Heart on things above, NOT earthly things? Early day question. Late night answer.

Setting our heart on things above,

NOT earthly things?

Early day question to me…

How do you “read” Colossians 3:2 about setting our heart on things above and NOT earthly things? It feels very anti-cultural, almost gnostic. Had a young preacher from America yesterday and that was basically his hermeneutical reading. Entertainment and enjoyment of earthly things, especially cultural, being equated with idolatry.

Late night answer…

I understand it in terms of Melchizedek, Hebrews, and Dooyeweerd’s understanding of the human selfhood in Christ as being supratemporal, ie rooted even now above time, anchored (even now as we breath) within the veil (Hebrews 6:19), without which timeless and unshakable foundation in Christ our temporal “shadow” reality would dissolve into meaninglessness and nothingness. Here we have no abiding reality (“city”), yet all things are from him, through him, and to him. Shall we despise that for which he died?

Consider the lilies and ravens, he commands us — so shall we piously refuse to look at them because we deem them earthly and “unspiritual”? Yet he commands us to look and ponder and to take delight in the beauty of the lilies and to learn from the ravens how God feeds them. God Himself certainly looks at them and therefore sees the sparrow fall. The swallow raises her young by His altar. The cattle on a thousand hills are his. A greater than Solomon in all his splendour is here. Before Abraham was I am. God is not the God of the dead but of the living. Solomon speaks of animals and insects and cedars and hyssop that grows out of the wall. He ponders these and speaks of them because he realises that wisdom from above is embedded in them. Only by considering earthly things in the light of eternity shall we begin to truly appreciate that their meaning is inexhaustible because the Creator is revealing to us who he is through them (Rom 1:20). 

Shall we despise the physical even though the Word became physical, thus legitimising and endorsing physicality, and indeed returning above clothed in physicality? In fact Hebrews 10:20 tells us that we must enter through the veil/curtain “which is his body”. The gospel is a message of embodiment not of disembodiment. Romans 8 tells us the whole creation groans waiting for the redemption of our bodies. The True Man who reconciled all things in heaven and earth by the physical blood of his physical cross is physically waiting for us as the first fruits of the New Creation. The Earth (the Cosmos) is indivisible from our full humanity. Christ is the corporate head of redeemed humanity. The Cosmos fell in the First Adam. The Cosmos is rescued in the Last Adam. The human as image of God is the steward, the centre, of the Cosmos. The Cosmos is anthropocentric in Christ the True Man, the True Human.

The sin to be shunned is to gaze on what is temporal without relating it (“whether we eat or drink” - 1 Cor 10:31) to the Christ in whom we are even now supra-temporal, ie above time. Idolatry tries to find and found the selfhood, tries to integrate all of reality around, tries to derive our ultimate meaning from, that which is merely time bound and therefore a hideous delusion devoid of any meaning in itself.

Our meaning here below comes only from above, and we must daily seek to align and conform our core selfhood (our “heart” from which arises the issues of life - Prov 4:23), with the Christ who is the author and saviour of life, and so daily dwell in Him even now and even here where we are. Where shall we flee fom His Spirit? His presence is inescapable (Psalm 139). All power in heaven and earth are his and he has promised never to leave us or forsake us (Heb 13:5). In John 17 he prays to the father NOT to take us out of the world but to keep us from the evil one.

“Chuir mi an Tighearna romham a-ghnàth; a chionn gu bheil e air mo dheas-làimh, cha ghluaisear mi.” (Salm 16:8)

“I keep my eyes always on the Lord. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken” (Psalm 16:8 NIV)

Herman Dooyeweerd writes:

« God's Word does not teach us a contrast between "nature" and "grace," that is, between the nature of God's creation and the redemption in Christ Jesus. It teaches only and exclusively the radical, uncompromising antithesis of sin and redemption, of the realm of darkness and the kingdom of God in Christ. God created humankind in His image. In the heart of humankind, the religious root, the center of its being, God concentrated all of creation toward His service; here He laid the supra-temporal root of all temporal creatures. This human heart, from which according to Scriptures flow the wellsprings of life, transcends all things temporal in the service of God. The whole religious sense (meaning) of God's creation lies in our heart, our entire ego, our complete self. This heart, in which according to the Word eternity has been laid, is the true supra-temporal center of human existence. At the same time it is the creaturely center of all of God's creation. The apostasy of this heart, of this root of creation, necessarily swept with it all temporal creation. In Adam not only all humankind fell, but also that entire temporal cosmos of which humankind was the crowned head. And in Christ, the Word become flesh, the second Covenant Head, God gave the new root of His redeemed creation, in Whom true humanity was implanted through self-surrender, through surrender of the center of existence, the heart. » (Extract from “The Christian Idea of the State” [De Christelijke Staatsidee], by Herman Dooyeweerd, 1936, translated by John Kraay. Published in Herman Dooyeweerd: Essays in Legal, Social and Political Philosophy, Collected Works Series B Vol 17, Paideia Press, 2012,2023)