BACK...
An up–ramp to heaven:
Gnosticism
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| BY THE mid second century, Christianity was
engaged in a great struggle with one of the most difficult opponents.
Every time it seemed that one battle had been won, another broke out. Over the last few weeks we have seen how heresies spring up when people have an unbalanced view of themselves. The racism of the Judaisers, the hatred of the physical world among the Docetists, these things form a pattern. We are forever trying to change God’s view of the world to fit our own. We forever seek to avoid real change. I was recently talking to a man who seems to have a mental illness. He was asking me questions about things going on in churches today, and I began to understand the statements which lay under the questions. He was telling me about conspiracies, about Popish takeovers, about... well, the leaders of the churches are against ordinary Christians and it will all end badly. That was his theory. And I realised that he probably comes from a church which views the world through the binoculars of paranoia. It’s an up–ramp building church, substituting an unreal worldview for the simple truth of the gospel. They feel that “real Christians” are the ones with access to secret knowledge about what is really going on. The Gnostics were cults which attacked the church from all sides in those dark days of the second century and for years afterwards. And they, too, sought secret knowledge. They wanted to be the specialists, the ones who really could explain how to know God. Something as simple as the gospel would not do. It was too available. They couldn’t be the experts. So they constructed their own philosophies and sold them to unsuspecting people.  What made Gnosticism so dangerous was that it preyed on new Christians. It said, “It’s good that you know about Jesus. That’s a start. But what’s the bet that your teachers didn’t tell you anything about the next level after you know Jesus, and the next one after that. They didn’t tell you, because they don’t know it themselves. It’s good to pass on what you know and help others, but you always have to move on. Sadly your Christian teachers are stuck. They have never moved to higher levels.” You can imagine how some people felt. They felt they were missing out. They felt that there was so much more to discover, and their old teachers were no more use to them. Believers started drifting off to the Gnostics. 
It’s hard to
define Gnostic beliefs, because if came in so many forms.A lot of Gnostic cults had a similar idea, though. They saw the physical world as one layer of reality. Above that lay another layer, and another, and another. Some said there were seven layers, some said different numbers. The final layer was heaven and God. The point was that each layer had a different set of rules and a different level of knowledge that you had to satisfy if you wanted to reach the final level and know God. It was worse than school. At least at school you will get a piece of paper to say you have arrived: in the Gnostic system, you could never be sure that there wasn’t another layer that you hadn’t yet heard of. Of course, the Gnostic teachers didn’t talk too much about that possibility! As I pointed out last week, we can’t be sure that the problem which got Paul writing to the church at Colossae was really Gnosticism. The first clear records of Gnosticism date from about 100 years later. But there were features of the situation in Colossae that paralleled what appeared in full–blown Gnosticism. In Colossians 2, Paul writes, COL 2:16 Therefore do not let anyone judge
you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a
New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the
things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 18
Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of
angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great
detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up
with idle notions. 19 He has lost connection with the Head, from whom
the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and
sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
Paul seems to take aim at two related difficulties.First, there are Judaisers, who insist on dietary laws, on various religious observances and on all the strictest rules of Jewish religion. But people like them appear in all religions, of course. Then there are those people who want to add various angelic beings to the Christian responsibility: you have to get on the right side of this angel and appease that angel. You have to break down your pride by performing pointless actions and behaving in prescribed ways. But none of it will make any difference. You remember what we read in the first session, that ...there is one God
and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.
There may be thousands and tens of thousands of angels and other
spiritual beings in the entire creation, or there may not be any at
all. It doesn’t matter. The one bridge between God and us humans is
Jesus, the Saviour who died and rose again. Paul also writes, COL 2:13 When
you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful
nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14
having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was
against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to
the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a
public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
At the core of the Christian message is the insistence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is not just an amazing and unparalleled event of history, but that it is the key act of God in all history. Without the cross and the resurrection, there can be no solution to our sense of alienation from God. Without the cross and the resurrection, there is no certainty of God’s real intentions for us to be in relationship with him. But, with the cross and the resurrection, all of those rules and regulations, all imagined or real spiritual beings, all human institutions which might seek to control us and make us conform to social norms and religious practices are abolished and shown up for the laughable shams that they are. In the cross, Jesus triumphs, and, in him, so do we! It suits some people to have a distant God. They want to be seen as super strugglers, outdoing everyone else in their effort to become acceptable to God. And the further away that God is, the more heroic their struggles seem. But the Gospel message is that God is not distant in place, he is not in a far–away heaven, nor is he always at his desk in the penthouse of a heavenly skyscraper, as the Gnostics would have us think. We do not have to know the right passwords and be recognised by the right security guards on each floor. God is distant relationally because we keep him distant. And that relational distance can be bridged in a moment, as soon as you or I take the way back. Once upon a time — so you will know this is a kind of parable — a father and a son had a falling out. They disagreed about how to run the family business. The father was of the old school: honest in all things, if you take a loan today, pay it next pay day at the latest, do the right thing whatever the cost. The son was more modern. Use debt creatively, don’t lie, but don’t necessarily tell the truth, either; do what is good for business whatever compromises you have to make along the way. It was bound to lead to a clash. The son did something the father wouldn’t have done, they argued, and the son stormed out. The next day the son boarded an aircraft for a far country, and lived there for a long time. He and his father did not speak. But the father’s heart ached for his son, and he was determined to win him back if he possibly could. The business was the father’s pride and joy. He had worked long and hard to build it up. He was not a rich man, but there was always enough for him and his wife to live on. He sat down and worked out what it would cost him to travel across the world and live there for several months until he found his son. He calculated what it might cost to bring his son back. He looked at his life’s savings. It was not nearly enough. He could think only of one answer. He gave his wife every bit of cash he had, so that she would be provided for, and he sold his beloved business. He locked up the building, handed the key over to a new owner, and caught the bus to the airport. In the foreign land, he lived in cheap flea-pit hotels and boarding houses where his neighbours were drunkards and prostitutes. He had never come so low before. But he would pay any price to find his son. He searched high and low. He visited the police, he showed a photograph to people. At last he got a clue. “I've seen him!” said one man. “He lived near me for a month,” said a woman. “He used to sleep in the park,” a boy told him. He followed the clues until he found his son, living in filth and squalor, sweeping floors in clubs and pubs for the money he found on the floor and a few dollars a day from the owner. “I love you, my son,” said the father. “I have sold everything, I have paid the price, to come and look for you.” “Dad, we've been so far apart!” the son said. “And are we any closer now?” the father asked. I want to ask you — what does the son need to do now? Does he have to apply to someone to persuade his father to see him? Does he have to know some fact, obey some rule, even change his clothes, to gain his father’s love? The father loved him even when the son first left home. He loved him long before he found him again. He loved him enough to give everything to find him and restore him. It is not about performance or knowledge or presentation. It is about responding to love freely given. Think about what God the Father has done through Jesus Christ. Jesus, the one who truly and accurately represents the Father, gave everything to bring you and me back to God. For God to give all the resources in all creation would mean nothing. He could create more. In the same way, there is certainly nothing I can give to persuade God to treat me favourably. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He owns rivers of oil. But God has acted first. He paid the only price that really means something: God’s life for yours and mine. The human life of Jesus was destroyed on a cross because God would pay any price to bridge the gap and open the way back to fellowship with himself. I can stand in the palm of God, yet, apart from Christ, I am no closer than if I were in the farthest reaches of hell. And I can be at the limit of hell, but, with Christ in my heart, I am as close to God as a heartbeat is to a heart. Do you understand why I love that verse, Romans 5: 8? God commends his love to us in that, while
we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
It is the reassurance that God’s love is greater than any sin of mine,
that it is entirely wrapped up in Christ’s death and resurrection, and
that there is nothing I can do to earn it or to gain more of it: it is
given, and will not be withdrawn.I need no further intermediary: Jesus is enough, and far more than my sin alone demands. He died for the sin of the world. There is a song, I need no other
argument
The Gnostics thought themselves so wise. They knew more than anyone
else did. They were so clever. But they knew nothing, because they did
not know Jesus — not as he really is.I need no other plea — It is enough that Jesus died, And that he died for me. I know a woman —she is quite clever, and does some good work in her field — but, in her mind, there is no one like her. The people who work with her constantly take the mickey out of her, but she doesn’t even notice, because she is so full of herself and her own cleverness. Maybe you have met someone like that yourself. The Gnostics were like that. They thought themselves so wise, so knowledgeable, so up–to–the–minute, but they didn’t have a clue. Sometimes we can get to feeling that we have something that makes us superior, that will really please God. We have better knowledge, our Bible studies are more intellectual, more probing. We are the ones who know what it is all really about. Don’t ever forget that that is exactly what motivated the Gnostics, and it is a spirit rampant in the church today, particularly in the more Calvinistic sections. What can you do? It is no good, dragging the chain about Jesus, hoping that by being a nice person or by reading your Bible or praying or attending church, hoping that those things might see you through. There is only one way — Jesus. What can you really do, but turn from the sin which creates that gulf between yourself and God, turn from it in repentance, and trust Christ and all that he has done for you. That is the only way to life. Will you come to Jesus now? AMEN |
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| © Peter R. Green 2003. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. | |
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