Does everything seem to be falling apart – from Peter Murnane’s blog: If it seems that way to us, we need to dig down to the basic truths of Christian faith. In this letter to the people of Colossae, Paul – or probably one of his disciples – makes the amazing claim that God will “..reconcile all things to [God]”. The same statement is in the Letter to the Ephesians (1:10) which says that God intends “…to gather up everything under Christ, as head”. And Jesus promised: “…when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself” (John 12:32) This promise fits with the nature of God, who must be absolutely one. Could there be more than one Infinite? And if it is true that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), what an amazing future we can look forward to! Which is what Jesus and Paul – or whoever – was trying to tell us. Yet these astonishing statements seem to conflict with the idea that most of us accept at some level, and have even been taught in Christian churches, that The Holy One is above the earth, remote and divided from us. This might be a reasonable assumption if we look only at terrifying natural phenomena that are totally beyond our control: the current floods; recent bushfires, tsunamis, earthquakes. And how remote – we feel – must be the Being who made the immense universe of a trillion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars… or more. But the amazing truth on which that
Read More