3D Printing

1 John 4:15

          For many people today, the phrase “broken record” really has no actual experiential knowledge connected to it. They have never heard an actual record player, let alone had a piece of dust or a scratch cause the record to reply a short portion of a song repeatedly. As someone who is old enough to have experienced records for themselves, it can be annoying when the skip happens in the middle of a favorite song. You stop the replay, remove the record from the player, inspect the record to see if there are scratches, carefully clean the record and then try to replay it, hoping the skip is gone.

          There is another kind of repetition that many of us wish we could forget. Sometimes our parents would tell us the same thing over and over again. We got so tired of “pick up your clothes.” And yet there was such an easy solution. All we needed to do was pick up our clothes!

          Some repetition happens to help fill in all the blanks, see something from many different angles. Art museums place statues in the middle of the room so that you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Seeing something from multiple angles helps enhance our experience of that work of art. We even look at paintings from different angles, and paintings are fairly flat.

          We study debate in High School and College to learn to think about multiple issues surrounding a single topic. We come at the topic from these different perspectives in order to more fully understand it. We repeat the same position during the debate in multiple ways in order to try to convince the debate judge that we have the better position, that our debate skills are superior.

          John keeps emphasizing the connection of loving one another and the genuineness of our faith profession. If we don’t love, we don’t have a genuine faith in Christ. He has repeated this Truth over and over again in this letter. And a key part of our faith profession is the essential character and nature of the person of Jesus. He is nothing less than fully God and fully man. He fulfills the unique position in the Godhead. He is the bridge between the Holy God and sinful man. As only God could, He provided a way of reconciliation without compromising justice. He provided for us what we could never provide for ourselves.

          The problem for John is that there were false teachers who were teaching that you could have a “God in me” kind of life without accepting this unique God-in-flesh understanding of Jesus. They wanted the power without the person. They wanted the prestige without the Passion on the Cross. They want the benefits without paying the membership dues.

Rift in Space

Mark 1:10

      One of the important parts of writing assembly instructions is to be sure that you write all the steps. You can never assume that the person reading will know the missing step. I used to love reading assembly instructions from other parts of the world. They used to be written in such funny English. It was always fun to try to figure out what they wanted to say. I have an MP3 player that I still can’t figure out how to use because the instructions are so poor. They leave out many steps.

      Mark is so focused on getting to the heart of Jesus ministry that he leaves out one step. Did you notice it? Do you need a hint? Jesus never goes down into the water before He comes up out of the water. Our brains assume the entry into the water from the context, but Mark doesn’t state the fact. For Mark it is not needed.

      One thing we can note is that Jesus was in the water. The water was not sprinkled on Him, or poured on Him. At least for Jesus, immersion, head to toe, happened. Now we could argue about what isn’t written, couldn’t we. Perhaps Jesus walked into the water up to his knees and John the Baptist sprinkled water on His head, or poured it on Him. Perhaps John used a Supersoaker to spray people in Baptism. If you only need a little water, why go to the Jordan River? Why not meet at a well somewhere? John’s ministry could have been much more mobile, traveling to where the people were.

      So what happens when Jesus comes out of the water? John sees heaven ripped open. It was not simply a clearing of the clouds, as I had imagined. This opening was more than the sun breaking through the clouds and bright bands of light cutting through the clouds at multiple angles. This tearing of the space between God’s dwelling place and earth was an abrupt action. This is an invasion from heaven into earth’s space. We see it in physical form. God opens the window and looks at us, and in that instant John gets a glimpse into heaven.

      In the space that is opened between heaven and earth, God’s Spirit descends. We don’t know whether He descended like a dove, flittering  and flapping, or whether He had the appearance of a bird similar to a dove. One way or other the Holy Spirit enters this earthly realm through a rift in the normal barrier between heaven and earth, and enters into Jesus. This must have been something to see!

       What can we gain from this verse for our lives today? God is able to bridge the gap between His dwelling place and ours. He doesn’t do it with this kind of flare very often, but He can and does enter. He entered at this point to signal His presence here on earth.