A fantastic quote from my reading during lunch. This is a future worth anticipating. Not the image of a world destroyed, abandoned or left behind; but an image of a world restored in the love and purpose of God, as fully imaged in the life and death of Jesus. Put more simply, this is why I am a Christian.
There is really no reason that we, as followers of Jesus, should allow the global mall, our class or income to define for us what constitutes the good life and better future. Remember the imagery of the better future that Jesus, “who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2), looked forward to. What was the “joy that was set before him”? It was to see “God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It meant looking forward to that homecoming day when he returns to a world in which healing comes to the broken, justice to the poor and shalom to the nations – all made possible because he endured the cross and because he rose as the first member of a new humanity.
Tom Sine, The New Conspirators (p. 228)
Tags: gospel, future, jesus, tom sine, new conspirators, joy
4 Comments
And the funny thing about this is that it seems like a lot of Christians consign this future joy solely to the afterlife, becoming suspicious of anyone who tries to make these things happen here on earth. Case in point: humans living in harmony with the environment and animals, respect and harmony among people groups, swords being beaten into plowshears, our full creative capacity being set loose, etc. Our Christian utopia looks a lot like the hippie utopia some Christians seem happy to malign. That always puzzled me. Sure, the world around us is ultimately impermanent in nature and things will change a lot, but whatever happened to redeeming the moments, redeeming the culture, redeeming the world around us, and redeeming the body—in addition to redeeming the soul? Seems like sometimes everything except the soul is deemed not worth time from the “spiritual” point of view, when God himself was the one who called all this material reality “good” and made us it’s caretakers (at least according to the Bible—but who cares to read that anyway when I can read Falwell / Rob Bell instead.)
I enjoyed this quote. The paradox of death and life plays out fully in the cross: the death of the Messiah brings life to the whole world, the death of a Jewish Messiah brings forth a King for all nations, the death of the Second Adam leads not to a lineage of sin and pain but to abundant life.
for sure, adam. It’s so easy for us to ignore the fact that jesus repeatedly talks about an inbreaking of the future kingdom NOW. “the future has invaded the present” (david bosch)
thanks thom. i’m suddenly struck by the depth of that death and life motif. it’s scary that we can take such a penetrating victory (that even overcomes death) and turn it into a promise of shallow gratification and proof that we are right and someone else is wrong. thanks for sharing your thoughts. i’ll definitely check out that site.