Each Wednesday, I’ll try to offer a short thought from a couple of my favorite sages: NT Wright and Dallas Willard. Today, a long quotation from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. In this quotation, Willard reveals how it was God’s plan to arrive among us through ordinary means:
He slipped into our world through the backroads and outlying districts of one of the least important places on earth and has allowed his program for human history to unfold ever so slowly through the centuries.
He lived for thirty years among socially insignificant members of a negligible nation – though one with rich tradition of divine covenant and interaction. He grew up in the home of the carpenter for the little Middle-Eastern village of Nazareth. After his father, Joseph, died, he became ‘the man of the house’ and helped his mother raise the rest of the family. He was an ordinary workman: a ‘blue-collar’ worker.
He did all this to be with us, to be one of us, to ‘arrange for the delivery’ of his life to us. It must be no simple thing to make it possible for human beings to receive the eternal kind of life. But, as F.W. Faber opens one of his profound works, now ‘Jesus belongs to us. He vouchsafes to put Himself at our disposal. He communicates to us everything of His which we are capable of receiving.’
If he were to come today as he did then, he could carry out his mission through most any decent and useful occupation. He could be a clerk or accountant in a hardware store, a computer repairman, a banker, an editor, doctor, waiter, teacher, farmhand, lab technician, or construction worker. He could run a housecleaning service or repair automobiles.
In other words, if he were to come today he could very well do what you do. He could very well live in your apartment or house, hold down your job, have your education and life prospects, and live within your family, surroundings, and time. None of this world be the least hindrance to the eternal kind of life that was his by nature and becomes available to us through him. Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone.
Joe Skillen 