Readings for today: 2 Peter 1-3, Jude 1
The Christian faith is full of paradox. Ideas that seemingly don’t go together. Illogical impossibilities. Take the doctrine of the Trinity for example. How can God be One God in Three distinct Persons at the same time? Or the Incarnation. How can Jesus be both fully God and fully human? Recently, I was talking to a friend about the paradox of predestination and freewill. He wanted to know which comes first. God’s action in regenerating the human heart or the human decision to open oneself up to God? And if God moves first, is it even possible to resist Him or is salvation a forgone conclusion and if that’s true, doesn’t it make a mockery of free will? These are important questions that cause us to wrestle with mysteries our finite human minds simply don’t have the horsepower to comprehend. It’s why the Bible makes it clear that God’s ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts higher than our thoughts. It’s entirely possible that what we might consider an “either/or” from the perspective of human logic is actually a “both/and” according to God’s logic.
Take our reading from today as an example. Peter says, “His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. By these He has given us very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:3-8 CSB) This absolutely tracks for me though it doesn’t make much sense. God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness and yet we still have to make every effort to supplement our faith with godly qualities and character so we can be useful to our Lord Jesus Christ. Some want to push back on Peter and say, “Which is it?” Is it God’s divine power that enables us or our own will and effort? If God has given us all we need then why do we need to “supplement” what He has done? Isn’t this introducing works-righteousness into God’s great salvation plan? I don’t think so. I think Peter is simply echoing what God’s people have known from the beginning. Yes, God has acted decisively within history and within our hearts to bring about salvation. At the same time, those who have been saved still need to make every effort to become the people has called us to become in Christ.
It’s “both/and” not “either/or.” The Apostle James says something similar when He argues that faith without works is dead. One simply cannot settle for one or the other. Nor can one pit one against the other. Both are necessary. God’s divine power effects saving faith. Our effort is the evidence of saving faith. So if God has truly delivered you from darkness into the kingdom of His marvelous light, then make every effort to be the light He has created and called and saved you to be this Christmas!
Readings for tomorrow: No devotionals on Sundays