Tag: eve

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?

Proxy wars

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed– Chapter 10 – The Class of Apparitions

Proxy wars

[Bible references: 2 Kings 17:1-6; 25:1-21; Jeremiah 1:14-16; Daniel 1:1-6; Ezra 1:1-4; 6:12; Ephesians 6:10-20]

Since the time of Adam and Eve a war has been underway. God’s Kingdom has found itself in a war with Kingdom of darkness, battling over the souls of God’s image-bearers. We cannot directly see the clash of spiritual kingdoms, but we see it indirectly, sometimes in clashes between image-bearers and sometimes within ourselves. The apostle Paul reminds us, though, that our struggle is not against “flesh and blood” but rather the “spiritual forces of evil.”

Even so, the spiritual war is played out in the human realm where we brokenly pursue love apart from God, hoping to find love somewhere else, whether in power, traditions, possessions, other people, etc. We then find that when we look for love other places than God, we are then confronted by fears which inevitably result in clashes, especially in times of change.

A great time of change was about to occur as the time approached for Jesus’ incarnation. There were clashes between empires that overran the Promised Land, clashes between groups of people in that land, and clashes of values between and within those groups.

As the time of Jesus’ incarnation approached, the residents of the Promised Land, begin to speak Aramaic instead of the Bible’s language of Hebrew. When the Greek empire moved in it tried to supplant all the local languages and cultures, resulting in an effort to the translate all the Hebrew writings into Greek, producing among many things, the Greek version of the Hebrew scripture called the Septuagint. The Septuagint became a major reference not only for the non-Hebrew speaking Jews but also for the church, particularly as the church became more Gentile. This change accelerated the loss of the Hebrew understandings of Scripture.

When the Roman empire overtook the Greek Empire, it initially allowed the use of Greek as the international language but would set up a clash later when the empire would replace Greek with Latin as its preferred language. The changes in languages and cultures became part of the clash over which writings should be considered as part of what will be called the Old Testament scriptures.

The Greek Church maintained the use of the Septuagint as it’s Old Testament, while the Latin speaking Roman-Catholic Church used only parts of the Septuagint. Later on, the Protestants rejected the Septuagint and only used the Hebrew writings that were approved by Jews in the early centuries A.D.[1]

The books used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches but not used by the Protestants are sometimes referred to as the Apocrypha (hidden) or the Deuterocanonical (second canon) books. Although the Protestants may disagree about whether those books are inspired, there is useful information in those books that help explain the culture of the world that Jesus was born into.

[1] Nelson, Ryan. “What is the Masoretic Text? The Beginner’s Guide” The Beginner’s Guide to the Bible overviewbible.com/Masoretic-text

Observe

Read Ephesians 6:10-20. What difference does it make if you are aware that the conflicts present in the world around us are manifestations of spiritual warfare?

Interlude

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

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

Interlude

[Bible references: Psalm 19]

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

Since the time of Adam and Eve we’ve had the temptation to place ourselves at the center of the universe, dismissing the idea that we did not create the natural beauty of the world around us but that we can possess and control it ourselves, that we are the masters of all we see. We are tempted to dismiss the reality that we are part of a universe we did not create with the idea that we can define the universe which we think revolves around us.

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

What can get confused is that this story is contained in the Bible which is often presented as a disconnected story. The Old and New Testaments of the Bible can seem disconnected because of the cultural barriers between us and the testaments. Some people even think the God described in the Old Testament is different from the God in the New Testament.

That disconnect is exasperated by the long and messy history of the church. The church seems very divided on how to interpret those writings and how to live into them, leaving us with a confusion of various interpretations and practices that seem to contradict one another. How is one supposed to make sense of it all?

However, it is possible to obtain a clearer understanding of how both Testaments make one cohesive story, a story into which we can fit. When we see how the unified story than runs from Creation to Revelation, we can then see how we, as part of God’s church, are intended to participate in that story. God did not need to create us or the universe, He did it out of a desire to share his love and delight. God’s creation was more an act of play than of work and He desires that we actively play with him, if you will, to dance with him in His Kingdom.

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

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

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

  • For those who are not practiced in studying the Bible, Appendix A gives a summary of techniques that could be used to help understand scripture. This may prove useful for understanding when you study the Biblical references given throughout this book.
  • Reading the material with a group can make the most impact. There are questions at the end of each chapter that ask you to reflect on the material and then read related biblical passages to think more deeply about various issues. These exercises and questions will help you engage with the material by first asking you to think about how each section applies to your life and secondly to share your thoughts with others in the group so that together you can more thoughtfully “Enter the Dance” with God, with all the others that have come before, with those that are coming now and with that will continue to come until Heaven and Earth are reunited.
  • Finally, the best participation will be not to just read and reflect, but to dance the Kingdom dance with God. Part 3 of this book will suggest ways to take part in his activity in bringing healing to the world he loves, broken now but to be finally and fully restored when He rejoins heaven and earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observe

Read Psalm 19. This Psalm captures a response to what Francis Bacon called the two books of God:  the Book of Creation and the Book of Scripture. How do you respond to the “two books”?