Hearts Enlightened

PASSAGE FOR THE DAY:
2 Corinthians 4 (click the link)


KEY VERSES:
For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:5-6, NIV)


REFLECTIONS:
It seems that Paul is constantly being put on the spot by the Corinthians. They want him to speak about himself, to defend his own ministry, his own person, his own character. But he refuses to do this. At least, he refuses to do it in anything like the way that they would regard as valid. Instead, he offers himself, like John the Baptist offered himself, simply as a voice, a witness, a signpost.

Paul is who and what he is because he is a messenger, a herald, of the King, the Messiah. The word "Christ," of course, means "Messiah," which itself means "King." We should sometimes remind ourselves of that, perhaps by using a phrase like "King Jesus." Paul is a herald of King: he travels around the ancient world, telling unsuspecting pagans that there is another King, namely Jesus (Acts 17:7). So Paul himself is simply a slave, a servant. He essentially says to the Corinthians: We are your slaves for Jesus' sake. We are simply here to serve you, to bring you the gospel, working as the go-betweens for yourselves and Jesus. When that encounter has taken place, we can stand back and let you simply be yourselves—the people of God in Christ. 

What has been going on in Corinth through this whole process is nothing less than the outworking of God's new creation, and, as a result, the shining of God's glory. In verse 6, Paul quotes from Genesis 1: God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. This same God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," Paul declares, has now "made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ."

What's going on here? For Paul, it is absolutely vital that what has happened in the gospel of Jesus is the beginning of God's new creation. The new creation began, as far as Paul was concerned, when Jesus of Nazareth came out of the tomb on Easter morning. The new creation will finally be fulfilled when the reign of Jesus in the present age is complete, and sin and death are fully overcome, so that, "God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). The life of the church runs from that beginning of the new creation to the completion of the new creation.

This is enormously important for a number of reasons. To begin with, Christian spirituality is not an escape from creation. It is not a way out, a way of declaring the present world and our physical existence to be simply evil, dark, gloomy and bad, dragging our immortal souls down into the mud and mire. On the contrary, God intends to redeem the present creation. He has begun that operation in Christ, and now continues it in the Spirit, in the hearts and lives and behavior of those who are now in Christ. And, as he does so, this means for Paul that God has shone into people's lives the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Every element in this rich statement needs to be unpacked and laid out. Without Christ, people are in the dark. They don't know who they really are as human beings. They don't know who God really is. In particular, they cannot make any sense of the strange story of Jesus. But when God works through the preaching of the gospel, through the work of the Spirit, people come to understand all these things about themselves, about the world, about God and about Jesus. And supremely they come to the knowledge of the glory of God.

God's "glory"—the phrase means, no doubt, that when people eventually see God the sight is astonishingly bright and dazzling. But beyond that, it also means that it is supremely lovely and beautiful. We don't talk as much about the beauty of God as we do about the glory of God, but glory surely embraces beauty, and a sense of awe and delight, as well is simply a sense of utterly dazzling light. And this is because God's glory, ultimately, is the revelation, the shining of who God actually is. In the gospel we discover that God is at heart the God of total self-giving love.

I don't do a whole lot of traveling, and I've never traveled alone. But I can imagine that this whole "enlightening" experience is a bit like traveling alone—we are separated from the people we love, away from those with whom we can relax, with whom we can be friendly. But then somebody we know comes to meet us, in an airport or at the bus station, or when we finally arrive back home. Our hearts are warmed, deeply comforted, by this sudden presence of somebody with whom we can be truly ourselves, someone who will give themselves to us.

That is a pale illustration of what it's like when you are away from God, not knowing who you are, not knowing who God is, and then you discover that the God who made the world is the God of utter self-giving love who longs to be there for you, to give himself to you, and to help you discover who you are. All of this is contained in the remarkable claim that God has "made his light shine in our hearts to give us the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ." We can know God deeply inside ourselves, in the face of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen one.

When Paul says the word "Jesus," he never forgets that this is the Jesus who died on the cross. If we want to know who God really is, we don't discover it by forgetting that Jesus died on the cross, by skipping past that and going on to what seems to us more obviously like "glory." We discover it as we look at the face which is crowned with the crown of thorns.

Standing back from this whole passage, we find that what Paul is trying to say to the Corinthians, and for that matter what we need to hear in the church today, is this: If we are to know God in Christ, and if we are to be the people that God wants us to be in Christ, we must learn the painful lesson of recognizing the glory of God, the god-ness of God, as we look at Jesus on the way to Calvary, and then finally on the cross itself. 

And part of this is learning that when, often to our dismay, we find ourselves called to follow in the way of the cross—in the way of painful suffering—that doesn't stop us from learning who God is. It doesn't mean that God has forsaken us. Times like these are the moments when we are privileged to be led by the Spirit, as Jesus himself was led by the Spirit, into the wilderness and along the way of the cross, away illuminated by the knowledge of the glory of God.


PRAYER:
Thank you, Father, for flooding our hearts with light, enabling us to see and know the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Your mercy and grace and abounding love overwhelm us! Enlighten our hearts afresh and new so that we might have a fuller understanding of your glory, particularly the glory of God as seen in the suffering Christ.


WHO AM I?
I am Tres Sansom and I have (slowly) been gaining an appreciation for traveling. I've always been a homebody, perfectly content to spend my vacation in the backyard of our house. But when Kate and I were dating, she repeatedly emphasized her love for traveling. I told her that I didn't think we'd be doing much traveling together because I had heard all sorts of horror stories about airlines losing wheelchairs and stuff. Little did I know. Before long, we made our first trip to Maine so I could meet her family (which, by the way, is a pretty crazy story). Since that time we've made half a dozen trips to Maine, taken a Caribbean cruise, and made a few quick jaunts to a number of places in Texas—all without a hiccup. This has given Kate boldness to talk of us taking trips to Hawaii, Europe, and a number of places on our nation's coasts. I'm just along for the ride with my wife, the world traveler.