Sunday April 18, 2010 | Greg Boyd
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
The love of God expressed in Christ on the cross was “foolishness to the Gentiles” and “a stumbling block to the Jews”. God’s love is scandalous to us all in different ways.
Greg argued that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God we have. What we learn about God from Jesus (the incarnation of God) is that God is love. “Scandalous” love. Jesus was scandalous to the Greeks because they expected God to be supremely rational, transcendent, powerful, distant and free from emotions. Jesus clearly was not what they expected. Jesus was scandalous to the Jews because he didn’t fulfill their expectations that their messiah would free them from oppression by the Romans and establish them as their own nation.
Greg had four main points for this message:
1. Jesus is the “Word of God” (John 1:1), the “image of God” (Col. 1:15), the
“form of God” (Phil. 2:6), as well as “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6).
2. “In Christ, all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Col. 2:9)
3. Jesus is the visible face of God. (John 14:9; 1 John 2:23; 2 Cor. 4:6)
4. Jesus trumps all previous revelations. (John 5:36; Hebrews 1:1-3; Mt. 11:27;
John 1:17-18; Mt. 5:38-39, 44-45; Luke 9:54-55.)
Today’s message contained a lot of Scripture passages. Take time as a group to look each of these.