May 1995
Dear Co-laborer,
As you read this, we are in the middle of spring, and some
schools are already out for the summer months.
You are no doubt thinking about how you will invest your summer.
I hope it will be a delightful time for you and yours.
For Leette and me, this is the time when the schedule
lessens, affording opportunity to stay closer to home and do serious studying.
I will do preparatory work on this series on eschatology for the next
year, some work in II Corinthians, and message preparation.
I am looking forward to it!
Eschatology, Part 11
It may be profitable to review before going on.
Hope is a characteristic unique to man.
Only man plans for the future, seeking to immortalize himself through his
creative skills. As Solomon notes, only man has eternity in his heart.
Hope has at least two characteristics, it is future and it defines what
we consider to be important.
People have short, middle, and long range hopes.
Eschatology is the study of what God says we can expect in the future,
especially during the time of Christ's return.
Eschatology, therefore, defines what God says is a legitimate hope.
Eschatology defines hope, an essential component in the Christian life.
So we see that eschatology is an extremely important subject.
The church, however, has had a problem agreeing on a
biblical eschatology. This has
caused great confusion among the people of God.
This series seeks to identify the reasons for this disagreement and lay
the foundation for arriving at a genuinely biblical hope.
In this issue I make two applications:
The influence of culture and the importance of chaos.
INFLUENCE OF CULTURE
Culture plays a far more significant role in shaping our
thinking than we care to admit. The
Patristics were children of their age, influenced by their cultural melieu.
None of us realize the extent, nor do we understand the areas in which it
impacts us. If we did, we would
monitor culture's influence and prevent it from having any adverse impact.
Much of what culture teaches is benign and therefore
non-essential. Missionaries tell
us, when we visit them overseas, "The way they do things is not wrong, just
different." Often the
frustrations we experience when entering a culture different from our own are
the product of our not understanding the "rules" by which they live.
We call this culture shock.
Much of what culture teaches, however, is unbiblical,
ungodly, and therefore destructive. All
of us are disturbed by the profound negative shift our culture in the United
States has taken. This motivates
many conscientious Christians to become involved in seeking to correct the ills
of society.
In those areas that are benign we seek to adapt to culture,
following the model of the Apostle Paul: "To
the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews; to those under the law I
became as one under the law--though not being myself under the law--that I might
win those under the law. To those
outside the law I became as one outside the law--not being without law toward
God but under the law of Christ--that I might win those outside the law. To the
weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all
men, that I might by all means save some."
In essence, Paul says that he will do anything short of sin to influence
people for Christ.
In those areas that are destructive to both ourselves and
our relationship with God, Paul tells us we must resist and become
non-conforming: "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the
renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good
and acceptable and perfect."
This statement forms the heart of Biblical application.
Instead of running the Bible through our cultural grid and conforming to
the world, we are to run our culture through the Biblical grid and be
transformed "by the renewing of our minds."
This mixture of "good and bad" in culture makes
it difficult to respond properly to the pressure of the world.
What is unbiblical vis a vis being "all things to all men?"
Looking in hindsight, we can see with relative ease the mistakes the
Church made in conforming to culture.
It is more difficult to see ourselves making the same kinds of mistakes
as we sort through our own cultural melieu.
The Patristics afford us a frightening example.
Jesus was a Jew, as were the apostles.
The Old Testament Scriptures clearly teach a future for Israel.
The persecution and rejection the Patristics received at the hands of
Judaism caused them to run the Bible through their cultural lens and conclude
that God had abandoned the Jews. Whatever
else you read in the New Testament, you will not find Jesus' disciples arguing
for the permanent rejection of the Jews.
Let me suggest a two-fold application:
First, we must be ever vigilant regarding the pervasive influence of
culture. Although much of culture
is innocent, we do well to hold all of it suspect.
Each time you expose yourself to the Word of God, prayerfully covenant to
challenge everything life teaches in light of Scripture.
Recognize that the natural tendency is to do the opposite, to interpret
the Bible in light of culture.
Second, take heart with the assurance that God listens to
our prayers with a stethoscope. We
only get into trouble with God when we are willful.
A lot of things can hurt us temporally, such as ignorance, but only being
willful with God can hurt us eternally. No
where in the Bible, that I am aware of, does God say that He delights in
theological purity. "The
sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O
God, thou wilt not despise."
IMPORTANCE OF CHAOS
Many of us have talked about this before; God purposely
creates chaos to keep people dependent upon Him. I believe God purposely kept the Patristics from seeing
clearly the theological issues and the profound impact they would make in
shaping their world view.
We are given a remarkable insight into this aspect of God's
character in the Tower of Babel. When
the "whole earth was of one language and of one speech," the people
decided to demonstrate their prowess by creating a tower to heaven.
"And the LORD came down to see the
city and the tower, which the sons of men had built.
And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all
one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing
that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech."
Astonishingly, God says if "They" do not stop
them "nothing that they propose to do will be impossible."
Man is never more prone to independence and rebellion than when things
are going the way he wants. Man's
quest for autonomy can either be left unchecked, in which case he goes to hell,
or God intercedes in a way that forces him to understand his need of Him.
Because of His grace, He does the latter.
Through the years I have tried to be a student of myself.
If correct, I am a perfectionist living in an imperfect world.
This has caused me no small amount of consternation.
I hate dirt, disorder, and dysfunctional things.
So I spend a great deal of time and energy cleaning, organizing, and
fixing. God creates an entropic
system, dirtying, disorganizing, and breaking.
I become frustrated until I remember that His love and grace created the
chaos.
I often feel like Charlie Brown when he faces Lucy with the
football. I am tempted to
conclude that God pulls away the football each time I seek to kick it.
In one sense this is a correct perception of God.
He never does it maliciously, but He does frustrate my efforts to keep me
humble. In the Old Testament God frequently brought chaos into the
lives of His people to keep them looking to Him.
So too in theology. God
will never allow anyone to understand anything perfectly.
We all "see through a glass darkly."
God wants it no other way. Each
generation of the Church thinks that it understands more fully the heart and
mind of God than the generations before, only to have succeeding generations
discover gapping holes in their thought processes.
God is not as committed to theological precision as is His people!
This does not mean that we should "make a shrine of
our ignorance." Accurate
theology does influence how we live. This
is the purpose of our study in eschatology; your view of the future plays a
profound role in how you live your life. In
part, God will judge His people on their diligence in studying and applying His
Word.
I recognize that I am far more disturbed with the tangent
the Patristics took than God. At
least that is what I am lead to believe in studying the Bible.
God will accomplish His work. Our
accuracy/inaccuracy, faithfulness/sloth, etc., will not influence it.
He said He will build His Church
and He is right on schedule, with or without our theological precision.
We have the privilege of participating with Him in His work, but we
cannot alter it. God's work unfolds
in history.
The Patristics are a good example of God's superintending
history. Although they
embraced a faulty hermeneutic, causing the church to misunderstand God's future
for Israel, they were mightily used by God in preserving Orthodoxy in its
doctrinal formulations.
Let me suggest a couple of applications:
First, we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.
"Our God is in the Heavens and He
hath done whatsoever He had pleased."
Theology is serious business, but not that serious.
When judged by God, I would rather be wrong with a pure motive than right
with an impure one. With God,
ignorance is an excuse.
Second, do not allow the sovereign control of God to lull
you into thinking that your actions have no consequences.
Granted, you cannot destroy another person's life, but you can negatively
influence the quality of your eternity with God.
Every action, thought, and intent has consequences, if not in this life,
then for sure in the life to come.
CONSEQUENCES TO YOUR
ESCHATOLOGY
There must be pragmatic reasons for embracing any doctrine.
Lacking practical application, a doctrine will be either neglected or
compromised. Your eschatological
convictions will influence: 1)- Your understanding of the grace of God in that
His promises to Israel are inviolable and not dependent upon reciprocity.
2) - Your view of the church (ecclesiology) as we have seen with the
Patristics embracing an OT view, seeing themselves as the New Israel.
3) - Your view of the mission of the church as seen by the fact that when
the Church ceased being a persecuted minority and became a triumphant majority,
it saw itself as a counterpart to the theocracy of Israel with a temporal rather
than eternal view of ministry. 4) -
Your view of whose job is the ministry as seen by the early church gradually
embracing an Old Testament mind-set with priests, an altar, and a clergy-laity
distinction. 5) - Whether you are
confused regarding the role of the Mosaic Law in the life of the Church. Although this was not so much a problem among the Patristics
in that they, by and large, did not see themselves as under the Law, it became a
problem among the amillennialists as they refined what being the New Israel
looked like. 6) - Your hermeneutic
and whether you allow for a less than literal interpretation of Scripture, which
in turn leads to heresy.
The connection between these six issues and eschatology may
not be immediately apparent, with the exception of interpretation which we have
discussed earlier in this series. I
hope, during our remaining sessions, to make the other five applications
obvious.
Yours for a life of obedience,