Surprised by Hope

Very deep book about the resurrection of Jesus and the power of it – that God brought heaven and earth together at that moment, and the power continues to radiate through us who believe. The idea that we are not Christians so that when we die, we get to “go to heaven,” but that we are Christians so that we can bring the love of God to those around us and thereby bring the kingdom of God to earth right now. There will be a renewal of the earth at the last day, but everything we do in the name of Jesus, now, has a place in building for the kingdom. Richard Stearns quoted from this book in The Hole In Our Gospel, and what he quoted captures the core message of this book: 

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are–strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself–accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world — all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

In Chapter 8, When He Appears, he offers a summary of the truth of the resurrection:

God will redeem the whole universe; Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of that new life, the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world. That final redemption will be the moment when heaven and earth are joined together at last, in a burst of God’s creative energy for which Easter is the prototype and source.

In this same chapter, he touches on the rapture and explains it this way:

When Paul speaks of “meeting” the Lord “in the air,” the point is precisely not–as in popular rapture theology–that the saved believers would then stay up in the air somewhere, away from earth. The point is that, having gone out to meet their returning Lord, they will escort him royally into his domain, that is, back to the place they have come from.

In Chapter 9, Jesus, the Coming Judge, he says:

We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands.

In Chapter 10, The Redemption of Our Bodies, he talks about what happens immediately after we die using the verses, In my Father’s house are many rooms (John 14:2) and, Today you will be with me in Paradise (Luke 23:43):

What does Jesus mean when he declares that there are “many dwelling places” in his father’s house? … But the word for “dwelling places” here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.

This fits closely with Jesus’s words to the dying brigand in Luke: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”…Luke must have understood him to be referring to a state of being-in-paradise, which would be true, for him and for the man dying beside him, at once, that very day–in other words, prior to the resurrection….For those who die in faith, before that final reawakening, the central promise is of being “with Jesus” at once….Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant…It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.

He has a very long chapter (11) called Purgatory, Paradise, Hell, and in it he discusses his ideas about Hell:

…When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God…My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God’s good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but also beyond pity….I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped….I should be glad to be proved wrong but not at the cost of the foundational claims that this world is the good creation of the one true God and that he will at the end bring about that judgment at which the whole creation will rejoice.

In Chapter 12, Rethinking Salvation, he talks about building for the kingdom:

What you do in the present–by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself–will last into God’s future.

And:

This, as we have seen, is what the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit are all about. They are designed not to take us away from this earth but rather to make us agents of the transformation of this earth, anticipating the day when, as we are promised, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

In Chapter 13, Building for the Kingdom, he discusses what that does and doesn’t mean:

Let’s be quite clear on two points. First, God builds God’s kingdom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image.

And then you have the quote above, “Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness…every act of care and nurture…every prayer…all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.”

Keep on working for God’s kingdom here on earth. No effort is wasted. God uses it all. That’s our purpose, our mission, our life’s aim. To do nothing for God in this world is to deny Him and to let the devil rule instead, along with decay, corruption, death. So, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Amen and Amen – Come, Lord Jesus, Come.