Sorry I've not posted on my Blog for a while, but here's a New Year's offering for you! Once again, I've posted here a post I made on the Repose website (www.findrepose.co.uk). Now,some might consider it cheating, other's might recognise it as recycling, personally, I like to call it self-plagiarism! However you take it, I hope you enjoy!
I don't do New Year's Resolutions... I can't remember the last time I even bothered to make a New Year's Resolution. Occasionally I might ponder the things I'd like to do in the course of the year, after all, a new beginning such as the New Year will normally inspire reflection on what has been and looking forward to what could be. But for me, Resolutions are out!
It occurred to me, though, that most of what people seek to do through their 'resolutions' is in fact to redefine themselves in some way... It might be physically - to work-out more, give up smoking, try a new hairstyle; or perhaps socially - to make more of an effort to visit friends, get out more and meet new people, start up a book-club to develop friendships with colleagues at work. Whatever it might be, it usually centres around a desire to be seen in a different light or recognised by different characteristics.
As I considered what it means to redefine ourselves - I started thinking about how God's character is communicated to us through Scripture. We always have a challenge on our hands when it comes to understanding who God is through the words of the Bible, because it's a human document, written by faithful but imperfect people, about a God whom they're seeking to know better but don't know fully. It gives us a helpful 'window' on the nature of God, but not the whole picture.
Have you ever written a text or sent a letter or an email, only for the recipient to mis-read it? And I don't mean, they didn't understand the words, but rather, they misunderstood your tone... When there's no other information to go on - no tone of voice, no facial expressions or body-language, only the text before you - sometimes even the most banal of words can seem 'loaded' with emotion.
The Old Testament is full of theological gems - it has held and continues to hold great significance for people of the Jewish and Christian faiths, in particular, and has much to teach people of all faiths and none for millennia, but parts of it leave us feeling decidedly uncomfortable, not least of all when it talks of God in terms that we don't like. However, we should not simply leave out the bits we don't like and neither should we avoid the difficult task of trying to understand just what they would have meant to the original audience. What we must do is allow God to define and redefine himself to us, and ultimately that happens in and through Jesus.
If we ackowledge how easily we can misinterpret others' meaning and be misunderstood ourselves, we mustn't be naive in thinking that we'll manage to truly understand God as he's revealed to us in the Old Testament. We can only have a hope of knowing God better as we know him through Jesus. This is why in Matthew 5:17, Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfil them." And why, in John 14:9 he says, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." He spoke about the Law and the Prophets to redefine them - in other words he, as God-redefined, makes scripture's meaning complete and fulfils its true purpose. In every sense of the word he 'fleshes-out' our understanding of who God is and what he's like.We really hope you'll make time this year to re-read those trickier parts of the Bible through the 'lens' of Jesus. And please do come and join us at Repose, once a month to get plugged-in to God's presence and to meet with our fleshed-out Father.
Happy New Year!
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