3 June 2025
You may well disagree with me. In fact, I hope you do. It is the process of questioning what someone is communicating that brings us to growth in our own understanding. Rarely do we have those ‘light bulb’ moments of insight without a puzzlement first. Personal perception of truth will always be that, personal, and yet, corporately the perception is much greater. It would be a rude assumption to think there to be only one way to process knowledge. This is why in a court of law there is an insistence on more than one witness. There is collaboration which brings confirmation, but if the two witnesses said exactly the same thing, the second would be discounted, for it would seem obvious that collusion had happened. We need various testimony for us to get to the truth of the matter. That is the beauty of the differing gospel accounts, and also a beauty that has continued through Christian testimony over the last twenty centuries.
The writer of Hebrews promotes the idea that God guaranteed the unchangeable character of his purpose with an oath. This oath, established with the patriarchs and confirmed through Jesus, was that he would be faithful to his promises, the covenant established with humanity at the time of Abraham. The promise was that God, knowing our weakness, would fulfill the covenant by his own strength and the integrity of his nature. Through the suffering of Jesus, but even more so through the life of victory Jesus lived, God’s faithfulness was proven true. As we look at the life of Jesus, we see that God has already taken authority of this world. No longer did the powers of darkness have such authority. Even before the cross, Jesus’ followers were casting out demons. Even before the cross, they were granting forgiveness to the repentant. It was as if the already victorious Jesus took the throne at the cross.
Where we are present in time, we have a profoundly great cloud of witnesses that have spoken into our souls, all bringing testimony of the faithfulness of the Lord. The arguments over creed and communion by the early church have benefited us. Those who are called saints lived lives that still give their influence. Reformers who challenged political assumptions of the church have given us the ability to continue to seek truth through the Living Word. Movement after movement seeking holiness and godly expression of care and worship have fed us. We cannot deny that the person proclaiming some grand insight has caused us to seek truth from the source, even if we have disagreed with their conclusions. As we reflect back upon God’s history in relationship with humanity, we see that truth wins out, over and over again. You may well disagree with me. I hope you do. If you seek the source because of my weird and wild interpretations of God’s whispers, God is glorified.