Living Forever on This Earth:: A Clarifying Statement

It has recently come to my attention (by more than one person) that my last post ended in a confusing manner. I was surprised to hear this since none of the comments reflected this but I confess, it is worded a bit awkwardly.  I appreciate the feedback . I want feedback on whether or not something makes sense. This will, in the end, make me a better communicator. Which will enable to to more effectively share my faith.

If nothing else is clear about the nature of this world it is that something went terribly wrong.   If you subscribe to the belief that this world was designed by a designer, than you have to wonder what the designer’s original intent was. For the sake of argument, we’ll call the designer God.  We know that life is sprinkled with both pleasure and pain. So the question becomes, did God design this world for pleasure and something happened which introduced pain, or did God design this world for pain and something happened which introduced pleasure? Either way we have a lot of explaining to do. Either we live in a good world gone bad or we live in a bad world gone good.  The naturalist should have a difficult time explaining pleasure in a world in which violence and survival of the fittest is the only natural virtue. The bible says that God created this world and it was good. So God’s intention is to have us live forever on this good planet. That is how He began this endeavor and that is exactly how it will end. God intends for us to live forever on this planet and with our bodies… only without all the yucky stuff.

It is interesting that in Revelation 21 that we don’t see us ascending up to heaven. Instead, what we see is the restored Earth descending down to us (sans yucky stuff) . That means that we remain on this planet. Our eternal home is not some place up in the clouds. It is right here. Same geography, same look and feel, same homey feeling… just without blemish.  Maybe you want to live in France… I’m sure you could do that. It will still be there (just without the yucky stuff like cigarette smoke and hairy armpits). As for me, I’m going to make my home in the Willamette Valley. I like it here and the bad things about it (grass allergies) will be done away with.

So that’s what I mean when I say that I want to live forever  on this Earth. The fact of the matter is we are going to do that. We will be immortal. Immortality is kind of hip right now. I can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody holding a Twilight book.  The cool thing is, immortality is not make believe. It is real.  It’s like Twilight without the blood diet and without all the girls being thrown in to hysterics over Edward (sorry… immortality is real but Edward is fake). Immortality on this Earth is what everyone wants. We have a certain longing for home.  God created us with that longing. It’s a longing for something homey but better than home. It’s a longing for Eden restored.

Hank Hanegraaff wrote a good piece on our cosmic age. The question is often asked, “how old will I be in heaven”? His answer is that our bodies will be at the height of their optimal development. He also often points out that we will have a one to one correspondence with our current bodies- only without the yucky stuff. In other words, we will have the exact same DNA, only it will be at it’s perfection. Maybe you don’t like the way your nose looks… in heaven it won’t have those genetic flaws which make it look so funny. Our DNA will be at its optimal level forever. That is how the disciples recognized Christ’s resurrection body. It looked like him- just without any flaws that he would have inherited from Mary.

So in short- what I long for is what we all long for. We have a certain longing for home. We want immortality but we want it here- not in some far off place up in the sky somewhere.  Faith in Christ is the only thing which can offer Immortality on Earth. Human enterprise cannot promise it despite our best efforts. This is exactly how the story of the Bible ends. We get to come back home with the people we love and we get to do so in our own body. . . just without the funny nose.

The Folly of Human Enterprise

There was a time in our history when the overwhelming evidence pointed to an imminent day in which all would be well on planet Earth. We were at the height of industrialization and it appeared that humanity, by virtue of its own effort, was capable of solving any obstacle that got in its way. Within a short span of 150 years we had made extraordinary advances in technology with inventions such as the cotton gin, the steam engine and electric light. These inventions catapulted a once slow and family centered economy into the fast and furious world of change that we know today. On the medical front, the new field of microbiology produced the first vaccines for cholera, anthrax and the plague produced an unprecedented optimism. Add to this the first blood transfusion and a looming vaccine for tuberculosis, and many started to believe that the maybe we could some day cheat death. On the theological front many had come to believe that the forces of Satan were being defeated and the Kingdom of God would soon be realized on earth. The revivals of Charles Finney,  D.L. Moody and R.A. Torrey were bringing in many new converts to Christianity and the Hymns of Fanny Crosby and Elisha Hoffamn drew many people into deep and personal relationships with God.

The optimism soon led to disillusionment during the first world war as we saw the devastation we could cause by our technological advances. The utilization of the airplane, machine gun and tank allowed us to kill more people with less effort. Killing had become easier than ever before; not just because of our new technology, but also because we no longer had to see the horror of death in the eyes of the one whom we had just killed. We now possessed the temptation of faceless killing. The second world war brought even more horrors as we saw the extent to which mankind would go in order to rid the world of an entire race. By the time pictures of Auschwitz and Hiroshima began to appear  most people had already abandoned their optimism for a more realistic view of human nature. To many, it appeared that Nietzche’s prophetic utterance that “God is dead”  (penned during the optimistic days of  flourishing science and religion) may have been truer than they had initially wanted to believe. The question was no longer “Is there a God”, but rather, “where is God after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Chernobyl and 9/11″.

Today we are once again in an age of scientific discovery and general optimism. From time to time we may hear of a modern day horror but we soon get back to our optimism because we are told that we must be a resilient people.  We haven’t the time nor the desire to stop and reflect upon the suffering around us. With new breakthroughs in cellular and molecular biology just around the corner, we are once again on the verge of prolonging life and improving its quality. We no longer concern ourselves with finding God.

But all is not well. Life is (by and large) like a large masquerade ball in which nobody wishes to look upon another person’s humanness. Furthermore, we live in fear that we ourselves may be unmasked and perhaps someone might catch a glimpse of who we really are.  We live in constant fear of our soul being found naked. We fulfill our need for community through social networking sights such as myspace, facebook or twitter. The irony in this is that social networking sights use narcissism as a binding agent for community. This has completely redefined relationship. Being online is by its very nature a solitary activity-an online community is  communal solitude (We are all alone together). When we have an entire society living in a virtual world with virtual relationships we have nothing more than virtual meaning.

To escape the madness of virtual existence, we take up arms with a political cause.  Sadly, this too is often nothing more than masked fulfillment of our own depraved sensuality. We politicise the suffering around us in a pretentious attempt to protect our reproductive rights. We no longer care about the sufferer-  they are merely a means to our political agenda. The terminally ill person is viewed as an opportunity to promote embryonic stem cell therapy and the suffering of an aborted baby is viewed as a small price to pay in order to maintain our own erotic standards of living. Like David Carradine, we are willing to entice Satan himself in order to fulfill our own autoerotic fantasies.  In the end we join Protagorus in declaring ourselves to be the measure of all things.  We are, in a word, hopeless.

The folly of human enterprise is that despite the hundreds of years which have passed since the industrial revolution, we are no closer to immortality than when we first began this endeavor. Suppose one day we discover a cure for cancer, we end all wars and there is no poverty. Then what? We die. Yes . . .despite all of our best efforts, in the end we are still dead. All we have managed to do thus far is prolong our suffering. If I am going to spend my time on Earth in an extraordinary effort toward anything- I am going to make sure that it doesn’t end in folly. The only thing worth my own endeavor is an endeavor which ends in immortality. Call me selfish, but I want to live forever and I want to live forever on Earth. Not only do I want to live forever on Earth, but I want everyone that I know and love to live with me forever on Earth. Anything short of this. . . is folly.

The Hope of Glory

And the LORD said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock.  So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by.

I feel compelled to confess to you that I don’t completely comprehend this passage in Exodus 33.  At first glance it seems like an act of divine grace in which God preserves Moses’s life.  God prefaces this statement  by telling Moses that no man can see His face and live.  Moses, in response,  insists on seeing God’s glory. Then something spectacular occurs. God condescends Himself to man and agrees to Moses’s demands. . . but there is a caveat. Moses cannot see God’s face, for if he does he will die. Then, in an intimate act of divine protection, God shields Moses from His full glory so that he will not die.

A few months ago, I wrote this post in which I alluded to a song which references this encounter between Moses and God. The song, like the passage in Exodus, alludes to God’s protection of Moses from His glory, and speaks longingly for  God’s divine presence. I don’t recall the exact lyrics, but it goes something like “I want to hide where the blazing fire cannot burn me . . . in the cleft of the rock… in your presence O God”.  I’m certain that I did not remember the lyrics exactly as they were penned by the author, but you get the general idea.

Now to clarify, I am not claiming that the author of this song has taken the passage out of context. In fact, I’m quite certain that she hasn’t. What I am saying is that I simply don’t get it.  It isn’t that I don’t understand why one would want to be spared of his life either. I get that. What I don’t understand (and there isn’t an easy way to say this so please bear with me) is this: what is so bad about the alternative?

  Yes… God’s blazing fire consumes and destroys – it even brings pain. However,  what is the object and purpose of God’s consuming fire? Is it something to be feared and shunned or something to be embraced? For answers to this question, I will turn to a familiar passage in Malachi 3:

But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness

 Consider also the following passage from Zechariah:

I will bring the one-third through the fire, Will refine them as silver is refined and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name and I will answer them. I will say, ‘This is My people’; and each one will say, ‘The LORD is my God.

 Again from I Peter 1:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love.”   

You see, the consuming fire of God is intended to purify us. It is for our benefit. Jesus likens it to a grape vine in John 15.  When we have a branch which does not bear fruit, the Father takes it away (a painful process). However, even when we are bearing fruit, the Father prunes the fruit bearing branch so that it can bear more fruit (also a painful process). To resist this pruning is to resist the blessing which God has in store for us.

If I were to stand face to face with God this evening as Moses attempted, what would be the result? Instant death for sure… but what else? I dare say that it will not only bring instant death, but through death it will being eternal life!  It would bring instantaneous purity, righteousness and holiness! God’s consuming fire is certainly something to be feared if you are without Christ. However, for those of us who are being transformed, it is something to behold! We long  for the day in which our corruptible nature will be stripped away and we are raised incorruptible! Our hope is in that day in which our body of sin might be destroyed (Romans 6) and we are raised with Christ. Oh to be unshielded from the Glory of God and purified, once and for all from our bodies of sin! 

The truth is, this is more than a distant reality- it is a reality which is here and which is now.  St. Paul tells us in Colossians that God has made known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery- and guess what? It is not far off! It is Christ in you that is the hope of Glory! Oh to be purified by the Spirit of the Living God… to cast off the sin which so easily entangles us! Let us look to Jesus who authored our faith and who will perfect it. Let us not turn our souls to another! We have something far greater than Moses… we have the very person of God dwelling within us and purifying us from within.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus! – Come Holy Spirit!

Lava quod est sordidum- Wash that which is unclean…
riga quod est aridum- Water that which is dry…
sana quod est saucium- Heal that which is wounded…
Flecte quod est rigidum- Bend that which is inflexible…
fove quod est frigidum- warm that which is chilled…
rege quod est devium- make right that which is wrong…

Veni, Sancte Spiritus…

Veni Domine Iesu . . . Veni!

Young Kierkegaard Meets the Crucified Christ

In his book Training in Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard tells a story of a father introducing the person of Christ to his son. In the story, the father places a picture of the crucified Christ in the middle of a pile of pictures depicting childhood heroes. After flipping through the pictures of heroes such as Napoleon and William Tell, they fall upon the picture of the bloodied Christ. Although told from a third person perspective, it is generally accepted that the Father is Kierkegaard’s own father and the young boy is Kierkegaard. The following is Kierkegaard’s retelling of the event:

The child will not at once nor quite directly understand this picture, and will ask what it means, why he hangs like that on a tree. So you explain to the child that this is a cross, and that to hang on it means to be crucified, and that in that land, crucifixion was not only the most painful death penalty but was also an ignominious mode of execution employed only for the grossest malefactors. What impression will that make upon the child? The child will be in a strange state of mind, he will surely wonder that it could occur to you to put such an ugly picture among all the other lovely ones, the picture of a gross malefactor among all these heroes and glorious figures.

And then the child will ask: “Who is he? What did he do?”

Then tell the child that this crucified man is the Savior of the world.  Yet to this he will not be able to attach any clear conceptions; so tell him merely that this crucified man was the most loving person that ever lived.

And what will the impression of this story be upon the child? First and foremost surely this, that he has entirely forgotten the other pictures you have showed him; for now he has got something entirely different to think about. And now the child will be in deepest amazement at the fact that God did nothing to prevent this from being done; or that this was done without God raining down fire from heaven (if not earlier, at least at the last minute) to prevent His death. . . . That was the first impression. But by degrees, the more the child reflected upon the story, the more his passion would be aroused, he would be able to think of nothing but weapons and war—for the child would have decided that when he grew up he would slay all these ungodly men who had dealt thus with the loving One; that was his resolve, forgetting that it was 1,800 years ago that they lived.

 Then when the child became a youth he would not have forgotten the impression of childhood, but he would now understand it differently, he would know that it was not possible to carry out what the child ¬—overlooking the 1,800 years—had resolved to do; but nevertheless he would think with the same passion of combating the world in which they crucify love and beg acquittal for the robber.

 Then when he become older and mature he would not have forgotten the impression of childhood, but he would understand it differently. He would no longer wish to smite; for, said he, “I should attain to no likeness with Him the humble One, who did not smite even when He Himself was smitten.” No, he wished now only one thing, to suffer in some measure as He suffered in this world.

The Tragedy of the Empty Cross

The tragedy of the empty cross is that we quickly forget the magnitude of our sin and the price which was paid upon it. Our modern (protestant) churches are adorned with Jesusless crosses which come in all types of styles from discreet wooden inlays to crosses with radiant backlighting depicting, I presume, the resurrection.  You can purchase them with just about every accessory imaginable:  purple robes, crowns of thorns, stained glass… and yes, even Christmas lights complete with synchronized light shows and fiber optic highlights.  Everything that is, except for Jesus.

Before I go any further, you should know that I do not think it is wrong for a church to use an empty cross. The empty cross is a symbol of the resurrected Jesus (albeit not as adequate a symbol as an empty tomb) and that is something which Protestantism has rightfully emphasized.  However, we miss something important when we take Christ off the cross. We miss the horror and the bloodiness of crucifixion.  We miss that constant reminder that our sin is serious business and that Christ bore an awful price to liberate us from it. In the end we lose a deep sense of disgust and proper perspective of our sin.  The Lamb of God becomes a cute fuzzy farm animal rather than a bloody substitution for our sin.

The Catholic Church has long used the crucifix as their symbol of choice when depicting the cross. The crucifix is simply a cross with the body of Christ (or Corpus) hanging from it. Contrary to what many Protestant Christians may have been taught, the Catholic Church does believe that Christ has been raised from the dead. They choose to use the crucifix because it is a reminder of the cost of our sin, and it draws them into the mystery of suffering.  The mystery of suffering is that when our suffering is united with Christ’s, we find redemption.  This is a profound mystery to which Protestant Christians rarely give proper consideration.

Now, at this point I feel that I must interject another disclaimer. For the record . . . I am not converting to Catholicism. I believe that the Protestant church has rightly divided the word of truth when it comes to the essential doctrines of the faith. However, I do believe that we have a lot to learn from our Catholic brothers and sisters and that there are some things which they just have more right than we do.  Like it or not, the Catholic Church does a better job at emphasizing the cost of discipleship. You would be hard pressed to find a Catholic church which teaches the tenants of cheap grace; conversely, you don’t have to look very far before you find massive movements within the Protestant church which promote easy believism and  Free Grace Theology.

In the end, I believe that protestant churches should retain a symbol of the resurrected Christ, but I am not convinced that the empty cross is the best way to do that. Modern protestant churches have shied away from preaching “Christ crucified” as Paul proclaimed in his letter to the Corinthian church.  The crucified God has been replaced with a God who does not demand a high price for sin. The cross is no longer a symbol of shame (as it rightfully should be) but has become a symbol of our shamelessness. 

 Sin is no longer preached from the pulpit as it once was; and the result is that nobody wants to be purified.  We are content to merely bear the name of Christ all the while continuing to live as slaves to the very sin from which He liberated us. We desperately need a symbol to remind us of the cost of our sin; and that symbol very well may be the bloody and beaten corpus which we find on the crucifix. More than ever before, we have forgotten the price that was paid for our sin, and as a result have become just like the world around us. Revival is impossible in this environment. We must first admit that we are pitiful sinners and only then can we do the unthinkable and cling to the bloody cross of Christ.

I don’t want to end this post on that note because it sounds rather hopeless. The truth is, God is moving in the hearts of His people at this very moment. He has reserved a remnant for Himself and out of them he is raising a vast army of committed people who have counted the cost and who have decided to engage in the battle.  I know this because I see this vast army all around me. I see them every Sunday night at our prayer service and I see them being mobilized by the great generals who teach us every Sunday morning.  It is they who are able to see Christ crucified even on the empty crosses; but how much more would that cross mean to us if just once, we were able to gaze upon the cross and see the horror that it truly is.

The Latest Addition to Our Family . . .

Yes, you read that right! Visit Jami’s Page to see pictures of the newest member of our family.