Colossians 1:26–27
the mystery that has been kept hidden
for ages and generations,
but is now disclosed to the saints.
To them God has chosen to make known
among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
I have
been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality, of course, it is
God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us. In a sense you
might even say it is God who does the pretending. The Three-Personal God, so to
speak, sees before Him in fact a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious
human animal. But He says `Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but
our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us
pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what
in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretense into a
reality.' God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside
you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine make-believe sounds
rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the
higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by
talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs
as if they were 'almost human': that is why they really become `almost human'
in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment