Tag: physical

Discipline of Resting/Sabbath

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 15 – Reforming our Souls

Discipline of Resting/Sabbath

[Bible references: Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5: 12-15; Mark 2:23-28; Hebrews 4:1-13]

We work to live

To understand the place of Sabbath we need to understand who we are and the place of our work (or play). The accumulation of archeological research in the last few decades has made it more possible to understand the Genesis creation account in the same way it was understood in the times of Moses. Creation was not primarily viewed as a physical event but rather the moment of being assigned a purpose. The creation account, understood this way, was a dedication of a temple, that is, a place where God would meet with his image-bearers. Those moments of dedication were done within the boundaries of days, “there was the evening and the morning.” After the temple was dedicated, it was now the time to live into the temple, to live into what it was designed for. The “rest” was not referring to a cessation of activity, but of doing the activity that the temple, in this case, the universe, was designed for.

The seventh day, as described in Genesis 2, was not assigned a beginning and an end. It was not designated with “and there was evening and there was morning.”  It continues now. Now is the time we live in the temple, doing that for which the temple was designed. Work has been designed for us, but we were not designed for work. Going back to Genesis 1 and 2, we see God was creating a place for him to reside and take control and for us to join him as co-regents. The seventh day, the sabbath, God had finished the dedication of the “temple,” but it was not a time where he ceased to do everything. Rather, it was the time where the “home” was now ready for God, and for us as co-regents, to begin the settling into our “home” and doing the things that our home was designed for. Jesus in John 5:1-7 clarified this idea where he explained, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” Living into this sacred space would entail us taking part with God in his continual acts of creating and sustaining the universe. When Eve gave birth to Cain, she recognized that “I’ve created a man with Yahweh.”

The work that we were designed to do was more than just tending the garden. In Genesis 2:15, we were given a mandate to “work” and “take care of” the garden God had created. These tasks, again looked at in light of Ancient Near East culture, were more of a priestly nature, taking care of this temple where we reside with God. We were to take care of this place which was designed to be a “very good” place for us to flourish in, creating whatever structures we needed to “increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.” This task, this mandate, meant that we would eventually go beyond the capacity of gardening and create not just a bigger garden but cities, a flourishing civilization as pictured in Revelation 21 and 22.

When examined closely, we can see the breadth of work committed to Adam and Eve. Subduing the earth would entail many physical, social, and intellectual activities. In the gardening we can see cultivation and farming; in taking care of the animals, we can see shepherding and domestication; in the naming of the animals, we can see a cultural and scientific activity which required understanding the nature and attributes of the animals and establishing authority over them. We can see that God had created things to be beautiful (Gen 3:6) and as his image-bearers we would be expected to also create beautiful things.

The introduction of sin has complicated this sense of work by corrupting the value of the good work that had been intended for us and by adding more types of work that are only necessary because we need to mitigate the effects of our sin (law enforcement, hospitals, military, etc.). But even to that work, we can join Christ in His work of redeeming creation.

We rest to remember

Having determined the nature and value of our work, we can now determine the place of sabbath rest. The discipline of Sabbath is a regular reminder that work may have a place for us, but we were created by God for God, we were not created by God for work. There is work designed by God for us to do, and even if we enjoy that work, we need the reminders that we were primarily made for our relationship with God. The Westminster Catechism states that we were designed to “enjoy God and glorify Him forever.” 

Our focus should be on God and not the work He has given us. In this world there is more than sufficient work to be done, but we are not created to be slaves to that work. The Sabbath is our opportunity to remember our dependence on God’s provision for us, leaning on His provision instead of our labors, trusting Him to provide for us instead of trusting in our work to provide for us. In that restful place we then have the opportunity to focus on our relationship with God. As Jesus pointed out, the Sabbath was made for us, for our benefit, for us to enjoy.

Observe

Read Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5: 12-15; Mark 2:23-28; Hebrews 4:1-13. What is the reason for the Sabbath?

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?

In time and In an eternal future

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

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

In time and in an eternal future

[Bible references: Genesis 2:9; Exodus 25-28; 1 Kings 5-6; Psalms 19; Ecclesiastes 3:1-22; Matthew 6:28]

Although we have not existed from all eternity, God created us with more than a mortal body. We are also endowed with a soul and a spirit that can be joined to God’s Spirit. In the present moment, our mortal bodies are created from the stuff of the earth, and we are born into particular times and places so that we may serve and enjoy God in those particular times and places.

God made us as creatures. And the good part about being a creature is we were made to be dependent upon God and, by our very design, also dependent on other people and the earth … Often what we’re missing is the good of dependence. We need to cultivate an awareness of how our dependence and our needs open avenues of love … What if we stopped thinking of life as to-dos and started thinking of it as relationships? When we’re so task-driven, it’s very hard to appreciate love, because love is incredibly inefficient … when we were younger, God didn’t expect us to be what we are now. He’s still taking his time, by his Spirit, to bring about order through developmental growth … Part of recognizing our limits is getting comfortable in God’s space and growing in dependance on him … Sometimes, I think we’re actually scared to death to pray, because if we actually take the time to get quiet, we might begin to fear that God’s not there or wonder whether he’s apathetic or just really angry. Only in prayer will we discover how compassionately God views us … cultivating the gift of encouraging and celebrating others. It’s a spiritual discipline, a healthy way of dying to yourself and encouraging others. We are all dying for someone to pay attention and notice our presence and being. When someone articulates that, it’s life-changing. [1]

Our creatureliness which sets us in a particular place and time with a particular body is an opportunity to appreciate our finiteness and God’s infiniteness, to cultivate a sense of dependence on God’s provision and our dependence on each other and within the context of those relationships to truly learn how to love.

Our creatureliness also forces us to deal with God’s ordering Creation through process. Everything, whether physical, social, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual, is controlled by processes. Sometimes we desire to bypass those processes: we want to be instantly knowledgeable and wise and experts at what we do … and not dependent on anyone else. But it was precisely that kind of desire that led to our rebellion at the beginning of humanity.

As God’s image-bearing creatures, we not only have relationships with each other but also with our Creator. In our relationships with God’s other image-bearing creatures, our love can be expressed in our opportunities to support, uplift, and encourage one other. God has no need of such support from us, but He offers us such support. When we recognize our dependence on Him, He gives us the ability to pray, to acknowledge our needs and to recognize His provision for us when He supplies our needs.

We think of prayer as mostly self-expressive—as a way to put words to our inner life … if we pray the prayers we’ve been given, regardless of how we feel about them or God at the time, we sometimes find, to our surprise, that they teach us how to believe … We sleep each night in our ordinary beds in our ordinary homes in our ordinary lives. And we do so in a universe filled to the brim with mystery and wonder. We always sleep in a crowded room in our crowded cosmos, so we ask for crazy things—that God send unimaginable supernatural beings to watch over us as we drool on our pillows … Sleep reminds us of how helpless we are, even merely to stay alive. In the Christian tradition, sleep has always been seen as a way we practice death. Both Jesus and Paul talk about death as a kind of sleep. Our nightly descent into unconsciousness is a daily memento mori, a reminder of our creatureliness, our limitations, and our weakness. [2]

As we pray in our mortal bodies, we remember that although our mortal bodies will return to the dust from which we are made, our bodies will be resurrected when heaven and earth are reunited so that we, with soul and spirit and new body, will be able to enjoy God forever into the future.

What is that phenomenon we call ‘beauty’ and why does it lie at the core of both collective civilization and individual desire, even as we value it precisely for existing outside of practicality? In his essay The Weight of Glory [A sermon given in Oxford in 1942], C.S. Lewis explains it as an echo of eternity, imprinted upon humanity as an indication of our origin and destiny.[3]

Indeed, our God is a God of beauty, and he has created us to enjoy his beauty. Art and our appreciation of it are among the great gifts God has given to us. Sure, like anything, it can be turned into an idol. But art, beauty, and appreciation for the finer things of culture are all good gifts from a good God. [4]

In the meantime, while we await for our resurrection and to “gaze on the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4), we have reminders of our connection with our transcendent God in the beauty of His Creation and in our capacity to make things of beauty. Whether the beautiful things are of our creation or the Lord’s, they reflect God’s own beauty.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing … they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited … We do not want merely to see beauty … We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.[5]

[1] Straza, Erin. “Learning to Love Your Limits” Christianity Today 13 Dec 2021 www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/january-february/youre-only-human-kelly-kapic-limits-god-design.html Interview with Covenant College theologian Kelly M. Kapic’s about his latest book, “You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News.”

[2] Warren, Tish Harrison. “The Cosmos is More Crowded Than You Think” Christianity Today 14 Dec 2021 www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/january-february/prayer-night-tish-harrison-warren-angels-crowded-cosmos.html

[3] Wang, Irina “Beauty betrays eternity” Salt salt.london/articles/beauty-betrays-eternity

[4] Meuhlenberg, Bill. “Art and the Christian” Culture Watch 28 July 2011 billmuehlenberg.com/2011/07/28/art-and-the-christian/

[5] Lewis, C.S. “The Weight of Glory” Theology Nov 1941

Observe

Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-22.  In the midst of meditating on the limitations of life on earth, verse 11 slides in a reference to beauty and eternity. How does that verse impact the rest of the chapter?

Body, soul and spirit

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

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

Body, soul and spirit

[Bible references: Genesis 2; Matthew 3:16-17; 19:6; Acts 2:42-47; Romans 5:5; 1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20; 12:4-30; 2 Corinthians 9:6-8; Colossians 1:18; Revelation 21-22]

The mystery of perichoresis which tries to describe the one person God consisting of the relation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit may very well be the best approach to understanding the mystery of God’s image-bearers. There are conflicting views on whether a person consists of a body and soul or body and spirit or body, soul, and spirit. Are we two parts or three parts then which parts? A similar issue arises in the attempts to figure out the relation between the brain and consciousness.[1] Some researchers think that consciousness is only due to biology and that we will be able to eventually build a computer with a conscious, but it is likely that the mystery of perichoresis will prevail.

As image-bearers, being created as community of male and female points one way to the community of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but also points in another way to their unity as represented by becoming “one flesh.” The term, “one flesh,” refers to the way in which the sexual union of husband and wife signifies the reconnection of Adam and Eve. Genesis 4:1 says that “Adam knew [Hebrew yada]Eve, his wife and she conceived …” The term yada is rich in meaning; it does not refer to knowing information about, but to know intimately on an emotional level. Also significantly, in the Ancient Near East, yada was used to indicate a covenant relationship.[2] All this together heightens the sexual intimacy to much more than a simple physical relationship.

In Genesis 2:22, most English translations translate the Hebrew word צלע (tsela) as “rib” but it more properly means “side.” Adam’s own words clarify that Eve came from one of his sides when he declared of his wife, “Finally, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” (Gen 2:23). Had Eve been created from the man’s rib alone, Adam would only have been able to say that she was “bone of his bone.” As Adam’s bone and flesh, the woman is the man’s “other half.”

So, Adam’s “deep sleep” (תרדמה, tardemah) was probably like a hospital patient’s sleep via anesthesia, more like a vision in which God removed half of Adams’ body to create Eve, she is metaphorically then, Adam’s other (better?) “half”. This vision then would present the woman as an equal to Adam.[3]

So the sexual union husband and wife reunites the two halve as husband and wife become “one flesh.”[4] Our male and femaleness show us our human incompleteness without each other. The joining of the male and female bodies brings completeness.

This completeness does not just happen at a physical level. Humans are unlike all other creatures in that we are made in God’s image with body, soul and spirit, and our spirit is joined to God’s Spirit. So as husband and wife become “one flesh,” they create a living metaphor of the union of Christ with the church. The love, intensity, and passion of two different but complementary bodies united both in spirit and in “one flesh” is an extension of the perichoresis of the Trinity as the bodies of the image-bearers united in spirit with Christ become the body of Christ on earth, joined in love, intensity, and passion, enjoying the overflowing goodness and shalom that God has intended for us.

We are created body, soul, and spirit with the intention that when heaven and earth are rejoined, we will be restored body, soul, and spirit (although it will be in resurrected bodies) in the new heaven and earth. It is also through our bodies that we are restored to Christ. When he took on flesh.

God created the flesh of man, which the Son assumes in the Incarnation, all so that he might save the flesh of man.

Tertullian states this idea straightforwardly: caro salutis cardo, the flesh is the hinge of salvation …Thus, our bodies are not meat-suits to be discarded or clusters of atoms that will disintegrate and disappear. They are made to last, because God’s kingdom will last, taking up from this world all that is good and preserving it. All that is made in and through Christ – including the body – will find its ultimate meaning in him. “My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God” (Ps. 84:2 RSV).[5]

When fellow Christ-bearers assemble together, they are together the Body of Christ, with each person bringing different gifts to support and strengthen the others in the Body. By wedding himself to humanity, Christ truly becomes “one flesh” with them (Ephesians 5:30–32), making them his members, “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27), with Christ as their Head (Colossians 1:18). Head and body are joined through the “bond of charity,” the love that has been “shed abroad in our hearts” by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). The union of love between Head and body is so close that “Head and body speak as one,” because they are “no longer two, but one flesh” (Matthew 19:6).[6]

[1] Tolson, Jay. “Is There Room for the Soul?” CBS News 15 Oct 2006 www.cbsnews.com/news/is-there-room-for-the-soul/

[2] Hegg, Tim. “As a Covenant Term in the Bible and the Ancient Near East” Torah Resource torahresource.com/hebrew-word-yada/

[3] Schaser, Nicholas J. “Splitting the Adam” Israel Bible Weekly 23 July 2021 weekly.israelbiblecenter.com/splitting-the-adam/

[4] Schaser, Nicholas J. “Did Eve Come From Adam’s “Rib?” Israel Bible Weekly 8 May 2021 weekly.israelbiblecenter.com/eve-come-adams-rib/

[5] Franks, Angela. “What’s a Body For?” Plough Quarterly 6 Aug 2018

[6] Colbrook, Niamh. “Inhabiting Our Feeling Bodies” Comment Essay 26 Aug 2021 comment.org/inhabiting-our-feeling-bodies

Reflect

If God’s love is expressed through our current bodies which were used to shape our character, do you think that it is possible that our resurrected bodies will retain aspects of our current bodies which have shaped us in the same way that Jesus’ resurrection body still bore his scars?

Observe

Read 1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 12:4-30. Together we are God’s temple and together we share the Spirit and His gifts. What do we miss if we try to be a Christian apart from other Christians?