Read through the Bible in one year with us. Below are links to the daily readings. Or, to listen to the verses care of the Daily Audio Bible.
There
is an ancient Roman god whose namesake carries the first month of our
year. He is called Janus.
Perhaps you have seen his depiction before?
Janus was the double-faced (sometimes
quadruple-faced) “deity” locked in a gaze perpetually and
simultaneously looking
backward and forward. He was the
gatekeeper, the guardian of beginnings and endings, seer of the past
and the
future. His image was set in doors,
portals and archways all over the Roman world, none of which was more
prominent
than the doors of his temple in the Roman Forum ritually opened in
times of war
and closed in (rare) times of peace. Janus
was thought to govern during times of transition such as at marriage,
birth,
and death. But there was a nasty side to
Janus as well; to be called Janus-faced was to be accused of duplicity
and
double-dealing as Shakespeare alluded, “Now,
by two-headed Janus / Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time” (Merchant
of Venice, Act i, Sc.1.)
I always felt “pity” for Janus, in a
figurative
sense—if pity is the right word. He was
a slave to his own dominion—locked in a double-existence—unable to
relax his
stare enough to focus upon or enjoy the present. He
was in a prison of discontent looking out though
the door’s peep-hole, yet never “being” in the room in which he found
himself.
By glorious contrast to the invented deities
of man’s
religions stands the Lord Jesus Christ—the Alpha and the Omega, the
Beginning
and the End, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
He is Lord over time, not subject to time,
but amazingly He stepped into time as to make Himself known to us in a
way that
we could understand. He is sovereign
over happenings, not subject to them or merely gazing at them from a
marbly,
mute and catatonic state. Jesus is not a
gatekeeper merely; He is the Gate, the Door.
He is not bound merely to the past and future; He brings the
past and
the future into the knowable present—full of color and sensation and
relationship.
The
reason this mute demon called Janus comes to mind this January is fully
connected to our beginnings and endings as a church family this January
2010
marked by our 20th anniversary as a local church. Unhesitatingly, it is not the “two-headed
Janus” who “frames” our space or time governing over our beginnings and
endings
here in the 2010th year of our Lord or presiding over our 20th
anniversary as Fellowship Bible Church of Siloam Springs.
Nor is it some cold doctrine of Fate that
steers the flow of time or space. Nor it
is we ourselves who guard the threshold of this new year or guide our
own
transitions. It is our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ who frames, governs, presides, steers, guards, and guides
us—not
in marble, but in glory—the true and living Head of the church. “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam 7:12). Hallelujah!
