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.