This week’s Bible study looked at 1 John 4:12-14. Earlier in the chapter, John has talked about knowing God and the evidence for this being our love. Now, he moves on to talk about our visible love being a pointer to God. No one can ever see God in all His glory and splendour (1 John 4:12, see also Exodus 33:19-23), but there are many occasions when God reveals Himself to us. In the Old Testament, theophanies (pre-incarnate appearances of Christ (eg Gen 32, Joshua 5:13-15)) occurred when God revealed Himself to people and clearly we could never know God at all if it were not for the revelations of Himself which He gives, though we wait for His glorious appearing before we can have a perfect knowledge of Him (see 1 Cor 13:8-12, 1 John 3:1-2). Nonetheless, John reminds us that one  evidence of God is His living within us and His love being made evident in our lives.

The key topic of abiding (or remaining) is returned to here (see also 1 John 2:6, 24, 27, John 15:1-8), for God chooses to dwell in us and we dwell in Him. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us (John 1:14-18); His love is therefore made available to us. We have the inner witness of God’s Spirit living in us (see also Eph 1:13-14), but we also have the objective truth that Jesus lived on earth, was crucified and was raised to life again. This dual combination of subjective and objective knowledge allows us to testify that Jesus came to be the Saviour of the World. His very name signifies His purpose (see Matt 1:21). A saviour is one who rescues, delivers, cares for and protects us from harm. Jesus is all those things to us!

Work has been going on in church to replace the stage curtains with a concertina partition and to carpet the stage area. The partition is not yet fully functional, but the carpet has now been fitted.

The stage minus the curtains:

The partitions as they arrived:

The partition track and smoothing edge:

Fitting the partition:

Carpet underlay:

Working round the trap door:

Fitting the carpet:

Local churches have a number of special events this week. At Furlong Road Methodist Church, there is a special healing service on Friday 10th October  starting at 6 p.m.  (all are welcome to attend) and on Saturday 11th October from 10 a.m. until 12 noon, the Salvation Army is hosting a giant jumble sale as part of their ongoing fund-raising to help the food bank.

Don’t forget our own midweek meetings, including the Bible study at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday and the Parent & Toddler Group on Friday morning from 9.30 until 11 a.m. We also have our usual coffee morning on Saturday from 10 a.m. until 12 noon.

Part of the family service involved solving riddles. People were very good at these! See how you get on!

Riddle 1

What is greater than God,
more evil than the devil,
the poor have it,
the rich need it,
and if you eat it, you’ll die?

Riddle 2

What has eighty-eight keys but can’t open a single door?

Riddle 3

You draw a line. Without touching it, how do you make the line longer?

Riddle 4

The Smith family is a very wealthy family that lives in a big, circular home. One morning, Mr. Smith woke up and saw a strawberry jam stain on his new carpet. He figured out that everyone who was there that morning had a jam sandwich. By reading the following excuses, figure out who spilled the jam.
Billy Smith: “I was outside playing basketball.”
The Maid: “I was dusting the corners of the house.”
Chef: “I was starting to make lunch for later.”
Who is lying?

The reason we were solving riddles is because the word used in 1 Cor 13:12 to describe our view through a mirror (in the KJV it talks about seeing ‘through a glass darkly‘) is ‘enigma’. Paul says that all we can see and know and experience in this life now is a little bit like looking in a mirror. Just as the image he would have seen in those ancient mirrors would have had a blurred or undefined outline, such is our knowledge here and now. Matthew Henry says in his commentary on these verses ‘All things are dark and confused now, compared with what they will be hereafter. They can only be seen as by the reflection in a mirror, or in the description of a riddle; but hereafter our knowledge will be free from all obscurity and error. It is the light of heaven only that will remove all clouds and darkness that hide the face of God from us.’ Barnes says of the idea of an enigma or riddle: ‘Little is known; much is left to conjecture; a very accurate account of most of that which passes for knowledge. Compared with heaven, our knowledge here much resembles the obscure intimations in an enigma compared with clear statement and manifest truth.’

Life here can be baffling and confusing, but we can take heart from the fact that God is in complete control, knows everything and is working all things together for good. We don’t need to solve all the enigmas of life. Instead, we are called to trust God and to rest in the fact that we are fully known and fully loved by Him.

P. S.

The answers to the riddles:

1. Nothing

2. A piano

3.You draw a shorter line next to the first line, and it then becomes the longer line.

4. The maid. (It was a round house, so there were no corners to dust…)

There are all kinds of mirrors, which are objects used to reflect light in a way that preserves much of its original quality even after its contact with the mirror. Most ordinary mirrors (used for personal grooming or decoration) are plane mirrors, but at fun fairs there are curved, distorting mirrors which can make things look shorter or  taller, fatter or thinner:

The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles is one of the most famous rooms featuring mirrors. Built for Louis XIV in the 17th century, this room has seventeen mirror-clad arches that reflect the seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the gardens and its dimensions are 73.0 m × 10.5 m × 12.3 m (239.5 ft × 34.4 ft × 40.4 ft).

Magic mirrors feature in fairy tales. The most famous is probably the magic mirror in ‘Snow White‘ where the wicked queen would ask ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?‘, confident that the answer would reflect her own beauty… only to find one day she had been usurped by Snow White and thus plotted to kill her.

Then there is the magical mirror in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ which leads Alice to a fantastical world of adventures.

In Bible days, however, mirrors were not made of glass and obviously were nowhere near as precise or effective as the mirrors we use today. The first mirrors were probably water, since you can see reflections in clear water (think of Narcissus, who was extremely vain and proud, so much so that when he saw his reflection in a pool of water, he fell in love with it, not realising it was merely an image.) Ex 38:8 and Job 37:18 indicate that mirrors were made of bronze and clearly not as effective as glass mirrors today. Perhaps that is why Paul says ‘now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face’ (1 Cor 13:12), for matter how good the mirror is, what we see is only a reflection of the real thing; it is not the real thing itself.

This passage in 1 Cor 13 emphasises the primary importance of love in the life of the Christian (see also John 13:34-35, 1 John 2:10-11), but Paul reflects also (1 Cor 13:8-12)  that our understanding of God is indirect and incomplete in this present life, using the analogies of childhood and mirrors.The analogy of the mirror implies that our visibility of Christ currently is indirect. In other words, Paul is comparing the nature of looking in a mirror to the relationship we will enjoy with Jesus when we see Him “face to face.” What we currently know and experience of God is not the whole story. There is so much more to be revealed (see 1 John 3:1-2) We may not know everything now, but God knows us through and through (see Ps 139:1-6) and there is coming a day when the perishable shall be clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality (1 Cor 15:52-54) and God will dwell with us, removing all pain, tears, suffering and death. (Rev 21:1-5) One day we won’t mirrors to see God; we will be like Moses who spoke with God face to face. (Num 12:8) What a day that will be!

Last night’s family service was on the theme of ‘Mirrors’ and Mark devised a series of challenges for people to do using mirrors. They had to count the number of photographs in the corridor or in the main room, tell the time from the mirror, search for cuddly toys or sweets. It’s not as easy to do these things when you have to do everything backwards and can only use the mirror as your eyes…