death – Dancing In The Kingdom

Future of the faith

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed – Chapter 12 – Launching the church

Future of the faith

[Bible references: Isaiah 65:17-25; 66:22-24; Luke 20:34-362 Corinthians 5:1-10; 2 Peter 3:10-15; Revelation 21:1-8]

As mentioned in the previous section, the war against evil has been won. Christ has won the battle over sin and death. We need to keep our minds fixed on that when the battles rage around us. We need to remember that we are the side of the victor and not get defensive – our God is not small! We need to remember that the forces of evil have reigned since the fall and so, when Jesus came in the flesh, it was the forces of good that have intruded on the forces of evil, not the other way around.

With the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Kingdom of God has entered onto the earth and Jesus continues to bring the Kingdom of God on earth through his church. Unfortunately, we need to wait until Jesus returns before he completely restores the Kingdom of God. But He will restore it!

One of the in-between time confusions centers around what happens in the day that Christ returns. In this time, when Christians die, we are not automatically resurrected, instead we leave earth to go to heaven to be with the Lord. But that is not our last destination! When Christ returns, He will unite heaven with earth, and it is then that we will then receive our resurrected bodies so that we can live on that new earth.

One of the other confusions around what happens what is the relation between the old earth and the new earth. The language in 2 Peter 3:10 can make it seem that the old earth will simply be annihilated and replaced with the new earth. However, that would seem to conflict with Acts 3:21 where God is said to “restore all things.”

“The times of the restitution of all things – The noun rendered restitution … does not elsewhere occur in the New Testament. The verb from which it is derived occurs eight times. It means properly “to restore a thing to its former situation,” as restoring a “strained” or “dislocated” limb to its former soundness. Hence, it is used to restore, or to heal, in the New Testament …”^{^[1]}

It so happens that “all but one of the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts do not have the final words “will be burned up” but instead have “will be found, …”^[2] and that would be more in line with Acts 3:21.[3] What has been the more common rendering of “burning up the earth” has caused some to not care about our current earth, but if the earth is to be transformed rather than destroyed then we might, as the stewards of the earth, pay more attention to taking care of the earth.

^[1] Biblehub “Acts 3:21” Biblehub biblehub.com/acts/3-21.htm

^[2] Wolters, Albert M. “Creation Regained: Biblical Bases for a Reformational Worldview” William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1985, 2005. (Location 568 of 1582)

[3] Bible.org “A Brief Note on a Textual Problem in 2 Peter 3:10” the meaning of the term is virtually the equivalent of “will be disclosed,” “will be manifested.” Thus, the force of the clause would be that “the earth and the works [done by men] in it will be stripped bare [before God].” BAGD suggests a slight modification of this: be found as a “result of judicial investigation” (s.v. εὑρίσκω, p. 325. 2), citing Acts 13:28; 23:9; John 18:38; 19:4, 6; and Barnabas 21:6 as approximate parallels. Danker2 suggested a parallel between 2 Pet 3:10 and Ps Sol 17:10 (“Faithful is the Lord in all his judgments which he executes on the earth”; the link here is conceptual, though in v. 8 εὑρίσκω is used of the exposure of men’s sins before God). We might add that the unusualness of the expression is certainly in keeping with Peter’s style throughout this little book. Hence, what looks to be suspect because of its abnormalities, upon closer inspection is actually in keeping with the author’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. The meaning of the text then, is apparently that all but the earth and men’s works will be destroyed. Everything will be removed so that humanity will stand naked before God.

Observe

Read 1 Peter 3:10-15. What should our attitude be because we know that the new heavens and earth will be happening?

The Spirit and the story

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed – Chapter 12 – Launching the church

The Spirit and the Story

[Bible references: Exodus 18:13-26; Joel 2:28-32; Psalm 16; Luke 16:19-31; John 16:13; Acts 2:1-4; 6:1-7]

During Jesus’ three years of ministry, His teaching about the Kingdom of God coming to earth was accompanied by signs: miracles of healing, cleansing, and raising the dead, and by forgiveness of sins. The miracles affirmed the message. With the introduction of the church as the vehicle by which the gospel would be spread, more signs and miracles were called for.

On Pentecost, Jews from all over the Roman Empire gathered in Jerusalem. Many were in the upper room with the apostles, when the Holy Spirit visibly empowered the apostles with tongues of fire, a violent wind, and the reversal of the tower of Babel as people of many different language groups were able to hear the apostles speak in their native tongues. These signs caused much excitement and wonder as the people responded to the work of God. As was true during the time of Jesus’ ministry, there were some who were ready to hear the gospel and others who were not. Those who were ready to hear the apostles’ message were able to understand the apostles’ message while those who were not ready did not understand the signs and resorted to mocking the apostles as if they were drunkards. This was no different than the time of Jesus’ ministry, the signs of the kingdom caused some to respond with increased faith while others responded with unbelief and hardened hearts.

As Jesus had promised, the Holy Spirit gave the apostles the words to explain what was happening. Peter quoted from the book of Joel about how the Spirit would be poured out causing all kinds of people to prophecy: sons and daughters, old men, and young men. Then Peter also quoted from David’s Psalms as he wove together the story of how all these things fit into the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Those who were ready to hear the gospel asked what their response should be. Peter told them to repent, be baptized and then they too could receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Since many of these people were from the Jewish diaspora, they, now filled with the Holy Spirit, would have been able to return to their homes to continue to spread the gospel, although it seems that some people from the diaspora stayed in Jerusalem.

We have sparse details of the life of the church, but there are a few things we know which are described quite succinctly in Acts 2:42-47:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

With the rapid increase in disciples came some logistical problems as well. The miracles of the Spirit did not end the day-to-day problems of communicating between different cultural groups within the church. In the normal practice of sharing goods within the church and within that the need to take care of widows and orphans, there came a point where the Greek-speaking widows from outside Israel were not getting the same care as the Hebrew speaking widows. Because the apostles wanted to focus on teaching and prayer, they gathered the church to address the issue. The church resolved the issue by selecting seven men to oversee the distribution of goods. However, this would not be the last time that language and culture barriers would affect life of the church.

Observe

Read Exodus 18:13-26; Acts 6:1-7. What do these passages say about effective leadership?

Passion unto death

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed – Chapter 11 – The Kingdom Enters

Passion unto death

[Bible references: Genesis 3:12; Matthew 16:21-23; 21:4-5; 26-27; Mark 9:30-37; Luke 22:54-62; John 1:14; 12:12-19; Romans 1:18-32; 5:20; 6:23; Ephesians 2:1-10]

There is a sense in which each moment of history is equally important to the next. Each moment is a moment which God pursues us as he guides us to our ultimate flourishing. There is no reason to suppose that our continuing flourishing will cease once heaven and earth are reunited, but we should expect that our flourishing will continue as a manifestation of his glory.

However, in our current state of affairs in which earth is broken from heaven, there are moments, epiphanies, in which heaven more noticeably breaks through. There are moments in which angels are more visible or in which Yahweh reveals himself through his prophets. Even more remarkable is the moment in which Yahweh submitted himself to taking on human form, even to the point of being conceived as an embryo inside the body of a human woman and then enduring the normal process of physically growing to become a human adult. Yet even that was not sufficient. Yahweh may have taken the form of a human, but it wasn’t a glorified human,^[1] not yet the human as he intends for us to be.

To do that would require him to suffer the shame and justice that we ourselves have earned. The sin that brought us death would have to overcome by a sacrifice that would bring us life. In becoming human, Jesus identified himself with us, but in order for us to become like him he would have to make us ready to receive his spirit. We were helpless to make ourselves acceptable to God, to make ourselves free from sin and its consequences. Bonhoeffer once related his prison experience to Advent. He could not free himself – he needed someone to come from the outside to rescue him.^[2] And that is our dilemma, we need someone to come from the outside to rescue us. The covenant revealed to Moses was given to increase our sin, to make it more evident than before about our inability to rescue ourselves. We were condemned by our sin to remain separated from God.

We saw in the previous chapter, that the world was very much like it is now, full of factions and frictions, the powerful and the poor, and everyone waiting and wanting the world to be a better place. The world into which Jesus was born was as broken as it is now. Jesus came into this world with a message of love and hope and with acts of healing and casting out of demons, but that would not be enough. Sin and death had a power over the world that needed to be broken. To rescue the world, to restore it to what it was intended to be, sin and death would need to be defeated. And there was no one who could carry out the rescue except God.

It was as true then as it is now, ever since Adam and Eve, people look at the problems around them and think that the problem lies somewhere else besides inside them. In particular, the more factions and frictions there are, the easier it is to find someone else to point to. So, when Jesus came, teaching, healing, and identifying with the common people more than the elite, it seemed that the more Jesus revealed himself the more the people seemed to think that Jesus would be the one – to rescue them from the Roman government.

Even Jesus’ chosen twelve disciples, the ones who would spend three years with him day and night … even they couldn’t understand the type of rescue they would need. Jesus would explain many times about what he needed to do, but the disciples couldn’t understand. The truth is, though, that even as we look back and see what Jesus had to do, we also have a hard time fully understanding just how desperately that we need rescuing. We don’t understand the depths of our own depravity.

When Jesus approached Jerusalem with his disciples for the last time, some of the disciples argued about which of them was the greatest, or who would sit next to Jesus on his throne. When Jesus showed his power with his resurrection of Lazarus, the crowds got more excited about the possibility of Jesus throwing out the Roman government and then they gave him a grand entry into Jerusalem. However, Jesus refused to act as they wanted, and the crowds eventually turned against Jesus. Even one of the disciples, Judas Iscariot, gave up on Jesus and agreed to betray him to the Sanhedrin. Then, when Jesus was arrested, the rest of the disciples went into hiding. Even Peter, who tried to follow the lynching party at a distance, refused to be identified with Jesus.

^[1] Got Questions “How does the Bible describe glorified bodies we will possess in heaven?” Got Questions www.gotquestions.org/glorified-bodies.html

^[2] Kincaid, Elisabeth Rain, “Bonhoeffer: Advent is Like a Prison Cell” Christianity Today www.christianitytoday.com/women/2018/december/bonhoeffer-advent-is-like-prison-cell.html

Observe

Read John 12:12-19. In this scene, the crowd is expecting a rescue from the Romans, the Pharisees are worried about their competition becoming too popular, and the disciples are not comprehending what is happening. How did the disciples eventually understand what was happening?

The God of War

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 7– Settlement

The God of War

[Bible references: Exodus 22:21-22; Leviticus 19:33–34; Deuteronomy 10:17–19; 24:19; Joshua 6:17-21; 1 Samuel 15:1-3; Psalm 10:14–18; 68:5; 146:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10; Hebrews 10:30; Revelations 19:17-21]

One of the troublesome tensions of the Christian faith is how to reconcile our picture of Jesus who’s come to bring us peace with the picture of the “pre-Jesus” God who seems so violent. In particular, the God who commanded Israel to “totally destroy,” to leave no one alive in the cities of the “Promised Land” they were to inhabit.

It has been so hard to reconcile the two images of the God, one of the Old Testament that engaged in violence and the second of one of the New Testament who came to “bring peace,” that from the earliest days of the church some Christians felt compelled to abandon the Old Testament altogether. There are several issues that affect how we deal with this problem.

There are less differences between how God is revealed in the Old vs. New Testaments than many think. (See Chapter 2; Paradoxes and Mysteries; Gracious, Merciful and Just). If we have a problem with God in the Old Testament, then we have a problem in the New Testament as well. Both Testaments together provide the full story of the Gospel and a full picture of God.

We need to see all suffering and death in context of Jesus’ suffering and death by execution. Jesus is God the Son, present from before Creation, the God of Creation, the God of Abraham, Moses and Israel, and the God who commanded Israel to cherem the people in Canaan. Jesus cannot be separated from all the activity ascribed to God’s activity in the Old Testament. The Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace that we are more comfortable dealing with, is only available because of all that He had done beginning with Creation, extending through history of the patriarchs and Israel and eventually his own incarnation, suffering and death.

We need to accept that there is much that we do not know. This comes to us in a couple of different ways. We must deal with our cultural separation from the unfamiliar ancient near east culture and a knowledge of God that is far beyond our comprehension. We also need to take Yahweh’s criticism of Job seriously, and Yahweh’s admonition to Isaiah that “my ways are higher than your ways.” Then we also must be careful to not accuse Yahweh of injustice when there is so much that do not understand.

The totality of destruction implied by cherem catches our attention, but this is only a specific, though perhaps extreme, case of the question, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” The answer to the everyday issue of why “innocent” people suffer, is the same answer that underlies the killing of people that we assume are innocent.

Our sanitized culture makes it difficult for us in the modern day who live in a time where we do not witness the slaughter of animals we eat. We have a hard time associating with those who lived in the time when there was the ritual slaughter of animals, not for the sake of food but for the sake of sins. We have not had to watch the slaughter of animals and contemplate the awfulness of our sin and of God’s hatred of sin because of its awful effect on us. We are then even further separated from the concept of a God so jealous for us that he would even offer himself to be slaughtered on our behalf.

Our perception is further sanitized because we live in a world that has been cleansed by the effect of the grace of Christian values (OK, we have to admit that the church has not always lived up to its professed values) and the ameliorative effects of technology and medicine. It has been the Christian value of life that confronted the once common practice of abandoning babies on the street to die and made it rare. It has been Christian values that have elevated the status of women and children. It has been Christian values that led to the development of modern science. So many of what are now commonly accepted values in Western civilization, were adopted from Christian values, but it’s easy to forget where those values came from.

Yet another level of sanitization occurs when we don’t consider the extent of our own sin and depravity in context of the extent of the holiness of God. A contrast that caused the prophet Isaiah to proclaim, “Woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips.”

We also are forgetful of the mercies of God. 1) Jonah was perturbed when Yahweh responded to the repentance shown by the Ninevites by not bringing about the threatened destruction. 2) The mercies shown to many of the idolatrous kings of Israel when they repented.^[1] 3) In the case of Israel entering the Promised Land, we don’t know what kind of warnings the Canaanites may have received prior to the “total destruction” of their cities. We do know that Yahweh patiently waited until he “sin of the Amorites would reach their full measure.” The Canaanites may have had sufficient warning to change their ways (and they had, among other abhorrent practices, that of sacrificing their children to the flames) and yet they didn’t. While we, in our time, may think of the “total destruction” as genocide, it may be instead an act of mercy – reducing the pain and suffering that would otherwise go on.

Sparing the lives of the “innocent” within the borders of the Israel did lead to the Israelites to continue the reprehensible practices of the Canaanite religions, prolonging the suffering that Yahweh wanted to put an end to. Israel was susceptibility to fall into the sin of the nations around them and was warned that allowing the original inhabitants to live alongside of them, would cause the Israelites to adopt the same abhorrent practices – which is what happened.

God had already used the forces of nature to directly carry out his cherem version of justice (ex: The Great Flood which killed all people except Noah and his family, the crossing of the Red Sea in which innumerable Egyptian soldiers died). With the formation of the nation of Israel, God now had human agents to act on His behalf. When God commanded Israel to invoke cherem, they were acting as his agent to execute a type of justice that God had already been practicing.

How innocent were the Canaanites: men, women, and children? We can’t argue from silence that the Canaanites did not have a chance to respond to God’s warnings. We do know that God waited several hundred years before executing his judgement.

It is not just in the Old Testament that we witness immense suffering. All around us today and through the years before, there has been great suffering among God’s image-bearers caused by our own violence or the violence of natural events or the violence of birth defects. All these can cause us to question, “Why, God?”

These issues and many others cause us to grapple with how God is implicated in the violent activity and the suffering endured by those we consider to be innocent. We are not left with comfortable answers. But we also need to remember, that if we have a “God” we think we totally understand, then it is not God that we are really understanding. Also, if we have a “God” that we are fully comfortable with, then we are not fully dealing with the holiness of God and the totality of our sin.

Jesus dealt with the totality of our sin by his suffering and excruciating death. It is only by the violence endured by Jesus that He has become our Prince of Peace. This is the lens through which we must see the violence around us. But even with that lens, we are not likely to have a ‘satisfactory’ answer. Even with that lens we will still struggle.

Time and time again, we see ordinary people approaching God with raw honesty about human suffering. And God responds to them, because they reflect his own lionheart that’s hell-bent against evil and death. God wants our protest against the evil and pain in this world. … To be a Christian is never to be apathetic toward evil and suffering, nor to avoid protesting God. Instead, we are told to work out our faith in “fear and trembling,” which includes unflinching lament at all the evil and death in this world. We are meant to hold our hands open in foolish faith, to watch and wait with hopeful expectation for God to show up in surprising ways—to remind us that he is good and powerful and that he will grant us his own steadfast courage. We are called to the daring and bold love of God in Jesus Christ, who stopped at nothing—not even death on a cross—to fight and win back the glory and goodness of God’s original creation.[2]

Perhaps we are meant to struggle, to lament about all that’s wrong, evil, awful, terrible, sad, and more that our hearts can bear. But in our lament, not to give up the hope that is also in our hearts, the hope that God our Father is alive, that our Father cares so deeply that He gave His Son, that miracles still do happen and that we can expect God to show up in our midst.

^[1] Rishawy, Derek. “God’s mercies aren’t so new” Christianity Today 17 Mar 2020 www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/april/gods-mercies-arent-so-new-rishmawy.html

[2] Hill, Preston. “Have Christians Forgotten How to Fight with God?” Christianity Today 21 Dec 2021 www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/december-web-only/problem-of-evil-christianity-faith-wrestling-with-god.html

Reflect

What have been your conflicting ideas between the Old and New Testaments?

Observe

Read 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10; Revelations 19:17-21. Why does God’s justice need to be meted out with violence?

Sacrifice and death

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 6– A nation emerges

Sacrifice and death

[Bible references: Genesis 4:4; 8:20; 36-39; Leviticus 1-7; Psalm 51; Romans 12:1-2; Hebrews 7:27-28]

God also gave detailed instructions about how and when to conduct the rituals surrounding the tabernacle. Burnt offerings^[1] had been offered before the tabernacle was built but now there were additional offerings to be made.^[2] In the case of all the offerings, something had to die. The cost of sin was death, and it takes death to restore one’s relation with God. Moreover, the animals presented for sacrifice for the burnt offerings needed to be pure and without blemish or defect.

These “perfect” sacrifices were pointing to our ultimate need for a truly perfect sacrifice made on our behalf. The sacrifice would have to be more than an animal with no visible blemishes. The sacrifice would have to be made by a perfect human whose identity would gradually and prophetically be revealed … a new “Adam” who would succeed where the first Adam failed.

Sacrificial death, though, can take a different form than we expect. In Psalm 51, David declares,

“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:16-17 ESV)

and Micah declares.

“With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8, ESV)

and later, the apostle Paul declares,

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2, ESV)

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, ESV)

These passages indicate a sacrifice of dying to oneself, of laying one’s own interests aside for the sake of another … for the sake of Christ. A sacrifice not made to “make things right” with God but rather a sacrifice made because things are right.

^[1] Hal, Doulos. The Fire Sacrifices and Offerings of Israel – The Burnt Offering” Impact Bible.org blogs 4 Apr 2020 blogs.bible.org/the-five-fire-sacrifices-and-offerings-of-israel-the-burnt-offering. Burnt offerings are sometimes called whole offerings (because none of the offering is put aside for eating) or ascent offerings.

^[2] Tam, Stephen, “The Five Offerings in the Old Testament” Moses Tabernacle 2003-2018 www3.telus.net/public/kstam/en/tabernacle/details/offerings.htm ; Bible.org “The Law of Burnt Offerings” Bible.org bible.org/seriespage/law-burnt-offerings-leviticus-11-17

Observe

Read Psalm 51; Romans 12:1-2. We do not have a temple to make animal sacrifices. What we do have is the opportunity to offer ourselves as a daily sacrifice. What is meant by a broken spirit?

Discipline, Miracles, and Death

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 6– A nation emerges

Discipline, Miracles, and Death

[Bible references: Genesis 15:13-14; Exodus 7-11; 12:31-36; 13:17-22; 16; 17:1-7; 20; 32; Numbers 13-14]

Miracles abounded.

There were the ten plagues that God brought upon the Egyptian captors to show the Pharaoh that Yahweh was not just a local God in Canaan but that His power extended over all creation, even in the land of the Egyptian gods. In the process, the Pharaoh’s own heart continued to harden against Yahweh to the point where God would seal the Pharaoh’s fate and further harden the Pharaoh’s heart. In the end, it took the killing of the firstborn of Egyptian families, including the family of the Pharaoh to convince the Pharaoh to let people of Israel go. And even more, the people of Egypt also supplied the people of Israel with great wealth as they left. Some Egyptians even joined the people of Israel in their flight.

Then there was the miracles of the pillars of cloud and fire, which would continue until the nation entered the Promised Land, and the miracle which let Israel cross the Red Sea on dry land followed by the drowning of the Egyptian army. The pattern of punishing a nation that was used to discipline the people of Israel would be repeated throughout Biblical history.^[1]

Once on their way, the Israelites experienced more miracles: a mountain enshrouded in a cloud where Yahweh talked with Moses and gave Moses the Commandments and other rules; manna and quail falling from the sky; springs of water in the desert. Despite seeing all those miracles, Israel wasn’t ready to have Yahweh lead them into the Promised Land to face the obstacles there, so God had them encamp in the wilderness for 40 years until all the adults who refused to trust Yahweh died. So many deaths must have happened, but scripture barely mentions them. Here we will see, not for the last time, that seeing miracles not only did not change hearts but that, even now, despite all the evidence that we see, that all our hearts seem predisposed to turn away from God.

^[1] Ex: Egypt (Genesis 15:13-14), Babylon (Isaiah 13, 21,23), and Assyria (Isaiah 10, 14; Zephaniah 2) were all used by God to discipline Israel

Observe

Read Exodus 8-10. In the narrative of the 10 plagues, several times we are told that Pharaoh hardened his heart, but then there came a time when Yahweh reinforced that trajectory and Yahweh hardened the Pharaoh’s heart. What kind of warning might that be?

Rampant evil

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 4– Retreating to chaos

Rampant evil

[Bible references: Genesis 6, 9]

So that we can know what terrible direction we are headed without that intervening grace, God initially allowed his image-bearers to live long lifespans. It seems that long lifespans delayed the penalty of physical death such a long time that the image-bearers behaved as if there were no consequences for their God-defiant behavior. The result was rampant unrestrained evil that infected nearly everyone, causing God to send a flood to destroy all but one family. Sadly, even with that severe penalty, it would not be long before our God-defiant behavior would threaten to be our undoing again, but God would continue intervening with grace as He would gradually work out His plan to restore us to Himself beginning with the rainbow as a sign of hope.

Observe

Read Genesis 6 and 9. God sent a flood to deal with the rampant sin in the world but it wasnot long after the flood that signs of human rebellion sprung up again in Noah’s family. What kind of trajectory did this indicate for humanity?

The plan to restore creation

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 4– Retreating to chaos

[Bible references: Genesis 3:13-15; 50:20; Isaiah 53; Micah 6:8; Zechariah 7:9; Matthew 10:28-31; Luke 19:11-27; 1 Corinthians 12; Galatians 3:13-14,23-29; Ephesians 1:11-12; Hebrews 1:1-3]

The apparent penalty for sin, physical death, was actually a blessing. Unlike the angels who rebelled against God, death provided the rebellious image-bearers a means of avoiding an eternity separated from the source of goodness and grace. But for the image-bearers, death provided a means where not only they but all of creation could be rescued from decay and death.

The plan of restoration slowly unfolded in ways that would sometimes be baffling and confusing and on a timetable that is beyond our comprehension. Over time though, God gradually revealed how he intended to restore our relation to him, to end our pain and suffering, and to overcome the evil that seems to pervade everything.

God started the process of revealing hints of how he would restore creation right at the beginning. God gave the initial clue in the curse given to the serpent, although the hint must have been a cryptic comment to His newly broken image-bearers. But since we have the privilege of looking back, we can see that God’s then cryptic reference was to the death and suffering of the character revealed in the Old Testament as the Messiah. As time went on, the Creator gradually revealed more and more clues about the plans He had to restore His creation. This gradual revelation was, and still is, a painfully slow time of waiting as we suffer the consequences of broken relations and a broken creation.

Fortunately, as we have waited in our broken universe, God’s grace has continued to intervene throughout history so that things are not as bad as they could possibly be. Our rebellion has not deterred God from providing for our everyday needs nor has he ceased to work on his plan to rejoin heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, God invites us to take part with him in the continued creation of the universe, bringing healing, health and hope directly into the midst of our now broken world, a task that he and we will continue until God fully restores his kingdom. Towards that end, he has provided spiritual gifts, gifts that we can share with one another, to build up one another and to bless the world as his ambassadors.

There are many things about the plans of God that we do not understand. God’s plans for us seem to be drawn out over a long time in which there is much suffering and pain. But even the suffering and pain we endure can be redeemed to help us become more like the Desire of our Hearts, the One who gave all Himself so that we all may become more like Him.

Reflect

What would the world look like if there was no goodness?

Observe

Read Isaiah 53. What did God need to do to restore our relation with Him?

Hope in the brokenness

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 4– Retreating to chaos

Hope in the brokenness

[Bible references: Genesis 2:16-17; 3:14-15, 23; Psalm 4; 102; Isaiah 1:26; Jeremiah 29:11; Acts:318-26; Galatians 3:13-14; Ephesians 1:11-12; Romans 5:12; 8:18-3; Hebrews 1:1-4]

Grief is the normal response to loss or separation. We may grieve when we lose dreams, jobs, health, family members or friends and many other things. Death is separation. Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God.

The first humans voluntarily separated themselves from God so that they could grab what they wanted. This was spiritual death. When the non-physical angels rebelled against God, they too suffered spiritual death. For the angels, the separation was permanent with no hope of reconciliation with their Creator. But the first humans were given the possibility of hope.

Humans were also physical creatures, with mortal bodies, physical bodies that could die. Indeed, the humans needed access to the Tree of Life in order to keep on living. When the humans rebelled, they immediately suffered spiritual death. When the humans were also denied access to the Tree of Life, then their physical death was ensured. Spiritual death followed by physical death. A double grief. But the double grief contained the possibility of hope.

The consequences of rebellions created a great tragedy that could not be undone, not by the image bearers. But even so, as we look around us, we can see that despite the tragedy around us, things aren’t totally bad. Even though evil is very evident around us, goodness is also evident. It is in that observation that we can glimpse the possibility of hope. Amidst the consequences of rebellion, there are hints of hope.

When God confronted the first humans with the consequences for their rebellion, He also gave them a hint of the undoing of death, a solution to the problem created by sin. This hint would only be the first of many other hints to come that we can see revealed in the Biblical text.

We can also see evidence for hope in the continued creation by God, as he continues to sustain the universe he created, continuing to create new living things, plants, and animals alike. There is also hope hidden in the mandate given to the image-bearers. Their mandate of stewardship of God’s creation was still in force, although there would now be suffering involved in the fulfillment of the mandate. There was hope hidden in the name of God’s Son.[1] There was also a strange hope in the banishment from the Tree of Life; the consequence of physical death would provide a way to free us from an eternity of being separated from God and open a way for our redemption.

The sacrifice of Jesus followed a life in which Jesus successfully waited to receive those things that His Father intended to give, resisting the temptation to grab those things for himself. In his life and death, Jesus successfully accomplished what Adam and all those who came after Adam had not.

In the beginning, we were eager to grasp for ourselves wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil on our own terms. What we didn’t plan on was the consequences that would follow. Sometimes God gives us what we think we want even though it would bring us the suffering that God was trying to steer us from. It’s a continuing pattern we see from the beginning until now, that it is not always a good thing when we get what we think we want.[2]

But Jesus life did not end with his crucifixion. Jesus’ resurrection was the proof of redemption and of the hope of restoration. Sin had corrupted all of creation and all of creation is groaning and awaiting its restoration.

The universe is not what it’s supposed to be. We are not what we are supposed to be. We are creatures created with the imprint of the image of God but broken in body, soul and spirit. Our brokenness shows up in our actions, words and thoughts. Our brokenness shows up in the way we are treated and the way we treat others. And our brokenness even shows up in the bodies we are born with. But in His death and resurrection, God is able to redeem and restore all of us, all of who we are, all of what we have done, all of what has been done to us, and even all of creation. God is able to use all of our suffering and use it for our good, making something beautiful out of what was broken.

[1] See Chapter 2, The Mystery of God’s Name

[2] See Chapter 8. Rejecting God as King

Reflect

It’s not hard to see signs of brokenness around us. Are there any signs of hope that can be seen?

Observe

Read Isaiah 1:26; Jeremiah 29:11; Matthew 17:11; Acts 3:18-26; Galatians 3:13-14; Ephesians 1:11-12;. Throughout the Bible, God has chosen to share his future plans in pieces at a time. What those plans are, have been the subject of much debate within the church. What is your understanding of God’s plans for the future?

Self-sacrificing and forgiving

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 3 – The image-bearers

Self-sacrificing and forgiving

[Bible references: Romans 6:4-5; 12:1-21; James 2:12-14; 1 Peter 2:10-12]

Our life in God does not begin with anything we have done but rather with the sacrifice made by Christ Jesus, the perfect sacrifice that was made on our behalf to reconcile us to God. When by baptism we join him in his death, we can also be united with him in his resurrection. It is that resurrection power that enables us to present ourselves as living sacrifices, to worship him by continually dying to our sins^[1]and offering ourselves to the service of God and to others. And just as the mercies of God flow into our lives, so those mercies should flow over into the mercy we extend to others on God’s behalf.

^[1] Piper, John, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice” Desiring God, 13 June 2004, www.desiringgod.org/messages/present-your-bodies-as-a-living-sacrifice-to-god; Wayne, Luke. “What does it mean to be a living sacrifice” Carm carm.org/about-bible-verses/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-living-sacrifice/; Gidley, James S. “A Living Sacrifice,” Orthodox Presbyterian Church opc.org/cce/livingsacrifice.html

Reflect

God did not need to rescue us, but He did, even though it required great sacrifice. As you ponder that, think of how you can show love to those around you?

Observe

Read James 2:12-14. Can a person who exhibits no mercy truly have faith in Jesus?

Self-sacrificing and forgiving

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 2 – The God who created

Self-sacrificing and forgiving

[Bible references: Acts 2:14-41; Hebrews 10:1-18; 1 John 2:1-14]

God’s faithfulness to us is sealed in the love he showed to us by the ultimate sacrifice he made on our behalf. His commitment of love towards us could not be made any more clearly than through the excruciating death he suffered when he allowed us to put him on the cross in order that he should bear the penalties of our sins. And it is through His suffering and dying that he can offer us forgiveness for the rebelliousness of our spirits and the sins we have committed.

Observe

Read Acts 2. Picture yourself as a witness in the setting of this passage as one of the travelers from out of town. How would you respond?

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

[Bible references: Acts 17:22-31]

The following is an Extremely Brief Account of the Very Long 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 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, 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.

Observe

Read Acts 17:22-31. How could we use Paul’s gospel message to people we speak to today?

Scope and direction of sin’s consequence

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

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

Scope and direction of sin’s consequence

[Bible references: Genesis 2:16-17; 3:14-15, 23; 6:5; Romans 8:19-28]

And so, it happened. The one thing that could create the ultimate catastrophe did happen. The good Creator, who only intended good things, allowed his image-bearers to give into their temptation, to put their own authority above His and violate the one restriction placed before them. This violation by the stewards of His creation broke everything: the relationship between themselves, the relationship between them and Him, the relationship between them and creation. All of creation was affected and is even now waiting for things to be made right again.

Everything in creation had been designed to be good, to reflect the good character of the good God. Creation was designed to be a place where God and his image-bearers could keep on creating good things and bring increasing glory to God. But now, although the ultimate structure of creation was still good, it was headed in the wrong direction. The broken universe would now cause things to move away from God’s glory.

“Anything in creation can be directed either toward ward or away from God – that is, directed either in obedience or disobedience to his law. This double direction applies not only to individual human beings but also to such cultural phenomena as technology, art, and scholarship, to such societal institutions as labor unions, schools, and corporations. and to such human functions as emotionality, sexuality, and rationality. To the degree that these realities fail to live up to God’s creational design for them, they are misdirected, abnormal, distorted. To the degree that they still conform to God’s design, they are in the grip of a countervailing force that curbs or counteracts the distortion. Direction therefore fore always involves two tendencies moving either for or against God.” [1]

In our current times, we can get things so quickly and easily compared to times in the past. We want what we want, and we want it now. Our desire to get what we want now overwhelms our capacity to think of others, as we put ourselves at the center of our part of the universe, replacing God with ourselves. In the case of the first humans, they wanted to grab knowledge and wisdom for themselves instead of waiting to receive it from God.

Everything was broken and separated from God. Spiritual death, the impaired relation between God and His image-bearers was immediate and would be mirrored by the physical death caused by separation of the people who would no longer have access to the Tree of Life. This was a great tragedy that could not be undone, not by the image bearers. But as we look around us, we can see that, despite the tragedy around us, things aren’t totally bad. Even though evil is very evident around us, there is still some goodness that is evident. It is in that observation that we can glimpse the possibility of hope.

God had ordained the penalty of death to be the consequence of turning away from him. Sin resulted in spiritual death, the immediate separation God’s image-bearers from God, nevertheless, the people did not die physically right away. Instead, what God did, was to apply discipline to his image-bearers. He also gave a hint of the solution to the problem created by sin, the first of many other hints that were to come.

[1] Wolters, Albert M. “Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Kindle Locations 685-689). Kindle Edition.

Observe

Read Romans 8:19-28. How has sin affected you and the one’s you love?

The Tabernacle and the Law – Part 2

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom, Chapter 6 – A Nation Emerges

Sacrifice and death

[Bible references: Genesis 4:4; 8:20; 36-39; Leviticus 1-7; Hebrews 7:27-28]

These “perfect” sacrifices were pointing to our ultimate need for a truly perfect sacrifice made on our behalf. The sacrifice would have to more than an animal with no visible blemishes. The sacrifice would have to be made by a perfect human whose identity would gradually prophetically be revealed … by a new “Adam” who would succeed where the first Adam failed.

Sacrificial death, though, can take a different form than we expect. In Psalm 51, David declares,

“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:16-17 ESV)

and Micah declares.

and later, the apostle Paul declares,

These passages indicate a sacrifice of dying to oneself, of laying one’s own interests aside for the sake of another … for the sake of Christ. A sacrifice not to “make things right” with God but because things are right.

^[1] Hal, Doulos. The Fire Sacrifices and Offerings of Israel – The Burnt Offering” Impact Bible.org blogs 4 Apr 2020 blogs.bible.org/the-five-fire-sacrifices-and-offerings-of-israel-the-burnt-offering. Burnt offerings are sometimes called whole offerings (because none of the offering is put aside for eating) or ascent offerings.

^[2] Tam, Stephen, “The Five Offerings in the Old Testament” “The Five Offerings in the Old Testament” Moses Tabernacle 2003-2018 www3.telus.net/public/kstam/en/tabernacle/details/offerings.htm; Bible.org “The Law of Burnt Offerings” bible.org/seriespage/2-law-burnt-offerings-leviticus-11-17

Reflect

How many people are willing to die for the sake of others?

Observe

Read Psalm 51; Romans 12:1-2. We do not have a temple to make animal sacrifices. What we do have is the opportunity to offer ourselves as a daily sacrifice. What is meant by a broken spirit?

Chapter 5 – Family to Nation

The Impossible Dance – Table of Contents

The Impossible Dance – Chapter 5 – Family to Nation

God working through broken individuals and communities

Although the all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of the universe is capable of simply doing things by a show of great power and irresistible force, he usually chooses to work through His image-bearers. He can work through individuals or groups, although even when he works through groups it’s typically through individuals within those groups. Most surprising is that even though all his image-bearers have flaws, God has still chosen to do His work within those flaws. Despite our persistent failures, not only does God patiently empower us to fulfill the responsibility of stewardship of Creation that He gave us from the beginning, but He also empowers us to participate in His work of restoring the universe.

Abraham

Walk of faith

Sometime after the scattering of nations, from the line of Shem and Noah, God called a man named Abram to leave his country in the Euphrates River Valley and go to a land “I will show you.” As Abram left his home country, at the age of seventy-five, God promised not only to bless Abram and his descendants but to bless the entire world though Abram. Despite his occasional failures, Abram (later named Abraham) was noted for his faith because he believed God and showed this by being obedient in following God’s instructions even when they didn’t make sense.

When God called Abram to journey to another land, we don’t know what earlier experience Abram or his family or any other citizens of Ur or Haran may have had with God. Was there any experience at all? If not, then with what confidence did Abram have that he was following God when he took that journey to the Promised Land? Then after Abram arrived in the Promised Land, what further questions may Abram have had when he experienced a deep drought in that same land, such that he needed to take a brief trip to Egypt?

After Yahweh told Abram, that he would make a great nation from him, Abram initially expressed his faith by his obedience when he took that journey to the Promised land. Again, when Yahweh showed him the stars and told him that his descendants would be as numerous as those stars, Abram believed, and Yahweh credited that to him as righteousness. Then Yahweh reiterated the promise again when Abram was 99 years old and changed Abram’s name (which meant exalted Father) to Abraham (Father of many nations).

God told Abraham that a great nation would come out of him and Sarah. Yet, this did not look promising when the only son born to Abraham and Sarah was Isaac who was not even born until Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety. Isn’t it interesting that God told Abraham and Sarah to name their son, Isaac, which means “laughter.”?

Hospitality

One day, while Abraham was sitting in the entrance to his tent, he saw three visitors approaching and offered them water to wash their feet and then went to much effort to offer them something to eat and drink. As we read this description of Abraham’s greeting his visitors, it may sound extravagant to us, but would have been normal for the culture of the time. The normal custom was to regard visitors as those who have been sent by God.

Pleading to God

We don’t know the moment that Abraham recognized that one of the visitors was Yahweh, but it apparently happened by the time the visitors talked about Sodom and Gomorrah, which they were going to destroy. Concerned about his nephew Lot, who was living down there, Abraham made a plea to save the city if there were righteous people living in the city. At first, Abraham asked what if there were fifty righteous people living there, would they still destroy everyone there. When Yahweh said no, then Abraham asked, what about if there were 45 or 30 or 20 righteous people there. Each time, Yahweh said that he would not wipe out everybody if there were only that many righteous people there. As it turned out, God destroyed both Sodom and Gomorrah after He gave Lot and his daughters the chance to escape.

Faith and obedience

In one of the most controversial events, God called Abraham to take Isaac and go to a mountain, build an altar, and then offer Isaac as a sacrificial offering. Abraham must have severely tested, but Abraham obeyed God and went through the entire process to the point where he was about slay Isaac when God provided a substitute, a ram. Isaac would indeed be the next link in the genealogical chain connecting Abraham ultimately to the birth of the Messiah 2000 years later.

Slow and steady

The man who Yahweh would say would be the “father of many nations” had only one son born very late in his life and that son, Isaac, would have only twins. Even then, Esau and Jacob were born late in Isaac’s life, so the “father of many nations” would die only seeing two grandchildren.

Isaac

Ordinary believers

Meanwhile, the Biblical record for life of Isaac is unremarkable. God had blessed Isaac with wealth, however, the most notable events in his life were 1) failing just as his father Abraham had done in fearing that king Abimelech might kill him to get his wife, so he claimed that his wife was his sister and 2) when he was preparing to die, he got fooled by Jacob into giving Jacob the primary blessing instead of his older twin brother, Esau. Blessed, fallible, unremarkable, yet still used by Yahweh to accomplish Yahweh’s will.

Jacob

Deceit instead of faith

The biblical descriptions of Jacob and his twin brother Esau are not flattering. Esau is the older twin brother, but for a pot of porridge Esau was willing to give up his birthright. To seal the deal, Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, would conspire to deceive Isaac: They would take advantage of Isaac’s blindness by deceiving Isaac and setting it up for Jacob instead of Esau to receive the primary blessing from Isaac. This deceit happened even though when Rebekah was pregnant with the twins that Yahweh had told her that “the older would serve the younger,” so it is curious that Isaac still insisted on giving the primary blessing to Esau instead of Jacob and that Rebekah saw fit to use deceit to help Jacob receive that important blessing.

A higher order

The case of Jacob and Esau is not the only example where Yahweh would choose to upset the common order of things. In this case, it was side-stepping the normal primogeniture and instead have the older sibling serving the other sibling. In other times it would be stronger serving the weaker or having people outside the family displacing sins within the family. God repeats this pattern later by selecting Samuel to replace Eli instead of Eli’s sons, and in God selecting David to replace Saul instead of Saul’s son. And in all these cases, we see God preparing someone new to lead while he arranges to end another’s leadership.

Nation of wrestlers

After the deception of Isaac, Jacob’s would continue his pattern of deception. Yet, despite that character flaw, God would continue to bless Jacob with success just as he had blessed Abraham and Isaac. Jacob’s deceit with Isaac and Esau forced him to leave home and visit his uncle Laban, in Haran for many years. On the journey to Laban, Yahweh shared with Jacob the promise he made with Abraham and with Isaac, that “all the people on earth would be blessed through you.”

While staying with Laban, Jacob would continue his deceit to take advantage of Laban. Then years later, when Jacob left Laban to return to the promised land, God saw fit to engage with Jacob on both the journey to and from home. On the journey home, Jacob now has two wives and two concubines, thirteen children and a great wealth in flocks, herds, and servants. On that trip home, Jacob finds himself in a wrestling match with a man that Jacob learns was God. During that struggle, Jacob confessed his character by admitting that his name means “deceiver,” but then was given a new name, Israel (which means “wrestles with God”). Wrestling with God would become a hallmark of Israel’s descendants (that is, the nation of Israel) and is evident throughout the Old Testament.

Joseph

Discipline and character development

Of Jacob’s 12 sons, Joseph was the most notable. When Israel treated Joseph as his favorite son and then Joseph developing a sense of self-importance, Joseph created a sense of jealousy among his brothers. So, on one occasion while out tending flocks on one opportune occasion his jealous brothers sold him off to merchants traveling to Egypt. In Egypt, the merchants sold Joseph to a captain of the Pharaoh’s guard as a slave. While he was a slave to the captain, Yahweh caused Joseph to prosper in whatever he took care of, inspiring the captain to trust everything to Joseph. However, Joseph became imprisoned because of an unjust charge by the captain’s wife.

Bloom where you are

While Joseph was in prison, Yahweh continued to cause Joseph to prosper, inspiring the warden to entrust many things to Joseph. A couple of the prisoners, the cupbearer and baker for the Pharoah, had dreams to which Yahweh gave Joseph the interpretations. The predictions Joseph revealed to the prisoners did come true, the cupbearer was restored to his job, but the baker was executed. Sometime later, when the Pharaoh had dreams that he wanted to have interpreted, the cupbearer informed the Pharoah about Joseph. Through the help of Yahweh, Joseph was able to interpret those dreams. This led to the Pharoah making Joseph his second-in-command, putting Joseph in charge of overseeing the harvesting and storage of grain in preparation of a coming 7-year drought.

Dreams come true

The drought extended up to the Promised Land, Canaan, where Israel was living. This gave the opportunity for Joseph to invite Israel and all the rest of the family to come to Egypt where Joseph would make sure they were provided for. Joseph was able to see that while his brothers had intended to harm him, Yahweh was able to use for the good. In fact, this provided the setting that Yahweh had revealed to Abraham in a troubling dream, that “your descendants will be strangers in a land not their own.” For a moment, Egypt seemed to be promising, but it wasn’t the final destination. It particularly wasn’t the promised land. More than that, God warned that dark times lay ahead before they would arrive there.

Discipling (a nation)

Following the process of growth

After Joseph and the Pharaoh who knew him died, the growing nation of Israel became enslaved in the land of Egypt just as God had foretold to Abraham. There are various questions that surrounded the captivity of Israel in Egypt:

When there was a drought, why didn’t Yahweh provide for the Israelites in Canaan instead of having them go to Egypt?
If they needed to be in Egypt, why couldn’t the Pharoah continue to treat them as guests instead of enslaving them?

We know that Yahweh told Abraham that a great nation would come from him and that He would give them the land of Canaan to live in. But why the side-trip into Egypt and why the slavery? The only reason given to Abraham was that “the sin of the Amorites was not yet reached its full measure.”

The reason given to Abraham for being in Egypt follows a general pattern. Although God occasionally supernaturally intervenes during events, it seems that God most often allows natural, normal processes to take place, whether they be physical, psychological, sociological etc. We see that process in living things – plants, and animals – as they grow through specific physical processes. Regarding, the great flood in Noah’s time, that only occurred after evil gradually, through normal psychological and sociological processes, eventually reached a particular threshold.

Fullness of time

The emerging story of the chosen people of God becoming a nation started slowly with Abraham, with one child of the promise, Isaac, who had two children, only one through whom the promise would come, Jacob. Finally, Jacob had thirteen children. But it would take time for that family to grow into a size that could be called a nation – and that took a couple hundred more years – in which time the “sin of the Amorites would reach their full measure.”

Although the Bible does not specifically mention it, there may have been other things that God was waiting to happen such as the development of the Israelite community and the consequent interaction of the Israelite community with the Egyptian community during the Israelite captivity. God allowed events to gradually unfold until “the fullness of time” came for God to orchestrate a dramatic release of the Israelite community. This event would serve as a foreshadowing of another event, the spiritual release of all peoples from slavery to sin.

So it was, that in the fullness of time, when the sin of the Amorites reached its full measure, Yahweh called Moses to release the enslaved Israelites from Egypt to bring Israel back to the Promised Land.

Discipline, Miracles, and Death

Miracles abounded.

There were the ten plagues that God brought upon the Egyptian captors to show the Pharoah that Yahweh was not just a local God in Canaan but that His power extended over all creation, even in the land of the Egyptian gods. In the process, the Pharoah’s own heart continued to harden against Yahweh to the point where God would seal the Pharoah’s fate and further harden the Pharoah’s heart. In the end, it took the killing of the firstborn of Egyptian families, including the family of the Pharoah to not only convince the Pharaoh to let people of Israel go, but the people of Egypt also supplied the people of Israel with great wealth as they left, with some Egyptians joining the people of Israel in their flight.

Then there was the miracles of the pillars of cloud and fire, which would continue until the nation entered the Promised Land, and the miracle which let Israel cross the Red Sea on dry land followed by the drowning of the Egyptian army. The Bible reveals the pattern of God punishing nations that He used to discipline the people of Israel.

Once on their way, the Israelites experienced more miracles, the mountain enshrouded in a cloud where Yahweh talked with Moses and delivered the Commandments and other rules, manna and quail falling from the sky, springs of water in the desert. Despite seeing all those miracles, Israel wasn’t ready to have Yahweh lead them into the Promised Land to face the obstacles there and so God had them encamp in the wilderness for 40 years until all the adults who refused to trust Yahweh died. So many deaths must have happened, but scripture barely mentions them. Here we will see, not for the last time, seeing miracles not only did not change hearts but that all our hearts seem predisposed to turn away from God.

Shadows of the Kingdom

The Tabernacle

During the time in the wilderness, God instructed the Israelites to build a tabernacle that would serve as the point of presence for Yahweh in the community. God’s presence within the Tabernacle would allow Israel to see God both as an unapproachable and transcendent God and as a personal, immanent God living among his people. In this way, the tabernacle would serve to display the shadow of a deeper reality.

The instructions are quite detailed. The materials used to build the tabernacle were gifts given to the Israelites as they left Egypt. God dedicated the workers for building the various parts of the tabernacle, filling them with his Spirit and then giving the skills and abilities they needed. God gave everything needed for the construction of the tabernacle. Between the detailed instructions, the materials provided by the Egyptians and the skills of the craftsmen, the tabernacle would be a beautiful work of art. Although the Israelites were told not to make graven images to worship as idols, that obviously did not mean that they couldn’t create works of art to be used to enable worship.

Sacrifice and Love

The amount of killing conducted in the tabernacle to fulfill the necessary sacrifices would be a constant, grisly reminder of the cost of our sin. There were sacrifices for many types of occasions: burnt (or ascension) offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings and others. There was much bloodletting from the many animals sacrificed on the altar, a constant reminder of the cost of our sins.

In addition to the rules of the tabernacle, God also gave other rules that covered other areas of life. Most of us are familiar with the moral code we know as the ten Commandments, but there were many other laws that covered other situations as well. The 613 rules in the Old Testament can all be summarized in the commands: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; Love your neighbor as yourself. Whether in the ten commandments or in the 613 rules, all the rules are predicated on love, thankfulness and pleasing one another. All the instructions point to practical ways for us to love God and one another.

God also gave detailed instructions about how and when to conduct the rituals surrounding the tabernacle. In the case of all the offerings, something had to die. The cost of sin was death, and it takes death to restore one’s relation with God. Moreover, the animals presented for sacrifice for the burnt offerings needed to be pure and without blemish or defect.

These “perfect” sacrifices were pointing to our ultimate need for a truly perfect sacrifice made on our behalf. The sacrifice would have to more than an animal with no visible blemishes. The sacrifice would have to be a perfect human whose identity would only be gradually prophetically revealed … by a new “Adam” who would succeed where the first Adam failed.

Sacrificial death, though, can take a different form than we expect. In Psalm 51, David declares,

and Micah declares.

and later, the apostle Paul declares,

The Calendar and liturgy

What does it mean to for us be created in the image of a holy God? What do we mean when we say, “God is holy?” We first encounter the term in Genesis 2:3 when God indicates that the seventh day was made holy, the seventh day was to be set apart from the other days. When Moses encountered God’s presence in a burning bush, God told Moses to remove his sandals because the ground was holy. It was also God’s intention to make Israel a holy nation, set apart from other nations and through which He would bless all the nations on earth.

The nation of Israel established a couple of practices which distinguished them from the nations around them: the food, and the calendar. There were some restrictions of the food they could eat such as certain meats, fish, birds, and insects, but the calendar provides the most distinguishing difference. While some cultures had recognized a 7-day calendar, it was the Israelites who set aside the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath on which no work was supposed be done. But that is not the only distinguishing characteristic of the calendar.

In the present day we have a universal calendar, and we have a priority for journalistic chronology. That is, we remember historical events on the actual day that the events happened according to our calendar. It is important for us to track events in the chronological order in which they happened. However, there are a few exceptions that we should note. Sometimes we set our remembrance day according to our convenience – for instance, we always celebrate days such as Martin Luther King’s birthday, not on his actual birth date, but always on a Monday because of our priority for extended weekends.

For the Israelite calendar, the priority was not chronology but liturgy. The remembrance days for events were not set according to the actual historical date on which they occurred but were set according to the liturgical calendar. This practice become clear when you trace out the timing of events in the Pentateuch (first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and compare them to the remembrance dates. It was more important to have events in the context of God’s activity rather than the contexts of the events themselves.

This concept provides the background for celebration of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was such an important concept for the Jews, that God used the account of creation in Genesis 1 to present the concept of Sabbath. When we think about God’s creating activities, God did not need six days to complete His creation, nor did he need to rest. So why do set up the remembrance of God’s creation in a 7-day timeframe? Once again, the crucial point is not the chronology but the liturgy.

The crucial point about the creation event was not the event itself, but what it was for. The purpose of creation was to create a “temple,” a place where God could “rest,” that is, “be” with his people. That’s the main point. There are tasks to do of course as we join God in his creative work in the universe, but the point of the tasks is to be with God. When you look at Genesis 1-2, you will notice that the first six days have a defined beginning and end, an evening, and a morning. The seventh day does not have a defined closing – that implies that we are in the seventh day. This day we are in, the age we are in, is the “day” that we “rest” with God. God has intended that all our activities should be done with, at rest with, God.

This brings us to a second distinguishing characteristic of the Jewish Biblical calendar: the first month was during the spring equinox, harvesting time, whereas in the surrounding cultures the first month of the calendar was set in the fall equinox, crop planting time. The difference in meaning was that since Israel’s year started with God’s work, the year begins God’s provision of the harvest which fed the nation and provided seed for the fall. This contrasted to the surrounding cultures which began their calendar with their work, so their year began with their work that provided for the next harvest.

What can be confusing is that in current practice, Jews do not use the biblical (or liturgical) calendar but the civil calendar which places the first month in the fall instead of the spring. Christians do have an equivalent practice: our civil calendar begins in January, which was set by the Roman government and coincided with Roman elections whereas some in the Christian community observe a liturgical calendar which begins in the fall with the season of Advent.

The liturgical focus of the calendar with its de-emphasis of the chronology of historical events helps explain some interesting discontinuities and apparent conflicts in the Biblical text. If we interpret the events described in Exodus liturgically instead of chronologically, we can make better sense of the flow of Exodus.

One of the “apparent conflicts” occurs in Exodus 19, as the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai. At the beginning of the chapter, Yahweh made a covenant like the one with Abraham and declared that they were to be a “kingdom of priests,” and that they were to prepare to go up the mountain after the sounding of the ram’s horn. And yet, at the end of the same chapter, Yahweh told Moses to not let the people, even the(people designated to be) priests, to go up the mountain. By noticing such apparent conflicts, we can better chronologically rearrange the events in Exodus so that they make better sense to chronologically minded folks such as we are.

A possible chronological arrangement of events looks like:

Covenant established – Exodus 19:1-25; 20:18-21
The initial, Abrahamic covenant was given followed by the Decalogue (10 Commandments) – Exodus 20:1-17; 20:22-23:33; 25:1-31:18
The golden calf incident – Exodus 32
A covenant renewal – Exodus 33-34
The code for priests – Exodus 35-Leviticus 16
An incident with goat idols – Leviticus 17:1-9
The Holiness code – Leviticus 17-25
Israel renews the covenant – Leviticus 26

While the rearrangement may help us make chronological sense of the text, in the end, the text in Exodus presents Israel as now being a nation with priests and the community centering its worship around a large tent called the Tabernacle. The liturgical intent of the text is to focus on the outcome, that Israel will be a nation with priests serving a holy God who may reside among them but who is not directly accessible.

Worship at the tabernacle was a community event. No one could do this by themselves. God assigned different people to do different tasks, which not only included direct involvement in worship but also in the care of the tabernacle and its furnishings. Even one’s individual sins required the use of priest to handle the sacrifice. Before the tabernacle, anyone could make offerings, but with the tabernacle, only designated priests could perform the sacrificial offerings.

The liturgical calendar also helps in understanding the creation account in Genesis 1. God did not need six chronological days to complete His creation. God established the six days for liturgical reasons: for establishing a week which consists of six workdays followed by a Sabbath as enunciated in Exodus 20:8-11. The Sabbath would be one of the markers that would set apart the Israelites from the other nations.

This arrangement continues the pattern of representing the holiness of God in creation. God’s image-bearing creatures are set aside from all other creatures; Sinful humans are separated from the Garden of Eden; Noah and his family are set aside in the ark from all other people; Abraham is set aside from all other people to usher in the blessing of all people; Moses is set apart from the other Israelites to see God face-to-face; the Levites are the tribe set apart from the other tribes to manage the care of the tabernacle; the priests are set apart from the other Levites to carry out the rituals in the tabernacle; the Sabbath from all the other days to remind us of God’s provision, in particular his provision for rest – and the list goes on.

Questions:

Read Psalm 51:17; Isaiah 40:8; 58:12; Philippians 3:20-21. What should our attitude be as God fulfills his plans through us?
Read Genesis 18:1-8; Hebrews 13:1-2. In the nomadic culture, hosts readily showed hospitality to any visitors because they were supposed to regard all visitors as being from God. What keeps us from exhibiting the same attitude?
Read Genesis 24-25. We can never know how God will use the ordinary things in our lives to fulfill his purposes. How does that knowledge help you look at your own life?
Read 1 Samuel 3-4; 1 Samuel 15-16. These passages illustrate how God continues to accomplish his will despite the messiness of our lives. How does that affect how you pray?
Read Genesis 32:22-28. God would rename Jacob to Israel, which means “wrestles with God,” which would eventually become the name of the nation descended from Jacob, and the nation through which the Messiah would come. Can we be strong in our faith in God if we have not wrestled with God?
Read Genesis 15:12-21; Exodus 1:1-22. We often don’t know the reasons for the difficult circumstances in life. How might Abram’s dream explain why God originally provided hospitality and refuge in Egypt but then allowed the Egyptians to enslave Israel?
Read Exodus 8-10. In the narrative of the ten plagues, several times the Pharoah hardened his own heart, but then there came a time when Yahweh reinforced that trajectory and Yahweh hardened the Pharoah’s heart. What kind of warning might that be?
Read Hebrews 8:5-6; 10:1-18, 1 Peter 2:9. God designed the Tabernacle to represent a greater reality. Our relationships among people also represent a greater reality. What is it?
Read Psalm 51; Romans 12:1-2. We do not have a temple to make animal sacrifices. What we do have is the opportunity to offer ourselves as a daily sacrifice. What is meant by a broken spirit?
Read Hebrews 10:19-39. The New Testament does not command Gentile believers to set aside people as priests nor to observe the Sabbath. However, we not to “neglect gathering together” so that we can “stir one another to love and good works,” and help each other persevere in our faith. How can we then help each other practice holiness by the setting aside of things in our life, to consecrate them to God?

Hope in the brokenness

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom, Chapter 4 – Deforming the intended direction for creation

[Bible references: Genesis 2:16-17; 3:14-15, 23; Psalm 4; Hebrews 1:1-4]

Everything was broken and separated from God. Spiritual death, the impaired relation between God and His image-bearers was immediate and would be mirrored by the physical death caused by separation of the people who would no longer have access to the Tree of Life. This was a great tragedy that could not be undone, not by the image bearers. But as we look around us, we can see that, despite the tragedy around us, things aren’t totally bad. Even though evil is very evident around us, goodness is also evident. It is in that observation that we can glimpse the possibility of hope.

God had ordained the penalty of death, spiritual and physical, to be the consequence of turning away from him. Spiritual death, the separation God’s image-bearers from God happened immediately, but physical death, the separation of soul and body, did not happen right away. What God did, was to apply discipline to his image-bearers. He also gave a hint of the solution to the problem created by sin, the first of many other hints that were to come.

There was also evidence for hope in the continued creation by God, as he continued to sustain the universe he created, and within that universe He continued to create new living things, plants, and animals alike. Related to that hope, was that the mandate given to the image-bearers was still in force, although there would now be suffering involved in the fulfillment of the mandate.

There was also hope hidden in God’s very name. The name given to us, which was given to Moses and first revealed in Genesis 2, is “Yahweh” (Hebrew, יהוה). In the ancient Hebrew, the characters would have looked a little different and each character would represent an object or action.^[1] In Hebrew, the characters are read from right to left. The first character (י) represents a hand or arm and could also represent work or worship. The character (ה) represents a man with arms raised and could also represent displaying or revealing something. The (ו) character represents a nail or tent peg and could also represent fastening something together. So, embedded in the name יהוה is the message “hand revealed nail revealed” – a foretelling of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

In the beginning, we were eager to grasp for ourselves wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil on our own terms. What we didn’t plan on the consequences that would follow. Sometimes God gives us what we think we want even though it would bring us the suffering that God was trying to steer us from. It’s a continuing pattern we see from the beginning until now, that it is not always a good thing when we get what we think we want.

^[1] Benner, Jeff A. “Hebrew Alphabet Chart”

Reflect

It’s not hard to see signs of brokenness around us. Are there any signs of hope that can be seen?

Observe

Read Galatians 3:13-14; Ephesians 1:11-12; Jeremiah 29:11; Isaiah 1:26; Matthew 17:11; Acts 3:18-26. Throughout the Bible, God has chosen to share his future plans in pieces at a time. Because of that, what exactly those plans are, have been the subject of much debate within the church. What is your understanding of God’s plans for the future?

Self-sacrificing and Forgiving

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom, Chapter 2 – The God who created

[Bible references: Acts 2:14-41: Hebrews 10:1-18; 1 John 2:1-14]

Reflect

In the world’s way of doing things, we overcome enemies by brute force and physical domination. We didn’t expect a God to overcome our enemies of sin and death by offering himself as a sacrifice. What is the most effective way for the Church to overcome opposition?

Observe

Read Acts 2. Picture yourself as a witness in the setting of this passage as one of the travelers from out of town. How would you respond?

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.

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.

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.

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?