Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Great Commission.14


If I had not come 
with the message of truth,
   the inhabitants of the world 
would not have been 
aware of their failings 
and wrong behavior. 

No longer can they hide behind their former ignorance of the truth. 


If I had not 

performed miracles among them, 
   they would not have known 
that the kingdom had come 
to dwell among them. 

Now those who have rejected the truth

 have also been witness to the miracles, 
   and hate both me and my Father. 

This is come to pass, that the prophecy might be fulfilled: 

"They have hated me without cause."
--Jesus


What is harder to imagine:  
the majestic grandeur of heaven 
-or-
 a world where Jesus 
'had not come?'

What better occupation for the Son of God than carpenter to build an understanding of all that is True into the fabric of social relations!

For what is True?  In carpentry it is the intersection of complex influences on the senses: perspective, level, plum, geometry, equilibrium, optics, and gravity.  However complicated these intertwining concepts there is a simple tool to measure True - a carpenter's level.

Jesus is the Level of Truth.  By Him mankind was given the gift of True; the way to measure all the convoluting influences on right behavior.  By pointing all things to our Creator Father we can understand better ourselves.  He taught us that it is in the doing of truth that we only understand the truth of a thing.


"Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally, where it can live; the effects upon it of another climate; what part the insects bear in its varieties-and doubtless many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: 'Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it.' The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk-the compeller of smile and tear from child and prophet.
The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man's imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God.

Man is man only in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. 
But he has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of the things around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to the higher, till then the less plain. 
These relations make a large part of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the very facts of the origination of his being. They are the relation of 

  • thought to thought, 
  • of being to being, 
  • of duty to duty. 
The very nature of a man depends upon or is one with these relations. They are truths, and the man is a true man as he fulfills them. Fulfilling them perfectly, he is himself a truth, a living truth. As regarded merely by the intellect, these relations are facts of man's nature; but that they are of man's nature makes them truths, and the fulfillments of them are duties. 
He is so constituted as to understand them at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them possible. 
Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it. 
The duty of Jesus was the doing in lower forms than the perfect that which he loved perfectly, and did perfectly in the highest forms also. Thus he fulfilled all righteousness. One who went to the truth by mere impulse, would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations, truths, duties, are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may choose them, and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him. Hence the whole sad victorious human tale, and the glory to be revealed!"  --George MacDonald, The Truth

Thus it is essential to our being to obey Jesus who leads us always to Truth!

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Comments are welcome. You can post them here or send me an email: clyon2msu@gmail.com. Thanks for reading, hope you are encouraged, blessed, challenged and grow stronger in your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Charlie