ALIVE IN THE LIVNG WORD
12/01/25 07:33
I invited a friend to a charismatic worship service some years back. His comment following was that there was not a lot of information being served to the congregation. This did not surprise me as what the people received in the services in this church was participation in the Presence of God – not a serving of the knowledge of good and evil on fundamentalist platters. My friend came from a culture where information of a certain kind was served up as life. But what it really was, was ‘the letter that kills’ or at least imparts no life. Which accounts for the notable woodenness of the inmates of his church.
IN HIM IS LIFE
If Christ is anything. He is alive. Thomas Torrance observes that, “In a faithful interpretation of the New Testament we may not treat the words employed in it as if they were no more than transient linguistic symbols detached from any objective content in divine revelation, and as if they were not lively oracles through which God speaks to us in Person.
“Rather must we treat them as words which the incarnate Word of God has deliberately assimilated to himself in communicating and interpreting himself to us in the course of his reconciling activity.
THE BEING OF GOD
“That is to say, in the words of the Bible through which the Word of God’s trinitarian self-revelation reaches us, we have to do not with some divine Word detached from his Being and Activity, but with the very Being of God speaking to us and acting upon us in an intensely personal way.
“In and through them we encounter the living Word who is identical with God himself, the Word in whom we have to do with the Person and Act of God, the Son made man in Jesus Christ, and are thereby summoned to personal commitment and faith in Christ and through cognitive union with him to have knowledge of God the Father.” (1)
This is how we know God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent – as a state of being. The congregational declaration of the creeds and key scriptures enable us to receive God’s living words into our lives, not just as words but as the emblems of life that they are. In this way the truths become us.
(1)Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 42). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.