ONE OF US

To all Americans I say, the Orlando shooter was one of you. More collectively I say, he was one of us. Our default will be to deny this. No solution proceeds from labeling him a terrorist, Islamic, deranged, different from. The victims too were ones with us. An avoidance response might be, "but they were gay." No one elevates himself by refusing to lower a flag to half-mast, or by asserting, "they deserved it." Politicians and NRA will honour humanity's incomparable privilege of sharing life on this planet only when weapons of war cease to be considered intrinsic citizen rights and as essential to domestic security.

EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

What kind of world are we living in? No matter how it may be described, God does have a word for us. It comes in Ecclesiastes, one of the canonical wisdom books. Ecclesiastes is a series of lectures in the Old Testament that speak about life, reality, and values for wise and successful living. Ecclesiastes has sometimes been misunderstood or neglected.  Some have considered it to be the strangest book in the Bible. The author has been accused of scepticism, fatalism, and pessimism. That's not an accurate appraisal. I recommend the following perspective. Approach the book with an open mind. Discard unflattering assumptions. It is possible to understand what the author was communicating to an Old Testament community of faith and to discern robust recommendations and warnings about life and for living in this age.

The descriptor "son of David" identifies the author as a male and although the author's personal name has not been divulged, the options are narrowed. "The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem …" (1:1). From among David's sons, it was Solomon who had a reputation for communicating wisdom and truth. He is called qoheleth meaning teacher as he takes on the role of a sage, a wise man, a scholar, a wise and older tutor of wisdom.  Like other sages of his day, Solomon spoke to the young people of his day. His primary audience was young adults embarking on life and making decisions about their priorities, their values, and their purposes in life.

The author begins the book by describing everything in life as vanity or meaningless. “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. 
Utterly meaningless!
 Everything is meaningless” (1:2). How long would you stay with a counsellor who spoke like that? He must have something more to say. 
He does.

GLORY IS THE GOAL

Defeat of Rebel Angels by Pieter Breugal Sr

At a time before time, a cadre of angels perpetrated a rebellion against God and while it was an unsuccessful coup, the rebel group spun off to infect others. In the broad window of pre-history God determined to create humanity and the world in which humankind would live. The original design and creation was perfectly achieved by the command of eternal God and time began. Humanity bore God's likeness in goodness and innocence. Humanity's participation in God's life and glory was the pre-eternal plan of God. For the briefest of moments there was intimacy between God and the first humans until the supernatural dissidents who had been evicted from God's presence, infected humankind. The faultlessness of the human species was soiled by personal sin that went viral. From that earliest time until now, the disabling effects of sin have dishonored the human story. This was not unforeseen and God did not react to that infiltration of wickedness as if surprised by it. Rather, since pre-eternity is that state of being from which God views all time, past, present and future as the same moment, He simply did what he intended to do. God elected to rescue fallen man through the incarnation and substitutionary atonement by God's Son who came supernaturally and then returned to the glory of his Father’s person. Since sin is viewed as personal liability, only individual faith in Christ's work that leads to salvation will be effective to regenerate a sinful person. Yet that person recreated and lived in by God's own Spirit, the second person of the trio of divine persons, lives with the assurance of entering the glory where God dwells beyond time. Glory is the goal toward which the whole story of redeemed humanity is moving.

FIRST MAN AND FIRST WOMAN

That act of rebellion by the first man and first woman defaced the image of God in the human in various ways. Human intelligence was impaired so people constantly erred in their reasoning. Morally and socially humankind no longer reflected God's image, being unable any longer to distinguish between good and evil but rather began to exploit others. Human mental, emotional and relational health has been damaged ever since. And you can’t fix those areas first and then hope to have a relationship with God.

God’s good news is that because God made humanity to reflect him and that image was marred by sinfulness he determined to restore the image bearing capacity and to do that he sent his Son into the world where the Son, Jesus, lived such a perfect sinless life that he revealed the exact image of the invisible God, actually God in human flesh, and the plan all along was that this sinless one would give himself as an atoning sacrifice to atone for the sins of the world. This is the great recovery of the image bearers.

When the resemblance was distorted, God went to an extraordinary length to rescue us. And from the moment that you place your faith in Christ’s atoning death for sin, you are redeemed through Christ and you begin to bear the image of His Son. Jesus modeled that life. Your life now corresponds with God’s creation purpose that you should be like God and enjoy powers that God puts in you. It is what it means to be truly human.

PARADISE WAS LOST

The Bible tells the tale that something terrible happened within humanity. The Reflection Of God Became Impaired By Sin. That happened in the paradise lost story, when Adam and Eve got the whole ball rolling. Like a snowball on a hill, it got larger and large affecting us all. Mankind today is only remotely like the ideal humanity portrayed by the psalmist in Psalm 8. The original Adam and Eve was ideal humanity. The human possessed the God-given capacity of self-determination, which meant that he and she had freedom to choose to obey God or to disobey. To disobey would be a violation of the relationship with God. When the original humans from whom we came, chose to disobey God, that act of rebellion defaced the image of God in the human and has affected the entire race. Long after creation, Solomon observed the tragedy that man did not remain as he was created. "This only I have found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes" (Ecclesiastes 7:29).

CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD THAT HE SHARES WITH US

Having mentioned the big ticket characteristics of God yesterday, such attributes as self existent, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, self sufficient, time transcendent and non corporeal which belong exclusively to him, there are other qualities of God of which there was intended to be a reflection in the human. Some of these are intellectual attributes like knowledge and wisdom, and moral attributes such as righteousness, holiness, goodness, love, grace, mercy, longsuffering, truthfulness and faithfulness. And there are volitional attributes like reasoning, ability to choose, to decide and even to cause. Humanity was created to have relationship with God because of this resemblance and to desire to worship God and to have ability to serve him.