Hebrew sightings of the church

N.T. Wright has helped many of us refocus our theological thinking, via encouraging us to look back – in particular past Plato’s greatest triumph – the Enlightenment – to the primal Hebrew atmosphere that Jesus, Paul and others of that time breathed. His Christological perspective, joined with a new creation theology and linked intimately to Jesus of Nazareth has helped us open up so much more of the narratives, and the teachings derived from them, found in Scripture.

In teaching on Romans N.T. Wright answered a question concerning why such perspectives had been hidden for so long and why aspects of Paul’s teaching were so hard to understand. His answer spoke of the difficulty the post-enlightenment/modern individual has in understanding Hebrew narratives with a mind born and bred in a world where rationalism still, for the most part, rules. He then reminded us that to many of the people of Paul’s time, narrative – graphical, relational and fluid – was their way of engaging truth, and thus, even though aspects of what Paul taught were ‘hard to understand’, it was not beyond the reach of the everyday individual to grasp. Thirdly and finally, he said that like any great literature, the writings of Paul, as with the sayings of Jesus, contained both a simplicity and an immense depth in their words: this to say that at one level it can be understood by the many, but also it invites people into a ongoing journey, both in regards the narrative and their own life, one that keeps on revealing more of the deep speaking to the deep in those written words.

It is the final part of this three-tiered answer that I want to emphasise. Endeavouring to not fall foul of the law of non-contradiction, I believe that we can progress, with Christological, Creation and Hebrew sight, further into the narratives of Scripture and discover much more than a systematic theology leavened by biblical rationalism has been able to deliver. To do so, it might be best that we do a drama workshop, where we imagine that we are one of the minor or, if we so choose, major prophets – making pots and then destroying them, lying on one side to prophesy till doom, floating axe heads… not to mention Hosea …

Of course, no one can pretend to be back there thinking the same as the Hebrew, but this does not mean we cannot pick up numerous clues that can help us think more of their thoughts after them. We do this in relation to the infinite God, so with Hebrew ‘man’ it should not be impossible! It is as we begin to more consciously critique our Western Enlightenment/ Modern mindset that we can, I believe, begin to clear out much of the fog of history. Here at least we might begin to compensate for the weaknesses of intellect we have inherited by virtue of Plato’s attempt to wrest power back from the democrats of Athens.

Jesus of Nazareth – a Hebrew man existing in a Hebrew world, in a nation whose sight and thought was profoundly and strategically shaped by a thousand years and more of relating to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - Jesus Christ, the Son of that same God, now made man. Where is he now? To my mind the greatest gift that the Hebrew vision gives is the sight of Jesus Christ now standing through the present created order in, through, and over his body the church.

It is this sight, this ecclesiology, that I want to go after in this paper; looking at the ramifications of the Hebrew vision of Jesus Christ in regards our way of seeing, doing and being ‘church’. To do this we need to explore two things in particular – one is the creation and the other is Plato. In the lectures on Romans, N.T. Wright spoke of ‘locating the church in the great cosmic map’. To my mind, if we do not take the opportunity these times afford us to revisit our ecclesiology, then, though many things will appear to change, not much will really change.

Let’s begin with Plato, knowing that the more we understand his underlying narrative the more we will be able to grasp the nefarious intent of his teaching and philosophy. Much, of course, has been written on Plato’s dualism and the idealism that flows down from his divided world. I want to focus in particular here on the political agenda that thickened the ink of this philosopher’s pen. Plato was an aristocrat whose clan lost its right to rule because the democrats took it from them. As Karl Popper suggests in his book The Open Society and its Enemies. Vol. 1, ‘The Republic’ can be seen as one long attempt by Plato to get back that throne and rule over Athens as its philosopher king. I go into more detail in regards the following in the book Renegotiating the Church Contract. Here is a brief snapshot of Plato’s strategy.

Plato said that the present world was a world of shadows, corruption and ignorance. In contrast to this, on the other side of his great divide, he said that there exists a divine, eternal, perfect and uncreated realm. Essentially this means that you are in the wrong place and need, somehow, to get to the right place. Plato said that the only trustworthy thing that can first connect you and then possibly get you ‘there’ is ‘the State’. This State, constituted by law, which is pure thought, is not corrupted, creation-bound or in any way akin to the flesh-encumbered mind of finite, frail humanity. This State, once set in place, would become the mediator between the realms. It would be fixed, never to be removed; the reason being that anything less than perfect is by definition evil or corrupt. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ Plato added, ‘this State will need a leader, and I suggest that you get a philosopher king for the job. I only know of one at present, so I guess I will have to do!’

One quote to drive Plato’s poison pen home to the heart of the issue: ‘The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male of female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative, neither out of zeal, or even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace – to his leader he shall direct his eye, and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matters he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community. There is no law, nor will there ever be one, which is superior to this, or better and more effective in ensuring salvation and victory in war. And in times of peace, and from the earliest childhood on should it be fostered, this habit of ruling others, and of being ruled by others. And every trace of anarchy should be utterly eradicated from all the life of all the men, and even of the wild beasts which are subject to men.’ (Republic. From Pg. 103 Popper)

Athens said ‘No thanks Plato’, but in and around the third/fourth century AD the leaders of the Christian church increasingly said ‘yes’. By the time Pope Gregory was in place in Rome around 500 AD, the church looked a whole lot like the ‘State’ that Plato had envisaged. The Platonic worldview had, for the most part, eclipsed the Hebrew vision of creation. The church was now something separate from the people, it was a mediating institution that alone could guarantee its members access to an eternal/divine heaven that was now far removed from the creation. It was ruled over by the main representative of the divine realm, the Pope. It was established by dogma that could not be changed, could not be wrong and should never be questioned. By this time the church was well and truly in bed with the emperor, and for many a century the case was closed. Plato had triumphed, not in Athens, but in Rome and in Christendom, and ultimately in the West.

In conclusion to this simplification of a complex history I was to add another general and somewhat simplified assertion. To my mind, this dualistic-inspired ecclesiology did not essentially change during the Reformation, or indeed up to the present time. We are still, for the most part, thinking divided thoughts from a divided world in a church divided off from the very creation that was meant to define and shape it. The church remains something distinct and separate to us, ruled over by its leaders and, for the most part, fixed in place by its buildings, its meetings and its doctrine. Divide and conquer is the core agenda of the philosophy downloaded into the Western mind by the Christian church. We must not, in our re-envisioning of the emerging church, underestimate the effect of this virus and the fog it has created in our way of seeing the nature, purpose and positioning of that most powerful body – the church. The Platonic virus has found its way into the bones, muscles and language of the church.

This being said, I hasten to add that the church Jesus came to create is still alive and well. I am referring here to a dominant virus that has infected this body of people, of an illness that has over years shaped a great deal of this body’s structure, strategy and culture. That being said, the church, like the people of Israel under the rule of earthly kings, may not be configured as God intended, but it still contains within the matrix of its relationships the promises, the covenants and the fullness of the Spirit. As such, its present structural form houses a wealth of cultural memory and people that must not be lost.

The church as ‘construct’ stands in our collective mind as the clearest representation of how we, down to this postmodern day, still think and believe. Also, one might add, without the luxury of space to explain the statement, that our present Platonic way of church as separate mediating institution, does not in fact exist in reality. Rather it is an organisational/ ideological projection of our mind. For these reasons, any easy reaction against it is guaranteed to produce no offspring – only a duplication of what has been.

I am truncating my paragraphs and would love to qualify and clarify more, so I am feeling the frustration of running too swiftly past such sweeping comments as those in the above paragraphs. However, this is not a book. Secondly, I need to get through to what kind of ecclesiology a Hebrew, as distinct from a Platonic, worldview might enable us to see. Again, this has to be set against the backdrop of the Platonic agenda. This because it is so easy to move, with Hebrew, Postmodern, or Californian presuppositions, to new forms of emerging church only to fall in love with new dualisms. We don’t want to start dating just another one of Plato’s ideological issues.

The Charismatic stream set out in the early seventies, rejected for the most part by the mainstream, but made all the more ready by that rejection to see and experience a whole new way of church. Its innovation was Kingdom and Church – the saints scattered ‘out there’ being the Kingdom and the saints gathered ‘in here’ being the Church. This new divide/distinction started out OK and did produce some innovations, but thirty years on there is now very little out there kingdom and still very much the same amount of in here church. In fact, there is now little distinction between the local churches that kicked out the charismatics and the charismatics’ congregations that got the boot all those years ago.

One cannot be the Kingdom – Tony Blair is not government, he is only an instrument, a representative, an approximation (!) of government. One, in relationship with others can, however, be the church. For that reason we need to take that most powerful of names back from its position as ideological mediator between the realms and make it ‘us’ once again. To do this, the one mediator between God and man needs to come into focus under the Hebrew heaven. It is as we see him that we will see his body the church.

Hebrew visions of the night sky

Let’s begin the unification process by looking at heaven and earth. God taught Hebrews like Peter, Paul, Isaiah and Jeremiah that the throne of God, heaven itself, was situated over and above all of their life and work on earth. When any one of them walked out of their house to go into the city to do business, they knew that the very heaven of God was overhead. Under the influence of Plato most Bible teachers of today say that this heaven over earth thing is only a metaphor – which is another way of saying that it’s not really there. However, God never gave any permission to teachers to remove his heaven from over his earth and consign it to some spiritual realm attached to the next life. Paul says quite naturally, in Colossians 1:23, that he proclaimed the Gospel ‘in all creation under heaven’.

In another epistle he spoke of a time when he was ‘caught up to the third heaven’ (2 Cor. 12:2). These three heavens speak of the realms or orders of creation. The first is inhabited by humanity, the second by angels, and the third is the place of the throne of God. These all interrelate and join to set the unified and big picture for our world sight. Plato hijacked the third heaven from over and above the present earth and consigned it to a realm removed from this life. It’s time that we put it back. We need to bring heaven and earth together, and let no man, no teacher, no philosopher separate them again in our thinking.

Another element of the Hebrew worldview we need to mention here relates to the spiritual/natural divide brought in by Plato. For the Hebrews, the spiritual was not something distinct from the natural realm. Rather, the spiritual, or what they called the unseen realm, was one with every created thing. We read about this in Romans 1:20. Paul says there that ‘since the creation of the world his [God’s] invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made’.

In summary here: the Hebrew vision sees the heaven of God over the earth and the spiritual realm as one with the created realm. It does not divide the spiritual from the natural realm, nor does it dislocate the heaven from the earth. Rather, it brings them into a unified relationship with each other. It is into this seamless vision of creation that we can now seek to locate Jesus Christ and the church that he came to establish.

Church of best fit

The book of Ephesians is often called ‘the book of the church’. The reason for this is that teaching about the church figures more in this epistle than in any other. What Paul says can, to my mind, only be clearly understood in line with the Hebrew vision of creation. Under any other operating system or worldview, it does not make complete sense. Speaking of Jesus Christ, Paul says, in verse nine of chapter four ‘Now this expression ‘he ascended’, what does it mean except that he also had descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended himself also he who ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.’

Quite simply, Jesus came down from the third heaven (the throne of God) to the first heaven (the earth). There he lived and died and rose again ‘through the heavens’ (note the plural here) to take his seat at the right hand of God the Father in the third heaven. You can see how simple this description is and, again, how much sense it makes from a Hebrew perspective.

At the end of his description of the journey of incarnation, death and resurrection, Paul tells us the reason why Jesus did all of this. He said that Christ’s purpose in coming from heaven and then returning again was so that ‘he might fill all things’. In the context it is clear that the ‘all things’ being spoken of here are the all things of the present creation. So, how is Jesus going to fill all things? To find this out we need to turn back to chapter one of Ephesians. It is there that we discover, with our Hebrew vision, what the church looks like and where it’s meant to stand in relation to this world.

Paul prays the most remarkable prayer for each of us in chapter one of Ephesians. His prayer rose out of the depth of his understanding, vision and passion for what he knew to be the church. Again, what he says only makes sense if we take the Hebrew vision of the heavens and the earth seriously. Paul wants us to know the power that God ‘brought about in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places’. This place in the third heaven, he goes on to say, is ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come’. He then climaxes his declaration by telling us that God ‘put all things in subjection under his [Jesus Christ’s] feet, and gave him as head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all’ (1:20 – 23). Literally the last part of this verse reads, ‘the fullness of the one, the all things in/with all things filling.’

If Christ’s feet are established on the earth and his head is in the third of the heavens over that earth, then it stands to reason that his body can only exist between his feet and his head. And so it does! Christ’s body, the church, stands in Christ right through the created order. Its calling is to draw out and establish the fullness of all things in creation. It stands on earth and is called to grow up through creation to the heaven of God. Its calling is to be the fullness of all that Jesus has filled. It has the mandate and the privilege to complete and accomplish Jesus’ desire, expressed by Paul in chapter four, to ‘fill all things’.

What we conclude from this teaching of Scripture is that the church is the people of God living and working in every sphere of creation, called to draw out the good, the substance, the very attributes, nature and power of God in every created thing. The way in which the body fills creation is taught throughout the remainder of the book of Ephesians. We are called, as Jew and Gentile, to join as one new man in Christ. As saints we are called to live a life of love (4:32) and purity (5:3) and are privileged to grow up in Christ (4:15) to the heavens (6:12) in and through the creation spheres of marriage (5:21 – 33), family (6:1 – 4) and work (6:5 – 9). This is of course in line with the ‘eternal purpose’ (3:11), one resonating fully with the mandate given to Adam in the Garden. There is no new strategy, there is only, and there will only ever be, one eternal purpose to sum up all things in Christ.

The extent to which God’s strategy for the church comes on line when we apply a Hebrew frame of reference to our reading of Scripture is, to my mind, quite amazing. Teaching that calls us to ‘grow up in all things’ (4:15) of the creation, ‘to the measure of the stature that belongs to the fullness of Christ’ (13), can be properly understood once we set the right context in place. The role of ministry gifts, the place of the gathering, the purpose of our working life and more become so much clearer when we place ‘the church’ in a creation, rather than a congregation, context.

So, once again, what and where is the church? The church is the body of Christ standing in marriage, in family and through every sphere of creation engaged by our work. The church is called to fill up and fill out every one of those spheres by releasing the light of the divine attributes, nature and power God has placed in each one.

Pillar and support

Once this creation-encompassing vision of the church is established we can better understand and place the church gathered. In 1 Tim. 3:15 we read that the church gathered, the household of God, is called to be the ‘pillar and support of the truth’. Again, if we interpret this phrase in line with our current doctrine of church, we would think that this meant that the gathered church was central. Now, however, that we have the big picture in place we can look again and see differently. If the church is the pillar and support of the truth, then what is truth? Scripture says that Jesus is the truth (John 14:6) and that truth is in Jesus (Eph.4: 21). And where is Jesus? Paul tells us in Ephesians that the Son of God stands right through the created order in and through the saints’ life in marriage, family and work. It follows from this that the church gathered must be called to be a pillar and a support to the church that exists in marriage, family and work. The pillar is made to support, not to be the centre.

Much has been made of the word ekklesia (church) in defining the church primarily as meetings in a building or in a home. The word speaks to us of a called out people. It was used by the Graeco-Roman people to describe an assembly for political reasons. It is well established that it is not the etymology/origin of a word that tells us what it means. Rather it is the usage of the word in its context that determines meaning. The Romans may have meant meeting when they said ‘ekklesia’, but when Jesus first took up this word and started to use it, he applied a far greater designation to it than had been the case prior to that.

Our theology of church, under the influence of Plato and his idea of community under the rule of the state, has caused us to emphasise this gathering aspect over every other element the word ‘ekklesia’ might contain. For example, in Ephesians the word ‘ekklesia’ is not used in relation to the gathering, it is used to speak of a body of people who have been ‘called … out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (1 Pet. 2:9). We have been called out of darkness to be in Christ, to gather in him as he stands in creation and seeks to fill all things. Certainly, the household gatherings of the saints are gatherings of the church, but we need to understand that it is not the gathering that makes them the church. They are the church and so when they gather they gather as that church.

This does not mean that our gatherings are unimportant. The reason, in so many people’s estimation, that our meetings are failing us is because of the pressure on them to perform the impossible. They were never meant to be the front line of the Kingdom strategy. We need to see a culture emerge where the ‘church as fullness’ (from Eph. 1:23) and the church gathered come into right relationship with each other. As this emerges we will, I believe, see the richness, diversity and substance return to the meetings we are trying so hard to keep relevant.

The Hebrew vision enables us to see ‘church’ differently. From that sight must flow a strategic re-alignment of the immense resources presently kept in the congregation domain. What we have made the centre is not the centre. The centre is to be found in the life and work of every son and every daughter standing in Christ in creation. If this is the case, then the resources of ministry gift (Eph. 4:11), sacrament, word, the name ‘church’, the right to gather and more, are meant to belong to the saints, to equip them to engage and gather their inheritance in creation. These immense gifts of God were not meant to be copyrighted and trademarked as brands, assets and functions of a local church or a denomination. They belong to the saints who are the church; saints called to fill creation through their life and work in the spheres of creation. The church as construct, the church as separate, the church as meeting, cannot and will never fill creation. God never called it to, and the truth is that it is impossible for it to ever accomplish such a feat.

The creation our counterpart

The second part of this paper has to do with the our theology of the present creation, particularly as it relates to the phrase ‘new creation’ and that key word that defines the purpose of Christ’s body the church, that being – ‘fullness’. As we move away from an ecclesiology drawn from Plato we cannot enter a vacuum. To replace our long-standing platonic addiction to future-placed idealism, centrist leadership and biblical rationalism, operating in a divided world from a mediatorial church, we will need something of quite some substance to replace it. Enter the creation… the present one.

In Ephesians, Paul tells us that our calling as saints is to realise creation’s fullness. Is this work something to that will happen at a future time when Christ comes again? Or, is this eternal purpose to be substantially accomplished in the here and now? We might tend to offer the quick and easy answer – ‘now and not yet’; but this phrase too easily consigns the matter to the present status quo. We still tend here to emphasise the ‘not yet’ at the expense of the ‘now’. Hence the need to dig deeper, endeavouring to discover more about the way in which the ‘now’ works to create the elusive ‘not yet’.

Now that we have located Christ as one who stands in his body throughout the creation, we have a clearer sight of both who and where he is and also who and where we are as his body the church. What naturally emerges from such sight is the need to grasp the third element in regards the eternal purpose, that of the creation context in which both Christ and his body are presently situated. What does the present creation mean to us and what do we mean to this creation? What does ‘fullness’ mean in regards our relationship to the creation and God’s eternal purpose for our lives? Ephesians has described that amazing journey towards the ‘fullness’, but I believe that Romans in particular describes the strategy, the how of getting there.

Let’s start with that most unusual phrase of Paul’s in Romans 8:17. He said there we are ‘heirs of the Father and joint heirs with the Son, if indeed we suffer with him’. Note the positioning of this verse. It comes just after our cry of sonship to Abba, Father and just before the cry of the present creation calling our name as sons and daughters. The reason it is placed here is simply because the creation that cries is our inheritance. The eternal Father gave it to the Son of God made man and all of those who are in him. If we are to welcome that inheritance into our lives, it appears that we must suffer.

Many commentators, even those who place greater stock in the continuity between the Garden, the incarnation and the age to come, still tend, I believe, to join that rather mad rush towards the eschaton at this moment in Romans. The tendency is to see creation as fallen and consigned to futility; left to wait in the mess for a future time when Christ comes with a new creation to, as it were, replace it. Along with this perspective, that key phrase ‘suffer with him’ is thought to simply refer to our own pain in sharing a common fallen fate, consigning us to the same waiting game as creation.

For years, I found it very hard to accept what I felt was quite a lame strategy. Leon Morris, in his commentary on Romans, encouraged me to suffer and wait, but I got bored. If there was no other scriptural evidence to the contrary, I suppose I would have gradually resigned myself to my decreed position as patient sufferer. But I lost my patience, and my mind began to wander into more of that rich and textured literature of Romans 8.

Speaking to Paul, as evangelicals do, I said: ‘The key factor, Paul, in gaining our inheritance in Christ is that we suffer with him. You don’t mention prayer, justification, holiness, not any or all of the list of other great things Jesus has done for us, just … suffering.’ Paul never directly answers evangelicals, so I continued without him. I read on in verse 17, about this entire creation suffering the pangs of childbirth. I turned to Genesis and read of the woman suffering the pangs of childbirth. Back in Romans I located the phrase, ‘we also…groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our… redemption as sons’ (8:23). And I reasoned that perhaps the suffering Paul referred to is much more like a travail, a labour within that is meant to give birth to something that must, by logic, be located, not outside of us, but within us; and in particular, not outside of creation, but within it. Did this mean that the new creation is now in the womb of the present creation, and is wanting to be ‘delivered’ now by we who are the sons and daughters of God?

Waiting in heaven

I carry this, perhaps to some, fragile link and begin to believe that somehow we as saints are meant to do something more than wait and witness until heaven decides to descend to earth and interrupt our long-suffering march. I link this idea with the call in Ephesians to grow up, in this present life, in all things towards the head, even Christ. I remember that this growth has every thing to do with the fullness of ‘all things’ somehow being realised. I read about the manifold wisdom that God wants to ‘now’ make known ‘through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places’ (Eph.3:10). Then I think of Christ, who is apparently meant to wait in the heaven overhead until the ‘period of the restoration of all things’ (Acts 3:21).

I realise that this fullness, this answer the sons give to creation, does not wait for the end of the age to come; this must be a present work we are called to decidedly engage in. If this is so, then our sufferings must needs be seen in different light; they must be understood in a different way; they must somehow contain an essence or a quality, like the pangs of child birth, that are meant to help direct our journey into a new creation that is right now residing and waiting in the womb of the present one.

I am briefly stopped in my tracks as I recall the number of ‘future’ words and phrases in the text I have just mined: ‘is to be revealed’, ‘waits eagerly’, ‘subjected… in hope that the creation will’, ‘waiting eagerly for our adoption’, ‘hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees’, not to mention verse 25. I return briefly to my suffering waiting room. Then I pay a visit to a meeting that exists, it says, to bear witness to the world to come, but during the sermon my mind begins to stray and I wonder: Our future fixation in the West, is it playing with this passage? Are we not gathering fruit right now unto eternal life? The harvest of the end of the age, is it not growing now? Did not Jesus say, ‘My Father works until now and I work’?

Then a flood of verses hit my mind, each one indicating to me that between the present and the future there is only ‘present’. That is, everything that God purposes to do he is at work in us to do ‘now’. Does not creation cry to us right now, and if so, should there not be some element in the eternal purpose that enables us to respond – now? Does not Ephesians suggest this present growth towards a progressively emerging fullness? I cannot return to the waiting room. A door is open; I can no longer shut it. I come to believe that the way to heaven is not in the forsaking of the present creation, the way to the heavens is through that creation.

No rushdooney

Here I am not advocating a triumphalism or a reconstructionism this side of the age to come. However, I will not run in fear from these polar positions and hide in passivity, consoling myself with character development and singing. Of course the end of the age is in view here in Romans, not as a tool to make us passive, but as a guarantee that the first fruits we gather to bring in that fullness will be carried into, kept and physically expressed in the new creation. There is no good reason for God to whisk us away to the heaven of elsewhere if little or none of his ‘eternal purpose’ has been achieved. God wants sons and daughters who will rule over the works of his hands, not infants who have never grown up in all things.

I believe we need to slow down the rush to the age to come, and see the essential link Paul is establishing here in Romans eight between these two. Ironically, this ‘slowing down’ will, I believe, actually hasten the return of Christ. The severing of this link has created an immense identity crises in the church; the reason being that this body of people, who were made for Christ and for the creation in which he presently stands, finds itself still, for the most part, defined by the congregation and the construct that houses it.

The present creation does not wait for annihilation; it ‘waits for its liberation from bondage to decay’. If then this new creation is to emerge from the present creation, like the child of promise from the womb of a travailing woman, what then do we need to do to expedite that? If then there is ‘now’ work to be done in regards our giving an answer to the cry of creation, then again this ‘suffering’ word – the one so critical to our coming into the inheritance – has to mean more, so much more. I find Paul much more talkative now, as he encourages me to press on to the summit of Romans.

The big verse

How might we possibly answer this immense cry of creation? Paul says in 26 and 27 that the Holy Spirit responds to our weakness in this regard by searching out an answer from the depths of God. The answer comes as a sound, a groaning ‘too deep for words’. It is verse 28 that follows which speaks to us of the nature and purpose of this amazing sound. Travelling with the momentum of all that went before, the sound that first touches the creation in suffering (vs. 17), now moves towards its fullest expression in the proclamation – ‘We know that God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love God and are called according to his purpose.’

The verb ‘we know’ found in verse 28 is in the perfect tense. This tense speaks of a present state arriving as a result of past actions. Hence we could render verse 28 in this way: ‘As a result (of the Spirit’s searching out the will of God) we now know that for the ones loving God he continually goes on working all things into (eis) the good.’ Here we discover critical wisdom concerning the sound of the Father coming through the Spirit to the sons. As a result of the Spirit’s search, we now know that the eternal purpose for the ‘new man’ is that he works all things in creation together in such a way as to bring about the ultimate good. There exists, in line with the ‘purpose’ of God, a powerful and strategic relationship between ‘work’, the ‘all things’ of creation and the quality or substance named the ‘good’.

By way of clarification here, I note two statements by Christ: ‘I must work the works of him who sent me’ and ‘My Father is working until now and I myself am working’ (John 9:4, 5:17). Also I draw attention to Paul’s words: ‘For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.’ (Eph. 2:10). The focus of all of the works of God is humanity. Hence, God’s purpose to work ‘all things together for good’ must refer to our work in him, rather than some separate work of God apart from Christ or the new humanity in him. Paul brings this relationship into focus when he states, ‘It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (Phil. 2:13).

The phrase ‘God works all things together for good’ is, I believe, the single most strategic verse found in Scripture. It brings together all the key elements of the creation reality we have looked at. This placement of the saints’ good works at the heart of the divine strategy arises naturally from the creation reality God established in the beginning. Man and creation are mutually dependent, unable to come into their created purpose apart from each other. Creation needs man’s work to come into its fulfilment and man needs to steward the creation through his work to come into his inheritance. It follows from this that, if God declared the creation to be ‘good’ and if man is called to work the creation, then by this work he must be able to bring forth, or realise, that ‘good’. The goodness of creation is another way of expressing its ‘fullness’. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Psalm 24:1 (KJB)). The goodness of the earth is to be brought forth, made manifest and enjoyed through all of the saints’ works in every sphere of creation – in marriage, family, in health, business, government, education, in ‘all in all’.

Our calling to ‘good work’ the earth is in fact God’s way of uniting us to all of creation. It is the God-given means through which we can fully answer creation’s cry and thereby come into our inheritance in and over all things in Christ. This is why the creation to this day looks forward, waiting in eager anticipation for the time when it will enjoy the fullest measure of the ‘freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:21). A life lived ‘good working’ all things of creation towards the good is a life most definitely lived ‘according to his purpose’. This is what the sound from the Father comes to accomplish. It is this sound, Jesus said, which we can hear and must follow (Jn. 3:8). It is any wonder this answer from the depths of God is too deep for words to encompass!

Suffering… one last time

Again, why is the suffering issue so critical to all of this? Creation was made in the beginning both as our inheritance and as our counterpoint. We made in innocence, it wild and in need of our stewardship. Our maturity marked by the bringing of this creation into our heart and under our hand. So, does it not stand to reason that when we fell into sin, it too would fall, under God’s design and decree, into futility to mark that fall? From a Hebrew perspective, I believe we can see that, rather than completely setting aside the initial creation reality, God only removed the full inheritance within creation out of the reach of fallen man and wicked angels.

It was only the coming of the Son that could put an end to the dead end God had placed in the all things of creation. So how did the Son of God as man relate and respond to the darkness, futility and death in creation? The answer is that he came to encompass, fill and fulfil each of them. The Son came into all of mankind’s fallen experience. He suffered his way through every judgement arising from the Fall. He entered into the fullness of sin, which is death. All of the darkness, futility and death that were brought in by God at the time of the Fall were taken on by God-made-man to begin the time of restoration. And then, after judgement was complete, the Son came out and into resurrection life. He now calls us to follow him in that same journey, reaching from and uniting earth to heaven.

This is a telling area for consideration, particularly regarding developments in our understanding of the relationship between creation theology and the atonement of Christ. The results of the first Adam’s sin in effect ‘closed down’ the creation via a series of divine judgements. From a Hebrew perspective, we can begin to see the last Adam, Jesus Christ, coming to ‘open up’ that creation once again. To accomplish this Jesus Christ had to firstly engage and then travel though, as it were, the consequences of Adam’s sin; he had to go through the judgement barriers put in place at the time of the Fall – thorns, futility, suffering and ultimately death. The word ‘consequence’ used here, suggests a judicial component, but contains a whole lot more than that. This way of seeing, can, I believe, give us a more rounded perspective on the atonement; one that aligns God’s work in Christ as the Last Adam to what has happened to humanity in its relationship to the present created order.

Creation then is our ultimate reality sign; it is the greatest measure of who we are and where we are in life. When we sinned, pain was multiplied as a sign to us of our dislocation from our inheritance in creation. To this day, our pain still stands as a major reality sign to indicate the state of our mind/body in its relationship to the creation. When we seek to engage creation through the good works we do, we come up against the thorns and futility placed there by God (and of course intensified by the activity of fallen men and angels). Our good work, directed by good desire (2 Thess. 1:11f), is designed to locate and seek after the good – the attributes, nature and power of God in all things – that resides in/through creation. However, when we endeavour to access that good, we come up against strongholds in our own lives. Here the dysfunction in (and desire for liberation by) creation meets with the dysfunction (and desire for fullness) in us, and we begin to ‘travail’. We enter into ‘his sufferings’ (Phil. 3:10).

To go through to the inheritance held in this area of life, we need to take the journey of divine suffering into oneness with ‘his death’ (3:10). For only in this place of divine dying can we leave behind ways of thinking and living conformed to the present world system. Only from this place can we emerge into the ‘the out-resurrection (ekanastasis) from the dead’ (3:11). It is in this new standing, this place of ‘newness of life’, that we find creation, in that particular area of God’s dealings with us, now so much the more ‘open’ before us. We have travelled through the thorns, through the sweat and through the death and have emerged to answer the cry and embrace the fullness. Yes, this is still in part, but this is that which touches and realises more of creation’s fullness; tasting more of its fruit, experiencing more of its goodness, and thereby growing up more in both all things and thus growing ‘in the knowledge of God’ himself (Col. 1:9,10).

This is what it means to ‘suffer with him’. It’s a unique kind of suffering for the good; a suffering that progressively gives rise to the fullness, one that will ultimately give birth to a new creation now expectantly growing unseen in the womb of the present one. Jesus Christ will come to effect this birth and the unseen we are now engaging and embracing will be seen in, through and over all things. Too brief I know, more in ‘Church Beyond the Congregation’. However, it serves to indicate that an understanding of our suffering – for the good – is critical to our ability to locate ourselves in the journey into and through the created order. If we do not suffer, we are not going anywhere. If we cannot and do not read our suffering, we will never know where we are situated in regards ourselves, our work, our inheritance and for that matter, our God.

Jesus the Hebrew man, said, in a statement that constitutes the clearest expression of his strategy of engaging the world with the good news of the Kingdom, ‘Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 5:16). Seen in a christological and creation light, this verse makes a whole lot of ‘new’ sense. Our works in every sphere of creation as Christ’s body the church are critical to the divine purpose. Our work and the suffering it occasions are the heartbeat of the divine strategy and eternal purpose. The church is made for Christ and made for the present creation. The new creation emerges not from heaven, but from the womb of the present creation. We are called to gather our eternal inheritance now, this by good-working the creation towards the fullness. The gathering is not the centre of God’s purposes, the saints in all of life and work are. If these things are true then certain things need to change in regards the present status quo of ‘church’. Where have we begun that change and how might it continue? And where might we begin again?