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The Day of the Lord (Notes from Last Night)
Last night we continued our study of how the Bible describes the end times by looking at a specific set of events that constitute a major transition in the plan of God–events known as the Day of the Lord. Here are the notes:
The Prophet’s vision of the End: The Day of the Lord
See Isaiah 13:1-13; Joel 1:15-2:5, 3:13-15; Obadiah 15
What it is: The coming of the Lord to judge and destroy evil and remove those opposed to his rule.
Elements of the Pattern: Military conflict: Armies, sieges, battle. Divine judgment: cosmic signs, divine action, God appearing. Judicial sentencing on all evil is passed. It concerns Jerusalem, and then other cities (Babylon, Edom, Nineveh) and then finally all nations.
Type and Fulfillment: Historically happens at several times, revealing a pattern that leads up to a final climactic set of events which will be final end of all evil and opposition to God’s rule.
Daniel gives us the time period: The 70th Week
Daniel received all kinds of info about “the time of the end.”
Dan 2:42-45 – There will be a succession of kingdoms, until God smashes them all and sets up his own.
Daniel 7:23-27 – Right before it’s all over, there will be a terrible king, and he’ll make things very difficult for 3.5 years. (see more about him in Daniel 8:23-27; 11:35-12:13)
Daniel 9:24-27 – Daniel is praying about what he read in Jeremiah 25—that God would keep Israel in exile for 70 years, and then they’d come back to their land. But Daniel gets an even more complete future history of the nation. There would be seventy “weeks” of seven years each which would transpire, in order to fully finish the history of the nation of Israel. After 69 of those weeks of years, the messiah would be killed. A final group of seven years would then be left to transpire, when everything is finally finished. A coming prince would set up an “abomination” in the temple in the middle of this last seven year period, and then destroy both the temple and Jerusalem.
Jesus teaches more: Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24:1-3, 15-22, 29-31) (Also Mark 13 and Luke 21)
Jesus integrates the day of the Lord prophecies with Daniel’s time of the end to show us that they are the same thing. The point? Jesus says that the day of the Lord prophecies, and Daniel’s time of the end, refer to the same thing—the sequence of events that, like birth starting with labor, begins with troubles, includes God’s pouring out of his judgment, and climaxes with the appearing of Christ in the sky. (“sorrows” = “birth pains”)
John receives more detail: Revelation 5-19
John sees the same pattern given in the Day of the Lord prophecies, Daniel’s “time of the end” prophecies, and Jesus’ Olivet Discourse: Judgments on all nations, Antichrist, 3 ½ years of trouble (Revelation 11:2-3 and 12:14), God doing battle, God’s appearing, final victory.
The Point: The three covenants must be fulfilled: God must establish his kingdom on earth and heal and bless the world. The way that kingdom comes in is called the day of the Lord. It is a sequence of events that include the intensifying of evil on the earth, and the process of God judging that evil, and then finally sweeping it away as he comes. This day of the Lord is prophesied to include a full seven year period, and is manifested in the final opposition of one evil king, who desecrates the temple in Jerusalem in the middle of the seven year period, which divides the seven years into two halves, and the second half is the most intense time of trouble the earth has ever seen. It is a time of exceptional trouble for God’s people, specifically, the nation of Israel, who is the focus of the events in that time. Jesus taught on this same subject when the disciples asked him about the end, weaving together what the prophets said about the day of the Lord, and the details Daniel used to describe it. John saw visions of even more details, but with the same structure—an evil king, whole-world judgment, 3 ½ years of exceptional trouble, Israel at the center of things, the final defeat of evil, a new kingdom set up. This Seven year “Day of the Lord” is what we often call the Tribulation.
What we’ll see next week is that, in the letters to the Thessalonians, Paul promises deliverance to those who believe from this Day of the Lord.
But for those who do not currently acknowledge Jesus as their savior, there is good news. The evil that we hate, God hates it too. He will not let it run on forever. He’s going to sweep it away in one climactic set of events, and then appear himself to set things straight. Judgment on all evil is coming. It is called The Day of the Wrath of God. But right now, it is not that day. Today, anyone who turns from the evil he’s coming to judge, who repents and turns to trust Jesus to rescue (save) them from this coming judgment will be a saved.
Because there is another Day spoken of by the prophets: The Day of Salvation. See 2 Corinthians 5:18-6:2.
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
“Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
“Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says (in the book of Isaiah), ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’
“Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the Day of Salvation.”
A Great Introduction to Islam
Recently I found a multi-part lecture series by Dr. Nabeel Qureshi which outlines the basic beliefs of Islam and some helpful things to know when seeking to share the gospel with Muslims. I wanted to pass them along–they’re especially useful if you feel like you’re starting from zero and need to learn about Islam from the ground up.
You can find them at the Biola University website here. Here are the individual links:
- Islam Through the Eyes of Muslims
- The History and the Law of Islam
- History of Muhammad
- Critical Issues in Islamic Studies
- A Look at the Quran
- Everything Else to Know About Islam
- Jesus of Islam vs. Jesus of Christianity
If you’re an Apple product user, the easiest way to listen is to grab these off iTunes U. The web link for that is here.
Here’s a You Tube post of the first lecture:
What the first Christians were waiting for (Notes from last night).
Last night we continued our study of what the Bible says about the end times by looking at what the first Christians were expecting–what part of the end times they were looking forward to. Here are the notes:
The first Christians came to see that Jesus was the one who was prophesied to fulfill all the promises, especially in terms of all God had promised in the three covenants—he was the One who would reign as king over Israel forever, with a kingdom that extended over the whole earth, and all nations would be blessed under his rule as sin is forgiven and the Spirit is given to individual men and women. See: Luke 24:44-45 and Acts 1:1-8. They reasoned like this:
If …
1: you’re resurrected, and
2: the Spirit’s going to be poured out…
…Then we must then see the other covenants fulfilled…right?
Jesus’ Answer?: you don’t need to know when that’s going to happen. There’s work to do.
Acts 2:16-21 – The Spirit is being poured out. These are the last days!
Acts 3:18-21 – All things will be restored, look to the OT to see what that means
Point 1: After hanging out with Jesus, having him open their minds to understand the scriptures, and receiving specific instruction on the kingdom of God, they expected him to return and fulfill the things the prophets said which he hadn’t accomplished yet. (See also Acts 1:11)
Note: They thought this way, because Jesus talked this way.
Matthew 25:31-32 Jesus will sit on the throne and judge all nations, to kick off a kingdom.
Matthew 19:27-30 Jesus will distribute authority over ethnic Israel to the apostles.
Point 2: This became a major part of their preaching and teaching.
Waiting for him: 1 Corinthians 1:4-8, Philippians 3:20, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10; 2 Peter 3:10-13
Point 3: They lived in expectation, because they felt that all of this could happen at any time…Or better yet, since they felt that it already had begun to happen, they understood that nothing was stopping it from finishing up. (“The beginning of the end has come! The end of the end could happen at any time!”)
Application:
The Apostles lived with a sense that the end had already begun. Things had happened which set in motion an unstoppable chain of events: The messiah had appeared, the resurrection had begun, and the Spirit had been poured out. In other words, the Covenants of promise had begun to be fulfilled, because the son of David had come, the New Covenant had been initiated, and the nations had begun to be blessed through the seed of Abraham. They knew that, if the first events of the end had happened, this meant that at any time the last events of the end could unfold. This caused them to be people who lived always with a sense of anticipation and expectation.
What were they waiting for? All the promises to be fulfilled: for Jesus to come reign from Israel over the whole earth forever, making the world a place where God’s Spirit connected everyone to God. They were waiting for the kingdom.
We live in the same time as them. Being a Christian includes learning to live with this sense of eager waiting. See Romans 8:22-25.
What Jesus didn’t say…
This piece by Kevin DeYoung has a bit of an “edge,” but still, probably a good two-minute thought experiment. Here’s what you won’t read in the Gospel of Matthew…
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets: I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
“But on the other hand, do not think that I have come to completely affirm everything in the Law or Prophets either. There are stories in the Old Testament that did not happen as they are recorded. Sometimes, God’s people thought they heard the voice of God, but were mistaken. Other times, ancient people used God to justify their violence and exclusion. We can still read those parts of the Hebrew Bible and learn how unenlightened people used to think, but those sections are best corrected or set aside.
“For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
“Obviously, this is a bit of an overstatement–Jewish hyperbole, poetic license, that sort of thing. By “jots and tittles” I don’t mean every bit of chronology, cosmology, or history. I’m just trying to say that the Old Testament is still really important and that it points to me. But whether, say, the exodus happened like it says in Exodus, or if Isaiah made any predictive prophesies, or whether the whole storyline of the Old Testament is out of whack–that kind of thing is not terribly important.
“Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
“Again, let me clarify: I’m not actually against relaxing some of the more outdated commandments. After all, who doesn’t like relaxing! I don’t want my disciples getting hung up on minutia. As long as you are concerned about love–whatever you understand that to be–I wouldn’t worry about the particulars. People need relationships not rules, you know.
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
“In hindsight, this is probably not the best way to express myself. I’m sorry for anyone who was hurt by the whole “never enter the kingdom of heaven” bit. That’s just an figure of speech for “the best way to live!” And I apologize if the righteousness piece felt legalistic. When I talk about hungering after righteousness or pursuing righteousness I’m thinking more on a cosmic level, not so much about your personal holiness. The only righteousness I expect to see from you is being right enough to know you are wrong. Look, the last thing I want is for people to get uptight with the Bible and start freaking out about doing everything by the book.”
And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were super cool with his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had a realistic understanding of the Bible and helped the disciples feel better about themselves.
Let’s not be ruled by it.
This was the cover of my Time magazine a couple weeks ago. The article is pretty fascinating. Even Time is sounding warning bells about the ways technology is affecting our lives in ways we don’t fully understand yet.
Then a friend passed along this response by Tony Reinke. He’s got some pretty important points for us to ponder. Enjoy:
Never Offline.
These words on a recent Time Magazine cover are intended to unnerve us with the ominous future of a techno-invasion. Computers are getting strapped around us and stuck on us, moving into our watches and our glasses, “attempting to colonize our bodies.”
Journalists Lev Grossman and Matt Vella explain in the article. “We’re used to technology being safely Other, but the Apple Watch wants to snuggle up and become part of your Self. The reality of living with an iPhone, or any smart, connected device, is that it makes reality feel just that little bit less real. One gets over-connected, to the point where the thoughts and opinions of distant anonymous strangers start to feel more urgent than those of your loved ones who are in the same room as you. One forgets how to be alone and undistracted.”
To never be alone and undistracted is especially alarming in light of the parable of the four soils where Jesus warns us of the spiritual hazards of distractions. Whether our concerns are in the next room or in the Syrian desert, life can get quickly crowded by any number of cares, anxieties and desires. The ephemeral chokes out the infinite (Mark 4:18–19).
But your wrist doesn’t need to be cuffed to an Apple Watch to feel distractions colonizing your life. The average iPhone pings and push notifies our attention with the cares of the world in real time. The latest news and chatter can rob our focus, knock our lives off center, and drown out the voice of God.
Finding Balance
To help find healthy balance with technology, I recently sat down with two seasoned fathers in the faith: David Wells and Arthur Hunt. Wells is the author of the new book God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World (2014). Hunt is the author of the new book Surviving Technopolis: Essays on Finding Balance in Our New Man-Made Environments (2013).
Both men appreciate the benefits of digital communications technology. And both of their books attempt to help Christians think critically about the place of technology and distractions in our lives. I asked these men about the iPhone — the problems it introduces into our lives, the toll on the Christian soul it potentially causes, and the solutions for wise balance it forces us to envision.
Final Descent Into Technopolis
We begin at 40,000 feet. Man has a long history with technology, reaching back to simple things like shovels and spears. Historically, technology helps our lives achieve convenience and efficiency. But over time, technology moved outside the boundaries of problem solving.
“We have reached a period in which all forms of cultural life have surrendered to the sovereignty of Technology,” warns Arthur Hunt. “We are now under a Technopoly, which says absolutely nothing is going to stand in our way of technological progress. We put so much cultural stock in sort of headlong rush into the future without any clear telos [goal]. The only real telos is it has got to be bigger, it has got to be faster, and it has got to be newer. Somebody might ask: Well, what is wrong with this? Well, it advances the notion that our purpose in life is to be a satisfied consumer of material goods. So the next big thing is not the coming of God’s kingdom, but the coming of the curved TV screen.”
In fact Christians do have a clear telos, says David Wells. “Our objective in life is to become God-centered in our thoughts, God-fearing in our hearts and God-honoring in all that we do. This is a society of distraction. If we allow it to overwhelm us and press us into its mold, it will take time away from those things that are central: our focus upon the reality and the presence and the glory and the goodness and the greatness of God. So in that sense it becomes a real competitor.”
The aim of technology and the aim of the Christian life can easily run counter.
Pings
“We get computer pings and beeps. We all understand this,” Wells said. “But the large question is this: What is this doing to our minds when we are living with this constant distraction? What happens to us when we are in constant motion? When, in fact, we are addicted to constant visual stimulation, what happens to us? That is the big question. The average person shifts tasks every three minutes. Half the time we interrupt ourselves! So what is this doing to us deep down? The smaller question is: How do we find time for the things that are really central in our lives as Christians?”
These are twin problems we must address.
Part of the problem is that we get drawn in to the lie that our lives are rendered irrelevant if we fail to connect in social media every day, multiple times a day, every waking hour. “People on Facebook update their status on an hourly basis, because if they don’t, they have become obsolete,” says Wells. “But the most relevant thing in the world is what is eternal. And in that sense, the eternal is the most relevant, the most up-to-date thing that anyone could find.”
Wells: “The average person shifts tasks every three minutes. Half the time we interrupt ourselves.” Tweet
The Internet is constantly working to make us highly impatient people, Wells warns. “We want to go on to the next thing now, immediately. It cannot be too soon before we move on. But the knowledge of God, learning to walk with him through all of the conflicts, anxieties, difficulties, injustices of life — that is a life process. It takes time for this knowledge to mature in people. And we rob ourselves of that if we allow ourselves to be shaped by this culture of distraction.”
Whether we are interrupted by external beeps for notification, or interrupted by internal cravings for distraction, our minds are changing. And this gets to the most serious concerns Wells has for younger Christians. “We are losing the capacity for attention, by which I mean the ability to focus on something and to think about it. And if we lose our capacity to focus, how will God be the central organizing thing in our lives? How will we become God-centered in our thoughts, if we are fragmented in our thoughts? And how are we going to be God-honoring in our lives, if our lives are just bits and pieces of information? That is the problem.”
Wells: “Our objective in life is to become God-centered in our thoughts, God-fearing in our hearts and God-honoring in all that we do.” Tweet
Now What?
These are serious problems, and not unique to Christians. But where do we go from here? How does Scripture help us navigate these concerns? How do we protect our time and attention to focus on what is eternally relevant? Hunt and Wells offer five takeaways to help us survive life in Technopolis.
1. Count the personal costs of a device along with the benefits (Hunt). “First I think the Bible informs us to walk circumspectly with eyes wide open. To some extent I think we should be like the children of Issachar, men who understood their times (1 Chronicles 12:32). We live in a world that is constantly changing and telling us that we need this new gadget and what this new gadget will do for us. We should be asking: What is this new gadget going to do to me personally? And what is it going to do to my family, to my community, to the world?” Every gadget comes with benefits. Every gadget comes with relational costs.
2. Be the master over your technology, don’t get mastered by it (Hunt). Don’t be a passive recipient for technology, but use technology to achieve the ends of your life. “We need to be masters of our technologies and not the other way around. The consumer should not be consumed.”
3. Moderate your use (Hunt). We are not monks. Separating ourselves from technology completely is not an option for us. Thus, “we should practice the virtue of moderation, or what the Bible calls self-control. We should learn to redeem the time because the days are evil (Ephesians 5:16). Time is short, because we are going to die. Therefore, we need to make the best use of our time.” And our attention is finite and limited. Create patterns in your life to strategically withdraw from technology.
4. Hone your skill to distinguish the significant from the insignificant (Wells). “We must learn to organize our internal world. If we don’t do that, we cannot see the distinction between things that are really weighty in life from those that are ephemeral and flashy and superficial; those that are true from those that are wrong; those that really matter from those that we can brush off. The capacity to do that is what the Bible talks about under the language of wisdom. We today might think of wisdom today as smarts. But in the Bible it is really not. It is a heart thing, the ability to see life for what it is by our knowledge of God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, because we are seeing our lives with the rays of eternity (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). When you see life in that sort of light, it looks very different from the way that life looks like on the Internet.”
5. Discipline yourself by reading books (Wells). “We need to keep exercising our minds by reading, because it exercises our minds to understand sentences and follow narratives. We need these abilities to study Scripture.”
For the health of our soul, we must learn to get alone undistracted.
Only in thoughtful silence can we order (or re-order) our lives by the greatest and most relevant news in the universe. “The greatest, deepest, most glorious thing that we can know is what God has revealed to us of himself in his love and his holiness,” Wells reminds us. “Everything else pales into insignificance. If you focus on the shiny stuff that glitters for a moment, at the end of your life you will find that your hands are empty.”
Jesus is the One. (Notes from last night.)
Last night we continued our study of what the bible says about the end times. We took the evening to look at one of the ways the New Testament describes what Jesus was doing and who he was: He is the one who comes to fulfill all the promises God has made, especially the promises contained in the three covenants we’ve been studying. Here are the notes:
1. Jesus is the one the Prophets wrote about:
Last week we saw that God promised to fulfill his covenants in two ways. 1: He would come himself and keep the promises, and 2: He would send a man to keep the promises. The Gospels answer the question which comes from the second strand of prophecy : WHO will be the man God will use to keep these promises? Their answer? Jesus of Nazareth.
See:
John 1:45, 5:46-47
Luke 24:25-27, 44-46
Matthew 1:1
Matthew 5:17-18
2. Jesus is the one who will fulfills the Covenants with David and Abraham
Jesus is the one who is the descendant of David and of Abraham, who will be the one to bring the fulfillment of the covenants to pass. Therefore—He will rule the children of Israel, in the land of Israel, on David’s throne, in an unending reign. Through that reign, he will bless all nations of the world, and his kingdom will extend over the entire earth and all people. Through his rule, from Jerusalem, he will heal the world and bring everything under the blessing and reign of God.
See:
Luke 1:30-33, 1:46-55, 1:68-79
Mathew 12:15-28
Matthew 16:13-17
Matthew 22:41-46
Matthew 28:18-20
3. Jesus is the one who fulfills The New Covenant
Jesus is the one who pours out the Holy Spirit. Since he will also rule on David’s throne, he will re-gather Israel. Since He’s Abraham’s son, he will bless all nations. But what we might have missed in the prophets becomes central for Jesus. Sins must be forgiven before any of this can happen. Once he saves his people from their sins, they will be able to enjoy the fulfillment of the other promises.
See:
Matthew 1:18-23
John 1:29-34
John 7:37-42
Luke 22:20
Luke 24:47
Summing it up:
How does God solve the world’s problems? With a person—a man named Jesus of Nazareth. He comes to be called “The Christ” since this means: the one God has chosen to fulfill all his promises and be Israel’s king over a kingdom that includes and blesses all people by forgiving all sin and then healing all brokenness. Jesus has the power to do this because he is not only David’s son, but Daivd’s Lord—God the Son himself in human flesh.
Parting Thoughts:
1. The only way to gain a deep, clear understanding of Jesus is by seeing the things the scripture says about him. One thing we need to know is that he is specifically described as the one who is keeping God’s promises contained in the covenants. For instance, he’s not just forgiving sins because he’s loving—he’s forgiving sins because that’s what the promise of the New Covenant said he would do, and he’s forgiving sins as the way to fulfill all the covenants of God.
2. If you want to know God, you have to know him through his solution to the issues the world faces: through this particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Abraham, son of David.
Applying all this to the end times:
The point of Jesus’ life was NOT to show THAT God had fulfilled all his promises.
The point of his life was to answer the question of WHO the one would be who WOULD do all the fulfilling.
The message is NOT: “God has fulfilled all his promises by sending Jesus!”
It’s: “God has revealed that Jesus is the one who will fulfill all his promises. And he’s started to fulfill them now!”
Some people make it sound like, since Jesus is the one who fulfills the prophecies, and since he came already, then the prophecies are basically fulfilled. There might be one or two left, like his second coming, but basically, what we saw promised in the Old Testament has already happened.
This means that there’s not much left to expect, except what people call heaven, and whatever life is like then for eternity. Typically this makes people stop thinking about or studying what the scriptures say about the end times.
But this doesn’t take into account the way the scriptures speak of Jesus as being all about keeping the promises of God, specifically, the promises that are contained in the three promise covenants.
What we see as we study is that the Gospels clearly say, “Jesus is the one who fulfills the prophecies!” But we need to see that much of what the covenants promises and the prophecies predicted has not yet happened. It’s just that now we know that it’s Jesus who will do all the fulfilling. And we know how God will keep the first promise, of dealing with sin once and for all.
In other words, the coming of the messiah falls into two stages:
In the first stage, he revealed his identity, dealt with sin once and for all, provided forgiveness, poured out the Spirit, and demonstrated that he was committed to keeping all the promises made in the covenants.
In the second stage, he will fulfill the promises of the three completely.
This means:
1. We don’t just trust in what he’s done, but in what he’ll still do. We can know what he will still do by looking at the prophecies and the covenants which are still to be fulfilled. That’s why we study the end times.
2. We can read the Bible and get excited about all the things it promises: amazing things are coming for the earth!
3. We don’t have to let the news freak us out! For those who believe, all bad news is temporary!
4. We never have to lose hope! Whatever hard thing comes in to our life, it can be used by God as part of his good plan for us, and one day everything that troubles us is going to be swept away by the goodness of Jesus’ kingdom as it spreads healing over the whole earth.
Next week we’ll see how his first followers came to see this, and what they were looking forward to in terms of the end of all things.
Thoughts for Prayer
To all of you who were away with us this weekend, thanks for contributing to a great time together in the Spirit. On Friday I passed out a booklet with (in addition to the schedule) a whole collection of scriptures and readings on prayer. If you weren’t there and are interested in having the booklet, here it is for download:
Thoughts & Scriptures on Prayer (pdf)
Why believe the Bible over the Quran?
Last year I met a couple of students who were Muslim, and began an ongoing conversation with one of them. This led me to finally begin (what I hope will be) a life-long pursuit of learning more about Islam, its people, and its teachings. I started reading articles, listening to lectures by Christians and Muslims, listening to debates over things like The Bible vs. The Quran, or Jesus vs. Muhammad. It has definitely been enlightening, but through it all one consistent thought has stayed with me.
The other day, I was surprised to see that this thought was exactly illustrated in a video. (It seems there’s no new thought under the sun.)
What is this thought I can’t shake? Watch and enjoy…
Incidentally, this is exactly the answer I give when people ask me why I believe the bible over the Quran. The Bible does not need the Quran to be true. The opposite cannot be said.
What the Prophets Saw (Notes from Monday night)
On Monday night we continued with our study of what the bible says about the end times by looking at what the Old Testament prophets said about the last days. This was part four of our study. They’re just a pretty sketchy outline, but here are the notes:
What the Prophets Saw in the OT
The old testament prophets foretold that God would carry out his plans for the world and the end of our age by enacting two solution: First, they said that God himself would come and fix everything; Second, they said God would send a man who would fix everything.
What was crucial for us to notice was that, in all of these prophecies (for both of the two “strands”) the prophecies were given to show that God was keeping his promises that he made in the three “promise” covenants, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with David, and the New Covenant.
God will come HIMSELF and fix everything:
• Judgment: Isaiah 24:1-3, 21-23
• Re-gather Israel: Jer 31:10-12, 23-36; Amos 9:11-15
• Rule & Bless Israel: Is 33:20-22, 40:9-11
• Rule & Bless the World: Is 2:1-4, 25:1-9
That is, God himself will fulfill the three promise covenants:
- To Abraham:
He will bless his descendants, they will inhabit the land forever
He will bless the whole world - To David:
He will establish the kingdom of Israel forever - New Covenant:
He will unify Israel as a nation forever
God will send A MAN to fix everything:
• Judgment: Psalm 2:1-12
• Re-gather Israel: Isaiah 49:1-7
• Rule & Bless Israel: Isaiah 9:6-7
• Rule & Bless the World: Isaiah 11:1-11, Jer 23:5-6, Zech 9:9-10
That is, God’s servant-King will fulfill the three promise covenants:
- To Abraham:
He is his descendant, who will be blessed and will bless all the nations of the earth
He will be over the nation, in the land of Israel, forever - To David:
He is the descendant of David, ruling on Israel’s throne, forever - New Covenant:
He will be the ruler of the unified people of Israel pleasing God
God will also fulfill the purpose for humanity stated in Gen 1:26-28: a human exercises dominion over the whole earth, which is now healed and cooperative with him.
How Does God tie these two strands together?
We have to turn to the New Testament to see that God makes sense of both of these predictions:
…In a man who is both: John 1:1, 14, Matt 1:1
…In a man who embodies all three covenants: Son of Abraham, Son of David, baptizing with the Spirit
Applications:
1. God is not far away. He’s personally involved, and will personally fix all the things everyone says he should. God cares about the things that are wrong with the world, and is doing something about it.
2. God is super committed to his promises. After he made the covenant agreements, he kept promising to keep them “to the T.” Mt 5:18
3. God is committed to humanity, and to this earth.
Nevertheless, our world is headed for a huge change—the one who made it is going to eradicate evil, and rule the world his way through his people. Everyone will have the opportunity to come under his new government and allow him to fix things his way—by judging sin and enforcing justice
Scripture, Respectability, and Gay Marriage
This piece by Mathew Lee Anderson is very important, especially for young (adult) Christians, on several levels. (Thanks to Mike Focht for pointing it out to me.) Save it for when you’ve got a few minutes to read and think…
The Questions of Gay Marriage: The Authority of Scripture
Why might one believe that a society should not include within its institution of marriage monogamous couples of the same sex? For many conservative Christians, the first and last word on the question belongs to the Bible. There may be other reasons out there, but many Christians are wholly uninterested in them on grounds that they will either necessarily be unpersuasive or that they will prove impossible to find.
That sort of pessimism is particularly an acute temptation for young Christians these days; having witnessed the purported failure of the “secular” arguments against gay marriage, it is easy to conclude that unless the social conditions were to change dramatically there simply are no arguments that could “work.”
Yet such a pessimism is a problem for the Christian, I think, even if we ought not be optimists about finding such reasons either. We are called to hope, in our search for understanding of society and the world no less than in our patient waiting upon the return of Christ. We have only sub-Christian reasons to believe that there are no “secular” arguments that will be persuasive or that we will never find them out. And if we give up the search prematurely, we may actually foreclose on finding ways of putting the case that would contribute to the very renewal of the society that itself makes the case more plausible. Onward, then, into finding and evaluating reasons wherever we can.
But nor can we ignore Scripture, at least not if Oliver O’Donovan’s formula that “the reasons to believe are the reasons of belief” has any wisdom at all. We might have other reasons, but we have at least these. Or so it might seem, anyway.
I am intrigued, however, by the discomfort that I think many young Christians feel at taking a moral stance simply because Scripture says it. It would be a bit humiliating, would it not, to examine all the arguments and then to find ourselves up against it, as it were, retreating to the privileged position of moral teaching based on special revelation? To many young Christians (even of the conservative sort, like me) who have invested a good deal in defending the rationality and intellectual plausibility of our tradition, that sort of conclusion would not be far from finding oneself taking up the cross of the flat-earthers: not only are “the facts” against our position, but society is as well.
That is precisely the sort of humiliation, however, that we ought to be willing to countenance. It is not so different from the humiliation of the Word that is the center and presupposition of our faith. It may be that such a humiliation is crucial to see the reasons of Scripture from within, to make sense of what’s at stake in the relationship between man and woman that makes such a relationship irreplaceably unique. In a world where the paradigmatic act of intellect is to doubt, such a credulous obedient stance can only engender embarrassment.
Two further cautions, though, are necessary. First, I acknowledge the possibility of genuine humiliation here only to highlight the stakes and to see in which direction the prevailing winds will invariably push the argument. In a society where appeals to Scripture’s authority are considered as inescapably anti-intellectual and where the stance that homosexuality is morally wrong is deeply offensive, those interested in the intellectual respectability of the Church’s witness will have built in motivations to seek ways of sanctioning same-sex romantic unions within the pages of the text. The inquiry in such conditions will take a very different tack, and the forcefulness of various arguments will seem different because of the broader cultural pressures at work. In other words, the rules of reading will be established in such a way to make progressive conclusions more plausible.
This temptation, however, works the opposite direction as well. Appealing to a revelation that confounds the wisdom of the wise (1 Corinthians 1:26) has sometimes been used to foreclose the work of investigation and inquiry altogether, or to simply treat our status as cultural pariahs as proof of a position’s truthfulness. There can be no room for such anti-intellectual fideism here, however, nor for bad logic. Authority can command obedience in the absence of other reasons (and even in the face of reasons to the contrary) as a provisional moment, but not a final one. Our obedience may continue until we are dead (and beyond), but that is only because of the aforementioned hope that stands beneath the intellectual Christian life. Our confident obedience to such an authority will hinge on how deeply we integrate other reasons for trusting in it in other areas. If we had reason to believe such an authority was not only morally pure but also incapable of error, then we might cheerfully and rationally adopt its prescriptions without hesitation.
My hope is that we will not be in a position where the argument goes forward in terms of Scripture alone. But acknowledging that possibility at the outset is helpful for clarifying what’s at stake in the method we adopt. Acknowledging and submitting to the authority of Scripture gives Christians real reasons to look for arguments that comport with its teaching and to maintain a general skepticism or wariness about arguments that do not.
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