Mediation

We little understand God’s meaning of mediation.  Since we can do nothing for God, except that which he asks us to do in cooperation with his purposes with us, and that relating to advantage for us, we may be helped with some understanding of the gestures we make that are identified as spiritual matters in the course of life.  God does not need our prayers, praise, thanksgiving, meditation, and whatever we might form to show our reverence, faith, dependence, expectations, and any other factor related to satisfactory life and hope (immortality) related to existence in love and faith.  All this is not a charade, a superstition, a useless factor of spiritual life.  God deals with us in a mediation that we do the best we can with his instructions (Scripture) and he mediates for that which is necessary to make up for omissions.  No matter what our physical age, we are as Christians the spiritual as well as the physical children of God.  He provides what is necessary beyond our genuine effort to match what we are with our standing with him.  We can’t match that standing, but we make serious effort to move toward that goal.  This doctrine of Justification is meant to motivate us, and to offer a goal that in seeking we gain confidence, presence, rest in our spiritual assurance.  The matter relates to the work of the Holy Spirit of God at work in the lives of those taking the Christian route for life – here and hereafter.  It must be remembered that this is a personal matter, but was large enough in history for devout persons to accept death rather than recant their faith to society. 

Persons sentenced to death, as in the death of the first martyr, Stephen, were ministered to through the Holy Spirit before losing consciousness to death.  The bravery in which they met abuse and death is a long and documented story.  In recent years beginning in the new millennium, several persons of great wealth in Italy have been engaged in the restoration of ancient monuments in the country.  The program has attracted world attention with the open understanding that the government of the nation is so taken with graft, with poor planning, with tax evasion, with general malaise and irresponsibility that it falls to the wealthy to get the restoration of crumbling national monuments from the past – if those monuments are to be saved for future generations.  The curator at the Coliseum stated in a public review of the renovation program that there was no documented instance of a Christian having lost his or her life there.  She admitted that there were many Christians who were executed in bizarre ways in Rome, but it was usually done away from the public gathering as the bravery with which the Christians died would have played on the sympathy of the population in the observance and have turned against the practice of the authorities. (60 Minutes, CBS, 10/19/2014)

An important reason for understanding the biblical narrative in doctrinal matters is to accent the way God works in eternal dimensions in the universe, and to permit mankind to discover those factors and structures by which God deals with mankind’s situation.  It is a situation identified as marred by sin and incapable of redeeming itself for approval by God so to be included in the Kingdom of God.  To make up for this loss Christ made the bridge, a bridge that only God could form.  The toll for crossing the bridge appears in the guidebook that we identify as Christian Scripture.  We are instructed in parental compassion that we may accept the plan, or reject it either by omission or by deliberate choice.  Favorable response leads to utter ecstasy, and omission or rejection leads to utter sorrow.  Because the matter is spiritual we can’t quite explain either heaven or hell, but we do have strong inclinations that the one direction is bliss and the other is banishment.  Whatever the outcome, God will offer whatever is needed to survive in the negative and to gain the factors that make the affirmative possible.  Scripture notes that if an earthbound person could see God, that person would die.  (Samson’s mother and father had a discussion over the matter, with mother wiser than father in the exchange – Judges 13:22-23.)   We too, like Manoah feel consternation about God. We gain the same answer that some things can’t be communicated to humankind: Why asketh thou . . . seeing it is secret? (Judges 13:18)  God in Christ mediates for our context of life.  Faith gains it for us.