Christ the center

Ephesians 1:9–10 reveals one of the mysteries in the New Testament: God's will is to head up "all things" in Christ. That goes far beyond what I understand, but it's worth spending some time thinking about it.

Scripture tells us that Christ is "the last Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45) and "the second Man" (1 Corinthians 15:47). In those two titles we see God's view of human history: He brought the human race to an end in the crucifixion, and He began something entirely new in the resurrection.

1 Corinthians 15:42–44 teaches us that resurrection changes things fundamentally. Resurrection makes us something different than we were. At the same time, it's not a replacement, but a transformation. This is a difficult concept for us to grasp: resurrection changes what we are, but it doesn't change who we are. I'm afraid it's easy to fall into error on both sides of that one: it's not that God replaces us, but He does transform us.

Christ, of course, is neither replaced nor transformed. He is eternally God, and that can't be improved. But at the same time, He is the end of what was before, and the beginning of something entirely new. There is now a New Creation, and Christ is the Man at the center of it.

In a Bible reading a few years ago, one brother said that in the first creation, God made the whole creation, then put a man at the center of it. But in the new creation, He started with a Man in the center, and built the creation around Him. Almost like He took the opposite approach.

We are part of this New Creation built around Christ as its Center.

It seems like what we really want, though, is a Christianity with Christ as a sort of a foundation, but not as the Center. We have all sorts of things we like to put at the center: morality, doctrine, even family. What we don't seem to realize is, whatever we put at the center is what we're worshiping.

1 Corinthians 1:30–31 tells us that God has made Christ our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, and our redemption. Christ is our life (Colossians 3:4). The Christian life is supposed to be all about one Person. It's supposed to be like the New Creation, built around the Lord Jesus Christ at the center.

But we have no shortage of other things we try and put at the center. We put morality, wisdom, knowledge – even relationships with one another – at the center. 1 Corinthians 1:17 reminds us it should be "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified" that's at the center of everything to us.

Imagine what that kind of life would look like! What would it look like if everything in our lives were centered around "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified"? What would it look like if we asked constantly how all the things we encountered were related to "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified"?