Introduction: Christ the Logos and His Lordship
By Jay Wegter
Consider the folly and absurdity of a non-teleological human being, and a non-teleological cosmos—a man and a universe with no meaning, no purpose, no destiny, no goal, no design. An undesigned man living in an undesigned, unpurposed cosmos is set forth as if it were scientific objectivity, as if the study of the properties of matter can conclusively answer the ultimate questions of metaphysics. That is the lunacy to which men cling to justify their love of sin. This massive philosophical shift is a guarantee that man is done with historic religion. And this is one of the reasons why there is going to be another Babylon, a new tower of Babel, so to speak (Rev 14; 16; 17; 18). Why? Because to be left without absolute meaning results in man worshipping himself so that nothing outside of him authoritatively defines him. That's the present state of folly which our Western world has reached.
Much of this damnable heresy of a self-created cosmos has germinated in the philosophical soil of secular humanism. But the Christian knows what is behind this. The devil is seeking dominion through man's counterfeit kingship. And according to Scripture, the delusion will be very convincing, for it is a counterfeit form of redemption (2 Thess 2:1-12). In fact, the history of the world is the canvas, so to speak, upon which God is unfolding redemptive history. But the terminus of history will involve a violent consummation. For a period of 3 ½ years, “it will be given” to the devil and the Antichrist to deceive the world, to exercise authority, and to persecute the saints (Rev 13:5-8, 14, 17; 17:17). The worship of the Antichrist will be global in extent (Rev 12:9; 13:1-8, 12-18; 17:8-18; 18:23). All who receive the mark of the Beast are declaring by doing so that they worship him. They will be tormented forever (Rev 14:9-11).
What is God’s purpose in ‘giving’ the devil and his Antichrist emissary 42 months of free rein? Answer, God intends, by the great delusion (2 Thess 2), to exercise perfect discrimination between the righteous and the wicked, and thus condemn the wickedness of unbelief. For unbelief is not an error in judgment, it is hardened hostility toward God (Jn 3:36). Unbelief is spurning God by trampling His offer of mercy and reconciliation. It is despising God’s testimony concerning His Son, thus treating God like a liar (1 Jn 5:6-10).
The nations are going to make a second global attempt at a one-world society, the first one was under Nimrod, builder of Babel (Gen 11:1-7). The second attempt at unifying the human race will offer to humanity the promise of realized human potential. But when God begins breaking the seals of the scroll through his Son, mankind is going to discover that the creation and the environment are very uncooperative with man’s utopian goals (Rev 5-6 ff.). This ‘uncooperative creation’ will take God's side against men and devils who are living in open rebellion against Him. The great usurper Satan himself and his minions are attempting to produce a world of devil worship, but consider what's going to happen to their plan. According to Revelation, inanimate things, clouds, skies, hailstones, blood, pestilence, earthquakes, fire, and asteroids are going to take up arms against the wicked. The utopian dream of globalism which the progressives have pushed for so hard and what Marxists have craved, is going to crumble to the touch after a few moments on the stage of history. The Day of the Lord will accomplish this destruction. That Day is spoken of in Isaiah, Joel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, 2 Peter, etc. (Is 2:12; 13; Joel 2:1; Zeph 1:14; 2 Pet 3:10). At the Day of the Lord, the fall of mystery Babylon will be very public, a demonstration before men and angels. For the Lion of the tribe of Judah is going to crush the kingdoms of this world. For the Lamb is conqueror and Lion. He will unleash the fury of divine justice upon the nations. He is the spoiler of the satanic version of the utopian dream. Christ who gave His flesh and blood for the life of the world (Jn 6:47-58), will shed the blood of the wicked at the Day of the Lord (Is 63:1-6; Joel 3:12-14, 19-21; Zech 14:12-15; Rev 14:14-20; Rev 19:11-21). Speaking of the cosmos itself opposing the wicked, there are O.T. examples of the creation itself ‘fighting’ God’s enemies (Ex 14:21-29; Josh 10:11-15; Judges 5:20). Though God is long-suffering, He cannot allow the usurpation of His authority over mankind to continue unabated. There's been an incredible duration of time with the doors of mercy open (Rom 2:1-16). But they will close, for the title deed to the creation will be reclaimed by its Creator, the Son of God (Rev 11:15; 12:10). This will take place at the Day of the Lord. On that Day there will be a massive, glorious display of true ownership by the One who defines and upholds the cosmos and its contents. For the Day the Lord will evict the wicked stewards—He will gather out all ‘stumbling blocks’ (Mt 13:39-42), and replace them with overcomers who are proven Christ-followers (Rev 21:7). This is God's glory plot. He's recovering His image through his Son's redemptive work; He's installing genuine stewards redeemed by Christ. The usurpers will be gone. In God’s glory plot, the saints will be given dominion over the world. The Kingdom will be given to the saints (Dan 7:18, 22, 27; Rev 2:26-28; 19:15). But this kingdom is not identical to the eternal state. For this kingdom involves an iron rod rule over the nations—an absolute monarchy of Christ’s Lordship in His visible reign on earth. All resistance to the absolutism of His rule will be instantly crushed like a potter breaking clay pots with an iron rod. This discipline of the nations is not a description of the heavenly eternal state, that state of absolute perfection must wait until the Messianic Age is completed (Rev 21-22). The God glorifying, effectual dominion Adam forfeited is restored to redeemed humans in Christ. How marvelous the Son of God, the Creator of angels becomes a man, lower than angels in His incarnation—all that He might by His work of redemption save a people for Himself and raise redeemed humans above angels in the coming Kingdom (Heb 2:5-8). The Day of the Lord will make God known as who He truly is. Your cosmology will be exposed on that day. If it is not the cosmology which honors the Son (Ps 2:10-12), then your cosmology will implode and you with it (1 Jn 2:15-17). If your cosmology is patterned after Lucifer’s self-deception, it will come crashing down. And the cosmos itself will become your judge and oppressor. It will not give you safe harbor. The creation will not give aid and comfort because you are in truth an enemy of the Creator. How reminiscent this is of the warning in Leviticus 18:26-28. “But as for you, you are to keep My statutes and My judgments and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the native, nor the alien who sojourns among you so that the land will not spew you out, should you defile it, as it has spewed out the nation which has been before you.” Keep in mind that God’s statutes are closely tied to His created order. His wondrous deeds go back to creation week described in the book of Genesis. For God created by separating things, and then blessing those separations and distinctions so that these creation structures became the very ‘furniture’ of what is good, blessed, righteous and honorable. And thus, we are to exercise discernment, for we are stewarding these distinctions; honoring what He has honored; blessing the order He's put in place, by which He brings blessing, prosperity, and fruitfulness. The created distinctions are, the differences between man and woman, the distinction between human and animal, between animal and plant, between good and evil, between righteousness and wickedness. God has formed these sharp distinctions, and yet followers of Satan have tried to blur them, and by means of subscribing to the blur, the devil gains followers. This blurring of God-ordained distinctions is part of the great apostasy foretold in Scripture. The great falling away will entail a false church in bed with a wicked governance (Rev 17). The mandatory philosophy of the apostasy will be an attempt at dissolving the distinctions which God has put in place. The erasing of divinely ordained distinctions has the intent of producing a global unity. But instead of a utopia, this will usher in a holocaust. Enter mystery Babylon and the campaign of the Beast. God will send judgment in the form of the plagues of Revelation. The present WOKE movement is but one of the powerful currents dragging the world into mystery Babylon's apostate clutches. The West seems intent on replacing the moral order found in God’s distinctions. But biblical theism is still partially standing in their way. The last fumes of moral conscience inhibit them from following their sin with complete abandon. If you talk to college students today, and they will tell you that right and wrong are evolving, that morals that characterized the Clinton era (marriage, one man one woman, and abortion ought to be rare), were biased and had to go—replace them with the idea of endless progress in the discovery of new freedoms in their reach for a utopian society.
The world acknowledges some of the separations caused by sin, but rejects the gospel answer. The separations borne of sin are: 1) man from God; 2) man from man, 3) man from himself, 4) man from nature, and 5) man’s soul from his body (death). The world in rejecting the gospel, proposes its own ‘solutions’ to the separations. The world’s false solutions are: 1) natural religion; 2) the U.N. identity politics, erasure of God’s distinctions; 3) psychotherapy; 4) deep ecology;
- atheism’s dream of no afterlife. As an exercise, let the reader answer how Christ in His own Person, work, and promises answers all five separations caused by sin. The idea that our values and our freedoms are determined by the state and not by our Creator is part of the apostasy. What a terrifying thing it will be when the human race stands before God as sheep and goats (Mt 25:31-46). For God will perfectly discriminate between the righteous and the wicked, between those who are obedient and those who are His enemies. Consider the following line of reasoning; your cosmology, whether it's biblical or satanic, answers two ultimate questions, why is there a universe and what is the purpose of a human being? The Christ Hymn of Colossians chapter one destroys the notion that religion is but an esoteric upper story, ethereal, subjective category belonging to the realm of myth. No, Christ, the Logos destroys the open gash between creation and redemption. He does so because He is the Lord of the universe. He is both Savior and Creator. He is both Redeemer and Judge. He upholds all reality and He is the focal point of all reality. He has first place; He is preeminent (Col 1:18). Christ, the Logos holds reality together, all reality is unified in him, physical and spiritual, created and uncreated. Being and becoming are all held together in Himself. Christ has called everything into existence. He holds it together, thus in Himself, by His power and wisdom and authority, He's holding together the tension between creation and redemption. I say ‘tension’ because redemption without a knowledge of God controlling creation, pulls us towards spiritualism, mysticism, Gnosticism, experientialism, Platonism, and pietism. Without redemption joined to creation in Christ’s Lordship, it also can pull us toward materialism and even pantheistic and deistic ideas—which are concepts embraced by religious liberals. If Christ is Lord only of immaterial, spiritual things, then by inference, the material creation must have a degree of autonomy. When we think about Christ supplying meaning and purpose, let us not forget that He is in command of the cosmos He has created. He rules over it and calls into existence the physical creation every moment, and so the entire creation, all of cosmology is at our Lord's disposal for blessing, for correction, and for judgment (Rom 4:17). It's important to realize that the arguments given in the Psalms that God keeps His promises are tied to His power exerted in fiat creation (Ps 33). For it is the word of God that called the heavens into existence, it is the word of God that upholds them (2 Pet 3:7), and it is the word of God that promises care and deliverance and blessing to the believer. His word has the power to raise the dead (Jn 5:25-29). His word has the power to purge the present creation and make a New Heavens and a New Earth (2 Pet 3:13). We are to take great comfort in the fact that the entire cosmology is under the command of our Lord's reign. There is an aspect of cosmology known as cosmological holiness. This means in the New Heavens of the New Earth, every tree, mushroom, pine cone, fish, creature, whatever it is, everything will occupy its created purpose, its telos; its cosmological design. Nothing will be out of order. Thus, this new world is characterized by cosmic holiness because in the perfection of all things everything will bear its proper relation to all else to the glory of God. The summing up of all things in Christ (Eph 1:9-10) will bring to pass this glorious state of affairs known as cosmic holiness. Now, in the meantime, true believers can be described as stakeholders. In other words, presently they have a stake in upholding God's moral and physical order. In ‘place-holding’, believers are stewarding the things God has entrusted to them. But conversely, the rest of the world is wanton, even if they claim to be defenders of the ecology, for their own bodies, their own minds, speech and actions reveal that they serve sin. Rather than stakeholders, they are desacralizing what God has made. Just to clarify, to desacralize means to misuse something sacred for unsacred purposes. This is not only the case in overt sins of the body, but also in sins of the mind. For according to Psalm 19, the heavens exist to proclaim the knowledge of God’s majesty. But, to ascribe to the heavens a chance origin is to desacralize what God has made sacred to reveal His glory. A true believer, like a landowner makes his piece of property prosperous to the glory of God. He makes his land a place where he instructs in the fear of God. He raises up God-fearing families on that territory entrusted to him. Consequently, he's a placeholder for the coming kingdom. He's a stakeholder who is guarding and carrying out God’s reign as His representative. Therefore, he is a son of light, a child of light (1 Thess 5:4-8). He is light because, for all to see, he is a steward of God’s truth and order. He is part of the kingdom of light, for how he orders his life and how he uses his property including his body is a testament that he is a placeholder. He is a stakeholder in the coming perfect order to come in God’s kingdom. He has cosmological territory entrusted to him which he is occupying and which he has claimed for the glory of God and the truth of God. And so, in this fallen world, he is imposing God's order upon what's entrusted to him, whether his family, his property, his farm, his place of business, or his relationships, he's imposing God's order upon what is in his sphere of influence. He will be rewarded for that. He is a flesh and blood testimony of the kingdom to come. He's a forerunner of this coming kingdom where cosmological holiness will characterize the entire creation.
What a glorious entrust and charge it is that the faithful believer is a stakeholder in a world hostile to the Creator. God is going to reward us for our willingness and zeal to honor Him by showing discernment and reverence for His created order. When the disciples asked if Christ were going to install the Kingdom immediately, our Lord gave The Parable of the Ten Minas (Lu 19:11-27). The theme of this parable is, occupy until I return. Conduct My business until I come back. Channel your time, talent, affections, and resources into serving Me while I am away. Consider our Lord’s remarkable promises to those who faithfully conduct His business. “Be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master will find on the alert when he comes; truly I say to you, that he will gird himself to serve, and have them recline at the table, and will come up and wait on them” (Lu 12:36-37).
Those who are faithful ‘stakeholders’ the Lord will grant them great responsibilities in His coming Kingdom. “And the Lord said, ‘Who then is the faithful and sensible steward, whom his master will put in charge of his servants, to give them their rations at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions’” (Lu 12:43-44).
The book of Psalms ought to be one of the first places we go for the solution to the chasm or tear which divides God's face toward creation from His face toward redemption. As Abraham Kuyper argues in his book, Lectures on Calvinism, ‘the moral and the mystical have been divorced from the cosmological.’ That constitutes a rend or tear between creation and redemption. But, where do we turn to in Scripture to find creation and redemption joined? The answer is the Psalms, for they give us an interlocking set of building blocks to show us the unity of theistic worldview. And so, the book of Psalms gives us the relationship between the physical order and the moral order and why rebellion in the moral order brings chaos and deprivation in the physical order. There are numerous Psalms which speak of God’s relation to His creation: Psalms 8; 19; 29; 33; 50; 51; 65; 90; 94; 104; 139; 148. In addition, there are places in Scripture where the created order is described as wonderful, even though we may take that order for granted. The simple tasks of how harvesting differs between kinds of crops is described in Isaiah 28:23-29.
Regarding one’s worldview, in Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper says that a person is either an abnormalist or a normalist. An abnormalist is someone who subscribes to biblical theism. It is someone who says that death, decay, war, disease and sorrow are not normal, but are the tragic consequences of sin’s entrance. Conversely, the normalist says, no, there's been no gigantic intrusion of sin and death. This is the way things have always been. The normalist justifies his revolt against God’s moral order and tends to downplay the massive chaotic fallout in the physical order resulting from the violation of God’s moral order.
Scripture teaches a very basic lesson, ‘reality 101’ is the fear of God (Ps 34:8-14; 111:10). For God has created both orders, physical order, and moral order. There is wisdom and goodness in God, and there is wisdom and goodness in His created order, those who fear God therefore will order their thoughts and motives and words and deeds and desires in harmony with who God. Those who do not order their faculties in such a way are considered wicked and are enemies of God. They will fall very dramatically without recovery. God will set them in slippery places (Ps 73:18). We also see in psalms such as Psalm 50 that God owns the creation, He has an absolute claim upon everything in it including people. Your entire life is accountable to him. Thus, there is utter rationality in the fear God.
Contrast this reverential fear to the skeptic, the Psalms speak of those who scoff (Ps 1:1-6) we think of modern-day atheists. What are some of the ‘miracles’ that modern day atheists believe, completely by blind faith?
- They believe that existence comes from nonexistence.
- They believe that order comes from chaos.
- They believe that life comes from non-life.
- They believe that the personal comes from the impersonal.
- They believe that reason comes from non-reason.
- They believe that reality comes from matter.
- They believe that virgin birth of Christ is a myth, but believe that the universe was ‘virgin born’ having no design or cause—that it is filled with information, but unconceived. It just popped into being.
The above is a description of the scoffer’s worldview, his errant cosmology. Now, when we think of Christ's command and rule over what he has made, we think of His preeminence, His authority, His exercise of justice, His enforcement of moral cause and effect, and also of His incredible humility and condescension to pay that awful price to reconcile us to Himself. We find in Him the fulfillment of our hunger for beauty, for excellence, for permanence, for compassion, for belonging, for love—we find that He is God's infinite gift to sinners, and who alone can answer our deepest longings (Phil 4:8-9).
The Psalms reveal the concept that God saves you from Himself by giving you a refuge from his implacable justice. This opens up comprehensively the meaning of refuge in God, and why taking refuge in Him brings honor and glory to God (Ps 18:2, 30). We should connect this to the gospel, for the gospel is a revelation of God's righteousness and wisdom and power, and love, and therefore it is a revealer of the means by which God is reconciling us to Himself (Rom 1:16-17; 2 Cor 5:18-21). In the Psalms we see a constant contrast between two paths, two viewpoints, two lifestyles, and two eternal destinies. The Psalms give us God as our true home and dwelling place and source of refuge. In the book by Tom Wells, Come Home Forever, the author describes sinful man as a homeless wanderer in the matter of his eternal soul. He's always grasping for something in the creation to provide security, belonging, and significance, a lasting, immutable home. He attempts experimenting with many counterfeits, all of which have an illusory set of promises, but also an expiration date tied to our mortality. The only ‘true home’ of the creature made in God’s image is God Himself, who has given Himself to us in Christ (Eph 1:4).
God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him (Augustine). To be a ‘stakeholder’ in a world of enmity toward God requires single-mindedness. It calls for self-denial and mortification of the flesh. It involves running with endurance and a lively hope. But the prize is priceless (Titus 2:13).