Relocating To Elfland

“Faster, faster. All swords out now, all shields up to the nose, all prayers said, all teeth clenched. Shasta was dreadfully frightened. But it suddenly came into his head, ‘If you funk this, you’ll funk every battle all your life. Now or never.’ ” (C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy)

How do we know God’s heart toward us? How do we know His posture toward us? How do we know we are His elect, holy and beloved? We know these things only by hearing and resting on His covenant promises in Christ. To look within to what has happened in our own hearts or experience yields no better assurance than looking to a minister of the gospel (1 Cor 4:1) – in both cases the source of true knowledge and assurance, the Word of God Himself, has been confounded with an instrument or organ by which that Word is received. Assurance cannot be grounded in the intellect, heart, conscience, or experience; it can be grounded only in Christ as He is revealed in the Word of the covenant.

Adam was reared in a Reformed home. He was baptized as an infant, but he has been taught all his life (sometimes explicitly, but certainly implicitly) that it falls to him to demonstrate the genuineness of his standing in God’s covenant (whether it be a public profession of faith, some kind of “conversion experience,” or what have you). Because of this, the genuineness of his standing has always been a matter of uncertainty: will he prove himself to be truly one of God’s people? He spends his life watching those who are “really in” and is taught that, if he is one of God’s children, he will behave as they do. Now, in his adolescent years, he has all the normal questions and struggles that accompany the onset of adulthood. These questions and struggles serve to confirm his uncertainty about where he stands with God, and he feels like a hypocrite when he worships with God’s people, because he does not feel the faith and joy and desire for obedience that they apparently do. (In fact, deep down he resents his lack of freedom to enjoy the independent life he is already effectively living.) He has been reared in uncertainty, and the fruit is now an ugly doubt, which manifests itself increasingly as either despair or indifference.

Eve, too, was reared in a Reformed home. She was baptized as an infant, and she has been taught all her life (explicitly and implicitly) that God is her God and Father, that Christ is her Savior and King, and that she is loved with an everlasting love. She has also been taught that because she is so loved – precisely because of her standing in God’s covenant – she has the duty and privilege to embrace the blessings of her God and to live according to His good laws and wisdom. The genuineness of her standing has never been a matter of uncertainty – she has never been “looking in,” but has always known God’s people to be her people – and this has borne fruit in a sense of holy obligation. She understands the expectations of the covenant-bond, and embraces them. Now, in her adolescent years, she has all the normal questions and struggles that accompany the onset of adulthood, but she has the resources to work them out as a child of God. She is not her own, which is for her a source of comfort and purpose. And in the transparency of fellowship with her people, she finds assurance that struggle is inherent in all true discipleship.

“Even a freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty. In the creation of humanity, God himself chose this way of freedom, which carried with it the danger and actually the fact of sin as well, in preference to forced subjection. Even now, in ruling the world and governing the church, God still follows this royal road of liberty. It is precisely his honor that through freedom he nevertheless reaches his goal, creating order out of disorder, light from darkness, a cosmos out of chaos.” (Bavinck, p. 1.479)

God “rested” on the seventh day, we are told (Gen 2:2–3), and “was refreshed” in the works of His hands (Ex 31:17). What makes this so remarkable is that we know God did not “rest” out of a deficit in His energies (the Almighty never wearies) but rather out of the surpluses of His joy; He set an entire day aside to punctuate His joyful pronouncement, “It is very good” (Gen 1:31). This suggests that in God’s very nature as God there is an “impulse” to savor things: not simply to do and fashion but also to delight in what has been done and fashioned. From this impulse the divine resting proceeded, not from any sort of fatigue after six days of labor.

What might this mean for those created in God’s image? We tend to think of the Sabbath as a much needed “break” after our draining labors in a sin-stricken world. It is this, but it is much, much more. The Sabbath as God conceived it takes its orientation not from exhaustion but from joy, not from the emptiness of the curse but from the excesses of divine blessing. We don’t need the Sabbath simply because we are fallen; we need it because we are made in the likeness of God. We need it for the same reason He “needs” it (so to speak): because it is in our nature, created and redeemed, to celebrate His goodness, to refresh ourselves in His beauty. Stretching to the horizon in every direction, we see by faith the works of the Lord – creation, redemption, resurrection, fruits of the Spirit. We stand at His side and pleasure ourselves in His doing and fashioning; and we glimpse in the glass of His promises still greater things to come. This is what the Sabbath is for. It was made for us, in conformity with our nature, because it conforms to the nature of God.

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

“I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason: ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthy beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

This was recently posted over at First Things, from one of my favorite contemporary poets:

Give thanks for all things
On the plucked lute, and likewise
The harp of ten strings.

Have the lifted horn
Greatly blare, and pronounce it
Good to have been born.

Lend the breath of life
To the stops of the sweet flute
Or capering fife,

And tell the deep drum
To make, at the right juncture,
Pandemonium.

Then, in grave relief,
Praise too our sorrows on the
Cello of shared grief.

The Bible doesn’t simply supply answers to our questions; it gives us the right questions.

A question of tremendous significance for our reading and application of the Bible is what the Old Testament “Promised Land” points forward to in the New Covenant era. Canaan was a piece of land (territory) claimed by the covenant Lord Yahweh in a particular period of redemptive history; what is our “Canaan” in the age of the New Covenant? If we don’t answer this question correctly, it’s going to be very hard to sort out how the stories of Abraham, and of Israel under Moses and Joshua and David, are “examples for us” (1 Cor 10:6). A number of options have been proposed:

1. Some would say that “Canaan” represents “heaven” (the state of the redeemed in the afterlife), or perhaps a bit more precisely, the new heavens and new earth to be established at the return of Christ. I think Gareth Crossly has shown as well as anyone the impossibility of this view, biblically considered:

“Heaven will not be a place of fighting, but of eternal rest and blessedness. In a sense it is legitimate to view Canaan as the end of the trials in the wilderness. But a slightly different perspective provides a more satisfactory application. When viewed in the light of all the battles that are recorded in the book of Joshua then entry into Canaan may be better seen as personal conversion – entering into Christ. The battles which occur in Canaan are then seen as typical of spiritual battles in the Christian life. The conquest of Canaan typifies victory over spiritual enemies (2 Cor. 10:3–5; Eph. 6:12). The partial subjugation of the Canaanites typifies the existence of besetting sins which remain unconquered (Heb. 12:1).” (OT Explained and Applied, pp. 186–87)

2. Crossley’s own view, then, is that Canaan represents the Christian life after conversion. But there are strong objections against this view as well. For one thing, it makes Canaan a “type” of Christ: the Israelites’ entering into Canaan foreshadows the individual New Covenant believer’s entering into Christ. For another thing, it makes Israel a “type” of the individual believer in the New Covenant era. Both of these proposed typologies are  problematic; indeed, I would be hard-pressed to think of any biblical evidence to support either one.

3. Still others regard OT Canaan as pointing forward to . . . well, Canaan. The Dispensationalists think that God’s promises regarding the land of Israel will yet have a total literal fulfillment. The literature dismantling this view is too vast even for a footnote here. Two pieces I have found particularly useful are (1) David Holwerda’s essay, “Jesus and the Land: A Question of Time and Place,” in Jesus and Israel: One Covenant or Two? and (2) O. Palmer Robertson’s essay, “The Israel of God: Its Land,” in The Israel of God: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

4. A fourth view, which happens to be my own, is that OT Canaan represents the entire world; the battles for OT Canaan foreshadow the warfare of Messiah’s kingdom after its inauguration. This is supported explicitly by a few New Testament texts: for example, Romans 4:13 indicates that Canaan was a “shadow” of the world; Hebrews 11:10 indicates that Canaan was a “shadow” of the city of God, or what we call the New Jerusalem.

Some would argue that these texts simply take us back to the first option outlined above: the “world” and the “New Jerusalem” in view are the new world and city of God to be revealed at Christ’s second coming. In an ultimate sense, this is true; but again, the OT scriptures represent a long period in which the battle to possess Canaan was just that – a battle – and this cannot point to possession of the world after Christ’s return, because that age will be one without enemies. We find also in New Covenant scripture clear statements that Christ has already been given authority on earth (e.g., Matt 28:18), that He is already heir of the world (e.g., Heb 1:2), and that His saints have already come to the New Jerusalem (Heb 12:22). We cannot, then, entirely defer Christ’s possession of the world and the arrival of the New Jerusalem until after He returns. Until that time, however, the spread of His kingdom in the earth will be accomplished in the face of militant opposition from His enemies. This fits perfectly with the foreshadowing war-stories of our OT fathers. Here is David Holwerda (commenting on Romans 4:13):

“The promise that the land will be inherited has become the promise that the kingdom of God, which embraces all nations, the entire creation, and even the cosmos itself, will be inherited. In Christ believers already possess all things, and that includes “the world” . . . . Paul’s attention is focused not on the land of Canaan but on the new creation and on the powers that hold this present creation in subjection (Romans 8:17–25).” (Jesus and Israel, p. 104)

On this view, Israel is a “type” of Christ, who has been appointed heir of all things but is waiting until all His enemies are put under His feet; and Israel is also a “type” of the church, which has been raised to sit with Christ above all principalities and powers (Eph 1:20–21; 2:6) but is still wrestling with these principalities and powers until the end of the age (Eph 6:12). It also helps us understand the warning in Hebrews, “While the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it” (Heb 4:1). This warning will not be necessary after Christ’s return; but it speaks volumes to those who are still fighting the battles of the kingdom, and who need great encouragement to hold fast to Christ in whom alone our eternal inheritance is secure.

“Christ himself, though free from all error and sin, was never, strictly speaking, active in the field of science and art, commerce and industry, law and politics. His was another kind of greatness: the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. But precisely for that reason he was a source of blessing for science and art, society and state. Jesus is Savior, only that but that totally. He came not only to restore the religious-ethical life of human beings and to leave all other things untouched as if they were not corrupted by sin and did not need to be restored. Indeed not, for as far as sin extends, so far also the grace of Christ extends.” (Bavinck, p. 1.445)