Christ the Logos unifies all Reality in Himself
By Jay Wegter
“Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor 5:11). The Day of the Lord will usher in and inaugurate the third cosmology known as the new heavens and the new earth. When God purges the universe by fire, the scope of 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 telos (our created goal/design). A telos of glory is our creational identity, we exist for God’s glory. All that God has made has a particular telos—a goal or design in how it will glorify God. This truth includes 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. 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 Day of the Lord, He will thoroughly shake everything which exists until the only thing remaining is God’s Kingdom (Hag 2:6-7). God is ‘a consuming fire’—like a furnace, consuming all that is not like Him in holiness (Heb 12:28-29).
At Christ’s glorious second advent there will be cosmic disasters the scope of which our imaginations cannot conceive (Rev 6:12-14). The Son of God, by whom the universe exists is the stone cut out without hands who will reduce all human structures and systems to powder carried by the wind into obscurity 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 His 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.
Christ is the ‘Light of the World’ (Jn 1; 8; and 12—the source of absolute truth. His role as, ‘Light of the world’ touches all of life, for how we know what we know with certainty is only found in Christ (Jn 1:4-9). By God the Father’s appointment, Christ possesses absolute epistemic authority—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 (Jn 12:35). 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). Thus, in terms of causation, when Christ the Logos and biblical cosmology are 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 the focal point, goal, and purpose of all existence. The fact that truth is a divine Person (Jn 14:6) means that truth is only known by a relationship with this divine Person (Jn 18:37). 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 elevator with cables cut, plummeting into hell.
Christ does what the world’s greatest philosophers could not do. He unifies being and becoming; temporal and eternal; visible and invisible; material and immaterial; created and uncreated reality. These truths baffle us, 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, He joins the human and divine. And by this union, we are brought as near to God as a creature could possibly be. 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, He is the source of the coming ‘cosmic holiness’ in the new heavens and earth, in which every created thing will declare God’s praise in accordance with its purpose (Rev 21:5). In unifying all reality in Himself, He 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 human form. This is the ultimate reason for human existence. To behold this glory is why we were created, it is why we endure trials. God is preparing His own to experience this eternal communication of Himself to them (2 Cor 4:16-18).
How can the church, having been emaciated and fractured by dualism return to the conviction that Christ unifies all reality? Answer: she must make it her highest goal to give Christ His proper place as supreme and preeminent, for He is the eternal Logos. In the Christ-hymn in Colossians 1:15-20, He is set forth as Lord of cosmology, exercising absolute dominion. The Father’s purpose is that
Christ have first place in everything. By proclaiming His preeminence in all things, His vastness is explicated, exalted, and exhibited to 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.
Dear friends, the dying sinner as well as our aging cosmos both 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 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 in Christ, for the origin, sustenance, and definition of the cosmos belong to Him as the Logos. His power, authority, and ownership are constantly exerted in His rule of the cosmos. He is designer, upholder, and definer of the telos of every aspect of the creation. At the Day of the Lord, by His infinite power, everything except fallen angels and impenitent sinners will be restored to its proper telos. All things in the creation then will ‘sing’ at their appointed frequencies—the entire creation a worshipping chorus in perfect harmony (Ps 104:1-2; Is 55:12).
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.
Christ is ‘the Choir Director of creation’ and the subject of its hymns. 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 exists is that God might use it as a stage to extend His glory by revealing His moral majesty. This purpose is being carried out through His Son who is fulfilling each program of God: Creator, Logos, Lawgiver, Lamb, Lion, Lord of the cosmos.