King of Heaven, Lord of Earth

Studies in the Book of Colossians by Peter Lewis

Lord of My Life
(Ch 1 vs 21-23)

The Bible is not all about God; it is all about God and us. It is not a tourists guide to
God: as if God was a static object of our human philosophies. It is the story of his saving
activity, his rescue of a ruined race, his redemption of a world under condemnation.
But God does not deal with us en masse. The Bible startles us with the message
that we are individually known, and searchingly found out and wonderfully loved. No one
understands the gospel until they apply it to themselves. No one begins to know this God
until they enter into conversation with him. And no one sees or hears him fully until they
see him at the cross, the Son of God, dying for their sins.

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
in my place condemned he stood,
sealed my pardon with his blood,
Halleluiah, what a Saviour.

This was for you: it was for you he came, they were your sins he bore, Bethlehem
was for you, Calvary was for you, the love of God has achieved all this for you and he calls
you to live in faithfulness to this Jesus as Lord of your life.
Let God take you up to the summit of this Everest of revelation and let him show
you the landscape of his love that stretches from your eternal election to your eternal joy in
his glorious presence. This is your story and His, the story of his love for you.
It can be summed up in three words, words which also sum up your own life with
God. They are

Alienation, Reconciliation and Faithfulness

Alienation

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of [or
as shown by] your evil behaviour.
We are none of us born Christians. The bible speaks of the fall of the race, of our
rebellion from God, and of universal sin. As a society, as individuals, as a human race we
have become alienated from God, fearing his Presence, rejecting his Lordship, disputing his
rights. This has made us rebels against him, in flight from him, and alone in a way we were
never meant to be alone.
This is why we feel lost in the universe because we have turned from the Creator.
We were made to see in the vast universe his greatness but now we see only our own
littleness. We were made to recognise ourselves as a unique creation in his world but now
we see ourselves only as well-evolved animals whose life is an accident and whose existence
is pointless. All because we live alienated from our Maker.
The cry of that alienation runs through very much of the literature of the twentieth
century and of the twenty first. We turn away from God and wonder why we cannot make
sense of life. We switch off the light and then complain of the darkness.
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The word existence comes from the Latin existere which basically means to
stand out, one thing standing out from another. Human beings were always meant to stand
out from the rest of creation as unique human existence, made in the image of God the
Creator, uniquely personal and made for a personal relationship with the Personal God.
Alister McGrath puts it well in his IVP book Bridge Building:
For men and women, to exist does not mean to limp along at a purely biological
level of being; it means to live an authentically human existence, in which we fully stand out
from the world, and achieve our full human potential.
But all kinds of dehumanising forces in the world threaten to reduce us to the level
of the impersonal. We run the risk of being reduced to a statistic, with our individuality
denied. We are in danger ofcollapsing into the background, and losing our distinctiveness
[McGrath Bridge Building 69]
As a result we are threatened by feelings of meaninglessness and desperately try to
assert ourselves. We insist we can create our own truth, invent our own moral standards,
and cultivate our own lifestyles without regard to God. The Bible calls this self-assertion sin,
and Paul here labels it evil behaviour.
Sometimes that comes out in extreme forms and Paul has the idolatry and
immorality of the ancient world in mind here. There is plenty of that still today. But often it
is shown simply in the God-ignoring respectability of ordinary, selfish, competitive human
life with its false image and its wrong goals. Everywhere sin dogs our human progress and
impedes the work of God.
As another writer puts it,
Sin makes a shambles of created harmony and gives battle to Gods restoration
work. Above all sin lays waste our critical relationship to God in an infinite variety of
tangled ways.It is amazing how quickly sin can take control of something good and
corrupt it. The advent of computers has changed many lives for the better but they have
also been used by persons to spread more quickly and more widely malicious rumours,
conspiracy theories, racial hatred and deadly electronic viruses aimed at destroying data.
Others have used them to entice young children with pornography or to recruit weak and
wavering souls into mind-control cults. Attempts to control abuse with legislation are well
intended but never get to the root of the problem. Sin is not just what we do; it is who we
are. [Garland Colossians 114]
This week, an article in The Times carried a warning that genetically targeted
weapons capable of ethnic cleansing could become a reality within five years. The warning
came after a report by the British Medical Association that within a decade genetic research
would unleash new and terrifying biological weapons capable of killing only people of
specific ethnic groups. They are worried that legitimate research, often conducted to find
potential therapies for debilitating diseases, could be perverted to develop weapons of mass
destruction. As the author of the report said, Every major piece of scientific research has
been used for malign purposes. [Times Oct. 26 2,004]
The heart of it all is our human war against God. Under our veneer of self-
righteousness and good will, says the Bible there is a profound dislike and distrust of God,
the real God, the holy God, the God who comes close and calls for Lordship in our lives.
You were says Paul here enemies in your minds. By mind here he means not just our
powers of logic and reasoning but the very core of our being, he is speaking about the
spiritual centre of the human person. There, he says, we nursed this universal grudge against
our Maker, this irrational dislike, this allergy to God and so lived under a holy and just
condemnation.
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The Bible is the revelation of what God did about all this. It is summed up in our
second word:

Reconciliation

But now he has reconciled you by Christs physical body through death to present
you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation.
Reconciliation deals with the divorce between the human race and its Maker. Sin
alienated us from God, that is one thing; but sin also alienated God from us more
profoundly than we know. We stood under wrath as well as love, the justice of God
condemned us even when the mercy of God spared us. At the cross wrath and mercy met.
In the reconciling work of Christs death God removes the ground of his alienation from us,
he takes our guilt and condemnation upon himself and deals with it, opening up a way of
reconciliation. That reconciliation is offered in the gospel to everyone who hears.
Theres a way back to God from the dark paths of sin,
theres a way that is open and all may go in.
At Calvarys cross is where you begin
When you come as a sinner to Jesus.
Tell me have you come to God by that way and received that reconciliation. Science
fiction writers like to write about gateways in space by which their characters can travel
immense distances in moments. Well this is no fiction: God has opened a gateway that can
take you from alienation to reconciliation in one moment. It does not take a life-time to get
to God by that way.
The moment a sinner believes
And trusts in his crucified God,
His pardon at once he receives;
Salvation in full, through His blood.
He has reconciled you by Christs physical body through death.
The stress there on Christs physical body may be with regard to certain heresies
common at the time. You and I belong to a culture where the physical is often everything
and the spiritual is nothing. In the first century it was often the other way round; the
spiritual was everything and the physical was regarded as nothing.
In some philosophies matter was regarded as contemptible and even as evil; the
body was regarded as an encumberance and the rational mind or the human spirit was
everything. Redemption was by ideas or other spirits or occult influences. They might have
seen Jesus as a teacher leading people on the way to enlightenment or as a spiritual force in
the universe, one of many between human beings and God.
Paul however tells it as it is. In the earlier verses as we saw he makes a very strong
statement about the true divinity of Christ, here he makes a strong statement about our
Lords humanity. The Son of God became a real human being, the Word became flesh-and
blood, one hundred per cent human. He took to himself a full human nature, a human
psychology as well as a human physiology, he became human through and through, like us in
everything except for sin.
In that human nature the Son lived a life of entire dependence and obedience, sinless
in thought and word and deed, God in our human nature living as God intended we should
live. And in his substitutionary death he represented us to God and stood in our place
before the judgment of God, God in our human nature bearing the condemnation our
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humanity deserved for its rebellion and sin: God divorced from God that we might be
reconciled to God.
There are many who think Jesus teaching and example are enough, that high ideals
and a fine philosophy of life is enugh. But if that were enough God would have sent us a
great philosopher to teach us not a Son to die for us. We are not saved by disembodied
ideas but an embodied Son: a unique Christ, achieving this once for all reconciliation at the
cross. People who say that it is only Christs social and ethical teaching and his good
example that matters have lost the point and the gospel. Anyone who dismisses the
centrality of the cross, manufactures a new religion and one that cannot save.
Islam says that Jesus was not crucified, that he did not die, that another died in his
place. It was unthinkable that a prophet so good, so favoured by God should suffer in this
way. But if he had not died in the darkness we would never live in the light. Paul
everywhere says that this death was as real as his life and the shame of his suffering became
the sign of his victory. Because of his death millions redeemed from this fallen world would
be presented to God on the Day of Judgment holy in his sight, and free from accusation.
There you have two pictures, one taken from the temple and the other from the law
courts. The words without blemish recall the work of the priest examining the animals
brought to the temple as offerings and sacrifices to God. They had to be without deformity
or blemish. The apostle Peter in one of his letters uses the reference to show that Christ was
the true and perfect sacrifice for sin but here the apostle Paul tells us that because of his
sacrifice we can be cleansed and presented to God free from blemish, accepted in Christ.
The other reference free from accusation relates to the law courts where an
innocent and righteous person is justified, pronounced righteous, and free from all charges.
That, says Paul has happened to us. As he will later put it, the long catalogue of our sins has
been cancelled, our debts paid, our punishment born by Another. Now no condemnation
attaches to us and before the throne of God we shall be free from accusation:

Bold shall I stand on that great day
For who ought to my charge shall lay?
Fully absolved through thee I am
From guilt and darkness, sin and shame.

Does it seem to you impossible that you should have that experience on the Day in
which God judges the world and the secret of mens hearts? Outside of Christ it is
impossible: There is no one righteous not even one. But listen! In Jesus Christ there is a
new identity and another righteousness available to us: the righteousness of God that comes
by faith to all who believe.
The unique thing about salvation in Christ is that we can hear the verdict at the Last
Day already, Not Guilty because of Jesus Christ. This is the order of things in the gospel,
not wait until you dies to see if you might be saved, not live as well as you possibly can and
hope for a good outcome, but Hear the verdict; live the life. The Christian life is to be a
God-sustained response to the love and grace and salvation which we have found in Christ.
Our calling now is to be faithful to that new status we have in Christ, the status of
men and women who will be acquitted and justified on the Day of Judgment
if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held
out in the gospel.
His if does not mean he doubts it, only that they must continue in this faith, not
leaving it for another gospel, which is no gospel, not abandoning the Christ of Calvary for
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the newly-invented Christ of the heretics. Only the Christ who bore our sins can acquit us
of their guilt and punishment. This, says Paul is the only hope the world has. That is why
the gospel has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. By that phrase he
obviously doesnt mean every individual, but everyone in the sense of Jew and Gentile,
western and eastern, everyone representatively not everyone individually.
The point is that this gospel is for the whole world. There is no alternative because
there is no substitute. God has done something unequalled and unrepeatable and he has
done it for the whole world for everyone everywhere which is why it must be preached to
every creature under heaven. God had only one Son and he made a once-for-all atonement;
now it remains to make this known to every creature under heaven.
There is no alternative because there is no other gospel and that is why the apostle
Paul gave his life to its dissemination and stood against the tolerant paganism of his day. We
too must maintain this in the face of the easy pluralism of modern society.
We are not preaching the gospel if we only preach it as a gospel one of many. That
would be an error like those heretics who said Jesus Christ was one of many. The
exclusiveness on the Christian message is based on the uniqueness of Christ and the
incomparability of his sin-bearing work on the cross. Here is an atonement and
reconciliation big enough for the whole world, adequate enough for the greatest sinner,
ultimate enough for all eternity.
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