John 1:1-18 | The movement from domestication to revelation

I believe I was a high school sophomore when Joan Osborne’s song One of us became a chart topping hit. In the song the composer, Eric Bazilian, tries to deal with various aspects of belief in God by asking questions and inviting the listener to consider how they might relate to God. The song’s intro begins with a serious contemplative question that echoes the deepest yearnings that a lot of people had about what they would like to be set clear about God as the verse goes:

“If God had a name, what would it be

And would you call it to his face

If you were faced with him in all his glory[1]”

That verse somehow got stuck to my head from that point on, in spite of the irony that it was also during that time that I started to underwent my local church’s discipleship program. And it wasn’t until a few years following my graduation from college, after years of staying away from my community of faith that I came to realize that the answer to the question posed in the song’s verse is a unanimous: “yes,” because Scripture testifies that truth in the person of Jesus Christ.

Ecclesiastes 12:1.13-14| Time will come…

Life is full of certainties. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 explains: “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Such a statement is true for most of us. Here are some things that I believe is certain: the first is change, as the all too familiar saying goes, ‘the only thing constant is change.’; the future, precisely because time is linear thus it only moves in one direction – forward; growing up and growing old, an exception to this process would make us abnormal; the inevitability and certainty of death, which for some of us it would either be sooner or later.

It is with the grasp of such certainties of life that the author of our passage wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes.