Tag: earth

Looking back – signs and shadows of the kingdom

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of contents

Part 2 – The kingdom revealed, Chapter 10 – The kingdom enters – hope revealed, unleashing shalom

[Bible references: Genesis 6:5-7; Exodus 25:17-22; Leviticus 16; Joshua 24:19; 2 Kings 17:6; 2 Chronicles 36:17-24; Ezra 1-2; Psalm 14:2; 53:6; Isaiah 43; Jeremiah 29:10; 31:31-39; Matthew 4:12-17; Romans 7:7-24; 8:20-22; Colossians 2:16-17; Hebrews 8:5; 10:1, 5-10; Revelation 21-22]

In the beginning, God created a good earth. Within that good earth, Yahweh created a special place, the Garden of Eden, where he could meet and live with the creatures that bore his image. The Garden was a place where the heaven and earth overlapped, a place where the goodness of Yahweh overflowed, a place of shalom, a place where his image-bearers were intended to thrive and develop as co-creators with Yahweh and ultimately create a civilization that would cover all the earth to the glory of God.

“Perhaps the most fitting symbol of the development of creation from the primordial past to the eschatological future is the fact that the Bible begins with a garden and ends with a city – a city filled with “the glory and the honor of the nations.“[1]

However, the image-bearers put Yahweh’s authority to the side and rebelled against him. The rebellion disrupted the union of the Yahweh’s kingdom with his creatures and all of creation was put into disorder. Human space and Yahweh’s space were separated and all of creation was damaged, including not only the relations between Yahweh and his image-bearers but between the image-bearers themselves.

In the Bible, the themes of heaven and earth can be thought of as heaven being God’s space and the earth being the human space. It may be helpful to think of them as different dimensions that overlap. In this case, the Garden of Eden was where the two spaces overlapped, and God and man could dwell together. In the garden the humans were to be partners with God taking care of this garden, however they decided to do things their own way rather than God’s. This resulted in the humans being ejected from the space where heaven and earth overlapped, and the remaining story of the Bible is about how God is once again going to bring heaven and earth back together.[2]

The image-bearers found themselves in an increasingly vicious cycle of violence and corruption which was so thorough that God needed to restart his project and caused a great flood. Fortunately, out of his deep love for his rebellious image-bearers, Yahweh had a solution in mind, a plan to reunite heaven and earth, extending his kingdom over all the earth.

Yahweh set processes in place that led to Abraham and Sarah, continued through to the other patriarchs, and then continued with the nation of Israel. Under Moses’ leadership and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the tabernacle was constructed to be the place where heaven and earth would overlap within the Holy of Holies. The temple was decorated and designed to make people feel like they were going back to the garden.

The difficulty was that God’s space is perfect, pure, just, and holy but the human space is full of sin and corruption. This problem was somewhat resolved through the sacrifice of animals, where the animal absorbed the sin of the people and died in their place, creating a clean space, but that clean space was limited. Within the Holy of Holies, the mercy seat on the ark was where God’s presence would be but could only be accessed once a year by the high priest.

However, the tabernacle with all its rituals were designed to only be a shadow of things in heaven and a shadow of the things that were coming. Yahweh’s relationship with his image-bearers were to be ultimately restored and all of earth would be joined with Yahweh’s kingdom in heaven as was intended from the beginning.

In the meanwhile, in those shadows of the coming kingdom, Yahweh worked within the nation of Israel, his chosen people, to gradually reveal signs of his intended restoration. Within those shadows, the people of Israel could see the futility of their own efforts to reconcile with Yahweh despite their denial of the reality of Joshua’s words, “You are not able to serve Yahweh.” Within those shadows, the nation of Israel would rebel against the kingship of Yahweh, rejecting his reign and insisting on creating their own kingdom, like “all the other nations.”

The nation was reminded time after time that the law was good, but they were not, that their continual animal sacrifices were never a permanent solution to reconciling with Yahweh, that they needed a redeemer, they needed a change of heart. Prophets were raised up to warn the people of the consequences of their continual rebellion, but they also delivered messages of hope that, despite their rebellion, God would restore his people to himself.

Then the promised judgement for their rebellion came: Most of the nation was lost to history as ten tribes of Israel were scattered through the Assyrian empire, and then the temple was destroyed, and a remnant of the remaining tribes were sent into exile in Babylon. If there was any hope that the ritual sacrifices at the temple could reconcile the people with Yahweh, now even that possibility was taken away. The restoration of their own kingdom seemed to be in doubt, never mind the kingdom of Yahweh.

However, the exile was promised to be temporary. After 70 years, the exiled nation had the opportunity to return to the Promised Land and rebuild the temple. Once the temple was rebuilt it was now possible for the temple worship to continue and even for their government to be restarted, although it would be under the auspices of a foreign nation. Yet in all that happened, one thing had not changed; the hearts of the image-bearers had not changed. There was still a need for a redeemer. Yahweh left clues through the prophets and the writings of his people about what to look for in the redeemer – but after Malachi, the last prophet that Yahweh would speak through, there would be a wait of four hundred years.

109 Wolters, Albert M. Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Kindle Locations 581-583)

[2] Bible Project “Heaven and Earth”

Reflect

God works his plans out in his own time but the processes that he uses take place in our time: Animals and plants grow from seed to mature adult according to biological processes. We grow from child to adult according to normal biological, psychological, and sociological processes. Civilizations mature according to normal technological, psychological, and sociological processes. God was going to send the long-awaited Messiah after certain events occurred. What do you have a hard time waiting for?

Observe

Read Matthew 4:12-17; Colossians 2:16-17. The Old Testament laws, sacrifices and rituals were shadows of what?

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?