The Hymn of the Great Mystery -1 Tim 3:16

One of the first things that you work out if you start a blog is that the title makes all the difference to your hit rate; and you can really increase your hit rate if you make your title a ‘how to’: how to find a marriage partner, how to increase your muscle mass, how to manage your time, how to smile for a photograph, how to write a theology essay. In fact, you may be able to disguise a perfectly abstract thought in a ‘how to’ blog post and gain quite a readership for it.
It’s practical wisdom we are seeking. We want advice in the craft of life; to gain a knowledge that has a direct purpose in engaging with the world; to be able to translate what we learn into action that counts and makes a difference. And it makes a lot of sense: life is complicated and the business of living in it messy; and I just want to be able to survive the next challenge and maybe just maybe succeed a little bit if I can. Practical wisdom gives us traction; the kind of abstract knowledge about matters far off from our experience leaves us with our wheels spinning.

What good, then, is Christian theology? It appears to apply the power of thought to a place far removed from the lives we lead, and demand from us a series of strenuous mental gyrations to get down to the ground. Or, perhaps it seems that Scripture itself divides worship from everyday life without ever bridging the gap – the ethics of Scripture are simply tacked on as a kind of ‘well, I guess you’d better behave while you are at it’. It is no accident that Christian books of practical knowledge check theology off at the door and, for the most part, simply couldn’t be bothered about making the connection. Believe in orthodoxy, and do this – it works. Be a principled pragmatist, but don’t ever let your principles too close to your practice… principles only get in the way after all.


To think in that way, though, you’d have to be reading Scripture with one eye closed. The three hymns of adoration of the Son of God that we have been addressing in this series all emerge directly from or connect directly to the practice of the church. The most grandiloquent pieces of poetic theology in the New Testament have direct consequences for what we do today. Let your attitude be the same as that of Christ Jesus, he says in Philippians. In Colossians, the inner being of the church emerges directly from the kind of Lord she worships – the great reconciler of all things by his blood, the peacemaker who cancelled the written code.
And today’s third great hymn, from 1 Timothy 3:16 is planted by Paul right in the centre of his first letter to Timothy, in the midst of his descriptions of the qualities of the various orders of ministry.
Beyond all question, the mystery from which all true godliness springs is great.

The NIV has added the word ‘springs’ to the sentence but it is right I think. Godliness, or piety, or the business of actually living well in the world of the creator, has its source in a great mystery: it flows out of it as water from a well, and as such you can’t see the divide between the mystery and the piety or godliness it produces.

The great Elizabethan puritan theologian William Perkins would say this: ‘Theology is the science of living blessedly forever’. It could have been drawn from this text. The extraordinary and exalted ideas of this theological hymn are the standing orders of the church. 

Now of course it is not simply a piece of theology without also being a piece of doxology – it isn’t simply thought; it is an offering of adoration. It is worship, that is to say: and that observation provides the key perhaps. The division between the abstract and the concrete in the Christian life is overcome by worship. Our thoughts about God are not simply thoughts but have are oriented to the Holy one, and so orient us to him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom has the same structure in it. Likewise, the commandments do not separate worship from life but rather show how worship and holy living belong together, with the one springing from the other. Perhaps we could even go so far as to say: Scripture contains no ethics and certainly no morality. What it contains is guidance for right worship.

And just as a corrective to our current talk about worship: yes, worship is ‘all of life’, but it is only ‘all of life’ because it springs from our verbal expressions of adoration; our lives are made worshipful because they match the words we say to God.

And this particular act of adoration is sublime. It reveals a mystery: in what sense is it a mystery? It was once a concealed truth and now it is a revealed truth. It was the plan of God from before the foundations of the earth; it was the song in his head that he has now played out loud. It’s a great mystery, too, not simply I think because it is really really mysterious, but because it is central and powerful. It’s a mystery that makes a difference to everything.
And what is this mystery? It has six parts:

First, He appeared in the flesh. Who did? The later scribes corrected ‘He’ to ‘God’, and while I think the proper reading is ‘He’, they were right in what they wanted to explain – after all the nearest antecedent is ‘God’; which, if that is right, makes this a profound statement about Jesus Christ: God was made manifest in the flesh, in Jesus Christ, true God, true man, truly God-man, overcoming the huge distance between the two realities. As Calvin puts it:
‘The difference between God and man is very great and yet in Christ we see God’s infinite glory joined to our polluted flesh so that the two become one.

There is no reason for us to think this is any different from the kind of Christological affirmations we see in chapter 2, where Christ is described as the one mediator of the one God, who gave himself a ransom for all.

Second: He was vindicated by the Spirit. It was the Spirit of God that pointed to Jesus and testified that he was God; we think especially of his anointing by the Spirit settling upon him as a dove; but also of his resurrection from the dead by the power of that same Spirit: as Paul himself says, Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh but declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead. 

Third, He was seen by angels. Why does this make it to the list? Angels attended Jesus and point to him at every stage of his earthly life. They worshipped him (Heb 1:6); his conception and his birth were heralded by angels, his temptation, his death, his resurrection and his ascension were all accompanied by the presence of angels – he was ‘seen’ in the sense of ‘recognised’ by them as they do their work in pointing to him; but also, we might speculate, the angels themselves are part of the final picture of the final victory of Christ since he is Lord of the angels as well as the rest of creation.
Fourth, he was preached among the nations. Jesus was declared and revealed to the Gentiles and not simply to the Jews; perversely it seemed given the facts of history God chose to reveal himself made manifest in the flesh to the nations – and to do it by means of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus.
And this preaching was effective, for, fifth, He was believed on in the world. The preaching of Jesus Christ did not fail to get a response, as much as it was rejected; the obedience of faith was not absent from the nations to whom the gospel came. Christ’s work in bringing people to believe him is ‘no ordinary miracle’, to cite Calvin again; and on it goes, a work in which we are privileged to share.
And the last spoke of this wheel is that He was taken up in glory. If the Son of God descended and took on flesh, it is also the case that he ascended to glory – and now reigns with God on high, which is a declaration about his rule of the world, sharing us he does in the divine rule itself. 

This then is the mystery of godliness – not trying harder, not doing more quiet times, not lists of how to do things, not pragmatism, not techniques. No – the secret to the pious and godly life is Christ – manifested, attested, preached and glorified. 

But the pragmatist might validly object: how does that actually help me? What does that have to do with me?

How?

And we shouldn’t dismiss this question as simply impertinent, or beneath contempt. But still: we might much like the answer we get.

The answer is it helps you because it changes everything about the world in which you live. And knowing that mystery makes living here possible: it is the basis for a true human life, because in this divine mystery we have declared to us the holy and glorious potential of human life. We have in this extraordinary disclosure the appearance of the divine in our midst while as yet we were still far off from God and not even seeking him.

What are we to do? Nothing but adore him. Bless him with our praise and adoration. Worship him not only with our lips but in our lives. The secret ‘how-to’ of the Christian life begins with the exaltation of Jesus as Lord of all.

This then is the vision statement and mission statement for the church you are going to plant – and it’s a believable one that’s worth trusting in (rather than placing your own charisma at the heart of your vision for the church, which is what so many of us secretly or not-so secretly do).

This is the truth you need to begin counselling people in their walk with Christ. This is the core reality out of which you will learn to preach great sermons and raise up a generation of leaders of God’s people. This is the bullet-point list you need to recall at every moment. This is the software you need to run in your ministry and in your marriage. This is what you need to teach people about holiness and about Christian maturity and growing in godliness. This is the powerful antidote to the legalism of so much that passes for Christian literature.

Praise Him: and his praise will be steady point around which we can integrate all the things we need to know to get by - and much, much more.