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Sunday, June 13, 2010

Completion and Truth

I have often said that God will waste nothing.  Everything in His created and spiritual order must be completed, it must "come true."  Jesus makes this point when He promised,
Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the  Prophets.  I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.  For amen I say to you, til Heaven and Earth pass away, not one jot, or one tittle shall be lost from the Law till all things have been accomplished.  Matthew 5:17,18
Jesus explains here that all things shall "come true."  By using the notion of "all things accomplished" Jesus is speaking about reaching fruition and final purpose.  This is the meaning behind "till all things have been accomplished" that is until all things have reached their final and natural end in God.  The Greek verb translated as "accomplished" means to come into being, to come into fullness.  This can be illustrated in looking at man's life which is to have its perfect consummation and peace in God.  This is the theme of each of the Beatitudes.

Our earthly pilgrimage is time of grace and mercy which God offers to us to work out our earthly life in keeping with His divine plan.  This divine plan for man has been written deep in the human heart by the Holy Spirit; and Scripture acknowledges this by saying that man is created by God and for God; and our heavenly Father never ceases to draw every person to Himself.  The presence of the Cross is ever active achieving God's will of redemption for all persons.  Only in God will we find truth and lasting happiness.

In His parables Jesus compares our earthly life to fallow fields and relationships that must mend and mature and seeds that must be planted in order to grow into capable and sturdy shrubs giving shade to all.  Seeds must die to blossom, lessons must be heard first to be learned, and fields will be seeded and harvested.  God spoke at the beginning of Creation and He shall speak at the close of the age.  God is both Alpha and Omega, the first Word and the last Word, the author of love and of judgment and mercy.

So the completion that Jesus refers to, the "coming to furition" is both internal and external.  He explains that the internal completion is focused on becoming the person God made us to be.  This is the person God longs to love and in our heart of hearts we long to become.  Achieving this becoming is what Heaven is all about.  It is that place where the true and perfect reside.

This talk about things "coming true" is realizing how our basic desire for God is written in the depth of our heart, written in such a way that we know from within that we are created by God and for God and that He never ceases to draw us to Himself.  We must realize that only in God will our soul be at rest and there we find the truth and the happiness we never stop searching for.  Grace is the supernatural help God gives us to help us draw close to our vocation of becoming His adopted sons and daughters.
Becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ means accepting the invitation to vocation to God's family, to live in conformity with His way of life: "For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother, and sister, and mother." (Matt 12:50)
So, our dignity rests on the fact that we are made to live in intimate communion with God.  The Christian life is just this!  This vocation is initiated from the very moment we come into being in our mother's womb.  We "live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) because God wills this through His love and by means of His eternal love He continues to hold us in existence. We cannot live fully according to truth and come into fullness and completion unless we freely acknowledge God's sustaining love and prayerfully entrust ourself to Him always.