The Tapestry of Creation

In Romans 1, Paul speaks about the fragmentation of humanity, and in Romans 12-16, he speaks about the re-integration of humanity in the body of Christ. The thing that Paul is showing is that humanity has fallen apart in the fall through sin and death and that the only way to be brought back into one whole human family is through the work of Christ through the Spirit. This means, as Paul is careful to show, that this wholeness cannot come through the law. The only way the righteousness of God in Christ can come to mankind and re-integrate the human race is in the new humanity that is formed from the glorified humanity of Jesus Christ that is poured out and shared in fullness through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Lawless humanity seeks to re-create the human race through their own law. This is humanism. Utopians are obsessed with creating their own rules and regulations that impose their own self-centered version of righteousness on the world around them, upon those over whom they gain dominion. But this experiment is doomed to failure. They seek to be righteous apart from the indwelling power of God in Christ, and they cannot attain it. The only way that the tragic fragmentation of humanity can be transformed into the re-formed oneness of Romans 12-16 is through the spirit/Spirit indwelling of Romans 8.

The law cannot produce righteousness, whether it is the self-centered, godless "righteousness" of Romans 1 or the religious, ritualistic "righteousness" of Romans 2. All the law can produce is the fragmented humanity of Romans 1. The only answer is to be filled with the Spirit per Romans 8. This is the answer. We must pray in this way to be filled with the Spirit so that we may become the whole, complete new humanity that finds its reality in Christ.

The one thing that we must understand and communicate to our children is that a godless, self-centered reality falls away from what it means to be truly human. Humanists will try to tell us that we can only be truly human if we flee from the image and likeness of God revealed in His Word, if we rebel against the purpose of God for which we were created. But they are wrong, flat wrong. When we flee the image and glory of God and seek our own righteousness, we end up becoming less human, less the person we were created to be. If we desire to be all that we were meant to be, we must discover the humanness revealed in the one perfect human, Christ Jesus. He alone can shape us into the destiny we were intended to become by pouring His Spirit out into us as we pray in the Spirit and are filled with Him in the depths of prayer where we cry, "Abba, Father!" and the Spirit brings us into oneness with Christ through faith.

The fragmentation of humanity is due to sin. All creation was formed around Christ as the center of all reality (Colossians 1). God created everything to be the outworking expression of the image and glory of God. Remember, God made all things to make His invisible attributes visible. All creation was formed, the very DNA of the universe was "written," to reveal the image and glory of God. Thus, when man sinned, he chose to repudiate the knowledge of God and "create" a distorted reality, a "vain" existence conformed to the idols of the world, which are simply expressions of man's own proud, self-loving heart. This means, because human existence must conform to its original reality, the reality created in the image of God, that humanity is dehumanized when it falls away from the image and glory of God. When man chooses to seek his own righteousness, he cannot help but fragment into a dehumanized creature.

Man was created as a part of a larger whole. God created a world that cannot express His glory apart from the countless multitudes of creatures bearing His image and sharing His glory. God created a world where countless creatures share in relationship with Him and with one another, and this complex reality of relationships become the mosaic of relational revelation that truly "images" the glory of God. Or, to use another example, God created a world where His glory could only be truly revealed through the countless threads that are woven together into one tapestry revealing the glory of God. When man sinned and created his own fallen reality, the fabric of that tapestry began to be ripped apart. The individual threads of the tapestry began to unravel until the picture of God, the invisible things of Him clearly seen, was distorted, and the image of God was defaced into a lying image of God in the leering faces of a thousand idols.

God's world was created to be an image of God revealed in the manifold and multiple relationships of individual people brought together by the Spirit into one living expression and manifestation of the glory of God. God's glory cannot be fully revealed apart from "the number that no man can number," and this glory was refracted when the tapestry of human relations bearing the image of God was ripped in the fall and the threads of human relations began to be pulled apart. Redemption repairs the tapestry by reweaving the threads back into the beautiful picture of God that the Creator first intended. Romans 1 describes what the unraveled tapestry looks like as the human race begins to become more bestial than human, as it falls from man made in the image of God to fowls, to beasts, to reptiles. Romans 12-16 describes what the repaired tapestry looks like as all humanity is woven back together again into one, God-revealing, God-manifesting human race.

The fall of man had a dreadful effect on man, on nature, on relationships, on health and prosperity, and on all of life. The fall of man yanked man away from God in Christ as the center of creation. Thus, all of creation began to spin wildly out of control, and the threads of the tapestry of creation began to unravel and come unwound from the original picture that God intended. But in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the threads are being re-sewn and re-wound. This does not happen all at once, just as the unraveling did not happen all at once. But the re-sewing of the threads of the tapestry is being done one thread at a time. The key here is that each thread cannot exist within the tapestry apart from the other threads. Every thread exists in relationship with the others. And this relationship begins and ends in Christ.