“The power of the gospel lies not in the offer of a new spirituality or religious experience, not in the threat of hellfire (certainly not in the threat of being “left behind”), which can be removed if only the hearer checks this box, says this prayer, raises a hand, or whatever, but in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God’s new world has begun. This is the real cosmic Christology of the New Testament: not a kind of pantheism, running under its own steam and cut off from the real Jesus, but a retelling of the Jewish story of wisdom in terms of Jesus himself, focusing on the cross as the act whereby the good creation is brought back into harmony with the wise creator.” If you put these two ways of telling the story together and cast them into poetry, you will find you have rewritten Colossians 1:15–20.
Equally, if you tell the story from the point of view of human rebellion and the consequent sin and death that have engulfed the world, this again emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for: the eternal expression of the father’s love became the incarnate expression of the father’s love so that by his self-giving to death, even the death of the cross, the whole creation can be reconciled to God. Humans were made to be God’s stewards over creation, so the one through whom all things were made, the eternal son, the eternal wisdom, becomes human so that he might truly become God’s steward, ruler over all his world. “If you tell this story from the point of view of the good creation, the coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church It is God’s advance declaration that when someone believes the gospel, that person is already a member of his family no matter who their parents were, that their sins are forgiven because of Jesus’s death, and that on the future day, as Paul says, “there is now no condemnation” (Romans 8:1).”
(Those who overanxiously defend a doctrine from which all mention of works has been rigorously excluded should consider with whom they are colluding at this point!) No: justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world. Justification by faith cannot be collapsed, as so many in the last two centuries tried to do, either into a generalized liberal view of a laissez-faire morality or into the romantic view that what we do outwardly doesn’t matter at all since the only thing that matters is what we’re like inwardly. “this picture of future judgment according to works is actually the basis of Paul’s theology of justification by faith.4 The point of justification by faith isn’t that God suddenly ceases to care about good behavior or morality.
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