Christ’s Lordship in His Role as Logos

Christ’s Lordship in His Role as Logos

By Jay Wegter and Shane Haffey

The Day of the Lord will usher in the third cosmology known as the new heavens and the new earth (2 Pet 3:10-13).

“Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor 5:11). When God purges the universe by fire, this purification process will extend to the very nuclei of atoms (2 Pet 3:10-12). In terms of this cleansing of the cosmos, it could be said, “God will do 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 corruption-free state.

The event known as the Day of the Lord is a critical component in the role of Christ the Logos in biblical cosmology (see Revelation chapters 5; 14; 19ff.). Sadly, a thorough going grasp of this central doctrine of cosmology is missing in much of Christian ministry today. And in response to the great need for the church to be salt and light— checking the spread of new age paganism, my pastor friend said, “The cosmology bomb has to hit!” What he means is we will not break out of our limp-wristed anemic Christianity until we proclaim the ramifications of Christ the Logos, Lord of cosmology, Lord of the cosmos.

As the Creator of the universe and its order, Christ is central to the study of biblical cosmology (Col 1:16-17).

The Son of God is eternal and self-existent, the divinely acknowledged focal point of reality, preeminent over all existence. Christ the Logos is the origin and goal of all created things. Thus, rationality, logic, and meaning are inherent in the creation because it is the purposeful expression of our infinitely wise Creator. At the incarnation, Christ the Logos, the eternal utterance of God entered His own creation as the God-man (Jn 1:14). He did so to obtain eternal redemption (Heb 9:12). The cosmos is thus, as ordered and explained by its Maker, the intellectual property of Christ, “for all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him” (Col 2:3). He owns all things, directs all things, and will bring all things to a reconciled consummation according to His eternal will (Eph 1:9-10; 3:8-12; Col 1:20).

One of the dangers of neglecting cosmology involves 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 the damnable myth of old earth theistic evolution. Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Evangelicalism has been substantially weakened by Darwin’s pseudo-science myth to which 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. If the student is of evangelical persuasion, he hears 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 the creation is a meaningless coincidence. Philosophic naturalism gobbles up the truth claims of Scripture, relegating them to folklore. Can a thirty-minute bouncy devotional homily on a Sunday morning effectively counter our culture’s atheistic dualism?

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. Needless to say, of vital importance to the fear of the Lord is our commitment to biblical cosmology (Rev 14:6-7). For, biblical cosmology refers to the fixed moral and creational order which God has put in place. And this cosmology has at its core: male and female, marriage and family, and fatherly headship. Thus, it is no surprise that when the academy became apostate, 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, or created design for His 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).

The prophet 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, and 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. In His matchless grace and electing love, God through Christ takes lumps 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 holy 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 plot, His glory story is an all-consuming, totalizing life view.

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 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’—consuming as a furnace all that is not like Him in holiness—indeed He will ‘do Himself to His creation’ (Heb 12:28-29). He will grind to powder all that is not Christ’s Kingdom (Dan 2:35).

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). 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 away 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 event elude us. But one inadequate one came to mind which hearkens to Christ’s parable of the wicked husbandmen in Matthew 21:33-43. Imagine someone giving you an unlimited budget to build your earthly dwelling. Your dream home would be designed according to your specifications, and you would choose everything about it, 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 have designed. Only then would it 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 the Day of the Lord. To make a new heavens and earth, Christ the last Adam must reverse the ruin caused by the first Adam. Christ’s sovereignty, incarnation, and all-sufficient redemptive work, including His resurrection is the warranty that a new cosmos is coming (Rom 4:23-25, NKJV).

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

Attacks upon Christo-centric 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 holiness of life is not required (Rom 1:23-27). The lies of paganism need the theory of evolution to do their work of obscuring God’s claim upon us as bearers of His image and likeness.

Christ as the center is expressed in Scripture as Him being the ‘Light of the World’ (see John chapters 1, 8 and 12). The Son of God is this world’s appointed light. Light is the ultimate metaphor for truth. He is the source of absolute 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 regarding certainty of knowledge (Jn 1:4-9). No wonder those outside of Christ so often say ‘we cannot know anything with certainty’. Well, for them, that is true! For apart from 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, believers are assured that 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 —He is the only final source of certainty of knowledge. Christ alone in His Logos authority gives certainty concerning purpose and meaning, and certainty about what is true, real, right, and wrong. If you do not walk in His Son’s light, you will sentence yourself to skepticism, atomism, pessimism, confusion, and hopelessness.

When Christ, Lord of cosmology is missing from our teaching a host of spiritual ills and symptoms may occur.

1. Without a foundation in Christo-centric biblical cosmology, a church goer experiences a weak grasp of the significance of his telos his creational identity as the image and likeness of God, created for His glory in all aspects of life.
2. A second symptom 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 a false worldview of the body.
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. An old earth view of Genesis implies that natural law is capable of imposing positive upward change. This opens a door to the error of an autonomous universe that is self-sustaining, self-evolving, and self-interpreting.

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 questions with biblical accuracy and authority, “What is prime reality?” What is Christ’s relation to the cosmos?
6. The sixth symptom is a reductionist trivialized approach to doctrine. For without the determined goal to instruct in the majesty of 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 God’s majesty and awe-inspiring 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’. Lightweight devotional reading replaces transformational Scripture meditation. Comfortable preaching replaces masculine preaching and its attendant discipline of ‘theologizing’. Christ is seen as Lord of spiritual things, and not Lord of the cosmos itself. This leads to a divided life severing faith from practice, reason from revelation, and truth from life.

9. And finally, when Christ the Logos is not proclaimed, there is an egregious neglect of Christ’s offices of Prophet, Priest, and King in the life of the church. Paradoxically, this gives the church tacit permission to settle into a business model of ecclesiology, “we’ll run things while Christ is away.” In that approach, the church exists to perpetuate itself, as David Wells warned, ‘the church replaces God’. Hyper-structuralism is often joined to authoritarianism which stifles the organic nature of the church. Elder meetings become staff meetings conducting church business. Ministry and love feasts become events. Prayer meetings become one dimensional, dominated by an inordinate attention to temporal needs rather than to bringing every member to maturity (Col 1:28-29).

Christ is the focal point and goal of all existence; He unifies all reality.

Truth is a divine Person (Jn 14:6), and truth is only known by a relationship with this divine Person. What 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 (Rev 22:13). 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; 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 and forerunner 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 and fulfilled in Him. His titles delineate His roles in redemptive history: Creator, Logos, Lawgiver, Light, Lamb, Lion, Judge, Alpha and Omega, 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.

By cosmic holiness, we mean that in the new heavens and earth, every created thing will declare God’s praise in accordance with its created purpose (Rev 21:5). In unifying all reality, Christ is the solution to the dualisms that have afflicted the church since the beginning. For He presently 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. 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, the revelation of the glorified Christ—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—which is the ultimate reason for human existence. The revelation and the communication of God to redeemed men and women is history’s destination. This is the glory for which we were created. The believer’s destiny of beholding this weight of glory is the highest possible happiness. This 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 rediscover 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 sovereign dominion over creation from His Headship over redemption. How can the church return to the conviction that Christ unifies created and uncreated 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. For it is the Father’s purpose that Christ have first place in everything. For He possesses preeminence in creation, in redemption, and in judgment. By virtue of Christ having first place in everything, the glory of His vastness is explicated, exalted, and exhibited before our eyes of faith.

The proclamation of Christ the Logos must be primary in our disciple-making. Since Christ is the Creator, Sustainer, and Goal of the church, His last command will be the church’s first priority (Mt 28:18-20). Thus, in the church’s prioritizing of the Great Commission, she will be an organic, flourishing, culture-making buttress of truth with all the spiritual vigor her Lord supplies as she abides in Him (Jn 15:1-10; I Tim 3:15). When Christ is preeminent in the church His bride’s preparation for glory will be central—for in fulfilling her telos of glory He will present her to Himself without spot or wrinkle (Eph 5:26-27; 2 Pet 3:14; Rev 19:7-8).

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 every moment and exist for Him (Heb 1:3).

The human creature as well as the cosmos itself find their telos in Christ.

Christ alone makes men new, and He will recreate a cosmos that’s new. ‘New’ in this context means telos or goal 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. The harmony which Adam in innocence enjoyed with the earth in Paradise will be restored and improved for Christ is the better Adam and His work infinitely superior. At the Day of the Lord, by Christ’s infinite power, everything except fallen angels and impenitent sinners will be restored to their 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 (Ps 104:1-2; Is 55:12). How many professing Christians grasp this truth to such a degree as to be staggered by it?

Reality is unified and ‘consolidated’ in Christ, for the origin, sustenance, and definition of the cosmos belong to Him as Logos.

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, restores—and makes 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 by His Son’s entrance into redemptive history, and through His Son’s rule over redemptive history, and by His Son’s fulfillment of redemptive history. “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him” (Eph 1:9-10).