Shards Of Glass And The Supremacy Of Christ

If you are honest, is there anything in your life that is exactly how you want it to be? Is your job perfect? Your home life? Your body? Your finances? Relationships?

We try so hard to shape the world around us to fit the picture of how we think things should be. We do our best to improve ourselves in every sphere of life. Exercise, setting goals, making plans, working hard, being deliberate in our interactions with others and yet nothing seems to work out as it should. Things are just off, no matter what we do.

The Bible says that the world in which we live is broken. I like to picture the whole of creation as a snowglobe. Stay with me here, maybe it will be a helpful picture for you too. Originally the snow globe was beautiful, depicting a stunning scene with tiny little characters populating a picturesque village. Nearby a forest decorates the foothills of a mountain from which rainwater cascades to fill a lake teeming with life and reflecting the sun which illuminates the whole globe.

A beautiful scene. Until it gets dropped and the whole thing shatters. Now those characters are misshapen, the LED sun shines down glaringly and a large chunk of the mountain has cracked and fallen over to crush half the village and the forest. The entire scene is littered with micro-shards of glass from the dome that once protected it. Now that snowglobe is more a danger than a decoration.

That’s the world in which we live. Everything is terribly, terribly broken. We strive so hard to get somewhere, to be someone, to shape our surroundings, only to discover that the dream job isn’t all it appeared to be. The home you tried to build experiences tension and misplaced hopes. Your body decays a little more each day and the things you thought would bring you some level of contentment only leave you wanting more.

The people around us are prone to hurt, disappoint, or betray us, no matter how good their intentions. Worse, we do the same to others and there’s nothing we can do about it. We soon realise that if we look for lasting happiness among our misshapen fellows, we’ll never find it. So what can we do? Maybe having status will make us happy, or power, or wealth, or respect from others, or nurturing children who will love us, or gadgets, or retreating to some sort of fantasy world in our minds or on our screens.

To use the snowglobe analogy, we reach out our broken hands to clasp for shards of broken glass, which will only serve to further break us.

We need the creator of our little globe to come and fix things which is exactly what we see in the Gospel. Colossians 1:15-23 tells us that everything that was created was made by Jesus and for Jesus, who holds all things together and is the image of the invisible God. Our brokenness, our sinful and evil behaviour has alienated us from God, indeed, made an enemy of Him. But God was pleased to reconcile all things to Himself through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross that we might be presented as holy in His sight, free of blemish and accusation.

It’s like having a washing machine that breaks down. The machine has no ability to fix itself, it needs a qualified representative of the manufacturer to come and fix it. There is nothing in our shattered snowglobe which can repair the damage, or provide the satisfaction that its broken denizens desire. Only someone outside of that brokenness can come and fix it, and us.

So are your hands clinging on to shards of glass in the hopes of fixing your misshapen surroundings and life, or are they reaching for the Creator?

Jim Carey once said that he hoped that everyone would become rich and famous because then it would show them that wealth and status are not the answer. We were made by Jesus, for Jesus. It’s only in Him that we will ever find the satisfaction that our souls crave and it’s only through Him and His redemptive work on the cross that we can be presented to God the Father as holy and blameless.

Jesus is before all things, that is He is the preeminent one, the supreme one. There is nothing greater than Jesus who to know is to love, and to love is to long for, and to long for is to find, and to find is to know and then to love even more. On it goes.

Dear reader, what are you clinging on to today, what are you reaching for? Shards of glass which will only leave you bleeding, hurt and disillusioned? Why bleed when Jesus has already bled for you? Why search for treasure among the created when the Creator designed you to find pleasure in Him alone?

For now we walk through the shattered snowglobe. Every step takes us through daggers of glass and it hurts. My heart yearns to make us see (myself included) that scooping up and closing our fists on the things of this world will only be detrimental and disappointing. If only we could say with Paul

“But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him.”

Phil 3:7-9