Welcome to the next post in my new series, “Meditatio – Dispatches from the Educational Frontlines.” If you missed them, here is post #1 and post #2.
You can’t understand where you are now, if you don’t understand where you’ve come from. You won’t know where you’re supposed to go, if you don’t have a direction. As we talked about last week, education is motivated by a particular view of who people are, and what the world should be like. Education is training and guiding people, of whatever age, in a certain direction. So, where did we come from, and where are we going?
In the Bible, there are two important anchor-points that help us understand where we came from, and where we’re going. Genesis tells us where we came from—Revelation tells us where we’re going.
But first things first! In the beginning … God … In the beginning God was an eternal triune personality—an eternal dance of love, delight, of union and communion. We see this relationship described beautifully in Jesus’s extended prayer for his disciples before he is betrayed and executed (Jn. 17). I call this Trinitarian Koinonia.
As Douglas Jones (my philosopy professor from college) describes it: “God is not static. He is not a frozen picture. Father, Son, and Spirit have been acting, communicating, serving, sacrificing, adoring, laughing, and more for all eternity. The Trinity acts, and that act is love.”[1] God did not create because He was lonely—He created to share his eternal koinonia (“fellowship”) with temporal creatures. God created all things to glorify himself, but I believe he also created out of the overflow of joy that is at the center of his Triune Being. We were created to share in this joy (Psalm 16:11 & John 17:13, 20-24). We don’t know much about the creation of angels, but we do know they were not the point of creation. Mankind is the point of creation.
Psalm 8 shows us that Humanity stands at the top of creation, with authority given to us from God. We were created with the capacity to lead. We were created to be leaders. We were created to rule.
As Geiger and Peck point out in Designed to Lead:
If we believe that God created the world and handed responsibility for watching the garden to Adam and Eve, then human leadership must be understood as God-initiated. He purposed to use humanity to steward and cultivate (Gen. 1—2); His people were and are “at the center” of His plan. From the beginning, His people have been designed to lead.[2]
Nex time, we’ll look in more detail at where we came from.
[1] Douglas M. Jones, A Rhetoric of Love, vol. 1 (Lancaster: Veritas Press, 2018), 62.
[2] Eric Geiger and Kevin Peck, Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2016), 2.