City Notes 27: Books in 30 minutes or less
City Notes are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read.
Here are links to the previous City Notes books:
City Notes are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read.
Here are links to the previous City Notes books:
Here are links to the previous City Notes books:
City Notes 27: The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That's Dying to Bring Us Home Part 3 of 3
| 2 | Taking Down the Corporation: Crucifixion Cont.
Fish on the Dock: Things have been ordered toward justice by our loving heavenly Father. We're designed for "life, and ... more abundantly," for shalom, or flourishing in right relationship, so we can thrive. Creation is a gift from a God who is for us. But what happens if we reject this right relationship? If we rebel against the Creator's ordering? If we tear at the fabric and rip at the flourishing of God's good world?
Throughout Scriptures, God reminds his people that how we live matters – there are rewards and punishments, blessings and curses, compensation and consequences. The Creator reminds us that swimming in the ocean of his good, loving, and just ways that leads to thriving – this is the natural environment we were made for. But when we rebel against these ways, we're like fish jumping out of the water – leaving our intended environment and flopping around in the distance. + pg. 160
Fish on the Dock: Things have been ordered toward justice by our loving heavenly Father. We're designed for "life, and ... more abundantly," for shalom, or flourishing in right relationship, so we can thrive. Creation is a gift from a God who is for us. But what happens if we reject this right relationship? If we rebel against the Creator's ordering? If we tear at the fabric and rip at the flourishing of God's good world?
Throughout Scriptures, God reminds his people that how we live matters – there are rewards and punishments, blessings and curses, compensation and consequences. The Creator reminds us that swimming in the ocean of his good, loving, and just ways that leads to thriving – this is the natural environment we were made for. But when we rebel against these ways, we're like fish jumping out of the water – leaving our intended environment and flopping around in the distance. + pg. 160
Fish on the Dock: God has an interesting way of showing his anger; he gives us what we want. Thomas Aquinas, one of history's most famous theologians, observed how when we attack God's loving order, we unleash injustice, or disorder, into the way things are supposed to be. A husband's affair affects not only him but shoots a cannon into his marriage and family. Wall Street's bad loans impacted not only greedy bankers but threw a sledgehammer into the global economy. The BP oil spill not only hurt the company but wreaked havoc throughout the gulf. Sin lets loose ruin. ...
But sin also does something more. It impacts not only the world around us – it impacts us. For Aquinas: "The order of creation is such that when we rebel against the order, we disorder ourselves, losing our interior order and justice to ourselves ... When humans turn away from this divine love and refuse our debt of justice, humans lack the justice we were created to have, that is inscribed in the created order ... the resulting disorder is itself a punishment."
In other words, when we attack God's loving purposes for our world, it messes us up inside. When we reject the justice of his ways, we corrupt our character. We're like fish jumping out of the water we were made to live in, who wind up flopping around on the dock. This is why, for Aquinas, "sin itself then is a punishment – of sin."
So again, flopping on the dock is both a natural consequence and divine punishment – at the same time. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the phrase "natural consequence" is itself misleading. We tend to think of nature as something exists independently of God. But the Creator gifts nature with its being, and sustains it with his very presence – so "natural" doesn't get us away from the Creator; it brings us before him. The natural consequences we experience are mediated by God's sustaining presence in the creation we've disordered.
We start to see wrath in this picture not as God being mean, or vindictive, or as something opposed to God's holy love, but rather as an expression of God's holy love. Because God desires the goodness and flourishing of his world, wrath is the opposition of God's holy love to that sin which defaces and destroys his good creation, by trying to distance it from him. Like the prodigal son who squanders his inheritance in the distant land, our self-imposed distance from the Father is a punishment. Because we were made for the ocean of God's love. + pgs. 161-163
Furious Love: Miroslav Volf, a theologian and public intellectual, shares a powerful reflection that can help us get started. Living through the horror of the war in Yugoslavia, he reflects:
"I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them.
"My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in form Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrator's basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them?
"Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. + pgs. 165-166
Furious Love: Jesus' eyes are wide open to all the horror and tragedy we unleash in his beautiful world. As the popular slogan puts it, "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." Well, God is paying attention. There's plenty of destruction in our world that should upset us. As D.E.H. Whiteley observes, "the opposite of love is not wrath but indifference." Fortunately, God is not indifferent. But too often we are.
When we pay attention to the plight of our neighbors, taking our eyes off our own selfish pursuits, we should be moved by the hurt in our community, the injustice in our city, the devastation in our world. There's an unrighteous anger, but there's a righteous kind too. Righteous anger is helpful in motivating us to action. And it is driven by love.
The real question is not why God would ever get angry enough to intervene, but why God waits so long. I've come to believe it has something to do with God being more patient than we are, and his patience with the destruction we unleash is itself a form of grace. But his patience will not last forever. When our sins have piled up to heaven, the reckoning day comes. ...
As Swedish theologian Anders Nygren observed, "Only that love which pronounces judgment on all that is not love is in the truest sense restoring and saving love." God's love is not a trite sound bite but an invasive mission to rescue, rebuff, and restore. + pgs. 167-168
Furious Love: All creation is sustained through Jesus and in the Spirit, so it is through Jesus and in the Spirit that these judgments are enacted. This should remind us of God's good character driving the scene. As Frederick Buechner observes, when God pronounces curses, " ... it seems less a matter of vindictively inflicting them with the consequences than of honestly confronting them with the consequences. Because of who they are and what they have done, this is the result." + pgs. 169-170
Unraveling Creation: Jesus absorbs not only our personal and social destruction, but our cosmic destruction as well. ...
Israel viewed creation as a cosmic temple, intended for God's indwelling presence. Adam is depicted as its priest, called to "work" and "take care of" its garden. These words, work and take care of, are paired together in only one other place in the Bible, to describe the role of the priests in the temple. Sacred gardens were common features of ancient temples, and Israel modeled their temple on the garden of Genesis, intending it to be a microcosm of creation. ...
When the Spirit of God evacuates the building, giving us the distance from God we crave, the structure of creation collapses in upon itself. ...
Like Babylon's forces of chaos later invading Israel's holy land and destroying the temple, the Flood's forces of chaos sweep in upon the earth and tear down the temple of creation. We've commandeered its steering wheel and rammed the ship into the rocks, away from God, dragging it down beneath the turbulent waters from which it came. + pgs. 173, 175-176
Furious Love: During Jesus crucifixion, he is mocked, forsaken, and darkness hangs over the land, all Old Testament images for the wrath of God. The simple fact that he dies is significant, for as New Testament lecturer Peter Bolt observes, "death itself is the manifestation of God's wrath." And it's not only that Jesus dies, but how he dies – both Jews and Romans agreed that death by crucifixion was a sign of being under God's curse. Israel's law declared, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree." Jesus bears the curse of the law under exilic wrath in order to redeem us from it.
On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prays whether "this cup" might be taken from him – the cup was a major Old Testament reference for "cup of God's wrath." Israel saw her exile as drinking this cup, but God's fury would not last forever – the cup would eventually be empty. When his anger subsided, the cup fully poured out, God would return for her and the end of exile would come. Isaiah held out hope for the day when God would say, "Behold I have taken from your hand the cup of staggering; the bowl of my wrath you shall drink no more." The end of exile would come. Israel would be reconciled to God.
Jesus sees himself as drinking this cup of divine wrath on the cross, bearing the weight of Israel's exile in his humanity in order to bring her home. Jesus is the head who drinks the cup that hangs over his body of people. And he drinks it down to the dregs.
Jesus bears the curse of exilic wrath afflicting creation in its distance from the Creator. He soaks in the dark, destructive decay we've unleashed in the masterpiece, to the point that he becomes the curse he's absorbed as he carries it into the grave – to restore the masterpiece by flooding it with the presence of God. + pgs. 171-172
Unraveling Creation: Jesus absorbs not only our personal and social destruction, but our cosmic destruction as well. ...
Israel viewed creation as a cosmic temple, intended for God's indwelling presence. Adam is depicted as its priest, called to "work" and "take care of" its garden. These words, work and take care of, are paired together in only one other place in the Bible, to describe the role of the priests in the temple. Sacred gardens were common features of ancient temples, and Israel modeled their temple on the garden of Genesis, intending it to be a microcosm of creation. ...
When the Spirit of God evacuates the building, giving us the distance from God we crave, the structure of creation collapses in upon itself. ...
Like Babylon's forces of chaos later invading Israel's holy land and destroying the temple, the Flood's forces of chaos sweep in upon the earth and tear down the temple of creation. We've commandeered its steering wheel and rammed the ship into the rocks, away from God, dragging it down beneath the turbulent waters from which it came. + pgs. 173, 175-176
Unraveling Creation: God is Light, Life, and Love. Move from the Light; pull your world toward darkness. Run from Life; encounter death. Rebel against Love; sink into the collapsing of a self-contained world. This unraveling is the punishment inscribed in a creation ordered for the indwelling presence of its Creator. When our mutiny pulls creation away from the Creator, and he pulls back his sustaining presence, the whole structure flops around on the dock. Creation unravels. God is good. Remove God's goodness and his good world falls apart. We were made to live on dry land, to flourish with our Creator in the good earth he's made, but we continually drive away from God, down toward the chaotic waters of oblivion – and drag the world down with us.
At the cross, Jesus takes all this head-on: our personal, social, and cosmic judgment. He comes under the dark, destructive decay we've unleashed, crashes under the turbulent waves of the tohu va wohu, grasping our hand deep in the depths below as he receives our unraveling of creation into himself – until it unravels him. The One through whom the world was made is himself unmade.
And yet, once he has identified fully with our tragic condition, grasping our hand and uniting himself with us in the depths below, the Father parts chaotic waters of the abyss once again, raising his Son from his baptism in the grave, and leading us in the wake of his Spirit behind him, the resurrected head of humanity and firstfruits of the new creation. + pgs. 178-179
Key Idea
Caricature: Wrath contradicts God's love and is inappropriate for his character.
Gospel: Wrath arises from God's love and deals honestly with our world.
Gospel: Wrath arises from God's love and deals honestly with our world.
| 3 | Rising Up from the Waters: Resurrection
Life into Death: The Father is, through the Son and in the Spirit, reconciling the world. The Father, Son, and Spirit remain sovereign through the event of the cross. The Son is sovereign over the grave, even as he lies dead in it – because the Father and Spirit will be faithful to raise him. The Father is sovereign, even as his Son marches toward Golgotha – because Jesus will not join humanity's rebellion and will be faithful unto death. The Spirit is sovereign, even when entering the grieving and groaning of creation to apply the work of Jesus to our broken world, because the Father and Son will receive the world he brings. The hope of the world is God's sovereign love. ...
As pastor and author Tim Keller observes: "God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself." In the words of theologian Adam Johnson, "through Jesus Christ the triune God brought the reality of sin into his own proper life, that he might deal with it in and through himself." Or as Benedict XVI, the former pope, puts it: "God himself becomes the locus of reconciliation, and in the person of his Son takes the suffering upon himself. ... God himself "drinks the cup" of every horror to the dregs and thereby restores justice through the greatness of his love, which, through suffering, transforms the darkness." ...
The cross and resurrection most powerfully reveal the Trinity because they display their faithful love to one another amid our darkest depths. The Father, Son, and Spirit take in our suffering, shattering, and death in order to overwhelm it with the life, light, and love they share as the one God. + pgs. 202-204
Key Idea
Caricature: The Trinity is an abstract doctrine with no relevance for today.
Gospel: The Trinity changes everything – the Father, Son, and Spirit are a holy communion of love who invite us to participate in their eternal life.
Gospel: The Trinity changes everything – the Father, Son, and Spirit are a holy communion of love who invite us to participate in their eternal life.
Bad Bridge: Jesus is: the Way our world is reconciled to God, the Truth of God's goodness outstretched to embrace resistant rebels, and the Life that restores our God-haunted, sin-struck world, back into the presence of the Father. The cross is not a bridge we use to get to God; it is the flag of God's kingdom planted deep beneath the death-dealing soil of the cracked and barren earth we tread. It is the bridge through which God breaks into us. The resurrection is not a motivational talk to get our lives together; it is God's life-giving power breaking through the walls of our rebellion, spilling around the ramparts we've erected, to receive all who will be embraced by his reconciling goodness, to restore all who will repentantly submit to his kingdom reign, to flood the earth with God's glory when all things are made new in the power of Christ's victory. Jesus is not a path we set out into the universe on to go find God. Jesus is the way God has come to find us. + pgs. 210
The True Myth: Our stories and traditions reveal, in many ways, our deepest longings, hopes, and desires. Our stories are projected from earth up to heaven, while Jesus bears an important distinction, coming from heaven to earth. In the words of Joseph Pearce, "Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. ... (where we encounter) God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself." Jesus is the "True Myth," who does not annihilate all the dreams and aspirations embodied in our stories but rather, in some important ways, fulfills them. + pgs. 211-212
True Myth: Jesus is good, true, and beautiful, and reveals in his presence that in our culture which is good, true, and beautiful. It can only be good, true, and beautiful by participating, whether its maker wants it to be or not, in the structure of creation held by him at the center of the universe in the power of his Spirit. ...
In our culture-at-large, my eyes are increasingly drawn to Jesus when I see the doctors bringing health to my father's body, teachers pouring wisdom into my daughter, janitors performing microbiological warfare on enemies of my immune system, or entrepreneurs launching initiatives for the flourishing of our community. ...
God is the Author and Orchestrator of our world. All things stand in relation to him. In making culture, we can look to our Creator for guidance in our vocations. Those in education can look to Jesus as Teacher; for those in medicine, he is Healer; for those in politics, he is King; for those in law, he is our Judge; for those in communication, he is the Word; for those raising children, God is our loving Father and nurturing Spirit. Our world is grounded in God. "In him we live and move and have our being." Jesus is the way God has come to us, revealing the truth that grounds creation, that we might have life if we receive him, allowing him to cast away the corruption and treasure the true as he refines us in his image. + pgs. 215, 218
The True Myth: Our stories and traditions reveal, in many ways, our deepest longings, hopes, and desires. Our stories are projected from earth up to heaven, while Jesus bears an important distinction, coming from heaven to earth. In the words of Joseph Pearce, "Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. ... (where we encounter) God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself." Jesus is the "True Myth," who does not annihilate all the dreams and aspirations embodied in our stories but rather, in some important ways, fulfills them. + pgs. 211-212
True Myth: Jesus is good, true, and beautiful, and reveals in his presence that in our culture which is good, true, and beautiful. It can only be good, true, and beautiful by participating, whether its maker wants it to be or not, in the structure of creation held by him at the center of the universe in the power of his Spirit. ...
In our culture-at-large, my eyes are increasingly drawn to Jesus when I see the doctors bringing health to my father's body, teachers pouring wisdom into my daughter, janitors performing microbiological warfare on enemies of my immune system, or entrepreneurs launching initiatives for the flourishing of our community. ...
God is the Author and Orchestrator of our world. All things stand in relation to him. In making culture, we can look to our Creator for guidance in our vocations. Those in education can look to Jesus as Teacher; for those in medicine, he is Healer; for those in politics, he is King; for those in law, he is our Judge; for those in communication, he is the Word; for those raising children, God is our loving Father and nurturing Spirit. Our world is grounded in God. "In him we live and move and have our being." Jesus is the way God has come to us, revealing the truth that grounds creation, that we might have life if we receive him, allowing him to cast away the corruption and treasure the true as he refines us in his image. + pgs. 215, 218
Upside-Down Kingdom: Before the name Christian took hold, Jesus' first ambassadors were simply called followers of "the Way." They wanted to walk behind Jesus and follow in his dust. What was this way? He summed it up for his disciples: "If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me." Jesus calls us to the way of the cross. The cross is not a way we break out of the world to get up to Jesus, but a way Jesus breaks into the world through us as his people. In the words of Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus forms us on this journey to be a people marked by "giving rather than taking, self-sacrifice rather than self-protection," dying rather than killing ... (to find) that we win by losing, we triumph through defeat, and we become rich by giving ourselves away."
This is tough for our culture of glory to accept. We want to find God with our best foot forward rather than let God find us in the secrets of our darkest closets. We strive to minimize our suffering and make our best life now. We're addicted to self-help: always on to that next diet fad, that next fashion trend, that next project or philosophy to put our lives together, with Oprah and Dr. Phil as our high priests along for the ride. If we get ourselves together, maybe we'll get God in the process.
But God beckons from our brokenness, breaks in through the back door, invites us to encounter him in our insecurities, sits in our suffering, waiting for us to join him there. And when his grace rather than our glory becomes the starting point, there's freedom to enter the world as it is, to not ignore or sugarcoat the pain but to call it what it is and graciously give our lives away for his glory there, as signposts of the upside-down, resurrecting kingdom.
Jesus is a one-way bridge moving contrary to our culture of glory. While we're striving to move up from earth toward heaven, climbing the social ladder to "make a name for ourselves," God is breaking in from heaven to earth, bringing resurrection power through the back door to name us as his own. We're invited not to set out and find God, but to stop running and be found. Not to strive harder and do, but to hear him say, "It is done!" To let the Father lift us on his back and carry us on the strength of his shoulders across the wasteland that surrounds us into the world he is making his home.
Key Idea
Caricature: Jesus is the one and only way we go out to find God.
Caricature: Jesus is the one and only way we go out to find God.
Gospel: Jesus is the unique and decisive way God has come to us.
Blind Date: Augustine famously said, "The church is a whore, but she's my mother." I love this quote and the tension it expresses. On the one hand, we have this checkered history (and present), yet Jesus pursues us through her. I wouldn't know Jesus without his people, and neither would you. The church has carried the words of Scripture, the witness of the Spirit, and the sacraments of God through history right on down to us. Like Hosea, Jesus pursues his messy bride and identifies with us, even when it's in confrontation. Our hope as the church is not in our greatness but in the greatness of God.
We receive the presence of God through the people of God. As Cyprian of Carthage famously said in the early church, "you cannot have God for your Father unless you have the church for your mother." We receive God's life through her, and from her womb in the power of the Spirit we are born into the presence of God.
Jesus is a better Hosea. He comes after us in our weakness, in our broken areas, the places where we don't have it all together. We don't have to perform for Jesus, to try and make ourselves into a shiny, sexy supermodel so he'll want to take us as his wife. Jesus delights to pursue us at our worst, to meet us where we are and take us as we are. As Luther observed, "The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it." God isn't looking for the beautiful to give his love to; it's the reception of God's love that makes us beautiful. Jesus comes looking not for our trophies, but our scars.
So there is a freedom to get vulnerable before God with where we're really at, our frustrations and disappointments, the areas we feel as though we're a letdown or we don't measure up. Those are precisely the areas where we find ourselves in need of grace, before a God who loves to give it. The beauty of the gospel is not that we make ourselves good for God to need us; it's that God wants us and finds us where we're at. + pgs. 249-250
Key Idea
Caricature: God prefers the polished, pretty, and put together.
Caricature: God prefers the polished, pretty, and put together.
Gospel: God goes after Nazis and whores, victims and oppressors, to make them his people and his bride.
Vampires: Here's the major distinction that sets us apart from the vampires: Jesus makes us bearers of life, rather than death, to a world that he loves. When Jesus takes us to himself, he makes us part of himself. He doesn't just invite us to join a club; he makes us part of his body. The church is not so much a collection of individuals pursuing God together as, rather, the body of people through whom God pursues the world. Jesus continues to embody his outpoured love into the world – through us. The Pursuing God makes us a pursuing people.
Vampires: The point is not simply to practice a religious ritual, but to come to the living Christ at the center of our life as a people. While Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox have disagreed on the exact nature of how the Eucharist works, all the major traditions have agreed that Jesus is actually present through it. In the power of Jesus' Spirit, his presence is alive with us today. ...
Augustine envisioned Jesus as saying: "I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me."
As Jesus binds us into union with himself, we are brought into the body of Christ. Communion is not just an act between me and Jesus, but a participation in the people of God. As Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann observes, the original meaning of the word liturgy was "an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals." Jesus gathers us together and forms us as his people. The Eucharist is the body that makes us a body. ...
When we receive Jesus' body as gift, we are brought into the gift: we become part of the body of Christ we receive. Indeed, union with Jesus is wrapped up in the very nature of the gift itself. We become Jesus' gift to the world.
Jesus takes us in his Spirit, breaks us like that bread, and pours us out like wine, giving our lives in sacrificial love to his world. In the words of Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh, the Eucharist is "the heart of true religio (religion), a practice of binding us to the body of Christ which is our salvation ... the stunning public leitourgia (liturgy) in which humans are made members of God's very body. .... As members of the Body, we then become nourishment for others – including those not part of the visible Body – in the unending trinitarian economy of gratuitous giving and joyful reception."
The Father embraces us through his Son, in the power of their Spirit, and pours our lives out for his world. Jesus continues to take on flesh and bone today, as he unites himself to us through his Spirit for the Father's glory in the world. + pgs. 254-256
Vampires: Communion confronts my individualism. ... In Communion, I am being gathered into the global and historical body of Christ. I am bound with the Afghan villager and the Vietnamese businesswoman across national borders, united with my homeless neighbor and the CEO who runs my bank, drawn into life together with the soldier, the soccer mom, and the starving artist sitting in the pew next to me – the people of God in all our diverse array. Jesus didn't die so I could hang out with my buddies; he died to reconcile a gloriously diverse humanity.
This confronts the individualistic way many Americans approach life with Jesus. For example, we often read the New Testament books as if they were written directly to us like personal letters. But as a friend once pointed out, "The yous of the New Testament are plural. ...
The emphasis is less on "me" and more on "we." God cares about our life together as his people. The one another statements throughout the New Testament also strongly showcase this dynamic: Romans 12:10 encourages us to "honor one another above yourselves"; Galatians 5:13 to "serve one another humbly in love"; and 1 Thessalonians 5:11 to "encourage one another and build each other up." ...
Lesslie Newbigin observes how we want to encounter God through the "skylight," opening our own personal window to the heavens above to have a direct one-on-one encounter with God. But God prefers instead to come through the "front door," encountering us through the neighbor who comes bearing the message and presence of Jesus.
Why? What reason could God possibly have? It is because, Newbigin reflects, God is not as interested in millions of scattered, one-on-one relationships with isolated individuals as he is in building a body, forming a community, gathering a people to himself and through himself to one another. "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news." God enters through our front door so that we can only receive him by receiving the presence of our neighbor. We enter his body by receiving his body. + pgs. 256-258
Vampires: Baptism is entrance into the church. We rise not only into union with Jesus, but into the body of Christ in all its fullness. The two are simultaneous. We do not join our lives to Jesus, then go find a church. When we are bound to Jesus, we are – by the very nature of that act – bound into union with the church. Union with Jesus means communion with his people.
While Jesus' death and resurrection are central, when we zoom out to the broader biblical storyline, baptism is loaded with more layers of meaning. The waters, as we have seen, are a Hebrew symbol for the primordial chaos, the tohu wa vohu, the state of disorder that sin wants to unravel the world back into. As we go under the waters, we identify with the trajectory of our sin: the nothingness of separation from God, the annihilation of the world in its distance from our heavenly Father, the unraveling of creation under our rebellion against the Creator.
And yet, God's gracious Spirit parts the waters once again. As in the beginning to make space for creation; as in Noah's day to bring forth restoration; as in Exodus to bring slaves into freedom, the Creator parts the waters, bringing us out from the enslaving chaos of our life under sin and into the fresh space of kingdom life for his new creation.
Baptism is not only our entrance into God; it is God's entrance into us, and through us into his world. Some people think of the church as a fortress, a holy huddle clambering inside the defensive walls, trying to protect ourselves from the big bad world outside. We want to make sure we get "upstairs" to God and aren't left behind on earth below. But the life of the church works in the opposite direction.
As we are brought into the embrace of the Father, through the life of the Son, in the power of the Spirit, we are caught up through God's pursuit of us into God's pursuit of the world. We are no longer afraid of being tainted or inconvenienced by the messiness around us. We can dive headfirst into the sin-struck war zone of God's world to embody his life, hope, and sacrificial love. + pgs. 259-260
Bigfoot Jesus: Jesus wants to fill his world through us. Heaven is breaking into earth. A people are coming under the rule of the King. Jesus takes us to himself as his body, in order to embody his presence in the world through us today. The Father is present through his Word and in his Spirit, gathering a people to him and pouring them out for his world. We who feed on the body become the body. We who drink the blood are poured out. The Pursuing God pursues through us. + pg. 271
Key Idea
Caricature: The church is a collection of individuals pursuing God together.
Caricature: The church is a collection of individuals pursuing God together.
Gospel: The church is a body of people through whom God pursues the world.
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– Sully
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