The Patience of God

As I read through the history of the divided kingdom – Israel and Judah – I am struck by the incredible patience of God. From the moment they split, the northern tribes, then known as Israel, went astray. Because they couldn’t go to Jerusalem to worship anymore (it was in the region of Judah), they established places of worship in their own territory. Quickly, these devolved into pagan shrines honoring the very gods Yahweh had forbidden them to worship. Without exception, the kings of Israel refused to clean up their act, and the treachery, assassination and bloody coups which smear their history prove the error of their ways.

Yet, to my amazement, God put up with Israel’s faithlessness for almost 200 years before He finally turned them over to the Assyrians who dragged them off the land and dispersed them across their empire. Judah’s track record is slightly better, having a few kings who tried to follow David’s example of righteousness. Ultimately, though, even they were deported to Babylon for their 70-year captivity about 100 years after Israel was taken. Here again, Yahweh’s patience shines forth in His promise to return them to the land after they had served their sentence.

From our vantage point on this side of Calvary, we can understand that Judah had to be saved so that the Lion of Judah could appear to do the work God had planned. We may wonder at the centuries-long process to bring about the culmination of the plan, but we should remember that with God, “a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day.” Realistically, the true time period of the redemption plan starts even further back just outside the Garden of Eden when God promised to effect a rescue from human fallenness by the “Seed of woman,” later identified as Jesus Christ.

I can only begin to understand the reasons for God’s patience when I consider His larger purpose. As I have recently discovered (See Understanding Salvation and It’s Not All About You), from the moment of creation, God has been in the business of developing a race of creatures who can serve as His agents in the process of turning Earth into His fellowship garden. He had that for a minute, walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, until the deceiver ruined the plan. I believe He still wants that, and Jesus’ announcement that the Kingdom of Heaven had come to earth marks the next phase of its development.

After years of sermons and seminaries teaching me that salvation is about saving souls, I have come to the realization that we have missed the point. Getting saved is not about going to heaven when we die. It is about getting with the program and bringing heaven to earth now. As N. T. Wright points out in Surprised by Hope (yes, him again), doubters might say that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of heaven on earth 2,000 years after Jesus announced its arrival, yet there are plenty of signs if one wishes to see them. The Soviet Union was toppled in large part by the efforts of a Polish Pope. Apartheid was dismantled through the efforts of an African bishop. Nations and neighborhoods are being transformed by the persistent pressure of the coming kingdom in many large and small ways.

I fall prey to the same thinking that prompted Peter’s contemporaries to ask why God has delayed His coming. Look what he answers: “The Lord is not delaying the promise, as some consider slowness, but is being patient toward you, because he does not want any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” There it is again: the patience of God. Why is He so patient? Because He is gradually building His family of co-heirs with Christ to complete the original plan: make Earth His garden.

Many ancients believed their gods dwelled on a mountain in a garden. In our case, Zion is the mountain of the Lord – the garden of His delight. Revelation predicts that the whole earth will one day be filled with God’s glory. For now, according to Hebrews, we have come to Mt. Zion, but only in a spiritual sense, obviously. We are waiting for the final chapter when the new heavens and the new earth will bring the kingdom of heaven fully to earth.

I am not saying like many used to believe that we can make earth a heavenly kingdom so that Christ may return. I am saying that our kingdom work begins now because the real meaning of kingdom is rulership. We can announce the rulership of Jesus as Lord right now. When the disciples asked Jesus on the day of His ascension if He was restoring the kingdom at that time, His answer is misunderstood. He didn’t say, “No;” He said, “Yes, but the kingdom is going to look quite different from what you have imagined.”

Quoting Wright again: “What Jesus has in mind is every bit as much the fulfillment of God’s long-delayed plan for Israel and the Kingdom. Jesus has been raised from the dead… [and] is the world’s true Lord…. His messengers, his emissaries, are to go off into all the territories of which He is already enthroned as Lord and to bring the good news of His accession and His wise and just rule.” We must do what the first disciples did: go into our world and summon everyone to believing obedience to the “new sheriff” in town.

While doing this, we follow Micah’s advice: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” Or as someone once said, preach the good news always and everywhere; when necessary, use words. God is waiting patiently for us to help Him gather the full complement of His people. Once that’s done, God will renew us and the rest of creation so we can continue the business He started in Eden, finally bringing Him all the glory and enjoying Him forever.

Related posts: It’s Not All About You; Understanding Salvation

Defending the Wrath of God

When God gave instructions to Joshua to conquer the land of Canaan, He generally said to kill everyone including women and children. Sometimes even the animals were to be slaughtered. This seems excessive. It is certainly offensive to most modern peoples’ sense of justice or fairness. I wrote about the mental conflict this causes several years ago in Daily Bible Reading. In that article I pondered how one could explain God’s wrath to an unsaved neighbor. I concluded somewhat weakly that we had to let God be God and stop trying to understand the incomprehensible.

There are reasons we can give for God’s harsh instructions to Joshua. For one thing, we know that the people inhabiting the promised land were there under God’s judgment. God told Abraham that neither he nor his immediate descendants would inhabit the land God promised because, “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” Amorites was a catch-all name for the various people groups that lived in the land of Canaan. Either God was exhibiting the patience Paul speaks of hoping for repentance, or He knew they would eventually get so bad they would have to be wiped out. This answer won’t satisfy a modern non-believer, but it is justifiable to anyone who believes in the sovereignty of God.

Another reason why God wanted Joshua to exterminate virtually every living person in the conquered land was because God knew the Israelites would be tempted to intermarry with the indigenous people (a forbidden act) and to follow the pagan gods they worshipped. Both of those things occurred, and there is a curious reason given by God to explain why He let Joshua get away with only partial genocide in several cases. In the book of Judges, God admits He left some of the pagans, “in order to test Israel whether or not they would observe the way of Yahweh, to walk in it just as their ancestors did.” Again, this is an unsatisfying explanation if you are not willing to let God write His own script for the plan of redemption.

The incident that sparked this visit to the topic is a dream that I woke from early this morning. I couldn’t recall the details of the dream, but when I awoke, I heard myself defending God’s reasoning for total extermination of the Canaanites. I explained that God knew that the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the promised land were actually demons posing as gods. Paul supports this idea telling the Corinthians that the things pagans sacrifice, “they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” This reveals the fact that the land was infested with allies of Satan, God’s arch enemy. Eliminating the people who worshipped the demons was part of the cosmic battle being waged through the millennia. (For more on the battle see America is Not the Promised Land and It’s Not All About You)

God’s harsh treatment of the demon worshippers also had a benefit to Israel beyond the cosmic victory. If the people had been allowed to remain, the demons they worshipped would also be present because demons often inhabited people. This may also explain why in some instances God insisted that they kill all the animals too. We have only to remember when Jesus cast the demons out of the Gadarene demoniac; the demons asked to be allowed to enter a nearby herd of pigs. It is a reasonable, even loving act by God to require the extermination of anything that would permit His enemy to have a foothold in or near His people.

We don’t talk much about demons these days even in our churches. There is a line of reasoning that says demonic activity accelerated during the time of Christ on earth due to the importance of the events of the day. This seems to avoid the obvious fact that the demons were there in the centuries before the incarnation, and there is no reason to think that they suddenly became extinct at the Cross of Calvary. Paul did tell the Colossians that Christ triumphed over the evil powers on the cross, but he also reminded the Ephesian believers that our battle continues primarily against wickedness in the spiritual realm. Until Christ puts all the enemies under His feet, the battle rages. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis aptly pointed out that there is no better strategy for the enemy of our souls than to make us believe he doesn’t exist. The cosmic battle continues; we are pawns in that war whether we know it or not.

Getting queasy about the wrath of God is a corollary to ignoring the spiritual battle that we all participate in. If we honestly regarded the faces of evil we encounter in our daily lives, I don’t think we would despise the wrath of God that is due His enemy. We are soft on sin, and we deny the depth to which it has pervaded our society. My woke neighbors will hate me for saying this, but when political correctness becomes a cloak for evil, we have surrendered the field without firing a shot.

Paul made the point clearly in the first chapter of Romans: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of people, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The silence of believers concerning the “impiety and unrighteousness of people” gives aid and comfort to the enemy. I know that vengeance belongs to the Lord, not me. But if I don’t warn people of the wrath to come, don’t I become complicit in their evil deeds? Their destiny is in their hands, but should we not tell them what’s coming? According to Jesus, and Paul and Peter (quoting the Psalmist), genuine Christian witness will never win a popularity contest, but you have to ask yourself this: do you want to be popular, or do you want to be right? I like the tone of the old Rich Mullins song: “Our God is an Awesome God”. His wrath is part of what makes Him so awesome. We can celebrate that with no shame whatsoever. 

Related posts: Not Our Father’s God; That’s Not God; The Goodness of Wrath 

Lessons From History

 My recent through the Bible reading covers the lives of David and Solomon. Both of these men were spoken of reverently and honored by God and Israel (most of the time). In retrospect, I don’t think either one is a perfect role model. David’s most glaring failure was the incident with Bathsheba which ultimately produced Solomon. Solomon became all the terrible things God warned Israel about when they clamored for a king. Jews today still look back at those two kings as representing the glory years of Israel. And yet….

Last November I wrote a piece called “Losing the Boundary Stones.” In it I warned that forgetting history or rewriting it as many wish to do today would cause the loss of important elements of who we are. Knowing where we have come from personally and politically should help us understand who we are and protect us from making the same mistakes we find in our past. Instead of using past mistakes as lessons, many people today want to erase them from our collective memory. The wisdom of the frequently quoted line applies: those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

In a recent post I cited an article published in Imprimis, a Hillsdale College publication. The article said that sinister forces are attempting to radically reshape Western culture. A reader emailed me after reading the piece to say that he was praying for protection from the likes of me. He included Hillsdale and the “white evangelical American church” and its “demonic minions” as like-minded institutions. This caused me to speculate about what could be so dastardly about wanting to return to the principles that motivated our founding fathers. I know the woke culture today wants to erase most of our past, but I cannot fathom how a supposedly Christian person could see a revival of our founding principles as demonic.

That led me to question my own opinion of America’s founding ideals. Beginning with the first European colonists, our history is replete with honorable efforts and horrific failures. I am reminded of David and Solomon. Both they and we have checkered records. The Jews rightly honor David and Solomon as we do Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin et al. I don’t want to follow Jefferson in his disbelief of Bible miracles. I certainly don’t condone Franklin’s peccadilloes. However, they each have their moments of greatness. It is especially noteworthy that Washington’s farewell address revealed his solid Christian worldview.

I understand that being Christian doesn’t necessarily mean all their positions can be supported biblically. The early colonists mistreated the Native Americans. Washington held slaves. Rather than expunge the record of these misdeeds, we should look more deeply into their reasoning to seek understanding. The triumphalism of the Protestant colonists caused them to gloss over the clear Bible teaching that all humans are created in God’s image and due appropriate honor. The founders’ desire to keep the southern colonies in the new union led them to accept slavery, although many saw it as a temporary situation needing correction later. An accurate record of history does not necessarily condone everything it records.

There is another popular saying about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. David is “a man after God’s own heart” not because he is an adulterous murderer; his willingness to confess his sins and repent earned him that title. Thomas Jefferson is not remembered honorably for his dalliance with one of his slaves, but for his wise application of Lockian principles of government. If we can learn anything from the utter humanness of people in our past, it should be that perfection is unattainable. Even more, we should recognize that God does not expect perfection in His people. “He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” That does not give license to wallow in the dust, however. It should assuage our guilt over our own misdeeds as well as those of our forebears.

Israel never became the light to the nations it was created to be. America has never been a flawless Christian nation. The shortcomings of both nations should be not just remembered but highlighted. Paul told the Corinthians that they should take note of the failure of Israel to remain faithful so that they would not fall into the same unbelief. The principle applies equally to American history. Instead of tearing down statues of people who committed offenses to our modern sensibility, we should teach our children what the offenders did and explain why it was wrong.

Christianity is a historical faith. That means it is based on what God has done using real people, flawed people to accomplish His will on earth. The story of Israel without reference to David or Solomon would be significantly diminished. We can’t take the Jeffersonian approach and snip out passages of Scripture that we don’t like. “Question with boldness even the existence of God,” [Jefferson] urged his nephew in 1787, “because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” I am a proponent of reason as anyone who reads me regularly knows. However, I do not believe that leaving the Bible whole, warts and all, is an offense to reason. Rather, it is a testament to faith. Because I don’t “question the existence of God,” I accept His Word as the inspired revelation it is. We should do the same with American history minus the inspiration. Read and learn.

Related posts: What’s Wrong With Politics; Pandemic of Disrespect; Christians Are Responsible to be Politically Engaged

Conspiracy Theory Part II: The Great Reset

I am once again in the midst of one of the divine conflations God pulls on me from time to time. I’ve written previously about how God will take elements from disparate sources and bring them together to reveal a new way of seeing something. This time the sources are the book I have mentioned several times, N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, a novel by James Lee Burke, and an article in Imprimis, the Hillsdale College publication.

The object of this present conflation first entered my thinking back in graduate school when a professor assigned the book by Ronald Sider, Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger. It struck me then that there is a disconnect between our profession of love toward our neighbors and our incredible wealthiness compared to the poverty of many of our global neighbors. Sider suggested some radical responses to this disparity, and he “walked the talk” by radically changing his own lifestyle. I will admit to feeling slightly guilty at the time, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything substantive. As a struggling grad student and Christian school teacher raising three children, I didn’t have great excesses of anything, but I realized that even in my straitened circumstances, I was wealthier that ninety-plus percent of the world’s people.

My regular readers may be tired of hearing my references to Wright’s book, but it has again struck a chord that rings true and makes me think I should do something about it, although I’m not sure what to do. While calling the church to bring justice as part of its mission, Wright accuses much of the modern church of baptizing free-market capitalism as God’s own business. I have always believed that the American economic system has proven to be the most successful and egalitarian way to do business. I am not saying it is without its flaws. The term “robber barons” was an apt description of many powerful men in the early industrial era, and the virtual indenture of miners to “the company” highlight the major flaw: fallen men will always find ways to abuse any social structure.

The novel by Burke, Wayfaring Stranger, chronicles the rise of a poor southern farm boy to the upper echelons of American business. As in all his stories, Burke reveals the worst in human nature pitted against his protagonist’s effort to remain true to good, if not godly principles. One of the themes of the novel is ecological destruction in service to the almighty dollar. This leaves our hero yearning for the simpler times when the beauty of the world was untouched by human greed. The current debate over the Keystone Pipeline and offshore drilling would fit perfectly into Burke’s tale. Economic progress and ecological protection are often at odds. There is no easy solution for a principled person.

The Imprimis article by Michael Rectenwald titled “What is the Great Reset” presents a cast of characters that would play perfectly in a Burke novel. When the COVID 19 pandemic (so-called) gave rise to all manner of draconian measures by governments worldwide, I began asking what possible motivation there could be for the unwarranted restrictions. (See related posts below.) In “Conspiracy Theory” I suggested it was about money and power. Rectenwald exposes the sinister (my term) forces that were behind the pandemic madness. According to the author, the corona virus outbreak was purposely used by power brokers behind the scenes to speed the transformation of our economic and social structures into their utopian progressive model: the great reset.

Rectenwald provides the documentation to prove my conspiracy theory. He adds the dimension of an economic paradigm shift to the lust for money and power I suggested. I highly recommend Rectenwald’s article to anyone who doubts there is a conspiracy afoot. While Wright and Burke help me realize that something needs to be done, I refuse to subscribe to the progressive agenda of socialism or, as Rectenwald reveals, a plan to institute, “capitalism with Chinese characteristics —a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below.” 

Without doubt, a reset is needed. American capitalism has run amuck. We have reached the point in our fallenness where national elections can be rigged, tens of thousands of small businesses can be destroyed, and personal liberty can be curtailed at the whim of political and commercial power brokers. The reset we need is not going to come from any of our secular institutions, however. I believe Wright is right to insist that the mission of all believers is to begin building the kingdom of God now in preparation for the ultimate “great reset” we know is coming in the recreation of all things according to God’s plan of redemption.

We are living in the great in-between. Immediately after the Fall, God promised He would set things right again. He told Abraham, “And all families of the earth will be blessed in you.” Israel missed being the light to the nations they were called to be; we now carry that mandate as the heirs of Abraham and fellow heirs with Christ. Jesus announced the coming Kingdom of God during His earthly ministry and proclaimed the initiation of it after His resurrection from the dead. One day soon, I hope, the Kingdom will fully come. Until then, we labor in the already/not yet state of the Kingdom of God. (See “What Are You Waiting For?”)

 The world is far from perfect, but we are tasked with making God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven. The great reset is coming; we are the agents God has called to bring it. In “Bringing the Kingdom” I closed with this: “As Micah said, ‘He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does Yahweh ask from you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ That’s how we bring the Kingdom.” That is the Great Reset.

Related posts: Finding God in COVID 19; The Emperor Has No Clothes; Herd Immunity or Incredulity

Understanding Salvation

 Warning: what I am about to say is going to be surprising, perhaps disturbing to most of my readers. I have certainly been surprised as I shouldn’t wonder since the title of the book I am reading is Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright. I have mentioned this book previously along with Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Michael S. Heiser. (See below) The impeccable scholarship of these two highly regarded professors has caused me to rethink and recover some deep biblical truth that has been misunderstood and misapplied by the church for hundreds of years.

I am aware of the danger present in any “new” interpretation of the Scripture. Heresies that pretended to be founded on the Bible began less than one hundred years after the last page was written, and they continue to this day. With that potential for error paramount in my mind, I still believe the truth of what I am about to suggest is based solely on the Bible text properly interpreted. Although the caliber of the authors is of the highest order, it is my own reading of the Scripture in the light of their exposition and the light of the Holy Spirit upon my reading that gives me confidence in the truth that follows.

Most Christians do not know what salvation is. Surprised? My own seventy years of church attendance and personal study enhanced by Bible college and seminary left me thinking, as with most of my fellow-believers, that getting saved means we get to go to heaven when we die. A fresh look at Scripture unfettered by traditional teaching reveals two things wrong with that proposition. First, neither Jesus nor the authors of the New Testament ever said we go to heaven when we die. When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven (or the parallel phrase Kingdom of God) He was speaking of the rule of God over all creation, not some place we enter after we die. Jesus’ teaching was that the Kingdom either had already come or its coming was on the horizon.

The second thing that is wrong with thinking salvation is about going to heaven when we die is that it completely misses the point of what we are saved for. To say we are saved for our own personal benefit is not only mistaken, it misdirects people from their true responsibility as saved people. (See It’s Not All About You) I quote N.T. Wright: “Faced with his beautiful and powerful creation in rebellion, God longed to set it right, to rescue it from continuing corruption and impending chaos and to bring it back into order and fruitfulness…. He did not want to rescue humans from creation…. He wanted to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation.”¹ Wright notes that this nicely fits one of the synonyms for salvation: rescue.

I have known many people over the years – even Christians – who expressed some dismay at the thought of spending eternity sitting on a cloud playing a harp. This image is cartoonish, of course, but absent any real evidence of what it means to go to heaven, all sorts of silliness has entered the picture. Wright suggests, and I half agree², that there may be a “place” one could call heaven or paradise (as Jesus did when speaking to the thief on the cross) where one goes upon death. However, Wright insists that such a place (if it is “place” at all) is only a temporary stop on the way to life eternal on the recreated earth in the recreated body we are all promised. In support of his thesis, Wright points out that when Jesus promised “mansions” to be prepared when He left, He used a word that we might translate as hotel or inn – a stopover for a traveler.

According to Wright, and here I fully agree, heaven is no one’s final destination. God’s chosen people are going to fulfill the mandate given to Adam and Eve in the beginning. This explains why all creation is waiting – the groaning Paul mentions in Romans chapter eight. Creation awaits the revealing of the sons of God because they will be the agents of God to dress, till, keep, and to have dominion over the recreated earth. God will reinstate the order lost to chaos at the fall, and He will empower us to keep that order for Him.

But one may argue that the Bible speaks of a new heaven alongside the new earth. There are two possible explanations for that apparent contradiction. First, in Bible times, the word heaven might refer first to the place where birds fly or second to the place where the stars are or, third, to the place where God and the angels dwell. When Paul writes of our enemies being “spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies,” he has in mind the third heaven which is a dimension parallel to our earthly existence but distinct from it. Obviously, the two dimensions intersect on occasion as when angels or demons appear on earth. In a future time, the intersection will be complete.

A simpler explanation for the new heaven is that the first and second meanings of heaven – the sky and outer space – will be made new along with the earth. This makes sense when you consider that the earth and the two heavens (as it were) were created by God as a package. The third heaven (as it were) won’t need to be renewed because it was not affected by the fall of Adam and Eve. It remains the eternal dwelling place of God and His created host forever before Earth came to be and forever after Earth is renewed.

One might ask where the New Jerusalem fits in this scheme. Revelation pictures New Jerusalem as a golden city floating in the sky over Earth where God sits enthroned, and people go there to worship Him. There are two ways to answer this. First, ever since the earthly Jerusalem ceased to be the location of God’s special presence, symbolized by the tearing of the veil to the holy of holies when Christ was crucified, the New Jerusalem has been the location of God’s throne (if a spiritual existence can have “location”). Both Galatians and Hebrews state that believers have come (perfect tense) to the heavenly Jerusalem. The verb tense means we are already there. The heavenly Jerusalem with God’s throne is available to us now. The writer of Hebrews says we can approach the throne of grace with complete confidence on account of the saving work of Christ.

The other way to imagine what it means for the New Jerusalem to “come down out of Heaven,” as Revelation describes is to understand that in that new situation, with all God’s enemies defeated, the dwelling place of God and the dwelling place of humans have been reunited. As the book records, “, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” Lest one think that this is a future reality held off until the final chapter, remember Jesus promised when He left that, “If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and will take up residence with him.” When we joyously sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus we often imagine we are speaking of a future hope when in fact the kingdom we are proclaiming has already come.

Already come, I know, but not yet. The already/not yet dynamic applies to most of our Christian experience. We are already sanctified, but not yet. We are already glorified, but not yet. We are already saved, but the full meaning of being saved is not yet available to us. We are living in the tension of the Lord’s Prayer request, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (My italics.) Along with all creation, we groan as in childbirth for the fullness of our salvation. Not to escape Earth and dwell among the clouds, but to be clothed in our incorruptible bodies, as Paul calls them, to do the work we were originally designed to do. In the meantime, we can begin our kingdom work; everything we do in the Spirit will bear fruit in the New Earth. If you understand what salvation is, you can see that you have work to do. Get to it.

¹ N. T. Wright; Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church; 2008; Harper One; New York.

² I say I half agree with Wright’s suspicion that there may be a waiting place for all who die prior to the final judgment. Half of me thinks that there is no need for a waiting place because when we die, we depart the time/space creation. Time has a different meaning in the spiritual realm where God exists. Remember that with God, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.

Related posts: Defending Resurrection Faith; Why Heaven Matters; Bringing the Kingdom