Christ Returneth!

304 Christ Returneth!

1. It may be at morn, when the day is awaking,
   When sunlight thro' darkness and shadow is breaking,
   That Jesus will come in the fullness of glory
   To receive from the world His own.

Chorus:
   O Lord Jesus, how long, how long
   Ere we shout the glad song?
   Christ returneth, Hallelujah! hallelujah!
   Amen, Hallelujah! Amen.

2. It may be at midday, and it may be at twilight,
   It may be, perchance, that the blackness of midnight
   Will burst into light in the blaze of His glory,
   When Jesus receives His own. [Chorus]

3. While His hosts cry Hosanna, from heaven, descending,
   With glorified saints and the angels attending,
   With grace on His brow, like a halo of glory;
   Will Jesus receive "His own." [Chorus]

4. O joy! O delight! should we go without dying,
   No sickness, no sadness, no dread, and no crying,
   Caught up thro' the clouds with our Lord into glory,
   When Jesus receives His own. [Chorus]
                         H. L. Turner
                         Hymns for the Family of God

Thwarted!

Then he, without any voice or opening of his lips, formed these words in my soul: ‘By this is the Fiend overcome.’ Our Lord said these words meaning overcome by his blessed Passion, as he had shown it earlier. Now our Lord was revealing how with his Passion he defeats the Devil. God showed that the Fiend is still as wicked as he was before the Incarnation and works as hard, but he continually sees that all those to whom salvation is due escape him gloriously through the power of Christ’s dear Passion, and that grieves and humiliates him severely; for everything that God allows him to do turns into joy for us and into shame and vexation for him. And he feels as much sorrow when God allows him to work as when he does not work; and that is because he may never do as much evil as he would wish, for God holds all the Devil’s power in his own hand.—Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 60

Why the somber face?

Our hope for this world and for the world to come is a High Priest, an altar, a temple, a tabernacle, a shrine and a Savior by the throne above. This we Christians have. What bothers me is how we can keep so quiet about it and why it is that we can take it so soberly, almost sadly. It would seem to me that we Christians ought to be the happiest people in the whole wide world.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 92

Future hope? Or present reality?

On the other hand, if the central saving act of Christian faith is relegated to the future with the fervent hope that Christ’s resurrection is the pledge of our own and that one day we shall reign with Him in glory, then the risen One is pushed safely out of the present. Limiting the resurrection either to the past or to the future makes the present risenness of Jesus largely irrelevant, safeguards us from interference with the ordinary rounds and daily routine of our lives, and preempts communion now with Jesus as a living person.—Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child, 99

The goal

To be sure, there will be judgment; neither the wicked nor their works will have further sway. But the accent of the final chapter of the Christian story is not upon our just deserts but upon the culmination of the glorious, liberating work of God to set his redeemed creation free. Or to be more precise, the consummation is when the world is finally and completely taken up in the work wrought in Christ from beginning to end.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 223

Separate? Nope!

The Pauline language for human reality in the interval between our death and the consummation of all things derives from his sense of our participation in and union with Christ. Prepositions are theologically strong words for Paul. The human being cannot be divided from Christ because we are in him; when we die we are therefore with him. Nowhere in his letters does Paul explain how this can be so, that is, what part of the human being it is that can exist with Christ without its transformed body, how God relates to this part without a body, how this requires us to think differently about time, and so on. What Paul does express quite clearly, however, is the belief that Cod’s act of love in raising Christ from the dead defies the power of death to separate us from him in any way.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 101

To what end salvation?

I return my reader to one of the key questions of this book: What is the goal of salvation? For too long, scholars and laymen alike have myopically viewed justification and salvation as ends in themselves, whether for the benefit of the individual or of the incorporative body of Christ. The goal of salvation is believers’ conformity to the Son of God—their participation in his rule over creation as God’s eschatological family and as renewed humanity—but only and always with the purpose of extending God’s hand of mercy, love, and care to his wider creation. This was humanity’s job in the beginning; it will be believers’ responsibility and honor in the future; it is God’s purpose in calling his people in the present.—Conformed to the Image of His Son, 266

<idle musing>
Indeed! We underestimate the purposes of God and are unaware of his ability to bring it about.

That's the final paragraph of the book. I hope you enjoyed the brief snippets I posted; they really don't do the book justice. It is definitely worth the time invested in reading it. But, be aware that it is loaded with untranslated Greek—both LXX and NT—so if your Greek is rusty/nonexistent, you will miss some of the nuances. But, it is still worth the time invested.
</idle musing>

Escapist theology

This resolute focus on the church’s imminent exit to heaven has the effect of inclining believers in the rapture to treat the future (and thus the present) of the earth as unimportant. This lack of concern for our earthly future in the early part of the twentieth century was clearly tied to an otherworldly heavenly—mindedness, but as the century progressed, it has resulted in the free reign of consumerism and greed among North American evangelicals, since there is little theological ground in a rapture—oriented eschatology for ecological or social responsibility.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 303

Not yet, but getting there…

The fact that John died in prison should warn us of the difference between a biblical understanding of the kingdom and the triumphalistic assumptions of much that goes under the name of the “health—and-wealth gospel” or the “prosperity gospel.” Jesus himself endured rejection and death before resurrection, thus paralleling Israel’s experience of bondage in Egypt before deliverance and their exile in Babylon before return to the land. Paul himself says that we must suffer with Christ in order to attain to the resurrection (Phil. 3:10–11). Indeed, all creation is groaning in its bondage, awaiting liberation (Rom. 8:18–25). In other words, while resurrection, healing, and holistic restoration constitute the appropriate Christian hope——and there is substantial healing and restoration possible in the present—“hope” means that we trust in what is coming but is not yet with us in its fullness. We live between the times, after the inauguration of the kingdom but before its final consummation.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 272 n. 11

There's more to the gospel than that!

What John [the Baptist] did not understand was that the kingdom does not come all at once. John was in danger of stumbling over Jesus on this point. He expected too much, too quickly.

Historically, however, many Christians have had the opposite problem. We have not expected enough. And what we have expected, we have often delayed until “heaven” and the return of Christ. We have not really believed that God cares about this world of real people in their actual historical situations, which often are characterized by oppression and suffering. Our understanding of salvation has been characterized by an unbiblical otherworldliness. So our expectations of the future have often not reflected the full-orbed good news that Jesus proclaimed at Nazareth.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 271

Don't limit the good news!

But the message of Jesus was good news not just for his original hearers; it is good news for us today as well. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom at Nazareth can help us unlearn dualistic habits of mind that shackle our reading of the gospel and limit the scope of God’s salvation. But it does more than change our understanding, important as that is.

The message of the kingdom that Jesus brings is good news most fundamentally because we, no less than his original hearers, desperately need the healing and redemption that he came to bring, a redemption that touches all we do. For we are, in multiple ways, caught up in the brokenness of the world, complicit in sin not just at the individual level but also as part and parcel of the fallen social order, which is out of whack with God’s purposes, living in a creation that is groaning for redemption. And we yearn for healing. The good news is that the coming of God’s kingdom impacts the entirety of our lives—our bodies, our work, our families, all our social relationships, even our relationship to the earth itself. The good news of the kingdom is nothing less than the healing (literally, the establishing) of the world (tikkûn 'ôlām), in which we are all invited to participate.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 261–62

Nope, that's not heaven!

Note that “the air” (where believers are to meet Christ) is not “heaven” in contemporary Christian theology. Classical Greek authors often used the term aēr (which Paul uses here [1 Thess 4:17]) to refer to the lower atmosphere (below the moon), characterized as dense and misty, in distinction from the aethēr (the pure upper region of the stars). While we cannot simply attribute this understanding of the air to Paul without further ado, the New Testament sometimes associates the air with the domain of Satan, who is called “the ruler of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2), a phrase essentially synonymous with the Johannine expression “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30). Note also the association of birds (which inhabit the air) with the evil one/Satan/the devil in different versions of the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:4, 19; Mark 4:4, 15; Luke 8:5, 12). If any of these associations is relevant to 1 Thess. 4, Paul may be intending to say that redemption occurs on the devil’s “turf,” and he is powerless to impede it.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 222–23 n. 12

You don't want to hear this

The apocalyptic pattern emphasizes that until Christ returns, salvation is only partial; Christian hope thus involves waiting patiently for the unveiling on the last day. To be faithful in the interim, as we live toward the parousia, Christian discipleship will be cruciform, following the pattern of Christ’s life, and will therefore often be characterized by suffering and sacrifice; this is because of the ethical tension between the promised kingdom of God and the powers of the present age. The cruciform pattern of the Christian life is very hard for contemporary Westerners to hear, since we (and I include myself here) typically want quick fixes, and we somehow think that our (presumed) faithfulness should make us immune to suffering. It turns out, on the contrary, that faithfulness to Christ and our love for others will often require a voluntary taking up of suffering on our part in order to live ethically in this fallen world.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 211

It's being prepared

N. T. Wright nicely illustrates this point [about the city of God being prepared in heaven] with his analogy of a parent telling a child in advance of Christmas that there is “a present kept safe in the cupboard for you.” This does not mean that once Christmas comes, the child has to “go and live in the cupboard in order to enjoy the present there.” Rather, the present will be brought from the cupboard to enrich the life of the child in the day-to-day world.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 220

On the throne!

And Paul, living after the death/resurrection and victory of Jesus, understands this risen and ascended Messiah to be presently reigning as Lord of all; yet Paul anticipates a further stage in redemptive history when the Messiah, having subdued all powers that oppose God (including death, the final enemy), will hand the kingdom over to the Father (1 Cor. 15 :24–26). Then, according Revelation 11:15, the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of God. And God, says Paul, will be all in all (15:28). Then the created order will once again respond in obedience and praise to its maker. In the end, the Bible envisions nothing less than the eschatological transformation of heaven and earth.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 210

There will be no more sea!

For example, the disappearance of the sea in Revelation 21:1 (“and the sea was no more”) is not making the point that no one goes swimming in the new creation. Rather, the sea is a traditional symbol in the ancient Near East for the forces of chaos and evil (thus in Rev. 13:1 one of the beasts comes from the sea). The point is that the forces of evil and chaos will be eradicated. Beyond the traditional background of this image, the book of Revelation previously mentioned the exploitative sea trade of the Roman Empire, which will end when Rome, the great city (called, symbolically, “Babylon”), falls (18:11—18); that is why among those who mourn the passing of the city are “all shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea” (18:17—18). It is therefore good news that in the eschaton the sea (which facilitated the economic expansion of the Roman Empire) will be no more.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 169

Your God is too small!

Sure, that's the title of a (very good) book written by J. B. Phillipps (Epworth Press, 1952), but he's correct. How wide is God's plan for salvation? This wide:

Salvation is here conceived as reconciliation or making peace between those who are at enmity, presumably by removing the source of that enmity, namely, sin. Indeed, [Col 1] verse 20 contains the idea of atonement through the blood of Christ; this is how reconciliation is achieved. But in contrast to much Christian preaching, which emphasizes that the blood of Christ was shed for “me” (and we are told to put our name there), Colossians 1 does not myopically limit the efficacy of Christ’s atonement to the individual or even to humanity. Without denying that the atonement suffices for individual people, the text applies the reconciliation effected by Christ’s shed blood as comprehensively as possible, to “all things, whether on earth or in heaven.”

This wording brings us back to verse 16 (just four verses earlier), which affirms that in Christ “all things in heaven and on earth were created.” When Verse 17 goes on to say that “in him all things hold together,” we are warranted in thinking that the reconciliation spoken of in verse 20 continues and brings to completion Christ’s unifying work as creator, which has been disrupted by sin. The point is that redemption is as wide as creation; it is literally cosmic in scope.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 158–59

<idle musing>
That's pretty big, isn't it? And you are worried about anything? Then your god (lower case "g") is too small!
<idle musing>

Shake, rattle, and burn!

Yet Psalm 104 is clear that while God’s judgment of evil (temporarily) destabilizes the cosmos, this is not God’s normative relationship to the world he loves. Earlier in the psalm we are told that God “waters the mountains” and that “the earth is satisfied from the fruit of [God’s] work” (v. 13). Indeed, at creation YHWH “set the earth on its foundations, / so that it shall never be shaken” (v. 5). The paradox is that God’s initially unshakable world, now distorted by evil, will indeed be shaken when evil is removed, but that is precisely so that creation can once again stand secure.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 126

Judgment with a purpose

Suffice it to say that if we were to investigate every case of theophanic judgment in the Old Testament, we would find not only that the language of extreme destruction typically describes some intrahistorical event, but also that it is always for the ultimate purpose of salvation.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 122

And there was no more sea

John’s vision in Revelation describing an oceanless new heaven and new earth thus anticipates but goes beyond the vision of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God promises in his covenant with Noah that he will never destroy all flesh again by unbounding the reservoir of waters (Gen. 9:11). Moreover, God will one day slay the great writhing dragon of the sea (Isa. 27:1—2). A river flowing from the temple will make the Dead Sea fresh (Ezek. 47:1—12). Yet John’s vision brings this line of thought a step further. At the end of God’s story the sea will not even exist! John’s vision indicates that the danger posed by the untamed waters (and the beasts associated with the waters) in times past and present will no longer even be possible in the the new earth. The perilous sea will not just remain tame but will have been entirely removed. John’s vision of an oceanless new order, then is best read as announcing the utter and absolute removal of all external threats to life for humankind.—Matthew Bates in Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 135 (emphasis original)