God is here

I’m not sure how noticeable it is in this journaling space of sorts, but I’ve been going through what feels like a massive shift in how I understand the Gospel and, really, the Bible in general over the last few years. For so long, I thought of it mostly as a guidebook through the wilderness wasteland of earthly life to the Promised Land of heaven beyond—a view that I think a lot of Christians have, and one that is easily reinforced in our churchly experiences. “Repent and be saved so that you can go to heaven when you die” has been the prevailing message of what has been called the Gospel for many recent decades.

The trouble with such a gospel is that it leaves us there in the wilderness wasteland, waiting around for death. What then is the point of life? Is it any wonder that we’re so often tempted toward either fearful legalism or lawless hedonism when we don’t know what else to do with the intervening years before our salvation is, in our mind, actually realized?

But if the whole story of the Bible informs how I understand the Gospel, then there must be so much more to it than repent, be good, and wait around to die.

In the beginning, God planted a garden paradise where His presence would dwell, and He placed His image bearers within it. They were to cultivate and keep it, and to fruitfully multiply into families of image bearers, working in partnership with a present God to push the borders of Eden wider and wider until His holy garden-temple-kingdom might envelop all Creation.

We know what happens next: Instead of working in cooperation with the plan, the bearers of God’s image rebelled against His wisdom, choosing their own instead, and were consequently banished from His presence.

All this takes place in the first three chapters of Genesis. What then is the rest of the Bible? It’s the story of God’s relentless efforts to remedy the breach and return to dwell among His people—from the wilderness tabernacle to Solomon’s temple to, finally, incarnation in Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God With Us.

He, crowned King over all Creation and then ascending to sit at God’s right hand, sent His Spirit to dwell not only with us but in us. And He has never left.

God is here.

And yet our version of the Gospel seems too often to tell us that we’re just like the intertestamental Israelites, living in a broken and oppressed society, our temple overrun by moneychangers, our God silent, and our only hope in some unknown day when the Messiah might appear or we might die, whichever comes first.

Does that sound like good news?

Contrast this dismal picture with the language of the New Covenant for Israel, described in Ezekiel 36:

Thus says the Lord GOD, “On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places will be rebuilt. The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. They will say, ‘This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ Then the nations that are left round about you will know that I, the LORD, have rebuilt the ruined places and planted that which was desolate; I, the LORD, have spoke and will do it.”

Ezekiel 36:33-36

This is, importantly, a text directed at God’s people Israel, describing the New Covenant that superseded the Mosaic Covenant through the Messiah. It wasn’t written to you and me. But as adoptees into God’s family, we have been grafted into this covenant (Romans 11), and so while the specific renewal of the Holy Land isn’t directed at us or our nation, the imagery remains applicable: desolation gives way to flourishing, desertion gives way to multitudes, waste gives way to fruitfulness. Ruin gives way to Eden. Death gives way to life.

Because for those whose iniquities have been cleansed, God is here, and He is hard at work, partnering with us once more to transform a desolate world into a heavenly kingdom.

Too many of us, including myself a lot of the time, are loitering around the construction site dressed in suit jackets and pearls or collecting signatures on a petition or just sitting on the ground with our head in our hands, waiting for a rescue that has already occurred while the job that still needs doing sits undone.

Yes, it’s slow, dirty, uphill work. It’s discouraging at times to know we will not see its completion during our earthly lives. It’s curiously the richest and poorest vocation simultaneously, the loveliest and the ugliest, the biggest and the smallest; it’s both completely invisible to the untrained eye and a shimmering beacon in the black of night, a city on a hill.

And it’s so much better than whiling our lives away walking circles in the wilderness, trying to attain Pharisaical perfection or giving ourselves up to selfish depravity.

God is here. Not only with us, but in us. I wonder what might happen if we started living like it—not in a guilty or shame-based way, but by breathing deeply of His Spirit and letting His life animate us to work in partnership with the heavenly vision. As Jesus said in John 15:4-5,

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

The focus is not on tirelessly pumping out fruit until we die so that God will be pleased with us, but on restfully drinking up the life offered by the Vine, with fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and their holy results as they feed the hungry souls of others—being the happy byproduct.

Advent is a beautiful season. I’m enjoying reading a Scripture and singing a hymn each day with Clara, in symbolic anticipation of the coming Christ. But I’m also firmly reminded that I’m not a B.C. Israelite waiting in a dark silence—I’m redeemed, made new, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. He is here. And because that is true, my role is to abide in Him, to bear His image, and to live as a citizen of His heavenly kingdom—both now and not yet.

just be here

I’ve just come home from a weekend at home—which is an odd-sounding statement, now that I’ve written it, but nonetheless true. I am in my home as I type this, and yet I was at home twelve hours and two hundred miles ago as well, home in the house I grew up in and with the people who know me best.

This tension always makes me wonder if we were meant to live like this, separated from our people. For most of human history we’ve lived in tight-knit communities, from the familial clans of the patriarchs to small colonial towns. With industry and progress and technology have come a much larger world, for better or worse. Now we hardly bat an eye at the idea of living states or even continents away from our parents, maintaining our relationships almost entirely by digital means. Those of us in the suburbs often live a stone’s throw from houses full of people we’ve never met beyond a “hello” on the way to the mailbox—people whose pantries we can’t imagine borrowing from, people we’d never dream of asking to babysit our children, people who might not even answer the door if we’d locked ourselves out of our house without a phone late at night (ask me how I know).

I walk through my neighborhood and see large houses full of stuff and empty of people, divided by tall fences. I walk through my grocery store and hope I don’t see anyone I know that I might have to make small talk with. I wonder how to fix it, even as I perpetuate it. Community, generosity, hospitality—these are all such warm kingdom words, and I long for them, but still instinctively steel myself against them, because as warm as they are, they’re not safe.

Perhaps what my generation missed, with all its Do Hard Things and Radical and “You were made for more,” is that the opulent, individualistic, global Western lens through which we view concepts like “hard” and “radical” and “more” renders our interpretation utterly different from that of Christ. We tend to think only of going bigger and better, when the truly hard and radical thing to do is get smaller.

Smaller is harder. More intimate, more vulnerable, more terrifying. It’s harder to share the Good News with someone you see every day, because they will immediately measure your life against your creed. It’s harder to commit yourself to a tiny, local assembly of believers, because they will soon be elbows-deep in the muck of your life. It’s harder to serve your own immediate family faithfully day in and day out, because the very people we love the most can be hardest to love when it’s an every-minute-of-every-day demand on our energy.

I’d love to think that the most important thing for me to do is shatter the universe with wisdom shouted from a platform overlooking millions—grand and impersonal, safe from the discomfort of being known, set up on a pedestal to be admired from afar—but in the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Even Jesus modeled the power of small. The effects of His ministry were universe-shattering, of course, but the means were hardly grand. Twelve men. Just three in His closest circle. He let them watch Him, learn from Him, live with Him for three years. In the end, it was one of these men who betrayed Him, and it was the other eleven who carried His mission forward into the next two thousand years.

In our day of Twitter and virtual-everything and Church, Inc., it’s so easy to forget that every massive work of God in the Bible started small and moved slowly. He multiplied Abraham in to a nation over the course of four centuries, most of which the Israelites spent in slavery. He relentlessly pursued and tirelessly loved that nation through a thousand years of rebellion, repentance, idolatry, exile, and return. He finally sent the Messiah in the form of an embryo who would take 40 weeks to develop and be born a baby—a baby who would then take 30 years to mature into ministry. And He’s been continuing that ministry now for more than two millennia.

God is on a different timeline than I am. Even if I do the biggest, wildest things with my life, it will still be miniscule when it plays out on His stage. My 27 years, or 87 if I’m given them, can never be more than a blink when the scope is this large.

So I will just be, and I will just be here: faithful and small, loving my little circles well, knowing that God created me with limits but that when I am obedient in my limited part, He can better do His work in the infinite whole.

just be

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to Him a child, He put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

“Whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Matthew 18:1-6 ESV

One of my favorite things is watching Clara get lost in her own little world of play. She appears to forget all about me as she unstacks blocks, pulls apart puzzles, pretends to burp her baby dolly, or examines the intricacies of a stick of lip balm. She is sometimes silent, but more often chatting softly to herself and her toys. “Bah! Tickatickaticka. Oooh.” Sometimes one of the cats, watching a bird or a squirrel through the sliding door, catches her attention. “Tor!” she might exclaim, and make a beeline to enthusiastically pat him on the head, which he endures with a longsuffering grimace. When he inevitably loses patience and saunters away, she picks up her tiny Lowly Worm Word Book and practices pointing to each little picture, pretending to read the words.

Before Clara, the only real experience I could call upon to interpret a Bible passage like this one from Matthew 18 was my own dim memories of being a young child. That helped some, to be sure, but I obviously can’t remember anything from the purest childlikeness of being just a year old, all my needs lovingly met and not a care in the world except whether I could coordinate putting one block on top of another without toppling them both over.

Now I think I see: Jesus’s disciples wanted to know what kind of rankings exist in God’s kingdom—what kind of righteousness demands the highest reward—and Jesus pointed them to the ones who never would have thought to ask such a question.

Clara’s life is about 60% sleep, 30% play, and 10% food. She doesn’t have any goals or checklists when she gets up in the morning except to grow, to learn, and to let me meet her needs. She’s not concerned with being good at anything or earning her keep or leaving a mark on the world. She’s content to just be.

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

We get a glimpse of this as God’s initial intention all the way back in Genesis, when He charged His image-bearers to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). They were to be cultivators and keepers, partners with Him in the joy of creating and caring for what was created; they were to increase the numbers as well as the borders of this garden paradise until it covered the whole of Creation.

Obviously, the story went awry, and that was never achieved. But the vision is still pertinent, for the King has come, and He is taking His Creation back! This is not the time for distractions of legalism or delusions of grandeur. It’s time to become children again.

It’s time to rest in the generous provision of the Lord. It’s time to do away with self-important pursuits of individual impact. It’s time to stop asking what more we can do to please God and simply trust Him, for in this, He is pleased.

I think He delights in watching us love our spouses, raise our children, care for our neighbors, and create beauty in the world much as I delight in watching Clara interact with her toys and learn how to be a person. I’m not annoyed with her for not helping me make dinner; her job is merely to receive dinner once it’s done, and to enjoy her little world in the meantime. Likewise, it’s not about what I accomplish in my lifetime to show for the years God gave me, but about what He is accomplishing over the course of millennia as He guides history to its stunning climax: to a New Creation, an everlasting reunion of God and His people who were rent apart by sin. My job is to rest in Him, to receive from Him, and to glorify Him, which in its most honest form is usually a rather un-glorious-looking matter—but nonetheless beautiful.