Torrance Tuesdays: January 2007 Archives

Wrap your mind around this. T.F. Torrance writes:Â

We believe that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, He is in Himself, antecedently and eternally in Himself; and that what He imparts to us through the Spirit who sheds the love of God into our hearts, He is in Himself, antecedently and eternally in Himself. It is thus that through Jesus Christ God has given Himself to us and through the Holy Spirit takes us up into communion with Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God of all grace whom we know as the God of our salvation.

Think of the immense revolution this means for our understanding of God.

It means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in His aloofness or shut up in His solitariness, but on the contrary the God who is free to go outside of Himself, to share in the life of His creatures and enable them to share in His own eternal Life. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in His grace and outgoing love He graciously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate Himself to us, in such a way as to be received and be known by us. But of course the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that the more we know God in Himself in this way the more wonderful we know Him to be, a God who in His inexhaustible Nature infinitely transcends all our thoughts and words about Him, but who in spite of that reveals Himself tenderly and intimately to us through His only Son and in His one Spirit who are of the same divine Nature as God the Father (The Christian Doctrine of God, 3-4).

Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance writes:Â

"In bringing His work to completion Jesus laid hold of man at the very point where he contradicts Him. Until we recognize that, and allow it to awaken in our own heart the recognition of the same antagonism within us to the love of God, we are evading the issue and destroying the relevance of the Cross to us. In other words, the Love of God lays hold upon us and exerts its power upon us by exposing in our hearts a deep-seated hostility to God. Is not the Cross God's attack upon the pride and inhumanity of man, and is it not man's attack upon the holiness and love of God? Jesus did not endure the Cross that we might side-step that whole issue between God and man, but endured the Cross both to expose our strange hatred of His grace and in grace to remove that antagonism through atonement. But He knows that this antagonism has its roots so deep in man's heart and will, and even beyond it in a vast evil will, that man is helpless to remove it. His will has become so much his self-will that whatever he does to escape from it only serves to imprison him deeper in his self-will. Man's hostility to God is part of a whole kingdom of evil over which he has no control. Jesus descended into that to do battle with it, to wrestle with it and to break its power over man, and to hew a way out of its tyranny and lead men back into the freedom of God's children.

"He who refuses to acknowledge that the hostility that nailed Jesus to the Cross is lodged in his own heart, that he too has his share in the contradiction of sinners against the love of God, renounces the relevance of the Cross to him, and puts himself beyond its saving power. Only if we are implicated in the Cross can it be an instrument for our salvation. Only when we allow it to uncover our guilty implication in the crucifixion of the Son of God, and to awaken in us the conviction that in our heart too there is embedded the contradiction of sin against God's love, does the Cross exert its healing power upon us. Then it is our Cross and our salvation, for we belong to the sinners who crucified Him and we belong to those for whom He died" (When Christ Comes and Comes Again, T.F. Torrance, 166-167).