With the beginning of a new church year we return to lesson series A and its OT Lessons based solidly in Isaiah. In verse one it is made clear that the prophet is a seer (of visions). His intended audience was Jewish and they continue to understood his words in the context of the Israeli political and cultural situation. Christians have taken his words and applied them to Jesus. Our Jewish confreres are still looking for the promised Messiah.
In the OT the greatest expression of Godliness was a trip to Jerusalem and God's Holy Temple. It was the symbol of God's presence here on earth. They looked for a time of Jubilee when soldiers would turn the instruments of war into farm implements. When wars would cease. Then the peoples would prosper.
To properly understand our Epistle one must read the first ten verses in the chapter. The NT Writers anticipate the Day of the Lord when the Saviour of the world will make all things right. What Paul makes clear in Romans 13 is that it is our actions that will be instrumental in bringing it to pass. The Gospel emphasizes that we must live our lives in such a manner that we will be ready whenever the day of accounting should come for we know not the day or the hour.
I like the commentator's idea of placing a plough in the Narthex for Advent One, then a stump and stones for latter lessons.
We have been serving up a great deal of eschatological writing lately. Many OT and NT writers wrote about an apocalypse in which God or Jesus would intervene in history to raise the dead--the resurrection and judge the living and the dead in a final cataclysmic event. Many early Christians looked for this intervention to come within their lifetimes indeed Paul cautions his fledgeling congregations against laziness and sloth because some had sold all they had and were sitting back waiting for it to come. Indeed the Nicene Creed has us state, "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."; the Apostles Creed, "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."
There have been numerous doomsday prophets in recent years who looked for these end times putting a date on the event all of which have obviously passed so far. There have also been cults that engaged in mass suicide to bring on their own version of the apocalypse, we can think of the Jonestown Massacre and the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas.
We are left with the question of the nature of the resurrected body and life of the world to come. Many have taken apocalyptic writings literally and inspired by allegorical writings such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and John Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained think in terms of a Angels appearing at the last Trumpet, Pearly Gates guarded by St. Peter, and a physical Heaven where the streets are paved with silver and gold. God with a long flowing silvery grey beard gets off his rocking chair and mounts a massive throne for the final judgement.
The Biblical Message is obviously filtered through the minds of Early Christian writers. We would do well not to take their allegorical writings literally. When Jesus says:
Joh 14:2 There are many rooms in my Father's house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. I would not tell you this if it were not so.
Joh 14:3 And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am.
he does not necessarily speak of a physical location inhabited by physical bodies. In fact the best indication I can think of was the confrontation between Jesus and the Sadducees we studied 3 Sundays back in Luke 20: 27-38 in which the Sadducees raise the hypothetical question of the woman with seven husbands. In Christ's response he declares that life everlasting transcends our mortal existence and our concerns of time and space. Both Jesus and later Paul counsel that we live our lives in constant preparation for 'that day'. But we are told that the best preparation we can make is to be about our Father's work here on earth. As Christians we enter the eternal Kingdom of God which transcends earth and heaven. We enter it here on earth and at the hour of our death become permanent members of that Kingdom. As moral beings we cannot fully understand that spiritual realm but we are counseled to believe that God wishes us every good thing. We are advised to trust in this and to live our lives without concern for the things to come, it has already been taken care of.
As to the when we know that in 5-6 billion years the sun will become a red giant and engulf the orbit of earth. There is also the remote chance that an asteroid will slam into the Earth and wipe out life as we know it save for the cockroaches. What we are all certain of is our own mortality and the fact that we all face death. At our deaths our spiritual 'bodies' enter eternity. Whether the bright light at the end of the tunnel symbolizes our union with God eternal matters not; it is the lives we have lived here on earth that have prepared us for that union. If we have strived to bring God's Kingdom on Earth then we need have no concern for the life to come.
In the OT the greatest expression of Godliness was a trip to Jerusalem and God's Holy Temple. It was the symbol of God's presence here on earth. They looked for a time of Jubilee when soldiers would turn the instruments of war into farm implements. When wars would cease. Then the peoples would prosper.
To properly understand our Epistle one must read the first ten verses in the chapter. The NT Writers anticipate the Day of the Lord when the Saviour of the world will make all things right. What Paul makes clear in Romans 13 is that it is our actions that will be instrumental in bringing it to pass. The Gospel emphasizes that we must live our lives in such a manner that we will be ready whenever the day of accounting should come for we know not the day or the hour.
I like the commentator's idea of placing a plough in the Narthex for Advent One, then a stump and stones for latter lessons.
We have been serving up a great deal of eschatological writing lately. Many OT and NT writers wrote about an apocalypse in which God or Jesus would intervene in history to raise the dead--the resurrection and judge the living and the dead in a final cataclysmic event. Many early Christians looked for this intervention to come within their lifetimes indeed Paul cautions his fledgeling congregations against laziness and sloth because some had sold all they had and were sitting back waiting for it to come. Indeed the Nicene Creed has us state, "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."; the Apostles Creed, "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."
There have been numerous doomsday prophets in recent years who looked for these end times putting a date on the event all of which have obviously passed so far. There have also been cults that engaged in mass suicide to bring on their own version of the apocalypse, we can think of the Jonestown Massacre and the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas.
We are left with the question of the nature of the resurrected body and life of the world to come. Many have taken apocalyptic writings literally and inspired by allegorical writings such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and John Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained think in terms of a Angels appearing at the last Trumpet, Pearly Gates guarded by St. Peter, and a physical Heaven where the streets are paved with silver and gold. God with a long flowing silvery grey beard gets off his rocking chair and mounts a massive throne for the final judgement.
The Biblical Message is obviously filtered through the minds of Early Christian writers. We would do well not to take their allegorical writings literally. When Jesus says:
Joh 14:2 There are many rooms in my Father's house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. I would not tell you this if it were not so.
Joh 14:3 And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am.
he does not necessarily speak of a physical location inhabited by physical bodies. In fact the best indication I can think of was the confrontation between Jesus and the Sadducees we studied 3 Sundays back in Luke 20: 27-38 in which the Sadducees raise the hypothetical question of the woman with seven husbands. In Christ's response he declares that life everlasting transcends our mortal existence and our concerns of time and space. Both Jesus and later Paul counsel that we live our lives in constant preparation for 'that day'. But we are told that the best preparation we can make is to be about our Father's work here on earth. As Christians we enter the eternal Kingdom of God which transcends earth and heaven. We enter it here on earth and at the hour of our death become permanent members of that Kingdom. As moral beings we cannot fully understand that spiritual realm but we are counseled to believe that God wishes us every good thing. We are advised to trust in this and to live our lives without concern for the things to come, it has already been taken care of.
As to the when we know that in 5-6 billion years the sun will become a red giant and engulf the orbit of earth. There is also the remote chance that an asteroid will slam into the Earth and wipe out life as we know it save for the cockroaches. What we are all certain of is our own mortality and the fact that we all face death. At our deaths our spiritual 'bodies' enter eternity. Whether the bright light at the end of the tunnel symbolizes our union with God eternal matters not; it is the lives we have lived here on earth that have prepared us for that union. If we have strived to bring God's Kingdom on Earth then we need have no concern for the life to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment