Encounter the Truth

Jonathan Griffiths: It's a painful thing to experience relational breakdown in any kind of context. To know that there's tension where there should be an embrace, animosity where there ought to be love. But it's a profound emptiness when the alienation is with respect to the God who made you and who loves you.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. I'm Steve Hiller. Glad you're with us as we look at really one of the most significant, huge, important concepts in all of the Bible, and that is the fact that we've been separated from God, but we have been or can be reconciled through Jesus. Jonathan, it's a big idea. How would you explain that super simply?

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, I think we all know what it is to have a broken relationship, and maybe that is the experience of some listening today. You're living through the brokenness of a relationship that was once warm and close and you know it's not anymore. So I don't think we need too much help understanding the idea of a broken relationship.

And just occasionally, we will see reconciliation take place in human relationships. And it's wonderful when that happens, isn't it? You know, it's a life-giving thing. It's a fresh start and it's joy. But something's got to happen to deal with past hurts. There's got to be something that takes place to set the relationship right.

And when it comes to our relationship with God, who is holy, who is our just judge, to whom we have an accountability, for things to be made right, well, there's going to have to be some serious work done and there's going to be a price that has to be paid. And the Bible tells us that Jesus came to make things right for those who would trust in him.

Steve Hiller: That is what we're looking at today in our broadcast. So I do hope you'll stay with us, and I also hope you'll open up your Bible to the book of Colossians. We're in chapter 1 as we begin our message, "Reconciled Through Jesus." Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: Now, I don't know if you've ever seen those image sequences—maybe in a film or somewhere on social media. A number have been produced in recent years. But an image sequence that begins way out in outer space, with the planet Earth maybe just as a speck within the galaxy, looking at the Earth in its cosmic context. And then the image, it begins to sort of zoom in. Have you ever seen one of these? I guess, eventually from the perspective of a satellite, it zooms in, and then it zooms in closer. And it captures a hemisphere, and then a continent, and then a nation, and then a region, and then a city, and then a neighborhood, and then a street, and then a single property, and then a backyard, and then a person on a sun lounger in the backyard—one person, one individual—going from the cosmic to the personal through a very, very clever visual.

Now, in a sense, that is the nature of the rapid journey that we undertake from verse 20 to verse 21 of chapter 1 of Colossians. In the previous verses, Paul has just shown us the cosmic Christ in the grand context: the Christ of creation, the Christ of redemption, the Christ who is preeminent in all things. That's what we saw in the previous verses. And Paul, he wanted us to get to grips with the bigness and the beauty and the majesty of Jesus Christ. It was through this Jesus, verse 20, that God set out to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. It's a grand vision that we've just been given, painted on a very, very big canvas. It's a mission with a truly cosmic implication.

But now verse 21, Paul zooms in. Now he makes it personal. "And you," he says. The camera now is squarely on you. It is squarely on me. What does this cosmic Christ mean for us personally? That's the question. What are the personal implications of his great work for you and for me? And that's our interest, isn't it? Whenever we go through an election season, we hear grand visions, don't we, of leaders and potential leaders—grand promises, grand hopes. We're accustomed to hearing them. We hear their pitches in their radio ads. We watch their debates on TV, perhaps. And if they are a leader of any kind of merit, they will have a very, very big vision. They will paint for us a big picture of what they will do for our society as a whole. And that's good, and that's proper. That's what we expect of any leader.

But at some point in the campaign, you and I are going to have to ask the question—we will come to it—"What about me? What about my needs? What about my priorities? What about my concerns?" How does this all come down to my level and the details of my life, my concerns? It's a fair question. And that's where Paul goes now in verse 21. Having painted that grand picture on that cosmic canvas, he now turns to each of us personally: "And you." Here is where it comes down to ground level. Here is what the reconciling work of Jesus Christ at the cross means for the individual.

And Paul begins at just the right place as he explores that now. He begins at the very beginning. He goes back in history with what we were. That's the first focus. What we once were. Verse 21: "And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds." Just notice the language there in the words I just read. It's quite grim, actually, a little bit depressing. Nothing appealing or uplifting about this at all: alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. Not a pretty picture.

I like to think of myself as still being sort of in my youth. High school and university, they weren't all that long ago. I can still remember them just about. Still sort of enjoying at least the twilight of youth, I tell myself. Well, yesterday I opened an email from my high school class rep inviting me to our 20-year anniversary dinner from graduation. And I have to tell you, it was a bit of a shock to the system. I don't think of myself as 20 years out of high school. 20 years, surely not!

And of course, when you open an email like that, the mind starts going back and you start reminiscing, thinking about how things were. I wonder if you've ever had the experience of looking back at old photographs, maybe from 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Looking back at the old pictures, maybe from high school days, I don't know. You see the clothes from the '70s—remember? You see the hair from the '80s—maybe you don't want to remember. You remember some rather dark fashion days from the '90s. Memories that had been suppressed, they start coming back, don't they? And you look at yourself in the photos and you think to yourself, "Did I really actually look like that? Was that really me? Surely not. Surely I didn't do that."

Paul takes us back through the spiritual photo album here. He's flipping through the pages. He's getting out the old Kodak projector and the carousel, if you remember those. And he's showing us a picture of ourselves that we would prefer not to see. Why did anyone keep that photo? Why wasn't that thrown out? We might say, "No, that wasn't true." But the evidence, it's right here before us. And so we've got to brace ourselves. We've got to look at this image together, however uncomfortable it may be.

Now, as we turn to this spiritual photo from the old album, it's important for us to recognize and bear in mind that this state of affairs that we're going to look at, it is not how things always were in God's world, and it is not how God intended things to be in his world. But ever since the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, turned against God in the garden, humanity has been born in this desperate state, in the state of sin, born as fallen creatures. We begin life after the fall as a people alienated from God. That's the first thing that we see in this picture. That's the first term that Paul uses there in verse 21: alienated.

Human beings, you and I, we are fundamentally relational creatures. That's who we are. That's how we're wired. We were made for relationship. We were made for interaction. We were made to know and be known. That's how we're wired. And incidentally, I think that's one reason why we found the pandemic so very hard, haven't we? It's been brutally hard relationally. Many people isolated, cut off from loved ones. And it's been a grievous thing. It's been a trying thing. It's led to so much isolation. And many of us during the time of the pandemic have discovered, if we didn't know it before, we've discovered just how very relational we are. We may be introverts, but we still need people around us.

When we lost interactions with others, when we lost opportunities to relate and interrelate, we felt that lack very deeply, didn't we, each one of us? We suffered as a result. We are relational creatures. That's who we are. We're made to flourish as we interact with one another. And most profoundly, we are made for relationship with the God who created us. We were made to know him and be known by him.

You see, the God who is our maker is the fountain of our life and the source of our joy. Apart from him, cut off from him, well, our life wanes and our joy ebbs away. That was the experience of Adam and Eve, of course, as they left the garden, as they were sent out of the presence of God when they turned away from him.

Very interestingly, the Lord Jesus speaks of eternal life in relational terms. That's the way in which he describes it, in terms of knowing God and being known by him. John 17 and verse 3, Jesus says this: "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Augustine, the famous theologian of the early church, rightly said that "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless still until they find their rest in you."

We were designed, created, made for relationship with God. And until that relationship is restored to a place of health, we cannot be at peace. We cannot flourish as we were designed to flourish. Ever since the creation, ever since the garden, ever since Adam and Eve turned from the Lord, we human beings, we have been living in a state of alienation from God, from the God who made us, who is the source of life, of fullness, and of joy. That's all of us, each one of us here. That's where we came from. That's where we all have been.

And it may well be that that is actually where you are today. I have no idea. That may be your situation personally. It may actually describe the state of your heart and the situation of your life. Maybe you're here among us in this gathering, maybe you're listening because you know it and you don't like it. You're aware of that dynamic within your heart. You sense the distance. You sense that there is a breakdown, there is a barrier between you and your maker. You sense that God is there. You know that he is real. And you know as well that things are not right between you and him. As Augustine put it, your heart is restless within you, and you know it.

It's a painful thing to experience relational breakdown in any kind of context, of course. We all know that. To know that there's tension where there should be an embrace, where there's coolness where there should be warmth, animosity where there ought to be love. That's an awful feeling in any kind of situation, to experience it.

But it's a profound emptiness and it is a profound loss when the alienation is with respect to the God who made you and who loves you. That's something that unsettles us at the very core of our being. We might try to suppress the feeling of dislocation, the feeling of unease that is attached to that, and we might suppress it for a time. We might try and explain away an unsettled heart in a myriad of different ways. But none of us can be at odds with our maker and at peace in our heart of hearts. And again, you may be living that reality today. That may be your reality. You may be acutely aware of it.

Well, if that is so, if that is your situation, please keep listening. There is hope. And we're going to come to that hope this morning. But that's the reality that Paul speaks of here. And it was the reality for each one of us. We were alienated. And linked to that, we were hostile in mind. That's the next thing that Paul says as he opens up and shows us this spiritual photograph.

I don't know if you've ever considered this truth, but the fact of the matter is that no one is neutral in their attitude toward God, in their disposition toward him. There is no such thing as the impartial onlooker in spiritual things, the unbiased inquirer, the malleable agnostic. Such a person does not exist. The place of spiritual neutrality, that mythical spiritual Switzerland, it actually doesn't exist. It's not a real place. Those who do not know Jesus, says Paul, are at enmity with him.

And all this goes back—it goes back to the fact, it traces back to the fact that God is our maker and he has a rightful claim upon our lives, each one of us. We owe him honor and we owe him love and we owe him obedience. And ignoring him, refusing to live in his way in his world, that's not a neutral disposition, whether we recognize it or not. It's a place of rebellion. It's a place of hostility toward the one who deserves our devotion.

Linked to that hostility in mind, that rebellious turn, that hardened attitude, linked to that, says Paul, was the doing of evil deeds. Verse 21 again. That's the next descriptor in the list. We didn't want God telling us what to do because we like to do things our own way. We like to do what we thought best, what we felt would bring us pleasure or satisfaction.

But God, he is supremely wise and his way is supremely good. It is the best way. It is the only right way. And you know, we see all around us the fruit of human beings doing things according to their own ethic, choosing for ourselves what we will deem right and what we will deem wrong, what we will deem acceptable and what we will deem unacceptable. We see the fruit of that all around us, don't we? And it's not pretty. We're living in days of violence and we're living in days of moral chaos.

I won't depress us or disgust us by listing all the evils of our hearts and all the evils of our culture and our world. You don't need me to illustrate the point. We know the reality. We're all too familiar. We know the darkness. Now, that is the glance back at the photo album of our former life. And it's not a pretty thing. We would just as soon see that sent back to the basement and never unearthed again.

Now, for some, as I've mentioned, this may actually be more of a mirror than a dusty photograph. It may be more of a mirror because what Paul speaks of in verse 21, what I've just described, is actually the state of your heart and your life even today. It's your present-day reality simply because of this: you don't yet know Jesus Christ. You don't yet belong to him. And if that's you, you need to hear what is yet to come. There's hope for you.

But this is where we've all come from. This was each one of us. This is what we all were: alienated, hostile, doing evil deeds. It's an unappealing look, an embarrassing snap from the album. But having given us that rather downbeat reminder of what we were, Paul now turns to tell us of what he has done. And that's our next focus: what he has done, what Jesus has done. And this is much more hope-filled. Verse 22: "He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death." That's what Jesus has done.

If you ever face a situation of alienation, of discord, of conflict, if ever you find yourself there—and we all do from time to time—an urgent priority is to figure out what it will take to make things right, to open the door once more to relationship, to establish a bridge, to deal with the offense, to remove the barrier. In the great alienation of humanity from God due to sin, within that great alienation, what was it going to take to bring us back together, to make things right, to remove the barrier, for the door to be opened, for the relationship to be restored? What was it going to take?

The guilt and the wrongdoing within the dynamic, that was all us. God was holy and righteous in all his interactions with us, and he still is in all his judgments toward us. But although we were in the wrong, we were also at the same time entirely powerless to make things right, to do anything about the crisis of relationship. God is high above us. He dwells in unapproachable light, in the light of his holiness in his heavenly home. We had no access to him. There was no way of us getting up there. We couldn't reach him.

But the wonder of his grace and the heart of the gospel is this: he came down to us. He came to meet us in our crisis, and he came to meet us in our need. It's not that he simply traveled to this world, that he made a fleeting visit to the disaster zone for a quick photo op. He didn't just come to our locality, visit our community, stay a while in our vicinity. No, he did something profoundly more wonderful. In Christ, he became one of us.

That's the truth wrapped up in that phrase that Paul uses: "his body of flesh." The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, took on flesh, became human. And this step, the incarnation of Christ as we speak of it, this step was necessary. This step was vital. This step was essential if reconciliation was to be achieved.

You see, the cost of our sin is nothing less than death itself. The Bible makes it so clear that for the problem of sin to be dealt with, there needs to be a death to pay the price. There needs, in fact, to be a human death to pay for human sin. And God in his divinity, well, God cannot die. The eternal God, he is not subject to death.

But death would be needed for this reconciliation. That was the basic precondition. If things were going to be made right between us and God, death was going to be essential. The price of sin is always death. Adam and Eve learned that in the garden. They were warned that if they disobeyed God, they would surely die, and die they did. Paul writes elsewhere that "the wages of sin is death." It's the price set by God himself. It is the price justice demands. For us to be forgiven, for our debt to be cleared, for the justice of God to be satisfied, for the relational barrier to be removed, there needed to be a death, a human death, to pay for human sin.

And Jesus gave his body, the body of his flesh, to pay the price, to suffer and to die in our place. His body, his flesh, became the place and the means of reconciliation. He came to us in humanity. He came to us in flesh, and he gave himself to die.

Steve Hiller: What a powerful way to wrap up our time together. You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. Our message is called "Reconciled Through Jesus," and we'll continue on our next broadcast, so I hope you'll make it a point to join us. If you ever miss a program, you can catch up online. Just visit our website, EncountertheTruth.org.

Jonathan, for years now, we have had people attacking the gospels, sometimes trying to figure out things that they say are conflicting accounts in various gospels, and even groups of scholars who have got together and said, "Well, we're not so sure about this," or, "We're not so sure about that." And I know you've got a friend from the UK who has written a book entitled, *Can We Trust the Gospels?* It's written by Peter Williams. And Jonathan, what argument is Peter making in this book?

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, Steve, I don't think it's going to surprise you or surprise any of our listeners when I say that yes, I think Peter's case is very compelling and very strong for why we can trust the gospels. His answer is yes, we can trust them. As Christian believers, we need to be willing to engage with the arguments and to really think through the issues. And I think for those who are exploring the faith but maybe aren't yet committed Christians, you want to know: are these documents in the Bible reliable, and can I take them seriously? And Peter's got serious arguments to engage with. And so again, we would just love to get this resource into your hands so that you can open up the arguments for yourself and engage with the evidence yourself.

Steve Hiller: As you give a gift of any amount in support of Encounter the Truth this month, we do want to send you and will send you a copy of this book. Again, it's entitled, *Can We Trust the Gospels?* You can give online at EncountertheTruth.org or call us at 1-833-99-TRUTH. That's EncountertheTruth.org or 1-833-998-7884.

You can also write to us at Encounter the Truth, P.O. Box 5513, Ottawa, Ontario, K2C 3M1. Or in the US, Encounter the Truth, 215 North Arlington Heights Road, Suite 102, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 60004. For Jonathan Griffiths and our producer Mark Brudda, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.