Session 6 - Return of Jesus & New Creation | Core Testimony

Christian hope is not built on decoding a timetable. It rests on the promise that Jesus will return, the dead will be raised, evil will be judged, and creation will be made new.

Wayne places that hope within the larger biblical story of the Day of the Lord. The prophets expected God to enter history, judge evil, preserve a people, and begin a renewed age. In Jesus, that promised day was divided between His first coming and His return. We now live in the time between: a time of grace, mission, and confident expectation.

This session does not invite us to escape the present or predict the future. It asks how the promised future of God should shape our life now. The final question is not, “Can we calculate when Jesus will come?” It is, “What is worth fighting for while we wait?”

Transcript

A Farm Story About End Times

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When I was a young lad growing up on a farm in Minnesota, most of the people who were part of our rural congregation were relatives or distant relatives of one another. Part of a German community that migrated from northern Europe to the plains of Minnesota during the 19th century. One of my dad's second cousins was not a great farmer. We were all farmers or connected to farming industries. One of my dad's second cousins was not a great farmer. He was a very spiritual man and loved to study the Bible. And so when a traveling evangelist came through our neighborhood and held evangelistic services, my dad's second cousin was there at every meeting. One of the key features of this evangelist is that he believed he had had a special insight into the book of Revelation so that he had been able to figure out times and circumstances and chart these along human history. And he thought that he knew exactly when it was that Jesus was going to return. He got excited about this. He became a traveling evangelist. He got a motor home, a kind of glorified van that, you know, had a bed in it, and it wasn't fancy at all. But he traveled around to little towns and communities in the upper Midwest of the United States. And he held these conferences, evangelistic outings, trying to help people to see that Jesus was coming very soon. Well, my dad's cousin got so excited about this that he actually sold his farm and he gave a lot of money to this traveling evangelist to support his work. And then he wanted to commit himself to himself and his family. And so he bought a rundown motor home. And he and his family went with this evangelist and many others that were collected along the way in the various stops that the evangelist had. They became sort of a touring group across small towns in the upper Midwest of the United States, stopping long enough in each town to set up an evangelistic service and call people to Jesus and then to repentance and then to the end times. More and more people traveled with them. It was several months that they were on the road together because the evangelists had picked a date and he knew exactly when it was going to be. And by that time, they were about in the very heart of the United States, somewhere in Kansas. And they pulled their motor homes together in kind of a large circle, and they knew that it's such and such a day, very soon Jesus was going to be coming back. They started a bonfire, they sent out messages to the surrounding villages and towns and invited people to join them and wait for Jesus to return. And at the appointed hour, they stayed up all night waiting for Jesus to come back. And Jesus didn't come back. And then the evangelists realized that he had probably gotten the dates wrong, so they waited again. And Jesus didn't come back at the second appointed hour. And they waited some more. But by this time, some of the group were beginning to leave, and nobody was coming to the evangelistic services. And in a couple of months, my dad's second cousin came back with his family. A broken man in many ways. He had given up his resources, he had lost his farm. He didn't have finances to support his family. He got a job for an hourly wage. They rented a small apartment. And it was only a short while after that that he got very sick and he died, and he left his family destitute. It was a hard thing for us to understand. His name was Lewis, but people began to call him Screwy Louie. And they did so as a sign of derision. And we're talking about dedicated Christians. We're talking about people who had deep faith and deep commitments to the things of Jesus and a sound and stable home life, community life. They began to see him as weird and odd, and they were willing even to name him by a very crass name, screwylooie. And that sometimes happens in the history of Christianity.

A Simple Map Of The Bible

SPEAKER_01 4:49

If you think of these learning series, we've done this is our third thing that we're doing. The first learning series was going over the entire Biden. A long time, eight sessions on the Old Testament, eight sessions on the New Testament, basically six words that we came up with, that I came up with that overview these things, the mission of God, the method God chooses through ancient Israel, planting this people in the promised land, which is at the crossroads of human civilization, before there's planes, trains, and automobiles. The managers of this mission, Moses and Joshua and the elders and the judges and the kings, and then the prophets, and then the meltdown of that mission. So that everything that God was doing to influence all of the nations of the world to bring God's people back home again seemed to almost be dissipating. And so the prophets began increasingly to talk about the day of the Lord when God would have to jump into human history once again and make everything new, because we were not doing it on our own, and we were not doing it even with the assistance of God. And God would have to initiate a time when God would take the initiative and make it all happen. That led to the New Testament and the appearance of Jesus. I call it the miracle, because Jesus is God become one among us, and the message and the ministry and the miracles of Jesus, and then his death and his resurrection, and his promise as he leaves to come again. And that becomes the sixth of the M's that overview the books of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, the mutation. The prophets had seen a once-for-all coming in which God would restore all things the way they were meant to be and wipe out the effects of sin and evil. But Jesus took that singular day of the Lord. And that's why we're living here in the time between Jesus' first and second comings. This becomes the message of the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, but we didn't see it clearly there. We've also taken a second learning series to see how the church has worked that out. How do we live in these times in between Jesus' first and second coming? The story of Jesus' family, our common history together. And the various ways in which we've tried to do that with power, aligning ourselves to nation states, and sometimes through suffering and persecution and through witness and the variety of ways that we've tried to talk about these things. And now we're in the third series, and this series is all about how do we summarize these ideas in a way that is rememorable, memorable, and that we can communicate them to others. And I've tried to suggest it so far that it's all by faith, and that is a worldview choice. It is a gift of God, certainly, but it is also one among several options that we can use to see the world in some way that makes sense out of the many things that take place. It is a gift of faith that there is a God and that God has created this world, and then God cares about us, and that God has come into our world, the person of Jesus, and that history is moving toward a particular end. We talked about our growing understanding as humans about the character of God, knowing God early on in Old Testament times as the creator and the provider and the one who controls winds and waves and armies and nations. And then we saw that there was a new factor that was involved, not a change in God, but something that, like little children, we don't understand about our parents until later on. So with our God, we began to see suddenly that although there is one God, this one God exists in three persons. And Jesus came to show us that Jesus is fully God, but Jesus is not the Father, and the Father is not Jesus. And then came the Holy Spirit. So we began to understand God in a new way, the Trinity that is at the heart of Christianity. Then we began to talk about what was it that Jesus was? Was he fully human? Was he fully divine? How did these natures and characters integrate with him? What exactly are we talking about? And so we probed issues with regard to how do we think about Jesus. And in the fourth session, we talked about how does the work of Jesus come to us? What exactly do we mean by salvation? What are the different ways to think about being saved and what that means? And then last time we talked about the manner in which through the Holy Spirit the church begins a witness in the world. What exactly does witness mean? What exactly does mission mean? And now we're coming to culmination of all of that.

The Four Big Human Questions

SPEAKER_01 10:10

What's still ahead? And that's where the book of Revelation becomes a huge part of our thinking, but it's not the only part to think about when we think about things yet to come. Because there is a sense among all of us that there has to be some resolution to the story of the human race, to what's happening on planet Earth as well as in the stars and in the planets and in the galaxies themselves. Why was, in fact, this all created, or why did it emerge and where is it heading? Many times we like to talk about four dominant themes that we need to think about: origin, unity, purpose, and destiny. Where did we come from? What holds all things together? Why, in fact, do we exist, and where are we headed? And in this session, we're going to talk particularly about what the Bible says about where we're headed and what we do in the times before Jesus returns. Now, the Bible is very clear on something, and that is that God seeks a resolution to the things that we have, the things that we have experienced. The Old Testament is filled with that, and that's that day of the Lord. The idea of the day of the Lord came as God's mission in and through and with Abraham's family was beginning to be diminished. Although God and Abraham started out with this great promise, this great anticipation, through you, said God to Abraham, I will bless all of the families on earth, all of God's kids, all the people of earth are God's children. We are all made in the image of God. That's the biblical message. But God was distant from and alienated from, not by God's own choice, but by the way that human society came about in a way that we were distant from our creator. How would our heavenly father reconnect with all of us? And it was through the family of Abraham that God attempted to reconnect with all the families on earth. We've looked at that several times. But the story of the Old Testament and Israel's demise is really a sad story in the Old Testament. And the prophets kept talking about as God once stepped into human history to initiate this missional role and great movement, so God now will have to step into human history again. And they talked about it as the day of Yahweh, the day of the Lord. That was the first one with Exodus, with God grabbing the people of Israel, the family of Abraham, and leading them out from slavery into freedom and establishing them as partners in mission in the promised land. Now that that promised land was being whittled away by others, now that the people of God were forgetting who they were and whose they were, the prophets kept saying, God will have to do the day of the Lord thing again.

The Day Of The Lord Pattern

SPEAKER_01 13:24

And they consistently talked about the day of the Lord in terms of three major elements. One is judgment, a purifying judgment that would get rid of sin and the effects of sin, the evil that's present in our world that limits us and destroys us and undermines our effectiveness as human beings. And secondly, the sparing of a remnant. There will be people who will not be destroyed in the fires of judgment. The desire of God is not to destroy God's children, but to bring them through the fires of judgment into a new world. And that's thirdly, the third part of the day of the Lord, the beginning of a new age, the messianic age. Isaiah would talk about the time, the peaceable kingdom, when the lion would lie down with the lamb, and the snakes wouldn't kill people, and no one would die of deadly diseases, and everything would be at peace, and the nations wouldn't make war against one another, and a little child would lead them. In other words, what the prophets increasingly saw is a day when whatever it was that God had intended at the beginning of creation, a world resplendent with all that was necessary to sustain life and help it to thrive. And when humans were conscious of their relationship with God and the world around them, that kind of thing would be restored. Only a Messiah, only a divine sent messenger could do that. Now we get to the new age. And

Why Jesus Delays The End

SPEAKER_01 14:59

here's where the thing became kind of strange for many of us, because this one-time event got split in two. Jesus did, in fact, experience the judgment for sin and evil. Jesus died a horrible death on the cross, in that he absorbed all that was wrong and that was evil and the judgment of God on those things in Jesus' own self. Secondly, Jesus also began to usher in a new community, the disciples who talked about going to see others and bring others into this remnant community. And thirdly, Jesus promised to come back to make all things new. He said this when he left. Those around him said this when he left. And the book of Revelation is all about that and the testimony of the disciples of Jesus that this same Jesus who left is going to come back and he will make all things new. But there are things that are going to happen in the meantime. So now we're left in this age, this missional age in which we exist as the remnant community of Jesus, awaiting Jesus' return, not certain exactly what it's going to be or when it's going to be, and making all sorts of predictions, but also finding it a little bit hard to understand.

What Happens If We Die First

SPEAKER_01 16:27

And the reasons for it being hard to understand are real, realistic. For one thing, we are born to live. I don't want to die. I was born to live. And yet I know, I know when I think about it, I will likely die. I would like to live, as Paul said at one time, until Jesus returns. Maybe Jesus will return very shortly, and I will be one of those who will see Jesus coming back. But there's a good chance that I will not be alive when Jesus returns. And so then what happens to me before Jesus returns? And here's what Paul wrote about to the Thessalonians, because they said, You promised that we would see Jesus coming back. He's not coming back, and then my wife died, or my husband died, or my parents died, or my child died. What's going to happen to them? And so 1st and 2nd Thessalonians are some of Paul's earliest letters in which he addresses that very specific question. There are also issues with regard to what exactly are we and when does the end come for us?

Soul And Body Isn’t Biblical

SPEAKER_01 17:35

And here's where our world has been highly influenced by Greek philosophic thinking. You may think that the Greeks aren't much of a country today on the world scale of things. And you may think that Greek philosophy of way back when doesn't really matter to us. But in fact, in certain ways, it has significantly affected and influenced what we think about ourselves. And the biggest of those things is a sense of Greek dualism, anthropological dualism. What does that mean? Very easily we will talk about being soul and body. That somehow this person that you see, this body that I have, whether I like it or not, whether I'm trying to change it through exercise or diet or all sorts of medical programs that affect the way I look, or whether I really like what I look like, or I like how I function. The fact of the matter is that this is the way you perceive of me. You see a person, but there's something about me that you cannot see. And that's my thinking, my emotions, my rationing, my understanding of things, my sense of perception about things. There is an interior to me. The Greeks began to think extensively, and they were not alone in this, but they made it so much a part of their communications that since that time, nearly every society has been influenced by what they began to officially teach that humans are soul and body, soul and body. Two things deeply intertwined. That's the philosophic questions. How deeply are they intertwined? What exactly is our soul? What is our body? Can they be separated? Are they, in fact, so tied to one another that when we die, our souls die too? The reality is that even the language of the New Testament, not so much the Old Testament, but the language of the New Testament picks out some of those terms. But here's the catch. Nowhere in the Bible does any of the writers conceive of the human identity being understood as two parts that can be taken apart. Soul and body are Greek philosophical concepts that are not used in the Bible to describe human life. Now, why is this significant? Because in our popular culture, we have a tendency to think of our souls as pure and undying, even as our bodies age and pass away. And if that's the case, we can hope and project that someday we will be freed, we will have souls that can travel, that can see, that can expand their capacities, and we have this in very popular ways.

Grief And The Myth Of Spirits

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Some years ago, the secretary in the church that I served, her sons, twin sons, were duck hunting with a friend, and they were in a small boat on a small lake, and a flock of ducks flew overhead, and as they were all aiming for the ducks, one of those two sons, a grown son, very young but grown, began to stand up in the boat and came in the direct line of fire of the person behind him who was his friend. And he was killed. It was a horrible thing. It was a horrible, horrible time. And the funeral that we had for him was so heart rending. This was a young man. A promise taken much too early from this life in a horrible way. A year after that happened, his twin brother did not attend worship on the Sunday morning closest to the anniversary of that date. One year later. A week later, that brother, that twin brother who was alive, was back in worship services and he talked to me. And he said that he couldn't be with others on the anniversary of that awful event that took his brother's life. So he went up north in Michigan and he spent time out in the wilderness in the woods. He did some bow hunting, bow and arrows, deer hunting. And he had this tree stand in a forested place. And he was up in the trees watching the wildlife and waiting for a large deer to come. And finally, a large deer came. He said it was a 12-point buck, which is a very old and massive, mature, beautiful deer, male deer. And he said it just stood there in a clearing, perfect shot for him. He got his bow and arrow ready to fire at the deer. And he was thinking about his brother, and he was saying in his mind, and this is what he reported to me, Pastor, I just knew that Jimmy brought this deer to me and that he was so close to me, and he was right there. And because it was a gift from my brother Jimmy, I decided I would not take its life. And I let it linger for a while and then walk back into the woods. A gut-wrenching story about a young man who lost his best friend, his twin brother, a year later grieving and going out to be alone and to think about his brother. And what does he think about? He thinks that his brother's spirit, soul, is still lingering in the wilderness with him, keeping an eye on him and moving animals. Now there's something a little strange about that, and it is, I think, related to this Greek idea of soul-body dualism. That somehow these bodies, as much as we try to make them muscular or beautiful, we dress them in various ways, and we try to live in meaningful ways with them. We're a little ashamed of them and we're aware of the limitations of them, and we know that they're going to die anyway. But we have this idea that we have a soul which is going to live on and on and on, and somehow we'll be able to fly, and we'll be able to do things, we'll be able to see things, experience things. That's simply not what we get from the Bible. The thing that happens when we take into our lives that perspective is that we begin to think about ourselves as almost godlike and in not in need of redemption. Maybe these bodies we can't control, but somehow our spirits are freed. And when they are freed, boy, they will be able to do anything. Will they be angels? Will they be gods? Will they move to other planets? What will it be like? And we don't need Jesus to come back because we are freed from whatever it was that dragged us down. That's one of the things that makes it hard for us sometimes to think about a future life or to long for or expect the return of Jesus because we have sometimes this Greek dualism of our anthropology that makes Jesus' return not necessary or inconsequential. Death itself, bad as it is, will free our immortal spirits to become God-like in their own right. There's a second thing that becomes difficult in our anticipations of the future. Nobody knows it. In Shakespeare's drama Hamlet, in the third act,

Why The Future Confuses Us

SPEAKER_01 27:29

where Hamlet is dying, he says, in this cruel world, draw your breath in sorrow to tell my story. Well, what is that story? And the story is that we never succeeded everything we wanted, and we die. But then he also talks about the undiscovered country, the world of the future, from which no man can return. We don't know what will happen next. And there are hints and there are anticipations of that, but we just don't know. And a third reason that we sometimes have a hard time thinking about the future is that the things we do hear in the Bible, we can't exactly figure out what they're trying to tell us. Jesus talks with his disciples the night of the Last Supper. They've just eaten the meal together, the meal that we continue to eat and remember Jesus' death. Jesus had the Last Supper with His disciples, and then they went to the Mount of Olives. In order to get to the Mount of Olives, they had to pass through the temple courts. And the disciples, mainly from the countryside up north in Galilee, were now in the big city, and they were astounded and amazed again at the beauty and size of these buildings. Look at these buildings, amazing buildings. And Jesus says, Yeah, too bad. They're all going to be thrown down. Every stone is going to be cast away from one another. And Jesus said, Yeah, it's all going to happen. And then he goes on this thing talking about wars and rumors of wars and the fact that Jerusalem will be destroyed, but that's not the end yet. And there are other things that are coming, famines and sighs in the heavens, and many things will happen, the moon turned to blood, and all of these things, and the end is not yet. But watch and wait because the Son of Man will come. This is where that splitting of the day of the Lord, Jesus is already anticipating it. The disciples at this time don't have a clue what he's talking about. And all that he tells them, they will remember later. They will think about, yeah, Jesus is coming back again. And before he comes, the world will be in a great deal of chaos. And Paul echoes that somewhat in the book of, in the second letter to the Thessalonians. First Thessalonians, he he reminds the Thessalonians that Jesus is coming again. So be ready, be watchful. But as some of them say, we're gonna watch and we're gonna wait in the nighttime skies for Jesus to return, like Screwy Louie, my dad's cousin, and people who went with that evangelist to Kansas and sat there waiting for this to happen. They're not the only ones through the history of the world. But Paul has to say to them while I'm confident Jesus will return, we honestly don't know when that's going to happen. So get back to work. Go back to providing for your families, go back to your jobs, pay your bills, establish your farms and your businesses. Don't forget that Jesus is coming back, but don't stop living here until that happens. And Peter does something of the same in his second letter, 2 Peter chapter 3, where he says, now people are saying, oh, when's the Lord coming? When's the day of the Lord? When's that going to happen? Nobody has seen it, not gonna happen. And Peter says they forget this one thing that a day with the Lord is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day. And the Lord is not slow with regard to his promises, his coming, but he's gracious, waiting for all to repent. But it will come. And then he talks with powerful language about the burning of the heavens and the elements. That's the cleansing of the fires of judgment and the restoration of all things. And Paul talks the same way to the Corinthian Christians, his long letter answering their many questions. And one of their questions, 1 Corinthians 15, was when is Jesus coming back? And do we really need the resurrection? Can't we just sit around and say, boy, this is a happy, go-lucky religion. Aren't we glad to have one another as friends and let's be nice to one another? And hey, whether Jesus returns or not, we're having a good time now and we're being nice people. Paul says, look, if that's all your Christianity's for, it means nothing. If Jesus did not come back from the dead, then we are dead and we're gone. But if Jesus came back from the dead, then we too will die and come back to life. And what will we be like? We don't exactly know, but we know that Jesus was something even more astounding when he came back from the dead than he was before. And he was quite astounding then. And so it will be with us. And then we get to the book of Revelation. And the book of Revelation is given to John when he's being persecuted. He's been removed from his

Revelation Begins On Patmos

SPEAKER_01 32:52

family, his friends, his work. He's been taken away from Ephesus by the Emperor Domitian. He's been sentenced to a hard-worked colony on the island of Patmos. And as he's there, Jesus comes, and John was Jesus' best friend. Jesus was John's best friend. Always was and always will be. And Jesus comes to John and says, Buddy, brother, I love you. Here's what's going on. It's important for you to think about these things, and especially for those who are in difficulties right now, it's important for you to pass this word along to them. And then we have the book of Revelation. And it is wild and weird, and it has been variously interpreted. And there are a lot of people who are still going to interpret it in various ways. There are, in fact, four major ways, as we've looked at before, how the book of Revelation is interpreted. One is

Four Interpretations Of Revelation

SPEAKER_01 33:52

to say that this was primarily coded language about events in John's time, that the Romans would eventually destroy Jerusalem, but Christ Jesus would destroy the Romans. And it's all about the first two centuries and probably looking toward Constantine and the success of Christianity. That's called a praetorist approach. A second possibility is what's called the historicist approach. And that's where the book of Revelation is coded language, but coded language not just about the first and second centuries, but about the whole span of time between Jesus' first and second comings. And if we read the signs clearly enough, we will see where we're at in the list of chapters as we have them, and we can see where Jesus will come again. And so there's a lot of effort put in by some to find specifically where we're at in the story, in the coded story, and then figure out how soon it will be till Jesus returns. A third possibility is that chapters one through five take place during John's life. Jesus appears to John on the island of Patmos. Jesus says, write the letters to the churches that exist in the world right now. And then Jesus opens up heaven to show John four and five, chapters four and five, of the glory of God that transcends heaven and earth, and how the world is at worship of Jesus. And then what comes from chapters six through 22 is still off into the future. And here's where the evangelist that took Dad's cousin on that motor hull crusade throughout the Midwest of the United States and ended up in Kansas, where he got the idea that if we understand this right, this is still in the future. But one of the things that he was thinking about there, and here's a whole conflation of ideas, is that part of the signs is the return of the Jews by and large to the nation-state of Israel. This will become part of a theological development in the middle of the 19th century, about 1830 is when it began. It's something called dispensationalism. And it will take a look at the book of Revelation and say it's all hinged on something that's still to come in the future, largely connected to the nation state of Israel, that the people of God's ancient kingdom of Israel are going to regather themselves. The world's going to get to be such a dark and gloomy place and powerfully antagonistic to Christianity that Jesus will actually have to snatch God's people out of this world. And then Jesus will come down to rule in Jerusalem, which is re-established now with the nation state of Israel. And for a thousand years, Jesus will be king there. And in that time, sort of powerfully, the Jews will be converted or come back to their God and they will know Jesus as Messiah. And at the end of that thousand-year period, the nations around that don't believe these things, particularly Russia, that's the big bad guy, and maybe probably China now too. These are the big bad entities, and they will come and converge, and they'll try to wipe out little Israel, sort of like the kinds of things that have been part of the news recently. But Jesus will miraculously blast every other nation to smithereens, and Jesus will make all things new, and the church that was left, that left before this time will be brought back in, and then we'll have the end times. That's called the futurist interpretation. The preterist, all of this was geared toward John's times with the Roman Empire, the first, second centuries. The historicist that it's coded language for the whole time between Jesus' first and second comings, and the futurist, in which the bulk of Revelation is still helping us to think through the clock that's ticking down to the very near future when all of this will shift and change, and then Jesus will come. There is a fourth interpretation of the book of Revelation, and this is the most widely held by the church and its theologians throughout time, and that's what's called the idealist position. And the idealist position says it is a kind of allegory in which we understand the ongoing tension between good and evil, between God and the devil, between the world and the church, and that they're constantly in battle, but it's a promise that God is going to resolve all things and make all things new. It does not specify times or places. And that generally is the one that's been held by the church since John first passed along these things to us. It's kind of interesting that all of the scenes and all of the things that are mentioned in the book of Revelation actually emerge from scenes in various Old Testament books. The four horsemen from Zechariah, the flying scroll from Zechariah, the scroll that's eaten by the prophet Ezekiel and the prophet John from Ezekiel, the ten plagues and the seven plagues, the seven plagues of the book of Revelation are seven out of the ten plagues on ancient Egypt. The number seven, the son of man, both from the book of Daniel, the new heavens and new earth, and the Jerusalem that spews out water that will replenish the earth from the book of Ezekiel. The books of the Old Testament come back almost in summary in the book of Revelation in the New Testament. So all of the scenes John tries to put into human language, things he can't really describe, but the only language that really fits is the language of the prophets of the Old Testament. If that all is the case, and I stand with those who interpret the book of Revelation in this fourth sense, this idealist way, that it's the ongoing struggle between good and evil, between God and the devil, between the world and the church, but that the promise is God will make all things new, then some of the other things light up too. And one of the key things, again, that's hard to interpret is chapter 20 of the book of Revelation, where we're told about the

The Millennium And Bound Evil

SPEAKER_01 40:49

millennium. Now, we use the term millennium, the word millennium simply means 1,000 years. And five times over in the chapter 20 of the book of Revelation, we're told that for a thousand years, something's going to happen. For a thousand years, Satan is going to be bound. Satan is going to be in the pit, the gospel will be preached, evil will be restrained, and the good news will go forth. These kinds of things are specified in chapter 20. And again, it all depends on how you look at the book of Revelation. But if in fact you take this approach that has been historically the church's understanding, and you see the book of Revelation as a promise that in spite of the ongoing tension between good and evil, God and the devil, the world and the church, that what is going on as God will bring this to resolution, then in fact a thousand years become symbolic of the restraint on evil that is current in our times. Think of it this way: in the Old Testament, several times over, we're told that the Spirit of God fell on the leaders of the people. We have that at the creation of the tabernacle, Basal on a holiach. We have it in number seven, where there is a time of kind of chastening of the people of Israel. And in order for Moses to have a stronger leadership hand, there are elders who are appointed. And the spirit of God falls on the leaders, the elders that they share with Moses, the leadership responsibility. And Joshua is one of those leaders. And along the way, what happens is that two of the elders are not in the group of elders at the camp tabernacle at that time. And the spirit of God kind of goes out into the camp and finds those elders and they start prophesying. And Joshua gets a little upset and says, Moses, they're out there. They're not in our consistory room right now, in our council here. They're not with us. They shouldn't get the spirit out there. And Moses says, Would to God that all God's people had the spirit. And that's what happens in the book of Joel, where Joel sees the day of the Lord and a time when the spirit of God will be spat uh scattered broadly on all human flesh. And Peter picks this up in the sermon he preaches at Pentecost, where he says, this is what the prophet Joel said. In the last days I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons, your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. And what he's saying is that Satan is being bound. And so the few who remain in the family of God in the Old Testament are suddenly expanded miraculously to the worldwide Church of Jesus in the New Testament. So a lot of these things make a lot of sense if you think about them in the idealist way as sort of an allegory of the way in which God is functioning. Well, having said all that, what are we taking from this? And the reality is that there are three major

Grace First Then Mission

SPEAKER_01 44:04

ideas that flow out of the New Testament and the splitting of the day of the Lord.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

One of those is grace.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

God could come at any time and hammer it down and squash evil, including within us and human populations. But the constant theme of the New Testament is that God is our heavenly father, and no parent wants to kill the kids. God does not wish. For any of God's children to perish. So this is a time of grace. It is secondly a time of mission, because those within God's family who are now aware of the Heavenly Father in a unique way and no longer running from the things of the Creator, they wish to expand the communities of the family, the congregations of the Christian church, the extent of the fellowship, not because they want to build a kingdom for themselves, but because those who love want to share in the laughter of love with others. If you delight in something, you want to tell someone, you want to have friends who share the good news with you. If you see somebody struggling, your heart goes up because you have a heart of your father in heaven, and you want that person or those people to share also in the care that God provides directly, many times, but also indirectly through your own investments into their lives. You wish for good in others. The book of Acts says Jesus went about doing good. That's the testimony from one of the early teachers of the Christian church, that one of the things we know about Jesus is that he went about doing good. And so do we, as the people of Jesus, go about doing good. So there's this sense of graciousness and compassion, that the judgment is delayed. This is what Peter says, 2 Peter 3. There's this age of mission, that we are again part of the new Israel, Galatians 6, verse 16. The Israel of God. The church is the Israel of God. That whatever God was seeking to do in the mission of God in the Old Testament, in with and through the family of Abraham, now becomes the energizing mission of the family of Jesus in the New Testament age, the age of mission. And thirdly, the confidence that Jesus will return and bring an end to whatever it is that is going on here. When it will happen, how it will happen, we are not entirely certain, but we are confident that this is one of those things that will happen. Jesus said that, Paul said that, Peter said that, John said that. And they were all deeply connected to the story of God in Jesus. So these are all elements that are non-negotiable in our Christian faith. So what are the things that we do hope for? And there are really four things that are

Four Clear Christian Hopes

SPEAKER_01 47:41

a clear message of the New Testament. These four things are there regardless of all the speculations other people might have. Number one, Jesus is coming back. Judgment, promise, take it as you will, but this world has an end date. We don't know it. It's in the mind of God. It will happen. That's part of it. Acts chapter one, as Jesus leaves, the angels who are sent to talk with the disciples, suddenly there. Why are you looking into heaven? This same Jesus who has left will return in the same way. Two, the resurrection of the dead. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. We who are alive will not precede those who have died. They will be brought to life again. 1 Corinthians 15. The idea is that these are the persons we were meant to be. We are not intended to be soul entities that are separated from bodies, that our souls are somehow able to escape and live on and on and on, and we don't need our bodies. These are the entities. And the idea of Christianity is not merely some Buddhist moving up the eightfold path until the body disappears and life disappears into the oneness of all being, but that this entity, this entity that we can see and know by way of our identification of one another, this is what I was intended to be. And the fact that God became human in a singular human body with a name, with a face and an identity, is confirmation, says Paul, that we who have to go through death will come alive again. We are not merely partners in sharing some kind of life force. We are entities that were intended to live and the fullness of our lives, many times limited by sin and evil and the effects of society around where we die at a young age or we are incapacitated in some way or we go through depression and doubt and struggles, these things will be removed so that whatever it was God intended for us to be, this will be the fullness of our existence beyond our expectations in the world to come. I will live again. The third thing is judgment. That there is, in fact, a right and wrong, a sense of propriety and impropriety. That the way in which God gives the Ten Commandments makes sense because there is evil that restricts who we are, whose we are, and what we're about. And that has to be dealt with. And the powers of peoples and nations that defy the creator's intentions need to be limited and destroyed and put aside so that God's people can fully live out what they were intended to be. And the fourth thing is the new creation. And this becomes pretty important too, because if in fact the story begins with creation of everything as the home place for humankind, the book of Revelation ends in the same place. We do not become disembodied angels that live forever with wings, holding harps and singing in choirs that even if we don't like to sing, it goes on and on and on and on. We are restored to the fullness of our human identities in a world where heaven and earth are not distant from one another, but our sense is there all the time of the creator's presence, of the values that the creator intended, of a lifestyle that makes perfect sense, and we will be able to explore things we've only begun to explore here. Could it be that the vastness of this creation, this universe with its many, many, many, many, many millions of galaxies, that part of our eternal destiny is to explore the many places we haven't yet been able to think about because we haven't really been able to get off planet Earth? And it will take us billions and billions of Earth years even to begin that interstellar exploration. There are all sorts of things that are part of the future. Can you imagine the things we will paint, the music we will make, the way in which we will love, the kinds of crops we will develop and grow, the things we will enjoy about our relationship with animals, the capacities of our human body, and the explorations we will have to see things that now we only begin to wonder at. So those are the four things that we can hold with confidence. Jesus will return. Our bodies, our entities will be restored to life, not bodiless souls, not angels, not some kind of furtive things in the future, but the persons we are and were meant to be. Judgment that clears the slate and does get rid of the evil that right now is a constant plague upon us. And fourthly, the renewed creation in which things become what God intended for them to be, and we continue to be, in the best of ways, managers and stewards. And so what we do with the creation right now matters. It's not just that the things are going to get swept away, but that what we do will actually live on into the new creation, and that's a powerful thing as well. Now, with all of this in mind, how should we then live? We are those who love God because

The Question That Demands Action

SPEAKER_01 54:20

we know God loves us. We are those who are redeemed by the sacrifice and the life and love of Jesus. We are those who are empowered by the Holy Spirit to actually care for the world in which we live for ourselves and for one another, and engage in telling others about these things. I think about the way in which, you know, travel to South Africa, Alan Payton put it in his third novel. He wrote a number of short stories, but three novels. The one that we most often think about is Cry the Beloved Country, in which he explored the impact of apartheid before the final stipulations were put in place in Pretoria. And that one is a heart-wrenching story about the evil that we do to one another. And you should read it if you haven't read it yet, Cry the Beloved Country. But Alan Payton's last novel, written in 1981, long after apartheid had been in place for some time, and all of its cruel effects were being felt in the injustices of South African society. It focuses on six different stories, and these are all connected to people that Alan Payton knew. He disguised them. It was historical fiction. The second of those stories is about Robert Mansfield. Robert Mansfield in Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, was a former player, rugby player on the great team of South Africa, the Springboks. He was well known and he was liked immensely, and he became an educator and he became the head of a school system. He was the principal of the school. He was primarily invested as sort of principal of the senior school, the secondary school. And as the rules of apartheid are coming down from the government, Robert Mansfield, who does not consider himself to be a political person at all, realizes that this is wrong. He will not abide by some of the rules and regulations of who can play with whom on the sporting fields and who can be with whom in classes and who can teach in schools and all of these kinds of things. And he refuses to implement some of the rules of apartheid. And because of that, he's arrested. He's forced to leave his job and his family. He's placed in a secluded house, separated from family and friends. He's awaiting trial. And the only person who can have interaction with Robert Mansfield is Emmanuel Nene. He is a court reporter or a servant of the court who drives his little moped back and forth. And he brings all of the paperwork from the court to Robert Mansfield in a secluded place. And he takes back signatures and signed documents to the courts while this is all going on. One of the things that Emmanuel Nene has been instructed in is that he's not supposed to have direct interaction with Robert Mansfield. He is only a messenger. He is not to build any relationship or get to know personally Robert Mansfield. But this is not an Emmanuel Nene's character. So Emmanuel Nene, whenever he meets with Robert Mansfield and exchanges packets of materials, he always asks some questions. And after they develop a sort of preliminary friendship, at one point Emmanuel Nene says to Robert Mansfield, so why did you do it? Why did you oppose the government? Why did you not enforce the stipulations of apartheid? Why have you done this? And it's cost you your job and it could cost you much more. And Robert Mansfield, who doesn't consider himself a particularly political person, kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 58:32

And then Emmanuel Nene says this. He says, I think I know.

SPEAKER_01 58:38

You and I were both Christians, he says. And we both know that one day, someday, when our Lord returns, we'll go to the other side. We'll meet him face to face. And we will enter into that big group of folks who are there, present with the Lord, and we'll see him there and see his smile, and we'll hear the singing and the laughter. And we'll see the scars in his hands, the wound in his side, and he will welcome us home and say, Well done, good and faithful servants. And we will say to him, Can we touch those scars? Can we see those scars? And he will show us his scars, and we will be amazed. And then you know what will happen. He will sit back and he will look at us and he will say to us, and now show me your scars, and we will get the quizzical look on our face, and we'll say, Lord, Lord, were your scars not sufficient? What was it that you expected of us? And then he will sit back and he will nod, and he will smile, but a tear will come down from his eye, and he will look at us and he will say, Yes, yes, indeed, my wounds were sufficient for your salvation, and he will pause, and then he will say to us, but was there nothing to fight for?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

And that's what I think about. That's what haunts me sometimes in these days of my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:43

When I still try to figure out what revelation means, when I try still to figure out when Jesus will come, when I try still to figure out my faith, I hear this haunting question through Alan Payton's novel, Jesus saying, But was there nothing to fight for? I don't earn my salvation, I don't earn anybody else's salvation. But in these times of struggle, what is there that I am willing to fight for? How will I seek to bring in the promises of God? How will I seek to help renew the church of Jesus? How will I seek to bring justice to the places in this world where there are voices that are missing at the table? And where are those who are being pushed aside and abused? What is it that I'm willing to fight for? And where are the scars of my testimonies of faith? I believe in Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:49

I believe he is coming again to make all things new. And what am I doing during these times in which he delays?