Category: Chapter 1

Breathed by God, Written by Human Hands

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

Breathed by God, Written by Human Hands

[Bible references: Genesis 2:7; Acts 15:1-35; 2 Corinthians 4:1-4; 2 Timothy 3:14-17]

It is God who gives life, breathes life. The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, is the same word for wind. God breathed life into the creatures of the earth and then into the first people, creating them as images of himself who could serve as priests and stewards of His Creation.

God’s Spirit guided Abraham to leave for the Promised Land, guided Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, guided Joshua to lead his people back into the Promised land, guided leaders who were identified as judges to guide his people, guided kings to rule over his people, guided prophets to exhort His people and inspired them to record the words he spoke, guided disciples to become apostles to further the project of bringing his kingdom into the world. God inspired disciples to write biographies of his life and letters to the churches. After the apostles had died, that same Spirit raised other leaders to disciple the church and guide the church in how to live and practice its faith, to become mature disciples of Christ, guiding church councils to discern truth from error and to discern what writings should become the scripture for the church.

God had inspired (“God-breathed”) those who had written scripture, but Spirit-led guidance is just that, guidance. How we respond to God’s guidance is up to us. So even if we receive Spirit-led guidance, we need to grapple with a couple of problems. The first problem is that everyone only incompletely understands who God is and different people come to different and incomplete understandings. The second problem is our sin and rebellion against God causes us to deceive ourselves and others, and to fall further from God.

To help overcome these problems, the church has learned to come together in councils. By gathering in councils, church leaders guided by the God’s Spirit have helped each other discern the truth, grow in the faith and bond together in unity. Over time though, as the church expanded into different parts of the world, different languages and cultures added to mix of differences that were already mentioned, which led to apparently irresolvable differences that has resulted in the fracturing of the church, a fracturing that has continued to this day. Despite that fracturing, different parts of the church have still found benefit in gathering in their separate councils to determine what doctrines and practices are correct. While there are forces at work to further fracture the church and disrupt its unity, the Holy Spirit is at work throughout the Church, preserving the Biblical message and creating a unity that is hidden behind the fractured and broken church. The obvious message is that the Church is not the Savior but needs the Savior as much as those who are not yet in the Church. This allows the Church to invite others to come alongside as together we all learn how to Dance.

Observe

Read Acts 15:1-35. What is the power of having a council making a decision together? In what situations do you seek a decision from a group?

Old and relevant

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

Old and relevant

[Bible references: Hebrews 13:1-8]

How can the Bible, written so long ago be relevant to our lives today? It’s not written like a normal textbook, and it seems that many different people think it says many different things,[1] so then how are we supposed to make sense of it? Those are all good questions and hopefully by the time you finish reading Dancing in the Kingdom you will have some understanding. The goal of Dancing in the Kingdom is move between the extreme of under-reading the Bible and making it too simple and the extreme of diving in so deeply that one needs a seminary education. To do that we’ll lay out the big picture of the Bible and the church while spending time of some details that help to flesh out the deeper meanings within the Biblical story. One avenue to explore is the Bible’s stories about people, people who have temptations, weaknesses, struggles and emotions that we call can relate to. And as we see God interact with those people, we can see ways in which God can interact with us.

[1] Storms, Sam. “Why are there so many different interpretations of the Bible?” samstorms.com www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/why-are-there-so-many-different-interpretations-of-the-bible-the-problem-of–pervasive-interpretive-pluralism-

Observe

Read Hebrews 13:1-8. Paul gives a lot of different kinds of advice on how to behave in different areas; then he says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today and forever.” Why does he say that? Which advise might you need to heed?

Dancing through the pain

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

[Bible references: Luke 17:20-21; Hebrews 12:2; Revelation 21:1-3; 22:1-5]

Right now, it might seem hard to see images of the Dance of God’s Kingdom. We look at the news and wonder where things are headed to. Sometimes we look at our own lives and wonder … If there is a God where is God? What’s His plan for the world – for the church – for us? Then we pick up a book called the Holy Bible and read the stories and wonder how they all fit together. Then we look at the church – well, churches, there are so many of them – and wonder why it’s so complicated and messy and wonder if anybody’s got it right. And, what about me, my story, my mess? How do I fit into it all that?

But hints of God’s activity with His people are there to be found. God has been working through and intervening in the lives of many people that have been dancing the Kingdom Dance through the years, bringing hope and healing to the world. Their stories can be found in the Bible and in the rest of history[1] and sometimes even inserted into the news of the day, in the middle of all the stories of our brokenness.

I dance because it makes me happy! My experience is that when I dance I can express something from my heart to God that cannot be expressed in words. Dancing is a point of contact with God for me. It gives me an experience of God as the origin of creativity and beauty … “I dance because I want to spread a message of love, joy, hope and faith to the world … Among the dimensions added by the dance expression itself is the meta-message that there is room for the whole human being and life in its fullness in a Christian religious setting. Dance can teach children and adults a body-embracing way of living, believing and being in God’s world. One participant says that through dance in general, “we want to communicate heaven to people down here, the message of salvation, our freedom in God, the joy in God, and the joy of dancing with fellow Christians.” … Through dance these Christian dancers experience and practice their religion in a bodily way. This means that their spirituality takes an embodied form and that dance for them is not only a bodily practice, but also a spiritual one.[2]

For us to dance the Kingdom Dance we don’t have everything figured out, He does. We don’t even have to worry about the results of the dance because the results are not dependent on us but on Him, who is working through us. As much as we may mess things up, as we have done and will continue to do, He will ultimately restore us and the rest of creation, making us all into what He had intended from the beginning.

Among all the creatures that God created, we are uniquely made, even if we are not the physical center of the universe as some people may have thought at one time. Through the pursuit of science, we now have instruments that make it very clear that we are not physically at the center of everything, not that we can prove anyway. We are only specks on a small planet spinning around a star in an apparently random solar system in an apparently random galaxy in a universe we cannot even see the edges of. Although we don’t know where the center is, the universe seems to have been created with us in mind. The properties of the universe, the physical constants, the atomic structures, were all created such that it would support our existence.[3] Interestingly, although we are creatures made of the stuff of the universe, not only can we study and reflect on the properties of that stuff, but we can also study and reflect on and even reflect the one who created us.

In the meantime, we do not know when He will return, and we find ourselves in the middle, in-between those two times, between the beginning of the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth and the time when it will be fully accomplished. In this in-between time, sometimes we see some signs of God’s restoration – and sometimes we can’t – and it’s hard to figure out what God is doing, especially when there are times that He seems to be absent. In those times, we need to call upon our faith to hold onto the hope that God is still working out His plans. We need to recall all the times that we did see Him at work, and then we also need to remember that getting to the end of the plans that He intends for us may require some pain on our part just as it required pain on His part. And like Him, our pain will be overwhelmed with the glory that will be revealed.

Our ultimate destination is not a mere returning to the way we started out, but to the full flourishing of our potential, where God will establish a kingdom of image-bearers released to display God’s character and reflect His glory.

“And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them. The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed—it isn’t too strong a word—to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation; they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future. That is what Paul insists on when he says that the whole creation is waiting with eager longing not just for its own redemption, its liberation from corruption and decay, but for God’s children to be revealed.” [4]

With that in mind, we can not only wait and hope. We can participate with God in bringing His kingdom to earth and bringing a taste of healing and hope into a broken world that desperately needs it.

“Within the biblical story, the Christian discovers a constant call for justice on behalf of the weak and forgotten. In the biblical tradition, justice is an aspect of God’s shalom, a notion that carries with it the idea of completeness, soundness, well-being and prosperity, and includes every aspect of life – personal, relational and national.”[5]

The suffering and pain in the world can be overwhelming, challenging our ability to maintain hope and persist in effort to bring shalom. That challenge forces us to focus on the taste of shalom that God has given to us knowing that it is just a foretaste of the fullness of the shalom that awaits us in the fully restored earth.

[1] See the section, “Recognizing the contributions of the Church” (p. 104ff) for some examples

[2] Schurr, Hildegunn Marie T. “Dancing Towards Personal and Spiritual Growth”) Nordic Journal of Dance – volume 3, 2012 (pp. 31-40)

[3] Slezak, Michael. “The human universe: Was the cosmos made for us?” New Scientist, 29 April 2015. www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630190-400-the-human-universe-was-the-cosmos-made-for-us

[4] Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. Harper Collins 2008. Kindle Edition

[5] Katongole, Emmanuel. Rice, Chris.  “Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing,” p. 72

Reflect

Think about how the universe seems designed for us, our capacity to think about and explore it and then think about our capacity to reflect on the One who created it all. What does that suggest to you about what God has intended for us?

Observe

Read Luke 17:20-21 and pages 107-108 in the text. Can you think of any stories from the past or presence either from your experience or your reading that help remind you that God or his people have been working at healing and restoring our broken world?

Interlude

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

Interlude

As I was working one warm summer night at a convenience store with the door open, it was not unexpected to see a moth fly in through the door. Normally, moths are attracted to light sources, but this time the moth was attracted to the white top of a garbage container. The moth was distracted by the light reflected off the garbage container. I think that describes a lot of human behavior; we get distracted by the pretty garbage.

In the meantime, there is a story that began long ago when God brought into being creatures made in his image, a story about his plans for those creatures, plans for them to fill the earth and making the whole earth a place of love and goodness, but a place where that love and goodness would be disrupted by our rebellion. Fortunately, that disruption did not deter God from continuing his plans for his image-bearing creatures and that story is still in the making. That story is now our story.

For too many people, even Christians, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible can seem disconnected. Some people have even proposed that the God described in the Old Testament is different from the God in the New Testament. This is partly due to the issue of the cultural barriers between us and the Old Testament. One purpose of this book is to show the unity of both Testaments, how they help make sense of each other and how together they make one cohesive story, a story into which we can fit.

There is a further disconnect. Between us and the biblical writings is the long and messy history of the Church. The Church seems very divided on how to interpret those writings and how to live into them. It is downright confusing to sort out all the various interpretations and practices that seem to contradict one another. How is one supposed to make sense of it all?

This book’s purpose then, is to not just overview the Biblical story from Creation to Revelation, but to show how we, as part of God’s Church, are intended to participate. God did not need to create us or the universe, He did it out of a desire to share his love and delight. God’s creation was more an act of play than of work and He desires that we actively play with him, if you will, to dance with him in His Kingdom.

The Kingdom Dance is not meant to be a solo effort, we are to dance with God and with his people. To that end, while this book can simply be read as a solo exercise, there are additional ways to engage with the material.

  • Biblical references are provided extensively through the book. They are there to support the text. If you read them, take the time to slow down and let God the Spirit speak to you. The Bible has been described as ancient Jewish Meditation Literature.[1] It is best read when you give yourself time to absorb it.
  • There are extensive footnotes throughout the book. Whenever possible, I have provided hyperlinks to make the additional materials easily available to you. If you spend time investigating the footnotes, you will notice that I am not drawing from only one Christian tradition, but from a variety of them, allowing the richness of the different traditions to form a more complete story. To form a more complete story I also, particularly in the beginning, will use materials from the “Second Book of God” that is, book of Creation.[2]

“God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”[3]

  • For those who are not practiced in studying the Bible, Appendix A gives a summary of techniques that could be used to help understand scripture. This may prove useful for understanding when you study the Biblical references given throughout this book.
  • Reading the material with a group can make the most impact. The Dancing in the Kingdom Workbook provides exercises and questions to help process the material as a group. These exercises and questions will help you engage with the material by first asking you to think about how each section applies to your life and secondly to share your thoughts with others in the group so that together you can more thoughtfully “Enter the Dance” with God, with all the others that have come before, with those that are coming now and with that will continue to come until Heaven and Earth are reunited.
  • Finally, the best participation will be not to just read and reflect, but to dance the Kingdom dance with God. The last chapters of this book will suggest ways to take part in his activity in bringing healing to the world he loves, broken now but to be finally fully restored when He rejoins heaven and earth.

The Bible is a complex collection of literature, using many literary styles and techniques and it can be difficult to understand some parts, particularly when one part seems to contradict another part. I have found a useful principal in studying the Bible which I call “Conflicts are clues” which says that any apparent conflict or confusion in Scripture should be handled as clues to look further instead of thinking that the conflicts create contradictions which reduce the integrity of the Bible.

In our age, many regard science and theology to be in conflict. In years past, however, the issue was not about conflict but about which discipline rules over or undergirds all the other disciplines. These ideas were expressed in ways such as “theology is the queen of all sciences,” “math is the queen of all sciences,” “philosophy is the queen of all sciences,” “philosophy is the handmaid of all sciences.”

The biblical perspective is that God speaks to us both through two books, the book of Creation and the Bible. Theology’s main goal is to understand spiritual reality and science’s main goal is to understand physical reality, but both fields can inform the other about the nature of God.

This principle of “Conflicts are Clues” applies not just to the “First Book of God” (that is, Scripture) but also to the “Second Book of God” (that is, Creation) which is practiced by the testing and revisions of theories, but also between the Two Books. During the course of history, the study of the Two Books got separated and some of those in science rejected Scripture and some of those who were Christian rejected science, leaving conflicts unresolved as contradictions. But moving forward, this does not prevent us from considering apparent conflicts between the books as clues to be investigated further.

[1] Bible Project “Ancient Jewish Meditation Literature” Bible Project bibleproject.com/explore/video/bible-jewish-meditation-literature-h2r/

[2] Rusbult, Craig. “How should we interpret the Two Books of God, in Scripture & Nature” American Scientific Affiliation http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/two-books.htm

[3] Bacon, Francis. “The Two Books of Francis Bacon of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.” The First Book. Section.VI.Paragraph.16 1605

Reflections

Look at the four videos you can find at bibleproject.com/explore/category/how-to-read-bible-introduction/ for an overview of the Bible. How do these videos help you understand the larger context of the Bible?

Observe

Read 2 Timothy 3:14-16; Hebrews 4:12-13; Romans 15:1-6; 2 Peter 1:19-21. What is the purpose of the Bible?

A Brief Account

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

A Brief Account

The following is an Extremely Brief Account of the Very Long Story, a summary of the Bible’s story.

There was, and is, and will be, a complex person we call God, who exists as three people that we have come to know as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God decided that he wanted to expand the love that was shared between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To that end, he created an entire universe so that on one of its planets he could create an abundance of living creatures.

On that planet, he created special creatures, humans, who were made in his image such that they could love him in the way that he loved them. This universe then, would be a form of temple, a place where God can meet with his people. The garden he placed them in was where the dimensions of heaven and earth overlapped. The garden was a place where God’s good and beautiful kingdom of heaven was fully present.

Of course, these humans were not duplicate spiritual beings who were gods themselves, but physical creatures who had enough of God’s characteristics so that they could love in the way God loved. But because love is a voluntary thing that we must choose to do, we cannot love unless we have the option to not love.

God placed his first people in a garden and gave them an assignment. They were to be his representatives, priests if you will, in this garden. They were to take care of it as His representatives, His stewards in the garden. Their long-term task was to multiply and fill the earth so that the whole earth would become the place where God could meet with all his people. The entire earth was intended to be filled with God’s abundant provision for his people who would then take care of what God provided, and all the while giving and receiving and sharing the love which God would freely bestow. In this way, the kingdom of heaven would overlap with the entire kingdom of earth and God would freely mingle with his people.

The option to love or not love was provided by a test of trust. There was in the garden a tree whose fruit not only looked appealing but promised to provide the gift of all knowledge if one ate it. The humans were told to trust God and not eat the fruit of that tree. Eating that fruit would not only provide certain knowledge but would also provide death.

The results of that test are now apparent all around us. Death comes to us not only in the form of physical death, the separation of our souls from physical life, but also in the form of spiritual death, the lack of love which separates us from each other and from God. Fortunately, our current situation is not our destiny – and that is what the rest of the story is about.

God intended that death would not merely be a penalty for not trusting (or loving) but would also be the very mechanism by which he would restore us to himself. From the descendants of the first people, God separated out a family through which he would bring blessing to the entire world. Through that family that a nation would be raised and through that nation the eternal God would choose a family to accomplish the inconceivable. In that chosen family, the eternal God would cause himself to be conceived within the womb of a woman who would then give birth to a being who was both fully God and fully human. He would then be raised as a human and eventually would suffer death by execution as a human and then be resurrected as a human.

In that resurrected human body, the eternal God would return to heaven, but before doing so, he invited us to, in essence, to represent Him on earth by becoming part of his body on earth. By trusting him and accepting his Spirit, we could join with him in His death and resurrection by dying to our own self-interests and uniting with his loving interests.

He then promised to return to us again in bodily form, at which time the kingdoms of heaven and earth will again overlap. Heaven will be rejoined to earth to fulfill the intention God had from the beginning. But meanwhile, in this time between His incarnation and His eventual return, we are still called to be stewards of our currently broken world, bringing slivers of the light and hope of heaven into a world now very dark with evil and suffering and pain.

Reflections

How do you feel in comparison to the immense size of the universe? What does it mean to you, that the universe was designed with you in mind?

Observe

Read Acts 2:22-36; 7:2-50; 10:34-43; 13:16-39; 17:22-31. These passages show the various ways the gospel was presented to various audiences. As you read through the different accounts of the gospel, what stands out to you?

Let the confusion begin

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

Let the confusion begin.

[Bible references: Psalm 139; Jeremiah 29:11; Ephesians 2:10]

Many of us don’t want the story of our life to end where we currently are because we want our lives to be more than the mess we are or the mess we see. We have a sense that “this is not the way things should be,” something is not right either about ourselves or our bodies or our minds or our situation or the world around us. At some level we are discontented, dissatisfied, and restless.

A few thousand years ago, someone began writing a story, a different story than the others in circulation at the time. Those other stories were about gods who, except for being immortal, acted just like the humans with all their faults and shortcomings. And those stories headed nowhere. Nothing got better.[1]

But this new story was not about many gods but one God. This new story explained that even though there is a mess now, things had been originally good, and there is a plan to make things good once more. Intriguingly, although the story was begun by one human author, other authors would continue the story. These different authors spoke different languages and lived at various times over the course of 1500 years. What held the story of all these different authors all together was the Divine Author whose Spirit was breathed into each human author. What began as a set of writings by one human author, eventually became a book, a literary masterpiece with common themes, but using complex literary devices and different genres. These writings, all linked together with direct quotes or allusions creating webs of intertextual references, created one long, complex story of a God who has remained faithful despite our distracted and discontented ways.

These texts were sometimes about events before the writers lived, sometimes about events witnessed by the different writers or sometimes prophetic judgments about the immediate or far-off future.[2] These prophecies revealed God’s co-authorship when the events that were foretold made no sense at the time they were written, but became clear only later, either after later writers clarified those prophecies or after the prophecies were actually fulfilled.

[1] Ouro, Robert. “Similarities and Differences between the Old Testament and the Ancient Near Eastern Texts” Andrew University Seminary Studies, Vol 49, No. 1, 5-32 digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3125&context=auss

[2] Bible Project. “Ancient Jewish Meditation Literature” Bible Project bibleproject.com/explore/video/bible-jewish-meditation-literature-h2r/

Reflections

Think about the Life Map you made in the previous section. What questions emerge from your story?

Take time to share your story with others. As you listen to each other’s story, what themes do you see in each other’s lives?

Share the impressions you have of the Bible and of Christianity. What questions do you have? Do you see how your story fits into God’s story?

Observe

Read Psalm 139. Think about the comprehensiveness with which the Creator knew you even before He created you and even before time and how He is intimate with you during each moment of the day. What kind of confidence does that give you?

The Story-Teller and His Book

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

The Story-Teller and His Book

[Bible references: Genesis 1-50; Matthew 1-28 or Matthew 13:1-23]

Over the last two millennia, many scholars have delved deeply into the details of this complex story in their attempts to interpret this story, trying to figure out not just the story but its Creator. There is so much of the creation itself that we don’t understand that it “makes sense” that we would be unable to understand the one who created it. In all of this, in what seems to be a deliberate pattern, the Creator doesn’t try to explain Himself, as much as He just does things and then tells us who He is and what He does, things such as:

  • The creation of the world and His response to it.
  • The first people He created and the messes they made and how He responded.
  • The family he chose to give His laws to, the messes they made, and how He responded to them.

And then the seemingly impossible happened, God came to us himself, in human flesh, as Jesus, a man from Nazareth, a small town in the Galilee region of ancient Israel, speaking to us as one human to another. In condescending to us, much of his basic teaching was given in the form of little stories called parables through which even children as well as adults can intuitively grasp the very character of the Creator.

The complexity of the Biblical story opens up the possibility to many various ways to retell the story, allowing us to draw attention to the many different aspects of the story. The Bible itself starts out by laying out various themes at the beginning that are then retold in different ways throughout the Bible. Dancing in the Kingdom will continue that spirit, laying out that story in different ways. As you read through each iteration, look for what is unique in each instance. When you reach the end of Dancing in the Kingdom, take the time to retell the story in your own words and how you fit into it.

Reflections

If you have the time, skim through Genesis and/or Matthew. Notice that much of the Bible is narrative, stories about things that happened. Write down your impressions of this high-level skimming read of these books and of any questions you have then share them with others.

Observe

Read Genesis 1-3 and Matthew 1-3. Compare the first three chapters of Genesis with the first three chapters of Matthew. What do they show about how God works?