Anthony Hoekema on total cosmic renewal

First of all, Patty Griffin’s new album Downtown Church is great and you should go buy it right now. Second of all, in doing some reading for my Eschatology class, I came across this excellent quote from my good friend Anthony Hoekema (He’s not really my good friend, but if he were still alive and teaching at Calvin Seminary, I’d say we’d probably be buds) in The Bible and the Future.

While redemption from sin is certainly about Jesus dying on the cross in our place for our sins, many of my fellow evangelicals leave it at just that, forgetting the essential eschatalogical hope of the redemption of the entire cosmos.

“Fully to understand the meaning of history, therefore, we must see God’s redemption in cosmic dimensions. Since the expression ‘heaven and earth’ is a biblical description of the entire cosmos, we may say that the goal of redemption is nothing less than the renewal of the entire cosmos, of what present-day scientists call the universe. Since man’s fall into sin affected not only himself but the rest of creation (see Genesis 3:17-18; Rom. 8:19-23), redemption from sin must also involve the totality of God’s creation.”

Which Jesus do you worship?

Today I started reading Your Jesus Is Too Safe by Jared C. Wilson, pastor and blogger at The Gospel-Driven Church. I’ve been looking forward to starting it for a while now and I would highly recommend it (even by just reading the introduction!).

We live in in a culture that has many different pseudo-Jesuses (macho-Jesus, buddy-Jesus, therapist-Jesus, flowing-product-in-hair-Jesus, etc.). Unfortunately, these are just as present within the church as without. So, with the hope that you’ll see who Jesus really is, which Jesus do you worship?

“The great irony is that, despite being the most discussed and confessed figure in all of history, no historical figure has been more marginalized and commoditized than Jesus. For many today he is a generic brand, a log0, a catchphrase, a pick-me-up. He’s been fictionalized by The Last Temptation of Christ, and humanized by The Passion of the Christ, and satirized by South Park. He’s been romanticized by countless admirers, and sanitized by the Christian consumer culture.

Yes, even the church itself is guilty when it comes to the marketing of Jesus. We’ve put our own gloss on him, our own spin. It’s no wonder the world doesn’t get Jesus, because we’ve spent decades selling a Jesus cast in our own image. Even our religious ancestors feared the stern taskmaster Jesus. This quasi-Puritan Jesus liked to smack you on the knuckles with a ruler when you got out of line. Later, we received Postcard Jesus–the Coppertoned, blond-haired, blank-stare Jesus of the gold-framed portrait, a bland, two-dimensional figure occupying moral tales that help us to be better people. This flat portrait evolved into the Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, and this Jesus has inspired millions to say a prayer to get his forgiveness–and then go on living lives devoid of his presence….

…You’d think if anyone’s got a handle on Jesus, it would be the Christian church. But we’ve settled for the glossy portrait. We’ve used him and abused him, made him into types and stereotypes, taken his message out of context and made it about being a better person or being cool or helping us to help ourselves. Consequently, what we have today–in a world where Jesus is most cited, most recognized, and most admired–is a generation of people who don’t know the Gospels very well–which means we don’t know Jesus very well.”

Jared is a guy worth listening to. He was even nice enough to give me a copy of his book through a contest on Twitter. Check him out, but more importantly, check Jesus out. The real one. The one who is King.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis on “gospel intentionality”

Yesterday, my chapel coworkers and I had a great conversation about how important it is for the church to be both a gathered and sent people. There is no church where there is not a people gathered around the proclamation of the Word and the administering of the sacraments (Acts 2:41-42, 1 Cor. 11:17-34, Titus 1:9, etc.). However, the church is also a sent people. We live as citizens of the Kingdom that was inaugurated in and through the person and work of Jesus and will eventually be consummated at his second coming. We are on mission with Jesus, preaching the gospel, making disciples of the nations, and demonstrating the mercy and grace we have been shown in Jesus (Matthew 28:18-20, John 15:12, Galatians 5:13-15, etc.). This calls for living with gospel intentionality. In their excellent book Total Church, Tim Chester and Steve Timmis give us some words of wisdom as to how this might play out.

“Western culture has become very compartmentalized. We divide our lives into work time, leisure time, family time, church time, and mission or outreach time. We want to spend more time in evangelism, but because this can happen only at the expense of something else, it never happens. Rethinking evangelism as relationships rather than events radically changes this. Evangelism is not an activity to be squeezed into our busy schedules. It becomes an intention we carry with us throughout our day. The same is true of church. If church and mission are redefined in relational terms, then work, leisure, and family time can all be viewed as gospel activities. Ordinary life becomes pastoral and missional if we have gospel intentionality.”