Ember Monday

Christ the Lord is risen today! That was our celebration last night at Ember, even though we didn't sing that song. Garth and Kelly pulled together a great team of musicians and singers from our congregation to lead us in praising Jesus. I think it was our biggest music team yet!

I preached a message on Mark 16:1-8, which concluded our series on the Gospel of Mark. It was our longest series yet--15 weeks in all. I preached all but one of the weeks, when Cory led us through a Passover meal (which was awesome!). You can listen to the audio of that presentation here.

The part of the service that I was most excited about, of course, was the baptisms. We baptized three folks last night--Mary, Ian, and Dustin. I've already written about the holy privilege of getting to hear their stories, which made it so much more meaningful to baptize them last night.

Special thanks to Lauren Kreischer for taking photos. It was a great night and a great service. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who made it happen. The resurrection of Jesus is the reason that we all gather together in the first place.

Why Would God Allow...

It seems like all the most difficult questions of faith fall along the same general line: How can a good God allow evil to exist? Why would God allow natural disasters? Why did God let so-and-so die? Underlying these questions is another one: Is God really all-powerful? Is he truly in control? If he's not, then we desperately need to rethink our conception of God. But if he is, then how can he possibly be good?

These are difficult questions. The deists thought they had found an answer when they created a God who was omnipotent but disinterested. But when God becomes disinterested and distant, everything else--Creation, sin, the Incarnation, the cross, resurrection--falls apart. You may as well be agnostic.

Part of the difficulty of these questions is the way we understand the term "allow". Or, to put it in more theological terms, what we mean when we say "God is sovereign", or "God is omnipotent". We assume that, because God is sovereign and omnipotent, then he must give his approval to everything that happens in the world. On any given day a certain number of proposals cross his desk, and he rubber stamps some APPROVED and others DENIED. Those proposals which are approved, like Hurricane Katrina or the Haitian Earthquake, actually occur, and those which are denied do not.

I hope that seems silly to you, because it is utterly ridiculous to me. God doesn't have a desk or a rubber stamp. He is not the bouncer standing at the gates of the earth. He is the King, and his kingdom is in rebellion against him. God created an ordered paradise (Eden) and gave a tremendous measure of power to human beings, who then used that power to turn on God, which resulted in the loss of order and paradise. More accurately, our sin resulted in the loss of God's direct sovereignty over Creation, because if he were to exercise his power in all its fullness, there would be no more Creation. Now, in order to spare our existence, God exercises his power in humility.

Evil, sin, natural disaster, and death are not exceptional. These are normative for a world in rebellion against its Creator. They are not punishments, they are simply the natural course of events that follow from the overthrow of God's direct sovereignty over Creation. None of these exist within paradise. But outside, east of Eden, they are inevitable.

The real "allow" question, the one that doesn't make sense, is why would God allow his son to leave the throne room of the castle and come, unarmed and vulnerable, into the rebellious kingdom. Why would God allow his son to live east of Eden, where evil, sin, disaster and death are the norm? It can only be because he loves the rebels so much that he wants to save them from the foolishness of their own rebellion.

Knowing he couldn't directly coax or command them out of it, he sent his son to be just like one of them and to die at their hands. And then the King did the most amazing thing ever--he raised his son from the dead! And by raising him from the dead, the King said to the rebels, "I forgive you for all of your rebellions and your sins. See, here is my son, whom you killed, but whom I have raised back to life! Look to him and have hope that evil, sin, disaster and death don't have the final say, but that the last word belongs to me. Behold, everything is being made new!" The one act of evil that God did allow in this world--the death of his son--is the one act by which he is remaking the world and is restoring all things to a new and glorious paradise.

Straight Line Down

Last Thursday I took a look at one of the "Rapture" passages, Matthew 24:36-41. Today I'd like to go back to a passage I've already discussed on this blog, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Here's the text:

13Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. 14We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18Therefore encourage each other with these words.

Those who hold to Rapture Eschatology see here undeniable evidence that the Rapture will happen. What else could “we…will be caught up…in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” possibly mean? For many, this is the clearest teaching of the Rapture we have in the Bible.

But there are three questions that stand out. First, what is this passage really about? Second, what is the physical path that Jesus will take when he returns? Third, where exactly will we be with the Lord forever? Let’s examine each of these questions in turn.

To answer the first question, we must look back at verse 13, where Paul tells us why he is writing everything he writes in this paragraph. “We do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep.” The Thessalonian Christians became alarmed when their brothers and sisters began to pass away. Jesus had, after all, promised them eternal life. Paul’s solution to this conundrum was to look at Jesus and see that, just as he had died and risen again, so we will die and rise again. The resurrection of our bodies is our hope through death. This passage is first and foremost about what happens to dead Christians when Jesus returns and why those who are alive can have hope for them. This passage is about resurrection.

To answer the second question we have to look more closely at verse 16. “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven….” Paul’s picture of Creation was vastly different from our own because he lived before the time of Galileo, Newton, space flight, and the Hubble telescope. He understood heaven to rest directly above the earth, so when he says Jesus comes down from heaven that means the only place for him to go is the earth. There is no mention of Jesus taking any other path. He moves in a straight line down from heaven to earth. There is no indication from the text that he stops halfway, calls all true believers to himself, then turns around and goes back into heaven.

The answer to the third question begins with an examination of verse 17. “We who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with [the resurrected Christians] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” The question of where we spend eternity with Jesus has, according to this verse, two options. We either meet Jesus as he is coming down to earth and escort him down, or we meet him halfway and stay there. Again, nothing about this text says that he turns around and goes back up to heaven. We either meet him as he is coming or we meet him halfway—meaning we either spend eternity on earth or in the air. The one place that is not an option, according to this passage, is heaven.

Our understanding of this passage is colored by our misunderstanding of eternity. Only if we bring an American folk-lore picture of eternity and heaven to this passage can we interpret a Rapture here. The key to reading this passage aright is fixing our picture of heaven. If Revelation 21 and 22 are the definitive biblical teaching on eternity, then we will not be in heaven or in the air. We will be here, on the recreated and renewed earth, living with the Trinity in the New Jerusalem. (And if you want to go really deep, look at how John talks about the New Jerusalem and how other NT authors talk about the Church. This will blow your mind.) When we trade in our pseudo-Christian, American folk-lore picture of eternity for a biblical one, then this passage in 1 Thessalonians 4 will come into clear view.

There is so much more that could be said about this passage, but for now we can know, 1) this text is primarily about resurrection, 2) Jesus travels in a straight line down from heaven to earth when he returns, and 3) we spend eternity with the Trinity here on the new earth. Finding the Rapture here is a bit like finding an F# in a rainbow. There is no Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.