HOW TO SEE LIGHT AND NOT WALK IN A FOG

We are living in a season of confusion and stupidity. A season in which ignorance is cherished, incompetence is excused while demagogues are embraced as a messiahs. The ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood is foundational because it is the ability to distinguish between life and death. Thus, Jesus came among us as The Light and the Life. Without Christ as our compass we lose the ability to know what is wisdom and what is nonsense.

We can please ourselves how we express Jesus. In Him we are the uncontrived expression of His person – if we allow Him to be who He is and have His way. But this is not all. He lives in us and reveals who He is into our hearts and minds. This is why we must take care not to insulate ourselves from Him with ‘other gospels.’

BEING IN THE LIGHT
Myk Habets observes that For “Torrance, for Christ to be Light necessitates his being Word also, for the two are hypostatically  related*. “The very Light of God could not be consistently Light,” Torrance writes, “and certainly could not be known as such, if Jesus Christ were not also Word of Word as well as Light of Light, and thus immutably, eternally God of God as both Light and Word.” (1)

Jesus came as Word and Light because He is God. He came to show us the way because He is the Way.
Thus, Jesus among us as the Son of God is not independently light but is THE LIGHT because He is God among us. This brings to mind the penetrating nature of light as truth.

SHARP NOT DULL AND CONFUSED
 ‘For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart’ Heb 4.12 NIV.

This word/light separates religion from spirituality and degrees of death from unlimited life. It demarcates real life from the knowledge of good and evil.
RAZOR SHARP
This scripture, as Biblicists might not want to assert, is referring to much more than the Bible as the word. It denotes the Living Word who is also the light of the individual and the world as Torrance perceives. Habets then remarks “True knowledge of God, even of his uncreated and invisible Light, is “seen” and “known” only in Christ.”
IMPERVIOUS TO LIGHT
Individuals and families can be quite impervious to this kind of light, being renowned for their lack of spiritual discernment. Possibly the cause is genetic. More probably the cause is living in the separation from God effected by a law mindset.

TO BE GOD’S LIFE
Union with God as a state of being accounts for the ability to be spirit and life and for teaching that is apostolic. We are talking teaching that proceeds from God about the nature of God and ourselves as sons of God. But it also explains why those contained in ‘other gospels’ have so often purveyed un-life. Cells functioning in their proper order and operating after their kind make healthy organs and healthy bodies. Cells in which the genes are distorted in any way become a cancer that saps life from the Body. In this way the adoption of ‘our brand’ versions of the gospel grow us as tumours in the Body instead of being Christ our life. This is the curse of ‘other gospels’ of which Paul warns.

If it’s important for us to share life as life and obnoxious for us to proclaim nonsense as a gospel, we need to find ourselves baptised into Christ our life instead being  purveyors a bunch of words that are no life at all.
(1)  In The  Princeton Theological Review

Volume XIV, No. 2 Issue 39 Fall 2008 Myk Habets is a lecturer in systematic theology and director of the R. J. Thompson Centre for Theological Studies at Carey Baptist College, Auckland, New Zealand.
*Jesus and the Father being of the same nature, as in Hebrews 1.3.