Christ the Logos Unifies All Reality in Himself

Christ the Logos unifies all Reality in Himself

By Jay Wegter

The Day of the Lord will usher in and inaugurate the third cosmology known as the new heavens and the new earth.

“Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor 5:11). When God purges the universe by fire, this burning purification process will extend to the very nuclei of atoms (2 Pet 3:10-12). In previous articles we have referred to this cleansing of the cosmos as, “God does Himself to the creation.” By that phrase is meant that God will ‘press down’ His moral majesty upon the entire creation in a cosmic-wide event that extends down to the smallest particle. He will reorder the cosmos to a pristine state.

The event known as the Day of the Lord is a critical component in the role of Christ the Logos in biblical cosmology. Sadly, a thorough going grasp of this central doctrine of cosmology is missing in much of Christian ministry today. As my pastor friend in Georgia said in response to ignorance of cosmology, “The cosmology bomb has to hit!” By that statement he meant we will not break out of our limp-wristed anemic Christianity until we proclaim the ramifications of Christ the Logos, Lord of cosmology.

One of the dangers of neglecting cosmology is the church lapsing into retreat mode pondering the prospect of moral surrender in the face of the world’s relentless pressure. It seems that every year another Bible college raises the white flag, abandoning its scriptural stance on Genesis in favor of old earth theistic evolution. Evangelicalism has been substantially weakened by this subtle form of pseudo-science to which so much of the church has given safe harbor.

Consider that the secular humanist academy teaches its students that they are nothing more than a jumble of atoms. Public university students hear this worldview from their professors, and then, if of evangelical persuasion, hear the opposite for 40 minutes on a Sunday. What a quandary, church-going students hear of God in one ear, and in the other that their search for life with meaning is absurd because they live in a universe that is ultimately meaningless.

The Western world is undergoing an historically new phenomenon; burgeoning technological achievement coupled with appalling biblical illiteracy —resulting in an educated populace without fear of God. Important to the fear of the Lord is our commitment to biblical cosmology. For, the fixed order which God has put in place has at its core: male and female, marriage and family, and fatherly headship. Thus, it is no surprise that when the academy became apostate and atheistic, it declared war upon God’s creation structures of heterosexual marriage, family, and biological patriarchy. Consequently, the progressives have characterized God’s good institutions as ‘oppressive’.

A genuine fear of the Lord involves our continuous pressing in upon our created purpose—our telos of glory.

For a telos of glory is our creational identity, we exist for God’s glory. What’s more, all that our Creator has made has a particular telos. In other words, a goal or design in how it will glorify God. This all-pervasive truth extends to even simple forms of life. Fireflies flash to the glory of God, kangaroos hop to the glory of God, and good bacteria break down substances to the glory of God. And, if a humpback whale could talk, it would say, “I sport in the sea to the glory of God, that is my telos!” God’s fixed order in cosmology is a foundational and central piece of His glory story. But it is man who has departed from his telos.

‘Do you not fear Me?’ declares the Lord.
‘Do you not tremble in My presence?
For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea,
An eternal decree, so it cannot cross over it.
Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail;
Though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it.
‘But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
They have turned aside and departed.
‘They do not say in their heart,
“Let us now fear the Lord our God,
Who gives rain in its season,
Both the autumn rain and the spring rain,
Who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest
(Jer 5:22-24).

Jeremiah comments further on man’s departure: “Thus says the Lord, “Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it’ (Jer 6:16).

But praise be to God, He will not leave Adam’s entire race in self-imposed ruin. For, the five great ‘beats’ of redemptive history are: creation, fall, redemption, judgment, restoration. That fifth beat, restoration involves the perfect recovery of created order. But a great assize or judgment is coming first (Heb 9:27). Romans chapter nine teaches that those who know Christ are vessels taken from the same lump of defiled clay as vessels of wrath and dishonor. But, in His matchless grace and electing love, God through Christ takes vessels of corrupt clay and makes them vessels of mercy and grace (Rom 9:22-24). What a cause this is to fear God; for on Judgment Day, He will ‘pour out’, and reveal the contents of each vessel. Will it be spiritual fruit exalting His unmerited mercy and grace, or will the contents be a lifetime of sin and selfish ambition? There will be no hiding in that Day, for God will reveal the secrets of men’s hearts (Rom 2:16).

God’s glory story is an all-consuming metanarrative.

All history will be consummated in Christ when He sums up all things in heaven and in earth in Himself (Eph 1:9-10). In the purification of the cosmos, He will thoroughly shake everything which exists right down to the atomic level until the only thing remaining is the everlasting Kingdom of God. This event is associated with God described as ‘a consuming fire’—burning like a furnace, consuming all that is not like Him in holiness—indeed He will ‘do Himself to His creation’ (Heb 12:28-29).

Christ’s glorious second advent will be accompanied by cosmic disasters the scope of which our imaginations are incapable of conceiving (Rev 6:12-14). And, by that incapability of mind we refer to the fact that His shaking of creation will extend to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, beyond our telescopes (Hag 2:6; Heb 12:26-29). For the Son of God is the stone cut out without hands who will reduce all human structures and systems to powder carried by the wind, in preparation for the new heavens and the new earth (Dan 2:35-45).

When we use the phrase, “God will do Himself to the creation” at the Day of the Lord, illustrations and analogies of that phenomenon elude us. But one inadequate one came to mind. Imagine someone giving you a budget without limits for building your earthly dwelling. Your dream home would be designed according to your specifications, and you would choose everything about it including landscaping, functional features, décor, location etc. The design you would choose would say a great deal about you. But, say that your plans got into the hands of an evil and woefully incompetent architect, and after waiting for months, you looked at the blueprints and saw the following: the jacuzzi was in the garage, the garbage composting pit was in the dining room, the toilets were in the living room, and the dog run was in the kitchen. To make matters worse, the contractor had trucked to the building site hundreds of felons to live in your house and on your property. You would be justly outraged at the chaotic disorder, and you would take the appropriate corrective action. Because to enjoy your dwelling and your property, you would make right everything that was wrong, right down to every square inch of what you own and what you have designed. Only then would it comprehensively comply with your plans and wishes and reveal your purposes. This is but a feeble example to show how Almighty God will exercise His righteous indignation on that great day, the Day of the Lord.

When we teach these vital truths of biblical cosmology, it is important that we keep Christ at the center.

For Christ’s sovereignty, incarnation, humiliation, and all-sufficient redemptive work, including His resurrection is the warranty of a new cosmos (Rom 4:23-25, NKJV). For in order to make a new heavens and earth, Christ the last Adam reverses the ruin caused by the first Adam. Attacks upon biblical cosmology come from this present evil world in which the powers of darkness have over the millennia, introduced lying philosophies to take men captive (Col 2:8). What we owe God by virtue of being created in His image, gets erased by Darwinism. Afterall, if human beings are but a species formed in the image of an animal then we owe God nothing, and there is no holiness of life required (Rom 1:23-27). The damnable lies of paganism need the theory of evolution to obscure humanity’s core identity as the image of God.

We must not fail to include at this juncture the references in Scripture to Christ as the ‘Light of the World’ in John chapters 1, 8 and 12. The Son of God as this world’s appointed light refers to the fact that He is the source of absolute truth. For light is the ultimate metaphor for truth. Our Lord’s title, ‘Light of the world’ touches all of life, for how we know what we know with certainty is only found in Christ. He is God’s appointed illumination to mankind (Jn 1:4-9).

No wonder unbelievers who are outside of Christ so often say ‘we cannot know anything with certainty’. Well, for them, that is true! For outside of Christ, in their darkened condition, they do not know where they are going, no matter how many academic degrees they possess (Jn 12:35). Conversely, all the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ (Col 2:3). Our Lord has, by God the Father’s appointment, absolute epistemic authority—that is the only source of certainty of knowledge. If you do not walk in His Son’s light, you will sentence yourself to skepticism, atomism, pessimism, and hopelessness.

Now returning to our central theme: why is it so significant that Christ unifies all reality? As we have seen above in this article, the world has declared war on God’s absolute truth, resulting in its fragmentation (atomism).

In terms of causation, when Christ, Lord of cosmology is missing from our teaching a host of spiritual ills will manifest themselves.

A number of these ills, or symptoms are described in the following list:

1) Without a foundation in biblical cosmology, a church goer experiences a weak grasp of the significance of his telos as the image and likeness of God, created for His glory in all of life. 2) A second symptom or consequence is the breaking apart of the body soul binary—manifested as the devaluing of embodied life, which is accompanied by a discounting of our bodies as our chief spiritual resource. Pornography ‘feeds’ on this symptom. 3) A third symptom is the ripping from Christ’s hands His control over all existence, followed by crediting the control of the cosmos to the laws of science. 4) Fourth, without instruction in God’s relation to the creation, there is a tendency toward the privatizing of Christian experience so that it becomes inward, self-focused, and pietistic. 5) Fifth, there is a palpable metaphysical lostness in which even a professing Christian cannot answer the question with biblical accuracy and authority, “What is prime reality?” 6) The sixth symptom involves a truncated approach to doctrine. For without the determined goal to instruct in Christ the Logos, church goers will have little idea of the dignity and glory of the One who judged our sins in His own Person. 7) Where Logos doctrine is weak or absent, Christian experience tends to move toward a man-centered, manageable ‘pragmatic’ form of Christianity that is missing the foundations of divine transcendence. 8) Next, as Christianity is shoved into a subjective category, the church feels the pull to look to rationalism for ‘real knowledge’ rather than to divine revelation. Consequently, a devotional approach to the Christian life ‘eats up the life of the mind’. Christ is seen as Lord of spiritual things and not necessarily of the cosmos itself. This leads to a divided life which pulls apart faith from practice, reason from revelation, and truth from life. 9) And finally, when Christ the Logos is not proclaimed, this doctrinal deficiency shows up as an egregious neglect of Christ’s offices and transcendence in the life of the church. Paradoxically, this gives the church tacit permission to settle into a business model of ecclesiology. In that approach, the church exists to perpetuate itself, and as David Wells has warned, ‘the church replaces God’.

Christ in unifying all reality, is also the focal point, goal, and purpose of all existence.

The fact that truth is a divine Person (Jn 14:6), and truth is only known by a relationship with this divine Person is a poignant commentary upon our utter dependence on Him as His creatures (Jn 18:37). Liberals like to say that Christianity is one of many religious options. May the Lord have mercy upon them, for Christ truly is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Everything outside of Him is but confusion and soul-damning darkness—a runaway descending elevator with cables cut, plummeting into hell.

In unifying all reality, Christ does what the greatest philosophers in history could not do. He unifies being and becoming; temporal and eternal; visible and invisible; material and immaterial; singularity and multiplicity, created and uncreated reality. These central truths baffle us, for how could the Creator take on creaturehood? How could the timeless One become subject to time for 33 years? No wonder Paul describes Christ as ‘God’s mystery’ (Col 2:2-3).

Christ is the first ‘heavenly man’—the prototype of the glorified man; the ‘first fruits’ of the resurrection to come (1 Cor 15:23-28; 45-48). In Himself, in the hypostatic union He joins the human and divine. And by this union, we are brought as near to God as a creature could possibly be. In Himself, He unites all redemptive history—for every program of God is carried out in Him, Creator, Logos, Lawgiver, Lamb, Lion, Lord of the cosmos. No greater miracle can be imagined than God becoming one of His creatures. This was necessary for Him to be the perfect Mediator to bring His own from defiled dust to flawless glory.

In making all things new, the Son of God is the source of the coming ‘cosmic holiness’ in the new heavens and earth.

In the new heavens and earth, every created thing will declare God’s praise in accordance with its created purpose—that is what is meant by ‘cosmic holiness’ (Rev 21:5). In unifying all reality in Himself, Christ is the solution to the dualisms that have afflicted the church since the beginning. For He rules His church by means of His three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King. And these three offices are dimensions of His mediatorial glory. In exercising these offices, He unifies redemptive history, He Himself being its goal. For all recorded time will be consummated and summarized in Him (Eph 1:9-10)—on that Great Day, history will prove to be the record of the honoring and the dishonoring of God and the results of each.

All things will dovetail into one unifying purpose—seeing and beholding God in our nature. This is the purpose of the ages (Eph 3:9-11), to dwell with God in our nature—this explains the ultimate reason for human existence. The revelation and the communication of God to redeemed men is history’s destination. This is the glory for which we were created. This destiny of beholding this glory is the highest possible happiness. To behold this glory is why we were created, it is why we are going through trials. We must be prepared by God to experience this communication of Himself (2 Cor 4:16-18).

How can the church experience a fresh discovery of Christ’s lordship over all creation?

Admittedly, the church has been beat up and fractured by a form of dualism which rips apart Christ’s sovereignty over salvation from His dominion over creation. How can the church return to the conviction that Christ unifies all reality? Answer: she must make it her highest goal to give to Christ the proper place His supremacy and preeminence deserve, for He is the eternal Logos. In the Christ-hymn in Colossians 1:15-20, Christ as Lord of cosmology is exalted in His role of absolute dominion. Colossians chapter one reveals that it is the Father’s purpose that Christ have first place in everything. He possesses dominion and preeminence in creation, in redemption, and in judgment. By virtue of Him having first place in everything, His vastness is explicated, exalted, and exhibited before our eyes of faith.

What is missing from most pulpits today is Christ’s cosmological power and authority as Creator, Designer, Owner, and Upholder. Few professing believers are conversant with His role as Logos—namely that all the laws and ordering principles which make our universe a beautifully ordered and rational cosmos, are upheld by Him and exist for Him.

The dying sinner as well as our aging cosmos both find their true telos in Christ.

Christ alone makes men new, and He will recreate a cosmos that’s new. ‘New’ in this context means telos realized—created purpose restored. The new heavens and new earth will be occupied by men and women made new—both the cosmos and the redeemed will together perfectly fulfill their telos. But how many professing Christians grasp this truth to such a degree as to be staggered by it? Now returning to our thesis of unified reality.

Reality is unified and ‘consolidated’ in Christ, for the origin, sustenance, and definition of the cosmos belong to Him in His role as Logos. For it is the exercise of His power and authority over the cosmos, and His ownership of it that constitutes prime reality. We reiterate that because of a weak understanding of biblical cosmology in the church, and an ignorance of Logos doctrine, a ‘robber’ has been plundering Christ’s bride. The thief has sought to chip away at the supporting column described in Scripture as, “. . .the church of the living God [is] the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15b).

But God be praised, Christ is Overcomer and Conqueror (Rom 8:37; Col 2:15; Rev 19:11-13). By the infallible Word of God, the ‘thief’ has been identified and ‘finger-printed’. Yes, the fugitive bandit is idolatrous paganism concealing itself behind the lab coat of pseudo-science. That thief has been astoundingly successful in darkening minds by stealing the glory which belongs to Christ’s dominion over the cosmos and handing it to the cosmos itself—as if the universe were autonomous.

This subtle lie leaves the world of religion with a feeble savior who is not Lord of all, and who cannot conquer a man’s lusts, much less bring in a new world. Scripture’s corrective is comprehensive; for Christ has absolute power and authority over the creation. In His role as Logos, He exerts His sovereignty by designing, upholding, and defining the telos of every aspect of the creation. At the Day of the Lord, by Christ’s infinite power, everything except fallen angels and impenitent sinners will be restored to its proper telos—with no remnant of corruption. All things will ‘sing’ at their appointed frequency so that the whole creation will be a worshipping chorus making a joyful sound of praise to God in perfect harmony (Ps 104:1-2; Is 55:12).

This restoration of the universe to function as a worshipping chorus is all owed to Christ ‘the Choir Director of creation’ who is carrying out every aspect of God’s plan. For all the Father does is through His Son. He creates, upholds, defines, reveals, saves, sanctifies, glorifies, judges, and restores—making all things new. The crowning reason the cosmos and its contents exist is that God might extend His glory by means of revealing and exhibiting His moral majesty. And His purpose of extending His glory is being carried out through His Son’s rule over redemptive history, and His Son’s entrance into redemptive history, and His Son’s fulfillment of redemptive history.