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PetersonsQuoteWritten by Eugene H. Peterson. While on vacation, our family worked on a jigsaw puzzle. When those thousand pieces were dumped onto the table, it seemed an impossible task to put them together. The only thing that kept us from throwing the pile into the fire was that there was a picture on the box of what they could become -- a picture of Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe and surveying the fields of an English estate where a murder had taken place. That picture made it possible to do something. Because of that picture, we had the motivation and faith to go to work. Without it, the chaos would have overwhelmed us, and we would have given up. That's precisely what the Scripture does for us in relation to the chaotic world in which we live. It gives us a picture. Christ is the one who gives coherence to all the disconneted pieces of that puzzle. In Him everything interlocks. In Him everything finds its purpose. With that picture of Sherlock Holmes, we were motivated to begin the work of piecing the puzzle together. Everyone joined in. It was a painfully slow process. The seemingly endless search for a piece with a bit of red in it, for example. And occasionally the reward of fitting the piece in place. The [Biblical] word for that is reconcilliation -- putting together what [should belong] together. That's what Christ is doing with the chaos of the world. And that's what He's doing with the chaos in the smaller world of our lives. Putting our lives together. And making them whole. End Quote (I'm going to bring a number of scripture references together to show how Scripture gives us that picture of what God wants for His world and the people in it.) |