Introduction to Trinitarian Faith Course - Session 3

Hi everyone, welcome to this evening.

Can anyone remember my acronym Mind the GAP?

That then goes to GASP and tonight we're going to do GRASP

gap is gentleness. Ask if you don't understand

anything. Pay attention to how you feel S

say something. So I'm going to say something.

This is great bedtime reading for views on hell.

Woo Hoo. And the thing I'm going to say

is when I read this a while ago and actually it comes up in one

of the videos, I not only I follow the person who compiled

it, I've also heard at least two or three of them separately,

contributors on podcasts talking about things.

These are all really good people who really care about, who love

Jesus and really care about faithfulness to Scripture.

And they've come up with four different interpretations that

are genuine. And I kind of came away with

that. I already thought two things

could be true at the same time. We see that a lot in theology.

Jesus is both human and divine, the word physical.

The Bible is both fully human and fully divine.

There are so many ways that we have to live with paradox and

tension. But I think this helped me with

the incredible complexity of the fact we're creaturely and we

follow the Creator, the infinite mind, and we have such a finite

mind, but our desperation from Eden is to be in control.

We just really want, we really want to be in control, to rule

in our own wisdom. And so it was just a little,

just a little moment of I think the big thing I came away with

this was, wow, people can be completely convinced by

something. And, and there's something very

powerful about being able to hold things in tension.

One of the big mysteries as we know and keeps coming back again

and again and again, is this tension between free will and

predestination, whether we're all predestined to believe or

whether we're predestined to heaven or not, or, you know,

what the spectrum is with that and agency.

And it's not perfect, but Chris and IA long time ago came across

this metaphor of being on a bicycle and that you put the

pedal down on, it's all on God, it's all on God, it's all on

God, or it's on me, my response, my consent.

And you need to kind of keep peddling both to get somewhere.

If you just keep putting on one or the other, you go around in

circles and fall over. And I think there's something I,

it can't be an eternal metaphor because there was a time before

the wheel was created and invented.

But I do think there's something quite strong about that metaphor

because what we're doing on this course is we're pressing,

pressing and pressing on, on who God is, what he's done.

It's all on the predestination side.

And we're also, well, so far in five sessions, there may be

someone on agency in response, I don't know.

But just to kind of hold that complexity, that's my saying

something. Yeah.

So we've got Tim or Paul over to Athanasius.

Thanks, Alice. Tim, you.

Tim's going to give us a breakdown of Athanasius of

Alexandria. Take it away.

Thank you very much. Goodness.

I'm at a point where I should have gone for 12, not 11 on my

print off. OK.

Good evening. I'm Tim.

Those I've met. Nice to see you all.

So, yes, Sent. Oh, yeah.

That feels very, very formal, isn't it?

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. I've actually, before I read

this, thoroughly enjoyed researching this, Not as deeply

as I would like had I had more time, but enough to for

Athanasius to become a bit of a hero.

I mean, I knew a little bit about him, but he's literally a

hero. And so hopefully in the next 10

minutes you'll feel the same. St Athanasius of Alexandria,

Bishop, theologian, exile and man who proved that one Bishop

with a good argument can indeed stand against an empire.

St Athanasius was born in the year 296 in Alexandria.

Just Athanasius. Alexandria was a place of

libraries, lecture halls, philosophers, mathematicians,

but also a heated debates and theological ferment.

It was in this environment Athanasius received his

education and 1st encountered the Christian faith in its

richness and complexity. By the time he became a Deacon

under Bishop Alexander, he had already possessed a sharp mind

and clear theological instinct, qualities he would become

essential very soon. For in 325 AD the young Deacon

accompanied Alexandra to what was arguably arguably the most

consequential gathering of bishops ever assembled, the

Council of Nicaea. Nicaea was no small gathering.

It was an an emergency meeting of the entire church, convened

to settle a theological crisis. Arianism Arias, a presbyter from

Alexandria, also had proposed that Christ was not fully

divine, but rather the highest of God's creatures.

There was when he was not, Arias famously said, presenting the

view that, though philosophically tidy, threatened

to unmake Christian proclamation from the inside out.

If the sun were not truly God, how could he save?

How could the incarnation be more than a pious metaphor?

And what would become of worship offered worship offered to

Christ? Athanasius, even as a young man,

saw the stakes with clarity. The Council, of course, produced

what we now call the Nicean Creed, affirming that the Son is

of 1 substance with the Father. But while many bishops accepted

the Creed, some did so reluctantly, and many more found

ways to reinterpret it once he they returned home.

The controversy was just beginning.

Three years later, when Bishop Alexandra Alexander died,

Athanasius, still young, was chosen to succeed him as Bishop

of Alexandria. This would not be a quiet

pastorate. Over the next decades,

Athanasius became the chief defender of Nicean orthodoxy, a

task that earned him admiration in the long arc of history, but

not so great in the short term as it earned him exile. 5

separate exiles. Emperors found him inconvenient,

rival bishops found him relentless, and theologians of a

more compromising disposition found him impossible.

Athanasius was not merely stubborn, he was principled,

perceptive, and utterly convinced that the truth of the

Gospel depended on maintaining the full divinity of Christ.

He saw with clarity that if Christ were not fully God,

Christianity would unravel at it's core.

Salvation would become uncertain and sacraments would become

empty signs and the Church's worship would lose it's anchor.

He was willing to be exiled rather than allow the

unravelling to begin. It would be a mistake, though,

to imagine an Athanasius as purely A combative figure.

His enduring legacy lies equally in his positive theological

contributions. One of the treasures of

Christian literature is his early work on the Incarnation.

In it, Athanasius unfolds a vision of salvation that is both

intellectually rigorous and spiritually luminous.

It was once said that is a work so deep and theologically rich

that only Paul Golf has a faintest idea what he's talking

about in it. In it, he argues that the Word

becomes flesh, not as dramatic gesture or as a temporary

necessity, but to heal and restore human nature itself.

His most famous line, which is still quite today, is he became

human that we might become divine.

It is Asanasius's way of describing the transformation

made possible by Christ's incarnation.

It in fact represents A profound vision of Christian life, one in

which the incarnation is not merely the mechanism of

salvation, but it's very substance.

That's not my words, but what brilliant sentence.

So I had to see the mechanism of salvation.

So not the mechanism of salvation, but it's very

substance. It's also worth noting here that

the word used to become divine is in that sentence is theosis,

which means union with God. So it's not as heretic as it as

it as it sounds to the modern reader.

His pastoral sensitivity appears also in his friendships with

monastery communities of Egypt. During his exiles, Athanasius

sought refuge among the desert monks, who in turn found him a

spirit found in him, a spiritual ally.

His biography of Saint Anthony the Great Hermit played a

crucial role in bringing monastic spirituality to the

wider Christian world. Through his work, Athanasius

shaped not only doctrine but also devotion, not only not only

the Church's theology, but its spirituality, spirituality and

its imagination. His influence did not end with

his own lifetime. The Cappadocia Fathers, Basil

the Great, Gregory of Nicaea, spelled slightly different

Nicaea and Gregory of Nasiensis built upon the foundation he

laid, developing the full articulation of the Trinitarian

doctrine that would become the guide for the Church thereafter.

Athanasius was not Athanasius was not the architect of that

doctrine alone, but he provided its essential cornerstone, the

insistence that the sun shares fully and eternally in the

divine essence. Without that conviction, the

later flowering of Trinitarian theology would have been

impossible. We sometimes speak of historical

figures as if they belong safely in the past.

Athanasius belongs to us still. His word was full of political.

His world was full of political pressures, tempting compromises

and theological half measures, temptations not unfamiliar in

any age. He reminds us that truth is

worth defending even when it is unfashionable, and that the

heart of the Christian faith cannot be reshaped to suit the

spirit of the times, and that courage in theology is as

necessary as clarity. With Athanasius, theology was

not merely an academic exercise, but a matter of life, worship,

and salvation. By the time he died in 373, the

tide had turned decisively. The Nicene Creed, which he had

defended with with such relentless passion, became the

faith of the of the universal Church.

Later councils confirmed that Athanasius had fought what what

later confirmed what Athanasius had fought for.

Christ is fully God, fully human and inseparably united, and

inseparably united in his identity as a Saviour of the

world. Very.

Good, nice one, thank you. Alice and I were joking as well.

There's this sort of semi apocryphal story about Father

Christmas at the Council of Nicaea punching out areas in a

in a punch up. So we say like celebrate

Christmas, punch a heretic. Also you, you, you might.

So Gregory Vanessa Basil of Caesarea, super important,

really fantastic. Like read them.

But later on in the manual, I think it's in this version.

It might have been in the later version.

We put in one exercise on Saint Macrina the elder, who is the

elder sister of both of both Basil and Gregory and their

writings about her basically said, look, all of our thinking

comes from her. So she she speaks to us through

them as a key early church Apostolic thinker woman St.

So we we understand her thinking through them and it it is it's

phenomenal. So yeah, thank you, Tim.

And yeah, I don't know really how to respond to your comment

about understanding Athanasius, but I think that I think what I

take, what I take from reading Athanasius, even if you just

read the Against the Gentiles first, this first defence, you

know, he goes through describing the Gospel in an apologetics

kind of way with the Jews, with the Gentiles, and he kind of

goes down these different arguments.

And it's just if you if you read that, one of the things that's

really conspicuous is how alien it reads to contemporary modern

Christian conversation. Like what he focuses on is just

so completely different and also his kind of conclude it towards

the end, he starts going into well, if if nobody, if still you

don't agree with me. And he said, and by the way,

most of the world is already converted.

It's interesting. He puts pretty much everybody

already believes in Jesus. So I'm talking to the few of you

who don't. And and if you still aren't

persuaded by any of my arguments, the bottom line is

how can you get over the fact that none of our people are

afraid of death? And this is his really his kind

of ultimate argument. He says none of none of our

people are afraid of death. He said this is the most

unnatural thing. All people are afraid of death.

All animals are afraid of death. Everyone's afraid of death.

It's like the thing to be afraid of.

How is it that any of our people could possibly not be afraid of

death, even to the point they get thrown to the lions or

whatever else, and they just don't care?

And for him, this was the the strongest and most definitive

proof of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

He said, how can they not be afraid of death if Jesus hasn't

risen from the dead, It can only be because there isn't, there

isn't crisis in them. So from the, from an apologetics

point of view, I really like that because he also passes

through well, you know, OK, if you can't get on board with all

the healing and the miracles and stuff that just happens

everywhere the cross is preached, then let me just bring

it down to something you can relate to.

Everyone's scared of death except our people.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

So I, I kind of like that. So I do, I do recommend reading,

reading him. So what I'm going to do tonight,

I'm going to talk for a bit before we get back into kind of

discussing in groups. And I think this is a really

it's a really pivotal lecture and chapter in the course.

I'm just looking at the the outcomes here.

I had in mind a direction to go tonight, but we might go to in a

slightly different one. I want to make sure that people

have the opportunity to ask the questions they want to ask.

So either because actually a few some of the best conversations

I've had here have been at the end of the evening when most of

the people have left and we've got into kind of, you know,

we've, we've kind of continued. So, you know, do when we're in

the groups as well, do wave me over to come round if you want,

you want to ask. And then also please ask and

we'll try and get through as much as we can in the in the

session tonight. But just to frame the the

takeaways for me, where I think the significance of this chapter

lies. If you recall in the in the

lecture at the end, there's a question and I can't remember

what the question was, but Baxter, he took the answer into

what do you think Jesus feels when he hears moment by moment

the Father say to him, you're my beloved son in whom I'm well

pleased. What does Jesus experience?

The human Jesus, because he's still human now he's

irreversibly human. Do you think he's worried about

anything? Do you think he's afraid of

anything? Do you think he's bothered by

about the criticisms of the Pharisees or the, the, the

concern that maybe the trajectory of, of history is not

going to go in the right direction or that he's going to

lose a handle on everything? Do do you think that any of that

exists for him or within him at all?

And of course, the answer is no. The question what, what is it?

You do feel Jesus is probably a question for prayer more than it

is for speculation, but the point is to say that Jesus

emotional centre is the life that has been given to us in

him. That is our power source.

That is what we live from that that that is the mind of Christ

that has been shared with us and mine doesn't just mean thoughts,

It means the whole internal makeup of a person.

The scripture says who's known the mind of the Lord that he has

instructed him. But we have the mind of Christ,

not we will have, but we have it's not put forward into some

future we'll we'll be able to understand everything it's

saying. Jesus eternal centre of gravity

has been put within us for us to enjoy and access and live from.

That's the Christian gospel. Not that we're trying to close

close the gap with a legal fiction of some kind, but that

God has come to us in Christ. And this is also the, the

question that that came up towards the end about what do we

do when we're reading the Scripture, when we're reading

the, when we're reading the Old Testament?

Well, how, how does the New Testament read the Old

Testament? Well, the New Testament authors

fail every Bible hermeneutics class that you would put them

through, by which I mean, if you were to put the apostle Paul,

John, Peter, Jude, whoever wrote Hebrews, if you were to put them

into Trinity College hermeneutics, you know, how do

you read the Bible interpretive class?

Every single one of them would fail.

They break all of the rules according to contemporary Bible

hermeneutics. How are we supposed to read the

Bible? They completely throw that book

out the window and that ought to cause us to wake up and ask some

questions about, well, how do we read it?

Because if we, if we read it in a way that is not commensurate

with the way they're reading it, are we following in the

Apostolic tradition or how or are we doing something else?

And to me, you have the the New Testament, I forget who said it,

but in, in the past, God spoke to us in many ways.

But now in these last days, he has spoken to us in the in his

son. So this the son is the final

word of the Father. He is the word of God and he's

the final word of God. And actually he is the one who

comes to the prophets who don't understand what they're saying

according to Peter, but but in whom the spirit of Christ is

pointing towards something. But now Christ has come.

Every other vision has to die at the feet of Jesus.

There is nothing that. Can continue on without passing

through the revelation of God in Christ, his incarnation, his

death, his resurrection, his ascension and his baptism of the

world. Everything has to pass through

that. If we're retaining anything that

hasn't passed through that, then it's not Christian.

But for it to be Christian, it passes through that revelation.

So you get the Nicene Creed. Again, a comment from the from

the lecture, the first line, I believe we believe in one God,

the Father Almighty, not the Almighty Father.

That's deliberate. It's not accidental.

Every word is put there deliberately.

The orders put there deliberately that the, the, the

Nicene fathers took great pains to locate the fatherhood of God

as this preeminent truth which is to infer the Trinity, right,

The fatherhood of God and he is the Father Almighty.

And how often we say we believe in God.

What's the first thing we say about God?

Well, God's all powerful often the first thing that people say.

It's the other way around. What is it about our thinking

that pushes us towards power before it pushes us towards the

revelation of fatherhood? The second point on that too is

if we've first established with Jesus and his testimony to us

that God is Father, what then does that?

How then does that change and baptise and upgrade our

understanding of what it even means to be powerful?

What does Almighty look like when it's the Father Almighty

rather than just the Almighty Almighty?

How is the concept of Almighty baptised in the vision of the

Father, Son and Spirit? And this is holiness.

The holiness means to be a cut above and what I had in mind to

do and I might do a little bit later is just try and map out on

the on the whiteboard how starting with an idea like

holiness. How everything we believe about

what holiness even means changes through about 5 different levels

based on whether or not we agree with Jesus about the revelation,

the revelation of his relationship with the Father.

If we start from there versus if we start with a a singular Aryan

God who creates Jesus, how that then changes the in the kind of

the sequence of everything. So a big question, and I think

this really is a crucial session to address this is is this

question of what what is Baxter says it a number of times.

What is the hermeneutic? What is the way we understand

how to read any of this stuff or how to interpret anything?

Like what, what is our framework that enables us to do that And

to to agree with the Nicene Fathers, we would strongly

contend, is to say that the, the hermeneutic is the revelation of

God in Christ, which is the triune God.

That's why we're talking about. This is the Trinitarian faith.

That is the hermeneutic lens through which we read everything

else. So within that, if I might, I

mean, Alice, we've known each other a long time, been friends

for a long time and, and have have debated a lot.

If I, if I might dive back to your bicycle image for a moment.

I, I am not trying to rebalance a bicycle like this.

This course isn't trying to rebalance a bicycle because

we've learnt too far in One Direction and we need to lean

too far on the other. On the other way.

I, I, I want to remove the road completely, right, because

there's no Rd. He is the road, He is the way,

right? And I think that we have the,

the predestination free will question.

I don't believe it's a truth intention.

It's a fundamental corruption in the, in Western theology.

And my proof of that would be this was not an issue for 1000

years when the terms were different and the legal

framework had not been brought in and introduced into the into

the Christian story. It's just not there.

You get it kind some stuff is there in Augustine.

But again, we can, we can go into ways in which it's not in

Augustine. And also we can go into ways in

which Augustine has major problems with his, his reading,

right. This is not new territory.

It's kind of well won, well won territory.

But I said some years ago, Grace and I were preaching in an

Anglican church in, in Saint, I think it's Saint Paul's in

Weston Super Mare. And we used to do quite a lot

there with the previous vicar Andrew Alden was there and pre

COVID. And at the end the youth pastor

came up and he said, well, you know, the I'm just not really,

yeah, this whole predestination free will stuff a lot.

I'm just a practitioner. I get on with it.

You know, I'm not, I'm not kind of not really, you know, I don't

really want to have that kind of discussion.

And I said to him, you don't get to say that you're a

professional Christian, right? You set yourself up here as a

teacher of the word. And these are not secondary

issues. These are primary issues.

They deal with the most essential tenets of what we

believe. What is the nature of the

gospel? What is the nature of salvation?

This is literally 101 Christianity.

It's not. It's not an ivory tower theology

conversation. And I said to him, don't you

think that the failure of the Protestant church for 500 years

to resolve this question, IE which side of the bike are you

putting more weight on? Does the does the complete

failure to resolve that using the same scriptures, claiming

the same methodologies and yet unable to resolve that?

Does that not tell you that there might be a problem with

the bike? Not a problem with how much with

like where, where we're balancing?

Is it not the grounds and the terms of our more that are more

fundamental, the terms that we're, we're playing with, you

know, the field that we're involved with?

Is this not to say that that is where the problem lies?

Because we can make all sorts of assumptions about the ground

that we're on and then come up with all sorts of different

interpreting frameworks which might more or less approximate

experience a little bit. Like if we believe that the sun

goes around the Earth, we can look up at the stars and come up

with all kinds of complex mathematics to try and place

what they're doing. And people did for hundreds and

hundreds and hundreds of years arguing about we'll know what,

How do we account for the fact that Pluto goes into retrograde?

It kind of goes forward and then it goes backwards.

How does that work, You know, and the failure to resolve that

mathematically in the end gave way to a paradigm shift where

somebody says, do you know what? I guess it's Copernicus, right?

Perhaps the earth goes around the sun.

And if we get our, if we change the terms, does everything else

suddenly resolve? Do our conundrums and our issues

resolve this? This course is based on the 100%

conviction that absolutely that is, that is the case.

And it's, we, we sometimes talk about evangelising the

foundation of the Western mind because the, the, the, the, the

reformational thinking, which has many extraordinary and

wonderful things in it, because it's, it's possible to do that

even when you're not playing with a full deck.

I mean, we do that all the time, right?

None of us is playing with a full deck.

It doesn't mean that it invalidates everything, but it,

but it doesn't mean at a certain point we have to look back and

say a foundation that is out of line will have a consequence on

the building in the long run. And we want to see that

foundation healed. And that's, that's a big part of

this conversation, right? Is, is seeing that foundation

healed? So I, I think I'm, I'm often

finding myself in conversation of sometimes debate with the,

with the concept of tension or balance.

You've heard me if you've been around here and paid any

attention to me, which you probably haven't, But if you

have and heard me on a Sunday morning, you know, I've, I, I,

I've said, you know, balance is the favourite word of Bible

believing Christians that never appears once in the Bible,

right. So the concept of balance, I

don't consider the I don't consider the cross to be an act

of balance. It's not a balanced individual,

you know, and so I often will hear people say things like,

yes, you're saying God is love. We agree with that, Amen.

We love that. That's good.

But but also God is holy or they'll say, but also God is

just as if God's holiness and his justice are in tension with

his love. I complete this completely do

not agree with that. Give me a chapter and verse on

that one, right? It's that's not there.

Also, it's strangely bipolar if we, if we begin with the

doctrine of God, right, which is what we're saying Christology,

who is Jesus? How does this shape our thinking

about everything else? Because if he's the cornerstone

and he's the capstone, the cornerstone is what sets the

parameters for how you build and the capstone is how you finish

it off, right? So if he's the cornerstone, he

gives us the he gives us the right angles and how we're

building go back to go back to the right angles.

If something is out of if a few degrees out, we go go back to

the the start, who is Jesus? And if we suggest that there is

somehow a tension of forces within God, right.

So and this is how it often comes out implicitly or

explicitly. God loves you, but he's also

just therefore must punish sin. You heard that one?

God is God loves you, but he's also just and must must punish

sin. OK, so God must do something.

Must he like must implies that there's a force that's superior

to God that he's subordinate to. So justice is God and not God,

right? God is subordinate to justice.

Or well, justice is just his nature.

OK, so you're saying God has something that he wants to do,

but his nature prevents him from doing it.

So his will and his nature are not in accordance with one

another. Then he's in division against

himself. Is the bipolar, schizophrenic

God right in division against himself?

At least the Calvinists are honest because they they

recognise this problem. And the Calvinists say no, we we

don't believe God loves everybody.

He loves some and he hates others and he does that before

the foundation of the world. It has to be about him and not

about us. Therefore, he has chosen to love

some and he's chosen to hate others.

The reason he does that is because he wants to make both

sides of his nature known. One side of his nature is

loving, merciful and kind to the other is wrathful, awesome, you

know, obliterating nuclear Holocaust.

And and he is going to torment some people in hell for eternity

because he wants to demonstrate that.

And that's also what we're going to worship God and thank him for

as well. If that sounds like a

caricature, this is not a caricature.

Go and read John Piper and read what he actually thinks.

He actually believes this, actually believes and teaches

this. It's not, I'm not I'm not saying

anything that he wouldn't get up and say.

Yeah, Amen. That's what that's what we

believe because that's what the Bible teaches.

It's not what the Bible teaches, but that's what they think at

least it's honest. And it says it's that it that

it's consistent. It's saying, no, we don't

believe in an all loving God. We believe in a limited loving

God Calvinism the the Tulip limited atonement Tulip is a

five points total depravity. That's the T unconditional

election limited atonement irresistible grace and

perseverance of the Saints. The L of Tulip says God is God's

love and the atonement of Christ is only limited to son.

It's limited to those He's choose, chosen to demonstrate

his love in, everybody else has chosen to demonstrate his wrath

in. And that's good because God's

ways are higher than our ways, because He's holy and we need to

get with his programme. And you'll agree with Him in the

end. And in a million years from now,

when your unsaved friend, family, child, son, daughter,

mother, father, children, whatever are burning in hell,

you will be praising God and rejoicing with Him in his

judgement over them. Because that's what it means to

be a Christian. And if this sounds completely

bananas, this is what huge sections of the Christian Church

not only implicitly believe, but actually state in their faith

statements. This is what they believe.

John Piper explicitly believes this.

Not implicitly, not like fudging it.

He actually believes it. A lot of people kind of pay lip

service to it, but don't really believe it, right?

Because it doesn't make any sense.

It's too dissonant anyway. So they kind of say, well, yeah,

it's over there in an in an abstract sense.

And then they do things like, well, of course, when we say

hell, we don't really mean burning fire.

We mean separation from God, right?

You heard that one because we don't like the idea of God

putting people in an oven for eternity with flames, because

that just sounds a little bit too Hitlerish, right?

No, no, it means separation from God.

It's to sanitise it a little bit for for modern people, because

the idea of Dante's Inferno doesn't work on modern people

most of the time, maybe works on mediaeval people who are used

to, you know, tyrants and torture and all the rest, that

they might be able to accept something like that about God.

We can't accept that about him. So but we can't accept the idea

of let's, we're going to just be separated from God.

OK, That doesn't, that doesn't sound quite so bad.

That doesn't sound quite so much like I'm going to stop listening

to anything you have to say. Now.

I might continue to listen a little bit more or because

separation from God, OK, well, that that's fairly abstract to

me anyway. I don't know what it means to be

not separated from God. So separation from God.

OK, fine. I'll listen to more of your

gospel pitch. All right, so then we introduced

the idea of separation from God again, New Testament.

Show me where the New Testament says Jesus comes to save us from

separation with God. Jesus died to save us from

separation from hell, which is separation from God.

Give me chapter and verse because all the guys who say

this will say it saying with believing what the Bible says,

but then give me chapter and verse.

If you really think that, show me.

So it's a it's a massaging of an idea to make it a little bit

more palatable. I mean, it's not really that

much more palatable if you really take it seriously.

But of course, most people don't take it seriously because they

get on with life and they say, like my friend in Saint Paul's,

well, I don't want to think about that stuff.

It's too complicated anyway. I just want to get on with the

stuff. And and that's right, OK, if

that's the best you've got, then do that.

Love people, you know, pray with them, introduce them to Jesus,

XYZ do that, do that stuff. The Aryans were doing that too

for hundreds of years, right? So when Augustine says the whole

world groaned under the weight of Aryanism, Augustine's

analysis of the of the the church in the 100 years or so

pre Nicaea was that the majority of Christians were Aryan.

They did not believe that Jesus was God.

They thought he was a created being.

And Augustine's angle on this was this is a this was a tragedy

that needed the Nicene fathers that needed Athanasia so that

others like him, Hillary of Pasha, to come along and really

smash this. And they they didn't come and

make peace with it. They didn't sit down with the

areas and say, yeah, we we do see your point there.

Let's work out a way that we can have your version and our

version and kind of combine them together.

Father Christmas literally lamped the guy, right, literally

socked him in the face. This was not this was not like

something that they saw that now we can critique that too, right,

but but there's AI think it's Athanasius is called the hammer

of the Aryans, the hammer of the Aryans, right.

This is not like nice, nicely nice origin of Alexandria was

called origin Adamantius. You know, the Iron Man is what

Adamantius means. The Iron Man, he'd completely

invincible because he would just wade into any fight anytime,

anywhere. And that's what got him into so

much trouble. They were, they were on the

front foot, not on the back foot.

And they understood what was at stake and they understood what

was at stake with the from the perspective of, you know, a

couple of 100 years of or close to a couple of 100 years of

church history and what they already perceived as having of

the corruption that had come in and what was being lost in that

conversation. And that's why they put a stake

in the ground and said, we are going to fight for this.

And it was, I think Nicea was not a nice place to be.

I don't think it was a friendly powwow.

I think it was pretty tense. I mean, you sometimes see these

these pictures of people like parliaments around the world and

they explode into punch UPS, right?

And we think, wow, you know, Bulgarian, I'm probably throwing

them under the bus because it wasn't them.

Someone sorry, Bulgaria. Some you sometimes see these

parliaments and they and you know, they they're like throwing

punches. And I mean, our parliament gets

close to it, but because they get, they get taught in private

school how to do it, you know, with rhetoric instead.

But I mean, I guess maybe in the olden days they do a duel.

But the point is nice. Nicaea was not a a safe place to

be walking around. This was everything was at stake

in this conversation. And we can even critique whether

they even did everything perfectly right.

So I'm not trying to say they did even everything perfectly,

but they gave us, they gave us Orthodox Christianity and they

also gave us the Bible, by the way.

So it's the same people who are deciding on the Nicene Creed are

the ones who are deciding even what the Bible is.

So it's not like the Bible versus Nicaea, which sometimes

people will say, oh, we just want to go back to the Bible.

Look, the same process that gave you the Bible gave you Nicaea.

So you can't really take the one and not the other and pretend

like you're being Christian. I mean, you can you can say

you're being something else, but you know, to suggest that you

can somehow reverse the Nicene discussion and get to something

that's more true by just looking at the Bible completely

nonsensical. It's like people who say that

about the apostle Paul as well. Well, we can.

We just want to do deal with Jesus and not with Paul because

we don't like some of the stuff that Paul said.

The chances are the stuff you don't like is because of bad

translation. But even that that aside, you

know, that like the Gospel of Luke is written by Luke, who

wrote Acts, who was Paul's like assistant, you know, in his

Apostolic team. And Luke saw the content

continuation from the gospel into the book of Acts and into

Paul's writings. Like these guys did not see any

conflict whatsoever between what Paul was preaching and teaching

and what's present in the gospels.

They didn't see that conflict. And they're also the ones

responsible for giving us the gospels in general terms.

So the idea that we can access by going to the gospel,

something that is unaffected by, you know, the later discussion,

that's not the Christian history.

It's not that we, we inherit that tradition, Sola scriptura,

the noble idea that you can just read the Bible by itself doesn't

exist. You can't read it by itself.

The fact that it's a Bible at all means it's not by itself.

And that's not a, that's not a bug, that's a feature, right?

It's supposed to be that way because this is supposed to be

works out in dialogue in the communion of Saints.

This is part of what the church is.

That's part of what the legacy in the history of the church is.

Our problem is we were joking. Malcolm and I were joking a bit

earlier. The problem with much Protestant

theology is that the history of Christian theology goes Jesus,

John and Peter, Paul, maybe small brackets or footnote

Augustine and then Martin Luther.

And that's the that's the story of Protestant theology.

And then, you know, we kind of pick it up from there.

Pentecostals are even worse because it basically goes Jesus

book of Acts, William Seymour, like 1900.

You know, they erase even more of the church history, which I

said to a good Pentecostal friend of mine who said when we

were talking about penal substitution and when after he

could no longer answer any of the points I was giving to him,

said to me, I guess I just can't believe that God would have

allowed us to get it wrong for so long.

And I said, what are you talking about?

You're a Pentecostal. You believe God let us get it

wrong for 1800 years before you guys came along.

I mean, what are you talking about?

You know, and it makes me feel like there's that part in

Corinthians where Paul says, did the word of God come to you only

or did it only come from you? Where did you get this idea in

this sort of closed echo chamber type conversation?

So we're, we're looking back, what why is it that to the

Niceans, the Nicean fathers, the question of who is God?

Why is this so fundamental? Because they understood that

changes the nature of everything else.

It's not we, we, we don't have this like bipolar thing where,

OK, God's love on this side and he's just on this side.

That's very that's to reduce God to a human level.

And that's to reduce God to the level of a human judge, where

you say, well, OK. The judge might look and say,

well, I'm compassionate on you because I can see you had a bit

of a bad start in life and you had these issues and that issue.

So, you know, and it's your first offence.

So we want to go a bit lenient and all the rest.

But the law is the law, you know, and my job is to serve the

law and I have to execute that. And I also have a responsibility

for reparations to the family who you robbed.

And you know, and we have a responsibility to maintain

social order. And I have to do these things as

well. So I'm going to still have to

give you a custodial sentence or, but you know, I'll be

slightly lenient here, but over here, I'm not going to be, or

it's your third offence. No, no more leniency for you.

You're getting the full whack, right?

This is to reduce God to our human conceptualizations of

justice. We have an intuition of what

justice is, which is conditioned by our culture.

We layer that onto God and we say, well, if God is just,

that's what it means to be just instead of doing the Christian

thing, which is to say, what is the character of God as revealed

in Jesus? What is the life that Jesus has

that he has shared with us? And based on the world

transforming effect of that life, how do our ideas of

justice, holiness, goodness, all these other things, how do they

need to to be recapitulated, to be brought back into the hedge

of Christ? How, what do we need to repent

from about those things? Metanoia, a transformation of

the mind that's saying, OK, we used to think XYZ and now we

realise that we've now we have come to the cross.

Those ideas, they have to die and maybe they get resurrected

or get processed through the cross, but we cannot remain the

same as we were before we came there.

And this is this is the vision to see the resurrection of all

things in the person of Jesus. Jesus, forgive me.

You gave me the bicycle analogy. I know we could go there, right?

Jesus does not ride a bicycle, right?

The way of Jesus being with his Father is not a balance between

the the initiation of the Father and Jesus's own effort.

That's not the way of Jesus being.

If it's not the way of Jesus being, it is not the Christian

life, because the Christian life is.

Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part

in me. Right?

It's not. Again, I've said before, Jesus

doesn't want you to be a follower.

I sometimes upset people deliberately because it gets

them to pay attention. Right.

I'll go travel somewhere and I'll say I'm here to tell you

stop following Jesus. And then they're like, what?

They freak out. Yeah, stop following Jesus.

You need to stop right now. How long have you been a

Christian? 20 years.

Man, you should have stopped following Jesus a long time ago.

Because the thing about followers is followers.

Followers can lag behind, Followers can get distracted,

they can take a wrong turn. Followers can run ahead.

Followers can do all these sorts of things.

Trying to copy the Messiah, trying to emulate him when he'd

said, look, eat my flesh and drink my blood, don't follow me.

The purpose of following is so that they followed him, so that

their hearts could burn long enough that they could trust him

when he said eat my flesh and drink my blood and they could

think. Even though he sounds like a

complete nut case, we have to go with it, right.

So the purpose of following is to give you a bit of an on ramp

to introduce you to Jesus so you can hang around for him, with

him for a bit so you can experience what he's like and

think, yeah, OK, I think I could trust him to go a little bit

further. So then when he says the really

inflammatory stuff like eat my flesh and drink my blood, you're

actually able to say with Peter, where else can we go?

You have the words of eternal life.

The problem in the, to me, big problem in the Western

conversation, you know, Tim alluded to the, the, the concept

of theosis, it as a deification to be reconstituted into the

nature of God, but without being God, right.

This is the, this is the early church's witness of what the

what salvation is all about. That has been always completely

eliminated from the discussion. And So what we're left with is

behavioural management, and then later on we're left with mind

management, like doctrinal management, you know, thinking

the right thoughts and doing the right things.

Follow Jesus, emulate him, copy him.

He's a good example for you. Jesus is not an example for

anyone. He's the Lamb of God who takes

away the sin of the world, not an example.

Which isn't to say we don't see things in him that we learn from

and think, OK, yeah, we can do that.

But he he puts it this way, do unto others as you would have

them do unto you. Well, where's the example There.

I thought I'm supposed to do what you're doing.

Jesus. If I'm supposed to follow your

teachings. Yeah.

Well, I'm telling you, do to other people what you want them

to do to you. Which puts you at the centre of

gravity in that right. How do you how do you want

people to treat you? That's how you should treat

them. Well, how do I follow that?

You can't. There's no formula to follow in

that statement. What there is, is OK.

How do I want them to treat me? I don't know.

Because I'm a mess on the inside.

Because in me is all of my, all of my hang ups, all of my fears,

all of my go away from me, Lord, because I'm a sinful man.

Peter's first words to Jesus, right?

Or second words to Jesus, all of that stuff is there.

Isolation, separation, shame, arm's length, self hatred,

addiction, all of those things that bury the real me under them

or that I hide behind. How do I relate to others out of

that? I can't unless I know the love

of God. Right.

And we love because he first loved us so that the the love of

God as we know the love of God. Then do unto others as you'd

have them do unto you. We don't need anyone to explain

it to you, right? Of course.

Yeah. Do unto others as you'd have

them do unto you. I know the love of God, growing

in the love of God, experiencing it, seeking to allow everything

in my life to reorient around that.

And therefore, OK, it kind of starts to become obvious.

What would Jesus do? You don't need a little band,

right? You have the risen Christ in

you, working with you and through you and overflowing that

love. Now, to me, that's not a

balance, right? That's not how much of it is

Jesus and how much of it is me? And do I need to put equal

weight on both sides so the bike doesn't fall over to me?

That is, my side is dead and buried in the ground.

It's no longer I who live. Is Christ living in me, in fact,

Christ living through me. Paul says I struggle with all

the divine energy that so powerfully works within me.

Same word he uses when he talks about prayer later on in

Colossians. Our dear brother Epaphras is

always wrestling in prayer for you.

It's the same word struggling in prayer.

Same concept. He's not like, I'm really trying

to work up a revival egg and lay that egg, you know, praying

really, really, really hard, shouting and wailing, all of

that. He's like problem for poor old

Patras. He can't stop praying.

Guy keeps trying to lie down and going to sleep and he's so

blasted by the Holy Spirit. He keeps praying for you.

That's what Paul's talking about.

And he's saying that's what it's like for me.

I'm, I just, I've got so much of the energy, the divine energy of

God working through me, which is his love, by the way, even

William Seymour said that. What is William Seymour, by the

way, founder of the Pentecostal movement?

He said, what is the Pentecostal power?

It is nothing other than the love of God.

It does not come with the love of God.

It is a counterfeit fire. Father of Pentecostalism.

It's only the love of God. That's it.

It's not anything else. He understood that.

So when Paul saying I struggle with all the energy of God

that's so powerfully works within me, he's saying I am so

strung out on what it's like to have even a little bit of access

to Jesus's internal world that I can't stop preaching the message

because it's the message preaching me.

Jesus is the message. I am the overflow of his

message. He spoke and gave me life,

right? The message is preaching me.

It's not me preaching the message.

This is union. It's to say not what must I do

to be saved or how do I locate myself in the right in the right

box, or how do I being in the right box?

How do I get my ducks in a row so that now I'm in, I can learn

how to do it properly? It's to Take Me Out of the

equation altogether. That's what Watchman Lee said,

great father of the Chinese church, modern Chinese church.

God deals with every problem in your life by taking you out of

the way and replacing you with Jesus.

That's the good angle on substitution.

That's the substitution bit. It's just not a penal

substitution. It's it's an ontological

substitution, a substitution of being.

He becomes what we are so that we can be what he is, the

Athanasian Creed. Now why?

If Jesus is just a created being, he cannot do that.

If Jesus is a created being, He can give us the highest order of

creation, but he cannot give us the divine life.

The divine life is still behind an impenetrable veil.

What is the mind of God really like?

Well, it's not it we we see some reflection of it in Jesus, but

we don't see the substance of it in Jesus.

The Nicene Fathers, he is of one being 1 substance, 1 essence

with the Father. And later on Constantinople they

added language to confirm that that was also true of the Holy

Spirit because that wasn't the the biggest focus in Nicaea.

So they, the kind of Nicaea Part 2 included more sections on the

Holy Spirit in the same way. So what they're showing us is

this, and this is Athanasius. He's saying look, our problem is

by initiating this cosmological catastrophe called the fall, we

have introduced death, dissolution and non being into

the equation of the universe. And our problem is we are now

unravelling and dissolving away into nothingness.

How does God solve this problem? By taking his indestructible

life and making it become flesh, placing it in human flesh, flesh

being the bad word for humanity, right.

And we looked at that last time, not anthropos meaning man, sarks

meaning flesh. The word became flesh.

God united his indestructible indissoluble life with humanity.

That's that's our basis for saying nothing can separate us

from the love of God. It's not the basis of because

we've prayed the right prayer or done the right thing or

participated sacramentally in the right process, we now have

qualified to say nothing can separate us from the love of

God. It's to say because of Jesus,

who he is, his nature even before what he's done, it's to

say who he is. It matters who he is.

It matters that He is the eternal Son of the Father, who

always has been the eternal Son of the Father, because if that's

who He is, then when he becomes flesh, he brings all of the

fullness of that triune life with Him.

And what does the New Testament say?

In Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily

form, and you have been given fullness in Him.

So it's because He is the Creator.

To go back to our last session, we see any discussion in the New

Testament in the letters or the Gospels, especially John, the

Synoptics. It's still there, but it's, you

know, a little more pragmatically focused.

But the Gospel of John Paul's writings, we start with he's

some some iteration of he is the creator and sustainer of

everything. So going back to the lecture,

and I'll push it back to the tables in in just a moment.

So going back to the lecture, Baxter made the point which he

and I have talked about a lot of his friend who got very angry

with him and said, you can't, you can't just go around saying

to everybody that they're that they're children of God and that

they're they're included in him already.

You don't know whether they've believed in repented of their

sin and all the rest and back says, OK, so tell us before

they've done all that. What is the nature of God's

relationship with them? And he just said categorically,

well, this is a judge. He becomes Father after you've

done XYZ, you know, after you've believed the right thing, then

he becomes Father because that's what it means to be adopted,

right? In that, in that way of

thinking. But nice here starts with

Father. But the fundamental truth of

God's being is Father because there never was a time when he

was not father, because there was never, there never was a

time when the Son was not the Son.

He didn't become the Father when he created the Son.

The Son is eternally begotten, meaning the Son, the Son's

identity as a son. Think, if you think about it

this way, the Son's identity as son is to infer the Father,

right? You don't get the Son without

the Father because to say Son means there's a Father and to

say Father means there's a son or child.

It's not gendered, right? And we could, I'm not trying to

do the gender thing tonight. We could use either, but just

keep the, the, the male language for a moment.

If you can go with me on it, to say father is to infer a child

and to say child is to infer the parent.

So in and this is there's one of these other issues as cropped up

called the eternal subordination of the Son, where OK, the Son

will always be subject to the Father, like secondary to the

Father, which is also another subtle heresy.

But if you think about it this way, it's impossible for the

Father to be the Father without the Son, because if the Son

isn't there, he's not Father anymore, right?

Be something else. And it's impossible for the Son

to be the Son without the Father because to say the Son infers

the Father. So when you say the name of

Jesus, the inferences, the name of God is Father, Son and Holy

Spirit, and Holy Spirit's a little more mysterious.

But again, we flesh that out in Constantinople and there's a lot

of discussion to have around the Holy Spirit.

But the point I'm trying to make here is when in the Nicene

sense, whenever we're using these terms, Father, Son, Holy

Spirit, 1 being Trinity, what we're saying is that there is no

hierarchy within this God. There's no superiority.

All you have in the nature of that being is other focused,

self giving love. The Son is always submitting to

the Father. The Father is always submitting

to the Son. The Son is submitting to the

Spirit who's taking what is the fathers and the sons and making

it known to you. You see the language of Jesus,

It's constantly, it's constantly deferring to the others.

So no one can come to the Son unless the Father draws him.

But no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom

the Son wills to reveal him. So how does that work?

The Father says, Jesus says the Father himself judges no one.

He's entrusted all judgement to the Son because he's the Son of

man. And then later on, well, I judge

no one. Listen to my word.

So you, you have a a, you have a constant deference within the

Trinity. Now that that's not, that's not

just a way of condescending to human life.

The point about this is to say this is the revelation of what

the very life and nature of God is.

See, God does not have a love side and a justice side within

the Trinity. It's not that, not that the

Father, Son and Spirit have to work out what is just and

equitable among us. How do we divide things up so

that it's fair for me, Jesus, and fair for you, Father, and

fair for you, Holy Spirit. We have to, we have to judge

that. And you know, we need to

moderate ourselves around each other so we don't take too much

ground, so that we give enough ground so it's fair, equitable,

stable and just. We do not see that in the

Trinity. We see complete other focused,

self giving, self sacrificing love that is poured out from the

one to the other, even to the point where the scripture can

say Christ is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of

the world. How can he be slain from before

the foundation of the world if he was slain 2000 years ago?

Well, this has to this has to tell us that something about the

very nature and essence of who God is is revealed in that

truth. We sometimes put it this way,

God is cruciform, meaning God looks like Jesus hanging on the

cross. The most perfect picture and

image we see of what God is like is when Jesus is hanging on the

cross and he prays. Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they do. This is the pinnacle.

That's why John has in his gospel.

This is the moment of Jesus's coronation, his glorification.

It's why he wears the crown of thorns when he goes on the on

the cross for John, because this really is his enthronement.

When he's lifted up on the cross is the moment that he's lifted

up on the throne of the universe for John.

And this is also why in the Book of Revelation, when John's

weeping because no one can open the seals, you remember this

crazy bit. And he is the Angel saying, the

lion of the tribe of Judah has overcome.

He has been found worthy. And then it says, John says,

then I looked and I saw a lion. Where's the lion?

There's no lion. He hears the lion is overcome,

and then he turns to find a lion.

But he finds a lamb. And not even just a lamb, it

says like a newborn baby Lamb is the Greek.

It's not just like an ordinary young lamb.

It's a, it's an infant newborn like lamb.

I don't know what the term is in in English farming.

People might be able to tell me. But anyway, it's the newborn

lamb who's been slain on the throne.

So he sees a slain lamb on the throne.

And it also has seven horns and seven eyes, which is kind of a

bit crazy. But the point is he's, he's not

seeing a lion, right? So again, we get our songs, we

sing. Well, Jesus, you're the lion and

Jesus, you're the lamb. No, you're not.

Jesus, you are the way in which you are a lion.

And the lion is a symbol of, of, you know, kingship, of strength,

of dominance and all of that. The way in which your powers

manifest is in the lamb likeness.

It's not that you're a lamb on one side.

You're a lamb on a good day and a lion on a bad day.

It's this, it's not bipolar, right, that these two things

are. There's no tension.

It's not lamb and lion in tension with one another.

It's no the way in which he is a lion, which is a a well known

metaphor for the Jews, the lion of the tribe of Judah, well

known metaphor for the Messiah. But in what way is he a lion?

In what way is he a conqueror? In what way is he an overcomer?

It's as the slain Lamb, what is the power which enables him to

bring the whole world into alignment with him.

It's the power of the cross. That's why Athanasius says

wherever the cross is held up and declared, the demons flee.

The sickness is heal. You know all of that.

He comes back to this. It's good because God is

cruciform. God is shaped like the cross.

He looks like the character of God as revealed on the cross is

the truest statement we get about what God is like.

So every time we're coming to the Lord's Table, it's supposed

to be a re engagement without reality.

Because as Martin Luther said, we need to hear the gospel every

day because we forget it every day.

We're constantly getting dragged away by other human ideas which

make more sense to our rational minds.

And I'm as guilty of that as anybody, right?

Yeah. I mean, God, I would be doing a

better job of this than you. But don't you think that

absolutely doing a better job of sorting out the Ukraine war than

you would be right now? God, I do not think you're doing

a good job. My, my natural mind looks at

this a certain way, right? But the, the invitation, once

we've, once we've learned, once we've tasted that our hearts

burn within us around the person of Christ that enables us to

say, like with Peter, OK, Jesus, we cannot figure this out, but

where else can we go? You've got the words of eternal

life and we need to hang around with you and trust that it's

going, that sense is going to come into this and your light is

going to continue to confront the darkness and going to

continue to make sense of this stuff.

And we don't know how that's going to going to get worked

out, but we're participating right now.

And there's the action, right? And there's where where faith

working through love gives rise to love as an action Love, love

put into effect in, in, in real pragmatic terms, it falls into

places, the natural overflow and the consequence of getting

straight in face to face with him and discovering, oh, his

love is in me. His love is reconstituting me

because I'm not the centre of the question any longer.

It's not what must I do, it's who is he?

And now what has he done? And how has that then changed

everything about me and the world and everything else?

And then we're able to say, like Paul's able to say, we now no

longer regard anyone after the flesh, only after the Spirit.

Even we used to regard Christ that way.

We don't regard him that way or anyone else any longer.

Can you say something like that? How can you get to a point of

saying we do not? I do not look at anybody and

process my decisions about who they are or what they, what

they're like based on anything in the physical, fleshly,

material world. I base it only after the Spirit.

And that spirit is also again good Trinitarian formula.

And Christ the last Adam became the life giving spirit.

Crazy language and so we see in the Holy Spirit the same nature

and character and the same will the same mind that when Jesus

says the Son can only do what he sees the Father doing so the the

Holy Spirit perfectly expresses in the same way the same life

that the Holy Spirit has with a father and son for all eternity.

Now, if that if we we start getting straight on that, this

becomes our hermeneutic where we say, all right, given that

reality, how then do we need to That's like Baxter talks about

it is the the twist at the end of the book.

You know, if you're reading a crime novel, Agatha Christie,

you get the twist at the end. And suddenly when you get that

twist, it changes everything that has happened up until now

in that book. What was the book saying to us?

Well, now the twist was it was all a hallucination.

Hang on a minute. I need to go back and read.

Where were the clues? Right.

So when we when we get that final word of the Father, which

is Jesus Christ, we then don't take him and put him on the same

level. We, we don't put him as this

component and put Moses here and the prophets here and all of

this and put them all out and say, OK, now how do we harmonise

all of these into a nice rational, cohesive whole?

We don't, we don't do that. We say, like the the voice of

the Father said to James, Peter and John on the Mount of

Transfiguration when they had Moses, Elijah and Jesus all

appear in front of them and Peter wanted to put three

tabernacles up, one for each of them.

As soon as he wants to do that, the Father envelops them in a

cloud and says, this is my son by the way, listen to him.

Then when the cloud is removed, Moses and Elijah are gone.

What's that supposed to tell us? Moses and Elijah means the law

and the prophets. When Jesus says before Abraham

was I am, He's trying to say to you, listen, he even puts it

this way, but you've heard Moses say this, but I tell you this

James and John calling fire down from heaven.

They want to do it because they're just quoting what Elijah

did. And Jesus doesn't say to them.

We don't do that anymore because it's a new time, you know, and

we're being nice to people now that the pendulum is swung from

the judgement side to the love side for a while while I'm here.

And by the way, it's going to swing back again, you know, when

I, when I come back and nuke the planet right in the second

coming, because that's what a lot of Christians believe that

Jesus is going to kind of nuke the planet, right?

And then New Jerusalem is going to come down like a giant board

cube from Star Trek and land on it coming, coming from space.

You know, I mean, a lot of people actually believe this.

I don't know, maybe you do, you don't, but a lot of people do.

But he's he's saying, I'm losing my thread.

I need to stop and put you in groups.

He's saying to them, he doesn't say we're not doing this

anymore. Look at his words.

He says you do not know what spirit you are of, you do not

know what spirit you are of, which is tantamount to saying

you don't know who the God is that you believe in.

You don't know you want to call fire down from heaven because

you think that's what God is like.

I know where you get that from, but you don't know what God is

like. The Son of Man, which means God,

by the way, when he says the Son of man, that's a statement

meaning God, the Son of man has not come to destroy men's lives,

but to save them. So then the question is, will,

at what point did God change what God was doing?

Was God, Well, OK, up until now he's been a been a, you know, a

severe but fair judge that's been saving some and destroying

others. And now Jesus has come and is

kind of doing something to change this around a little bit.

Well, well, that's to say that Jesus and the Father are not in

a court, right? It's to say that there is some

introduction of significant change in who God is, that the

attitude and the nature of God is as a perfectionist judge,

that he's kind of weighing you against one side or another.

Would you? And that's what the that's what

the apostles are thinking. That's why they want to call

fire down from heaven. And when Jesus comes and he says

the Son of Man has not come to destroy men's lives, he's

telling us what God is like. God is not a destroyer of men's

life. Who is the destroyer?

Well, he says the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy.

The thief is the destroyer, not God the thief.

I've come to give life. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and

giver of life. It's in the Nicene Creed and the

resurrection and the life. He's the life giver, not the

death giver. The disciples thought that it

was death and life because they had that in their Bible.

You have stories like God sent an evil spirit to possess soul.

Do you believe God sent an evil spirit to possess soul?

Because I don't believe that. I don't believe God has evil

spirits who work for him and he sends them around to get people

to go into line. And the reason I don't believe

that is because I met Jesus and there's nothing in Jesus that

remotely demonstrates that to me.

On no level does he show me that pattern of behaviour.

He does not show me that character.

And when when Philip says to Jesus, we'll just show us the

Father and that will be enough for us, he says, if you've seen

me, you have seen the Father. The question is, who is the

Father? Well, you've, you've seen me,

you have seen him. There is no difference in, in

the sense of there's no qualitative difference, right?

There's a personal difference. We see the Son and the Father,

you know, are two of three in one God in three hypostatic

persons. But the nature and the

character, the identity of the Son is a perfect reflection and

manifestation of the heart of the Father.

The Son can only do what he sees the Father doing.

So when he says the Son of God has not come to take men's

lives, this is not a dispensational temporary.

We're going to, we're doing this little window of time where

suddenly we're changing how we're behaving towards humanity.

This is the word made flesh that's come into our confusion

and our mess and our darkness and has come to light it up from

the inside so that there could be no more ambiguity.

And then for Athanasius and others, all other visions of God

have to die at the feet of the vision of the Father, Son and

Holy Spirit as revealed in Christ.

And we take that and we go back and we say, all right, let's,

let's see it. Help us now to see Jesus show us

what we couldn't see before. What were we blind to before?

What were we, what frameworks were we using to understand the

Scripture or to understand life, our own experience that now need

to be reconstituted now that we've met you like the like the

people who said which man sinned who sinned this man or his

parents that he was born blind. Well, they're just working with

the Bible. I will visit the sins of the

fathers on to the third and the 4th generation, right.

It's just there in the Bible, and Jesus said neither this

happened so the glory of God could come into him.

Which isn't to say God caused it.

He's just point. He's just pointing to the Father

again. He's saying, let me show you

what the Father is like. Bang.

Here's the healing. Your sights, your sights

restored. You're asking a question of

legal significance. Who gets punishment for what?

I'm going to show you what the Father is like.

Here's the healing. His sight is restored.

You see these? Yeah.

OK, take the group time and wave me over if you want.

But my last conclusion on this is these are not, these are not

compatible, right? It's oil and water.

They don't mix. It's like we say grace and law

don't mix. It's we can put that in better

terms. Grace plus law equals law.

And if any part of the chain depends on us, then the whole

chain depends on us because the chain's only as strong as the

weakest link. So therefore, what is Jesus

presenting to us that is not the chain that we've had, we've had

before. All right, take it, take it,

discuss, wave me over if you want.

Hey everyone, please keep staying and chatting if you

want. I got, I got waylated to another

discussion at the back. But if you if you want to, we

have sort of formally finished and maybe if you could take a

plate out and put the scrape the things away in the bin on the

way out would be would be grand. And do we need the tables to the

sides as well, Chris? Yeah, if you don't, if you don't

mind. But I mean, I'm I'll stick, I'll

stick around. We'll be the last out if anyone

wants to keep talking. But thanks very much.

Cheers.