Title: Roots of Faith and Love
Contents
This letter that Paul sent to the Colossians today is also not as simple as it is to give us grace just by reading it. It may be possible for us today, but we are going to enter into these words with an attitude of going back almost completely through the past 2,000 years of Christian history. Spirit of truth, help us in our weakness.
faith and love
When Paul heard that the Colossians “believe in Jesus and show love to all the saints,” Paul said, he thanked the Father and God of Jesus Christ. There are two key words in this sentence. Faith and love. The word “believing in Jesus” is so familiar to us that we do not need to explain it here. The word showing love to the saints is also not difficult to understand by itself. Originally, we should think more deeply about these two topics rather than go over them in this way, but today's sermon is a bit off topic, so I'll move on. However, the fact that these two topics are related in this parallel way here is very significant. Believing in Jesus and loving the saints are presented at an almost equivalent level.
Hope
Paul does not see this faith and love as an independent world. Look at verse 5. “That faith and love comes from the hope of the blessings that heaven has prepared for you.” The root of faith and love is hope. In the end, faith and love begin with hope.
There are other passages in the New Testament that directly describe this relationship. These are the words contained in Paul's letter to the church in Corinth. "Therefore, faith, hope, and love, these three will remain forever. The greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). A letter to the Thessalonian church has something similar. “I constantly remember before God our Father your work of faith, your labors of love, and your steadfast hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3). Although these three verses, including the book of Colossians we have chosen today, have slightly different nuances, they are in common in that they present faith, love, and hope as the basic attitudes of life that Christians should have. Perhaps early Christianity identified these three elements as being so essential, and expressed them slightly differently depending on the circumstances.
If we focus only on today's text, the root of faith and love is hope. In 1 Corinthians, love is mentioned as the most important of these three, whereas in today's text, hope is mentioned as far more important. Then you might think that either 1 Corinthians or 1 Thessalonians is wrong, but it is not. It is expressed differently depending on the point of view, but the importance of these three factors cannot be overlooked. Whereas 1 Corinthians describes these three relationships in terms of the ontological power of love, today's text approaches the problem within the metaphysical framework of Christianity.
First, let's briefly explain this. Faith is related to Jesus in the past, love is related to the ability to take place in the Christian community today, but hope is related to events that will happen in the future. This structure is really interesting. We generally think of history as flowing from the past, through the present, and into the future. In the sense that our life is also a process of being born, living and dying like this, it seems to be right. So people argue that we should learn from the past how we should live in the present and in the future. However, the Christian view of history goes backwards. That the world of life that will occur at the end intervenes in our history today. This is the Christian eschatological view of history. So is our personal destiny. We are not dead yet, but certain events that will occur due to death are dominating our lives today. From this metaphysical point of view of Christianity, the statement in the text that faith and love arise from hope is correct.
sky
This theological interpretation is not easy to touch on our skin, so let's think about it in our daily life. Paul describes this hope this way: “Hope for the blessings that heaven has prepared for you.” If faith in Jesus and love for the saints are related to this earth, hope is related to heaven. It is not necessary to think of the sky here as any one place in outer space. For the ancients of Bible times, heaven was a hidden place for life. It is an absolute world that is completely different from this type of life we live on this earth today, and that our perception cannot capture at all. They thought that God was right there. Do you think it's a little childish? It's not childish, it's mysterious. On the surface, we seem to have a lot more information about physics than the ancients, but about ultimate life, they are almost exactly the same. They only exaggerate their little information and show off. This is similar to saying that a one-year-old child or a two-year-old child cannot understand the hearts of their parents.
Those who hope for the blessing of heaven with such absolute life can believe the events of Jesus and live by giving love to the saints. In this regard, deep knowledge of the world of resurrection, which is the absolute life, is the most important concern for us Christians.
2004. 7.25