Category: Christianity

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What do Christians hope for?

I want to write about Christian hope. What do we hope for? I suppose the obvious answer is “heaven” or “eternal life”.

When you think about heaven, what comes to mind?

Maybe you don’t think about it – God has it all under control so there’s no need to worry about it.

Perhaps you think of eternal rest, with no work.

Maybe you think of the caricature of playing harps on fluffy clouds.

The Bible has a great deal to say about heaven. In my experience most Christians have very little understanding of what the Bible teaches about heaven and therefore only a vague understanding of Christian hope.

Until comparatively recently I was well and truly numbered amongst those who had precious little understanding of our glorious hope.  All I knew was that there had to be something more than my poor understanding allowed for. My wife Kay and I both attended Melbourne Bible Institute in the late 60s. As I recall there was absolutely no teaching whatsoever about Christian hope whilst we were there. I’ve read and studied goodness knows how many books since then but none of them contained any clues that helped me expand on my rather poverty stricken notion of Christian hope — until . . . 

About fourteen years ago I read a brief article in a magazine by a Baptist theologian who lives in Sydney which piqued my interest. I wrote to him, asking if he could suggest a few books which would put flesh and bones on the article. He replied with several suggestions, I bought the books and read them, and the result has been the most profound spiritual renewal in my more than 50 years Christian pilgrimage. It has been a renewal with enormous implications for the way in which I live my life today.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to share something of what I have discovered about our glorious hope.

One of the first, and most surprising things I discovered, is that heaven is a two stage process! 

In John 14: 1-3 we read ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.’

I suspect most of us see this famous and much loved passage as a reference to our final destination, but I don’t believe it is.

The word translated “rooms” or “dwelling places” is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place, but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run. So these much loved words do not refer to our permanent abode.

In similar vein, Jesus’s words to the dying thief on the cross ‘today you will be with me in Paradise’ refer not to a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day.

For those who die in faith, before the final reawakening, the central promise is of being ‘with Jesus’ at once. ‘My desire is to depart’, wrote Paul, ‘and be with Christ, which is far better’.

If the present heaven is not our final destination, then what is? More on that later.

I discovered the massive importance of the resurrection of the body.

I think for a lot of Christians — perhaps for the vast majority of Christians — the resurrection of Jesus Christ means little more than ‘Christ is risen, that’s great, it means he really is divine, so my sins are forgiven, and I’m going to heaven when I die’. I guess I was like this, although very unwillingly — I knew there HAD to be more to it, but I was very fuzzy of what that ‘more’ might be.

I learned that at the second coming of Christ I will be given a new body, a gift of God’s grace and love. I learned that eternal life will be lived in a physical body.

I learned that in this present life I am a mere shadow of my future self. I will be given a new body the purpose of which will be to rule wisely over God’s New World. There will be work to do and I will relish doing it.

Theologians in the 12th and 13th centuries taught that the resurrection body will be identical with our earthly body but transfigured:

‘It will be immune from death and sorrows; it will be at the height of its powers, free from disease and deformity, and around 30 years old, the age at which Christ began his ministry. It will surpass anything we can imagine, even from the accounts of Christ’s appearances on earth after his own resurrection.’

If you want to read up on this, 1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection of the body. It is the longest discussion anywhere in Paul.

There are a couple of hymns that get this exactly right.

Oh how glorious and resplendent
fragile body, thou shalt be,
when endued with so much beauty, 
full of health, and strong, and free!
Full of vigour, full of pleasure,
that shall last eternally.

The other hymn is ‘For All the Saints’. The last three verses read:

The golden evening brightens in the west:
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest,
The peaceful calm of paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, alleluia!

But look! – there breaks a yet more glorious day;
Saints all-triumphant rise in bright array –
The king of glory passes on his way!
Alleluia, alleluia!

From earth’s wide bounds, from dawn to setting sun,
Through heaven’s gates to God the Three-in-One
They come, to sing the song on earth begun:
Alleluia, alleluia!

Then, to my great surprise, I came to see that heaven is a place on earth and ‘eternal life is life AFTER life after death’.

Revelation chapter 21 is the answer to the question I posed earlier — ‘If the present heaven is not our final destination, then what is?’ — the answer is the new earth that God will one day make.

It is not we who go to heaven, it is heaven that comes to earth; indeed it is the church itself, the heavenly Jerusalem that comes down to earth as the bride of Christ. Here is the final answer to the Lord’s prayer that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as in heaven.

Verse 4 of that great hymn ‘Crown Him With Many Crowns’, put it this way:

Crown him the Lord of peace–
his kingdom is at hand;
from pole to pole let warfare cease
and Christ rule every land!
A city stands on high,
his glory it displays,
and there the nations ‘Holy’ cry
in joyful hymns of praise.

I have made many more discoveries along the way, for instance, that the last judgement is something to look forward to, and that we shall rule with Christ, but perhaps the greatest discovery of all has been to come to understand that the way we live now, the life we have lived, we are living, and continue to live actually contributes to, is taken up and used in, the new creation.

For instance, in Revelation chapter 19, we read about the Marriage Supper of the Lamb

6 Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
‘Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
7 Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
8 it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

As Randy Alcorn, author of a superb book on Heaven writes  ‘The bride’s wedding dress is woven through her many acts of faithfulness while away from her bridegroom on the fallen Earth. Each prayer, each gift, each hour of fasting, each kindness to the needy, all of these are the threads that have been woven together into this wedding dress. The bride’s works have been empowered by the Spirit, and she has spent her life on Earth sewing her wedding dress for the day when she will be joined to her beloved bridegroom.’ I would want to add that much of what we have done in our daily work, our raising of children, our work in the community and so on should also be included.

Tom (N.T) Wright puts it this way: ‘What we do in the present — by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving our neighbour as ourself, raising our children, by being outposts of the Kingdom, by practising Kingdom values, by seeing where we live, work and volunteer as God’s mission field, by the ways we behave, by the values we incarnate, in our relationships, the contributions we make — all of this will last into God’s future.’

Miroslav Volf takes up this theme in writing ‘The noble products of human ingenuity will be cleansed from impurity, perfected and transfigured, to become part of God’s new creation.’ 

The famous missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin wrote ‘All who have committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labour was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed kingdom.’

Francis Schaeffer wrote ‘Contrary to what people say — that you can’t take anything with you — yes, you do take your work with you. It’s a biblical teaching, that what you do matters and will continue on into eternity — building houses, walls, and hiking paths and the whole of human existence.’

Let Tom Wright have the final say. ‘It is hugely important that each one of us, and the church as a whole recapture the biblical vision of the new heavens and the new earth. For so many Christians for so long, hope has simply meant pie in the sky when you die, or going to heaven. The biblical picture is not about what happens immediately after death, but about what happens after that again — life after life after death. Christianity is not about heaven and hell, it is about God making a new heaven and new earth and raising people to a new life some time long after their death to be part of that new world. Hope is a virtue, something that doesn’t come naturally, something you have to work at in the power of the Spirit. It means being so grasped by the vision of the new heavens and the new earth, based on the resurrection of Jesus that we teach to think hopefully in a world without hope all around us.’

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Judgement is good news!

Do you find watching the TV News depressing? I certainly do, and it often makes me angry.

* Deliberate political strategy of fear and hate
* Powerful men (never women) who sit in paneled offices and never have to suffer the consequences of their decisions
* Efforts to clamp down on press freedom
* The failure of governments worldwide to take climate change seriously — lest the powerful interests whose profits would be hit stop donating to their parties.
* The destruction of forests such as in the Amazon
* Land clearing that destroys animal habitats and puts species in danger of extinction
* The failure to provide in a compassionate way for people unable to find work.
* People in positions of power using power privilege and wealth to crush little people — such as whistleblowers.
* The annexation of one country by a much more powerful one
* So much lying, so much bowing to powerful interests
* The callous disregard of human life by terrorists

And all the perpetrators think they will get away with it, there will be no consequences for their actions.

One of the themes of the Bible that is hidden from us in plain sight is the theme of judgement. That there will be a great day of reckoning, a day when God, the righteous judge will come to set the world to rights. I recently finished reading through the whole bible — a year’s reading project, and I have been truly amazed at the prevalence of the theme of judgement throughout the Bible. Here’s a few examples.

The psalmist wrote:

‘he judges the world with righteousness;
he judges the peoples with uprightness’.

Judgement was part of the gospel presentation of the apostles. 

When Peter was speaking to the centurion Cornelius, his gospel summary included: ‘God raised Jesus on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.’

Paul to the Areopagus in Athens.

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

Judgement is good news! We are assured that those who are making themselves wealthy and fat by exploiting others will not get away with it. Those who have inflicted great injustices, perhaps even on you, will not get away with it. We can confidently leave revenge to God.

I was discussing this sermon with the minister of the church I attend, and he told me of a famous Yugoslavian theologian, Miroslav Volf, now at Yale, who said that as a young evangelical he used to look down on Old Testament cries for justice against the brutal — both individual and nations — until his people, Croatians, were terribly brutalised during the Croatian war for Independence, where up to 14,000 Croatians were killed. He said only the expectation of the Day that God would repay made it possible to let it go and not repay evil for evil.

Nature itself will rejoice on the day of judgement. 

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;|
the world and those who dwell in it!
Let the rivers clap their hands;
let the hills sing for joy together
before the Lord, for he comes
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.

The apostle Paul reminds us in a seriously ignored passage in Romans chapter 8 that the whole creation groans, waiting for judgement. Extinct animals, endangered animals, animals treated inhumanely, the victims of fish kills, the creation which is suffering because of climate change. 

Isaiah tells us that The trees of he field will clap their hands:

For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

All of nature itself will be put to rights when God comes to judge his world.

We shall be involved in the judgement — we shall judge the world, and judge angels — presumably cleansed of all bias! 

Paul writes: 

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?

Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 

And as if to reinforce his point, he adds 

‘Do you not know that we are to judge angels’. (1 Cor. 6).

Judgement is good news. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgement is a GOOD thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy, and the trees of the field to clap their hands. 

New Testament scholar Tom Wright writes: In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there will come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak and defenseless are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God MUST be a God of judgement.

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Joining God in his Mission

In reading through the Summer 2021 issue of the Australian Oikos magazine, I came across an excellent article by Alan Hirsch, a well known author, coach, advisor, consultant and mentor in the field of (and I’m struggling here!) of home churches, house churches, evangelism, and no doubt a lot more. He is the author of a number of books, including ‘The Forgotten Ways’. The article is in twelve parts, but what really struck me was part seven, which was for me an eye-opening and revolutionary insight into personal evangelism. With Alan’s permission, I have reproduced part seven below. 

I understand (from someone in our small group) that C.S. Lewis said the same sorts of things in ‘Mere Christianity’ a long time ago. I read ‘Mere Christianity’ as a very young Christian in the early sixties, but have no memory of it at all, other than that it was incredibly helpful at the time.

Here’s Alan’s article.

It is false to say that only Christians can experience God.

One of the most basic assumption of the incarnational missionary is to assume God is already involved in every person’s life and is calling them to himself through his Son. Our mindset should not be the prevelant one of taking God with us wherever we go. Instead our minset should be that we join God in His mission.

This means that the missionary God has been active a long time in a person’s life. Our primary job is to try to see where and how God has been working to and partner with him in bring people to redemption in Jesus.

Understanding that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27) and in the deepest possible way made for God, we can assume every human is motivated by spirituality and search for meaning. Even idolatry indicates people are searching for something beyond themselves. It is deformed spirituality to be sure, but it is spirituality nonetheless — and you can work with that. Recognise that behind many of the things not-yet-Christian people do lies a search for something else.  C.S. Lewis once noted that all our vices are virtues gone wrong. If we take this as a clue, we can develop new missionary eyes to see what God is up to in people’s lives. 

Let’s take a deeper look at this: Consider Las Vegas, the consummate sinner’s town. And it is that — a deeply broken place where people get really messed up. But can we put aside our moral misgivings and choose to look at the gambling dens with more missional eyes. We might ask, what is the person who is sitting at the slot machine really searching for? Perhaps it is the search for redemption but in the wrong place. It is the belief that to win the jackpot means to be be changed and transformed into a new life. This search might also be driven by a now-pathalogical need to take risks because life has lost its sense of real adventure. 

We can literally work our way through any type of event or activity in the following way.

GAMBLING
What is really being sought?  
• Redemption by luck or money
• Finding meaning in doing things
• Need for risk
How the Gospel addresses this issue\
• Hope
• Overcoming unhappiness
• Call to risk living adventurously and risk loving as a disciple

SPORTS EVENTS
What is really being sought?
• A cause to belong to
• A real cause that aims at changing the world
• Transcendent experience
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Real transcendent experience
• Community with team or fans
• Authentic community

PUBS
What is really being sought?
• Community
• Real but loving community
• Partner
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Highs without drugs
• Overcoming loneliness
• Non-exploitative relationships
• Fun or chilled time
• Lasting joy

DRUG TAKING
What is really being sought?
• Ecstatic experiences
• Encountering God
• Escaping from live
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Meaning and purpose
• Overcoming guilt and pain
• Forgiveness and healing

MOVIES
What is really being sought?
• Hearing the stories and myths
• Connection with the story that that shape life, makes sense of our stories
• Suspension of disbelief
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Reality, not fantasy
• Entertainment Escape
• Feeling again (laughing, crying etc.)
• Passion leading to compassion

We can trust that because of the way God has designed us, in the end human beings are always searching (albeit in false and idolatrous ways) for real meaning, authentic relationships, to love, and to be loved in return.

One more dimension of this that must be mentioned is that all people have religious experiences. It is false to say only Christians can experience God. Anyone looking at a sunset can experience an in-breaking of God-awareness. In The Color Purple, Celia recalls a time as a child walking with her mother past a field of violets when she felt that God was making a pass at her in the flowers. God is constantly ‘making a pass’ at us in everyday experience — we simply need to become much more aware of Him. People call these experience theophanies (God encounters), and our task at God’s sent people is to bring a meaningful interpretation to these experiences and point people to Jesus as the centre of the God-experience. 

Another way to look at this role of seeing ‘the virtue in the vice’ is to conceive of ourselves in terms of one of our deepest identities as disciples — namely, the priesthood of all believers. In his book ‘Untamed’ Alan Hirsch and his wife Deb suggest that unlocking this is one of the most potent things we can do to allow God to work through all of His people. A priest is essentially someone who mediates the knowledge of God. Our priestly role, therefore, is to introduce people to Jesus and Jesus to people. After that as far as we can, our role is to make sure it is a right understanding of Jesus we are mediating, and then step our of the way — let Jesus o his thing with people. He knows exactly how to deal with them. 

Let’s ask the Spirit to open our eyes to show us where He is at work all around us, and how He wants us to join Him in His mission.

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Why have a healing ministry?

Why have a healing ministry?

For me it’s all about the Kingdom of God. We pray ‘your Kingdom Come’. How? What will it look like when your Kingdom comes? It will be when ‘Your will is done on earth as in Heaven’. So what will it look like when God is running this show?

Well let’s look for a minute at this expression “the Kingdom of God”.

It is the expression Jesus used above all else to in relation to his ministry. He said at various times:

The Kingdom of God is at hand,
The Kingdom of God is upon you,
The Kingdom of God is near,
I must preach the good news of the Kingdom
Go and proclaim the Kingdom of God

In key places, Paul’s ministry is also summarized in terms of the Kingdom. The very last verse in Acts has Paul proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

He reminds the troublesome Corinthians ‘For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power’.

Have you ever noticed that there is a big hole in the great creeds of the church. Without exception they all say something like Jesus was ‘born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate’? What about the bit in the middle? What about the life of Jesus? What the creeds fail to mention, takes up the major part of all four gospels —  by my count at least 85%.

So what was going on in those three years of Jesus ministry? A recent book by one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars (N.T. Wright) puts it this way. He says ‘God was becoming King’. The title of the book which deals with this exact subject is ‘How God Became King’. 

Wright says: ‘The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator God, Israel’s God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus’s answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this show? If you want to know what the world would look like if God was running the show — look no further than the life of Jesus’.

At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, Satan was the one with authority. When Jesus was tempted, we read this (in Luke’s account): ‘And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours’.

At some stage during Jesus’s ministry (specifically when the seventy had been sent out — Luke 10:18) there was a regime change. Jesus said ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven’.

But at the end of Jesus’ ministry, after the resurrection, Jesus, in what we know as the Great Commission, says: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’.

During Jesus’s ministry and in particular through his death on the cross and resurrection, the powers were defeated, and God’s long promised kingdom was finally inaugurated.

So what does the Kingdom of God that was inaugurated through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus look like? What does it look like if God is running this show? Well, a read through the gospels tells us. 

It is an upside down Kingdom where the poor in spirit, mourners, the humble, those seeking righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, peacemakers and the persecuted are blessed.

It is a kingdom where those who care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner will inherit the kingdom.

It is a kingdom where fasting and giving are to be done in secret, where we are not to be judgmental, not to be fearful, to love our enemies and pray for them.

It is a kingdom where sinners are forgiven and set free.

It is a kingdom where Jesus shows that he has extraordinary authority over nature.

It is a kingdom where divisions of race, status and gender are eliminated.

And it is a Kingdom that is now, but not yet.

But overwhelmingly, when you skim through the gospels, it it a kingdom where damaged, broken people are made whole.

Where the deaf have their hearing restored, 
Where the blind are made to see, 
Where the dead are raised to life, 
Where the lame and crippled are healed, 
Where the demon possessed are delivered,
Where the paralyzed are healed, 
The fevered are cured,
The dumb are enabled to speak, 
The unclean are cleansed,
Where incomplete bodies are made complete, and 
Where sinners are forgiven and set free.

John’s gospel records the cry of Jesus the cross ‘It is finished’. This is usually interpreted as a bill being paid, or an account settled, so that our sins could be forgiven. But John’s point is that it is the completion of Jesus’s task, his vocation to inaugurate NEW creation. In Genesis we read: ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done . . . ‘ That creation, the creation in which we live, was and is corrupted by sin. On the cross, when Jesus cried ‘It is finished’, the work of inaugurating NEW creation, the work of inaugurating the Kingdom of God, the work Jesus had been going about for three years, was finished.

‘Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s Kingdom has been launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been defeated, the NEW creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers — that’s us — have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.’ 

And that includes healing the sick. In the Great Commisssion, as we have already noted, Jesus says: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. He goes on to say: ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age’.

And of course, one of the things he commanded his disciples to do was to heal the sick.

And that’s why every church should have a healing ministry.

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Christ is risen . . . so what?

There are 23 references to ‘resurrection’ or ‘raised’ in Acts, and only 3 references to ‘crucified’ (all of them ‘you crucified’) and none to the cross. I have long maintained that the balance between preaching the cross and the resurrection is woefully out of balance in most churches today. For many Christians, the resurrection means little more than ‘The resurrection proves that Jesus is who he said he is’. This is a message subtly reinforced by the lack of preaching on the resurrection. In many churches all you get is the annual interruption to the church’s preaching programme, in the form of just one sermon on the resurrection on Easter Day. The Anglican lectionary specifies a seven week Easter period. Oh how I wish our churches would give the resurrection at least seven weeks each year! The statistics above say something we need to listen to about the preaching priorities of the early apostles.

With the foregoing in mind, I thought I would try to detail as much as I can the consequence of the resurrection. I think I was more excited by Easter this year (2021) than I have ever been. This is possible due to a book I read recently (‘All Things New: Heaven, Earth and the Restoration of Everything you Love’ by John Eldredge) and one I am reading now (‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’ by Richard Hays). However it was Tom (N.T.) Wright’s book ‘Surprised by Hope’ which I read in 2008 which was the nearest thing to Paul’s blinding light on the road to Damascus that I expect to experience this side of eternity that really opened my eyes to the real significance of the resurrection. So here are the consequences of the resurrection as I understand them. I may have left some things out, and would be glad to to be corrected and further illuminated. 

The resurrection facilitates the forgiveness of sins, and freedom from condemnation (There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. Rom 8:1-2; And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses. Col. 2:15)

Through the resurrection, death has been defeated. (I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. John 11:25-26) 

Through the resurrection New Creation has been launched. I think this is the meaning of Jesus’s cry from the cross ‘it is finished’ (John 19:30). In Genesis 2:1-2, we read: ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done’. Tom Wright in ‘The Day the Revolution Began’ makes the point that this is the completion of Jesus’s vocation in parallel with the completion of creation itself in Genesis 2:2.

‘Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s Kingdom has been launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.’ Quoted from Tom Wright’s book ‘Surprised by Hope’.

The powers of evil have been defeated.(For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Eph 6:11-12; He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Col. 2:15). 

We are destined for eternal life, with new, healthy bodies, never to die again (1 Corinthians 15). The risen Jesus is the firstfruits. Just as we can look at the  firstfruits of a harvest to see a picture of what will follow, so the risen Jesus enables us to understand how we shall one day be. As the hymn ‘Light’s Abode: Celestial Salem’ puts it:

‘O how glorious and resplendent,
fragile body, shalt thou be,
when endued with so much beauty,
full of health and strong and free,
full of vigour, full of pleasure
that shall last eternally.’

Through the resurrection, we are given and expected to use power to defeat sin. (We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6:4) I think Romans 6 is one of the great neglected chapters of the Bible. In this chapter, Paul hammers home repeatedly that through the power of the resurrection, available to us right now, we have the power to walk in newness of life. 

The resurrection is the source of our hope, and is the message we should be prepared to give if our manner of life results in us being asked. (but in your hearts honour Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. 1 Peter 3:15). If I understand this correctly, our witness should be to the resurrection.

As a result of the resurrection, the church is created: ‘the church is not only the recipient of revelation (Ephesians 1:9) but also the singular medium of revelation to the whole creation, including the cosmic powers that still oppose God’s purposes (Ephesians 3:10, 6:10–20). (Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, p62). Read that short quote again. Do you know of a church anywhere carrying out this mission? You can read how the early church (for the first 300 years) carried out this mission in Rodney Stark’s book ‘The Rise of Christianity’.

As a result of the resurrection, God has given gifts to everyone who he has called (see the various gifts passages in the epistles, such as 1 Corinthians 12): ‘ministry is conceived as the work of the entire community, not of a specially designated class of spiritually gifted persons. The interplay of gifts in the church is designed to bring the community as a whole to full maturity, so that the church might ultimately stand unambiguously as “the body of Christ”, the complete embodiment of Christ in the world. The imagery of growth suggests that this visionary goal is not to be understood as a future instantaneous transformation (i.e., at the resurrection of the dead) but as the end result of a process already underway in the community.’ (Hays p63)

The consequences of the resurrection extend to the whole creation. It is about far, far more than saved souls going to heaven (indeed it is NOT about saved souls going to heaven). The animal kingdom will be transformed on the last day, and quite possibly the inanimate kingdom — ‘Let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth.’ (Psalm 96:12-13); ‘The mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’ (Isaiah 55:12); ‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.’ (Romans 8:18-23)

Thanks to the resurrection, there will be a final judgement, one in which God’s people will participate. Everyone who thinks they got away with it will find out that they didn’t. Final judgement is something to look forward to. Peter, speaking to the Roman Centurion Cornelius said ‘And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.’ (Acts 10:42). Paul, speaking to the Areopagus said ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. (Acts 17:30-31). Judgement is good news! Those who are making themselves wealthy and fat by exploiting others will not get away with it. Those who have inflicted great injustices, perhaps even on you, will not get away with it. We can confidently leave revenge to God. ‘Throughout the Bible, God’s coming judgement is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over’. (Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope)

Famous theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian, said that as a young evangelical he used to look down on Old Testament cries for justice against the brutal actions — of both individual and nations — until his people, Croatians, were terribly brutalised during the Croatian war for Independence, where up to 14,000 Croatians were killed. He said only the expectation of the Day that God would repay made it possible to let it go and not repay evil for evil.

Because of the resurrection, when Christ comes again ‘all things will be made new’. Matthew 19:28 says ‘in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ The Greek word paliggenesia used in Matthew 19:28 is translated ‘in the new world’ in the ESV, but more accurately ‘when all is made new’ in the Jerusalem Bible. 

Thanks to the resurrection, our daily work has eternal significance. In 1 Corinthians 15:58, at the conclusion of the great chapter on the resurrection of the body, Paul writes ‘Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.’ We are inclined to think that the expression ‘in the Lord’ refers only to ‘church work’, but Paul knew of no such concept. All the work of Christians (paid, volunteer, in the home etc.) is done ‘in the Lord’, just as we are ‘in Christ’ all the time, not just when we are doing ‘church work’. Thus Paul is saying our work has eternal significance. Francis Schaeffer once wrote: ‘Contrary to what people say — that you can’t take anything with you — yes, you do take your work with you. It’s a biblical teaching, that what you do matters and will continue on into eternity — building houses, walls, and hiking paths and the whole of human existence. You live with energy.

Tom Wright in ‘Surprised by Hope’ writes ‘What you do with your body in the present — by painting, preaching, singing sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbour as yourself — will last into God’s future’. 

And Miroslav Volf writes: ‘the noble products of human ingenuity will be cleansed from impurity, perfected and transfigured, to become part of God’s new creation.’ It is easy to see the profound effect this view could have on our daily work. The belief that one’s work can have eternal significance in its contribution to humankind and God’s creation is transformative. 

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Who am I in Christ?

I regularly read about the importance of knowing who we are ‘in Christ’. I thought therefore I would list as many of the blessings  that Christians enjoy through being in Christ. It seems like an almost endless list, and I would welcome any comments, especially things that I have missed. 

There is one crucial rider to all that I have written below, and it is that virtually every one of the blessings mentioned below is plural, and I have changed them to singular, so they should pretty much all read ‘I, along with all God’s people . . . ’ 

A book could be written (and many have been) about each one of these privileges that have accrued to God’s people as a result of being adopted into God’s family. I have decided to compile the list below mostly without comment. So here’s the list.

I am ‘in Christ’.  I like a friend’s take on this. Look at it like being in an aeroplane — everything that happens to the plane happens to me.

I am not under condemnation — I am delivered from it. (Romans 8:1)

I am adopted as a member of God’s family.  (Ro. 8:15, 23, Gal. 4:5, Eph. 1:5)

I am a citizen of the Kingdom of God — my citizenship is (kept safe for me) in heaven. (Philippians 3:20)

I am a member of the body of Christ. (1 Cor. 12:12-31)

I am a living stone, being built into a living, holy temple (the temple is where God dwells), being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. From 1 Peter 2 ‘you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’. (1 Peter 2:4-10)

I am a member of the royal priesthood. This means I am a ‘blesser’, called to bless. (I Peter 3:9, Numbers 6:22-27, 1 Peter 2:9)

I have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 1:3)

I was chosen before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4)

I have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of my trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon me, in all wisdom and insight. (Ephesians 1:7)

I have been sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of my inheritance until I acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. ‘Sealed for the day of redemption’. (Ephesians 1:13)

I have access to the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 1:20)

I am his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. (Ephesians 2:10)

I have have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:18)

I am a member of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:19, 1 Tim. 3:15)

In Christ Jesus our Lord, I have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. (Ephesians 3:12)

I am light in the Lord. (Eph. 5:8)

I am an heir of God and a fellow heir with Christ. Our inheritance is the whole renewed, restored creation. (Romans 8:17)

I am called to suffer with Christ in order that I might also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:17)

My old self was crucified with Christ, and I am no longer enslaved to sin — I have been set free from sin. I walk on resurrection ground. (Romans 6:7-8)

When I die, I will go to be with Christ, awaiting the final resurrection. (John 14:2, Luke 23:39-43)

I am, along with all God’s people, seated (now) in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:6)

Along with God’s people, I have (perfect tense — past action, current implications) already come ‘to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel’. (Hebrew 12:22-24)

I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses (who are they?). (Hebrews 12:1)

My labour in the Lord (everything I do, not just ‘church work’) is not in vain. All my work that is in keeping with God’s purposes is therefore done in cooperation with God. The noble products of human ingenuity will be cleansed from impurity, perfected and transfigured, to become part of God’s new creation. So I am contributing to new creation. My thanks to Miroslav Volf and Tom Wright for this understanding of work. (1 Corinthians 15:58)

At the final resurrection, I will be raised with a new body, to be part of the new heavens and the new earth. (all of 1 Corinthians 15)

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Apostolic preaching . . . and preaching today

Recently in the course of my daily bible reading, I read Acts chapter 17. I was struck by what Paul and Silas in Thessalonica and Athens were preaching about.

The first hint is in verse 7, where they were accused of acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. This suggests to me that they were preaching about the Kingdom of God.

Then in Athens, in the famous address to the Areopagus, as his hearers were trying to work out what Paul was talking about, Luke records that ‘Others said “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” — because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection’.

Lastly, in verse 30, Paul asserts that ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’.

So Paul was speaking about the Kingdom of God, the resurrection and the final judgement. And note that this preaching was not to the church, but to outsiders, to the unconverted if you like.

I have a very interesting book entitled ‘To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church’s Urgent Question’, by David Norrington.

The author argues that all preaching in The Acts of the Apostles was delivered to outsiders, as part of the evangelistic endeavour, and yes, he does deal effectively with possible exceptions. In New Testament times spiritual growth was achieved not by the use of the sermon, but by a variety of other means, all designed to help produce mature Christians in mature Christian communities. There is nothing to suggest that these means included the regular sermon. He calls for the abandonment of the regular sermon delivered to believers, and for it to be used as it was in Acts — to unbelievers in an evangelistic setting.

He makes the obvious point that: ‘while New Testament and extra-biblical records of these early meetings are sketchy, it is quite clear that first century believers were expected to be fully involved in all of the activities of the church. The practice of small-scale meetings in homes was ideally suited for such one-another ministry. One simply cannot find any support, either in the New Testament or in early church history for today’s professional clergy and specialized church buildings’.

By contrast, the ubiquitous sermon, delivered by a trained clergyman in a specialized church building most often acts as a deskilling agent. ‘By using the regular sermon the preacher proclaims each week, not in words, but in the clearest manner possible, that, be the congregation ever so gifted, there is present, for that period, one who is more gifted and all must attend in silence upon him (less often her). . . Sadly, competent preachers may create dependence more effectively than incompetent ones. This means, ironically, that in the long run competent sermons may be more damaging than indifferent ones!’

And then, these two devastating paragraphs, sheeted home to the practice of preaching: ‘Yet today, in spite of exceptions, the individual Christian is often excessively busy and unused to reflection, unskilled in prayer, more concerned with doing than becoming, lacking in understanding of the relevance of the faith to nearly all aspects of life, ignorant of the past, anti-intellectual, materialistic, welded to the secular thought of the day, timid in the face of social and political injustice, barely capable even of recognizing the enemies of God (or his friends), lacking in steady and forgiving love and deficient in the skills required to detect nonsense—a living monument denying the assertion of Jesus that ‘I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.’ (John 10: 10 RV). As sociologist Jacques Ellul observes, far from being a model of freedom, most Christians are models of mediocre bondage, simultaneously the slaves of the latest fad and the ecclesiastical and humanistic traditions in which they were reared. The disastrous consequence is that the non-Christian world experiences little Christian influence in any area of thought and has little, if any, understanding of the essence of biblical Christianity.

Christianity is thus inexorably pushed to the margins of society. The end-product is social decay, a rise of unbelief, an increase in cults and non-Christian religions, depression and failure, among Christians, a tarnished reputation for the church as a whole and the wrath and the judgment of God.

And yet, there are even those who assert that preaching has a sacramental quality about it. ‘Preaching is not just a word about Christ; it is a word of Christ’. Uhh? ‘We are asked to believe that when the clergyman (our modern professional replacement for the plurality of elders in the New Testament church) in the dedicated church building (as opposed to in homes as was the practice in New Testament times) mounts the pulpit (that elevated fixture introduced in the 3rd century) and addresses a passive audience (who were not passive in the New Testament) or “laity” (a designation added long after New Testament times) in the pews (13th century addition) via the regular sermon (which did not exist in New Testament practice) then and only then is the event especially pleasing to God, who responds with a special, if not unique channel of his grace.’

I maintain, therefore, that sermons today should be delivered to the same sort of audience as they were in the first century — to unbelievers in an evangelistic context — and NOT to believers in a church setting.

Respected New Testament scholar Richard Hays, in ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’ affirms that the growth to maturity of the church has nothing to do with sermons. He puts it as well as anyone when he writes ‘Ephesians 4:1–5:20 presents a visionary description of the character of the reconciled community. The diverse gifts in the church have as their common purpose “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and…to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:12–13). Thus, as in 1 Corinthians 12, ministry is conceived as the work of the entire community, not of a specially designated class of spiritually gifted persons. The interplay of gifts in the church is designed to bring the community as a whole to full maturity, so that the church might ultimately stand unambiguously as “the body of Christ,” the complete embodiment of Christ in the world.’