By the Word of His Power

Today was my day to post  at Out of the Ordinary, and I posted on a few words I love from Hebrews 1, “He upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

Christ and his creation are not like a watchmaker and his watch. A watchmaker assembles a watch, winds it up, and lets it run. There is no “letting it run” with Christ; He keeps the universe moving along by his own power. What’s here is here because he made it, and it keeps on working because he continues to make it work.

But the difference between Christ and the watchmaker is even greater than this. Leon Morris says the thought in Hebrews 1:3 is that Christ 

is carrying [the universe] along, bearing it toward an important goal. Creation is not aimless; it is part of God’s plan and the Son is continually bearing creation along toward the fulfillment of the plan.1

A watchmaker winds his watch and lets it run until it winds down. The watch fulfills its purpose best at the very beginning if its existence when it is new and freshly wound. Someday, inevitably, it will wind down and stop forever, never to fulfill its true purpose again. Not so with creation. Creation is forever fulfilling it’s purpose perfectly because it is being moved toward its ultimate aim by the One who made it.

Read the whole post.

I plan to be back later with this week’s post on The Discipline of Grace.

Thankful Thursday

Today, in anticipation of Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday, I’m thanking my heavenly Father for 

• my full life, more busy and more full than I could have predicted just a few years ago.
• garden produce picked, cleaned and stored.
• a full fridge and a full pantry.
• unbelievably beautiful fall weather.
• my yard, full of fallen leaves.
• my home, full of family memories and ready for more to be made.
• more books than I can read.
• a warm and comfy bed.
• family nearby.
• opportunites and time to serve.
• the Father who sent.
• the Savior who came and died.
• the Spirit who gives life.

All these good gifts, and more, come from my good God, and I am thankful for his generous provision for me.

When Father Is a Bad Thing

Quoting from Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Michael Reeves: 

Not everyone instinctively warms to the idea that God is a Father. There are many for whom their own experiences of overbearing, indifferent or abusive fathers make their very guts squirm when they hear God spoken of as a Father. The twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault had very much that sort of issue. The bulk of his life’s work was about the evils of authority, and it seems to have all started with the first figure of authority in his life: his father. Fearful of having some namby-pamby for a son, Foucault Senior—who was a surgeon—did what he could to “toughen up” the little mite. That meant, for example, ghoulishly forcing him to witness an amputation.  …

For Foucault, paternal power had not been used to care, to nuture and to bless, and so for him the word father came to be associated with a host of dark images.

One’s heart goes out to the children of such fathers, and those of us who are fathers ourselves know that we too are far from perfect. But God the Father is not called Father because he copies earthly fathers. He is not some pumped-up version of your dad. To transfer the failings of earthly fathers to him is, quite simply, a misstep. Instead, things are the other way around: it is that all human fathers are supposed to reflect him—only where some do that well, others do a better job of reflecting the devil.

This last paragraph is especially important for those who resist the idea of God as Father because of the hurt their own fathers caused, but it’s also a reminder to all of us, even those who have good fathers. God is not “some pumped-up version” of our own fathers. We don’t learn what God is like by looking at our own dads, rather, we learn what a father should be by looking at God.