He Is Your Life
The Departure of the Apostles to Preach the Gospel
The supremacy of Jesus is the issue at the end of the age. Though all sorts of secondary issues may assail the church as to distract us from this plain truth, the New Testament is clear that the most important confession concerning a believer is that concerning the person of Jesus Christ. While we might be tempted to move on from what some would consider the “elementary doctrines of the faith,” Paul makes it irrevocably clear that if we move ahead and build upon “any other foundation than that which is in Christ Jesus” then we are in danger of joining the way of unbelievers.
The testimony of the preaching of the early Church is the same as that which is to be preached in the context of the end of the age. When Peter stood up at Pentecost (Acts 2) the whole diving focus of his preaching was that God had exalted Jesus and “made him both Lord and Christ.” For the early church this was no light thing. The revelation of the New Testament was that a man now shared the divine throne and that this one who had been crucified in their midst was that same Lord of Glory who had created the Heavens and the Earth. Paul and Peter both use the same Old Testament concept that “whoever calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved” (Joel 2) to declare that it is Jesus Christ who one must acknowledge as the Lord in order to be saved.
The reason which the church must have clarity concerning Jesus Christ is that he is the active participant in the drama of the end of the age. That which the Old Testament tells us YWH will do at the end of the age is what the New Testament reveals Jesus will do at the end of the age. The event of the end times are meant to confront the earth with the Identity of YHWH, and the name which that Identity carries is ‘Jesus.’ He is the one to whom all the nations will bow and whom they will confess as Lord. If the church does not have clarity concerning this man then we too will be deceived into offense at the way by which YHWH confronts the nations and forces them to reckon with his identity.
The crisis of the Western Church today is that almost everything else is preached except Jesus. Whereas in the New Testament writings, Christology is the predominate theme which is addressed — his preeminence being established in almost every circumstance, doctrine, and teaching — today in the church the topic of Christ is rarely preached with its full weight. We are satisfied to let Christ simply remain a peripheral issue, a figure relegated to the sidelines and left in the shadows while the Church pursues a Christless and often unscriptural spirituality devoid of any transformative power and all to often “without God in the world.”
Instead of our lives, confessions, songs, preaching, meditation and practice being consumed with the glory of this man it is all to often consumed by almost all other form of distraction. Preaching is often centered instead around how Christianity can perhaps garner us comfort is this lifetime, this next year or even this next week, rather than preaching Christ and the splendor of his glory in the hope which is to be revealed. The central indictment of Evangelical Protestantism in the earth today is that it is shallow, baseless, and often unspiritual all because it lacks the foundational rootedness in the person and work of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
The New Testament writings make it clear that the wave of delusion which is going to come upon the whole earth is to begin in the Church first. Whereas in the last days an ultimate man will arise and lead the nations into apostasy, long before that takes place the crises facing the nations will be the delusion which will sweep through the Church of Christ. When the true gospel and the centrality of Jesus are not preached and upheld the very bedrock upon which the Christian faith is built erodes away and gives rise to delusion within the body of Christ.
The supremacy of Christ is answer to all the perpetual woe of the Church. All our rootless spirituality, our endless neurotic striving for the “next thing” which will placate our hearts and sooth our souls finds answer and satisfaction in gazing upon this one most beautiful God-man. He, himself; the knowledge of him, the pursuit of him, intimacy with him, is the whole of the Christian faith. He is the substance around which all our desires and wants find fulfillment.
The apostle John writes of Christ by saying “in him was life” (John 1:4) but it is the apostle Paul who takes this reality one step further and expounds on our relationship to Christ in the most absolute of terms. In Colossians 3 we find that that our very lives are hidden in Christ. The mystery then is that we do not even know what our life is outside of Christ. The very sum total of our existence is summed up in him. What we truly are, our desires dreams and plans are all hidden in him.
Paul goes on to call Jesus “Christ, who is your life.” The totality of our existence, the whole of everything that makes up what it means to live, to be human, to exist, from the most complex and lofty thoughts of hope, love, and joy, to the most simple and base activities such as simply breathing are summed up, contained, transcended and find fullest expression in Christ Jesus the Lord. There simply is nothing other than him.
He is the fullness of deity dwelling bodily, the most elegant revelation of who the eternal one is. To see him is to see God, because he is God. There is no other obsession which should captivate the heart of a believer as meditating on this most beautiful one should. He is the fairest of ten thousand, the sum of all our thoughts, and the heart of our dreams, desires and goals. Outside of him is only darkness, in him is only light. Christ Jesus must be out preeminence. He will be our preeminence or we will not be his. As the apostle said, the Lord has “fixed a day” (Acts 17) to judge the earth by this man and in that day there will be no question as to his identity. He will be shown as YHWH to the whole world. “Come; let us press to know the Lord” now so that that day does not come upon us like a trap.
