaks of capital-W wisdom as the ikon of God: a “manifestation,”[3] God truly visible, truly at work, fully present. To the Hebrew mind, wisdom was alive, constructive, guiding, dynamic, saving. Proverbs tells us “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth” (3:19). Later, Wisdom speaks: “When [God] established the heavens, I was there, when He drew a circle on the face of the deep, [. . .] then I was beside Him, like a master worker; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing before Him always [. . .] and delighting in the human race” (8:27-31). Paul may have such passages in view when he writes that it was through the Son, this ikon, that “God created everything” (1:16). Recall that magnificent first chapter of the Gospel according to John. Paul adds something very rich, wonderful, and encouraging for us: “God created the whole universe through [Christ] and for [Christ]” (1:16). It’s as if the whole universe—this Father-Son project—were the Father’s gift to the Son. Why did God create? Have you ever wondered, at least a little? So that the Father could give it to the Son: a gift, an act of love. Love consists in giving. We give love. You see, we still catch glimpses of our likeness to God, ruined though it is by sin.
“In him all things hold together” (1:17, RSV) What, who do we have in Jesus? We have the Son, who, like the sun, gives us light, warmth, life, who holds us in his gravitational pull: the gravity of grace. During vacation Bible school, our science guru spoke with the children about gravity and did some activities to help them experience gravity. We experience gravity all the time. We almost never think about it.
Do we take Jesus for granted? Millions who are not Christian want to know God, but don’t. Oh, some think they do, and in our more universalist moments we incline to the one God, many ways talk. Scripture tells us they don’t know God. Jesus himself tells us that no one comes to the Father, God, except through Jesus, God. Is it arrogant to trust Jesus? When people know Jesus, they will know God. But I fear we are taking Jesus for granted.
Paul wants to tell us just who we have in Jesus, wants to lead us into the wonder of Christ. In Jesus, the ikon of the living God, we see, hear, and know God. God is not hidden, not far from us. In Jesus, God is assuring us that He wants a relationship with us; He wants us with Him. Nothing is going to stop Him from having us with Him, in Christ, through the Spirit—not even our sin, our freely willed acts and inclinations that take us away from the living God, to cobble together our own gods, after our own ruined hearts, gods that like what we like, want what we want, that call good what we call good.
The Son is the one through whom all things were made, including us, and for whom all things were made, including us. We were meant for Christ, and always have been. The Father was giving us to the Son. Love delights in giving: above all, in giving love. We were made and meant for loving God. This truth, and the fulfillment of this reality, is given to us in Jesus Christ, “the head of his body, the Church; he is the source of the body’s life” (1:18). When Jesus tells us that, apart from him, we can do nothing (Jn 15:5), he isn’t being dramatic or arrogant. He is telling us he is the source of our redeemed life and life itself.
The Son is the source. “In the beginning” (Gen 1:1). Hebrew uses one word, there, b’reshith. The root of that word is rosh, as in Rosh Hashanah. Rosh can mean beginning. It also means head, and it means source, as we might say the headwaters of a river. It might not be pushing too far to say that rosh can mean point of origin. Christ is the rosh, the source of life for the Church and for everyone, and for all things. He is the point of origin of the universe. Splash! We just took a leap into the deepest waters! In Christ, we are in unfathomable, eternal, infinite depths of glory, grace, and power. And we know him. And he loves us. You, of all people! Me, of all people! Why do we take that for granted?
William Barclay brings what Paul says about Jesus into very sharp focus: “Without [Christ] the Church cannot think the truth, cannot act correctly, cannot decide its direction [. . . .] If a man neglects or abuses his body, he can make it unfit to be the servant of the great purposes of his mind; so by indisciplined [sic] and careless living the church can unfit herself to be the instrument of Christ, who is her head.”[4] Hope for the church will come from relying fully upon Jesus Christ, relying fully upon the power of the Holy Spirit, relying fully upon the Word of God: the gravitational pull of Word and Spirit in Christ, the source of our life.
What we believe and teach about Jesus Christ is of supreme importance. Paul is very clear that Jesus was raised from death (1:19). “[I]n order that he alone might have first place in all things” (1:19). Through the resurrection, Jesus Christ demonstrates he is the source and fulfills his nature. Have we even begun to fulfill ours? Is world history the story of the fulfillment of human nature, the perfection of humanity? If so, God help us! It’s only through the perfection of Christ that we can have any real hope for our own perfection, which must be in him and through him. Truly, apart from him we can do nothing—which does not mean we are powerless. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the test detonation of the atomic bomb in the deserts of New Mexico, quoted Hindu sacred writing—how fitting! “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Destruction makes Nothing, takes what was something and makes it into nothing. We are highly talented at making Nothing: lives into nothing, world into nothing, faith into nothing.
Jesus is no faded photograph of God. Paul tells us that by “God’s own decision [. . .] the Son has in himself the full nature of God” (1:19). In Christ, God is fully able to do all that He does in Jesus, fully able to offer everything He offers us. Christ is fully able to give us all that God offers in him. In Christ, we have everything we need—we have the only one whom we need.
What is God offering? Paul calls our minds and hearts to reconciliation. Pursuing our appetites, we freely willed alienation from God. That choice is irrevocable, from our side. So, God revokes our decision from His side. He “decided to bring the universe back to Himself through the Son” (1:20).[5] What is reconciliation? It is healing. It is restoration. It is relationship. It is love. It is grace. It is peace with God. It is Christ, making peace for God with us through the cross. Paul is more vivid: “God made peace through His Son’s sacrificial death on the cross and so brought back to Himself all things” (1:20).
When the cross becomes a piece of furniture in the church, we have lost touch with Christ, the source of our life. When we take no time in mind or heart to survey the wondrous cross, our faith grows cold. Oh, we may do loving things, but we do them for the sake of love rather than for the sake of Christ. But God is love! And see how our idol-making hearts have made love God. Are we worshiping God, or are we worshiping love?
Christ’s sacrificial death. The blood of Christ. Did you know Muslims think highly of Jesus? One of the greatest prophets. They do not believe he died on the cross, but was taken alive into heaven, like Elijah. The cross is a scandal, a shock, an impossibility, you see. Mainline Christians are commonly taught to emphasize the life and teachings of Jesus. We must also emphasize his death on the cross: apart from that death, that blood, that suffering, we are under the wrath and curse of God. That’s heavy stuff, not very pleasant. People stop going to church, after hearing such things. Contemplation of what is not pleasant makes the reality all the more glorious, beautiful, and desirable. By Christ’s bloody, agonized death on the cross, God brings all things back to Himself, like the sun, holding the planets perfectly, even the comets, that seem to wander off very far, yet are still held, and drawn in, by the sun’s gravity.
Not just people. All things, creation itself. In a way that we do not understand, that freely willed sin of ours put everything out of order. Paul reminds us of our own wanderings—maybe yours have just been little sins—if you even have any!—beloved, apart from Christ, we are all out of favor with God. “You were far away from God and were His enemies because of the evil things you did and thought” (1:21). Oof. You may already know that gravity gets weaker with distance. The closer we are, the more firmly we are held; the further we stray, the weaker the pull. Maybe you’ve never done or thought an evil thing, in your own estimation. Who is the judge? Have you loved God always, and always put God first in your life? Have you aimed your life and resources at God, or at getting comfort, wealth, prestige, pleasure? Have you lived for, other people? Have you lived for, a cause? Have you lived your life for God? What has consistently been your reason to get going in the morning? Just duty? Just habit? The bills? Coffee? What about the call of God in Christ?
Christ taught many beautiful, worthy, wise things about how to live with others. Listen and do. It’s not Christ’s ethical teaching that saves, beloved. “By means of the physical death of His Son, God has made you His friends” (1:22)—the cross; Christ, on the cross; Christ come among us to go to the cross for us, in our place, our substitute; the choice he made, freely. Again, why? Why us? Why me? Why you? You know the answer is love, but do you know the answer? Do you know the love of God for you? Do you know the love you have for God? Is it alive in there, vital, growing, blessing, healing, giving, hoping, praying, dwelling abundantly in the Word? God has made us His friends! In Christ, God makes peace with us. This is from God, God’s doing, not our doing. His will, not ours.
God gives us this peace through Christ’s death on the cross, “to bring [us], holy, pure, and faultless into His presence” (1:23). Apart from Christ, we are unable to be in God’s presence, to behold Him, experiencing and loving Him, knowing Him and delighting in Him. He wants us sanctified: able to be in His presence. He had that with Adam and Eve, until their freely willed choice expelled them from His holy presence. God will not allow anyone, so long as he or she is impure, full of fault, to be in His presence. It’s like God has a white carpet. Why He would ever want that, I don’t know, but that’s what He has. He will not allow us on it with mud on our shoes. You can see why. It’s like we want to shake God’s hand, and our hand is caked in mud, grease, manure, and blood—our own or the blood of something else. Tell me, ranchers, that you haven’t had a day like that! And God says, Go wash, for God’s sake, and then I’ll shake your hand! In Christ, God takes us by our filthy hands, our soiled hearts, and He washes us; He holds us, dresses us in new, clean clothing, and He feeds us.
Finally, Paul encourages, insists, that the faithful, knowing their source of life is Christ, knowing that Christ is pulling all things back to himself, knowing that, in Christ, they are given the priceless blessing of peace with God—knowing all this, they are encouraged to hold fast to Christ, to “continue faithful on a firm and sure foundation” (1:23). Well, why wouldn’t we? Here’s the teaching that one of my fellow PC(USA) pastors teaches God’s people: “I actually don't care that much about salvation. That's not my primary concern. My primary concern is about the world that we live in, and how we make a more just world.”[6]
Beloved, Christianity is not first and foremost an ethical way of life. For a long time, there has been great concern to make the faith socially relevant, as though the Gospel were irrelevant. Beloved, it is! To society, the Gospel is irrelevant: the Gospel addresses nothing that society teaches people to want. The Gospel offers nothing that society believes it needs. William Barclay wrote, “If the Cross will not waken love in men’s hearts, nothing will.”[7] The Cross will never waken love in society’s heart, only in the hearts of people, individuals here and there, just as happened in the days of Christ, just as happened in the days of Elijah, in the days of Moses, in the days of Noah. When we waken to that love, we waken to the gravity of grace.
And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.
[1] “The Ground of Love.” June 16, 2019. https://bethelpreswc.org/sermons/the-ground-of-love/
[2] William Barclay. Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 117-118.
[6] Rebecca Todd Peters, qtd in, https://www.thenation.com/article/a-christian-argument-for-abortion-a-qa-with-rebecca-todd-peters/
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