1 Timothy 6:17 – Creation As Revelation Rather Than Rival
17 Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy.
"Henry Luce used to complain," sympathizes Lance Morrow In 1948: the Best Year of Their Lives on John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson, "that novelists never wrote heroic stories about businessmen." Morrow channels, "If they turned up in novels at all, would be villains, and that seemed to Luce an affront to what he saw as the heroic story of American enterprise."
We evangelicals have probably had something to do with that divide. For, we haven't embraced the fullness of Scripture like 1 Timothy 6:17. Even in a passage full of staunch wariness against the power of materialism too, as Wordsworth put it, waste our powers in getting and spending, we see both the supremacy of God Who is Spirit and His absolute determination to express Himself through material gifts.
We can pause, and we should, and we did, to commemorate that God gives Himself as the ultimate counterbalance to material preoccupation. Paul picks His everlasting nature as the attribute to focus on when inoculating Timothy against presentism in his age, against the particularly virulent Ephesus strain of gaining at the expense of other men. Yet, while that emphasis is still in the air, on the mind of the reader, Paul follows through with a balanced value of the material world. We abide with the living God, Paul says, and we rejoice that He gives us richly, not just adequately, all things.
We are more than a little wary of the joy to be had in enjoying His provision because it is His provision. Justifiably, we know how ready we are to give our hearts to the guests rather than the Giver. But frame that battle again.
He knows our sticky hearts better than we do, and yet He is willing to engage in a pitched battle for His glory again and again. It would be safer, to be sure, to call us to a spirit-only existence, or to provide for us with adequacy to keep us alive. Yet, He is so convinced that His Nature is captivating, that our spirit ultimately crave Him more, that He is willing to compare Himself to His Creation constantly. Enjoy it, really enjoy it, He pledges, and You enjoy Me.
Whatever our calling in this particular chapter in life, then, there is something heroic in it that would please Henry Luce. To be sure, today's routines as student, as teacher, as parent, as spouse, and as employee will so resemble yesterday's. This is especially true in the props we are called to use.
They are so similar, so familiar that we are dull to God's glory therein. Part of God's gift, though, is to reveal Himself not so much in the things themselves as they are hoarded, counted, and defended, but as His own use those things on behalf of fellow sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who need them. What is over-familiar to us may equip us not entirely unlike an angel of the Lord to somebody who needs us beside them in life's battle. The war is on, and Christ is greater than it, in it, through it, and after it.
"Henry Luce used to complain," sympathizes Lance Morrow In 1948: the Best Year of Their Lives on John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson, "that novelists never wrote heroic stories about businessmen." Morrow channels, "If they turned up in novels at all, would be villains, and that seemed to Luce an affront to what he saw as the heroic story of American enterprise."
We evangelicals have probably had something to do with that divide. For, we haven't embraced the fullness of Scripture like 1 Timothy 6:17. Even in a passage full of staunch wariness against the power of materialism too, as Wordsworth put it, waste our powers in getting and spending, we see both the supremacy of God Who is Spirit and His absolute determination to express Himself through material gifts.
We can pause, and we should, and we did, to commemorate that God gives Himself as the ultimate counterbalance to material preoccupation. Paul picks His everlasting nature as the attribute to focus on when inoculating Timothy against presentism in his age, against the particularly virulent Ephesus strain of gaining at the expense of other men. Yet, while that emphasis is still in the air, on the mind of the reader, Paul follows through with a balanced value of the material world. We abide with the living God, Paul says, and we rejoice that He gives us richly, not just adequately, all things.
We are more than a little wary of the joy to be had in enjoying His provision because it is His provision. Justifiably, we know how ready we are to give our hearts to the guests rather than the Giver. But frame that battle again.
He knows our sticky hearts better than we do, and yet He is willing to engage in a pitched battle for His glory again and again. It would be safer, to be sure, to call us to a spirit-only existence, or to provide for us with adequacy to keep us alive. Yet, He is so convinced that His Nature is captivating, that our spirit ultimately crave Him more, that He is willing to compare Himself to His Creation constantly. Enjoy it, really enjoy it, He pledges, and You enjoy Me.
Whatever our calling in this particular chapter in life, then, there is something heroic in it that would please Henry Luce. To be sure, today's routines as student, as teacher, as parent, as spouse, and as employee will so resemble yesterday's. This is especially true in the props we are called to use.
They are so similar, so familiar that we are dull to God's glory therein. Part of God's gift, though, is to reveal Himself not so much in the things themselves as they are hoarded, counted, and defended, but as His own use those things on behalf of fellow sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who need them. What is over-familiar to us may equip us not entirely unlike an angel of the Lord to somebody who needs us beside them in life's battle. The war is on, and Christ is greater than it, in it, through it, and after it.
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