When I was with a friend once driving through the countryside, we passed a field of daisies. I remarked that there were many young girls who would love to stroll through just such a field. My traveling companion replied that the dry stubble on the ground would only cut their feet, adding that the romantic is all in the imagination. I was troubled by this statement, but said nothing.

Many months later I was walking along a street in Europe and passed a poster with the photograph of a woman. The photo was clearly intended to catch the eye of the masculine sex–which, of course, it did. And I thought to myself: “how many other women are there on this very street of comparable beauty? And yet the mind is drawn to this particular photo.” The answer is that the woman in the photo was portrayed in such a way as to provoke the imagination. This disturbed me, but not quite as much as the statement of my traveling companion several months previous.

There would be no great buildings, colorful paintings, astounding achievements, apart from the projections of the imagination. Such things must first be seen in the mind, and desired, for them to come to fruition. So the imagination has the incredible power to bring forth reality, not on its own, but by its command of all the powers of the human psyche and body.

If it is the image of God to create, and so humans are builders and creators in their own right, then is it not also the image of God to be imaginators? If the Holy Spirit is God’s working agent, his indwelling and efficient doer, and if the Son is God’s word, his communicator to creation, we could say in one sense that God the Father is the divine imagination.

The tree of life is incomparably beautiful in that it prompts the imagination toward all that is in God, all that he desires to give. Yet Eve’s imagination was turned to the knowledge of good and evil, seeing that it was desirable. So then our sanctification is being renewed in the hope of the new creation in Christ, that is, obtaining a beatified imagination through faith in its perfect embodiment, the beautiful lamb, the crucified and risen Son.

What does a person possess in and of them self? There is the vestige of God’s image, though now fallen and corrupted. There is the capacity for ‘good’ insofar as this world calls good the things which are beneficial and ostensibly selfless. This good of the image of God; it is the ability to act selflessly and the ability to build up another. How then does Paul say that in him there is no good thing? But he adds “that is, in my flesh.”

The flesh never wants to do anything selfless; the flesh wants what makes the flesh feel good. So truly, in the flesh dwells no good thing. But yet in the created will of humanity there is what we call goodness. There is compassion, sacrifice, mercy, and other virtues that remain in people because of the image of God. But none of these virtues can raise anyone from the dead.

People are dead in their sins, “in the uncircumcision” of their hearts. That means that they are not ‘set apart,’ and though they do things which are good, yet the desires and inclinations of the heart are toward those things which accommodate the flesh because of the sin that is in them from the day Adam sinned and because every sin committed since their birth strengthens those fleshly inclinations. The desires which draw all people away from salvation that is offered in Christ are the ‘uncircumcision of the heart.’

It is for this reason that all must depend on grace. Grace is not a wrapped package that is given and subsequently abides in a person. No, saving grace exists solely in God, who exudes grace, if you will, giving favor upon those who have faith in the life that was bought by the blood of Christ.

Nor is this faith a wrapped gift that a person can possess of them self after it has been given. All people have some sort of faith. There are many faiths, for every individual has the propensity for faith in something beyond one’s self. The strength of faith depends in no way on the individual having faith, but rather on the strength of the object of one’s faith. If the strength of one’s faith depends on the individual, then the faith is worthless, for though it may produce good works from time to time, it ultimately depends on a person who is always burdened with the flesh, which blindly seeks not the object of faith, but one’s own pleasure.

Rather, faith that saves must be faith in the savior. Though all have some sort of faith, the only faith that saves is that which has as its object the one who has the power to kill the flesh and raise the body up again to be a glorious body. This faith conquers the flesh because it is faith in the sin- and flesh-conqueror. This faith can only be given and sustained by the one who is the author of life and salvation and who calls us out of darkness of serving ourselves in the flesh and into the light of grace, flowing from the father to all who believe.

In Romans 12:1 the Apostle Paul says: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” There is a curious use here of the physical body as a spiritual sacrifice. This use would not be so curious in the Old Covenant as there are many physical sacrifices to be found in the law. But in the teachings on the New Covenant we need to stop and think about what exactly he means; it’s not quite as obvious as the symbolism of slaying an innocent lamb for sins.

When we come together as the body of Christ in a worship service we sing and listen to the Word taught and fellowship. This is called worship. The word used in the verse quoted above for ‘spiritual’ is ‘logikhn’;Sometimes this word can mean ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’. In any case it is dealing with the nonphysical reality of a concept, that is, the idea of it, the perfect idea of it in it’s essence. So in this case we speak of worship, or service; words used in the context of the priest’s service in the temple, and in Paul’s writings, of the service that believers render to God as a living priesthood. So the perfect idea of worship in its essence is spiritual. One may also argue that ‘divine’ is a good word to use. And indeed, many Christian traditions have called the liturgy the “divine service”.

What Paul is speaking of then, is a worship that is a service, like that of a priest who is a ‘slave’ of sorts to God, and it is a service that is very real in its spiritual significance. It is of the essence of what worship is all about; that is the meaning of ‘logikhn’: it is of the essence.

But how does one go about doing this? “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” So this is not a mindless sacrifice, as if we are causing ourselves to suffer just for the sake of being a sacrifice. Rather, we are to make this sacrifice of ourselves, a true spiritual and divine sacrifice, by a radical change in the way that we think. The sacrifice is not a destruction, but a transformation.

Our paradigm for this is of course the cross, where Jesus both died and rose again as a complete, perfect and acceptable sacrifice to God on our behalf. He was not destroyed

The human is by nature of a contingent will.

Because humanity is contingent, there is a finite number of possible scenarios in which they can exist. Therefore their choices are limited to pre-established, finite possibilities. It is from these pre-established dispositions that they ‘choose’ with the will. Because they are restricted and thus choose according to a certain existential pre-determination, their context and possibility of choice is of a certain exclusive character. This exclusive character is their nature. Therefore what a person chooses is indeed of themself, and what is of themself is of their nature and therefore exclusive. In this way any choice excludes the other possibilities within their nature and leaves them with a more restricted nature than before: slavery to sin.

In God all things are possible and the choice to continue to exist in this possibility is the choice to not choose anything but what is already given in God. When humanity chose something finite which was not already given, they chose necessarily to have an exclusive nature whose character was that without the infinite possibility of God’s provision, i.e., death necessarily. So the choices now available to the will are exclusive to death.

The solution of Christ is that he shares of the non-contingent life of God; the first premise does not apply. Though he took on contingent flesh, dependent on his father also spiritually, althewhile he remained non-contingent God. He has a nature whose exclusive character is God and so is the only one able to give to the contingent person God’s life by exchanging a nature exclusive to death for the nature exclusive to life as the non-contingent son of God in contingent humanity.

When a person receives this life of God by faith in Jesus they have all the possibilities that are in the infinite God, with infinity defined as God’s will; and they rest in them, not grabbing one or the other, but trusting in him who provides all. So then they are free and have a freedom in regards to all things, yet the very joy of that freedom is essentially in the rest and not in the exercise of choice (which would in fact leave the person in a more exclusive position) but in the exercise of submission to the non-contingent will of God.

That Christ is the word means more than just “word” by itself. It means that He is God’s communication, his mouth piece to man and the expression of himself to his people. In the beginning God created the world by speaking it into existence: there’s Christ. He is the creator, as it says in Colossians, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of creation, for all things were created by him, whether, thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things for in him all things hold together.” He is God’s creative power. That means that all physical things even on this earth are expressions of Christ (that is, in their perfect form before the fall).

The only way we know God is in his communication to us, and his communication, or word, is Jesus. So when God wanted to communicate salvation to us, it is his word that he sent to become flesh and communicate all of his love, and all of his will in redemption, ‘explaining’ through his own actions the gospel, as he himself was and is the gospel, the word of truth.

He is called the first-born of creation because he created all things, but also because he himself became a part of creation and as such was the only perfect created man; thus he is said to be the firstborn, meaning the best, but also meaning that he became apart of creation, while having existed long before creation. Because of his power as creator and the first born of creation, the new creation, it is he who has the power to create new life in us and make us a part of the new creation. He did so at the beginning of the world by creating all things through his word, and he does so now by creating in us new life by his word, the gospel, Jesus himself in his death and resurrection.