Squirrels, Beckham, Les Mis, Public Enemy, and Jesus

As a family we read some Scripture together during breakfast everyday, that is if we haven’t accidentally overslept and are scrambling to get the kids ready for school and out the door, and today we read Colossians 1:15-20. It was a reminder and an encouragement to all of us of whom our faith actually is in. I don’t know about you, but I need to be reminded every day because my ability to maintain focus on Jesus Christ and the truth of his love and mercy for me is about the same level as a dog on a walk. It seems like the world is almost too stimulating for them. Every little smell, every little sound gets their attention and takes their focus. Of course Pixar captured this perfectly with Dug the dog in UP, who always thinks he sees or hears a squirrel. I am Dug. And the various needs and challenges that come up each day, not to mention the larger unsolved problems that we are all working with at any given moment, distract me. They taunt me and steal my focus like those arrogant squirrels running around laughing at dogs everywhere while they gather their nuts in the yard. So, I figured a good re-focusing would be to hear again about this Jesus fellow. Who is He? And what does he have to do with my day?

In his letter to the Colossians Paul tells us a lot of about Jesus in just one paragraph. First, Paul tells us Jesus is God. Boom. Nothing like easing into it! He says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Ok. That’s important. Paul doesn’t hesitate. He continues to describe Jesus based off of this first point. Paul says that Jesus is the Creator – He “is the firstborn of all creation,” which means he is the cause of all creation, not that he is a part of creation itself. Paul gets clearer in the next sentence saying, “by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible – all things were created through him and for him.” Next, Paul expounds a little more on Jesus being God by saying, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” In other words Jesus is the sustainer of all of creation. Literally, everything holds together because of him. The sun rises and sets because of him. We breathe in and out because of him; the seasons change because of him; the earth remains in its orbit and order is maintained in the universe because of Jesus. I’m starting to see how my everyday depends on Jesus…in fact every second of everyday depends on Jesus. That’s what Paul is saying here. Jesus is the beginning and the end. He is preeminent. THE Power. Most important, above everything else.

So, Paul tells us a lot about Jesus in this paragraph. All very true and consistent with the larger testimony of the Bible, and at the same time it can often just feel like information about Jesus…abstract. At least to me, it sounds really cool and great, but it can be hard to connect with. I don’t actually feel like I know Jesus any better really now than I did before. It’s almost like reading his stats on the back of his sports playing card. You can know and conclude that he’s really great, the greatest even, but it’s different from actually experiencing that greatness. I recently watched the new Beckham documentary on Netflix about the famous English soccer player David Beckham. I played soccer from 5 yrs old through college, so I’m familiar with the game, and Beckham was playing while I was at the pinnacle of my playing years in high school and college. There was a time at the height of his fame that practically everyone on earth knew who David Beckham was, and they might have even known he was a good soccer player. But it is a whole ‘nother thing to actually watch him on the field. The documentary showed highlights of games I remembered watching live and being amazed at just how good he was. To witness his vision and ability to place a ball right on the foot of one of his teammates streaking toward the goal from 50 yards away or to see him perfectly place a ball in the corner of the net from 30 yards out on a free kick. It’s an entirely different kind of knowing. Imagine what it would have been like to actually have him on your team!

This is just how we are in general as people. We can respect someone based on facts about them, but we don’t really care as much until they have a personal impact on us. We need Jesus to be applied to us. We’ll come back to Paul, but I want to look at a line from one of the Old Testament greats, Jeremiah, that I think is key to really knowing Jesus and who He is. In chapter 23 Jeremiah is prophesying and predicting the coming of Jesus over 600 years before Jesus’ birth, and in it he uses another name for Jesus. He says, “And this is the name by which he shall be called, ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’” The name by which he shall be called is “The Lord is our righteousness.” Well, that may seem even more abstract to you than all of the big picture talk that Paul uses to describe him. But understanding Jesus in this way, by this name, “The Lord is our righteousness” makes him immediately applicable to our everyday. He is no longer removed or just a lovely thought or abstraction. Jesus is our righteousness. Jesus is your righteousness.

What Jeremiah is telling us in this new name is that Jesus wants to be known only in conjunction with the need of broken and hurting people. Jesus wants to be known only as affiliated with sinners. So much so that it is a part of his name. It’s kind of like the etymology of many of our last names. One friend of mine has the last name: Crumrine. He told me that it is German. Crum means crooked or bend and rhine means river, so his ancestor was known as the guy who lived on the bend in the river, “Crumrine,” and it became part of his name.

We see a similar thing with Jesus. He wants to be known directly for his relationship to sinners. What is our definition of sinner? As we’ve said before on this blog, it’s anyone who cannot give love or receive love in the way that they should…broken lovers. Righteousness is just another word for perfection – literally the state of being right or just. Jesus reveals himself to us as primarily our Savior from our imperfection., from our broken love. The One who is perfect for us. It is the most important thing you can know about Jesus – He wants to be known only in conjunction with sinners, only as affiliated with the broken, with, as Victor Hugo calls them, Les Miserables, the miserable ones.

Do you see how radical this truth is? Remember how Paul described Jesus? The pure one true God of all existence wants only to be known for what He has done for you! There is a phrase that I am sure I heard from someone else, but I can’t remember who, but I have fallen in love with it. It is that “Jesus is enthroned upon the praises of sinners.” He is seen as truly good and truly God only in the context of those he came to save. That is why Paul says in another one of his letters in the New Testament, “His strength, [Jesus’ strength,] is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Only in weakness do we see His power to save. Only in weakness do we really come to understand His love for us. Only in acknowledging our wounded and skeptical selves do we then recognize Jesus for who he really is. He is the One that created us, and he is the One that crossed through hell and the power of death to save us.

Death is a force on earth that is more powerful than anything humanity can muster. No matter the technological advancements, no matter how great our healthcare is, no matter how big our weapons are, no matter how good we try to be, no matter how many people we serve in our lives, or how many kittens we rescue from trees, or little old ladies we help across the street. . .there is something that we cannot contend with, a force that we cannot stop or even put a dent in, and that is death. Death is the common experience of humanity. No matter how different our context, no matter how wealthy we are or how poor, no matter what the color of our skin, our height, our weight, our attractiveness, our ugliness, no matter who we are, none of us escape death. We will all die. This is our great foe in life. Death is public enemy number one.

And it is in that context that we come to understand who God is, who Jesus is. As Paul says, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things through Jesus Christ” (Colossians 1:19-20). We all experience death because we are not perfect. That is the long and the short of it. We are not perfect. Everyone knows it so much that it is a cliché, “Nobody’s perfect.” Or “That’s just human nature.” Or, “I’m only human.” I have even heard modern humanists use these phrases, which is somewhat amazing because they are the ones that are supposed to believe the opposite. We are basically good. They believe in humanity as the ultimate good in all of the world. And yet, they can’t avoid the fact that we are not perfect. We are flawed. We are broken. We are by nature imperfect, or to use a more Christian term, unrighteous. Not right. Not just. Wrong. Fallen. Broken. Lost. We are all in this boat together, and we are all headed for the same destination, death.

It makes sense if you think about it, that imperfection would lead to death. Perfection implies eternity. It implies not dying because it is perfect. If something is perfect, it has no flaws. It should not end. It should not age or decay. It should simply just be. It is the plumbline, the gold standard. It is the thing by which all other things are judged. Interesting that in the Bible in Exodus God refers to himself in this way. Moses asks God his name, and God says, “I AM.” He is. He is perfection. He is. He exists. He does not change. He does not grow old. He does not decay, but He simply is because He is perfect. He is righteous.

God could have just left it at that. He could have just said, “I am perfect. That’s all you need to know.” I’m so glad he didn’t. That’s not how He is to be known or understood by us. If that were the final Word on things, it would be the last thing we ever heard from Him because the perfect cannot be with the imperfect. They simply cannot go together. They are contradictions. They are opposite ends of the spectrum. Diametrically opposed to one another. Another way of thinking about it is light and darkness. Light is light. It is by definition the absence of darkness. And likewise, darkness is darkness. It is the absence of light. The two cannot be in the same place at once. They cannot exist simultaneously. If light is present, then darkness is not. And vice versa. So it is with imperfect humanity and perfect God. If he had simply left us with just knowledge of his perfection all that would have done is exaggerate our predicament even further. We would have stood condemned.

The only way for opposites to be together is for one of them to change the other. The darkness must be overcome by light and the imperfect must be made perfect. And this is exactly why Jesus comes. This is why he matters to my everyday. We need to be reminded of Jesus everyday because we need to be saved. We need to be delivered from the domain of darkness and brought into the light, which is exactly what Paul tells us. He takes the majesty of Jesus, all his amazing stats, and applies him directly to us. It’s what Dr. Steven Paulson calls “the for you.”

Paul says, “[we] give thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13 emphasis mine).

Paul and Jeremiah don’t just tell us about Jesus, they give him to us. Jesus is FOR YOU! I need to hear this everyday, not because it is possible for me to somehow lose my salvation. . .by no means. Once the Lord has broken into your life and laid claim to you, there’s no changing that. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful - for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). At the same time, experientially I deal with unbelief in some way, shape, or form everyday. . .I get distracted by all the different kinds of squirrels in my daily life. I need Jesus to be reapplied to me. . .I need to hear his love and mercy for me again for the first time everyday.

Jesus, the Lord, is our righteousness. He came into the world to save sinners, to die for the broken and the lost, the hurting and the scared, to conquer death on our behalf so that we might live. He is our righteousness. . .his perfection is our perfection. We are no longer seen as imperfect. Because he took our imperfection, our sin, upon himself dying a sinner’s death on the cross. He traded his perfection for our imperfection. He suffered death so that we would not ultimately have to, and he rose again from the dead three days later showing us that death too will come to and end. We will be raised up with him on the last day.

We who were once diametrically opposed to God, darkness to His light, have been rescued because Jesus has made peace between us and God by the blood of his cross. He stands with us. He stands with you today. That’s His name: The Lord is our righteousness. This sets us free to be who we are. Perfection is no longer the goal because we have redemption in Jesus. We are perfect in Him. This means we can be weak as Paul says because we know that He is strong. We can be broken and needy because He provides and cares for us. He heals our wounds and meets us in our skepticism and says, “You are forgiven. You are free because I love you. You are a child of the light because I am your righteousness.” Amen.

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