But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’.
We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father thus alone, he is not truly love. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are moulded in the deepest way by what we think of God. “What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Small wonder, then, that creativity, the ability to craft, adorn and make beautiful, is a gift of the Spirit: Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts-to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.” (Ex 31:1-5) The Spirit makes his creation alive with beauty.”ĭelighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith The psalmist sings: “When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). Isaiah writes of the time when “the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest” (Is 32:15). He delights to make his creation-and his creatures-fruitful.
“Ongoingly in his creation, the Spirit vitalizes and refreshes.
0 kommentar(er)
