Hi everyone, welcome to this evening.
Can anyone remember my acronym Mind the GAP?
That then goes to GASP and tonight we're going to do GRASP
gap is gentleness. Ask if you don't understand
anything. Pay attention to how you feel S
say something. So I'm going to say something.
This is great bedtime reading for views on hell.
Woo Hoo. And the thing I'm going to say
is when I read this a while ago and actually it comes up in one
of the videos, I not only I follow the person who compiled
it, I've also heard at least two or three of them separately,
contributors on podcasts talking about things.
These are all really good people who really care about, who love
Jesus and really care about faithfulness to Scripture.
And they've come up with four different interpretations that
are genuine. And I kind of came away with
that. I already thought two things
could be true at the same time. We see that a lot in theology.
Jesus is both human and divine, the word physical.
The Bible is both fully human and fully divine.
There are so many ways that we have to live with paradox and
tension. But I think this helped me with
the incredible complexity of the fact we're creaturely and we
follow the Creator, the infinite mind, and we have such a finite
mind, but our desperation from Eden is to be in control.
We just really want, we really want to be in control, to rule
in our own wisdom. And so it was just a little,
just a little moment of I think the big thing I came away with
this was, wow, people can be completely convinced by
something. And, and there's something very
powerful about being able to hold things in tension.
One of the big mysteries as we know and keeps coming back again
and again and again, is this tension between free will and
predestination, whether we're all predestined to believe or
whether we're predestined to heaven or not, or, you know,
what the spectrum is with that and agency.
And it's not perfect, but Chris and IA long time ago came across
this metaphor of being on a bicycle and that you put the
pedal down on, it's all on God, it's all on God, it's all on
God, or it's on me, my response, my consent.
And you need to kind of keep peddling both to get somewhere.
If you just keep putting on one or the other, you go around in
circles and fall over. And I think there's something I,
it can't be an eternal metaphor because there was a time before
the wheel was created and invented.
But I do think there's something quite strong about that metaphor
because what we're doing on this course is we're pressing,
pressing and pressing on, on who God is, what he's done.
It's all on the predestination side.
And we're also, well, so far in five sessions, there may be
someone on agency in response, I don't know.
But just to kind of hold that complexity, that's my saying
something. Yeah.
So we've got Tim or Paul over to Athanasius.
Thanks, Alice. Tim, you.
Tim's going to give us a breakdown of Athanasius of
Alexandria. Take it away.
Thank you very much. Goodness.
I'm at a point where I should have gone for 12, not 11 on my
print off. OK.
Good evening. I'm Tim.
Those I've met. Nice to see you all.
So, yes, Sent. Oh, yeah.
That feels very, very formal, isn't it?
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. I've actually, before I read
this, thoroughly enjoyed researching this, Not as deeply
as I would like had I had more time, but enough to for
Athanasius to become a bit of a hero.
I mean, I knew a little bit about him, but he's literally a
hero. And so hopefully in the next 10
minutes you'll feel the same. St Athanasius of Alexandria,
Bishop, theologian, exile and man who proved that one Bishop
with a good argument can indeed stand against an empire.
St Athanasius was born in the year 296 in Alexandria.
Just Athanasius. Alexandria was a place of
libraries, lecture halls, philosophers, mathematicians,
but also a heated debates and theological ferment.
It was in this environment Athanasius received his
education and 1st encountered the Christian faith in its
richness and complexity. By the time he became a Deacon
under Bishop Alexander, he had already possessed a sharp mind
and clear theological instinct, qualities he would become
essential very soon. For in 325 AD the young Deacon
accompanied Alexandra to what was arguably arguably the most
consequential gathering of bishops ever assembled, the
Council of Nicaea. Nicaea was no small gathering.
It was an an emergency meeting of the entire church, convened
to settle a theological crisis. Arianism Arias, a presbyter from
Alexandria, also had proposed that Christ was not fully
divine, but rather the highest of God's creatures.
There was when he was not, Arias famously said, presenting the
view that, though philosophically tidy, threatened
to unmake Christian proclamation from the inside out.
If the sun were not truly God, how could he save?
How could the incarnation be more than a pious metaphor?
And what would become of worship offered worship offered to
Christ? Athanasius, even as a young man,
saw the stakes with clarity. The Council, of course, produced
what we now call the Nicean Creed, affirming that the Son is
of 1 substance with the Father. But while many bishops accepted
the Creed, some did so reluctantly, and many more found
ways to reinterpret it once he they returned home.
The controversy was just beginning.
Three years later, when Bishop Alexandra Alexander died,
Athanasius, still young, was chosen to succeed him as Bishop
of Alexandria. This would not be a quiet
pastorate. Over the next decades,
Athanasius became the chief defender of Nicean orthodoxy, a
task that earned him admiration in the long arc of history, but
not so great in the short term as it earned him exile. 5
separate exiles. Emperors found him inconvenient,
rival bishops found him relentless, and theologians of a
more compromising disposition found him impossible.
Athanasius was not merely stubborn, he was principled,
perceptive, and utterly convinced that the truth of the
Gospel depended on maintaining the full divinity of Christ.
He saw with clarity that if Christ were not fully God,
Christianity would unravel at it's core.
Salvation would become uncertain and sacraments would become
empty signs and the Church's worship would lose it's anchor.
He was willing to be exiled rather than allow the
unravelling to begin. It would be a mistake, though,
to imagine an Athanasius as purely A combative figure.
His enduring legacy lies equally in his positive theological
contributions. One of the treasures of
Christian literature is his early work on the Incarnation.
In it, Athanasius unfolds a vision of salvation that is both
intellectually rigorous and spiritually luminous.
It was once said that is a work so deep and theologically rich
that only Paul Golf has a faintest idea what he's talking
about in it. In it, he argues that the Word
becomes flesh, not as dramatic gesture or as a temporary
necessity, but to heal and restore human nature itself.
His most famous line, which is still quite today, is he became
human that we might become divine.
It is Asanasius's way of describing the transformation
made possible by Christ's incarnation.
It in fact represents A profound vision of Christian life, one in
which the incarnation is not merely the mechanism of
salvation, but it's very substance.
That's not my words, but what brilliant sentence.
So I had to see the mechanism of salvation.
So not the mechanism of salvation, but it's very
substance. It's also worth noting here that
the word used to become divine is in that sentence is theosis,
which means union with God. So it's not as heretic as it as
it as it sounds to the modern reader.
His pastoral sensitivity appears also in his friendships with
monastery communities of Egypt. During his exiles, Athanasius
sought refuge among the desert monks, who in turn found him a
spirit found in him, a spiritual ally.
His biography of Saint Anthony the Great Hermit played a
crucial role in bringing monastic spirituality to the
wider Christian world. Through his work, Athanasius
shaped not only doctrine but also devotion, not only not only
the Church's theology, but its spirituality, spirituality and
its imagination. His influence did not end with
his own lifetime. The Cappadocia Fathers, Basil
the Great, Gregory of Nicaea, spelled slightly different
Nicaea and Gregory of Nasiensis built upon the foundation he
laid, developing the full articulation of the Trinitarian
doctrine that would become the guide for the Church thereafter.
Athanasius was not Athanasius was not the architect of that
doctrine alone, but he provided its essential cornerstone, the
insistence that the sun shares fully and eternally in the
divine essence. Without that conviction, the
later flowering of Trinitarian theology would have been
impossible. We sometimes speak of historical
figures as if they belong safely in the past.
Athanasius belongs to us still. His word was full of political.
His world was full of political pressures, tempting compromises
and theological half measures, temptations not unfamiliar in
any age. He reminds us that truth is
worth defending even when it is unfashionable, and that the
heart of the Christian faith cannot be reshaped to suit the
spirit of the times, and that courage in theology is as
necessary as clarity. With Athanasius, theology was
not merely an academic exercise, but a matter of life, worship,
and salvation. By the time he died in 373, the
tide had turned decisively. The Nicene Creed, which he had
defended with with such relentless passion, became the
faith of the of the universal Church.
Later councils confirmed that Athanasius had fought what what
later confirmed what Athanasius had fought for.
Christ is fully God, fully human and inseparably united, and
inseparably united in his identity as a Saviour of the
world. Very.
Good, nice one, thank you. Alice and I were joking as well.
There's this sort of semi apocryphal story about Father
Christmas at the Council of Nicaea punching out areas in a
in a punch up. So we say like celebrate
Christmas, punch a heretic. Also you, you, you might.
So Gregory Vanessa Basil of Caesarea, super important,
really fantastic. Like read them.
But later on in the manual, I think it's in this version.
It might have been in the later version.
We put in one exercise on Saint Macrina the elder, who is the
elder sister of both of both Basil and Gregory and their
writings about her basically said, look, all of our thinking
comes from her. So she she speaks to us through
them as a key early church Apostolic thinker woman St.
So we we understand her thinking through them and it it is it's
phenomenal. So yeah, thank you, Tim.
And yeah, I don't know really how to respond to your comment
about understanding Athanasius, but I think that I think what I
take, what I take from reading Athanasius, even if you just
read the Against the Gentiles first, this first defence, you
know, he goes through describing the Gospel in an apologetics
kind of way with the Jews, with the Gentiles, and he kind of
goes down these different arguments.
And it's just if you if you read that, one of the things that's
really conspicuous is how alien it reads to contemporary modern
Christian conversation. Like what he focuses on is just
so completely different and also his kind of conclude it towards
the end, he starts going into well, if if nobody, if still you
don't agree with me. And he said, and by the way,
most of the world is already converted.
It's interesting. He puts pretty much everybody
already believes in Jesus. So I'm talking to the few of you
who don't. And and if you still aren't
persuaded by any of my arguments, the bottom line is
how can you get over the fact that none of our people are
afraid of death? And this is his really his kind
of ultimate argument. He says none of none of our
people are afraid of death. He said this is the most
unnatural thing. All people are afraid of death.
All animals are afraid of death. Everyone's afraid of death.
It's like the thing to be afraid of.
How is it that any of our people could possibly not be afraid of
death, even to the point they get thrown to the lions or
whatever else, and they just don't care?
And for him, this was the the strongest and most definitive
proof of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
He said, how can they not be afraid of death if Jesus hasn't
risen from the dead, It can only be because there isn't, there
isn't crisis in them. So from the, from an apologetics
point of view, I really like that because he also passes
through well, you know, OK, if you can't get on board with all
the healing and the miracles and stuff that just happens
everywhere the cross is preached, then let me just bring
it down to something you can relate to.
Everyone's scared of death except our people.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
So I, I kind of like that. So I do, I do recommend reading,
reading him. So what I'm going to do tonight,
I'm going to talk for a bit before we get back into kind of
discussing in groups. And I think this is a really
it's a really pivotal lecture and chapter in the course.
I'm just looking at the the outcomes here.
I had in mind a direction to go tonight, but we might go to in a
slightly different one. I want to make sure that people
have the opportunity to ask the questions they want to ask.
So either because actually a few some of the best conversations
I've had here have been at the end of the evening when most of
the people have left and we've got into kind of, you know,
we've, we've kind of continued. So, you know, do when we're in
the groups as well, do wave me over to come round if you want,
you want to ask. And then also please ask and
we'll try and get through as much as we can in the in the
session tonight. But just to frame the the
takeaways for me, where I think the significance of this chapter
lies. If you recall in the in the
lecture at the end, there's a question and I can't remember
what the question was, but Baxter, he took the answer into
what do you think Jesus feels when he hears moment by moment
the Father say to him, you're my beloved son in whom I'm well
pleased. What does Jesus experience?
The human Jesus, because he's still human now he's
irreversibly human. Do you think he's worried about
anything? Do you think he's afraid of
anything? Do you think he's bothered by
about the criticisms of the Pharisees or the, the, the
concern that maybe the trajectory of, of history is not
going to go in the right direction or that he's going to
lose a handle on everything? Do do you think that any of that
exists for him or within him at all?
And of course, the answer is no. The question what, what is it?
You do feel Jesus is probably a question for prayer more than it
is for speculation, but the point is to say that Jesus
emotional centre is the life that has been given to us in
him. That is our power source.
That is what we live from that that that is the mind of Christ
that has been shared with us and mine doesn't just mean thoughts,
It means the whole internal makeup of a person.
The scripture says who's known the mind of the Lord that he has
instructed him. But we have the mind of Christ,
not we will have, but we have it's not put forward into some
future we'll we'll be able to understand everything it's
saying. Jesus eternal centre of gravity
has been put within us for us to enjoy and access and live from.
That's the Christian gospel. Not that we're trying to close
close the gap with a legal fiction of some kind, but that
God has come to us in Christ. And this is also the, the
question that that came up towards the end about what do we
do when we're reading the Scripture, when we're reading
the, when we're reading the Old Testament?
Well, how, how does the New Testament read the Old
Testament? Well, the New Testament authors
fail every Bible hermeneutics class that you would put them
through, by which I mean, if you were to put the apostle Paul,
John, Peter, Jude, whoever wrote Hebrews, if you were to put them
into Trinity College hermeneutics, you know, how do
you read the Bible interpretive class?
Every single one of them would fail.
They break all of the rules according to contemporary Bible
hermeneutics. How are we supposed to read the
Bible? They completely throw that book
out the window and that ought to cause us to wake up and ask some
questions about, well, how do we read it?
Because if we, if we read it in a way that is not commensurate
with the way they're reading it, are we following in the
Apostolic tradition or how or are we doing something else?
And to me, you have the the New Testament, I forget who said it,
but in, in the past, God spoke to us in many ways.
But now in these last days, he has spoken to us in the in his
son. So this the son is the final
word of the Father. He is the word of God and he's
the final word of God. And actually he is the one who
comes to the prophets who don't understand what they're saying
according to Peter, but but in whom the spirit of Christ is
pointing towards something. But now Christ has come.
Every other vision has to die at the feet of Jesus.
There is nothing that. Can continue on without passing
through the revelation of God in Christ, his incarnation, his
death, his resurrection, his ascension and his baptism of the
world. Everything has to pass through
that. If we're retaining anything that
hasn't passed through that, then it's not Christian.
But for it to be Christian, it passes through that revelation.
So you get the Nicene Creed. Again, a comment from the from
the lecture, the first line, I believe we believe in one God,
the Father Almighty, not the Almighty Father.
That's deliberate. It's not accidental.
Every word is put there deliberately.
The orders put there deliberately that the, the, the
Nicene fathers took great pains to locate the fatherhood of God
as this preeminent truth which is to infer the Trinity, right,
The fatherhood of God and he is the Father Almighty.
And how often we say we believe in God.
What's the first thing we say about God?
Well, God's all powerful often the first thing that people say.
It's the other way around. What is it about our thinking
that pushes us towards power before it pushes us towards the
revelation of fatherhood? The second point on that too is
if we've first established with Jesus and his testimony to us
that God is Father, what then does that?
How then does that change and baptise and upgrade our
understanding of what it even means to be powerful?
What does Almighty look like when it's the Father Almighty
rather than just the Almighty Almighty?
How is the concept of Almighty baptised in the vision of the
Father, Son and Spirit? And this is holiness.
The holiness means to be a cut above and what I had in mind to
do and I might do a little bit later is just try and map out on
the on the whiteboard how starting with an idea like
holiness. How everything we believe about
what holiness even means changes through about 5 different levels
based on whether or not we agree with Jesus about the revelation,
the revelation of his relationship with the Father.
If we start from there versus if we start with a a singular Aryan
God who creates Jesus, how that then changes the in the kind of
the sequence of everything. So a big question, and I think
this really is a crucial session to address this is is this
question of what what is Baxter says it a number of times.
What is the hermeneutic? What is the way we understand
how to read any of this stuff or how to interpret anything?
Like what, what is our framework that enables us to do that And
to to agree with the Nicene Fathers, we would strongly
contend, is to say that the, the hermeneutic is the revelation of
God in Christ, which is the triune God.
That's why we're talking about. This is the Trinitarian faith.
That is the hermeneutic lens through which we read everything
else. So within that, if I might, I
mean, Alice, we've known each other a long time, been friends
for a long time and, and have have debated a lot.
If I, if I might dive back to your bicycle image for a moment.
I, I am not trying to rebalance a bicycle like this.
This course isn't trying to rebalance a bicycle because
we've learnt too far in One Direction and we need to lean
too far on the other. On the other way.
I, I, I want to remove the road completely, right, because
there's no Rd. He is the road, He is the way,
right? And I think that we have the,
the predestination free will question.
I don't believe it's a truth intention.
It's a fundamental corruption in the, in Western theology.
And my proof of that would be this was not an issue for 1000
years when the terms were different and the legal
framework had not been brought in and introduced into the into
the Christian story. It's just not there.
You get it kind some stuff is there in Augustine.
But again, we can, we can go into ways in which it's not in
Augustine. And also we can go into ways in
which Augustine has major problems with his, his reading,
right. This is not new territory.
It's kind of well won, well won territory.
But I said some years ago, Grace and I were preaching in an
Anglican church in, in Saint, I think it's Saint Paul's in
Weston Super Mare. And we used to do quite a lot
there with the previous vicar Andrew Alden was there and pre
COVID. And at the end the youth pastor
came up and he said, well, you know, the I'm just not really,
yeah, this whole predestination free will stuff a lot.
I'm just a practitioner. I get on with it.
You know, I'm not, I'm not kind of not really, you know, I don't
really want to have that kind of discussion.
And I said to him, you don't get to say that you're a
professional Christian, right? You set yourself up here as a
teacher of the word. And these are not secondary
issues. These are primary issues.
They deal with the most essential tenets of what we
believe. What is the nature of the
gospel? What is the nature of salvation?
This is literally 101 Christianity.
It's not. It's not an ivory tower theology
conversation. And I said to him, don't you
think that the failure of the Protestant church for 500 years
to resolve this question, IE which side of the bike are you
putting more weight on? Does the does the complete
failure to resolve that using the same scriptures, claiming
the same methodologies and yet unable to resolve that?
Does that not tell you that there might be a problem with
the bike? Not a problem with how much with
like where, where we're balancing?
Is it not the grounds and the terms of our more that are more
fundamental, the terms that we're, we're playing with, you
know, the field that we're involved with?
Is this not to say that that is where the problem lies?
Because we can make all sorts of assumptions about the ground
that we're on and then come up with all sorts of different
interpreting frameworks which might more or less approximate
experience a little bit. Like if we believe that the sun
goes around the Earth, we can look up at the stars and come up
with all kinds of complex mathematics to try and place
what they're doing. And people did for hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of years arguing about we'll know what,
How do we account for the fact that Pluto goes into retrograde?
It kind of goes forward and then it goes backwards.
How does that work, You know, and the failure to resolve that
mathematically in the end gave way to a paradigm shift where
somebody says, do you know what? I guess it's Copernicus, right?
Perhaps the earth goes around the sun.
And if we get our, if we change the terms, does everything else
suddenly resolve? Do our conundrums and our issues
resolve this? This course is based on the 100%
conviction that absolutely that is, that is the case.
And it's, we, we sometimes talk about evangelising the
foundation of the Western mind because the, the, the, the, the
reformational thinking, which has many extraordinary and
wonderful things in it, because it's, it's possible to do that
even when you're not playing with a full deck.
I mean, we do that all the time, right?
None of us is playing with a full deck.
It doesn't mean that it invalidates everything, but it,
but it doesn't mean at a certain point we have to look back and
say a foundation that is out of line will have a consequence on
the building in the long run. And we want to see that
foundation healed. And that's, that's a big part of
this conversation, right? Is, is seeing that foundation
healed? So I, I think I'm, I'm often
finding myself in conversation of sometimes debate with the,
with the concept of tension or balance.
You've heard me if you've been around here and paid any
attention to me, which you probably haven't, But if you
have and heard me on a Sunday morning, you know, I've, I, I,
I've said, you know, balance is the favourite word of Bible
believing Christians that never appears once in the Bible,
right. So the concept of balance, I
don't consider the I don't consider the cross to be an act
of balance. It's not a balanced individual,
you know, and so I often will hear people say things like,
yes, you're saying God is love. We agree with that, Amen.
We love that. That's good.
But but also God is holy or they'll say, but also God is
just as if God's holiness and his justice are in tension with
his love. I complete this completely do
not agree with that. Give me a chapter and verse on
that one, right? It's that's not there.
Also, it's strangely bipolar if we, if we begin with the
doctrine of God, right, which is what we're saying Christology,
who is Jesus? How does this shape our thinking
about everything else? Because if he's the cornerstone
and he's the capstone, the cornerstone is what sets the
parameters for how you build and the capstone is how you finish
it off, right? So if he's the cornerstone, he
gives us the he gives us the right angles and how we're
building go back to go back to the right angles.
If something is out of if a few degrees out, we go go back to
the the start, who is Jesus? And if we suggest that there is
somehow a tension of forces within God, right.
So and this is how it often comes out implicitly or
explicitly. God loves you, but he's also
just therefore must punish sin. You heard that one?
God is God loves you, but he's also just and must must punish
sin. OK, so God must do something.
Must he like must implies that there's a force that's superior
to God that he's subordinate to. So justice is God and not God,
right? God is subordinate to justice.
Or well, justice is just his nature.
OK, so you're saying God has something that he wants to do,
but his nature prevents him from doing it.
So his will and his nature are not in accordance with one
another. Then he's in division against
himself. Is the bipolar, schizophrenic
God right in division against himself?
At least the Calvinists are honest because they they
recognise this problem. And the Calvinists say no, we we
don't believe God loves everybody.
He loves some and he hates others and he does that before
the foundation of the world. It has to be about him and not
about us. Therefore, he has chosen to love
some and he's chosen to hate others.
The reason he does that is because he wants to make both
sides of his nature known. One side of his nature is
loving, merciful and kind to the other is wrathful, awesome, you
know, obliterating nuclear Holocaust.
And and he is going to torment some people in hell for eternity
because he wants to demonstrate that.
And that's also what we're going to worship God and thank him for
as well. If that sounds like a
caricature, this is not a caricature.
Go and read John Piper and read what he actually thinks.
He actually believes this, actually believes and teaches
this. It's not, I'm not I'm not saying
anything that he wouldn't get up and say.
Yeah, Amen. That's what that's what we
believe because that's what the Bible teaches.
It's not what the Bible teaches, but that's what they think at
least it's honest. And it says it's that it that
it's consistent. It's saying, no, we don't
believe in an all loving God. We believe in a limited loving
God Calvinism the the Tulip limited atonement Tulip is a
five points total depravity. That's the T unconditional
election limited atonement irresistible grace and
perseverance of the Saints. The L of Tulip says God is God's
love and the atonement of Christ is only limited to son.
It's limited to those He's choose, chosen to demonstrate
his love in, everybody else has chosen to demonstrate his wrath
in. And that's good because God's
ways are higher than our ways, because He's holy and we need to
get with his programme. And you'll agree with Him in the
end. And in a million years from now,
when your unsaved friend, family, child, son, daughter,
mother, father, children, whatever are burning in hell,
you will be praising God and rejoicing with Him in his
judgement over them. Because that's what it means to
be a Christian. And if this sounds completely
bananas, this is what huge sections of the Christian Church
not only implicitly believe, but actually state in their faith
statements. This is what they believe.
John Piper explicitly believes this.
Not implicitly, not like fudging it.
He actually believes it. A lot of people kind of pay lip
service to it, but don't really believe it, right?
Because it doesn't make any sense.
It's too dissonant anyway. So they kind of say, well, yeah,
it's over there in an in an abstract sense.
And then they do things like, well, of course, when we say
hell, we don't really mean burning fire.
We mean separation from God, right?
You heard that one because we don't like the idea of God
putting people in an oven for eternity with flames, because
that just sounds a little bit too Hitlerish, right?
No, no, it means separation from God.
It's to sanitise it a little bit for for modern people, because
the idea of Dante's Inferno doesn't work on modern people
most of the time, maybe works on mediaeval people who are used
to, you know, tyrants and torture and all the rest, that
they might be able to accept something like that about God.
We can't accept that about him. So but we can't accept the idea
of let's, we're going to just be separated from God.
OK, That doesn't, that doesn't sound quite so bad.
That doesn't sound quite so much like I'm going to stop listening
to anything you have to say. Now.
I might continue to listen a little bit more or because
separation from God, OK, well, that that's fairly abstract to
me anyway. I don't know what it means to be
not separated from God. So separation from God.
OK, fine. I'll listen to more of your
gospel pitch. All right, so then we introduced
the idea of separation from God again, New Testament.
Show me where the New Testament says Jesus comes to save us from
separation with God. Jesus died to save us from
separation from hell, which is separation from God.
Give me chapter and verse because all the guys who say
this will say it saying with believing what the Bible says,
but then give me chapter and verse.
If you really think that, show me.
So it's a it's a massaging of an idea to make it a little bit
more palatable. I mean, it's not really that
much more palatable if you really take it seriously.
But of course, most people don't take it seriously because they
get on with life and they say, like my friend in Saint Paul's,
well, I don't want to think about that stuff.
It's too complicated anyway. I just want to get on with the
stuff. And and that's right, OK, if
that's the best you've got, then do that.
Love people, you know, pray with them, introduce them to Jesus,
XYZ do that, do that stuff. The Aryans were doing that too
for hundreds of years, right? So when Augustine says the whole
world groaned under the weight of Aryanism, Augustine's
analysis of the of the the church in the 100 years or so
pre Nicaea was that the majority of Christians were Aryan.
They did not believe that Jesus was God.
They thought he was a created being.
And Augustine's angle on this was this is a this was a tragedy
that needed the Nicene fathers that needed Athanasia so that
others like him, Hillary of Pasha, to come along and really
smash this. And they they didn't come and
make peace with it. They didn't sit down with the
areas and say, yeah, we we do see your point there.
Let's work out a way that we can have your version and our
version and kind of combine them together.
Father Christmas literally lamped the guy, right, literally
socked him in the face. This was not this was not like
something that they saw that now we can critique that too, right,
but but there's AI think it's Athanasius is called the hammer
of the Aryans, the hammer of the Aryans, right.
This is not like nice, nicely nice origin of Alexandria was
called origin Adamantius. You know, the Iron Man is what
Adamantius means. The Iron Man, he'd completely
invincible because he would just wade into any fight anytime,
anywhere. And that's what got him into so
much trouble. They were, they were on the
front foot, not on the back foot.
And they understood what was at stake and they understood what
was at stake with the from the perspective of, you know, a
couple of 100 years of or close to a couple of 100 years of
church history and what they already perceived as having of
the corruption that had come in and what was being lost in that
conversation. And that's why they put a stake
in the ground and said, we are going to fight for this.
And it was, I think Nicea was not a nice place to be.
I don't think it was a friendly powwow.
I think it was pretty tense. I mean, you sometimes see these
these pictures of people like parliaments around the world and
they explode into punch UPS, right?
And we think, wow, you know, Bulgarian, I'm probably throwing
them under the bus because it wasn't them.
Someone sorry, Bulgaria. Some you sometimes see these
parliaments and they and you know, they they're like throwing
punches. And I mean, our parliament gets
close to it, but because they get, they get taught in private
school how to do it, you know, with rhetoric instead.
But I mean, I guess maybe in the olden days they do a duel.
But the point is nice. Nicaea was not a a safe place to
be walking around. This was everything was at stake
in this conversation. And we can even critique whether
they even did everything perfectly right.
So I'm not trying to say they did even everything perfectly,
but they gave us, they gave us Orthodox Christianity and they
also gave us the Bible, by the way.
So it's the same people who are deciding on the Nicene Creed are
the ones who are deciding even what the Bible is.
So it's not like the Bible versus Nicaea, which sometimes
people will say, oh, we just want to go back to the Bible.
Look, the same process that gave you the Bible gave you Nicaea.
So you can't really take the one and not the other and pretend
like you're being Christian. I mean, you can you can say
you're being something else, but you know, to suggest that you
can somehow reverse the Nicene discussion and get to something
that's more true by just looking at the Bible completely
nonsensical. It's like people who say that
about the apostle Paul as well. Well, we can.
We just want to do deal with Jesus and not with Paul because
we don't like some of the stuff that Paul said.
The chances are the stuff you don't like is because of bad
translation. But even that that aside, you
know, that like the Gospel of Luke is written by Luke, who
wrote Acts, who was Paul's like assistant, you know, in his
Apostolic team. And Luke saw the content
continuation from the gospel into the book of Acts and into
Paul's writings. Like these guys did not see any
conflict whatsoever between what Paul was preaching and teaching
and what's present in the gospels.
They didn't see that conflict. And they're also the ones
responsible for giving us the gospels in general terms.
So the idea that we can access by going to the gospel,
something that is unaffected by, you know, the later discussion,
that's not the Christian history.
It's not that we, we inherit that tradition, Sola scriptura,
the noble idea that you can just read the Bible by itself doesn't
exist. You can't read it by itself.
The fact that it's a Bible at all means it's not by itself.
And that's not a, that's not a bug, that's a feature, right?
It's supposed to be that way because this is supposed to be
works out in dialogue in the communion of Saints.
This is part of what the church is.
That's part of what the legacy in the history of the church is.
Our problem is we were joking. Malcolm and I were joking a bit
earlier. The problem with much Protestant
theology is that the history of Christian theology goes Jesus,
John and Peter, Paul, maybe small brackets or footnote
Augustine and then Martin Luther.
And that's the that's the story of Protestant theology.
And then, you know, we kind of pick it up from there.
Pentecostals are even worse because it basically goes Jesus
book of Acts, William Seymour, like 1900.
You know, they erase even more of the church history, which I
said to a good Pentecostal friend of mine who said when we
were talking about penal substitution and when after he
could no longer answer any of the points I was giving to him,
said to me, I guess I just can't believe that God would have
allowed us to get it wrong for so long.
And I said, what are you talking about?
You're a Pentecostal. You believe God let us get it
wrong for 1800 years before you guys came along.
I mean, what are you talking about?
You know, and it makes me feel like there's that part in
Corinthians where Paul says, did the word of God come to you only
or did it only come from you? Where did you get this idea in
this sort of closed echo chamber type conversation?
So we're, we're looking back, what why is it that to the
Niceans, the Nicean fathers, the question of who is God?
Why is this so fundamental? Because they understood that
changes the nature of everything else.
It's not we, we, we don't have this like bipolar thing where,
OK, God's love on this side and he's just on this side.
That's very that's to reduce God to a human level.
And that's to reduce God to the level of a human judge, where
you say, well, OK. The judge might look and say,
well, I'm compassionate on you because I can see you had a bit
of a bad start in life and you had these issues and that issue.
So, you know, and it's your first offence.
So we want to go a bit lenient and all the rest.
But the law is the law, you know, and my job is to serve the
law and I have to execute that. And I also have a responsibility
for reparations to the family who you robbed.
And you know, and we have a responsibility to maintain
social order. And I have to do these things as
well. So I'm going to still have to
give you a custodial sentence or, but you know, I'll be
slightly lenient here, but over here, I'm not going to be, or
it's your third offence. No, no more leniency for you.
You're getting the full whack, right?
This is to reduce God to our human conceptualizations of
justice. We have an intuition of what
justice is, which is conditioned by our culture.
We layer that onto God and we say, well, if God is just,
that's what it means to be just instead of doing the Christian
thing, which is to say, what is the character of God as revealed
in Jesus? What is the life that Jesus has
that he has shared with us? And based on the world
transforming effect of that life, how do our ideas of
justice, holiness, goodness, all these other things, how do they
need to to be recapitulated, to be brought back into the hedge
of Christ? How, what do we need to repent
from about those things? Metanoia, a transformation of
the mind that's saying, OK, we used to think XYZ and now we
realise that we've now we have come to the cross.
Those ideas, they have to die and maybe they get resurrected
or get processed through the cross, but we cannot remain the
same as we were before we came there.
And this is this is the vision to see the resurrection of all
things in the person of Jesus. Jesus, forgive me.
You gave me the bicycle analogy. I know we could go there, right?
Jesus does not ride a bicycle, right?
The way of Jesus being with his Father is not a balance between
the the initiation of the Father and Jesus's own effort.
That's not the way of Jesus being.
If it's not the way of Jesus being, it is not the Christian
life, because the Christian life is.
Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part
in me. Right?
It's not. Again, I've said before, Jesus
doesn't want you to be a follower.
I sometimes upset people deliberately because it gets
them to pay attention. Right.
I'll go travel somewhere and I'll say I'm here to tell you
stop following Jesus. And then they're like, what?
They freak out. Yeah, stop following Jesus.
You need to stop right now. How long have you been a
Christian? 20 years.
Man, you should have stopped following Jesus a long time ago.
Because the thing about followers is followers.
Followers can lag behind, Followers can get distracted,
they can take a wrong turn. Followers can run ahead.
Followers can do all these sorts of things.
Trying to copy the Messiah, trying to emulate him when he'd
said, look, eat my flesh and drink my blood, don't follow me.
The purpose of following is so that they followed him, so that
their hearts could burn long enough that they could trust him
when he said eat my flesh and drink my blood and they could
think. Even though he sounds like a
complete nut case, we have to go with it, right.
So the purpose of following is to give you a bit of an on ramp
to introduce you to Jesus so you can hang around for him, with
him for a bit so you can experience what he's like and
think, yeah, OK, I think I could trust him to go a little bit
further. So then when he says the really
inflammatory stuff like eat my flesh and drink my blood, you're
actually able to say with Peter, where else can we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
The problem in the, to me, big problem in the Western
conversation, you know, Tim alluded to the, the, the concept
of theosis, it as a deification to be reconstituted into the
nature of God, but without being God, right.
This is the, this is the early church's witness of what the
what salvation is all about. That has been always completely
eliminated from the discussion. And So what we're left with is
behavioural management, and then later on we're left with mind
management, like doctrinal management, you know, thinking
the right thoughts and doing the right things.
Follow Jesus, emulate him, copy him.
He's a good example for you. Jesus is not an example for
anyone. He's the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world, not an example.
Which isn't to say we don't see things in him that we learn from
and think, OK, yeah, we can do that.
But he he puts it this way, do unto others as you would have
them do unto you. Well, where's the example There.
I thought I'm supposed to do what you're doing.
Jesus. If I'm supposed to follow your
teachings. Yeah.
Well, I'm telling you, do to other people what you want them
to do to you. Which puts you at the centre of
gravity in that right. How do you how do you want
people to treat you? That's how you should treat
them. Well, how do I follow that?
You can't. There's no formula to follow in
that statement. What there is, is OK.
How do I want them to treat me? I don't know.
Because I'm a mess on the inside.
Because in me is all of my, all of my hang ups, all of my fears,
all of my go away from me, Lord, because I'm a sinful man.
Peter's first words to Jesus, right?
Or second words to Jesus, all of that stuff is there.
Isolation, separation, shame, arm's length, self hatred,
addiction, all of those things that bury the real me under them
or that I hide behind. How do I relate to others out of
that? I can't unless I know the love
of God. Right.
And we love because he first loved us so that the the love of
God as we know the love of God. Then do unto others as you'd
have them do unto you. We don't need anyone to explain
it to you, right? Of course.
Yeah. Do unto others as you'd have
them do unto you. I know the love of God, growing
in the love of God, experiencing it, seeking to allow everything
in my life to reorient around that.
And therefore, OK, it kind of starts to become obvious.
What would Jesus do? You don't need a little band,
right? You have the risen Christ in
you, working with you and through you and overflowing that
love. Now, to me, that's not a
balance, right? That's not how much of it is
Jesus and how much of it is me? And do I need to put equal
weight on both sides so the bike doesn't fall over to me?
That is, my side is dead and buried in the ground.
It's no longer I who live. Is Christ living in me, in fact,
Christ living through me. Paul says I struggle with all
the divine energy that so powerfully works within me.
Same word he uses when he talks about prayer later on in
Colossians. Our dear brother Epaphras is
always wrestling in prayer for you.
It's the same word struggling in prayer.
Same concept. He's not like, I'm really trying
to work up a revival egg and lay that egg, you know, praying
really, really, really hard, shouting and wailing, all of
that. He's like problem for poor old
Patras. He can't stop praying.
Guy keeps trying to lie down and going to sleep and he's so
blasted by the Holy Spirit. He keeps praying for you.
That's what Paul's talking about.
And he's saying that's what it's like for me.
I'm, I just, I've got so much of the energy, the divine energy of
God working through me, which is his love, by the way, even
William Seymour said that. What is William Seymour, by the
way, founder of the Pentecostal movement?
He said, what is the Pentecostal power?
It is nothing other than the love of God.
It does not come with the love of God.
It is a counterfeit fire. Father of Pentecostalism.
It's only the love of God. That's it.
It's not anything else. He understood that.
So when Paul saying I struggle with all the energy of God
that's so powerfully works within me, he's saying I am so
strung out on what it's like to have even a little bit of access
to Jesus's internal world that I can't stop preaching the message
because it's the message preaching me.
Jesus is the message. I am the overflow of his
message. He spoke and gave me life,
right? The message is preaching me.
It's not me preaching the message.
This is union. It's to say not what must I do
to be saved or how do I locate myself in the right in the right
box, or how do I being in the right box?
How do I get my ducks in a row so that now I'm in, I can learn
how to do it properly? It's to Take Me Out of the
equation altogether. That's what Watchman Lee said,
great father of the Chinese church, modern Chinese church.
God deals with every problem in your life by taking you out of
the way and replacing you with Jesus.
That's the good angle on substitution.
That's the substitution bit. It's just not a penal
substitution. It's it's an ontological
substitution, a substitution of being.
He becomes what we are so that we can be what he is, the
Athanasian Creed. Now why?
If Jesus is just a created being, he cannot do that.
If Jesus is a created being, He can give us the highest order of
creation, but he cannot give us the divine life.
The divine life is still behind an impenetrable veil.
What is the mind of God really like?
Well, it's not it we we see some reflection of it in Jesus, but
we don't see the substance of it in Jesus.
The Nicene Fathers, he is of one being 1 substance, 1 essence
with the Father. And later on Constantinople they
added language to confirm that that was also true of the Holy
Spirit because that wasn't the the biggest focus in Nicaea.
So they, the kind of Nicaea Part 2 included more sections on the
Holy Spirit in the same way. So what they're showing us is
this, and this is Athanasius. He's saying look, our problem is
by initiating this cosmological catastrophe called the fall, we
have introduced death, dissolution and non being into
the equation of the universe. And our problem is we are now
unravelling and dissolving away into nothingness.
How does God solve this problem? By taking his indestructible
life and making it become flesh, placing it in human flesh, flesh
being the bad word for humanity, right.
And we looked at that last time, not anthropos meaning man, sarks
meaning flesh. The word became flesh.
God united his indestructible indissoluble life with humanity.
That's that's our basis for saying nothing can separate us
from the love of God. It's not the basis of because
we've prayed the right prayer or done the right thing or
participated sacramentally in the right process, we now have
qualified to say nothing can separate us from the love of
God. It's to say because of Jesus,
who he is, his nature even before what he's done, it's to
say who he is. It matters who he is.
It matters that He is the eternal Son of the Father, who
always has been the eternal Son of the Father, because if that's
who He is, then when he becomes flesh, he brings all of the
fullness of that triune life with Him.
And what does the New Testament say?
In Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily
form, and you have been given fullness in Him.
So it's because He is the Creator.
To go back to our last session, we see any discussion in the New
Testament in the letters or the Gospels, especially John, the
Synoptics. It's still there, but it's, you
know, a little more pragmatically focused.
But the Gospel of John Paul's writings, we start with he's
some some iteration of he is the creator and sustainer of
everything. So going back to the lecture,
and I'll push it back to the tables in in just a moment.
So going back to the lecture, Baxter made the point which he
and I have talked about a lot of his friend who got very angry
with him and said, you can't, you can't just go around saying
to everybody that they're that they're children of God and that
they're they're included in him already.
You don't know whether they've believed in repented of their
sin and all the rest and back says, OK, so tell us before
they've done all that. What is the nature of God's
relationship with them? And he just said categorically,
well, this is a judge. He becomes Father after you've
done XYZ, you know, after you've believed the right thing, then
he becomes Father because that's what it means to be adopted,
right? In that, in that way of
thinking. But nice here starts with
Father. But the fundamental truth of
God's being is Father because there never was a time when he
was not father, because there was never, there never was a
time when the Son was not the Son.
He didn't become the Father when he created the Son.
The Son is eternally begotten, meaning the Son, the Son's
identity as a son. Think, if you think about it
this way, the Son's identity as son is to infer the Father,
right? You don't get the Son without
the Father because to say Son means there's a Father and to
say Father means there's a son or child.
It's not gendered, right? And we could, I'm not trying to
do the gender thing tonight. We could use either, but just
keep the, the, the male language for a moment.
If you can go with me on it, to say father is to infer a child
and to say child is to infer the parent.
So in and this is there's one of these other issues as cropped up
called the eternal subordination of the Son, where OK, the Son
will always be subject to the Father, like secondary to the
Father, which is also another subtle heresy.
But if you think about it this way, it's impossible for the
Father to be the Father without the Son, because if the Son
isn't there, he's not Father anymore, right?
Be something else. And it's impossible for the Son
to be the Son without the Father because to say the Son infers
the Father. So when you say the name of
Jesus, the inferences, the name of God is Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, and Holy Spirit's a little more mysterious.
But again, we flesh that out in Constantinople and there's a lot
of discussion to have around the Holy Spirit.
But the point I'm trying to make here is when in the Nicene
sense, whenever we're using these terms, Father, Son, Holy
Spirit, 1 being Trinity, what we're saying is that there is no
hierarchy within this God. There's no superiority.
All you have in the nature of that being is other focused,
self giving love. The Son is always submitting to
the Father. The Father is always submitting
to the Son. The Son is submitting to the
Spirit who's taking what is the fathers and the sons and making
it known to you. You see the language of Jesus,
It's constantly, it's constantly deferring to the others.
So no one can come to the Son unless the Father draws him.
But no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom
the Son wills to reveal him. So how does that work?
The Father says, Jesus says the Father himself judges no one.
He's entrusted all judgement to the Son because he's the Son of
man. And then later on, well, I judge
no one. Listen to my word.
So you, you have a a, you have a constant deference within the
Trinity. Now that that's not, that's not
just a way of condescending to human life.
The point about this is to say this is the revelation of what
the very life and nature of God is.
See, God does not have a love side and a justice side within
the Trinity. It's not that, not that the
Father, Son and Spirit have to work out what is just and
equitable among us. How do we divide things up so
that it's fair for me, Jesus, and fair for you, Father, and
fair for you, Holy Spirit. We have to, we have to judge
that. And you know, we need to
moderate ourselves around each other so we don't take too much
ground, so that we give enough ground so it's fair, equitable,
stable and just. We do not see that in the
Trinity. We see complete other focused,
self giving, self sacrificing love that is poured out from the
one to the other, even to the point where the scripture can
say Christ is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of
the world. How can he be slain from before
the foundation of the world if he was slain 2000 years ago?
Well, this has to this has to tell us that something about the
very nature and essence of who God is is revealed in that
truth. We sometimes put it this way,
God is cruciform, meaning God looks like Jesus hanging on the
cross. The most perfect picture and
image we see of what God is like is when Jesus is hanging on the
cross and he prays. Father, forgive them.
They don't know what they do. This is the pinnacle.
That's why John has in his gospel.
This is the moment of Jesus's coronation, his glorification.
It's why he wears the crown of thorns when he goes on the on
the cross for John, because this really is his enthronement.
When he's lifted up on the cross is the moment that he's lifted
up on the throne of the universe for John.
And this is also why in the Book of Revelation, when John's
weeping because no one can open the seals, you remember this
crazy bit. And he is the Angel saying, the
lion of the tribe of Judah has overcome.
He has been found worthy. And then it says, John says,
then I looked and I saw a lion. Where's the lion?
There's no lion. He hears the lion is overcome,
and then he turns to find a lion.
But he finds a lamb. And not even just a lamb, it
says like a newborn baby Lamb is the Greek.
It's not just like an ordinary young lamb.
It's a, it's an infant newborn like lamb.
I don't know what the term is in in English farming.
People might be able to tell me. But anyway, it's the newborn
lamb who's been slain on the throne.
So he sees a slain lamb on the throne.
And it also has seven horns and seven eyes, which is kind of a
bit crazy. But the point is he's, he's not
seeing a lion, right? So again, we get our songs, we
sing. Well, Jesus, you're the lion and
Jesus, you're the lamb. No, you're not.
Jesus, you are the way in which you are a lion.
And the lion is a symbol of, of, you know, kingship, of strength,
of dominance and all of that. The way in which your powers
manifest is in the lamb likeness.
It's not that you're a lamb on one side.
You're a lamb on a good day and a lion on a bad day.
It's this, it's not bipolar, right, that these two things
are. There's no tension.
It's not lamb and lion in tension with one another.
It's no the way in which he is a lion, which is a a well known
metaphor for the Jews, the lion of the tribe of Judah, well
known metaphor for the Messiah. But in what way is he a lion?
In what way is he a conqueror? In what way is he an overcomer?
It's as the slain Lamb, what is the power which enables him to
bring the whole world into alignment with him.
It's the power of the cross. That's why Athanasius says
wherever the cross is held up and declared, the demons flee.
The sickness is heal. You know all of that.
He comes back to this. It's good because God is
cruciform. God is shaped like the cross.
He looks like the character of God as revealed on the cross is
the truest statement we get about what God is like.
So every time we're coming to the Lord's Table, it's supposed
to be a re engagement without reality.
Because as Martin Luther said, we need to hear the gospel every
day because we forget it every day.
We're constantly getting dragged away by other human ideas which
make more sense to our rational minds.
And I'm as guilty of that as anybody, right?
Yeah. I mean, God, I would be doing a
better job of this than you. But don't you think that
absolutely doing a better job of sorting out the Ukraine war than
you would be right now? God, I do not think you're doing
a good job. My, my natural mind looks at
this a certain way, right? But the, the invitation, once
we've, once we've learned, once we've tasted that our hearts
burn within us around the person of Christ that enables us to
say, like with Peter, OK, Jesus, we cannot figure this out, but
where else can we go? You've got the words of eternal
life and we need to hang around with you and trust that it's
going, that sense is going to come into this and your light is
going to continue to confront the darkness and going to
continue to make sense of this stuff.
And we don't know how that's going to going to get worked
out, but we're participating right now.
And there's the action, right? And there's where where faith
working through love gives rise to love as an action Love, love
put into effect in, in, in real pragmatic terms, it falls into
places, the natural overflow and the consequence of getting
straight in face to face with him and discovering, oh, his
love is in me. His love is reconstituting me
because I'm not the centre of the question any longer.
It's not what must I do, it's who is he?
And now what has he done? And how has that then changed
everything about me and the world and everything else?
And then we're able to say, like Paul's able to say, we now no
longer regard anyone after the flesh, only after the Spirit.
Even we used to regard Christ that way.
We don't regard him that way or anyone else any longer.
Can you say something like that? How can you get to a point of
saying we do not? I do not look at anybody and
process my decisions about who they are or what they, what
they're like based on anything in the physical, fleshly,
material world. I base it only after the Spirit.
And that spirit is also again good Trinitarian formula.
And Christ the last Adam became the life giving spirit.
Crazy language and so we see in the Holy Spirit the same nature
and character and the same will the same mind that when Jesus
says the Son can only do what he sees the Father doing so the the
Holy Spirit perfectly expresses in the same way the same life
that the Holy Spirit has with a father and son for all eternity.
Now, if that if we we start getting straight on that, this
becomes our hermeneutic where we say, all right, given that
reality, how then do we need to That's like Baxter talks about
it is the the twist at the end of the book.
You know, if you're reading a crime novel, Agatha Christie,
you get the twist at the end. And suddenly when you get that
twist, it changes everything that has happened up until now
in that book. What was the book saying to us?
Well, now the twist was it was all a hallucination.
Hang on a minute. I need to go back and read.
Where were the clues? Right.
So when we when we get that final word of the Father, which
is Jesus Christ, we then don't take him and put him on the same
level. We, we don't put him as this
component and put Moses here and the prophets here and all of
this and put them all out and say, OK, now how do we harmonise
all of these into a nice rational, cohesive whole?
We don't, we don't do that. We say, like the the voice of
the Father said to James, Peter and John on the Mount of
Transfiguration when they had Moses, Elijah and Jesus all
appear in front of them and Peter wanted to put three
tabernacles up, one for each of them.
As soon as he wants to do that, the Father envelops them in a
cloud and says, this is my son by the way, listen to him.
Then when the cloud is removed, Moses and Elijah are gone.
What's that supposed to tell us? Moses and Elijah means the law
and the prophets. When Jesus says before Abraham
was I am, He's trying to say to you, listen, he even puts it
this way, but you've heard Moses say this, but I tell you this
James and John calling fire down from heaven.
They want to do it because they're just quoting what Elijah
did. And Jesus doesn't say to them.
We don't do that anymore because it's a new time, you know, and
we're being nice to people now that the pendulum is swung from
the judgement side to the love side for a while while I'm here.
And by the way, it's going to swing back again, you know, when
I, when I come back and nuke the planet right in the second
coming, because that's what a lot of Christians believe that
Jesus is going to kind of nuke the planet, right?
And then New Jerusalem is going to come down like a giant board
cube from Star Trek and land on it coming, coming from space.
You know, I mean, a lot of people actually believe this.
I don't know, maybe you do, you don't, but a lot of people do.
But he's he's saying, I'm losing my thread.
I need to stop and put you in groups.
He's saying to them, he doesn't say we're not doing this
anymore. Look at his words.
He says you do not know what spirit you are of, you do not
know what spirit you are of, which is tantamount to saying
you don't know who the God is that you believe in.
You don't know you want to call fire down from heaven because
you think that's what God is like.
I know where you get that from, but you don't know what God is
like. The Son of Man, which means God,
by the way, when he says the Son of man, that's a statement
meaning God, the Son of man has not come to destroy men's lives,
but to save them. So then the question is, will,
at what point did God change what God was doing?
Was God, Well, OK, up until now he's been a been a, you know, a
severe but fair judge that's been saving some and destroying
others. And now Jesus has come and is
kind of doing something to change this around a little bit.
Well, well, that's to say that Jesus and the Father are not in
a court, right? It's to say that there is some
introduction of significant change in who God is, that the
attitude and the nature of God is as a perfectionist judge,
that he's kind of weighing you against one side or another.
Would you? And that's what the that's what
the apostles are thinking. That's why they want to call
fire down from heaven. And when Jesus comes and he says
the Son of Man has not come to destroy men's lives, he's
telling us what God is like. God is not a destroyer of men's
life. Who is the destroyer?
Well, he says the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy.
The thief is the destroyer, not God the thief.
I've come to give life. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and
giver of life. It's in the Nicene Creed and the
resurrection and the life. He's the life giver, not the
death giver. The disciples thought that it
was death and life because they had that in their Bible.
You have stories like God sent an evil spirit to possess soul.
Do you believe God sent an evil spirit to possess soul?
Because I don't believe that. I don't believe God has evil
spirits who work for him and he sends them around to get people
to go into line. And the reason I don't believe
that is because I met Jesus and there's nothing in Jesus that
remotely demonstrates that to me.
On no level does he show me that pattern of behaviour.
He does not show me that character.
And when when Philip says to Jesus, we'll just show us the
Father and that will be enough for us, he says, if you've seen
me, you have seen the Father. The question is, who is the
Father? Well, you've, you've seen me,
you have seen him. There is no difference in, in
the sense of there's no qualitative difference, right?
There's a personal difference. We see the Son and the Father,
you know, are two of three in one God in three hypostatic
persons. But the nature and the
character, the identity of the Son is a perfect reflection and
manifestation of the heart of the Father.
The Son can only do what he sees the Father doing.
So when he says the Son of God has not come to take men's
lives, this is not a dispensational temporary.
We're going to, we're doing this little window of time where
suddenly we're changing how we're behaving towards humanity.
This is the word made flesh that's come into our confusion
and our mess and our darkness and has come to light it up from
the inside so that there could be no more ambiguity.
And then for Athanasius and others, all other visions of God
have to die at the feet of the vision of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit as revealed in Christ.
And we take that and we go back and we say, all right, let's,
let's see it. Help us now to see Jesus show us
what we couldn't see before. What were we blind to before?
What were we, what frameworks were we using to understand the
Scripture or to understand life, our own experience that now need
to be reconstituted now that we've met you like the like the
people who said which man sinned who sinned this man or his
parents that he was born blind. Well, they're just working with
the Bible. I will visit the sins of the
fathers on to the third and the 4th generation, right.
It's just there in the Bible, and Jesus said neither this
happened so the glory of God could come into him.
Which isn't to say God caused it.
He's just point. He's just pointing to the Father
again. He's saying, let me show you
what the Father is like. Bang.
Here's the healing. Your sights, your sights
restored. You're asking a question of
legal significance. Who gets punishment for what?
I'm going to show you what the Father is like.
Here's the healing. His sight is restored.
You see these? Yeah.
OK, take the group time and wave me over if you want.
But my last conclusion on this is these are not, these are not
compatible, right? It's oil and water.
They don't mix. It's like we say grace and law
don't mix. It's we can put that in better
terms. Grace plus law equals law.
And if any part of the chain depends on us, then the whole
chain depends on us because the chain's only as strong as the
weakest link. So therefore, what is Jesus
presenting to us that is not the chain that we've had, we've had
before. All right, take it, take it,
discuss, wave me over if you want.
Hey everyone, please keep staying and chatting if you
want. I got, I got waylated to another
discussion at the back. But if you if you want to, we
have sort of formally finished and maybe if you could take a
plate out and put the scrape the things away in the bin on the
way out would be would be grand. And do we need the tables to the
sides as well, Chris? Yeah, if you don't, if you don't
mind. But I mean, I'm I'll stick, I'll
stick around. We'll be the last out if anyone
wants to keep talking. But thanks very much.
Cheers.