the Story of God: Acts V - VII

Act V: The Advance of the Kingdom

On the heels of the resurrection of Jesus came the emergence of the church as a “kingdom of God” movement. The phrase “kingdom of God”, remember, meant the conclusion of Israel’s exile and the restoration of Israel, which necessarily involved the overthrow of the pagan empires, the vindication of Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of YHWH to Zion to judge and to save, and the enthronement of the Davidic King, the Messiah, at God’s right hand. In the midst of all this was the hope of the renewal of the entire cosmos, the flooding of the world with God’s justice and peace. The phrase “kingdom of God” didn’t denote some sort of existential, private, Gnostic experience; it wasn’t about any sort of personal piety and communion with God; it wasn’t even merely about God’s “rule” in our individual lives and churches. Rather, the kingdom of God was and is about the public, historical events that have come to bear upon the whole world. The church proclaimed the arrival of the kingdom of God, and it did so in a world where Israel remained in exile, where the Temple remained standing, where the pagans still lorded over the Jews with intimidation and force, a world where evil, unfairness, pain, and death still flourished, and even seemed to prosper.

It looks like cognitive dissonance: the people had hoped in something so strongly that when all the evidence ran contrary to their hopes, rather than admitting confusion at best and delusion at worst, they closed their eyes and clasped their hands over their ears and shouted as loud as they could muster, “Kingdom of God! Kingdom of God!”, as if to drown out the incessant ramblings of disapproving evidence. Perhaps the disciples invented the whole resurrection story and “paid off” witnesses and tried to ignore the obvious political ramifications of Israel remaining in dire straits? Or, perhaps, the church reconfigured the entire phrase “kingdom of God” to mean something else, so that instead of being about demonstrative, public, and shocking events, the phrase came to denote not a political state-of-affairs but a personal, private, and spiritual state-of-things. Christ-mysticism, and much of modern evangelical Christianity, abounds at this point. But there is a better understanding of why the church proclaimed the kingdom of God despite the apparent failure of kingdom expectations.

In 1 Corinthians 15 we find the first written exhibition of kingdom-theology within the church. This theology centers on Jesus’ resurrection, and the Apostle Paul writes that the Jewish hope would be realized fully in the future following its decisive inauguration in Jesus. Thus the coming of the kingdom, the Jewish hope, wouldn’t come all at once but rather in two stages: first, the resurrection of Jesus and then the resurrection of everybody else at the Consummation, when God would complete what He started in the cross and resurrection. The Anointed One was raised from death’s slumber and is the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep in death. For since death entered this world by a man, it took another man to make the resurrection of the dead our new reality. Look at it this way: through Adam all of us die, but through the Anointed One all of us can live again. But this is how it will happen: the Anointed’s awakening is the firstfruits. It will be followed by the resurrection of all those who belong to Him at His coming, and then the end will come. After He has conquered His enemies and shut down every rule and authority vying for power, He will hand over the Kingdom to God, the Father of all that is. And He must reign as King until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last hostile power to be destroyed is death itself… Then, when all creation has taken its rightful place beneath God’s sovereign reign, the Son will follow, subject to the Father who exalted Him over all created things; then God will be God over all. (1 Cor 15.20-26, 28  The Voice)

This template of the kingdom dominated the Christian understanding of Jesus and the kingdom of God, and this framework informed their behaviors, thoughts, evangelism, and narrative realities. They lived as if the kingdom of God had indeed come, and they anticipated in word and deed, in life and death, in symbol and story, the future and full realization of God’s kingdom. The coming of the kingdom came in a manner that first-century Jews didn’t expect. The Jews expected that all of the dead would be raised when the kingdom came; but, shockingly, and against all Jewish presuppositions, one man had been resurrected in the middle of time, and everyone else would be resurrected at the end of time. If the kingdom has indeed come, how do we make sense of all those classic Jewish hopes in light of Jesus?

The Hope for the Overthrow of the Pagan Nations. How could this possibly have come to pass when Rome still ruled over Israel? The Christians pointed to the cross. On the cross, all the evil in the world, in all its shapes and sizes (societal evil and personal evil, political evil and religious evil, and the supra-natural evil to top it all off) climaxed and crucified God, and in that act, evil’s power was exhausted, defeated, and dismantled; thus Jesus shook himself free of the chains of death and rose from the grave. The early Christians understood the greatest oppressive power not to be pagan empires (though they had a lot to say about them, not least that they, too, would be judged by Jesus and brought to subjection in due time); rather, the greatest oppressive power was that of sin. Jesus bore on his shoulders all the evil of the world, suffered under its blows, was murdered by it, and thus he bled it of its power. Evil, in the execution of God, found itself executed. The cross isn’t just about the atonement and forgiveness of sins, as Paul makes clear in Colossians 2.13-15: And when you were dead in transgression and swathed in its sinful nature, it was God who brought us to life with Him, forgave all our sins, and eliminated the massive debt we incurred by the law that stood against us. He took it all away; He nailed it to the cross. The atonement is remarkable! But that’s not all. He disarmed those who once ruled over us—those who had overpowered us. Like captives of war, He put them on display to the world to show His victory over them by means of the cross. Jesus’ death on the cross was a sacrifice, an offering, trumping all the sacrifices and offerings ever made in the Temple; and through his sacrifice, forgiveness of sins was made readily available to all without having access to the brick-and-mortar Temple. The day that Ezekiel and Jeremiah spoke of, the day of the renewing of the covenant and the forgiveness of sins, had come principally through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pagan empires still existed, but Christians claimed that Jesus was Lord over against them. “Lord” isn’t a proper name; it’s more like a title. It’s the title that Caesar himself claimed; the “Lord” was the King, and Caesar claimed to be “Lord” and “Savior” of the world, but Christians said, “No, Jesus is Lord and Savior of the world!” No wonder they were often seen as being subversive to the government.

The Vindication of Israel. The vindication of Israel is about the vindication of “true Israel,” and “true Israel” is comprised of those who put their loyalty and allegiance in Messiah. The manifestation of this vindication of Israel is seen chiefly in how all of the Christians fled the city of Jerusalem when the Romans came near, and thus they were spared from the awful catastrophe of the city’s fall. The Roman destruction of Jerusalem and her temple was a judgment by God against the Jewish peoples’ rebellion and disobedience in their failure to submit to God’s Son. This historical vindication of the people of God serves as a signpost to the future eschatological vindication of God’s people: when Jesus appears to execute judgment at the end of the age, his people will be vindicated above their oppressors, and God’s people will have a role to play in the future judgment of the world.

The Rebuilding of the Temple. Jesus didn’t rebuild the Temple into the splendorous blueprint spoken of by the post-exilic prophets. All he really did was render it ineffective for a few hours! Yet the early Christians understood that the Temple’s identity was central in the manner in which Jesus rebuilt it. The Temple, after all, was the place where Heaven and Earth met, the place where YHWH dwelt among mortals. A secondary function is that it was where one could find forgiveness of sins. And so we have, integral to understanding the Temple precisely as the Temple, two key functions, and these two functions (the dwelling place of God and the place where forgiveness of sins is to be found) are what make the Temple the Temple. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, the renewal of the covenant took place, and forgiveness of sins became available to all. The Temple no longer held its prized function of distributing forgiveness, and thus was “de:templed”. This de:templing took another step forward as Christians, embracing the reality of the fulfillment of Jeremiah and Ezekiel’s prophecies, understood that YHWH no longer dwelt in the brick-and-mortar Temple, but that He dwelt with his people, and His Spirit was within them. The Temple had been the place where Heaven and Earth met by virtue of being where YHWH (of Heaven) dwelt (on Earth). Now YHWH dwells within His covenant people, and those who put their faith in Jesus and repent of their sins find themselves indwelled by God’s Spirit, purified from sin, and are made “New Creations.” Thus the two functions which make the Temple the Temple have been realigned around Messiah: the dwelling place of God is no longer constrained to the Temple Mount, and forgiveness of sins and a clean heart isn’t found in atoning sacrifices year-after-year but in the once-for-all and wholly-effective sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The Apostle Paul writes, For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people.’ (2 Cor 6.16; cf. 1 Cor 3.16-17; 6.19; Eph 2.21) By virtue of covenant renewal, the functions of the Temple haven’t been discarded but realigned. The result is that the physical temple became just another building in Jerusalem, despite all its praise and glory. That this was the case became evident in A.D. 70 when the Romans ransacked it and lit it ablaze, decimating it into a pile of molten metal and scorched stone.

The Enthronement of the Davidic King. Jesus was hailed, from the very beginning of the church, as “Lord.” The title “Lord” designated the person in charge, the ruling monarch, the one with all the authority. The Roman emperors claimed this title, but their titles were mere parodies and shams. Jesus is the world’s true and only “Lord.” He is the King, and he rules over the entire world; he doesn’t just rule over the church (as isolations pretend to be the case) but he rules over the pagan nations, societies, organizations, and infrastructures as well. The Ascension of Jesus in Acts 1 isn’t about Jesus “going back to be with God”; it’s about him being enthroned, taking the rightful place of Messiah, embodying and fulfilling Psalm 2, which is all about how Messiah rules over the nations. The very language of “Ascension” is infused with royal overtones; when people in the Greco-Roman world heard this word, they would’ve immediately thought of Caesar. When a new emperor took the throne, he “ascended” to it. That this is the meaning behind the Ascension is Acts 1 is emphasized by Stephen’s vision in Acts 6.56: ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’

The Return from Exile. The Jewish people expected that when Messiah came, he would lead the great military battle against her enemies and exalt the Jews to their rightful place as co-regents over all the pagans. Yet following Jesus’ death and resurrection, Israel was not liberated; she still bowed down underneath the weight of her Roman oppressors. Within the Christian tradition we find that restoration, liberation, and the end of exile has already happened, except this time it isn’t focused on liberation from oppressive pagan nations (such as the Romans) but, rather, exilic return is focused on the greatest enemy, the original enemy, the enemy that enslaves both Jews and Greeks: evil, and its greatest weapon, that of Death. All of Israel’s geographical exiles point to the greatest exile of them all: exile from the Garden of Eden. The return from this ultimate exile takes place in two stages. In the first stage, return from exile involves freedom from enslavement to sin and the forgiveness of sins. The exile from communion with God as seen in the Garden is extinguished, and now communion with God is restored, at least in part: as it was in the Garden, so it is in the present time for those who are in Messiah Jesus, but even this communion is a shadow of what it will be when “God is All and In All”. Jeremiah 31 speaks candidly of this: ‘Look!’ [God says], ‘the days are coming when I will bring about a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors long ago when I took them by the hand and led them out of slavery in Egypt. They did not remain faithful to that covenant—even though I loved and cared for them as a husband. This is the kind of new covenant I will make with the people of Israel when those days [of judgment] are over. I will put My law within them. I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will people have to teach each other or encourage their family members and say, “You must know God.” For all of them will know Me intimately themselves—from the least to the greatest of society. I will be merciful when they fail and forgive their wrongs. I will never call to mind or mention their sins again.’ (vv. 31-34) This return from exile, this restoration of communion with God, takes place in two stages; a day is yet coming when the return from exile will be completed. Death will be destroyed and God’s good creation will be restored. Expelled from the Garden and then ransomed back, mankind will experience full return from exile: mankind will walk again in the Garden, fulfilling their destinies as God’s image-bearers, dwelling in harmony with God, one another, and with creation for all eternity.

The Renewal of All Things (or New Creation). Arching overtop all these Jewish expectations is the greatest of them all: the renewal of the cosmos, and within that not least God’s prized image-bearing creatures. Again we have a two-part process. New Creation has within it the benchmark of the resurrection of the dead; with Jesus’ resurrection, the message is clear: new creation has taken place. A simple look around the world reveals that this kingdom has yet to be fully implemented and realized. But resurrection has taken place, and those who partake in Jesus’ death and resurrection partake in his resurrection. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 6.1b-4, Is it good to persist in a life of sin so that grace may multiply even more? Absolutely not! How can we die to a life where sin ruled over us and then invite sin back into our lives? Did someone forget to tell you that when we were initiated into Jesus the Anointed through baptism’s washing, we entered into His death? Therefore, we were buried with Him through this baptism into death so that just as God the Father, in all His glory, resurrected the Anointed One, we, too, might walk confidently out of the grave into a new life. To put it another way: if we have been united with Him to share in a death like His, don’t you understand that we will also share in His resurrection? We know this: whatever we used to be with our old sinful ways has been nailed to His cross. So our entire record of sin has been canceled, and we no longer have to bow down to sin’s power. This is why The Apostle Paul can declare in 2 Corinthians 5.17, Therefore, if anyone is united with the Anointed One, that person is a new creation. The old life is gone—and see—a new life has begun! New Creation has arrived in the present precisely in renewed human beings. Any understanding of salvation that focuses solely upon a wicked person escaping hell and gaining entrance into heaven fails to take into account that salvation involves a renewal of the human person that is implemented in the present and fully completed in the future. This “Stage 2” of New Creation will involve all God’s people, all those within His covenant family, and all those who have put their faith in Messiah Jesus will be given new physical bodies in which to dwell in a new heavens and a new earth. Revelation 21-22 prophecies the eventual full recreation of the cosmos, the completion of New Creation.

All of these themes of the kingdom of God—the defeat of evil and the vindication of God’s people, the rebuilding of the Temple and the enthronement of the Davidic King with YHWH, the return from exile and the promise of New Creation—aren’t thrown out by Christians but, rather, reworked around the shocking and surprising death and resurrection of Jesus. His death and resurrection is the fulfillment of scripture: this isn’t to say that one can flip through the Old Testament and find a bunch of prophecies pointing to Jesus (though assuredly this can be done); rather, it means that what happened in Jesus of Nazareth, specifically in the death and resurrection of this Jeremiah-esque prophet, is the climax and goal of what the covenant has been pointing to all along. God made His covenant with Abraham, promising a family that will be as innumerous as the stars in the skies, and this family is the family of God in Messiah Jesus. God made His covenant with Abraham for the purpose of dealing with evil and reclaiming His cosmos, for the purpose of bringing healing and justice to the world. In Jesus God dealt with evil, and Jesus is currently reclaiming the cosmos and will decisively eliminate evil in the future. He will remake the heavens and the earth and the most prized component of His creation, His image-bearers, in the resurrection of the dead. What God had said He would do He has begun, and He will bring it to completion.

The church, comprised of those who are members of God’s covenant by virtue of their faith in Christ, exists between Easter and Consummation. Isolationists claim that the church’s best bet for surviving in this present evil age is to form our own little communities and “wait out” the prevalent evil world, praying for God’s kingdom to come so we can finally escape. “To hell with everyone else!” isolationists proclaim (and they don’t mean it metaphorically). Progressivists claim that since new creation has been inaugurated, it’s now the church’s job, as God’s priests and image-bearers, to fully implement the kingdom. God’s done his part in the resurrection of Jesus, and now the church must do its part in finishing the job. Both these polar perversions of the church’s role in the world are brought into focus with a church that declares God’s consummation will take a future and further act of God, but that doesn’t mean that the church shouldn’t be pursuing peace, love, and justice. The church’s mission, to put it succinctly, is to live by the gospel, proclaim the gospel, and empowered by the Spirit of Christ, to “go forth and disciple the nations.” The Bible teaches that Christ’s kingdom will grow (much like a mustard seed or leaven through dough) until it fills the whole earth. This growth is gradual, and it’s rough, but it’s an uphill movement. The gospel will be victorious, Christ’s kingdom will fill the earth, and the world will be a mightily different place prior to Jesus’ return in judgment on the world. The church has an active role to play in this drama, preaching the gospel in word and deed, and making room for the Spirit to bring people from all tribes, nations, and tongues to repentance and faith in Christ.

The gospel, it must be noted, is not an ordo salutis, an “order of salvation” about how we get to heaven when we die. Rather, it’s a declaration about Jesus: Jesus, the crucified and risen King, is Lord. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar in whatever form he may take (be it political empires, consumerist corporations, or money, sex, and power) is not Lord. The church proclaims the gospel, calling people to repent of their idolatry and rebellion and to submit themselves to their true King. People aren’t merely “invited” by the gospel; they are summoned by the gospel, and to respond inappropriately is to the demise of the human creature. The church is to declare that the creating and living God, YHWH, has acted historically and decisively in Jesus of Nazareth, and He is now calling all people to account and bringing everything to book. The church announces the news of the Kingdom of God, preaching that evil has been defeated, exile is over, restoration has come and is coming, that redemption and salvation are at hand. The church is to do this not only through word but also through deed, in signs and symbols, through the God-given sacraments, and especially through holy living (which is in and of itself a sign, a symbol, and a sacrament). The church is to declare that there is a new King in town and a new future for the cosmos. This message involves proclaiming the Creator’s grace, mercy, and love; it involves forgiving and being forgiven; it involves striving after those things that make for peace and justice on a global, societal, and personal level. The message must show the Narrow Way that leads to “life everlasting”, and the church must also show how the Wider Way leads to complete and utter destruction: those who embrace Jesus in faith and repentance will become members of God’s covenant people, partakers of the Abrahamic promise, renewed image-bearers; but those who persist in their rebellion, in their dehumanization, those who refuse to be what God demands they be, those who love themselves rather than God, who love darkness rather than light, who love sin rather than righteousness, these people will sleep with the Prom Date they’re courting: a mouthful of worms and a blanket of fire. Those who reject Christ will suffer the same fate as the rebellious Jews in A.D. 70: death and destruction, terror on all sides. As Jesus lamented the coming fall of Jerusalem, so his lament reaches out to us today: If only you had known the way of peace!

The church is to do all this, albeit brokenly and failing at times, in the power of the Spirit, following Jesus and being shaped by him. N.T. Wright captures this when he writes in his book Simply Christian, “[New] creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning.” The church, empowered by the Spirit, draws its strength from hope. This hope isn’t a far-fetched hope, nor a whistling in the dark, nor mere wishful-thinking. It’s a hope that is real, a hope that is promised, a hope that will come to pass in a future day. This future hope will swing wide the gates to a new and glorious world. Let Thy Kingdom Come!

~ Act VI: Thy Kingdom Come ~

The Christian hope isn’t a hope for some ethereal, pie-in-the-sky, supra-spiritual escapism but the recreation of the heavens and the earth, a recreation of God’s prized image-bearers, and the return to our original vocations. In short, the Christian hope is a return to the “Glory of God,” mankind living in unbridled and perfect communion with God, one another, and with creation in a restored universe. A day is coming when Jesus will return, when the dead will be resurrected, and when judgment will be announced. The righteous will receive new bodies and be granted eternal life in this brave new world. The wicked will be condemned and destined for destruction. After the smoke of the Great Judgment has cleared, there we find the restoration, renewal, and recreation of all things. God promised Abraham a tract of land in Canaan, but Abraham’s family will inherit the entire cosmos and rule over it. This act of recreation, this cataclysmic and traumatic moment in our universe’s history, isn’t the end of the story. It’s both the end of one era and the beginning of another.

~ Act VII: When All Shall Be Well ~

The End of the Story is really the beginning of a New. The story began with Act One: God’s original creation, His original plans for the cosmos. The story took a tragic turn in Act Two with the entrance of evil into the world and the subsequent marring of God’s good creation. In Act Three God launched His rescue operation, making a covenant with Abraham and choosing his descendants to be the people through whom He would bring healing and restoration to the world. Abraham’s descendants only complicated the problem, and though Abraham’s descendants were faithless to His covenant, God was faithful. In Act Four Messiah Jesus came, doing what God said he would do and what only God could do, and Jesus was what Israel failed to be and did what Israel failed to do. Jesus defeated evil and inaugurated the Kingdom of God. We currently live in Act Five, the time period between Easter and Consummation, when the inaugurated kingdom is advancing but not yet complete. We are looking forward to Act Six, when God will finally complete what He started in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And once we come to Act Six, then what? Bear in mind that the calling of Abraham and the work of Christ are all about God’s response to the Fall, which was in and of itself a deviation from God’s original plans for His good creation. If God were so moved by what happened at the Fall to put into motion the calling of Abraham, the election of Israel, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and His kingdom spreading through the whole earth for the purpose of reversing what happened at the Fall, then it says something about how much He prizes His creation and His aims for that creation. He isn’t just going to scrap the universe nor His original plans for it. What happened at the Fall may have put a dent, so-to-speak, in His plans for the cosmos, but He’s gone to great lengths to smooth out that dent.

What we find in Revelation 21-22, where Heaven descends to Earth and the world is made new, is a reversal of the Fall, and we find ourselves back in Act One. So the question is begged: What do we do then?God prizes Act One so much that He subjected Himself to a cross to bring it back to life. The serpent who tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden in Act Two is destroyed in the Sixth Act, and evil is eradicated, so the Fall cannot repeat itself. Act Seven is the restoration of all things, the restoration of the cosmos to its Edenic state. Mankind fell from the glory of God so quickly that he never even left the Garden to subdue the cosmos for God’s glory; following the consummation, God’s desires for creation and His image-bearing creatures will be carried out. In short, mankind will leave the Garden to subdue the wider world for God’s glory. God’s image-bearers will carry God’s authority and rule to the outermost regions of the cosmos.

While in the present God’s people must carry their cross in a sin-stained world, in the new heavens and new earth, God’s people will experience complete self-fulfillment as they live out their genuine human identities. It will be the existentialist’s wet dream as we live out our identities, fulfill our God-given roles, and experience the fruition of true joy, happiness, and contentment. No longer will there be fear, anxieties, or stress; no longer will there be crying, nor death, nor pain. We will dwell in peace with God and one another, and we will rule over creation, creating gardens in the tundra and deserts, in the mountains and valleys, in the rainforests and deciduous woodlands.

It’s not too farfetched to imagine a future world where civilizations are built, where towns and cities are constructed, where farms are tilled and gardens are flowering. One can imagine a brand new colonization of earth and even, dare we say it, of the entire cosmos. Creativity and technology will form an alliance to carry God’s standard into the farthest reaches of His ever-expanding universe. The current physical, societal, communal, and personal world even in its best moments is but a shadow of what is to come. In Christ’s death and resurrection, dawn has broken forth; the sun is still rising, and when it reaches its zenith at Christ’s return, the light will be so brilliant that all which defaces, distorts, and mars God’s good world will not only be chased away but eliminated. The universe will be ours for the taking as we serve God as His emissaries, ambassadors, and agents; in short, serving God as what we are created to be: His beloved, prized, and devoted image-bearers.

the Story of God: Acts III & IV

~ Act III: Israel ~

God could have dealt with the problem of evil in the same way he created the world, by his own word; yet he chose to work through human beings, and we must ask, Why?  The answer, I think, lies back in Genesis 1: it was God’s desire from the start to create a creature who would be the agent of his kingdom. It is out of God’s desire to work alongside his creation that he spawns a rescue operation centering on his fallen image-bearers. God wants his image-bearers to do their duty, to be his agents in the midst of a fallen world, for the purpose of rescue and renewal. The people he chooses (the people of Israel) are chosen as an act of God’s love. There’s nothing innately special about the Jews; they themselves declared early on that their election by God to be his peculiar and special people wasn’t something they deserved but a gift of God’s love. God chose them not because they were better than all the other pagan nations but simply because he wanted to. God chose to deal with the problem of evil in the world through a people whom he called out of his own good will, not because they deserved to be chosen. His choosing began with the calling of a Sumerian pagan named Abram (whose name would be changed to Abraham; we’ll call him “Abraham” for clarity).

In Genesis 12 God called Abraham to follow him. Abraham abandons his home in the ancient civilization of Ur and travels south into what will later be known as the Promised Land. There he dwells with his barren wife and according to the promise of God she bears a son. His son Isaac is the second son, but he’s the “Son of Promise”; an earlier son, Ishmael, was born between Abraham and his slave girl Hagar, and God wasn’t too appreciative of this sort of manipulation. Isaac is the first step in the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham. In Genesis 12.2-3, God made a covenant (or promise) with Abraham: I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. God promised that through Abraham, rescue and healing would come to the nations of the world. This promise remained prominent in the minds of his descendants, the people of Israel, who boasted of being “guides for the blind” and “lights for those who are in the dark.” (Rom 2.19) Thus through Abraham God promised to spread blessings upon all the nations; he promised that through Abraham’s descendants, his rescue operation would be launched. In Genesis 15.7, God made another promise to Abraham: I am YHWH, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it. God promised Abraham a nation through whom blessings would flow to all nations, and then He promised Abraham a tract of land, the Promised Land (also known as the Land of Canaan). This promise to inherit land is built so strongly into Jewish thought that one of the great pillars of the current political atmosphere in Israel today is the Jews’ knowledge of God’s promise to them to have a specific tract of land. This promise for land, however, was but a shadow and signpost to God’s ultimate promise: he would give Abraham’s descendants not just a tract of land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean but the entire world.

At the end of Abraham’s life, we have a two-fold promise given to him: he will have descendents who will be a blessing to all the nations, and his descendants will inherit the Land of Canaan (albeit after a 400-year period of enslavement; Gen 15.13-15). The story of Abraham’s descendants is a long one filled with all sorts of grand narratives, twists and turns, wacky characters, turncoats and penitents. Abraham’s descendants entered into slavery for four centuries under an oppressive Egyptian regime, and then through Moses and the Exodus God led them into the Promised Land. There they encountered all the wicked, detestable people-groups that had settled the land, and they eradicated them. They put up stakes in the land and adopted a theocracy with “judges” who worked to settle disputes among the people and to lead military campaigns against their pagan neighbors. The people weren’t happy with a theocracy so they begged God for a monarchy. God gave them Saul, who turned out to be a not-so-good-king, and then came King David. David was a very good king, at least prior to his “falling out” with a beautiful married woman whom he saw bathing naked on a rooftop (murder turns out to be a less-than-optimal solution to his adultery). David’s son Solomon took the throne, and he was very wise but loved riches and women more than he loved God, and he came to ruin and the kingdom went through a civil war. The united monarchy of Israel was divided into two: Northern Israel (known simply as Israel) to the north and Southern Israel (known as Judah) to the south. For the next several hundred years the two kingdoms forged alliances and warred against one another, adopted paganism and embraced revival and then slipped into paganism all over again. Eventually the wickedness of Israel made God want to vomit, so he sent judgment upon them in the shape of an Assyrian army. The Assyrians wiped out Israel in its entirety and then camped outside the great city of Jerusalem to do the same to Judah. The King of Judah repented and God destroyed the Assyrian army. The repentance didn’t last very long, and when the peoples’ idolatry became “ just too much,” God judged them with a Babylonian army under an upstart named King Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonians had their way with Jerusalem, destroying the city and ransacking the sacred Temple before burning it to the ground. The Judeans who had repented of their paganism prior to the national catastrophe found themselves exiled in Babylon, and they dwelt in that land for a long time. Many of them missed their homeland, but others settled in nicely, working decent jobs and making good pay and raising their families. A power struggle between Persia and the Babylonians resulted in a quick Babylonian defeat, and the ruler-ship over the Jews exiled in Babylon transferred to the newly-enthroned Persians. The Persian king Cyrus let any Jews who desired to do so to return home to Palestine. Not all went, since many came to prefer life in the wondrous and well-watered city of Babylon, but those who returned rebuilt the Temple, even though it was just a shadow of what it had been before (the old men who had seen the Temple of Solomon as little boys wept when they saw the shabby rebuilt Temple). Those who returned to Jerusalem got caught up in paganism all over again, and they became consumerist Jews. They didn’t experience the autonomy they enjoyed prior to their Babylonian overlords, for the Persians still ruled over them; and after the Persians came the Greeks, and after the Greeks came the Romans. This brief sketch of Israel’s history, from their enslavement to Egypt to their subjection under Rome, paints a portrait of a people who were supposed to be God’s answer to the problem of evil in the world but who, in actuality, didn’t get things right and were, instead, a major part of the problem.

All throughout their history, the Jewish people knew they were chosen by God and that God would work through them to deliver justice and peace to the world. Several strands of thought, evolving throughout the history of the Jewish people and capitalizing upon the Babylonian exile, came together to form a loosely-conjoined future hope. The spine of this Jewish hope centered on what the prophets called “The Day of the Lord.” Three primary strands came together to create this hope: (1) the hope for the Coming King, (2) the hope for the vindication of Israel and the overthrow of her pagan oppressors, and (3) the rebuilding of the Jewish temple.

Strand #1: The Hope for The King. God made a promise to King David that his royal house would endure forever, and that he would always have a descendant on the throne (2 Samuel 7). David was a great king (at least for a while), and his son Solomon definitely had his high water marks. But after Solomon the kingdom split down the middle. All the kings of Judah following the split were downright awful at worst and weak at best. Even the best kings (Hezekiah and Josiah) couldn’t keep God’s coming judgment at bay. On one hand is God’s promise that the Davidic line would endure forever, and on the other hand was the stark reality of it all: David’s line of kings came to a brutal end with the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. As the Jewish people wrestled with this paradox, a hope emerged that there would come a True King, a new sort of king, a king who would be the fulfillment of God’s promise to David. This king would do what all the other kings, including David himself, had failed to do: he would flood the earth with justice and peace (Ps 72.1-4). This new king would be anointed with God’s own spirit; the Hebrew word for “anointed one” is messiah, and the Greek word for the Hebrew messiah is christ. This Messiah, this Christ, would be the one who would put everything to rights.

Strand #2: The Hope for Vindication. This True King would do many things, not least overthrow the oppressive pagan empires that had enslaved and mistreated the Jewish people throughout their various exiles. The Jewish people experienced slavery under the Egyptians, then the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and on down the line: the Persians, the Greeks, and then (in due time) the Romans. The Jewish people yearned for the day when the True King would take up sword and shield and lead the great revolt. He would set up a Jewish government and would be King, establishing Israel as the dominating and enduring world power. A holy war would take place under Messiah, the pagans would be ground to powder under the feet of Jewish warriors, and the righteous Jews would win the absolute victory; through them God would reign over the pagan nations of the earth with the Jews being his co-regents.

Strand #3: The Hope for a Rebuilt Temple. King David laid the groundwork for the original Temple, and his son Solomon built it. The Jewish people understood the Temple to be the dwelling place of God, where Heaven and Earth collided. Solomon’s Temple was glorious, but it was destroyed by the Babylonians sometime around 586 BC. When the Persian king Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Palestine, they rebuilt the Temple, but it paled in comparison to Solomon’s. Later prophets such as Zechariah and Ezekiel prophesied of a coming Temple that would rival even the one Solomon built. The Jewish hope centered on Messiah also centered on Messiah’s rebuilding of the Temple.

In the midst of these three strands of hope came an over-arching hope, that of the hope for New Creation. This hope finds its birth in the prophet Isaiah, who spoke of God’s intentions to restore Israel and to bring light to all the pagan nations. Isaiah weaves the three strands of the Jewish hope together into a masterpiece of worldwide peace and justice. Isaiah speaks of a replanting of the Garden of the Eden, of a “new creation.” Isaiah 2.2-4 offers a vision of hope not just for Jews but for pagans as well: when God would finally act to deliver his people, when he would reestablish Jerusalem (or Zion) as the place where he lives and reigns, Israel alone wouldn’t share in the blessing. As God promised to Abraham from the beginning, through his descendants he would bring blessings to all the nations, not just his chosen people. In Isaiah 11.1-8, Isaiah asks, “How will God accomplish this?” It will be accomplished through the coming of the ultimate King of Israel, the Davidic descendant, the “Son of Jesse.” This king, possessing wisdom, would bring God’s justice to the whole world. The rule of this king, this Messiah, would flood all of creation with peace, justice, and harmony (cf. Isa 55.1, 3-5, 12-13). Isaiah 65.17-18 and verse 25 open a window into an entire universe renewed by God: heaven and earth would be wedded together, given in marriage, becoming one. This is a promise that the entire universe would be rescued and renewed. It is nothing short of new creation.

During the Babylonian exile, with these texts in the background, the Jewish people continued to rearticulate their hopes. All the exiles they experienced were but echoes of a greater exile. In a sense, all of Israel’s expulsions from the Promised Land (and their subsequent returns to the land) symbolized and enacted the original expulsion of mankind from the Garden. The ultimate return, over against expulsion from the Garden, would be a return to the Garden; and thus we have the hope of New Creation. And New Creation, according to a good number of Jewish folk, would happen when “YHWH returns to Zion”: when Messiah would come, lead a successful holy war against the pagans, exercise judgment over the defeated pagans, rebuild the Temple, and take his seat alongside God to rule over the world. When this happened, homecoming  would happen: the problem of evil would be dealt with, and everything would be put to rights. The end of Babylonian exile found the Jews longing for YHWH’s return to Zion, the results of which would be nothing short of a genuine return from exile and new creation.

Much of this expectation is built upon the prophet Isaiah, and in the prophet Isaiah we find something cryptic and strange, something downright weird—and dark. We find that the coming king who would be pivotal in God’s return to Zion would be YHWH’s servant, and this servant would become Israel, being what Israel couldn’t be and doing what Israel couldn’t do, since Israel failed to be obedient to her vocation. Israel was just as shipwrecked as the rest of the world and was no better than the pagans. Isaiah 11 serves as the backbone to this strange image; here we find a sketch of the coming King, a sketch enhanced with more prophecies regarding him found in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52-53. This servant, the coming King, would be expelled, like Israel in exile; drowned in shame, suffering, and death; and then, after death, he would be brought through to the other side. Jewish scholars sought to make sense of this strange text that put a “chink in the armor” in the Jewish conceptions of this coming King. Even the most advanced and articulate of the Jewish scholars couldn’t grasp the simplest explanation: that this king would suffer, die, and rise again; and that through this king, through this dying and resurrecting Messiah, God would fulfill all of his promises to Israel beginning with his covenant to Abraham and stretching past David and into the exile. Through this Suffering Servant, YHWH would deal with the problem of evil, he would set everything right, and he would bring the world to its climax. The prophecies of the Suffering Servant stood as a strange signpost pointing ahead into a strange and dark fog interspersed with light, pointing to where all the snaking storylines of YHWH, Israel, and the universe would converge.

~ Intermission: The Carpenter’s Son of Nazareth ~

The search for who Jesus is, what he did, and why that matters (or doesn’t matter) has accelerated over the last several decades. The official “quest” began with Hermann Reimarus, a German philosopher and writer; an outspoken deist, he’s credited with beginning what the later German scholar Albert Schweitzer called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” D.F. Strauss took the Quest to the next level with his own biography of Jesus, in which he denied Jesus’ divinity and attributed gospel miracles to natural events that the unenlightened first-century Jews misunderstood and thus misinterpreted. Since the Quest was born out of the Enlightenment, Strauss’ claims weren’t shots out of a vacuum but dispelled from a predominantly Enlightenment-infused approach to the gospels. The French philosopher Ernest Renan took a similar approach, construing Jesus as an historical person with no divinity. The Quest’s search for the historical Jesus (which was nothing more than a deconstruction of the biblical record through the lens of “enlightened” deist thought) didn’t come absent opponents: the famous German theologian Martin Kähler argued that the real Jesus was the one preached by the scriptures, not a mere historical hypothesis. Albert Schweitzer, the one who coined the movement’s emblem, argued that the gospels say less about Jesus than they do about the gospel writers’ biases. Protests emerged, namely in the biblical scholars Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann; Bultmann, though standing against Schweitzer, didn’t argue for a divine Jesus but, rather, argued that the only thing we can truly know for certain about him is that he existed. Out of this first wave of the Quest came the foundation for the epic dichotomy between “The Jesus of Faith” and “The Jesus of History.”

The Quest went into a fizzle to be later recapitulated by a series of scholars who focused on form criticism (how the New Testament came together) and argued for the hypothetical document Q; earlier approaches to the historical Jesus focused on what’s called Markan priority, the idea that since the Gospel of Mark probably came first, the best way to understand Jesus is to study Mark’s gospel. This new wave of study focused on the hypothetical Q, which these scholars perceived to be an original albeit lost gospel from which Matthew, Mark, and Luke were all derived. The gospel of John remained its own peculiar breed and was all but lost in the hubbub of form criticism. The prominent biblical scholar of this time was Ernst Käsemann, a Lutheran student of Bultmann.

A more recent movement, known as the Third Quest, focused and continues to focus on the social history of Jesus’ day and the use of non-canonical sources. These scholars (the most renown being Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg) seek to rework Jesus in various ways, their most notable accomplishment being the so-called “Jesus Seminar,” in which they deduced (more by presupposition than anything else) that Jesus was an itinerant Hellenistic-Jewish sage who preached, via strange tales and aphorisms, a sort of “social gospel”; he broke free from the restraints of Jewish norms, both when it came to Jewish theology and social conventions, and this nonconformity led to his death on the cross. He was executed because he was a nuisance and a troublemaker. As to the resurrection, the Jesus Seminar shouts a fiery “No!” Dominic Crossan speculated that Jesus probably hung on the cross for several days, slowly being torn apart by birds and wild dogs. While the Third Quest is most known for the “here and gone” Jesus Seminar, there are more scholars within the actual Quest who oppose the findings of the Seminar. This opposition sets itself starkly against the assumptions of the more liberal scholars, claiming that Jesus was a proto-rabbi announcing the arrival of the kingdom of God. The opposition clings to a more Jewish background and understanding of Jesus, focusing on Jesus within the constraints of the first-century atmosphere of Jewish culture and religion. Most notable among these are Bruce Chilton, James Dunn, E.P. Sanders, and N.T. Wright.

The question is begged: What’s the point? Most people assume that Christians generally believe all the same things about Jesus; suffice it to say, many of the scholars involved in the Quest for the historical Jesus are legitimate Christians who love God and their fellow man and are committed to Christ and his kingdom. Our current understandings of Jesus haven’t been without influence from the Quest. The Quest has influenced how we perceive Jesus, and even those most detached from the Quest—even those who know nothing about it!—aren’t free from its influence. Our presuppositions and perceptions about Jesus aren’t born out of a vacuum, nor even out of a “simple reading of the gospels,” but are, rather, influenced by the movement in minor and major ways.

One of the most common views among non-Christians is that Jesus was some sort of great moral teacher, a man who talked about loving your neighbor as yourself and going the second mile, a pacifist who puts even the most conservative Quakers to shame, who was one of the greatest hippies to ever walk the earth. This perception is fueled by the findings of the Jesus Seminar (though the “hippie” idea, while prevalent, isn’t what Jesus Seminarians would advocate). Within conservative Christianity, there is the contrarian view that Jesus is God, that he came to die on the cross for everyone’s sins so that we can go to heaven when we die (rather than going to hell, which is a harsh ordeal). Even this view gives much credence to the foundation of the Enlightenment and the heavy-rollers of the Quest’s beginnings. One must always be honest, and I confess that the produce of the Third Quest (specifically the works from those opposed to the liberalities of the Jesus Seminar) have influenced the way I understand the carpenter’s son of Nazareth. E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, N.T. Wright, and Bruce Chilton have all influenced how I read scripture and understand Jesus.

A wise old man once told me, “You must always establish your assumptions.” Throughout the entirety of the retelling of the Christian saga, my assumptions regarding Jesus are as follows: Jesus was the son of a Jewish carpenter, and he was known as a prophet akin to the prophet Jeremiah. He preached the kingdom of God and spoke of coming judgment on Jerusalem and, specifically, on her Temple. He was crucified not as a nuisance but, rather, because he was a blasphemer, and his deliberate actions in the Temple cemented his fate at the hands of the Jewish authorities. He died and rose again three days later, and his resurrection vindicated him over against his enemies and testified to his ultimate victory over evil: in the cross, he defeated evil, and in raising from the dead, evil’s ultimate handhold (death) was torn apart. Jesus defeated evil, reconstituted Israel around himself, swallowed up the Temple in himself, and he is now enthroned with God. He is with God, he is God, and he is Messiah.

These are foundational assumptions, and while my assumptions run much longer, they certainly don’t run shorter. Do I fancy Jesus to be Messiah? Yes. Is it what I want him to be? Absolutely. Mere wishful thinking isn’t enough for someone who seeks the truth, and my assumptions are grounded in what I believe to be valid historical, theological, and philosophical argumentation. I won’t attempt to argue for every “jot and tittle” of my assumptions; I’ll leave that up to brilliant and wizened men and women. With these assumptions established, we march straight into Act 4: the Coming of the Messiah.

~ Act IV: The Coming of the Messiah ~

Bearing in mind the Jewish expectations for what was soon to come—the vindication of Israel and the dethronement of the pagan overlords, the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, the overarching theme of the Davidic King, return from exile, and new creation—we fast-forward to the first century AD. At the close of the Old Testament, the Persians were the overlords of the Jewish people. The Greeks followed the Persians, and the Greeks were notably hard on the Jews in their attempts to Hellenize them (the horror stories about this “cultural indoctrination,” especially those stories involving the ruthless Antiochus Epiphanes IV, don’t serve as good bedtime stories). After the Greeks came the Romans, who weren’t as bad as the Greeks, but who still used and abused the Jewish people, especially by high taxation and the use of crucifixion to keep them in subjection. The psychological terror-tactic of crucifixion became necessary, as the Jewish people kept revolting; but these revolts always ended with Jewish hopes being dashed on the rocks with some charismatic leaders’ execution.

Despite all the false starts and bloody quelling of revolution, the Jewish people clung to the hope that the kingdom of God would come. God’s kingdom in Jewish thought was characterized by the manifest sovereign rule of God over the entire world. The kingdom of God spoke of the day when God would rescue Israel from her pagan oppressors, when evil (not least the evil of all those wicked pagan empires!) would be judged, and when God would usher in a new and final era of peace and justice. The hope of the kingdom of God encapsulated all the Jewish hopes that were coming to a head during their oppression under the Romans. Jesus of Nazareth showed up on the scene, beginning his public career after his baptism, which served as a dramatization of the Exodus, hinting that the return from exile was about to take place. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was both “here” and “at hand.” He proclaimed that all the Jewish hopes were coming together, converging in the present, reaching their climax. Heaven was coming to earth, and Jesus was at the center of it, and he showed how it was so through his miracles.

As Jesus announced the kingdom of God, this coming-to-fruition of all the Jewish hopes, one would think that the people would easily perceive him to be the Messiah, the King through whom all this would take place. But for the most part, that wasn’t the case. Most of his Jewish contemporaries thought he was a prophet in the same vein as Jeremiah. Just as Jeremiah predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple centuries before Jesus, Jesus did the same, and his predictions would come true in AD 70 when the Romans would decimate the city and ravage the Temple. Hardly anyone perceived him to be Messiah, and even his closest followers didn’t find a consensus on who he was. The Apostle Peter recognized Jesus’ identity as Messiah, which explains his actions in the Garden of Gethsemane; were Jesus the Messiah, the one who would win the military victory over the oppressive pagans, then Peter’s appropriate response, as an associate of the Messiah, would be to take up sword and shield. Not until the tail-end of Jesus’ ministry did the public sway towards identifying him as Messiah; his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey was a dramatic act revealing that Jesus was claiming to be the coming king, and the Jews’ praise of him showed that at least some of them believed him to be such. The reason for the skepticism regarding Jesus’ identity was that although he proclaimed the coming of God’s kingdom, he acted in a way that defied normal Jewish expectations of how it would come about.

Messiah, after all, would be crowned the Davidic King and would rule over Israel. Jesus taught that the best way to be a ruler was to serve, a counter-intuitive statement; and whenever people surrounded him in apparent efforts to hail him as king and crown him as such, he slipped away like an introvert in a Las Vegas rave. The Anointed One was supposed to defeat the pagan enemies and thus deal with evil; Jesus talked as if evil ran rampant even within Jewish ranks (not a surprising thing for a prophet like Jeremiah to say, but not something expected of the militant Messiah). Instead of advocating the zealot’s maneuver of overthrowing the pagans by the way of violence, Jesus taught non-violence through-and-through. If you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword. Turn the other cheek and go the second mile. Jesus saw that the best way to defeat evil wasn’t through violence, since a victory through violence would only be a victory for violence, no matter who won. Quite paradoxically, Jesus realized, evil is best defeated by suffering and martyrdom—something he would embody and put into practice at the end of his life. The Anointed One was supposed to rebuild the Temple, but Jesus condemned it as a den of rebels, and he prophesied not of its rebuilding but its destruction, the complete antithesis to the Jewish hope. His preaching against the Temple and his subsequent actions in the Temple (which rendered the Temple ineffective for several hours, symbolizing its failure to function) were foundational in the trials that led to his shameful death. When he was executed, the message was clear: he did not defeat the pagans but was rather defeated by them, and in the most grotesque and shameful way possible, suspended naked and bloodied over a mocking crowd. He did not rebuild the Temple but rather caused a ruckus and nothing about it really changed. He did not take the throne as the King of the Jews but was rather executed in a mockery of that title. Those who had followed him were disenchanted, disillusioned, and a little more than disturbed. They scattered, not so much out of fear but out of hopelessness and brokenness, having wasted so much time on yet another would-be but failed Messiah. The pagan overlords weren’t crumbled to powder under Messiah; rather, the disciples’ expectations of the Messiah were crumbled to powder under the pagan overlords. Evil still ran rampant, the status quo hadn’t changed, and Israel remained in exile, enchained by her mocking persecutors who nonchalantly crucified her would-be king.

And then Jesus rose from the dead, and everything changed.

The death and bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a sufficient explanation for the empty tomb, Jesus’ post-death bodily appearances, and the explosive rise of early Christianity. It isn’t just a sufficient explanation but a necessary explanation. All other explanations seeking to account for the empty tomb, the multiple appearances of Jesus, and the rise of early Christianity fail historically. The data we have at our disposal supports the resurrection no less than relevant data supports Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. The resurrection isn’t a “conclusion based on faith.” It is a scientific and historical conclusion, for such conclusions derive not merely by deduction from hard data but by inference to the best explanation for the gathered data. The conclusion that (a) Jesus died and that, subsequently, (b) he was bodily raised from the grave is the best explanation of the relevant data. It makes sense of the data in a simplistic, coherent manner and is, historically, highly probable. The burden of proof lies not on those vouching for the bodily resurrection of Jesus but on those denying it, since belief in the bodily resurrection makes the most historical sense. If the resurrection is so historically ridiculous, as many critics claim, then why has no one come up with any better explanation of the data, despite unending attempts to do so? The resurrection of Jesus has high historical probability, but the fact that it happened doesn’t tell us what it means. For that we must go to the scriptures.

Before his death Jesus told his accusers they would see him and thus he would be vindicated. His apocalyptic prophecy came true in two waves: first, his resurrection and ascension. This validated his teachings, his claims, and his authority. The resurrection in and of itself served as a testament to his identity as the Son of God. Second, the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the destruction of the Temple at the hands of Roman soldiers vindicated Jesus against his accusers and the accusations they lodged against him. Both of these stand as testaments to the reality of Jesus’s identity as Messiah. Early on in the Christian tradition, Jesus was identified as Messiah and as God: the titles “Son of God,” “Son of Man,” nor his resurrection prove that he was in any sense divine, but in the midst of the wrestling of the early church, the conviction that Jesus was not only with God but that he is  God arose, because Jesus had done what only God could do and what God had said through the prophets (not least Isaiah) he would do: defeat evil and inaugurate the New Creation. Jesus’s death and resurrection signified the dawning of a new age, the defeat of evil, and the overcoming of death itself.

St. Ignatius wrote to the Christians of Ephesus, “Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord. All these three trumpet-tongued secrets were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then were they made known to the world? Up in the heavens a star gleamed out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its luster, and the strangeness of it left men bewildered. The other stars and the sun and moon gathered round it in chorus, but the star outshone them all. Great was the ensuing perplexity; where could this newcomer come from, so unlike its fellows? Everywhere magic crumbled away before it; the spells of sorcery were all broken, and superstition received its death-blow. The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end. Now that which had been perfected in the Divine counsels began its work; and all creation was thrown into a ferment over this plan for the utter destruction of death.”

the Story of God: Acts I & II

We have all but forgotten our story. The disillusionment of modernism and the emergence of postmodernism has led to a rejection of storylines and meta-narratives. It comes as no surprise that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (all of which are founded upon overarching storylines) have fallen out of vogue in the western world to be replaced with a new obsession with New Ageism and Eastern religions which deemphasize storylines and exalt a cyclical and transient understanding of the world. The message of the gospel is that history is going somewhere, and Christianity has its own framework, or meta-narrative, for understanding the world. The proclamation of the gospel is precisely the proclamation of this story, but many Christians retain, at best, a foggy understanding of this story.

The basic understanding of Christianity goes something like this: “We are sinners and we need to be saved, so God sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins so that we won’t go to hell when we die.” An understanding of the Christian story is necessary for Christians for no less than two reasons: (1) by understanding the story, we can effectively proclaim it; and (b) by understanding the story, we can make more sense of Christian teachings. Perhaps one of the reasons many Christians struggle to grasp the “ins-and-outs” of such teachings as justification, sanctification, redemption, etc. is because these teachings have been reduced to being parts of a systematic theology. They have a certain “textbook feel” that detaches them from our real, run-of-the-mill lives. The Story of God, as I’m presenting it here, can be seen in seven stages.

Before plunging into the story, however, a note on these “seven stages” is in order. A popular understanding of the “Christian story” is dispensationalism, the idea that biblical history is divided into seven self-contained dispensations, which are ways that God works out his purposes. When one dispensation is exhausted, a new one begins. Dispensationalism is erroneous for a variety of reasons, and the “Story of God” presented here should not be confused with dispensationalism. While dispensationalism obsesses over so-called dispensations, the story presented here obsesses over biblical covenants. The story of God is essentially the story of the Creator God making covenants with a wayward people and faithfully executing those covenants. These covenants throughout history build upon one another, culminating in the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. There are no dispensations but, rather, the Creator God working through history and with fallen man to execute his purposes and to bring healing to a broken world.

The Christian story is, at its heart, a story of rescue and renewal, and the main actor in this drama is a God who cares about his world, his creation, and especially his image-bearing creatures. Against the pantheistic notion of God, the Judeo-Christian God is set over against creation, rules over creation, and is intimately involved with his creation while remaining other-than-it. Against the deistic view of God, the Judeo-Christian God cares deeply about his creation and is actively at work within it; he isn’t distant nor remote but so close that at times it seems like the veil between heaven and earth is paper-thin.

This God’s ultimate concern isn’t our happiness and contentment, nor the flowering of our selfish pursuits and the realization of our silly dreams; rather, his ultimate concern is the blossoming of his own loving pursuits and the coming-to-birth of his own glorious dreams: in short, the full consummation of his kingdom. God’s care for human beings isn’t simply about having a sacred romance with us, or filling a void in our lives, or making our hearts flutter whenever we think about him. His desire is that we become the people he created us to be (his fully flourishing image-bearers) and that we co-labor with him in his dream for the world. His great love and care for us is far richer and marvelous than we mere creatures can envisage. This God created a beautiful and good world, and evil marred it. The Bible accounts for both the goodness of God’s world (Genesis 1-2) and for its corruption (Genesis 3). The story doesn’t stop there, however: in a move radically different than we find with any pantheistic or deistic perspectives of God, the Judeo-Christian God is doing something about it.

The Judeo-Christian God has several names throughout the Old Testament, but the name he gives himself is the key to understanding just who he is. When God called the pseudo-Egyptian refugee prince Moses to confront Pharaoh and demand that he let the enslaved Israelites go, Moses asked him, “Who shall I say sent me?” God gave himself a name: “I Am Who I Am” or “I Will Be Who I Will Be.” Because the Jewish people so revered the name of God, they referred to Him as “He Who Is”. The Hebrew language of the ancient Israelites uses only consonants, so no one really knows how God’s self-revealed name is actually pronounced. The consonants for “He Who Is” (Y, H, W, and H again) lend to a best guess that his name was pronounced “Yahweh”. Strict orthodox Jews still refuse to speak his name even to this day, referring to him as “The Name.” Some won’t even write his name, writing “God” as “G-d”. In order to prevent God’s name from being pronounced, later Israelites infused the consonants of YHWH with the Hebrew “Adonai” (meaning Lord, Master, or King). When the name of God (YHWH) came about in their texts, if they were reading it out loud, they would read “Adonai.” Modern translations often interpret this mingling of the two names as “LORD” in all caps. Modern-day readers and interpreters have often taken this infusion and turned it into yet another name for God, the result being “Jehovah.” No ancient Israelite, however, would have been familiar with that pronunciation.

All this aside, the name God gives himself is identified with what he does, and his character is to be defined by his activities. Through the Exodus God showed that he is a God who hears the cries of his people and frees them from slavery. He is a deliverer, he is a rescuer. He is also a God who is faithful to his promises: he promised Abraham that, after a time of enslavement, he would lead Abraham’s descendants out of slavery and into the Promised Land. YHWH is a God who keeps his promises and remains faithful to his covenants; indeed, “the righteousness of God” can adequately be understood precisely as his faithfulness to his promises. Deliverance and rescue is what the Judeo-Christian God is all about, and thus the story of his dealings with his world can be seen in the light of his great desire to rescue it from the predicament in which it finds itself.

~ Act I: Creation ~

In Deuteronomy 6.4 we find the classic Jewish refrain, the Shema: Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. By the time of Moses, the foundation of Jewish monotheism had been laid, but until the days of Isaiah, this declaration of the Oneness of YHWH worked itself out in a variety of ways. Some Jews clung to henotheistic polytheism, the worship of one god—in their case, YHWH—while acknowledging the existence of others. Monarchial polytheism developed somewhat later; this is the idea that other multiple gods exist but YHWH is the supreme god who rules over them.  Not until the days of the prophet Isaiah did monotheism solidify itself in Jewish thought. God speaks through his prophet, declaring, I am YHWH, and there is no other; apart from me there is no god. (Isa 45.5) The Jewish people came to believe that there was only one God, their God, and that all other gods were shams, mockeries, parodies, or lies. The Apostle Paul, fitting snugly into Jewish monotheism (though reworking it around Jesus) quotes the Shema in his letter to the Corinthians: We know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one.’ For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor 8.4b-6) Woven into the fabric of Jewish monotheism is the conviction that the one God, YHWH, is Creator, the one ‘from whom are all things’. Pantheism ran amuck in the ancient cultures in the Old and New Testaments, and the Jews came as a breath of fresh (albeit odd) air, declaring that within creation there was no divinity, that all of nature was a creation of their God, and that creation remained separate from him.

Classic Jewish monotheism stood upon two pillars: the beliefs that (a) there is one God, who created the entire cosmos, and who remained in an intimate relationship while remaining distinct from it, and (b) this God called Israel to be his special people. The Creator chose Israel; but why? Why did he elect the Jews? (As an aside, the whole issue of election is born not of the Reformers but of the Jews’ own wrestling with their God-given vocation and chosenness). In order to answer the question of why God chose Israel, we must look at the first Act of the story: the birthing of God’s world.

God’s creation of the world is laid out in Genesis 1-2. These accounts are difficult to interpret, and scholars from all branches of Judaism and Christianity disagree on the manner of interpretation to the point of name-calling and finger-pointing. These texts are chocked full of symbolism, polemic, and apologetic; sifting through all this in an attempt to reconstruct precisely how God did it, what it was like when he did it, and how long he took to do it, is like trying to take a family photograph in a house of mirrors while blindfolded, deaf, and dumb. Sidestepping critical issues, what can we know about God, his creation, and mankind from these creation texts, always bearing in mind that Genesis 1-2 aren’t the only creation texts in the Bible (Job 38-41 stands as its own sort of ‘creation text’)?

First, What can we know about God?  We can know he is powerful. God has the power to create something out of nothing. We can know he is creative. Not only does God create, but He creates creatively. Second, What can we know about God’s creation?  This is an interesting question, because the world we currently inhabit is spoiled and marred by evil, and the current creation is but a weak shadow of the original. Even in all its beauty, the world we currently live in (a world of great deserts and thick jungles, a world of Siberian snows and deciduous forests, a world full of strange creatures like giant squids and anacondas and duck-billed platypuses) is just an echo, perhaps even a mirage, of what God originally created. Perceiving the beauty of the cosmos, and acknowledging the great mysteries that abound not only in the most distant solar systems but in our own deepest seas, we know that God delights in beauty, in strange things, in both comedy and mystery. He created the stupid ostrich, the bloated behemoth, and the terrifying Leviathan.

Scripture tells us that God created his world and declared it to be “very good”. Thus we know his creation is ‘good,’ but we must define what ‘good’ does and does not mean. ‘Good’ does not mean ‘perfect’ in the Greek sense of unchanging. Nor does it mean that God’s creation is always aesthetically pleasing; God delights in mosquitoes just as much as he delights in bunnies, and he finds pleasure in hammerhead sharks just as much as he finds joy in bottlenose dolphins. ‘Good’ means, quite simply, that God finds pleasure and beauty in his creation, even if our own aesthetic senses do not. One might ask, Were there thorns and thistles in God’s original creation? and What about tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires?  While we may not like thorns and thistles because they hurt, and while we fear natural disasters due to our vulnerabilities in being chained to an eventual physical death, these things are natural and not the enemy. Death is the enemy of mankind, not that which may bring death knocking on our front door. The curse regarding thorns and thistles in Genesis 3 is not that thorns and thistles become part of the landscape but that mankind would now have to wrestle with them in order to make a living (Gen 3.17-19). Nor is transience, such as the changing of the seasons, evil; winter is no less pleasing to God than spring or summer. All of these are parts of God’s good creation.

A pertinent question is raised: Was there death in God’s good creation before evil entered the world? I believe the answer is Yes. A critical reading of Genesis 1-3 reveals that in the original, unspoiled creation, both death and pain were present. One of the curses upon women was that the pains of childbirth would be increased (Gen 3.16); thus there must have already been some measure of pain. As any mathematician will tell you, an increase of Zero to the greatest magnitude will still give you Zero. Pain is a good thing, an invaluable part of God’s original creation, and it is due to the curse that pain has increased, not merely come into existence. We perceive pain as evil because it hurts us and we don’t like it. But is it actually evil? No. The same can be said of death. Death (in the nonhuman created order) was part of the original creation. The violence and brutality within nature frightens us, and so we deem it to be evil. We’re bothered by the scenes of orcas attacking baby seals, and we’re uncomfortable when cute bunnies are suffocated by pythons. In Job, God says that he is the one who created the lion, and he provides their food (Job 38.39). God’s ordering of his universe includes death being critical to the “circle of life”, and sometimes this “circle of life” isn’t aesthetically pleasing. But that does not make it evil. However, when we look at death in reference to human beings, things take on a different contour. Because of mankind’s rebellion in Genesis 3, death now enslaves mankind. Human beings are now subjected to that entity which had been limited to everything but them in the plant and animal kingdoms.

Genesis 1-2 tells us that God created the universe, and within that universe he created galaxies. Within one of those galaxies he created a solar system, and in that solar system he created a very strange planet. He filled that planet with all manners of life; top-to-bottom he filled it, from the oceans to the land masses to the skies; and on this planet, in the midst of a wild world filled with dangers, mysteries, surprises, and adventures, he created a garden. Within this garden he created Adam and Eve. This Garden rivaled any of the most popular destination spots in the tropical hemispheres; forget Maui, Cancun, or Montego Bay. After creating entire worlds and ecosystems within planet earth, God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. (Gen 1.26-27)

The pluralistic language of God’s decision (“Let us make man…”) has led some to wonder, “Who is God talking to?” Recent advocates of the “Alien Hypothesis”, the idea that ancient aliens created mankind and that mankind perceived these aliens as divine, point to this text as evidence that there was some collaboration between multiple entities involved with the creation of mankind. Over against this, orthodox Christians point to Trinitarian theology. Trinitarian theology, however, was unknown to Moses (or whoever wrote the Book of Genesis), and recent studies into the ancient world have discovered that such pluralistic language doesn’t demand the existence of multiple entities. Ancient kings and emperors would often speculate to themselves in such a manner. The pluralistic nature of God’s statement is representative of such an event: God, being One, speculates to himself and declares to himself his agenda. God spelled out his agenda: to create man in his own image, male and female.

From this agenda we can deduce mankind’s identity and purpose. God created mankind to be his image-bearers. In Latin, mankind is the Imago Dei, the “image of God.” Many assume this means we are endowed with characteristics similar to God: feelings, emotions, creativity, and choice. Animals, however, who are not made in the Imago Dei, can experience feelings and emotions and can exercise creativity. A recent book advocated that we are made in the Imago Dei, male and female, in the sense that men tend to be warriors and adventurers whereas women tend to be nurturers and caretakers. I understand why these understandings of mankind in the Imago Dei make sense, but I don’t think that’s what it means to be made in God’s image. The language itself, “image of God”, is taken straight from ancient Near Eastern culture: an “image” of something was believed to carry the authority of the image it bore. Ancient rulers of the Near East, when conquering foreign lands, would set up their “images” in that land as testaments to their authority and ruler-ship. The ambassadors and emissaries of these kings would be considered to be “in the image of their king,” in the sense that they carried his authority and rule into places where he was not directly involved. Fast-forward to the Romans, and we find them renown for carrying their standards, or images, into battle; these standards symbolized the power, weight, and might of Rome going forth against the pagan hordes, carrying the torch of Rome’s claims of justice and peace into alien territories. When Genesis says man is made in the Imago Dei, the point is the same: mankind, as God’s image-bearers, are the ones endowed with God’s creative power and authority, to go forth into the world and to rule over it as God’s representatives to all creation. The title “image of God” speaks not of something intrinsic to our nature but to our God-ordained mission and purpose. Ultimately, human beings are created to advance God’s rule and authority into his good creation.

So God created a universe over which he ruled, and he created mankind to be his royal ambassadors and emissaries, and he tasked mankind with the mission of going forth into the wild creation and subduing it. This isn’t a subduing of exploitation but a subduing by cultivation. Mankind was to leave the Garden and go about subduing all creation to the glory of God, to “carry his torch,” so-to-speak, and tame the wild creation, expanding the Garden of Eden into the rest of the cosmos. Before mankind even leaves the Garden, however, things went horribly awry.

~ Act II: The Fall ~

The biblical account of The Fall is found in Genesis 3, where we find strange language about a Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil and a talking snake and shame of nakedness. Like Genesis 1-2, peeling through the layers of symbolism, veiled meaning, metaphor, polemic, and apologetic is tricky business. At the heart of this story is the temptation presented to mankind: “Become like God!” (Gen 3.4) This temptation to “become like God” lies at the heart of rebellion, the heart of idolatry. God’s image-bearers decided that rather than bearing their Creator’s image, they would bear their own. The result was expulsion from the Garden and becoming not “like God” but “like the animals,” subject to decay and death. This great act of rebellion, this first act of idolatry, when man decided to serve himself rather than his Creator, to be his own king and master rather than an agent of God’s kingdom, is the moment when evil plunged into all of creation.

Our first question is often, How did evil infect God’s good creation? but a prior question must be asked: What, exactly, IS evil? We must distinguish between genuine evil and apparent evil. There are things that may appear to us to be evil but which are not evil at all. Pain and death within the created order (exempting mankind) were covered in the previous Act. Just because something is aesthetically unpleasing doesn’t mean it’s evil. This isn’t to say, of course, that there is no such thing as evil. Genuine evil does exist, and it seems to prosper. Theologians have spoken of evil in all sorts of categories, the prominent ones as of late being moral evil (that which is rebellion against God) and natural evil (the evil we find in earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornadoes). Categorizing evil can be a tricky game, and why are we to assume that natural events that affect us negatively are necessarily evil? Suffice it to say, evil is real, it causes pain, and it can be seen all over our world, from liars to genocidal megalomaniacs, from those who bully their peers on the playground to those who exterminate entire people groups. Evil can’t be reduced simply to “things that we do,” nor can it be reduced to mere “aspects of the heart.” Evil is both inward and outward. Injustice is done to the reality of evil by exterminating any supra-spiritual connections; an equal injustice is committed by centering evil upon “Satan” and “his minions,” making everything evil demonic by default. Evil is real, and though we may not be able to define it to a “T”, its affects are still felt in our world, on a global, communal, local, and individual scale. Like porn, we may not be able to define it, but we know it when we see it.

The Apostle Paul said, 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. (Rom 8.20-21) The Judeo-Christian worldview adheres to the belief that creation itself was affected by the curse due to mankind’s rebellion in the Garden. At the Fall, evil rippled throughout the entire universe. Like gangrene spreading through wounded flesh, evil spread throughout the created order, affecting everything from the subatomic level to the organization of galaxy clusters. As Paul said, creation will be set free from its bondage to corruption: it will be set free from the effects of evil set upon it. This liberation isn’t a present reality but a future one. Creation is presently in bondage, bulging against the chains of that bondage, sweating and huffing and puffing and crying out for deliverance; as St. Paul put it, We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. (Rom 8.22) The created world in which we live, while resplendent with great beauties and adventures and mysteries, is but a shadow of the original, and a day is coming when the Creator God will renew and restore creation to its rightful intended status. But we are getting ahead of ourselves; that’s not until Act Six.

Mankind’s rebellion in the garden set off a dynamite explosion that created an avalanche of ever-increasing evil within human beings themselves. The original “sin,” that first act of idolatry, set off a chain-reaction that rivals anything experienced in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Evil infected human beings, not just in the things that we do (as if legalism could purge us of evil); nor did evil affect us just by the corruption of our minds (as if philosophy or psycho-babble could cure us). Evil infected our minds, and evil is seen in what we do; evil has infected our behaviors, our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, our dispositions, motivations, and inclinations. Evil has infected us in our hearts, in our spirits, in the core of our beings. The Apostle Paul says that we are enslaved to sin and even indwelt by sin in Romans 6-7. Because of our rebellion, we are infected by evil to our cores, and we are unable (and unwilling) to serve God as his image-bearers.

God created us to be his image-bearers, but we have become our own image-bearers. God created us to advance his kingdom and agenda, but we seek to advance our own kingdoms and agendas. God created us as humans, and in the forsaking of our identities as image-bearers, we have slipped into subhuman status. We are still Homo sapiens, and we’re still endowed with the “tools” God gave us to do his will, but now we use those tools in coercion and manipulation to have our own ways rather than God’s ways. We have become subhuman, or dehumanized, because we are failing to live as we were created to live.

The eight chapters of Genesis following the account of the Fall showcase how sin’s effects within man escalates. First there is escalation into murder, followed by a strange account of Nephilim and “sons of God” where the thrust of the story focuses on the degradation of women and their subjection to man’s sensual pleasures. In Genesis 6 we find the double-statement regarding the widespread rippling of evil and its affects on the world: YHWH saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of men’s hearts were evil, evil, evil! and The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on earth. (Gen 6.5, 11-12) Genesis 6-10 recounts the story of the Flood: God regretted creating mankind and decided to wipe them out, but his love for mankind won out and he landed on a different approach in dealing with the problem (an approach launched in Genesis 12, beginning with Act 3). The whole series of the wretchedness, wickedness, and evil of the world comes to a head in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel: all the evil people come together to build a tower that reaches into heaven, for the sole purposes of exalting themselves over all creation. In a word, they hoped to usurp YHWH from his throne. The story ends with God quite literally confusing their efforts, and they fail to accomplish their goals. The Tower of Babel symbolizes what has already become a reality in men’s hearts: they love themselves rather than God, and they’re devoted to their kingdoms rather than his.

The end of Genesis 11 finds the world embroiled in a sour mess. Evil courses through the veins of every living human being, and the creation itself is spoiled. God is angry, upset, and saddened by the state of things, and he decides to launch a rescue operation. He will deal with the evil infecting creation, not least the evil infecting his image-bearing creatures whom he loves. He will renew the entire cosmos, he will flood the world with peace and justice. In a world that has become a wasteland, God will act and return it to its rightful place of beauty. He will do this not with a simple declaration or a snap of his fingers, but through a very peculiar people: the descendants of a desert pagan who had a wife with a barren womb and failed hopes for sons to carry on his legacy.