Thursday, April 21
From, for, through
Scripture: Judges 7-8, Psalm 47, 1 Corinthians 8
1 Corinthians 8:6 …yet for us there is one God, the Father. All things are from him, and we exist for him. And there is one Lord, Jesus Christ. All things are through him, and we exist through him.
Observation
In this chapter, Paul deals with the issue of eating meat offered to idols. He says that we know idols are nothing, and eating food won’t bring you closer to God or take you farther away. The problem was that not everyone knew this. For some, if they saw you eating this meat, they assumed that you, as a Christian, were still worshipping the old gods, that you had simply added Jesus to your pagan gods, giving them permission to do the same. So, Paul said, he would rather not eat for the sake of the weak, to keep from tripping them up.
In the midst of his argument, Paul inserts in verse 6 what might have been an early Christian creed, fashioned after the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4). He equates God and Jesus, affirming that there is one God, and that Jesus is fully God. And he uses three prepositions to describe our relationship to God: from, for, through.
“From”: all things are from Him. God created all things, including us. We are His by virtue of creation.
“For”: we exist for Him. God is our purpose, our goal, our reason for being. The purpose of life is knowing and loving and serving Him—living for Him.
“Through”: all things are through Christ and we exist through Him. This could be another way of affirming that Christ is God and the agent of our creation. Or it could be referring to our new creation in Christ. We live new lives and are redeemed through Jesus.
Application
Just as the Jews repeated the Shema each day, maybe Christians should memorize this and repeat it daily. It reminds us that our physical and spiritual lives are from, for and through God. Start to finish and everything in between, we are His: start (from), finish (for) and everything in between (through). We live from Him, for Him and through Him.
We say often that being a Christian is fundamentally relational. It’s about a relationship with God and relationships with people—loving God and loving people. These prepositions—from, for and through—define the fulness of the relationship. We are His—from start to finish and everything in between. We live from Him, for Him and through Him.
That’s worth thinking about today!
Prayer: Lord, thank you for this beautiful description of our relationship. Help me to live into it today…and every day. Help me live from You, for You and through You!