Relocating To Elfland

I want to apologize for the length of this post; I’ve been working on it for a while. I also wish to state that what follows is provisional, ruminative, and heuristic (not necessarily in that order).

As a pastor, I spend a lot of time wondering what to do about apathy. There are predictable forms of apathy – the person who, obeying a leftover instinct from childhood, shows up in the pew and snoozes through sermons; the pop tart whose chief end is to glorify iTunes and enjoy YouTube forever. But what’s a little weird for me is encountering apathy among deeply committed saints. The apathy shows up, not in the way they think about personal piety (which is of utmost concern to them), but in the way they think about the world around them. They think of themselves as belonging to a maligned minority on the fringes of society, and they don’t expect anything else – ever. They are eager to work out personal holiness, and want to see more people saved from hell; but any idea that the deserts of the world might blossom like the crocus, or its salt marshes be made fresh, or nations stream to Zion, or the lion lie down with the lamb, is for them wholly outside the bounds of present reality. They don’t bother about such things, because they simply don’t expect them to occur. Large tracts of daily living in the world are for them basically theaters of endurance, while they wait to be ushered into glory where the real fun begins.

It was brought home to me recently that a big part of the reason for this “apathetic” view of the world is that we think this is what the New Testament teaches. Notice that the lovely metaphors above are all drawn from the Old Testament; the New Testament by contrast teaches us to think of ourselves as strangers, pilgrims, and sufferers in the midst of ever-hostile world powers. If the grand prophecies of the Old Testament are to be fulfilled, it will certainly not be until the great conflagration in which this old world is destroyed, and an entirely new and different one ushered in, wherein dwells righteousness.

A prima facie difficulty with this reading of the New Testament is that the apostles manifestly believed God’s people in their time (and beyond) were experiencing the fulfillment of the things prophesied in Israel’s scriptures. The worldwide reign of the messianic king anticipated in those scriptures had now arrived in Jesus Christ; and while it is possible that the apostles regarded the interim between Christ’s ascension and His coming again as a kind of extended “parenthesis” in the fulfillment of Old Covenant prophecy, the case would have to be thoroughly argued. This is not to deny that they regarded the consummation of Christ’s kingdom as awaiting the end of all things; it is simply to affirm that, for them, the whole of Old Covenant prophecy informed their understanding of what had come upon them in the present reign of Christ.

With this in mind, let us scan the New Testament corpus and see if we discover there a pervasive “persecution complex,” a meek and mild minority content with its lot on the fringes, a loss of the world-vision so prominent in Old Covenant prophecy, a bunch of strangers just passin’ through.

To put it mildly, we do not. Ignore for a moment (if possible) the cosmic sweep of Jesus’ great commission to His disciples (Mt 28:18–20). Suppose He did not tell us to disciple all the nations, teaching them to observe His commandments. Suppose further that this commission has nothing whatever to do with the worldwide mandate delivered to Adam. Very well, then, what follows?

The book of Acts, we should note for starters, has a very curious construction. It begins with our Lord telling the apostles they would be witnesses of Him in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8); and lo! the book begins in Jerusalem and ends . . . in Rome. No, seriously, here is Paul, “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” to all who would listen – in the very seat of Caesar’s power (Acts 28:30–31). Kind of subversive, don’t you think? It sounds as if the church had a vision to infiltrate major urban centers of civilization and proclaim the real King of the world. “Ah,” you say, “but Paul is in chains. This is a suffering, persecuted Paul! All he is doing is living his individual life and talking to people about Jesus, nothing more.” Fair enough, that is what he is doing. I’ll even grant you he lost his head for it in the end. But funny thing: centuries later, mighty Rome lies in ruins, and out of its ashes arises not another pagan world power but something we call “Christendom.” Turns out Jesus was the real King of the world after all, and one suspects Paul grasped the implications of this even in his time.

The epistles, surely, will yield something less grandiose. They will urge us to live our small lives faithfully, to assist in gathering of God’s elect few from the nations, and suffer the domination of the wicked until He returns.

It cannot be denied that there are elements of truth here. The apostles wrote to real Christians in their letters, and these Christians lived in the dark shadow of very real Jewish and pagan powers. There is no simpleminded triumphalism in the epistles; but there is a note of mighty anticipation of things this side of glory, and it simply will not be suppressed.

Take Romans, for example. Paul opens and closes this epistle by announcing that his mission is nothing less than to bring about “the obedience of faith among all the nations” (Rom 1:5; 16:26). While he never deflects hope away from the final day in which all creation shall be delivered from its bondage to corruption (Rom 8:21), he is bold to expect that before that day “the fullness of the Gentiles” will come in and “all Israel” be saved (Rom 11:25–26); and he looks for God shortly to crush Satan under the feet of the Roman church (Rom 16:20). And given his appeal to Old Covenant prophecies such as Isaiah 11 (Rom 15:12), in which we find lions lying down with lambs, and the earth full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, we should be careful not to diminish too much the scope of his expectations.

Similarly in 1 Corinthians we find Paul’s magnificent articulation of kingdom theology, wherein Christ delivers the kingdom to the Father on the final day, having put down every rule and every authority and power (1 Cor 15:24), having reigned “until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Cor 15:25). In 2 Corinthians, likewise, we find Paul saying essentially that through the ministry of the New Covenant, the new creation anticipated in Israel’s scriptures has arrived – a new creation on par with the original one (2 Cor 3–4). It would be irresponsible not to note his insistence that this new creation life comes through death (2 Cor 4:7–18); but when he says “life works in you” (2 Cor 4:12), we surely cannot escape the conclusion that Paul expected real life, the life of the resurrected Christ, to flourish in, among, and through God’s people in the earth – and that the shape of this life will be what Israel’s New Covenant prophecies led us to expect.

Lest I be tedious (okay, I have already been tedious), what shall I say of the vision of redemptive history that pervades Galatians; of the uniting of all things in heaven and earth in Christ, which is so foundational in Ephesians and Colossians; of the significant reference to the imperial guard in Philippians; of the assurance in Hebrews that we have received the “better country” for which our fathers looked, and the intimation that if they subdued kingdoms by faith so should we? . . .

“Now wait a minute!” I can hear the outcry, “This is just plain sloppy! In the first place, you’re ignoring gobs of evidence against your argument – all the talk in these letters about suffering, all the exhortations to wait patiently for the coming of the Lord, all those statements about evil men waxing worse and worse. In the second place, whatever good hopes the apostles may have had for worldwide expansion of the gospel, they certainly weren’t expecting lions to lie down with lambs, or whole kingdoms to be converted to Christ, or deserts to bloom for real. You’re saying X while ignoring non-X, and saying X is Y when it isn’t.”

I demur. I’m sorry, but I do. First, a clarification about my whole argument: I am arguing that the apostles as much as the prophets expected the reign of Messiah to have transforming effects, not only in individual lives, but also in the nations, cultures, civilizations, institutions, and structures of the earth. Put another way, they expected visible effects of the gospel in whole people groups and societies. I really haven’t said much about how the apostles (or the prophets) expected this to occur; and I am emphatically not arguing that they expected it to come easily. In fact, unless I am missing something, I think Paul described it in terms of “wrestling.” Hard, bruising business. But the blood of the martyrs was – voila! – the downfall of Rome. So suffer patiently, keep your eye fixed firmly on the Day of the Lord, and keep doing subversive stuff like lifting up the poor to sit with you in the great seats of the assembly. This kind of thing could transform nations. It has.

Second, I’ll freely admit I don’t know exactly what Isaiah meant by lions lying down with lambs. But if the prophets set a timeframe called X-Y, and indicated certain things would occur in that timeframe; and then the apostles come along and tell us X-Y has arrived (in the period between Jesus’ ascension and return), I’m asking why we believe the apostles regarded everything meant by “lions lying down with lambs” as awaiting the return of Jesus? Yes, they expected the church to suffer; suffering tends to happen in war. But must we also say they never expected any swords to be beaten into plowshares, ever, anywhere?

It’s important to understand that the apostles wrote to believers where they were actually living.  Rome, the mighty fourth kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, had not yet fallen in their days. The edifice of Old Covenant Judaism was still standing. But the apostles laid the foundation of the new gospel order in confidence that others would build thereupon; and while they didn’t see the future in specific detail (anymore than we do), their expectations for the future were framed by God’s promises to Israel and her Messiah. Certainly their ultimate hope was full restoration of all things at the return of Christ; but it was precisely this hope that enabled them and their readers (and enables us) to be energetic participants in the restorations of the gospel now.

One last exploratory thought: Is God’s attitude toward the world, according to the apostles, “Let’s junk it and start over”? I’m saying their Old Testament exegesis (not least their doctrine of creation) wouldn’t have permitted this. For them, rather, God’s attitude toward the world is, “Behold, I make all things new.” They expected it to be a long, hard road; but they expected it to occur surely and visibly under the present reign of Christ, and to be consummated at His return. God does not destroy sinners in saving them; neither will He destroy the world in saving it.