Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
January 2009
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
In Roman mythology, Janus was a two-headed god who looked backwards and forwards, and so was regarded as the god of gateways and doorways. He has given his name to our month January, which is a time when people might be inclined to look back over the year that was and forward to the year that is coming.
The apostle Paul once wrote of himself as ‘the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God’ (1 Cor.15:9). He never forgot that he had proudly and insolently blasphemed Christ, not recognising that He is indeed the Lord from heaven (1 Tim.1:13). Christians ought never to forget their pasts, that we were all once dead in trespasses and sins (Eph.2:1), and that this manifested itself either in open unrighteousness or in the more subtle sin of deceptive self-righteousness. Three times in the book of Acts, Luke recounts the conversion of the apostle Paul (Acts 9, 22, 26). That is a salutary thing for any Christian to do. We all need to look back over our lives.
However, Paul was never governed by his past. He even spoke of ‘forgetting what lies behind’ (Phil.3:13). He did not mean that he had erased his past from his memory but that his past did not rule over him, and hamper his present usefulness. Some people look over their past, and see great failures, perhaps terrible sin, and this paralyses them. They dwell on it, stew over it, and act as if their failures are greater than God’s grace. That is not Paul’s method – he put his past behind him. He had blasphemed Christ, he had persecuted the church, but all that was behind him, covered by the blood of the Redeemer.
Nor did he rest on past successes or live off his experiences. Because Paul had preached in Asia (Turkey), he did not sit back and say: ‘Somebody else can do Achaia and Macedonia (Greece).’ Your present usefulness can be greatly hindered if you are constantly reliving the past. Whatever your failures and whatever your successes, put them behind you and press on. Paul was single-minded, governed by ‘one thing’. Hence he pressed on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil.3:13-14).
Paul looked back and also forward in his Christian life. Indeed, this is how the Christian looks at all of history. The coming of Christ was in the fullness of time (Gal.4:4). Christ is the centre of all human history. Even in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, according to 1 Corinthians 11:26, we proclaim the Lord’s death (which has already happened) and look to when He comes again (which has yet to take place). In A.D. 525 a Roman abbot, Dionysius Exiguus, introduced the custom of thinking in terms of B.C. (‘Before Christ’) and A.D. (anno Domini (‘In the year of our Lord’). This was adopted in the Middle Ages. It is right and good that we think of the flow of history in this way. We are those ‘on whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor.10:11). The Christian looks back to what God has done in Christ, and forward to what He will do in Christ. The Christian does so from a firm standing point, the person of Christ Himself, the Word come in human form.
Some people would tell us to repudiate the past, and live only for the present. Others dwell on the past in a nostalgic way. Yet others would seek to interpret the flow of history without recourse to the Lord of history. For the Christian, the one who gives light and meaning to history is also the one who gives light and meaning to the individual. Hence we can look back and forward while standing firm. The paradox is that we can grow without being swayed about (Eph.4:13-15).
John Newton put it marvellously well as he looked over his own life, and looked to where he was heading: ‘I am not what I ought to be — ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be — I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be — soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”‘ As a Christian, Newton knew what it means to look back, to look forward, and to stand firm.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes