Broken Ikons Rejoice! (A note from Luke 1 on sin, repentance, & faith)

Is the Bible Magic?
Luke’s stated aims and intentions at the beginning of his Gospel urge us to expect that we will receive reassurance about the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian faith from reading and pondering his account. But can we do this passively, expecting the mere mental exposure to his Gospel to ‘magically’ assure us? No. If we listen rightly to Luke’s narrative we will see that we are being drawn in, invited to participate, provoked to respond.

We are being called to use our minds, hearts, and wills to encounter God as he comes to us through this narrative. In so doing we will both ‘test’ the truth-claims of the Bible, and be tested by them.

The Grandeur of Sin
You see, the same Bible that is a window on the person of Jesus is also a mirror to our own souls. We are shown to be ‘sinners’ who in our heart of hearts are none to sure we really even want to meet Jesus!

Let’s be clear here that ‘sin’ is not first and foremost about all our little infractions of divine law such as lying and cheating and lusting and so forth. It is far more deep and devastating. Sin is the fundamental orientation of our hearts in choosing to rely on ourselves as our own kings and queens, gods and goddesses, rather than relying on our good Creator. Sin is our purposeful rejection of the one true God as the holy and sovereign and loving Lord of all and the self-appointed enthronement of ourselves in his place. Tragically and scarily we are usurpers to God’s rightful Kingship! Traitors! We are found guilty of the highest treason by the highest court.

We may not usually consciously think of sin this way. It may all sound a bit grandly dramatic! Well, yes, it is! That is actually part of the unspeakable honour and privilege God has given us in making us free and responsible agents in his image. The higher our status, the harder our fall! (Perhaps now we can begin to see why the Bible makes such a monumentally big deal of ‘sin’ and how it can be ‘paid for’ and ‘put right’.)

Longing and Loathing
So, being made in God’s image (ikon in New Testament Greek) and yet being fallen from the original state of that good image through sin (now a ‘broken ikon’), we find a struggle within us: we are simultaneously drawn and attracted to our good and glorious Source (because, as Augustine memorably put it: ‘You have made us for yourself, O God, and we are restless until we rest in Thee’) and at the same time repulsed and horrified by Him because of our state of rebellion and guilt.

We long for and loathe God at one and the same time! How do we break such an impasse? We don’t! We can’t. But our unfathomably gracious God can and does.

‘Power Tools’ Placed in Our Hands
Thus it is crucial for us to see that along with this invitation to respond to Jesus, we are also divinely supplied with the essential ‘tools’ we humanly need to respond and participate: they are placed right in our hands by the proclamation of the good news itself. That is, by God’s kind and wonderful grace when we sinners hear the good news about Jesus we are in that moment being empowered by the Spirit to overcome our spiritual stubbornness and respond to Jesus. As Jesus is presented to us throughout the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, Luke calls us again and again to, with the Spirit’s help, open our hands and grasp the response-tools God mercifully gifts to us: in one hand Repentance and in the other Faith.

Repentance: we turn (a word used often by Luke) away from our sinful self-reliance and toward Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It’s a reorientation of our lives, a re-centring: OFF of ourselves or any other idol (career, relationship, pleasure, achievement, beauty, etc.) and ONTO God; on his terms not ours. Total surrender.

Faith: we believe in Jesus, trust him, depend on him for his forgiveness of our sin and new life in his name because he has come at great cost to rescue us and provide this for us. We simply count on him to do what he came to do!

We stop trusting in ourselves and trust in God instead. We stop relying on ourselves and rely on God instead. We stop worshiping ourselves and worship God instead. We stop enthroning ourselves and enthrone God instead.

These are the God-given means by which we enter his kingdom and the eternal life he so graciously gives, by which we experience all his love and care for us and get busy with the meaningful, fulfilling, glorious purpose he has for our lives. (I don’t mean that last point in an individualistic ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-actualisation’ sort of way – it’s far more shattering and profound and beautiful than that.)
Pilgrim’s Process
But all in good time! There’s no ‘sales close’ here: sign on the dotted line today or you may miss your chance forever! I trust that the Lord is graciously taking you on a journey and will lead you faithfully to your destination and neither I nor yourself nor anyone else needs to manipulate that process. We each simply have to do our best with God’s help to faithfully respond to the light he is giving us in this moment.

‘All the care Luke gives to the task, as noted in his preface, is designed to reassure Theophilus, who has been taught on such matters previously. Whatever pressure this believer is under, he should be confident that God has moved to fulfil his plan through Jesus. Luke is carefully building on precedent to tell anew the story of Jesus. Like a pastor comforting a believer under siege by the world, so Luke wishes to encourage his readers. Theophilus may well be asking, “Is Christianity what I believed it to be, a religion sent from God?” Whether it is internal doubt, persecution or racial tension with Jews that has caused this question to be raised, Luke invites his reader to consider the story of Jesus again and know that these indeed were events that have been fulfilled among us.’ (Darrell L. Bock, Luke, p. 33)