Category: Christianity

Being Human — Chapter Seven — The jig is up (how habitats shape our habits)

This is an adaptation of the seventh talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

We have done a few “go back in time” exercises so far; this time I want you to imagine yourself in some present-day places — and I’ll use photos to help — I want you to imagine you’re in Paris, at the airport.

This shouldn’t be hard, because all airports look the same; there are certain architectural features — like check-in desks, security, and those arrival and departure boards that are basically the same.

Which means the airport looks the same in London.

And in Brisbane.

It is the same with train stations… Paris

Looks like London…

Except for the bears…

Looks like Sydney…

Supermarkets also look the same everywhere — France…

… England…

Australia… in a global market you will even find the same brands everywhere you go.

And then there is the Swedish embassy… IKEA. Which looks the same in Stockholm, in London, and in Brisbane…

Have you thought about the architecture of these places; what they do to us? Whether that is the places we go to go somewhere else that all look the same — airports… train stations… or the places we go to consume — to buy?

Even if you haven’t — others have — very deliberately. What about the shopping centre? Like Garden City…

The first ever shopping centre was created by the architect Victor Gruen as somewhere people would go to lose themselves in the bright lights and the indoor gardens with fountains and the mazey design, while finding themselves through buying stuff.

The exact moment that you lose yourself and start buying things you didn’t really want is called the Gruen Transfer; it is where you reach what is called “scripted disorientation” — you have lost yourself, but you are following someone else’s script.

Disorienting scripts shape the layout of the supermarket; like how at the shops the milk is up the back, so you have to go through the chocolate or biscuit aisle to get there. Even where things are put on shelves and what is at eye level is calculated to make you spend more…

IKEA is built as a maze, so you have to walk through the showroom maze, and then the buying maze, walking past stacks of stuff you weren’t going to buy…

This is choice architecture — a deliberate shaping of consumer habitats to shape our consumer habits so we will buy more.

The philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote a book, The World Beyond Your Head, showing how spaces are shaped to sell us stuff by grabbing our attention.

He tells two stories — one from Korea, which is kind of “in the future” for us — where buses come equipped with “flavour radios” that pump the smell of Dunkin’ Donuts into the bus, as an ad for donuts plays over the speaker, as the bus pulls up outside Dunkin’ Donuts…

And he talks about airports — this picture is from the site selling advertising space at the Brisbane Airport — where every space is covered with advertising — even the security trays — and your attention is demanded at every turn by people selling stuff…

That is, unless you pay for silence in the corporate lounge; where the sorts of people who create the habitats where our consumer habits are formed as we are bombarded with noise, pay for silence so their attention is free from distraction.

Crawford reckons our attention is our most valuable commodity.

“I would like to offer the concept of an attentional commons… Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us.”
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

He reckons we should create an attentional commons — we should see public space as common space for the common good and cut out advertising noise so we are able to pay attention and not be scripted and disoriented in public spaces like we are in shops. He makes a distinction between nudges — made famous by this book — and jigs…

“In general, when we are faced with an array of choices, how we choose depends very much on how those choices are presented to us (to the point that we will choose against our own best interests if the framing nudges us that way).”
Crawford

Nudges operate below the surface, framing how we approach decisions — like an IKEA floorplan — so we think we have decided ourselves. They can be good if they point us to things that are good for us.

Jigs are how we set up our environments to produce the actions we want — like a carpenter who uses jigs to make repeat cuts, or a chef who has set up their workstation just right for their task.

“A jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it.”
Crawford

And if character is stamped on us by repeated action — jigs make character-forming actions easier.

“The word ‘character’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘stamp.’ Character, in the original view, is something that is stamped upon you by experience, and your history of responding to various kinds of experience…”
Crawford

If we want to build character we might choose to shape our habitats to produce the habits we desire, or other people will do it for us. Because we are matter in space; spaces matter.

This French philosopher Marc Augé describes most spaces in modern cities as non-places. Places — he says — have three characteristics.

“Places have at least three characteristics in common. People want them to be places of identity, of relations and of history.”
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity

They are where we go to understand and perform our identity; to relate to a community, and to be connected to history — to a shared past, and a shared story.

Architects of places deliberately structure them so people can act according to these characteristics.
Churches in medieval villages were places like this; they were cross-shaped buildings, with a steeple reaching up to heaven; they would host festivals and saint days and inside there would be a pulpit, where a story was preached, and stained-glass windows and art telling stories.

You would receive communion, with your community; while the graves of dead people from the church would be just outside.

Going to church meant participating in that place; that story; with those people — living and dead. It was not just to create roots, but grow from roots created by others… And there is something pretty cool for us City South folks about the relationship our Church of Christ family have with this space, and a privilege we might grow into as we share this space and cultivate life in it together.

Church spaces were once at the centre of city life; but now — well, they are still there — just surrounded by transport hubs and places of commerce and outdoor advertising. City squares are now non-places.

Non-places are the opposite of places — they are fast-paced places where we do not belong but move through as transient anonymous individuals.

“A space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”

“The real non-places of supermodernity are the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight.”
Marc Augé

The spaces we enter as driver, or consumer, or passenger — they are spaces where we are bombarded with advertising imagery that reinforces transience in the place of transcendence. Augé reckons they are inherently narcissistic, and they leave us simultaneously “always, and never, at home…”

We increasingly do not live where we are born, around familiar landmarks and people; we will not be buried in a graveyard next to our churches… we spend so much time in transient non-places; we live as pilgrims or exiles; disconnected from place and community and history.

Home is where we feel understood and known and connected, but transient people in non-places can feel home because they are familiar. If you are a traveller feeling disoriented in a foreign country, being in your car as an individual on a motorway, or walking through big stores — IKEAs — or staying in familiar hotel chains…

“But that we encounter the world as travellers creates a ‘paradox of non-place’ — where ‘a foreigner lost in a country he does not know can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores, or hotel chains.’”
Auge

Shopping and seeing brands you know can feel like a relief; these act like landmarks giving us a sense of connection…

“But that we encounter the world as travellers creates a ‘paradox of non-place’ — where ‘a foreigner lost in a country he does not know can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores, or hotel chains.’”

Victor Gruen’s original vision for shopping centres was a response to non-places — he wanted to create hubs where people could live and work and play locally — he hated cars and roads, which he called:

“avenues of horror, flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity — billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores — ever collected by mankind.”

In other words, non-places. When his vision was not realised he moved back to Vienna, where a brand new shopping centre was being built… he had created a giant shopping machine…

“My creation wasn’t intended to create a giant shopping machine. I am devastated…”
Victor Gruen

He said he wanted to make America more like the village he had left, but had made Vienna more like America. He wanted the end of the shopping centre.

“I invented the shopping mall to make America more like Vienna and now I ended up making Vienna more like America. I hope all shopping malls end up neglected, abandoned and forgotten.”
Gruen

But now they are everywhere — as churches have moved to the margins, we have shopping centres. And as the theologian Jamie Smith points out; shopping centres function as temples; offering visions of the good life complete with routines and liturgies and priestly salespeople. Now — I just want to throw one other sort of physical space in the mix — another modern temple to the gods of fortune; the casino.

Casinos are designed to disorient… and worse — Natasha Dow Schüll wrote this book about modern gambling called Addiction by Design. She compares common places designed to build community rhythms and practices with casinos. One design style is wide and open and well lit.

“While modernist buildings sought to facilitate communitas through high ceilings, wide open space, bountiful lighting and windows, and a minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic…”
Natasha Dow Schüll

While casinos are designed with low ceilings, and maze-like layouts that direct your gaze, and your body, to the gambling machines; they are designed to keep you anonymous and disconnected.

“…casinos’ low, immersive interiors, blurry spatial boundaries, and mazes of alcoves accommodated ‘crowds of anonymous individuals without explicit connection with each other.’”
Schüll

They are lit in certain ways, and have no clocks, so that you will be disoriented — or rather — oriented towards the machines. There is a script for this disorientation.

“The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with the outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is.”
Schüll

She quotes Vegas heavyweight Bill Friedman’s book called Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, which proudly describes the purpose of the maze as being to confuse and confound; to get people lost so they will give themselves to the machines:

“The term maze is appropriate… it comes from the words to confuse or to confound and defines it as ‘an intricate, usually confusing network of interconnecting pathways, as in garden; a labyrinth… If a visitor has a propensity to gamble, the maze layout will evoke it.’”
Bill Friedman, Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition

This sort of thing should make us angry. I reckon. It is also the same strategy that drives IKEA, except their maze gets you to buy Scandi furniture and homewares. But there is a new strategy in casino design competing with Friedman’s design — where rooms are open, and well lit, and beautiful… one where a guy named Roger Thomas sees himself not as an “architect” but as an “evoca-tect” — he wants to make rooms that will delight and excite; so that people will spend money.

“My job is to create excitement and delight — a task I’ve come to call evoca-tecture.”

“People tend to take on the characteristics of a room, they feel glamorous in a glamorous space and rich in a rich space. And who doesn’t want to feel rich?”
Roger Thomas

He says people take on the characteristics of a room — our habitats shape our habits, in part, by evoking our desires, and this has become a more popular design strategy — and you can bet the super-casino and lifestyle precinct built on our river will look more like this; while the pokie room at your local club will look more like Friedman’s… but what they will have in common is that the architecture is designed to take your money, and so are the machines… they are designed to disorient and addict and destroy…

Natasha Dow Schüll describes how designers adapt their machines to “fit the player” to make more money as gamblers will “play to extinction.”

“The more you manage to tweak and customize your machines to fit the player, the more they play to extinction; it translates into a dramatic increase in revenue.”
Schüll

This means playing till they run out of money; but it is a bit more sinister; talking about the use of the terminology by a speaker at a conference for pokie design, she said:

“The point of ‘extinction’ to which she referred is the point at which player funds run out. The operational logic of the machine is programmed in such a way as to keep the gambler seated until that end—the point of ‘extinction.’”
Schüll

They are designed to keep people on the machine till they absolutely have to leave, like those stories of video gamers who play so long they die at their keyboards… these machines are calibrated to needs, longings, and the pleasure receptors in our brains to pull people out of space and time — their bodies — addicts describe entering a zone where any sense of existence outside the machine disappears.

“Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. ‘You can erase it all at the machines — you can even erase yourself.’”
Schüll

This sort of manipulation of the vulnerable should make us feel angry. Only, these same addiction mechanics are being used in our digital devices — not just by gambling apps, but by games for kids — and adults — with in-built micro-reward mechanisms that trigger exactly the same part of the brain — and Schüll says social media companies too — anyone making algorithms to keep your eyes hooked, and your hands active — people setting up the devices we carry with us to create the same scripted disorientation — the Gruen Transfer — everywhere we go — so they can make money from our addictions.

“Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites. In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention — which is measured in clicks and time spent.”
Schüll

Dr Anna Lembke wrote Dopamine Nation about how addiction works in our brain chemistry — she describes our phones as needles operating 24-7 to deliver digital dopamine.

“The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. The world now offers a full complement of digital drugs… these include online pornography, gambling, and video games.”
Dr Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation

She describes our apps — games, social media, gambling, and porn — even shopping — as drugs geared towards addicting us; hooking our brains on dopamine — the pleasure chemical — and leaving us wanting more. And more.

She talks about a dopamine economy — or what this other guy David Courtwright, who wrote The Age of Addiction, calls limbic capitalism — where a system is built and propped up by government and industry and technology — to capitalise on chemically hooking our brains — our limbic system, where dopamine works — by stimulating us in targeted ways geared towards excessive consumption, and then addiction.

“Limbic capitalism refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments encourage excessive consumption and addiction.”
David Courtwright, The Age of Addiction

His book is terrifying; it suggests like the pokie-machine player, we are working towards “extinction by design.” And if this is true, how can we ever feel at home in a world; in spaces; geared towards our extinction?

Especially if these forces are at work in our homes; Aussie academic Adam Alter wrote about why we are irresistibly addicted to technology; he reckons we are wired for addiction and disposed towards consuming — some more than others — and this is also wired into the technology we build into our lives — our spaces — in ways that reinforce our wiring. Addiction is an inevitable product of the places — environments — we occupy, including the technology we use.

“In truth, addiction is produced largely by environment and circumstance… A well-designed environment encourages good habits and healthy behavior; the wrong environment brings excess and — at the extremes — behavioral addiction.”
Adam Alter

He reckons well-designed environments are the key to good habits and healthy behaviour; to avoiding addiction, which he says is not about lacking willpower in crunch moments — if we are already nudged towards the habit, or hooked on it — one of the keys is avoiding temptation in the first place through how we have built our spaces…

“This contradicts the myth that we fail to break addictive habits because we lack willpower. In truth, it’s the people who are forced to exercise willpower who fall first. Those who avoid temptation in the first place tend to do much better.”
Alter

This starts at home. Our habitats shape our habits; we are made to be at home in our bodies, and in places that form us. And it turns out the more our attention is pulled out of physical places into digital non-places, where we engage as viewers, browsers, and users — the more homeless we feel. The evidence is stacking up that digital non-places make us lonely — disconnected — exiled — and narcissistic. Online spaces like Amazon and Facebook are like pokie machines; designed to pull us in; our experience is shaped by algorithms that are scripted to adapt the machine to us, while our dopamine-hungry brains crave bigger hits. It is a brave new world.

And maybe what is worst is when church spaces become non-places rather than sanctuaries from this world — when we copy the architecture of the shopping centre, or casino — building mega-facilities people drive to like shopping centres, where people flows and signage guide us into black-box rooms, where our attention is oriented towards screens.

And notice how all these churches end up…

looking…

… the same. Even the Presbyterian ones.
Like non-places built for transience, not transcendence.

Some of us met in buildings like this in West End — one was a theatre, one was the church building pictured in the first image — that was the pentecostal service meeting in the morning slot. Can you see how these habitats might subtly set us up to think about church as a product, or as entertainment; where our attention has to be grabbed and directed towards our desires, like at a casino, or we will leave unsatisfied? Where familiarity creates the illusion of belonging; rather than being places where family connection is cultivated and shaped by the story of the Gospel; places for us to inhabit with the people around us — those we commune with, whose faces we see — because the lights are not off — as God works in us through his word — that we can see without using a screen — and by his Spirit and his people?

The Bible does not set us up to live in non-places — but to live and interact as creatures in the created world; and even to make places in it as images of the God who creates place. Habitats for life, that prime us to engage in character-building habits.

God places Adam in a garden — a place — with fruit trees that are beautiful and good to eat (Genesis 2:8-9). Trees he’s to eat from — eating would be a habit that would teach him about God’s love; his provision; his hospitality (Genesis 2:16-17). The pleasure of seeing and eating that fruit was made to create something in our hearts as the pleasure chemicals kicked in. God created dopamine hits; they are meant to orient our hearts towards him, and each other, and so we could love and enjoy his world in ways that made us more human. To eat otherwise is to eat to extinction (Genesis 2:17). Our grasping, addictive, narcissistic hearts are the fruit of embracing sinful desire for self-satisfaction, and our self-declaration that things that are not good for us are good (Genesis 3:6). Chasing dopamine hits on our terms…

There is an interesting relationship between idolatry, desire, and place-making after Eden. Adam is placed in a place he is to cultivate and keep (Genesis 2:15) — these are space-making words. They are used for how priests are to maintain the tabernacle and temple as Eden-like spaces where God meets his people. The sanctuary — and altar — spaces that teach Israel about God (Numbers 3:7-8; 18:4, 6).

These spaces teach God’s people about God’s desire to be present and in relationship; his holiness; his grace; the shape of heaven and earth and the barrier represented by the curtain; his ongoing provision of life; even the smells and taste of meat and fruit and bread connected to sacrifices and feasts and festivals taught Israel its story in places; there are habitats jigged up to shape Israel’s habitual worship, stamping character — the image of God — on God’s priestly people.

Only Israel kept bringing idols and their rituals into their environment; they were a dopamine nation. Solomon is particularly instructive here, as a place-maker — while he builds the temple (1 Kings 8:12-13), he fails to cultivate and keep Israel as a place-space for life with God; by building high places and bringing in idols with their dopamine-inducing incense and sacrifices (1 Kings 11:7-8); the character-shaping habits of idolatry.

So Israel ends up in exile — in Babylon — with its hanging gardens and lush places and massive towers and idol temples — the whole environment of Babylon was scripted; designed; like our casinos, our scent-distributing buses, and our smartphones — to direct attention and habitual worship to their gods and king. But what does faithful life in Babylon look like? Place-making.

“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.”
Jeremiah 29:5-6

Planting their own little Edens; making spaces that are reminders of their story — of God’s hospitality, his desire for presence; that he is the source of blessing and that he calls his people to be fruitful and multiply and bless those around them — they get back in the land and rebuild their spaces, but something is missing.

And then Jesus turns up to end the exile — from Eden and Israel — as the tabernacle-in-the-flesh who brings heaven on earth — who comes to save us from homeless life in non-places — and he does not do this by restoring the temple to its former glory — as heavenly space — but his death tears the curtain, the picture of the barrier separating heaven and earth; representing our exile from Eden; from God (Matthew 27:50-51); and this does not mean that space-making is over; that suddenly we are meant to exist without habitats that shape our habits — without a temple.

Jesus makes a new temple — new tabernacles-in-the-flesh in Acts, by pouring out his Spirit on people — the church (Acts 2:33). The first church did not have cathedrals, or even church buildings. They meet in houses. Homes (Acts 2:46-47). They go to the temple, as well, in Jerusalem — but the home is the normal habitat as the church spreads into the rest of the world; and presumably there are some dopamine hits happening as they eat with glad hearts and praise God.

The home is the habitat for the Acts 2 habits — it is where they devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer — meeting together (Acts 2:42). The house becomes disciple-making architecture; homes become places connected to the story of the Gospel; of God making his home with his people, who are now temples of the Holy Spirit. The shared table is a setting geared towards teaching people about hospitality; to position those around the table as members of a household — it is a picture of us now being home with God; no longer exiled, but connected to him as family. Home is the ultimate place.

Look at what Peter says in 1 Peter 2; the church — people — are chosen by God and precious to him. As we come to Jesus — the living tabernacle — we are built into a spiritual house — or temple of the Spirit — we are the holy priesthood (1 Peter 2:4-5), the new Adam, the new Levites — with the job of cultivating and keeping the space where heaven and earth come together; where we learn about God and are shaped by him as we declare the praise of the God who has re-created us for this purpose through Jesus.

Our sense of homelessness in non-places is part of our longing for home; and this longing is satisfied as God makes a home with us, promising to dwell with us in a new heavens and new earth forever (Revelation 21:2-3). Our home-life — our space-making — is now an opportunity to testify to this story. Peter describes the church both as the home of God — home with God (1 Peter 2:5), and as exiles (1 Peter 2:11)… like foreigners in Babylonian spaces and other temples that wage war against our souls.

We have a weird relationship to earthly space. We are not home. It is like every space not oriented towards heaven — the transcendent — is a non-place, oriented towards earth, and transient.

“In the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home.”
Marc Augé

We feel homeless in a world full of people who feel homeless; but we know where home is, and our neighbours don’t. This transient never-at-home-ness and the places built to satisfy that longing with earthly stuff — casinos and shopping-centre temples, even digital spaces — are expressions of a longing to be home with God; part of being exiled.

But we are home because God is going to renew earth and make it heavenly, and we are heavenly people who can make little embassies of heaven in anticipation… pointing to the transcendent.

Our spaces are not temples — we are the temples; the church is the people not the building — but because we are place-making humans made in the image of a place-making God, and we are formed by our habits, and our habits are formed by our habitats, our place-making is an act of worship and of cultivating the world according to our story; whether that is at home, in our workplaces, or in our public spaces — like the church. It is also an act of embassy-building for us citizens and ambassadors of heaven… as we live good lives in Babylon, navigating idol temples, while making good places.

Abstaining from sinful desires raging war against our soul (1 Peter 2:11) requires resisting scripts that want us to forget our story; the story of the Gospel by cultivating habits of saying no to Babylon; acting with deliberation where the world wants us to act like automatons.

So here are some guiding principles from all this — we have to grab control of our attention — wrestle it back from limbic capitalism and its addictive extinction machines. We have to pay attention to the scripts that are disorienting us; pulling our feet from the path — whether in the physical environments we enter, or the digital spaces we occupy and devices we use. This might even look like deliberately walking the wrong way at IKEA or the supermarket — or sticking to a list — to resist impulse buying, or blocking ads on your browser, or limiting your screen time.

Maybe we could catch the vision of the attentional commons — in the spaces we control, but also in public — there have been some Christians who have campaigned for G-rated outdoor advertising; I wonder if we should go further; fighting against the privatisation of public spaces, for the good of our neighbours, especially fighting against gambling ads. We could pay more attention to the insidious and addictive gambling industry and how entwined it is in our culture — it is not a small problem.

And we should notice how the same techniques are embedded in our culture, and our lives, through desire-shaping technology, and advocate for the regulation of online spaces and technologies in ways that limit their addictive potential, rather than participating in platforms that make us lonely and narcissistic and are designed to drive people to extinction.

We are not saved by good habits; but we are saved to become disciples who are home with God; saved to devote ourselves — and we are given new hearts, by the Spirit, and new tools to do it, and a new story. Saved to break bread together; to have glad and sincere hearts, and to praise God in ways that are recognisably good in a world facing extinction. We have got to see where we are being nudged, and push back accordingly. And one way to do this is by cultivating our own spaces with jigs that make good habits feel automatic.

Whether that means creating a spot in your house where your phone is charged that keeps it away from your pocket, or your bedroom at night — or working out how to keep good things within reach; whether that is art on your wall, or photos on your fridge prompting you to pray for others, or physical copies of your Bible close to hand, or a picture on your homescreen; or your Bible app in the shortcut bar on your phone so you have to deliberately scroll past it to get to your distractions…

We have to consider the physical architecture of our houses, and our lives; one of my big regrets in the design of our house is the way we have oriented our couch towards the TV; that fuels my gaming addiction, and makes the screen our default.

There are implications here for how we create and use public space like this building — church buildings should not be non-places, or disorienting temples to consumption that are another form of limbic capitalism; it is tricky because those temples, like the hanging gardens, are often imitation Edens.

There will be wisdom and discernment involved in avoiding designs that nudge us towards extinction; and in cultivating spaces that teach us about God and evoke our sense of his goodness; just as there is in creating communal dopamine hits that are humanising because they come from encountering God through our bodies, rather than addictive.

Whatever the future looks like for this building, or a space for our communities — we should resist creating places without stories and connection to history and to people — living and dead — and should create places where community happens… places where we do not experience scripted disorientation, but Scriptured orientation — where we point our hearts towards God together; praising him through worship; through embodied life together in space and time.

This might include us appreciating the art on the walls downstairs as a picture of the faithfulness of a previous generation, but it might also involve us collaborating on new art, and beauty, and activities that bring life to this space. This might involve us resisting a tendency towards transient nomad life or being travellers, and seeking to put down roots; in space and time — but with our eyes looking towards our eternal home. This might involve us cultivating hospitality and habits and pictures of life and generosity that flow from here — like with Food Pantry and lunch together — in ways that celebrate God’s presence with us, as temples of his Spirit, and look forward to his hospitality in the new Eden.

September 5, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Six — A world of (im)pure imagey-nations

This is an adaptation of the sixth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

How does this image make you feel? Is your stomach rumbling?

What about this one? Are you salivating just a little?

And what about this one — can you imagine sitting in this lounge room?

How about this kitchen? How does it make you feel about your house?

It’s interesting — isn’t it — the way images work in our minds to create desires.

I could have shown you images of beautiful people — but I’m trying to keep things PG and these pictures of food came from the #foodporn and #houseporn hashtags on Instagram.

It’s not just Instagram that stokes our desire for food or furniture — you can have your senses tantalised on MasterChef, or My Kitchen Rules — and you can cultivate dissatisfaction with your kitchen appliances on The Block.

The Block had extra drama in 2022, with a couple bailing after one episode; because it wasn’t on-brand for them — it didn’t mesh with their image; Elle Ferguson’s in the image business… she’s a world-famous Instagram influencer. Being an influencer is a desirable new career path; the ABC is even reporting on children becoming professional influencers — and how powerful these influencers are.

It’s a tricky life. Aussie academic, Nina Willment, says influencers live with the constant threat of not being seen; if they don’t keep making content they might be punished by the machine overlords — the algorithm.

“The threat of invisibility is a constant source of insecurity for influencers, who are under constant pressure to feed platforms with content. If they don’t, they may be ‘punished’ by the algorithm – having posts hidden or displayed lower down on search results.”
Nina Willment, The Dark Side of Content Creation

But it’s not just influencers who reduce themselves to images and perform for a machine-like audience; in the age of expressive individualism, Instagram’s on hand inviting you to express yourself with the tools they provide.

Image making is part of being human; it’s what God does, and it’s part of images made in the image of an image maker (Genesis 1:27).

The catch is, when we live as images in a world where we have cut ourselves off from God — where we’re “buffered” — we’re not sure what image it is we’re meant to be like, and so we often end up choosing other people… And often it’s not just our parents, in our visual culture it’s celebrities — or, increasingly, influencers.

Christopher Hedges wrote the book Empire of Illusion, about life in a world dominated by images that are produced to manipulate us and keep us playing along with the image makers; the celebrity-making machines, and he says when we turn to celebrities — or influencers — as idealised forms of ourselves, it ends up impacting us; instead of being fully real, or fully self-actualised, we’re never sure who we are.

“Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully actualised, never fully real in a celebrity culture.”
Christopher Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Maybe we’re not buffered selves, but buffering — always trying to become who we are more fully, but never quite finished and ready to go.

With the sheer volume of evolving images how could we feel whole? We’re perpetually looking for the next image — whether that’s a meal, a house design, a holiday, a relationship, or some visionary version of ourselves.

In an article updating the argument in his book after Donald Trump’s election — Hedges says we’re worshippers of the electronic image — our modern-day idols shape our fantasies; our hearts and our lives. Even our interactions with others are shaped by all sorts of pixelated pictures, whether that’s through interacting on screens; or spending our time seeing people’s bodies in pixelated form.

“Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and fame they impart. We yearn to become idolised celebrities. We measure our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate.”
Hedges, Worshipping the Electronic Image

Hedges reckons Donald Trump’s reality TV instincts made him a perfect politician for the digital image world — he’s mastered the cultivation of political images — we saw this in this image during a series of FBI raids.

Bizarrely Trump seems to be the embodiment of all the vices from Colossians (Colossians 3:5), but his image-making machine controls the Republicans, and about 80% of people who identify as evangelical Christians in the US — and we might feel a world away, but consider how much of the imagery in our culture and on our screens is pumped out from the US…

Trump’s image-making is catching — those following his playbook can look like images in a live action role playing game, or like they’re playing multiple characters at once.

This isn’t new; we’ve always been shaped by images — once it was stained glass windows, and paintings that told the story about an enchanted cosmos, what’s new is the medium; and it’s much cheaper to make a digital photo than a stained glass window; today our icons are the pictures flashing across our screens.

“In the Middle Ages, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And it’s not just foodporn, obviously — porn itself is embedded in our culture and our imaginations — our image making. Both as an image maker and in the way its norms flow into the way human bodies are presented in advertising and entertainment.

Hedges is a lapsed Presbyterian minister who became an award-winning war correspondent — his book has a whole chapter on porn — and it’s like he’s covering a war; it has way too much information to be comfortable reading — he reckons porn both shapes and mirrors the violence, cruelty and degradation in our society the same way war can; and that porn is producing a loss of empathy by reducing human beings — and human bodies — to being commodities.

“The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy… It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

He suggests porn is part of a society that kills both the sacred and the human, replacing empathy and human desire — eros — and compassion with power, control, force and pain — and the idea that we are gods, and others will literally bend to our fantasies…

“It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods… Porn is the glittering façade… of a culture seduced by death.”
Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And we’re seeing the costs of this society in our society — in our schools even — I read this news story about how young boys raised on porn are sexually assaulting their classmates in record numbers.

Melinda Tankard Reist from Collective Shout wrote about the impact of porn not just in assault, but in the expectations placed on teen girls in dating relationships a few years ago where she said the culture, for teens shaped by porn, is that sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy, and authentic human connection — that young people are learning cruelty and humiliation not intimacy and love — this is what happens when we’re just bodies ruled by desire, or see each other just as pixelated images in the flesh, where our desires have been shaped by dehumanising images.

“Sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy and authentic human connection. Young people are not learning about intimacy, friendship and love, but about cruelty and humiliation.”
Melinda Tankard Reist

The culture we live in that commodifies people by turning them into images isn’t just happening in Instagram, or porn, it’s shaping dating — our relationships are increasingly mediated by digital images. One third of all new romantic relationships now begin online, it’s the most common way people get together.

And platforms like OkCupid — who promise dating for every single person — that’s clever — and who can even cater for niches like “people who like kissing while sitting in pie.”

Success on these sites requires cultivating an image that’ll make you attractive to others. And pictures create heaps more interaction than words; they have run studies.

David Brooks — who writes for the New York Times — wrote an article about online dating in 2003, celebrating how it was reintroducing a formal structure and ritual to dating, which he thought had been lost:

“Online dating puts structure back into courtship. For generations Americans had certain courtship rituals.”
David Brooks, Love: Internet Style, New York Times, 2003

He reckoned these platforms were all about love…

“But love is what this is all about. And the heart, even in this commercial age, finds a way.”
Brooks, 2003

In 2015 he wrote another piece — and he had changed his tune — he noticed something about the way these platforms worked — when we go to an online dating site on the same browser they use for their online shopping, we inevitably bring the same mindset — we shop for human beings. He says these platforms commodify people particularly by reducing people to a picture.

“People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t… It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people.”
David Brooks, ‘The Devotion Leap,’ New York Times, 2015

And this process is more or less the opposite of love.

“Online dating is fascinating because it is more or less the opposite of its object: love.”
Brooks, 2015

Things have become more complex since 2015 — dating sites like OkCupid have lost market share to apps focused on instant gratification and immediate availability; where even the rituals of the old web dating have been deconstructed with a swipe of the finger, and where image is everything.

Photography itself is interesting — it has rapidly evolved as part of everyday life since the mechanisation of camera production in the 70s; before then most people didn’t spend time taking photos; even then cameras had built-in limits — like film — but the jump from mechanical to digital means we now have a seemingly unlimited capacity to capture every moment — and then see everything on our screens.

Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay ‘On Photography‘ in the 70s where she was worried then that to capture and shoot images was an act of aggression — think of the words “capture” and “shoot.”

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography

Photographers, she says, are “always imposing standards on their subjects,” and objectifying them.

She saw the need — once families had cameras — to capture every moment as an addictive aesthetic consumerism.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
Sontag, On Photography

She suggests industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies, and this bombardment of imagery becomes an irresistible form of mental pollution.

“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
Sontag, On Photography

This was before the smartphone. Imagine how she would feel about the digital society…

Have you thought about it this way? The idea that images are polluting our brains, and shaping our desires, and reshaping our bodies — but we’re bombarded with images and these images shape our desires and produce reactions in our bodies; and we’re being discipled by our digital society — even by algorithms — to interact with images and present ourselves as images… and normally as images that keep making people more money, by stoking more desires and selling us the answer.

God made us as image bearers to see… to imagine… and to make images.

God made beauty.

He made fruit that was pleasing to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:9); but this visualising — our capacity to imagine — either leads us to or away from God. “Pleasing to the eye” and “good for food” is how Eve sees the fruit she’s been told is not good to eat too (Genesis 3:6). Then this pattern of seeing and desiring and being led to destructive sin repeats — it’s the same story with the Nephilim (Genesis 3:6, 6:2), and with David and Bathsheba (Genesis 3:6, 2 Samuel 11:2-4).

This relationship between sin and desire is also caught up in idolatry — so the Ten Commandments include a command not to make graven images of God (Exodus 20:4-5); and Deuteronomy commands Israel to watch themselves carefully and to avoid making images of living things to worship them (Deuteronomy 4:15-18), because those images will profoundly shape our vision of God and our life in the world.

What do you think Moses would have said about Instagram?

It’s interesting, though, that Israel’s holy spaces — the tabernacle and temple — involve man-made images of trees and fruit (Exodus 25:36); Israel’s eyes and bodies are meant to participate in worship — and making beautiful images of things God made can be part of that — but you won’t find carved images of God; or of animals, or of men or women — images of images of God, because Israel weren’t to worship images; they’re to be images… as soon as we reduce God to an image, or make an image our god, we’re working with a false picture of God; a God who is an image of our making.

This tendency to turn images into gods is pretty ingrained — Ezekiel talks about idols being set up in our hearts; the seat of our desires and loves (Ezekiel 14:4-5)… That’s where images go… Isaiah re-tells an idol making session with someone cooking food over one half of a chunk of wood, then carving an image of a god with the other (Isaiah 44:15), and he says something those of us who live with our phones wedged into our hands with our eyes hunched over giving all our attention… “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?” (Isaiah 44:20).

Are not these images that bombard me, and keep me looking down, and that shape my desires — aren’t they built on the same lies; the same call to misplace our desire, that the serpent used with Eve… Won’t they leave me always dissatisfied? Humans have always been fixated by images.

The New Testament church lived in an image-saturated world — there were statues of the emperors and the Roman gods everywhere; temples on every hill and corner in a city — they also lived in an age of spectacle that upheld the imagery; the degradation of human bodies in blood sports and sexual immorality — and this presented a major challenge for the early church;

They were pretty serious about Jesus’ commands on lust and the heart, and the idea of your eyes causing you to stumble (Matthew 5:28-29), and about his teaching on the eyes and the heart being linked (Matthew 6:21-22). For them, even attending the Roman spectacles; these games, was seen not simply as renouncing your Christian faith, but as announcing you belonged to the ancient empire of illusion. They wanted to cultivate a way of seeing the world that helped them see God, and so live as his images.

Two Aussie theologians — Ben Myers and Scott Stephens — co-wrote a paper about disciplining our eyes in a visual culture; they reckon we also live in a society of spectacle and one of our great moral challenges is deciding what images to look at.

Christians today live in a society of the spectacle. Our lives are dominated to an unprecedented degree by images and by the moral act of looking at them.

Without minimising the damage that sexual imagery does to us; they suggest all imagery is essentially pornography.

“All images today are pornographic: they arouse—but without danger, obligation, or contamination.”
Myers and Stephens, ‘The Discipline of the Eyes: Reflections on Visual Culture, Ancient and Modern,’ in HTML of Cruciform Love: Towards a Theology of The Internet

We’re so conditioned to objectify and worship — that imagery in ads and in social media streams arouse us without the danger of embodied commitment; without creating obligation, or without the complications that come when we actually use our bodies. And the spectacle shapes us.

And I know that some of us are here and we’re struggling with lust; with addiction to porn, and I’m not wanting to minimise that by saying that most of us are struggling with image addiction, in a machine world where the algorithms are geared towards ruining us by making us consumers — I don’t want to minimise it, but maybe I want to reframe the conversations about porn so that you see it as part of a dehumanising world that has objectified and commodified everything and everyone, where we’re taught that a fulfilled life is one where we satisfy our every longing and desire and that we can do this just with imagery — and maybe I think the rest of us should be confronting our own addictions too…

It’s easy for us to look across the ocean and judge the image-driven life of American politics; but ours is the same. It’s easy for us to throw stones at churches built on image, where that goes wrong — like at Hillsong’s New York campus where the image cultivation machine was operating in overdrive. But what about in our church? How do we go about avoiding the worship of images — whether that’s online, or the way we express ourselves?

This is something I’ve been pretty aware of as someone who lives online in an image-soaked world — I’ve resisted selfies, I don’t post or scroll on Instagram, I do scroll Facebook, and find myself comparing and contrasting to all sorts of people — especially other pastors. The sin of comparison will kill you just like any other. One of the ways I compare myself is that I hate when churches post photos from within a church service, especially of preachers — in a way that just creates a sort of #churchporn. Where are you engaged in image-based comparison? What spectacles can’t you turn your eyes from? What online images are shaping your hearts?

We aren’t going to think our way out of idolatrous practices that shape our desires; our loves; our worship — we actually need a new way of life; a new sort of worship and a new image to pursue.

How do we become worshipping images, where images — even the pictures on the screen — help us worship God rather than conforming our imaginations?

This, I take it, is what Paul is teaching the Colossians to do in their own world of idolatrous spectacle; he starts his letter by introducing Jesus as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15-16). Jesus is the one worthy of our worship, because in him and for him all things on heaven and earth were created; and because he has redeemed us and is reconciling us to God…

And then he calls his readers away from idolatry by calling us to lift our eyes; not focusing on the images we’re inclined to worship; but because we’ve been raised with Jesus and because he’s seated at the right hand of God in heaven, and that’s our future and what should be our desire; we should fix our hearts and minds on things above (Colossians 3:1-2); and this’ll mean cultivating a new way of looking at the world.

Because we’re called to take off the old self — with its practices (Colossians 3:9-10), that’s going to include practices of seeing, as we put on a new self with new practices of seeing and worshipping, so that we’re renewed in the image of its creator — which Paul says back in chapter 1 is not just the Father, but Jesus as well.

We’re to put to death what belongs to our earthly nature (Colossians 3:5-6) — a nature shaped by worshipping earthly stuff — seeing, desiring, and taking — by how we approach sex, lust, desire, and greed — which is idolatry — and I reckon Paul’s saying the stuff that belongs to our earthly nature is idolatry — these are paths to death; to God’s wrath. So kill them.

And take up new life — clothing ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience, and forgiveness — seeing others the way God sees them — and ourselves as God sees us — and over all this; love — the virtue that binds them all (Colossians 3:12-14).

When Paul talks about practices in the world — and with others — and these virtues — these practices have to include new ways of looking at the world, and at others — we can’t look at the world, and others, as objects to be consumed — lusted after — desired. That’s deadly idolatry. That’s what porn is; it cultivates death in you — your eyes, your heart, your body are all being aligned to death — but it’s also what any idolatrous image making and image-viewing does for us; instead we should be looking at others and at the things God made in order to learn compassion and kindness and humility — self-denial — gentleness and patience — these are the virtues opposite to pornworld and the age of instant gratification; and when we embrace these new patterns of looking it should transform our community so that we are images who look like Jesus in compelling and truly human ways.

The sort of practices we’re going to need are — like last week — ascetic — cultivating the discipline not to look; to self-deny — and aesthetic — cultivating an ability to look through the goodness and beauty of created things; and to use our desires and our eyes in ways that throw us towards the one in whom all things are made and reconciled.

But we need a third practice; too — one of keeping Jesus — keeping heavenly realities before our eyes, and shaping our hearts — so that as we say no to idolatry and yes to beauty our hearts are being governed by the image we worship; the image of God. This’ll be what stops us being buffered — closed off to God — and buffering — never fully human — we become fully human as we worship God who made us, and are renewed as his image bearers.

In terms of saying no — you might need to do an audit of your image viewing; being confronted with images in an age of spectacle is inevitable, but what can you do to not just turn your eyes, but keep your eyes looking where they should be. What apps do you need to delete? Delete them now. Just say no. What social media platforms or TV shows or games or magazines are cultivating your idolatry? Step back from them until you can step into them as an image bearer captivated by Jesus.

Job has that famous line about making a covenant with his eyes not to look at a woman lustfully (Job 31:1-2) — and there’s an app you might use to fight porn called Covenant Eyes, but if all imagery is pornographic — maybe we all need to make commitments not to look lustfully at sex, or violence, or food, or symbols of wealth, or whatever it is that turns our heart… and the word lustfully here is key; it doesn’t say don’t look at beautiful people or things God made; it’s about our hearts.

Ben Myers and Scott Stephens reckon we need to — in community — cultivate visual disciplines; periods of asceticism — where we put the screens down — as necessary parts of our spiritual life.

“Do Christian communities still believe it is possible to cultivate visual disciplines, and periods of visual asceticism, as necessary parts of the spiritual life? Do we recognize the moral value of providing havens from the dominance of the image, while also nourishing alternative traditions of perception?”
Myers and Stephens

They reckon this sort of discipline is necessary to give our eyes a break.

This is one of the reasons we do so little on social media and the web as a church — there are other reasons, like not wanting to put church forward as an “image” thing to be consumed — but you don’t need your screen. And we need to cultivate other ways of using our eyes; our perception as well.

Myers and Stephens remind us that we can see one another — the faces of living saints — as part of being shaped by images, but also suggest works of art might play a part. In Christian traditions other than ours; like the ones with stained glass storytelling; people’s imaginations were formed — catechised — using pictures; art.

“Do we offer catechesis in the use of holy images, whether these are works of art or the faces of living saints?”
Myers and Stephens

We Protestants tend not to have an aesthetic, or a sense of the place of art and beauty — both making and appreciating it — in our lives as a form of discipline or disciple making; art is a life-giving alternative to the death-taking imagery of porn and advertising…

And here’s where we might cultivate what Alan Noble calls an aesthetic life as a disruptive witness to the world — a life that values and even collects beauty because beautiful things — art, poems, flowers — create an allusionary sense that the world is enchanting, in a world of illusionary images, we need these allusionary images — images that allude to the beauty and character of God as creator.

“What makes a work of art, a poem, or a flower beautiful is the way it suggests more, the way it opens up possibilities, the way it alludes to other things in creation.”
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

He reckons this approach to aesthetics resists commodification — recognising beauty and the creatureliness or createdness of people and things reminds us of the creator; and reminds us we’re not just commodities where nothing matters — the world doesn’t just exist for our grasping; but is shot through with meaning that we’re meant to probe, as humans.

“Aesthetics reveals an irreducible universe — a universe that resists our attempts at totalizing and controlling it, that is always just out of grasp, that always offers us a little more meaning.”
Noble

This might even involve how we decorate our homes, and the food we serve on our tables — not just with images from Instagram; where people are trying to cultivate a sense of self through performance, but images that have a more artistic and allusionary quality that pull us towards the enchanted world; it might also involve practising noticing beauty in creation without taking photos at all, connecting with God’s world — and your body — and receiving beauty with thanksgiving.

Paul’s big solution to guide us as we do this is that we let the message of Christ dwell among us richly as we teach and admonish one another — with wisdom — contemplation of God’s world and how to live in it — through creativity; through poetry — through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit — songs we humans create as temples of the Spirit in response to setting our hearts on things above, and through engaging our voices and hearts as we sing to God — with gratitude in our hearts.

And his goal is that whatever we do — whatever images we make or see — as we live as renewed images — whatever we do we’re to do in the name of the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father through him. If you can’t do that when you encounter or create an image, then there’s a good chance it’s an idol (Colossians 3:15-17).

September 3, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Five — Sense and Sensuality

This is an adaptation of the fifth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

I’m going to open this piece with a content warning — we are talking about sex, and mostly in a “heteronormative” way; not at the expense of acknowledging LGBTIQA+ desires and attractions. In fact, I hope to acknowledge these desires and experiences as real and important, while providing an account of the Bible’s view of sex and marriage. I recognise that this will be hard for many of us to sit with, for a whole bunch of reasons — but sex is an unavoidable part of being human; it is our personal origin story (as in, you had parents), and it is part of navigating life in the modern world, whether you are having sex or not — or wanting to, or not.

I am going to kick off this week with a recap of where we have been as we hit the halfway point in this series. We started out asking why the modern Western world seems to be fragmenting us, leaving us overwhelmed while robbing us of a common narrative.

We have seen — following Charles Taylor — how part of that loss involves a shift from life in an enchanted cosmos to a disenchanted universe, and this has left us not as people open to outside forces, like God, but as “buffered selves”: liberated individuals who are finding freedom and identity in expressing our inner self authentically, often using the technology we create to overcome, or even escape, the limits of our bodies.

I know that has been overwhelming — and long — and a lot to take in. But so is modern life — and we need to try to work out what is going on, and how we should live, if we are going to be humans who live lives integrated with God’s design for our humanity.

One of the challenges we face with the loss of one big story is that we are now often living in multiple stories at once, that often compete. We have often incorporated stories about being human into our lives as Christians. So where last week we looked at a desire to escape our bodies using wires, this week we are going to look at how our bodies are wired for desire.

There has been a subtle shaping to our themes. Week by week across the term we are following the shape of our humanity that we find in the story of the Bible, starting with our origin story.

We have moved from the Triune God as creator (Genesis 1:1), to what it means to be made in his image — as individuals and in community (Genesis 1:27), to how we exercise dominion over the world through our creating — our technology (Genesis 1:28), to how we are given bodies, and souls, and the limits of life in time and space as gifts from God (Genesis 2:7–8).

We are working our way through Genesis 1 and 2 — asking what we are made to do — then seeing how sin and curse deform the image we represent, and how Jesus redeems and restores us, and what it looks like to have our future shape life as humans in our present.

Which means, as we step through Genesis — today we are talking about desire and sex:

We are people with bodies equipped with senses, geared towards sensual enjoyment of beautiful and delicious things made by God. Genesis tells us the trees in the garden were “pleasing to the eye” and “good for food” — both statements involve our senses (Genesis 2:9). Part of this picture of senses and goodness and embodied life involves intimacy with other humans — and even sex between humans — a man and wife — united as one flesh (Genesis 2:18, 24).

Our bodies and souls and minds are interconnected in profound ways. Desires are a place where they come together. Our emotions are not just things we think or feel in our brains — they are experienced all over our bodies. You can map desires and emotions on your body using heat maps — and even more:

Feelings and movements light up our bodies the same way; our pleasures and pains feed back into our desires.

The push away from the body is made even stranger when we consider how we learn our desires through our bodies.

In the modern world, where we have replaced God, one of the most natural things to replace God with is our desires. We have created a new social imaginary — a new way to understand being human that makes it impossible to imagine a good life without our bodily desires being fulfilled. Thanks to cultural and technological changes like the pill, and increasingly visual media technology, sexual desires have become one of the primary expressions of sensuality and desire.

This has created a phenomenon asexual author Angela Chen describes as “compulsory sexuality,” where sex becomes a necessary human experience. If you think it is hard to navigate life in the modern world, imagine navigating it as an asexual person — that is the “A” in LGBTIQA+. Asexuals do not experience sexual attraction, and so live in a world built on desires that are foreign to their experience.

Chen says the myth that we have to be sexual to be human is built on two parts — first, a society saturated with sexual imagery:

“The sex myth, which is an extension of compulsory sexuality, has two parts. One is obvious: sex is everywhere and we are saturated in it, from song lyrics to television shows to close-ups of women’s lipsticked mouths eating burgers, meat juice trickling down their throats.”
Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

And second, the idea that sexual pleasure and sexual desires are ultimate:

“The second part is the belief that ‘sex [is] more special, more significant, a source of greater thrills and more perfect pleasure than any other activity humans engage in.’ No sex means no pleasure, or no ability to enjoy pleasure.”
Angela Chen

It does not take much to jump from that to a view that being who you are sexually — embracing and expressing your desires — is the key to being truly human.

This goes in some increasingly strange places for people who cannot get that desire fulfilled and end up turning to technology.

There is a growing trend where people marry fictional characters and engage with them virtually; and one futurist predicts that within the next twenty years robots are going to be the answer to our sexual desires — maybe even for most people:

“There are millions of people out there who, for various reasons, don’t have anyone to love or anyone who loves them. And for these people, I think robots are going to be the answer.”
David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots

There is a whole industry devoted to developing that technology. And of course there is porn and electronic images — that we will consider more next week.

We find it hard to believe that a person can flourish without expressing our sexual desires, or at least articulating them as core to our personhood. This has produced more complexity — creating an environment where our attempts to articulate our desires and identity involve an ever-expanding vocabulary.

And maybe you are here — and you are over fifty — and even though you have lived through or after the sexual revolution, you are thinking “this is all too much; there are new labels all the time.” I want to suggest this new world is confusing for everyone, which is why there is an ongoing evolution of language and behaviours as people express themselves.

You might be at the point in your life where you also reckon all this stuff about sex is for young people, or for married people, but I want to suggest sex is an embodied desire that Paul uses to talk about how we use our bodies; and you still have bodies — and the role you play in a church community and in your families means it is worth trying to understand what is going on as you guide younger folks in how to steward our bodies and cultivate godly desires.

Like any idolatrous social imaginary, this is damaging — not least because this mythology we live by is typically built around male sexual desire. In a satisfaction-at-all-costs world where “nothing is sacred” about our bodies except autonomy and consent, this has produced what has been called “porn culture,” which is destructive for women — for everyone really — where we are taught women’s bodies exist to satisfy men.

One Christian response to the shifting modern world has been to assume that sexuality is fundamental to our humanity, and to build what has been called “purity culture.” Katelyn Beaty wrote about this for The New York Times in a piece titled ‘How Should Christians Have Sex‘. Purity culture includes the idea that marriage is where desire is satisfied, but particularly that a wife’s job is basically to manage her husband’s uncontrollable urges. As an unmarried woman she has found purity culture dehumanising. She says:

“Rather than emphasize the gift of sex within marriage, purity culture typically led with the shame of having sex outside of it… Young women, who were expected to manage men’s lust as well as their own, fared the worst.”
Katelyn Beaty, New York Times, ‘How Should Christians Have Sex’

But at the same time, she wants to recognise that our bodies are not nothing; and that sex actually involves the coming together of bodies and souls:

“So when a person engages another person sexually, Christians would say, it’s not ‘just’ bodies enacting natural evolutionary urges but also an encounter with another soul. To reassert this truth feels embarrassingly retrograde and precious by today’s standards… I yearn for guidance on how to integrate faith and sexuality in ways that honour more than my own desires in a given moment.”
Beaty

She is after a way to integrate her faith and sexuality in ways that move beyond her desires in any given moment — and that offer more than simply consent and “anything goes” as a way forward. And maybe that is you.

Katherine Angel is an author who has tried to explore a secular way beyond a sexual ethic just based on consent — and consent is important. In her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again she argues the issues leaving us cold and unsatisfied are built on inequality in how sex happens in our society, where women have been robbed of agency, and where the focus is on male gratification at all costs:

“Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs.”
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

She argues none of us is actually that good at articulating our desires in order to consent to what we want; and that we explore our desires and find fulfilment where there is openness and vulnerability in our pursuit of intimacy and mutuality, because we come to understand our desires as we use our bodies with that sort of connection. This is hard to do for buffered selves:

“The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something that lies in wait, fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing.”
Angel

I think she is right — not just about sex — but about the way our desires intersect with our humanity and our relationships.

Two thinkers are particularly helpful here. The first is James K. A. Smith, who pushes the idea that we are lovers; that ultimately, we are what we love:

“To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. And you are what you love.”
James K.A Smith, You Are What You Love

We are not “brains on sticks,” or just meat sacks; we are pulled through the world by our love — our desire — and we cultivate our desires through bodily practices:

“We are not conscious minds or souls ‘housed’ in meaty containers; we are selves who are our bodies; thus the training of desire requires bodily practices…”
Smith

He reframes the idea of eros — one of the Greek words for love, where we get “erotic” — which he argues has been given a bad name in a pornified world:

“Human beings are fundamentally erotic creatures. Unfortunately — and for understandable reasons — the word ‘erotic’ carries a lot of negative connotations in our pornographied culture… In its truest sense, eros signals a desire and attraction that is a good feature of our creaturehood.”
Smith

This has left us ill-equipped to see how our erotic natures — our sensuality — are part of our creatureliness; our bodies. There is a natural response to beauty that is God-given and meant to be God-directed — it is just corrupted by sin.

Sarah Coakley — an Anglican priest and theologian — argues we live in a world shaped by Freud’s beliefs about fulfilling sexual desires being the basic urge at the heart of our humanity, with his idea that God is a projection. She says we have to flip that: it is desire for God that is our most basic need, and we have tried to fulfil that erotic desire with sex and idolatry, but these desires are a clue that tugs at the heart to remind our souls of our need for God:

“It is not that physical ‘sex’ is basic and ‘God’ ephemeral; rather, it is God who is basic, and ‘desire’ the precious clue that ever tugs at the heart, reminding the human soul — however dimly — of its created source.”
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity

So here is the working idea for this week: we are made — male and female — in the image of the God who is love; the Triune God is an ecstatic communion of life and love that generates love that overflows into creation. Our desires are not just sexual, but sensual, and our desires are meant to direct us to God.

The way it is “not good” for Adam to be alone (Genesis 2:18) is because this image-bearing is impossible, not because he is a sexual man and needs an outlet, but because we are made as embodied people for intimacy and love who image God by loving in ways that generate life and love — and even more image-bearers. The way Eve is made from his side in order that they might become one is a description of our orientation to love; to unite ourselves in love in ways that generate love, and that can generate life (Genesis 2:22, 24). This was meant to happen in relationship with God. I am not saying that the only way to be human is to have sex and create children; but I am saying that being human means being designed to love in communion with God and others, and that one way such love is expressed is in sex and love in a one-flesh relationship as husband and wife.

This oneness is not just expressed in marriage. Paul is clear it is also expressed in the church, as the body of Jesus. But sin means our desires misfire. We have lost a way of being human because our sin has turned our hearts and desires in on ourselves, so we pursue self-gratification rather than self-giving in our relationships, with our bodies in the driving seat.

Jesus talks about our desires and our hearts when he talks about storing up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:20–21), and what or who we serve being a matter of our love and devotion. He says we can only really serve one God; one master (Matthew 6:24), which is tricky in a world that has idolised sex and money and made us masters of our own lives. This idea is going to shape how we think about sex and sexuality and the way we fulfil those desires as humans, but also how “treasuring heaven” might play out in not having sex — turning that desire upwards.

Jesus lived an embodied life perfectly shaped by his desire for the kingdom of heaven — and without sex. He talks about eunuchs — and this fruitful way of being fruitfully human without sex or procreation (Matthew 19:12). He says some people are born this way; perhaps born without sexual desires — and there is a massive rabbit hole we could go down around the idea of asexuality that is part of the LGBTIQA acronym — and the way our eros-based society feels like it eradicates the possibility of people who just do not desire sex. Or perhaps he is talking about those who cannot engage in sex — as a result of trauma, or medical procedures, or the nature of their bodies — and if that is you, Jesus sees you, even if our world does not, or if it dehumanises you.

And there are those who are “made eunuchs” by others. In the ancient world eunuchs were people who had been castrated in order to serve royal households — not quite the nuclear royal family; they had key roles at the heart of a kingdom on the basis that they were not able to have sex.

There is an interesting thread where 2 Kings and Isaiah both prophesy that in exile, Babylon will make young Israelites into eunuchs — which, if fruitful life is tied to procreation or the satisfaction of sexual desire, is a pretty big deal (2 Kings 20:18; Isaiah 39:7). There is a good case to be made that Daniel and his friends — chosen as prime physical specimens and handed not to the chief official, but literally to the head of the eunuchs — would have been made eunuchs in order to serve in the king’s household the way they did (Daniel 1:3–4).

Jesus sees a place in the kingdom for those whose bodies have experienced these changes in a world that produces a way of life and a vision for the body different to God’s Edenic vision — whether because of the way a broken world is reflected in non-Edenic bodies, or the politics of the body, or idolatry, or medical treatment for cancer. This is not dismissing the way male and female bodies were created to come together, but we cannot elevate that vision at the expense of those who experience embodied life differently; or those who choose to live like eunuchs — without sex — for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

This is such a profound passage for modern debates about our bodies, and I am not going to do it justice here. There are people in our community — both gay and straight — who, in order to use their bodies faithfully, are denying their erotic desires for other humans, while redirecting their hearts and bodies towards the kingdom of heaven; towards love for God, in ways that should teach us all about what it looks like to love God ultimately and be shaped by that love in a world built on the belief that sexual fulfilment is ultimate.

Finally, to 1 Corinthians 6. I think Paul has Jesus’ words in view when he writes about how we are to use our bodies and direct our sexual desires, because our bodies are temples of his Spirit and have been redeemed by God to be used for his glory (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Paul applies this to how we approach sex and marriage, and he will go on to apply it to how we indulge our bodies in eating and in worship.

Paul picks up the Genesis 2 idea that our bodies are made for love and oneness. First, with a metaphor about food — he quotes something someone from Corinth has said justifying using our bodies for whatever desire we see fit (1 Corinthians 6:12–13). Their idea is that if our bodies are meant for food, and food for our body, and it is all going to be destroyed, should we not just eat whatever we want?

This is clearly a metaphor for sexual immorality — literally porneia. Paul says our bodies are not meant for idolatrous sexual desires and behaviours, but for the Lord (1 Corinthians 6:13). What we unite our bodies to matters, because we are already united to God via the Spirit. We are not meant to join God to people not joined to God — or whom we are not united to in marriage — through sex (1 Corinthians 6:15–16). He particularly has temple prostitutes in mind in Corinth, but our approach to sex in the modern world is no less idolatrous.

Some want to see “the two becoming one flesh” in Genesis 2 as about kinship — and “one flesh” language can describe family — but Paul clearly reads Genesis as about a union of bodies created through sex.

What we do with our bodies — what we unite them to — shows who we belong to. This is the New Testament case for marriage being between a male and a female — ideally between other temples of the Holy Spirit. Marriage of male and female bodies is a way to live according to our origin story that tells God’s story of two different kinds of image-bearing people — male and female — being united in love the way Adam and Eve were, but also the way Jesus and the church are, as Paul puts it in Ephesians where he again goes back to Genesis 2 and two becoming one flesh to say this is a picture of Jesus and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32).

How we use our bodies — how we pursue our desires, or do not — reflects our love for God, and God’s love for us. At the same time it teaches us about God’s love. So we should flee sexual immorality because we are sinning against our bodies; we are rewriting our scripts, and our desires, and the story we belong to (1 Corinthians 6:17–18) — when instead we should be honouring God with our bodies. For Paul this shapes how we use our bodies sexually, or do not (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

He quotes another thing they have written to him about sex and says that married couples should have sex — with each other — to avoid immorality, and as an expression of their union. The way they use their bodies — as husband and wife — should be an expression of mutuality, belonging to each other, giving to one another in love, not just a one-way street. Married people are not our own (1 Corinthians 7:1–4). Notice too, his teaching here is not just about male desire and a wife’s duty to her husband — or just a wife’s consent — it is a dynamic of mutual giving to each other, not taking.

Paul, who is single, then unpacks a little more how being a “eunuch for the kingdom” plays out — he wishes everybody could be single like him; enjoying singleness as a gift from God (1 Corinthians 7:7–8). Imagine a world with compulsory sexuality grappling with this idea — maybe you find it hard to believe singleness is good — better, even.

Paul explains that he wants people to be freed from worldly concerns to set their hearts on God. He says an unmarried man can devote himself to God, while a married man will be concerned about pleasing his wife — rightly, I take it. An unmarried woman can devote herself to God — body and soul — while a married woman is concerned with pleasing her husband — rightly, I take it (1 Corinthians 7:32–34). Paul would love people to be able to give undivided devotion to God (1 Corinthians 7:35). This is life lived for the kingdom of heaven.

He will go on to talk about how Christians approach food and drink in idol temples, not making their bodies one with idols (1 Corinthians 10:20–21), and how they eat the Lord’s Supper in ways driven by sensuality and self-belonging and self-importance, rather than ways that recognise the body of Jesus and the way his death has brought about not only the redemption of our bodies through the forgiveness of our sins, but also the Spirit now dwelling in us (1 Corinthians 11:20–21). Therefore, they should eat differently — in ways that express we belong to each other (1 Corinthians 11:29, 33).

Life in the community of Jesus involves eating together — there is a sensuality in eating together — and this is meant to teach us about God’s love, just like the fruit trees in Eden, and to generate life and love in us so that we live together, with our bodies, as the body of Jesus. We remind ourselves that we are not our own. These practices with our bodies — practices of worship — are meant to shape our loves.

Honouring God with our bodies is not just going to be a result of new thinking, but of new practices that cultivate new desires — new worship — as people whose bodies are now temples of the Spirit; dwelling places of God, who are being transformed into the image of Jesus. This might mean letting the Spirit point our hearts towards heaven.

Here is where Taylor’s idea of a buffered self is interesting. Think of buffers as putting up walls. I reckon every time I consciously engage my body in idolatrous sin in the pursuit of fulfilling my desires, I have to deliberately shut my heart off to God. I have to pretend he is not in the picture, or that he does not care. I cannot serve two masters, and in those moments I am choosing to be the master — or, really, I am being mastered by desire.

We have to embrace being unbuffered; being open and vulnerable towards God — to live in the reality that he lives in us, all the time — and so to involve God as we use our bodies; as we pursue our desires.

Sarah Coakley describes prayerful contemplation as an act of openness — vulnerability — to divine action; where we allow ourselves to cooperate with the promptings of divine desire, trusting the Spirit will intervene for us and in us as we pray:

“Contemplation is an act of willed ‘vulnerability’ to divine action. In it, one cooperates with the promptings of divine desire… The contemplative encounter with divine mystery will include… an often painful submission to other demanding tests of ascetic transformation — through fidelity to divine desire, and thence through fidelity to those whom we love in this world.”
Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self

She calls this a submission to a master — to God — where we undertake tests of ascetic transformation (discipline and self-denial); being transformed by letting go of selfish desires and action, and aligning ourselves with God:

“What we discover in the adventure of prayer, in contrast to these other routes, is a gentle but all-consuming Spirit-led ‘procession’ into the glory of the Passion and Resurrection, a royal road to a ‘Fatherhood’… Here, in divinity, then, is a ‘source’ of love unlike any other, giving and receiving and ecstatically deflecting, ever and always.”
Coakley

She is talking about a prayerful practice where we invite the Spirit to lead us into the life and love of God in those moments where our desires might pull us from God. This all sounds mystical and weird until we remember we are temples of the Holy Spirit. Imagine yourself pursuing a desire — sinful or otherwise — and ask how conscious you are of God’s presence; how much you are seeking to honour him in those moments. How willing are you to be led by the Spirit in those moments, and what might it require to open yourself to seeing your body and your desires this way? It feels abstract until you imagine whether this sort of openness to God will lead to more honouring God with our bodies, or less — more love for God, or less.

I think this has implications for how those of us who are married use our bodies in marriage — where honouring God and seeking to teach one another about love in ways that are vulnerable, mutual, and not autonomous is key. We can bring buffered selves to our intimacy — pursuing our own gratification through others — and as a result fail to find intimacy. What might it look like to bring an openness to God and a desire to know him into our intimacy? And what might it look like to direct unfulfilled desires towards God in the same way, taking them to him in vulnerable prayer, trusting that they are God-given with the purpose of being God-directed?

This is the ascetic life of disciplining our desires. But I think we also need a new way of approaching aesthetics — a way of responding to beauty that turns us heavenward before desire kicks in.

There is something in what Paul says in 1 Timothy: when we are confronted with our desires we can respond by forbidding people to pursue desire — as people were in the first century — but Paul’s point is that God makes good things — beautiful things — and he makes good things to be enjoyed on his terms and received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:3).

There is a Christian purity-culture practice that Angela Chen writes about in her book — you might have heard of it — a practice that teaches men struggling with lust to, when they see an attractive woman — or man — “bounce their eyes” straight to the ground:

“Readers are instructed to ‘bounce your eyes’… which means immediately looking away from anyone who might trigger an impure thought. Visual repression starves the sexual appetite, supposedly.”
Chen, Ace

This ends up sexualising all attractive people as much as leering at them. Imagine never being able to make eye contact with another human because you cannot control your heart.

Maybe a better practice is not to bounce our eyes to the earth, but to raise them to the heavens and give thanks to God for beauty that is not ours to possess.

I have loved this idea since I read it in something Alan Noble wrote; he talks about a “double movement” — first acknowledging beauty where we find it, and then opening ourselves to God in that moment, turning to God in thanksgiving in ways that help us to love our neighbours. I have found this helpful in those moments I have managed to live as an unbuffered self, led by God’s Spirit in me, rather than the desires of my flesh:

“Simply put, the double movement is the practice of first acknowledging goodness, beauty, and blessing wherever we encounter them in life, and then turning that goodness outward to glorify God and love our neighbour.”
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

Maybe this is what it means to receive good things God has made with thanksgiving and consecrate them through prayer so that our desiring hearts are set on God.

September 2, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Four — Life in the cloud (is transhumanism the answer… and what is the question)

This is an adaptation of the fourth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

We have opened the last two chapters imagining the past; let’s look forward and imagine the future.

George Jetson was born July 31, 2022 — so the future is closer than you think.

Some of you are wondering who George Jetson is. He is a cartoon character from the past, who lived in the future — a future with flying cars and technology. Like smart watches. Zoom calls. Robot vacuums. Touchscreen remotes for controlling your smart house. They got some things right.

There are some more serious future predictions from the past landing soon too. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 quality of life would improve between four and eight times:

“All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is.”
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

We would be working fifteen hours a week — only because we would find the “old Adam,” the worker in the garden, hard to shake:

“For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented… Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.”
Keynes

This 2015 Atlantic article, ‘A World Without Work’ imagined automation and smart computers delivering this future. This is the promise of technology that many are working towards.

In a 2016 World Economic Forum paper, Justine Cassell predicted what computers would be able to do by 2030. She said computers would keep spreading, not just in our devices and appliances:

“We still have an image of computers as being rectangular objects either on a desk, or these days in our pockets; but computers are in our cars, they’re in our thermostats, they’re in our refrigerators.”
Justine Cassell, By 2030 This Is What Computers Will Do

But by 2030 we would see more biological computing. Not just seeing our bodies as computers, and our DNA like software, but merging our biological computers with real ones:

“You can think of biological computing as a way of computing RNA or DNA and understanding biotechnology as a kind of computer.”
Cassell

Smart, powerful computers will be everywhere — linking us to the machine so that ads can respond in real time to our emotions as we look at them, and robots will be making other robots as we become like robots:

“Everything from the information and entertainment sectors, that can imagine ads that understand your emotions when you look at them using machine learning; to manufacturing, where the robots on a production line can learn in real time as a function of what they perceive.”
Cassell

Sounds great.

More present future predictions come from organisations like Humanity Plus, who are elevating the human condition using science and technology to secure a better future. There are organisations working with genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology to hack the human; using machines, or merging us with machines, to make us more than human. Humanity Plus is a transhumanist organisation; part of a movement that wants to use technology to eliminate aging, and to enhance our intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

“The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”

“The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.”
Humanity+

An Australian academic working on this, Dr Elise Bohan, wrote a book called Future Superhuman where she calls transhumanism:

“A project of technological transcendence that aims to make us more than human.”

Dr Natasha Vita-More has been articulating a manifesto for transhumanism since 1983. She sees aging as a disease, with augmentation and enhancement of the body and brain as the cure:

“The Transhumanist Manifesto challenges the human condition. This condition asserts that aging is a disease, augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential to prevail, and that well-being is essential to prosper within safe and healthy environments.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto

Her manifesto declares our individual right to genetic liberty — to be free from disease and death — because we should own our own body, shape who we are, and live our own lives:

“Each person deserves the right of genetic liberty. People have a fundamental right to own their body, shape who they are, and live their lives.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto

This is a culmination of what we have unpacked over the last two weeks.

The idea is built on the assumption that we create ourselves.

That I am the architect of my existence, the author of my life. That my life should reflect my values — whether that is in the body or not; conveying the essence of my being, challenging all limits:

“I am the architect of my existence. My life reflects my vision and represents my values. It conveys the very essence of my being—coalescing imagination and reason, challenging all limits.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto

It is pretty clear in this model that our being is not limited to our bodies. There is some other essential bit of you or me that makes me me, and you you.

And to cap it all off — this will spread:

“Our unique ingenuity will spread far out into the capillaries of society. We are active participants in our own evolution. We are shaping the image of whom we are becoming.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto

Not made in God’s image, but re-making ourselves in our own image.

We will be gods.

This push to become the image of ourselves, as we imagine ourselves, is what happens when we are not living as the image of God anymore. When we no longer see our bodies as gifts from God.

This is not just a weird sci-fi tech thing at the fringes. You might not have encountered this thinking, but you are living in a world shaped by the tech. And it is not just tech — this thinking is happening in high fashion. So it will be in Kmart in a few years.

This Gucci fashion show called Cyborg in 2018 was called a parable about the possibility of being liberated from the confines of the natural condition we are born into.

It was a show celebrating the idea that our identity is liquid, and we can hack it with technology and the clothes we wear.

The show was set in an apocalyptic surgery, where transhuman creatures walked the runway wearing clothing and technology that displayed a transhuman future.

Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele said his show demonstrates:

“We are all the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives. Inventing, assembling, experimenting with identity as expressed through clothes, which can accompany you while you develop an idea of yourself.”
Alessandro Michele

And he concluded:

“We are in a post-human era, for sure; it is under way. Now, we have to decide what we want to be.”
Alessandro Michele

Now, there is plenty that is good about this sort of liberation — like we saw back in week one. We do not want to be imprisoned in bad and destructive pictures of humanity. Freedom to pursue what is true and good for us as humans, and to try it on, is good. Aging and death are also bad.

But this “new humanity” is also a product of the breakup with God; our need to define ourselves because we believe we belong to ourselves in a world closed off to God.

And our big tech gurus, who make the products you love, are all working towards a future with a picture of what it means to be human.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is investing in rockets because his vision is trillions of people colonising space. His company Blue Origin wants to open up the limitless resources of space to preserve earth:

“Blue Origin envisions a time when people can tap into the limitless resources of space and enable the movement of damaging industries into space to preserve Earth, humanity’s blue origin.”
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin

He has also invested in Altos, a biotechnology company fighting aging through cellular rejuvenation.

Mark Zuckerberg is investing in virtual reality — the metaverse — so you can put on a headset and go virtual fishing with family members across the planet, or maybe the galaxy.

This virtual reality is what he sees as the next logical step in technological evolution — from text, to photo, to video, to full immersion in the metaverse:

“You go from text, to photos, to video, the next logical step beyond that is having a medium where you can just be immersed in it, and feel like you’re right there with other people. That’s really the essence of what the metaverse is all about.”
Mark Zuckerberg

He believes it will feel real, and that we will want to hang out there. And maybe one day we will just plug in to virtual reality, digitise our consciousness, escape our bodies, and stay there forever — or at least until there is a power failure.

Elon Musk believes we are already living in that future, we just cannot tell. And if we are not, he has invested in breakthrough technology for the brain with his company Neuralink. Maybe that is how you win the simulation. He is developing an injectable mesh that will merge our brains with digital intelligence so we will control it, rather than having machines take over the world:

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”

David Porush, a techno-philosopher, describes this goal — to create a “magic technology” that will let us merge our brains with cyberspace:

“…a magic technology that will create a complete sensorium or virtual reality on a cybernetic platform; cyberspace, an accessible, self-referential, genre-destroying hyperspace, a soaring sensorium that will imitate, model, and link to its mirror image, the human brain.”
David Porush, Voyage to Eudoxia: The Emergence of a Post-Rational Epistemology in Literature and Science

…where we can live as immortal people who work and play in this new, clean, virtual Eden — where we are all going to flee when the physical world becomes an unlivable eco-disaster:

“We will become immortal there. It will enable us to combine work and play in a new way. Even the music will be better there. Cyberspace will be the new, clean, virtual Eden to which we will all emigrate when this physical world becomes an unlivable ecodisaster.”
David Porush

Sounds like heaven, right? Or something straight out of The Matrix — just without our fleshy bodies needing to be plugged in.

Much of this is built on a philosophy that sees the body as a “meat sack” to be overcome in order to push beyond our bodily limits. Hans Moravec is one of the early thinkers on this. He argues that we are not our machinery, but the processes that happen in our heads — the rest is “mere jelly”:

“Pattern-identity… defines the essence of a person, say myself, as the pattern and the process going on in my head and body, not the machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is jelly.”
Hans Moravec, cited in Why Transhumanism Won’t Work

But is that all our bodies are? Meat. Jelly.

Predicting the future is tricky, but our visions of the future are built from what we think it means to be human — meat and consciousness, body and soul — and where we think God fits.

These ideas about generating a new humanity through technology — whether you love them or find them terrifying — are disconnected from the idea that to be human is to reflect the image of God (Genesis 1:27). We are left constructing our own image. And yet, at the same time, many of the desires behind these technologies are fundamentally Christian — they are Christian heresies, rather than secular ones.

They are attempts — like Babel — to step into God’s role to bring heaven on earth: a world with no more death, or aging, or sickness — on our terms, using our technology — rather than seeing heaven as something built for humans, along with a new earth, by God (Revelation 21:3–4).

They are built on other Christian heresies — failures to hold furious opposites — particularly around what it means to be human (anthropology) and about the future (eschatology).

Mary Harrington coined a phrase I like to describe what is going on in this drive to transcend our human limitations — even our bodies — using technology. She reflects on the way that so many of us adopted new technological practices in digital spaces during COVID — lockdowns, Zoom meetings — that made it a little easier to imagine a “self,” or others, existing without a physical body. She says this dream of being free from bodily limitations is not new:

“If this is your normal, it’s not a big step to imagine a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with a physical body… But the dream of freeing human consciousness from the human body isn’t an internet-age invention.”
Mary Harrington

It is the ancient heresy called Gnosticism, which emerged when early Greek Christians fused the New Testament with Plato. In Gnosticism the material world and the body were dirty things to escape — to transcend to a higher, spiritual ideal via secret knowledge:

“One such was the body of thought that came to be known as ‘Gnosticism’, from gnosis or ‘knowledge’. What survives of their thinking suggests that for Gnostics, the material world was intrinsically evil and the task of humanity was to escape it.”
Mary Harrington

Harrington was reflecting on the economic inequality revealed in the pandemic — where many of us could escape to safety and work from behind screens, while those on the margins — think security guards or aged care workers — were forced by their circumstances to take up more risky shift work. She returned to the idea of a world without work, and a thinker back in 2018 — Aaron Bastani — who believed automation would create super-abundance and a machine-led revolution he called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, where robots would serve our every desire (like in Wall-E).

But she argues our new dream of freedom is freedom not just from work, but from our bodies — “Fully Automated Luxury Gnosticism.”

We are facing a bunch of new technologies geared at grabbing our attention, addicting us, and pulling us away from face-to-face, body-to-body interactions — where machines (like drones or robots), or perhaps a low-paid human controlled by an app, will deliver whatever we want almost immediately.

And the thing is, you do not need to want to escape your body into a computer to buy this gnostic vision of the human — one that disintegrates us. We have a version of this in the church, where we think of heaven as a disembodied liberation of the soul into some sort of cloudy, bodiless realm, or when we think that our bodies are not fundamentally part of our humanity — that the “real us” is our soul, or inner self.

Some aspects of transhumanism — some of its technologies — are expressions of us co-creating with God; joining with God in anticipation of the renewal of all things; using technology to change our bodies and make them more like the heavenly bodies we read about in 1 Corinthians. Most of us will not blink at fighting cancer or illness with technology, or having surgery. And the New Testament expects our bodies — our humanity — to be transformed. And yet, other aspects of transhumanism are an idolatrous attempt to rewrite ourselves and escape creatureliness and our human limits to become like God on our own steam. We have to work out how to hold our creatureliness and our transformation in tension — as we also hold our spiritual and physical nature in tension. I believe it is tricky — and one of the keys to doing this with wisdom is keeping these poles live and part of the conversation when we are assessing technologies, and having our humanity — body and soul — shaped by the story we are inhabiting as followers of Jesus.

Our bodies are not simply jelly or meat that we should mould as we construct our own identity according to some spiritual or psychological self — it is not that simple. Our bodies are a vocation. Stewarding them as gifts from God is part of our created calling as embodied bearers of God’s image.

In Genesis God forms a man by forming a body, then breathes life — the breath of life — into him. In the Greek Old Testament, he breathes the psyche — the word for “soul” — into the body. The human is not human without both (Genesis 2:7).

Now, obviously, the Fall impacts this — sin, death, curse, frustration. Our bodies now break and die and are not so clearly and neatly realised, even when it comes to biological sex. This frustration impacts our psychology, not just our physiology — and even these are deeply integrated, so that experiences in the body, like trauma, impact our well-being and rewire our brains. There may be a disconnect between our psychology and our physiology. But our vocation remains the same: to receive our bodies as a gift — even with these disconnects — and carry them in the world in ways that reflect God’s breath and life and love in the world, inhabiting his story.

In the Gospel — as Paul puts it in Romans — we are re-created when God breathes not just his breath, but his Spirit into our bodies, so the Spirit lives in us (Romans 8:11). We are united in Jesus, so his story becomes ours, and our story becomes his. The way the Father and Spirit raised Jesus — bodily — from death shapes our expectations for our own mortal bodies.

We are now stewarding our bodies towards glorious, transcendent life — the redemption of our bodies — groaning, and waiting eagerly and patiently for this future (Romans 8:23–25). Modern, tech-fuelled visions of the future are often impatient expressions of the grasping human impulse there in Eden — where we want to become like God without waiting for God.

Part of being human without being disintegrated is cultivating patience — which might mean embracing our embodied limits, and the failures that come through age and disability while waiting to be made whole, as a testimony to our belief that it is God who will redeem our bodies. But we might also see that redemption coming through human making — image-bearing — as an expression of being like God. This will require wisdom, integrity, and knowing what our bodies are for — or rather — who our bodies are for. Paul says our bodies are meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13). Living with this truth will deliver the fullest sense of being human, and an actual transcendent future for our bodies — not by post-human technology, but through Jesus, by the Spirit, as we become united to Jesus, brought into the life of the God who is love (1 Corinthians 6:14–15), and as we become temples of the Spirit — bought at a price — not our own — the implication is we honour God — not our inner selves — with our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

It is striking how directly the transhuman hope competes with the Christian hope. If you want transcendent, immortal humanity and a sense of yourself, you are being invited to choose between your inner self becoming the machine, or the God who is love, who invites you into the divine life at the heart of reality. In 1 Corinthians 15 we get a thread that runs from creation to new creation. God gives everything that has a body its own body, as he has determined — our push for self-determination risks playing God if we are not asking about God’s view of our bodies, and their purpose as essential to our humanity (1 Corinthians 15:38). We cannot raise our bodies from death, or defeat death — that is God’s job as the creator and sustainer of life (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). He is the one who can take our bodies that are sown perishable — in the grave — and raise them imperishable; in glory and power; not as “natural” bodies but “spiritual” ones. Paul is doing something interesting with these words. As he contrasts two humanities — first, from the first man, Adam, with humanity from Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Where he talks about the “spiritual” and the “natural” (1 Corinthians 15:46), there is — I think — a theological pun. It is the Greek words for Spirit — pneuma — and soul — psyche — with a particular word ending (-ikon) that sounds like the Greek word for “image” — eikon — which he uses in verse 49, as he talks about our move from representing Adam — the “souled image” — to representing Jesus — the “spirited image.”

There is a strange past-and-future thing here. We were like Adam, but we are becoming — by the Spirit — and will fully become — the Spirit-image, when we receive a resurrected body like his. We do not have it yet. We hope for it.

It is not going to be our clothing choices that liberate us as truly human. It will be God who clothes us; God who changes us; God who rewrites the physical code of our bodies, replacing perishable with imperishable and mortality with immortality to demonstrate that death has been defeated — and not by science (1 Corinthians 15:52–54).

The Gospel is a story not of technological transcendence, but of divine transcendence that makes us more human. Pushing for a disembodied future will disintegrate us, because our future is embodied. As Jesus, not technology, gives us victory over death (1 Corinthians 15:56–57).

For now, we live in bodies that perish — bit by bit, as we age, and head towards being planted in the ground. But our bodies also house the Spirit, who guarantees our resurrected life and reassures us of God’s love for our bodies, and his desire that we might use them — male and female — to represent him in the world as we are swept up into the Trinitarian life of love, and engage our bodies in singleness, in marriage, and in church community (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).

We live in bodies like Adam’s — and yet bodies that are already temples of the Holy Spirit; bodies that will be redeemed and raised as heavenly, so that we bear the image of the resurrected heavenly man. We live in our bodies knowing where they are going. Our vocation — tied to God’s gift to us in creation, and in redemption — is not just representing his life and love with our bodies; it is also testifying that they will be raised and redeemed (1 Corinthians 15:49).

Our bodies are good gifts — even as they age, and break, and experience the frustration we feel outside of Eden — both from curse, and from good God-given limits. I do not want to be ableist here. There is a goodness to our bodies — that sustain life, can create life, and can give and receive love — even when we do not see it. This goodness is reflected in our lives as individuals, and in community, and it is not tied to our capacity to function according to metrics we choose. The goodness is connected to the Giver. Our bodies are good, even if frustrated, and we receive them anticipating they will be made gloriously better.

For Paul this means we — in our bodies now — give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord because we know that our work is not wasted. We know death does not have the last word. It is not a post-work future, but a vocation to live with our bodies, doing the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).

In his follow-up letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about how — by the Spirit — we are being transformed into the image of Jesus with ever-increasing glory — in our bodies (2 Corinthians 3:18). This transformation comes, in part, through our embodied work — our worship — offering ourselves as living sacrifices. Or, as he puts it, carrying the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus might be made known in our mortal bodies (2 Corinthians 4:10–11). This will mean carrying our bodies towards death, rather than avoiding it, because we know death leads to resurrection; giving ourselves to God’s work, with this hope for resurrection and redemption; not working to not work, or to escape our bodies into machines.

Being human means living with our bodies as part of our being, not as something to be transcended, but as part of us that is becoming transcendent. This is one of our furious opposites to hold when imagining a human future, even as we ponder where technology fits. Another is that we are creatures — created with limits — but we are also made to represent God, and to become like him, through the work of his Spirit as we are conformed into the image of Jesus. Technology-making will be part of doing this, because it is part of how we work in the world to fight the impact of sin and death and curse while we wait for God to renew all things.

Our world risks embracing Luxury Automated Gnosticism — or the opposite idea that this body is all we have, so we should live well by maximising embodied pleasure and satisfying our desires. These are disintegrating forces. Our challenge is to see our bodies as good gifts anticipating glory, and to use them to inhabit this world, and this story, as we wait for its renewal.

Not living towards a “world without work,” but as those called to the work of the Lord. One way we can do this is by valuing the body in our work, in a world that does not — not just our own bodies, but all bodies that are given less dignity in the disincarnating world of screens and Luxury Automated Gnosticism. This will have implications for those of us who, for various reasons, are inclined to hate our bodies and seek to overcome or escape the “meat jelly.” Your body is a gift from God, not spam.

Mary Harrington noticed that while the rich disconnect from our bodies via screens, the poor cannot be, and they will bear the cost:

“Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications.”

She says no matter the promise of luxury through this automation, there will still be people taking out the bins, stacking the dishes, and caring for those who cannot care for themselves — the jobs hit hardest by the pandemic.

Maybe the work of the Lord — testifying to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus as an act of embodied love, restoration, and revolution — will be taking up those jobs that testify to our embodiment, or caring for those taking up those jobs. Maybe greet your garbo with a coffee this week, thanking them for their work. Maybe we should encourage our kids to work in these areas, while the world around them aims for a post-work, post-body future that marginalises groups of people.

The early church bore witness to the dignity of the body by conducting funerals and burials for any human. In a world where only the rich were seen as worth remembering, they honoured and buried even the poorest of the poor, because our bodies have dignity.

And when it comes to plans to elevate the human condition with technology? We should tread carefully — recognising that sin and curse and disease and death are not the ideal, or the future — while also recognising that Jesus, not tech, is the path to true transcendence and becoming more human.

And you might be thinking this transhuman stuff is all nonsense that is either far in the future, or has nothing to do with you. Michael Burdett, a theologian who thinks about the “post-human,” believes we are not shaped so much by thinking, but by action — and we have already got post-human habits and technologies and stories embedded in our lives:

“Because our practices shape us, form us and define us they are not benign when it comes to enacting the posthuman. We may not assent to posthuman ideology and yet live posthuman lives.”

He argues we have already embraced technology that has become an extension of our bodies and brains, connecting us to the machine — making us a bit post-human.

Burdett often collaborates with Victoria Lorrimar, a theologian formerly based in Brisbane. She notes how machines are not great at feeling their way into stories. They read facts, but struggle with narratives — because they do not have bodies that feel. Inhabiting stories is a way not to be robotic:

“Processing facts is very different to comprehending stories, a distinction that robotics researchers are now recognising and allowing to drive their development of embodied robots.”

This is true for what we believe about being human. Our bodies actually generate our beliefs as we live in stories, so our embodied life in the world teaches us the truth about the world, ourselves, and God. She says:

“Religious belief cannot be disentangled from our bodily experiences.”

So part of living differently — resisting the machine and Fully Automated Luxury Gnosticism — means cultivating practices that incarnate us where our technology might disincarnate us; practices that connect us to a story.

Burdett believes Communion is one of the best practices to teach us about our bodies — a practice that reminds us that Jesus taking on a body, and giving it as a gift, is at the heart of the Gospel. He calls it a counter-practice to those that teach us to be disembodied and autonomous and to perform post-human life with our technology:

“[Communion is] …a counter-practice or corrective to disembodied and autonomous posthuman performance… [that] unites a gathered community in real space.”

Not virtual space, but real space, in our bodies.

And when we gather in the flesh — as the body of Christ — and are invited to discern the body of Christ in us, as we remember being re-created by his body being given for us, we are invited to think about our vocation of giving our bodies to God, to each other, and to the world as gifts of love that are valuable because our bodies — like the body of Jesus — are profoundly valuable.

One of the ways Communion works is that it is embodied: we eat, we drink. As we take the bread as the body of Jesus we are remembering that he has become part of us, and we him, in communion. As we remember the Gospel it sustains our soul, and as we eat and drink — and perhaps this is why we should do it as a meal — it sustains our body. It teaches us that we are body and soul, and that our hope, in life and in death, is in Jesus.

Communion is not a magic thing; but it is an embodied practice that teaches us that our bodies matter, that we have died and are raised with Jesus, and have received his Spirit — a taste of transcendence. It is an invitation to feast on Jesus, and to live as his body in the world, testifying to a world that wants to avoid aging and death that, in him, we have the answer. Whatever the future holds, it is in Jesus’s hands, not ours.

September 1, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Three — Made to be Makers (and to be re-made)

This is an adaptation of the third talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

Last ‘chapter’ we imagined life in an old village. This time I want you to imagine you are living in a monastery in the thirteenth century.

Here is a picture from the dedication of an altar in a monastery in France.

These seven candles on the altar were not just lights; they helped you mark time. You knew roughly — not exactly — how far a candle burned in an hour, so the daily schedule of prayers and meals was not “by the clock,” but “by the candle.”

The rhythms and rules — the daily prayers, weekly rhythms, and the Christian calendar — provided an enchanted framework for life in space and time. These candles were a technology that helped.

They are an echo of the lights in the menorah — a candlestick that held seven candles, seven bowls of oil with wicks that lit up Israel’s holy place.

Israel’s priests had to keep these lights burning from evening till morning every day as a “lasting ordinance” — a picture of space and time to teach Israel its story (Exodus 27:20–21).

The lampstand was made like a golden fruit tree, and people connect it to the tree of life (Exodus 25:31–32).

And the lights were shining in front of the curtain, which separated the holy place from the most holy place, as a picture of the barrier between heavens and earth, with shining heavenly beings — cherubim — embroidered on it (Exodus 25:3, 26:31, 35).

The word for the lamplight is used in Genesis 1, and then repeatedly in the instructions for these candlesticks. It is used for the lights that mark sacred times and days and years, in the vault between heavens and the earth. These are reproduced in Israel’s mini-heavens-and-earth space, to teach people to live in a certain rhythm that reinforces their picture of the universe, and of God (Genesis 3:14; Exodus 27:20).

The act of crafting this lampstand, and keeping these lights alight, is an act of making. This lampstand, and its lights, are a technology that shaped Israel’s physical environment, in the temple, and their understanding of the world (Exodus 25:31–32).

Making things — making technology and art and objects that teach us and shape us — is part of being human; being made in the image of God, to represent him (Genesis 1:26).

The author Dorothy Sayers wrote about this in her book The Mind of the Maker. She says all we know about God when he says we are made in his image is that he makes things:

“When we turn back to see what [the writer of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created.’”
Dorothy Sayers

So a characteristic we have in common with God is “the desire and ability to make things.”

To be human is to make things from the world he made, even the gold in it (Genesis 2:15) — to represent and worship him. The task of cultivating and keeping a garden, and then a temple, required tools and technology. There are even instructions in the laws about the wick trimmers; tools made of gold (Exodus 25:38).

We can make temple furnishings that teach us about God and his world. Or, like bricks in Babel and Babylon, we can make things to push beyond our limits against God. Or we can make golden calves:

“He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.”
Exodus 32:4

That is the tension for us today. Being human means having the capacity to make technology that shapes the world, shapes how we see the world, and shapes us. That technology will either extend our function as image bearers, or deform us as we make idols. Both these truths are true and we have to hold them together.

And, just for fun, when Jesus is introduced as “the carpenter” in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:3), it is the word tekton — a word for craftsman — from the root for our word “technology.” The true human is a tech-maker.

So, back to our monastery, and these candles that taught people about life in the world: light and darkness; life in rhythm with God; as limited people located in space and time. Neither space nor time was split between secular and sacred; it was all God’s. This rhythm of praying the hours, marked by candlelight, provided a framework for life — one that was a little inexact. And if you were a stickler for rules, like some monks, this was a problem.

So in 1283 some monks at a monastery in England, who wanted more regulation, installed a mechanical clock, right above the pulpit in the chapel. That is when people started complaining about preaching going too long…

Historians reckon this might have been the first mechanical clock. It is likely they were invented in a monastery.

Marshall McLuhan is a bit of a hero of mine. He is the guy who said “the medium is the message.” His point was that we think we are changed by ideas — the content of a message — but those ideas are first shaped by the technologies — mediums — we use to understand things. Like with the candles: when we believe we are thinking things, changed by ideas, we neglect how our bodies interact with the world — how what we see and touch and smell and use shapes our thinking, and what we love.

Lots of his thinking about technology was actually built from two Biblical ideas. First, the idea that we become what we worship, and that we shape our tools — technology — and thereafter technology shapes us.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

And second, the idea that the incarnation of Jesus is the ultimate communication:

“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message. It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”
Marshall McLuhan

He believes the clock in the monastery changed our view of time, and space, and was the start of “natural man” giving way to “mechanical man.” The monks’ need for synchronised action in communal life, with a clock regulating prayer and eating times, introduced ways of seeing time that changed what we behold. Time was seen as mechanical, and not observed in sensory and tactile ways.

He says when missionaries brought mechanical clocks to Asia they replaced not candles but burning incense sticks, so time became disconnected from our bodies and senses.

And when mechanical clocks — invented by monks — were installed in town squares they regulated the workday, and brought a new world order, and a new story about the world. Working with factories and engine-driven public transport — like trains — to get whole cities or communities running like clockwork, or like an old-fashioned wind-up robot, an automaton.

“By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton.”
— Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan traces how this changed how we view space as well, shifting us from an enchanted cosmos to a mechanical universe. During this time, because machines were a powerful model of things working, people started talking about God as a watchmaker. The universe became clocklike.

And this would have been impossible without the clock embedding itself in our image-creating capacity — our imagination. You cannot imagine God as a clockmaker without clocks.

“The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Humans moved from thinking about God as a triune communion of love, whose love overflows into the world and in creation, to thinking about God as a distant engineer, because we do not just think, but we are people who live in time and space with our technology.

C. S. Lewis’s first public lecture as chair of medieval literature at Cambridge was about the difference between the world in the stories he loved, and the modern world.

He believed Pharaohs in Egypt had more in common with Jane Austen than we do. The enchanted pagan world had more in common with the enchanted Christian world than it does with the post-Christian world. And the big difference is the rise of the machine.

Especially the way with the machine we get a mythology that comes with technology: the idea that the newer and more efficient is always better.

“… a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy…”
C. S. Lewis

And while I would not want the medical technology of any time before now, I wonder if this is where the furious tension gets broken. Where we slip into an idolatrous belief that human technology will fix the world. That all change is good, even if it breaks us by pulling us past our limits with false promises that dehumanise us.

Lewis saw this with the car. When people did not have cars they were stuck in the village we imagined last chapter. Their church was the church in the public square. Their neighbour, who they were called to love, was their actual neighbour. Where clocks regulated village life, cars fragmented it, as people could go rapidly beyond the limits of being a body in space.

C. S. Lewis wrote about the car annihilating space. He had this idea that distance is a good gift from God in a vast world, that our limits are actually a gift from God.

“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.”
C. S. Lewis

Technology will always extend or break our limits. That is both a feature and a bug. It is where we end up in Babel-like idolatry, or making tools to feed people more effectively.

But despite the idea we often believe — that technology is neutral and where it takes us is about how we use it — McLuhan has a great line about this idea, calling it the “numb stance of the technological idiot.” Technology is not neutral. It is ecological. It always brings change to our environments, and so to us. If it does not, it is not really a technology.

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s work was trying to help us think through not just the obvious enhancements brought by technology, but the unseen forces — even at the level of myths and images — that change us and the world.

The monks did not imagine that, rather than regulating time with God, the clock might change how people thought about time and space and God. And maybe, like them, we do not think about how our technology is not just regulating our lives, but changing our imaginations and providing a mythology — a story — we inhabit.

There has been a technological revolution since the mechanical age that has already altered our picture of reality — our mythology — mostly in a closed-off universe. This has been about how we think of ourselves and the universe. People once talked about our brains as machine-like. Now we talk about them as though they are computers — programmed, wired, dependent on data. And people model human relationships as networks, while picturing the universe as a giant super-computer.

Elon Musk already believes we live in a computer simulation. There are more people who think if we are not already, that is the path to immortality.

Remember Yuval Noah Harari from chapter one — the guy who ‘annihilated space and time’ by giving a TED talk as a hologram? The thought-leader who believes we are on a tech-fuelled trajectory to become gods?

“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

He believes engineers — geeks in a lab — not Jesus — will lead us to overcome death:

“We do not need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

Now, most of us are not going to buy that obvious idolatry. And even if we were, Harari makes the point that most of us could not afford to, even if we wanted to.

But our lives — as individuals and in community — are shaped by digital technology, and often the devices in our pockets; these tools.

Now it is easy to think these are not just neutral, but good. Try to imagine life without one, and the apps you love, and they feel embedded and almost impossible to uproot. They are genius pieces of technology that feel like they make life easier.

It is much harder to uproot a technology you have adapted to than one you have not. But what if these are disintegrating our humanity? Could you do it? Could you walk away from your phone tomorrow?

When we talk about digital technology it is not just hardware, is it? It is software as well. But this technology is pushing us beyond our limits like never before.

It has its own disenchanting mythology, and view of the future we can buy into. Even if we do not want to digitise our consciousness, becoming one with the machine — we will look at that more next time — there is a future we are all actually living in that wants to see everything connected; a picture of the future where every surface is a touchscreen, and where all our devices — starting with the fridges — are connected to the internet, and watching us.

A smart fridge that auto-orders your groceries by anticipating your desires based on your TV viewing might seem exciting. I want one. But it is also kind of terrifying.

We do not just live in a secular age. Shoshana Zuboff describes the world we live in as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

She says there is another tech myth out there — that we are the product. But we are not. We are the patch of ground they buy a mining license for:

“We are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us.”
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Here. I have made a meme for you… the medium is the message.

It is not just that tech is not neutral. It is not just “if you are not paying for it, you are the product.” We are being mined, and our thoughts and actions sold to companies who want to exploit us.

Data is being continuously collected from our phones, cars, homes, shops, smart watches, airports, loyalty cards, Amazon searches and purchases, our Netflix stream, our search history — where we tell Google our inner thoughts — and our status updates — what we project to the world.

And not just to sell us the stuff the algorithms know we want, but also to start changing what we see and interact with, so tech companies can change how we think about the world and whatever cause they like, in what she calls long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mould us.

“Personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior. Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.”
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism

Our brains have become the software, programmed by others so our hardware — our bodies — act accordingly. McLuhan also said “the medium is the massage” — our communication forms form us. But this is next level, especially when companies outsource this massaging of our brains to machine learning: to algorithms designed to maximise their efficiency.

You might be worried about technology because you have noticed its impact on your well-being — whether that is the way you are addicted to screens, to doom-scrolling, to games, to porn, to whatever is giving you a dopamine hit. Lots of the tech we are addicted to is designed to grab and keep your attention using the same chemical reward cycle stimulating techniques as poker machines — designed to addictively link your brain chemistry and the machine.

You might have recognised that technology promises connection, but is objectively leaving users lonelier than ever.

But are you worried about how the algorithms that drive lots of machine-learning processes are racist, or amplify the bias we find in human behaviour? Not just chat bots that learn from Twitter, but the algorithms programmed by experts? You should be. Google sacked its internal expert on this stuff, and she has gone on to start an independent think tank on tackling racism in artificial intelligence. That said, Google just sacked another engineer who believed the bot he had been working on had become human…

But that is not all. Machines can now — with human help — make stuff that leaves us constantly having to question what is true and what is real. Whether that is deepfakes, where content can be generated using audio clips and videos to make anybody do or say just about anything, or randomly generated human faces, like this person — who does not exist — just like the lady in our series graphic.

These images can be used in just about any way. You could use AI to make a person who does not exist do or say things in a video.

And, of course, there is fake news. Not just the way people within our democracy might flood social media with disinformation, but how foreign troll farms are dedicated to flooding social media with memes geared to fuel destabilising polarisation.

Technology is not neutral. It can be disenchanting — like the clock. It can deny our limits — like the car, or the hologram, or the screen. It can make us less God-dependent, and more dependent on ourselves. Not just modern medicine — which is great — but the idea we can use tech to become immortal in the clouds — which is not so great.

Idolatrous technology distorts the way we live in the world, and ultimately it is part of what is disintegrating us — our societies, and our own lives — as we are pulled beyond our limits and in thousands of directions all at once. Sometimes the pull is from algorithmic sources we cannot see or understand, and sometimes it is just our own chemical dependency fuelled by our addiction. Often it is both at once.

And this comes back to Jacques Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society as a technological society built on the myth that technology and technique — the machine — always produces progress. He published this the same year as Lewis’s lecture. This is the idea that living right is about picking the right technology and techniques to maximise efficient outcomes. Think about the way, at about this time, machines were producing maximally effective fast food. He believed this was fragmenting us then, in 1954:

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

Just imagine what happens when we bring this story about technology and technique into our lives as disciples of Jesus, and into our life together as the church.

We do not have to imagine that — many of us have lived it, and we are recovering from the feeling of being part of a machine; fast-food church. Some of us have followed the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, basically the story of a church that was a technological society, fully embracing technology and technique in a digital world, to pursue limitless numerical growth, whatever the cost.

The fast-food church idea that a church should grow to 10,000 by building efficient systems, or should go global by streaming one man’s — it is always a man — one man’s preaching into auditoriums and lounge rooms around the world, where no questions get asked about that because the technology allows it… That is this technological age, and this is when tech turns idolatrous.

And so — what is the way forward? How do we be truly human — image bearers who create as people made to create? Who make tools and technology that can either connect us to God and his story, or become gods that disenchant the world? How do we resist technology that pushes us to deny our limits, distort the way we live in the world, create dependencies in our brains and bodies, and ultimately disintegrate us? All while digital Babylon — the world of surveillance capitalism — wants to use the magic of technology, and its promises, to disciple us, and exploit us while they build their towers?

Are we facing a looming disaster?

In the nineteenth century there was a collective of English textile workers who recognised the way the mechanical loom was reshaping life not just for them — taking jobs — but the way mechanisation was going to change life as they knew it. They got together and called themselves the Luddites. You might have heard of them. They tried to destroy mechanical looms wherever they got their hands on them.

I know some of you are thinking “OK boomer” when I talk about technology like this. But maybe you should be thinking “OK loomer.” Only, it is not that simple.

There are people who believe we should go back to monastic life to escape the power of technology. But that misses the fact that we are made to make — to make the world more like Eden.

I do wonder if we should be a bit more Amish. They are not anti-tech, just really slow to embrace new technology. They embrace limits, and carefully consider the changes technology will bring to their lives as individuals, and as a community, changing slowly and carefully, to resist the patterns of the outside world.

It is too late for us, though, right?

We have embraced so much of this technology and become addicts who are chemically wired into the machine.

And maybe there are some technologies we have embraced that are dehumanising us, that we need to walk away from like recovering addicts. There are new technologies we can resist, when we see forces of surveillance capitalism at play, and the risks involved in a smart toilet… or a hyper-connected world.

And yet, perhaps we Christians could also be at the cutting edge of technology if we thought about it deliberately, and built things according to our understanding of the world, and of being human. What if we made technology, or embraced techniques that reminded us of our limits, and of our place in an enchanted universe, pushing back against universal black glass and smart toilets?

And look: this would all feel abstract if a bunch of you were not super-genius tech and maths geeks at the start of your careers. Or in the middle. Or the parents and grandparents of people who might be. Or if some of you were not working out how to hack and redesign medical machinery to solve problems in the developing world.

This is the stuff of everyday life. Technology is inevitable. It is part of being human, because we are tektons made in the image of a tekton. The catch is we have the furious opposites thing going on, where tech can either make us more human, for the glory of God, or dehumanise us through idolatry. And we have to ask about the story technology teaches us — both medium and message — and how we connect ourselves to God and his creative work in creation and redemption.

Following Jesus the tekton — the creative Word who became flesh; coming as a user and maker of tools and technologies — who worked with his hands making things for thirty years, before taking part in the rebuilding project of bringing his heavenly Father’s kingdom to earth. Restoring us as images.

There is a cool thing in that bit from Ephesians we read. Paul says that we are God’s workmanship, his handiwork (Ephesians 2:10). This is a word that only turns up in one other place in the New Testament — in Romans 1:20, which talks about how we were meant to know God from what has been made — his handiwork. We — the church — we are God’s creative act, created in Jesus, to show the world what God is like as we do the good work — including the technology-making and the techniques we adopt — that reveal his nature to the world. We are saved by the work of Jesus the tekton, not our work, so God’s making is on display in our making.

We are re-created by a creator to do good, and that means creating technology and techniques — ways of being — but also living differently to the people in this world who are ruled by the prince of the air. That is the devil (Ephesians 2:1–2). Which means resisting the idolatrous mythology that surrounds technology, and the way some of that idolatry is aimed at making us like God. Just like the bricks in Babel, pushing us beyond our limits — time, space, even death — that will ultimately destroy us. Figuring out where technology is pulling us towards idolatrous self-sufficiency, and away from God’s work, will require big-brained discernment: knowing what technology can do, spotting myths and destructive patterns in our personal lives, and in our life together, and in the world. We can become like automatons united in a machine, or parts of a living body united by an animating Spirit. We have to work out together when technology is good to embrace, good to resist, and what is good to create. That will take wisdom.

What Paul says a bit later in Ephesians brings us full circle — back to the candles — the idea that God is light and life and that we should live as children of the light (Ephesians 5:8). And he does not mean backlit glass screens, but those who see the world as the workmanship of the God who said “Let there be light.” Paul says be wise and careful in how we live (Ephesians 5:15), which certainly includes thinking about technology. He says the days are evil; there is a prince of the air out there, making the most of every opportunity — or literally “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:15–17). Life on the clock tells one story about time. But we are called to occupy time differently; seeing our days as days lived before God, doing his work.

And maybe that means we need more candles — technology that pushes us back against the particular technological idolatry of our time. Tish Harrison Warren talks about how we are trained — discipled even — by our use of technology to spend more time on screens, a world away, focused on the trending and distant, so we miss the small and close features of embodied life:

“We are creatures made to encounter beauty and goodness in the material world. But digitisation is changing our relationship with materiality — both the world of nature and of human relationships… We are trained through technology (and technology corporations) to spend more time on screens and less time noticing and interacting with this touchable, smellable, feelable world.”
Tish Harrison Warren

She believes just as people have resisted fast food by turning to slow food, patterns of eating that are less about technology and technique, and more local and connected, we should embrace slower life in order to reconnect with our bodies, our limits, our community, and our God.

“Just as people have worked to revive slow, unprocessed and traditional food, we need to fight for the tangible world, for enduring ways of interacting with others.”
Tish Harrison Warren

Which raises the question: if some versions of church have been the equivalent of fast food — triumphs of pragmatism, technology, and technique — what does it look like to embrace slow church; church life that teaches us our limits?

We are certainly a bit minimalist, deliberately, as a church when it comes to technology. And we have tried to bring in some ancient stuff to resist modern patterns. Paul describes some mediums — techniques — that will keep us connected to God, and to each other. They are ancient techniques we still use in our life together: as we sing God’s truth to each other, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:18–20).

August 29, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Two — Connected Individuals

This is an adaptation of the second talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

I want us to use our imaginations for a bit — with some help from some art.

Imagine you are a farmer in a French village. It is about 1400 AD.

You work in fields owned by the local lord, whose job was providing order. He is part of a chain of rulers — appointed by the king, who was crowned in a ceremony in church to show he is a reflection of God’s rule over the world.

When you finished work, you would head to the public square, where the skyline was dominated by the steeple of the church — a building whose art and furniture and layout, at the heart of the village, were part of teaching villagers to be human.

If you got sick, or the weather caused your crops to fail, you would wonder how the spiritual world was at play. This painting shows people being struck down by plague.

The Black Death — a pandemic — had been sweeping through the world for fifty years, killing two thirds of the population in your village. Nobody knew what to do. If you went to the big city you found the borders closed, like in this painting, and you would have to die at home, or find a monastery to care for you.

Reality was a playground for angels and demons. The heavens and earth overlapped and were involved in everyday events.

Your version of Christianity was fused with folk religion. Not only were religious relics with miraculous powers touring from town to town, but if you wanted a bumper harvest you might pocket a piece of Communion bread and plant it with your crops.

Time was marked by holy days — feasts provided by the lord and the priest — moments of embodied celebration connected to stories from the Bible, and the lives of the saints. These also worked to reinforce an enchanted view of reality where heavens and earth overlapped.

Our guide to the secular age, Charles Taylor, says the human in this world had a porous self — open and vulnerable to forces, but also living in this order. While he calls the modern self ‘buffered’ — cut off from that reality.

“A crucial condition for this was a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, but what I want to call ‘buffered’.”
Charles Taylor

He calls the backdrop — the infrastructure, social structures, communal rhythms, and stories, the stuff that shapes our imagination and beliefs — a “social imaginary.”

“I want to speak of ‘social imaginary’ here… because I’m talking about the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings… it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc… that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.”
Charles Taylor

Things were not great back then. Obviously. Deadly pandemics without medicine. A social order you were born into where your life was determined. Living at the whim of the weather without farming technology providing food security. Corrupt human authorities claiming to act for God.

People needed a revolution — the Renaissance — an explosion of art and culture and new ideas, a new social imaginary that included the development of humanism, and the philosophical concept of the individual.

We tend to assume this framework — that we are a self; in control of our own identity; that we belong to ourselves — but individualism is a development in the West.

The French politician Lord Montaigne wrote about the idea of self-ownership — he only wanted to lend himself to others, not belong to them, because we should only give ourselves to ourselves.

“As much as I can I employ my self wholly to my self… My opinion is, that one should lend himself to others, and not give himself but to himself.”
Lord Montaigne, 1588

An idea the English philosopher John Locke picked up one hundred years later when he said every human has a property in their person that no one else has a right to, and it is the same with the work of our hands. This idea produced liberalism, and democracy.

“Every individual man has a property in his own person; this is something that nobody else has any right to. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are strictly his.”
John Locke, 1689

Where we are our own.

There was another changing of the social imaginary in the mix here; the church was going through its own revolution — a Reformation, because it had become corrupt. The Reformation and Renaissance go hand in hand.

Tara Isabella Burton wrote Strange Rites — a book about our modern religious sensibilities that emerge out of the modern self. She charts how Protestantism, in particular, drove the move from institutional to individual, starting with Martin Luther’s emphasis on a more individualistic path to God.

“Religion itself heralded this transition from the institutional to the individual… Protestantism — particularly Martin Luther’s vision of religion — pioneered a different and far more individualistic path.”
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites

His emphasis was on personal faith and the individual, on reading the Bible freed from corrupt religious authorities.

“Luther saw the experience of Christian faith as primarily a personal one; the relationship between the individual and the Bible was one that no outside body or cleric had the authority to encroach upon.”
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites

Luther was a priest who was also a humanist lawyer. When he looked at the corruption of institutional power, and at the Bible, he re-articulated the way the Gospel did not say you are saved by your relationship to the institution.

This painting of him preaching has him holding the word and speaking from it to put the atoning death of Jesus in front of people, and the salvation of the individual through faith in Jesus.

Which was good. Except maybe that it led to the collapse of some other truths that had been part of the social imaginary. Luther, and Reformers after him, were so keen to go back to the text that they started a demolition of the church’s view of the sacraments — dropping the number from seven to two — and of folk religion — like magic relics, or planting Communion bread.

They also demolished festivals — things that had structured people’s experience of time and space.

There was another factor here — technology. While all this was being removed from the rhythms of life, the printing press meant more people had books. It changed who got to tell the stories. And unlike the institution, Protestants were so keen for people to be able to read the Bible for themselves that they started schools for everyone.

This education program shifted how we understand being human. We became much more focused on filling the brain with words, than on how we used our bodies. The self was a product of the mind, where we could be absolutely sure we belonged to ourselves. This inner self became the starting point for our relationship with God.

There are pretty clear lines we can draw from this changing of the social imaginary to disenchantment.

There is lots of great stuff about Protestantism that we probably love. But in these revolutions there is a reaction against one heresy — the “furious truth” that we are not our own — with the “furious truth” that we are individuals.

It is true that you — you as an individual — are made in the image of God; you have personhood and dignity as a gift from God inherent to your being (Genesis 1:27). It is true that we are equal before God, and that the Gospel has implications for you as an individual built on your relationship with the God who gives everyone life and breath, and in whom we live, and breathe, and have our being (Acts 17:25, 28) — the triune God who is a communion of love (1 John 4:8, 16).

And it is also true that we belong in a communion with others that reflects God’s nature. Part of imaging God, being human, is in the plural “them.” We are human in and through relationships. Part of our humanity is actually a product of the relationships that produce us, that give us love and attachment as we belong to our communities. At their best these communities are part of our social imaginary that teaches us about God and the universe we live in, because we are representing God.

And heretical movements, both in the church and in the world, have picked either of these truths — that we exist as humans in community, and that we exist as humans as individuals — and placed them at odds with each other. That is part of what pulls us apart.

One way to observe these heresies at play is in our own plague — the pandemic and our response to it. Think about what you might call the right and the left. In a liberal democracy both these poles are still going to be built on individualism to some extent, but the right tends to emphasise the individual self; individual responsibility, while the left tends to think about systems or societies of individuals — social responsibility.

We have had to face a disease that has brought death, in large numbers, around the world — and for most of our neighbours that has happened in a new social imaginary without God to give us comfort, and with the idea not that this could be God’s judgment, but that we humans have to fix it. We turn to technology like masks and vaccines to save us.

And the mask has become a revealer — which is ironic. It is meant to cover things. But it has revealed our fractured social imaginary. The same with lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine mandates.

Dr Clare Southerton, an academic from Sydney, has studied the way masks have done this in Australia, and the West. She says:

“Masks have really become politicised around the issue of personal freedom – about whether governments and health officials have the right to require individuals to wear masks… issues of personal freedom versus collective good are being negotiated.”

It is a furious opposites moment where both are true. But where political polarisation is happening because we are still heretics at heart — and these are both Christian truths unmoored from Christianity.

The thing about movements built around polarised positions like this — around our intuitions and our heresies — is that we turn to new social imaginaries, new social media story-tellers, and new festivals of belonging to have our identities recognised and reinforced.

Whether that is an anti-vax “freedom” movement, a Black Lives Matter movement, a Pride march, a football game… These are rhythms and rituals that help us with a sense of self as we bring our inner self to the world, and engage our bodies, and even dress them, so that we are recognised in a way that helps us feel human. They fill a void of something we have lost from when we lived with God as our witness in this human-centred universe where we need other people to witness us. Charles Taylor talks about this as being part of a culture of expressive individualism, or a culture of authenticity, where basically we boil things down to “finding our way” while “doing our thing.”

“There arises in Western societies a generalised culture of ‘authenticity’, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, ‘do their own thing.’”
Charles Taylor

While Tara Burton says we have replaced institutional religion with intuitional religions:

“Today’s new cults of and for the Remixed are what I will call ‘intuitional religions.’”
Tara Isabella Burton

We have moved from doctrine and dogma and hierarchies and any story that we are given, and replaced it with our own authority — self-authoring ourselves from our gut instinct as we navigate our experiences.

“By this, I mean that their sense of meaning is based in narratives that simultaneously reject clear-cut creedal metaphysical doctrines and institutional hierarchies and place the locus of authority on people’s experiential emotions, what you might call gut instinct.”
Tara Isabella Burton

Now we have to figure out who we are as people who have buffered ourselves; cut ourselves off from anything outside our mind, and defined ourselves from within. In the modern world this is where we talk about identity; the idea that we have to discover who we are on the inside, and express and be recognised as who we are on the outside in a way that matches.

“For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me…”
Charles Taylor

You might have heard people say that we should “find our identity in Christ.” But I believe this can be a dangerous way to assume this modern model of the person. This idea of identity — used the way we use it — is a new thing in the English language; newer than the individual and the self.

Google has this tool called the N-Gram — it shows the frequency that words appear, as a percentage, in books published since 1500. Look at this. There is a real uptick in the 1950s that can be explained by two academic disciplines — psychology and sociology — both using the word to mean two slightly different things to answer the question “who am I” for a world rapidly breaking up with God.

In psychology, identity is about your inner self and finding ways to live consistently. In sociology, your identity is something performed and recognised by other humans, in a group.

So now we live in a world where everyone has to work out their identity question from within — belonging to themselves — and have it recognised by others. And so, in these words from Alan Noble’s great book You Are Not Your Own:

“Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are — which is a fairly accurate description of social media.”
Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own

We have to do all this in a world where complexity and speed mean we still cannot see the invisible forces that make things happen. But we are pretty sure it is not demons.

“Complex systems are often characterised by an absence of visible causal links between their elements, which makes them impossible to predict.”
Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative: For a Better Future, World Economic Forum

And when we face big problems it is not on God to fix things; it is on us — and often the “us” there is individual.

Think about how climate change has become an issue you have to solve by your decisions and actions — like turning off the lights, or cutting plastic out of the picture. Now this is good creation care; good stewardship. But your small changes — like not using plastic straws, or bread tags — will not make a difference if there are not also big systemic changes; changing legislation or companies changing how they work.

Even the Great Narrative says tackling overwhelming stuff starts with you. You have to get it right.

“Tackling an issue that seems overwhelming begins with practicality – with every one of us acting and focusing on the things within our remit, like being empathetic towards our fellow human beings, reaching out to those in need, making the right decisions on how we engage with others, eat, shop, travel, vote, and more.”

You have to navigate these invisible forces in a complex world and make all the right decisions.

And you cannot.

There are two risks with all this for Christians.

The first is that we treat our Christianity as though we are modern people creating an identity — seeing coming to church as just like a rally, or a preference we perform to be recognised; just one choice we make while being true to ourselves and belonging to ourselves.

Maybe you can picture people you know who tack Christianity on as something like a brand; who pose for photos with Bibles outside a church, while nothing else about their life changes.

Or maybe it is you. Maybe church is one of many identities where you perform, then jump to something else… not as an integrated person, but as a dis-integrating person; wearing different masks, performing different identities in different communities as you remix religious ideas following your intuitions.

This is not what church is; and it is not how we are created to live.

Christianity is not a preference to be performed; an exercise in self-expression. It is not an identity we have to shout at people on the internet, even if we might use the internet to point to Jesus.

There is a risk when we bring in the category of identity that we focus on being human as individual selves, and that Christianity becomes a psychological or sociological thing, where we use God as part of an answer to our question “Who am I?”, rather than changing the question to “Whose am I?” — realising that God gives us our humanity, and we become truly human not by our choice, but by receiving his gift of life and communion with him.

The second risk is that we can slip into thinking as individuals when it comes to our own complex problems. We tend towards putting responsibility for godliness on individuals — saying “fix yourself through discipline” rather than cultivating communities where individuals are encouraged and discipled in godly ways.

Think about how we talk about addictive, sinful behaviours as though they are simply a choice, when often they are products of sinful systems that benefit from addicting us to things; and from bodies that carry trauma memories, and brains addicted to dopamine hits, in a world where we have been set up to believe individual fulfilment is the best thing, and we get that by consuming more of what we want.

Our sinful individual actions are sin that we are responsible for; absolutely, that is true. It is also true they are products of social imaginaries created to reinforce these same sinful behaviours, so that the answer is not just personal change by an individual self.

We can end up with a faith that puts all the responsibility for godliness on your shoulders. And your brain. “You have an addiction? Fix it by thinking right. Read more Bible. Know more stuff about God. Choose right. Take some ownership. Belong to yourself.”

We will ask no questions about how our culture — whether in the church, or in the world — is breaking you and pushing you towards coping strategies… about what is going on in your brain… we will just tell you to self-improve… And “self-author;” “self-justify;” “save yourself” by getting your works right. This move is an anti-Gospel and it leaves us crushed by our inability to actually do it. And then the world tells us the answer to being crushed is found in the world — it is in technology, and techniques — medication, mindfulness, our coping strategies — porn, alcohol, coffee, work. And so we go back to our addictive behaviour and the cycle continues. Avoiding these risks is hard enough without living in a social imaginary that bombards us with an almost limitless number of stories about reality that reinforce our disintegration. A world built on the heresy that you are your own.

We spend all this time asking “Who am I?” and “How can I self-improve?” — but we actually need to spend more time asking “Who is God?” and “What does that mean for us?”

This is where our readings are really helpful — and where we find a phrase that became the first thing in the Heidelberg Catechism, a teaching tool from early in the Reformation:

You are not your own.

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
Heidelberg Catechism, 1563

The right thing to do; both in creation — where, because we are made in God’s image, and in God’s story of salvation, is not to “own ourselves” or “lend ourselves out,” but give to God what is God’s. We are not our own because we have been bought, redeemed, at a price. The price paid by Jesus, the true human — who showed us what it looks like to give yourself fully to God as he did. He did not just lend a bit of himself but gave his life, his body, to bring us into communion with God.

Paul uses this truth against first-century expressive individualism. People were saying “It is my body, and I have rights to pursue my own way” — around food, and worship, and sex, but Paul offers an alternative to the crushing pressure of belonging to ourselves, and to being pulled in every direction by our desires, and those telling us they will fulfil them without God in the mix. He says our bodies are made for communion with the Lord (1 Corinthians 6:12–13). So that we find our life in God as God lives in you, and transforms you with his Spirit dwelling in you — so that you become his temple. Because you are not your own. You were bought at a price; you belong to God (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

And there would be a tendency for us to individualise this, right — to think this is a transformative truth about me, the individual… that is who I am. I am a temple. My body. I should diet, go to the gym, and not get tattoos.

But there is a catch. Because the “you” here is not just you. We heretics read it this way…

It is youse — like two thirds of the time the word “you” is used in the New Testament; these are plural in the Greek.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in youse, whom youse have received from God? Youse are not youse’s own; youse were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with youse’s bodies.”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20, New Plural Version (NPV)

This is a picture of a new reality for us as individuals-in-community — and our bodies, that are temples of the Holy Spirit, and are bought at a price. United to him, and each other, by the Spirit, to play this visible role of the presence of God in the world; to teach each other about the reality of the heavens and the earth because God’s Spirit dwells in youse.

Now, what the church building and festivals were in our medieval village, the temple was in Israel. It was the centre of the social imaginary. The rituals and rhythms of Israel’s community life were centred on this place that taught them about the heavens and earth, their story, and God’s character: his holiness, his love, his judgment and forgiveness; his desire to be present in order to live in relationship and restore people to life with him.

We have a new social imaginary to shape our belief — it is our bodies. Together.

Not just my body as an individual, but the way we use our bodies in community — in communion — in ways that express our story and our hope.

Our bodies are another thing we Protestants disenchanted in our rush to the mind. But how we use them is going to teach us about God, and belonging to him as we belong to each other.

Paul is going to take this idea about the body through to how married Christians act in private, and in public, when husband and wife belong to one another (1 Corinthians 7:4), and then how the church community, a new social imaginary, operates as one body, with one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12–14).

A communion — of many individual parts — all working together in a dynamic, God-created way. He put us together. That teaches us about the oneness we have been bought into and brought into by the body of Jesus, as we live as the body of Jesus (1 Corinthians 12:24–25, 27), taking up the most excellent way of love (1 Corinthians 12:31, 13:4). The way of God. This is what it means to be truly human because it is what it means to be the image — the body — of Jesus in the world as people united in him.

So how do we get back to seeing the world right? To understanding ourselves this way, in an enchanted world where God rules? Without bringing back corrupt kings or priests — or being enslaved by those who would dehumanise us by trying to make us, our bodies, belong to them. How do we see the world in a way that does put the body of Christ in front of our eyes as we open God’s word, but also as we live as the body of Christ, shaped by the Gospel together?

We need rhythms for our bodies; a story to shape our view of the world and life in it, not for our individual inner self, but for our communal life as we operate as God’s temple — his image bearers — for each other and the world; as we represent the God who is love, who gives himself to us — in the Son and the Spirit — to justify and redeem us and make us truly human, truly his. Not needing to ask “Who am I?” because we know the real question is “Whose am I?”

We need a new social imaginary.

We, together, need to cultivate new art and architecture in our lives that teaches us who we are — not just how to think, but how to be human — in a community embodying this reality. And that is what the church, the body of Christ, is.

We have abandoned the church calendar — the holy days — so we march to the calendar set for us by Westfield, who co-opt Christian days — Easter and Christmas — and even saint days, like Valentine’s — to sell more stuff to us, keep us consuming. Which is one of the reasons, as a church, we have started thinking about the church calendar more — especially around Advent.

We need to tell a better story — but not just tell it — move it from a story we hear to a story we live. One we participate in with our bodies. Which is one of the reasons we Presbyterians were so quick to jump on board with weekly Communion. We could see that as an empty ritual, and it can become one, but the key is to make it meaningfully connected to truths about God. Doing this regularly is a feature, not a bug, that makes it part of our rhythms — our framework for belief.

We need to cultivate a sense that we belong to a community way beyond ourselves — a communion with other people that includes those of us in the room, but also connects us even to the villagers we imagined back at the beginning. That is one of the reasons to say the Creed; not only do we say big truths together, but we are remembering connection to others who share our beliefs — and most importantly to God.

We stand and sing together — not singing as soloists, but a choir — whose voices join together in worshipping God; praising him for his goodness in creation and redemption; recognising that we belong to him.

We eat together and celebrate that we are now a community, a family, a body.

And we need to cultivate patterns and rhythms of serving each other. None of this is only about Sunday; a social imaginary operates 24/7, and there is a powerful one out there teaching you that you belong to yourselves. We actually have a calling from God to be building an embassy; being a temple — a picture of an alternative way of life to a world full of people being torn apart by the belief they belong to themselves and that is it.

We need to spend time in communion with God — meditating on his word, not just as ideas, but seeing the life it calls us to. And in the sort of silent, contemplative prayer we practiced last week that teaches us about our limits and about God’s place in the cosmos, and that we do live and find ourselves before God, rather than before the audience of our peers.

None of these are silver bullets. They are also not just individual practices, but they might shape our imaginations and help us to practice godliness in our own lives. They are practices designed to pull us out of ourselves and connect us to the life of God that we have been connected to by Jesus; to teach us that we are not our own, but have been created and redeemed by a God who loves us and justifies us, and who does the work to save us — even from ourselves.

August 28, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter One — The Trinity

A few years ago (2022) I preached a topical sermon series exploring what it means to be human in an age that seems to be built to disintegrate us — I mean that in the sense of fragmenting and pulling us apart as we are moved in many directions away from our embodied reality and away from God. I’ve been meaning to turn these into posts for a while — blogging has taken a back seat for me (obviously).

I preached this series when the most ‘AI’ thing I’d played with was thispersondoesnotexist.com and very early Midjourney image generation. Over the next little while I’m going to turn the sermons into posts here. This was talk one — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.

And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out above.

This is a different sort of sermon to normal — and a different series. I just want to warn you up front, because I am wanting to set the scene a little for us as we tackle this series. There will be a little more talking about the world, and a little less working through a passage like we did through Matthew, and then through Genesis.

We are just coming off the back of our Origin Story series where we saw how God is the author of a story — a complex and integrated story that runs through the whole Bible; and how we were made to live lives shaped by this story. But it is a story we have lost in the modern Western world; and this loss is coupled with the loss of God, as the author of life — not just life in general, but our lives.

We are living in a world more like Babylon; where our neighbours are trying to make a name, and a story, for ourselves. We are the authority over our own lives, the authors of our own stories. But there are some movers and shakers in modern Babylon who are starting to realise we have lost a grand narrative — and that maybe Babylon needs one to survive.

So the World Economic Forum is inviting us to discover The Great Narrative for a Better Future.

Now, I do not think the U.N, or the E.U, or the World Economic Forum are the only “towers of Babel” around. Any of us can try to build things where we are little gods in little kingdoms — and you are probably more likely to be impacted by an Instagram influencer, or your family and friends, than by a bunch of faceless boffins in global think tanks.

But there is something about an organisation trying to unite the world to alter the future, creating a sort of trans-national heaven on earth, without God, that is Babylon-esque.

This book is a product of political and thought leaders from around the world — looking for a new story, especially as we have been so shaken by the pandemic.

“Narratives are how we make sense of life; they provide us with a context, thanks to which we can better interpret, understand and respond to the facts we observe.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

They recognise that stories are powerful — they provide us with meaning-making and a context we use to make sense of the world. They recognise that the loss of a coherent and integrating narrative has created many of our problems.

And just like Rome and Babylon and Egypt there is wisdom in the thoughts of these leaders — and there is idolatrous guff — and it is our job to figure out what is gold that is worth integrating into our own thinking, or, rather, where they are thinking true things about God’s world.

“Complex systems are often characterised by an absence of visible causal links between their elements, which makes them impossible to predict.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

Their analysis of life in the modern world is that life now is complex — everything now seems multi-factorial, and all the systems out there are integrated. You change one thing in one place, and this integrated complexity flows through to all sorts of unexpected places.

We are seeing this with the price of lettuce with the floods, and the price of fuel with the Ukraine conflict, and the empty shelves at the supermarket when different global supply chains are disrupted.

Supply chains for complex products — like electronics, or a computer — look like this when you map them. And we live in these systems — like one of these dots in the supply chain for a single Dell laptop — and we are in danger of being pulled apart by this web of forces we do not see.

Life is complex.

And, as The Great Narrative puts it:

“Everything is happening much faster than it used to, because technological advances and, to a lesser extent, globalization have created a culture of immediacy… This new culture of immediacy, obsessed with speed, seems to be in all aspects of our lives… It is so pervasive that some thinkers have called this new phenomenon the ‘dictatorship of urgency’.”
— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

Now I think this is a reasonable analysis that lines up with how I am feeling about the world, and about life.

How about you?

This is not a new idea. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote about our technological age — our obsession with using technique and technologies to solve our problems — back in 1954.

He argues that technology does not just change our environment; by doing that it changes us — modifying our essence. We have to adapt to this new world that is of our making; a world where the tools we have made to extend our limitations push us beyond our limits.

Here is a quote:

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

That is one of the key ideas in this series — that our limits, as humans, are actually a good gift to us from an unlimited God, and maybe we should embrace them more.

Ellul says we are made to walk — our bodies — at 6 kilometres an hour, but now machines fly us around at a thousand. We are made to live in a rhythm with the natural world, but we obey a clock. We use electric lights, and screens, to stay up late and sleep less.

And here is the kicker — we were created, he says, with a sort of essential unity — an integrity or coherence — but all these forces of the modern world are fragmenting us. They are disintegrating us. And that is what many of us are feeling, seventy years later.

Disintegrated.

Technology always extends us beyond our natural limits; sometimes in good ways, but always in ways that change us — it lets us push against the limits of being bodies who live in space, and time. Our technology can move us faster around space, or throw our images or voices to the other side of the world in an instant.

Making technology is part of being made in the image of a maker — but our technology — like Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar’s bricks — can make us feel like gods.

The writer Yuval Noah Harari is one of the thought leaders the World Economic Forum loves.

He has a slogan: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

He is the first person to present a TED talk as a hologram — or digital avatar — a picture of time and space being warped by technology.

He believes we are moving into a new phase of existence — a move he writes about in his best-seller Homo Deus — Latin for “divine human” — where he says now technology has lifted us from beastliness, the next stage is going to be chasing immortality, and bending the world to our will — upgrading us humans into gods. We will become the authors of our own destiny; our own lives.

“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

He is not alone.

Jeremy Rifkin is an economic advisor to the European Union. Back in the 1980s he wrote about life beyond God:

“We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behaviour conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules.

It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces.

We no longer have to justify our behaviour, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever.”

Recognise those words?

Part of what has caused the loss of a grand narrative, in the West, is this decision to position ourselves as God and to push and push God out of the picture. It is Babel, only now we are not building a tower into the heavens; we are saying the heavens do not exist.

Our model of reality used to be a cosmos, where the heavens and the earth exist and God is present in both. That shifted to a belief that there was a secular realm, where God had no interest, and a sacred realm — where we get ideas like the separation of church and state, or secular work and God’s work. To now where there is only the secular; the universe; us and our technology in a material world.

The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book called A Secular Age — he calls this process “disenchantment.” That is a word that is going to come up a bit in this series.

He says:

“Disenchantment dissolved the cosmos, whose levels reflected higher and lower kinds of being… which contained spirits and meaningful causal forces… In its stead was a universe ruled by causal laws.”

Lots of people have stories for how we ended up here — disenchanted, and with this secular frame as the default. He calls these subtraction stories — the idea that we have shed bad stuff and elevated ourselves by removing superstitions that held us back. The “science killed God” story. But he believes the process is more complex than just enlightenment.

“What I call subtraction stories… I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”

And it is also that we have added new things and ideas and practices that have made this move possible; through new technology; migration and the opening up of multiple religious stories. We are not just subtracted, but pulled in lots of directions, and this stops us having one big shared story.

Taylor again:

“Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings, and related practices.”

This is part of what is happening with the decline of Christianity in the Western world — that we have seen mirrored in the Australian census results where in every hundred people there are about this many Christians.

Stan Grant wrote this fascinating analysis for the ABC. He says:

“…the West is not the world. Indeed in many parts of the world the turn to religion is connected with a rejection of colonialism and Western values…
The West is a place beyond history. The past is another country. Tradition is seen as stifling, old fashioned. No doubt some traditions are well rid of. Which woman or person of colour would want to return to the white, male-dominated 1950s?”

This ‘subtraction’ phenomenon is only really happening in the Western world — people are actually becoming more religious in places where Western values are not part of the story, while we in the West are cutting ourselves off from history and tradition. Also, just as a disclaimer — noting Grant’s points — just as adopting some new technology into our lives is good for us as humans, some rejecting of old ideas is good, especially for people who are not white, or male.

Grant points out that while historically the West was built on a shared version of the Christian story; the modern West is shaped by a breakup with God where God is not sovereign, but people are. Where liberalism — individual freedom — our self-authorship — where we are the authority over our lives — is the chief good. And now we are free to re-imagine and re-invent ourselves, untethered from the past, from our family, and from faith — and that sort of liberation has a fundamental goodness to it so long as we are escaping a bad story, and finding ourselves in a better story.

There are people here who have come from other faith traditions, or who have escaped abusive family or church traditions, or who are enjoying the benefits of a Western world where women, and sexual minorities, and non-white people have increasing dignity… and this is good liberation; freedom from bad authorities — bad authors. We want to be able to see the goodness in liberation, while questioning the narratives we are moving to; the stories on offer in the world — whether that is the Great Narrative, or the promise offered by technology companies, or our entertainment, or advertisers, or Instagram influencers, or the stories we make for ourselves. We have to ask if authoring our own stories — being our own authorities; belonging to ourselves — is actually liberating.

Are the modern West’s God-free stories — whether we become gods, or choose God’s role in our lives as a personal choice — better than what we have rejected? We will look more at this next week in terms of what the idea that “we belong to ourselves” does. This week we are going to tackle a different starting point: asking what the God our world has liberated itself from is actually like.

See, here is the other thing that is true about the West — and you will see this in “how did we get here” stories — from Stan Grant, or Charles Taylor, or the secular historian Tom Holland who wrote a book about exactly this. Because the West was first shaped by belief in the Christian God, before rejection of the Christian God, developments in how we understand God, the world, and humanity in the West are often what you might call Christian heresies. Secularism itself is made possible by Christianity in a way it is not by Islam.

Heresies are often a failure to hold two — sometimes more — paradoxical ideas in tension.

The writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a book in the early 20th century called Orthodoxy. He is a fun writer, and he talks about this inability for us to hold tensions.

He says the way to avoid heresy in these situations where there are furious opposites is not to pick one, or to find some middle ground, but to hold both truths, and to hold them furiously:

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Christianity is a belief system built on these tensions — Jesus being fully God and fully man; the Bible being God’s word, but also human; and God being three and one, and also infinite and glorious and so not “in” the universe as a creature, but also knowable through his work in the world — and paradoxically, through the Word becoming flesh, entering the world as the creator in the creation — the author writing himself into the story.

The shift from cosmos to universe — disenchantment — the modern West as we see it and experience it is built on a Christian heresy; it starts with a warped view of God.

Part of the flattening of the cosmos to the universe is a product of us wanting to live and act as though God is a creature; a being we might find through our human observation. When we could not find God with a telescope, or space travel, suddenly “science had disproved God.” But this happened through the removal of the idea that there is a transcendent overlapping spiritual reality; a heavens and an earth.

This emphasis on the natural world meant rejecting the Bible as God’s word — it became human utterances about an unknowable God, pasted together by evolving human processes. People started looking for the historical Jesus behind all the spiritual stuff in the Gospels, and rejecting the idea that Jesus is divine — that he is the Word of God come in the flesh. And in the same theological schools there was a rejection of the idea of the Trinity, because God was either fully beyond our reach, never engaging with the world, or unknowable from the incarnation or the Bible. And this all started first in the church.

We can do another thing in the church where we emphasise the opposites of all these moves — seeing Jesus as fully divine, and not really human, or seeing the Gospel just as spiritual, with no bearing on life in the world, or the Bible as only divine and not a product of human authors embedded in the community of God’s people, and in history. We even saw a thing in the last few years where Christians jumped up to support a footballer who rejected the Trinity — who saw humanity as just a skin God was wearing for a bit — but said some things about sexuality people liked. Many of us saw him as a Christian saying bold things, and the Trinity as too hard and not important. It has only been — in the West — when Christians have failed to hold tensions and hold them furiously that we have been able to conceive of ourselves as gods, and tell stories using the language of the Bible, without God in the picture, but really, truly, being human does not start with a world with no God in the picture. When we ask what it means to be human — real knowledge of ourselves — it does not actually start with us; it starts with knowing God as God is.

This is our project in this series — and really in our life as a church — not just in the sermons, but in all our time together: in our songs, when we say the Creed, when we pray, when we read the Bible, when we share communion, when we eat together over lunch, and when we go out into God’s world. We are wanting to know God more, not just know more about God, but know God as God is.

And that means knowing God as triune — knowing that God is both a community of persons, and three persons who are working in perfect harmony with one another without losing their personhood — and holding these two truths furiously. When we pick one side of this paradox we end up in bad places, but this profound idea we proclaim, maybe without really thinking about it, whenever we say the Creed together — that God the Father is God, that Jesus the Son is God, and that the Spirit is God — is at the heart of our faith and at the heart of being truly human, images of God.

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27

How can we bear the image of God without knowing what God is like? How can we live an integrated, coherent life without knowing the author of life — especially if God is actually the one who has authority over us, the one we actually belong to?

Which is Jesus’ point in that test with the coin, about authority — give to Caesar what has his image on it, but give to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21).

Being human means holding the truth that we are individuals — that we should be liberated from the authority of people and systems that are harmful — with another furious truth: that we are only truly human in communion; with each other, and with God, because we are images of the God who is triune — a God who is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit — but one God. A God who is love.

This is one of the implications of the statement we find here in our reading — it comes up twice — that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). God cannot be love — at least not eternally, and without being contingent on other beings or things — if God is simply a single person. Part of what is caught up in this statement is that God is love within the life of God, it is caught up in the dynamic of the life of the Trinity, and even in the names of the persons of the Trinity.

That God the Father is called the Father only makes sense if he has eternally been the Father — eternally the Father, and eternally loving the Son. If there was a time that the Son did not exist, then there was a time that the Father was not the Father — and that he was not loving the Son. But Jesus, in his prayer in John’s Gospel, talks about God’s love for him from before the creation of the world; from eternity past (John 17:24).

Michael Reeves has a couple of nice little devotional books if all this abstract thinking about the Western world does not resonate with you — or even if you just want to think about God and not the world. One is called Delighting in the Trinity. It is about how essential the Trinity is to how we understand God. He says:

“Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.”

He lands the book with this quote from an influential Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky, who has shaped a whole heap of modern interest in the Trinity after a bunch of Germans told the world the Trinity was a waste of time:

“If we reject the Trinity as the sole ground of all reality and all thought, we are committed to a road that leads nowhere; we end in despair, in folly, in the disintegration of our being, in spiritual death.”

“The disintegration of our being” — that is the world we find ourselves in now; a world that has lost its foundation; a world decoupling itself from the author of life; the God who is love.

Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel are part of his prayer that we might be swept up into the life and love of God — that we might be one, have communion with God and each other, just as the Father and Son do (John 17:20–21). And part of what binds us together — as we come to know God — is this love; God’s love — the love that flows around within the triune God — might be in us too (John 17:26).

There is a big debate about how much we can apply the dynamic love of the Trinity into human relationships; whether there is a possible analogy we can draw between God’s eternal and divine life and our finite relationships. The idea is not to collapse the gap between God and us — creator and creatures — but for our lives, and our love, to image the life and love of God. Part of being made male and female is that God’s life and love is represented not just by individuals but by individuals and communities — those furious opposites. And that is the product of another furious opposite — we are both drawn into oneness with God — made to be like God — and not God. We are limited creatures — embodied, and mortal — living in time and space.

When John, reflecting on these words of Jesus, says God is love it is not just about the Father, it is a Trinitarian statement. He is overwhelmed by the way that we, children of God, are swept up into the life and love of the Trinity; not in a way that means we ever fully grasp what God is like; not in a way that collapses God’s life and love into something finite, but in a way that does teach us how to be human; how to reflect God’s life and love in our lives.

God’s love overflows from within the life of God — in the heavens — into the earth, as the triune God creates — Father, Word, and Breath; Father, Son, and Spirit, all caught up in the creative act together — as a community, and each playing his part as individuals. And it is the same in the incarnation — the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as an act of love from God, and as an act of love within the communal life of God, and in God drawing us back into life with him, through the death of Jesus and the Spirit dwelling in us. These acts of God that we experience show us what love is.

In our “world without God” imagination we have turned love into a god; without really knowing what it means — without an integrated basis for how we define it. So we can also say “love is love” as though that makes sense; as though whatever you put on either side of the “is” is simply the same by virtue of our authoring things that way. John says we know what love is because we have experienced it in Jesus laying down his life for us; and that this is meant to shape our lives, and our love (1 John 3:16).

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

So in his letter not only does he say that denying that Jesus — the Son of God — has come in the flesh is the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2–3), he says that Jesus is the way we know what love is; in fact, he is the way we know what God is like (1 John 4:9–10). This is because of another set of furious opposites — he is both God and human.

In his other great book — Rejoicing in Christ — Reeves says:

“Here, then, is the revolution: for all our dreams, our dark and frightened imaginings of God, there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus.”

God shows us what love is like by sending Jesus that we might have life — the life of God. He shows us what love is like by acting first to bridge the gap between him and us — loving us first — and sending Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sins. We know what love looks like when we look at the cross, and contemplate it, and understand it in its fullness. Because in that act we are seeing the persons of the triune God co-operating in their fullness.

We see the lengths that the Son will go to to show his love for the Father — the oneness of God. And in the resurrection we see the lengths that the Father and Spirit will go to show their love for the Son. Then in the Father and Son pouring out the Spirit on humans as a gift of love — to dwell in us — we see the lengths that God will go to to love us. Jesus even stays human; stays in the flesh. John is not just writing about people who deny the incarnation, but the resurrection and the ascension — that Jesus “coming in the flesh” is an eternal act of loving, gracious generosity to us, as an overflow of his love for the Father.

Jesus shows his love for God — and for us — in his life, in his sacrifice, in his giving of himself to God as the author of life, in order that we might be brought into the life of God. That we might not just be images of God, who bear the image of God in how we relate to each other as humans together — individuals and in communion — but that we might do this because we live in communion with God; drawn into the life and love of the Trinity.

Jesus — the God-Man — shows us what God is like, while showing us what humanity should look like — what it means to be human and to be like God. It is to love like God. Did you catch that in the reading? John says we should love each other the way God has loved us. Because God takes the initiative and loves us before we are part of his family — we should love others this way too. Generous. Prodigal. Hospitable. Sacrificial love. Given without any guarantee of reward — as we live in a story. This is not just a set of individual responsibilities — John is describing a new communal life in Jesus; as, in this world, we live and love and are like Jesus, because Jesus has brought us into this family.

You want to know what it looks like to truly be human; to bear the image of God? To be like God — in relationship with him — without acting as though you are God? Look at Jesus, and love like him.

We can be like him as we love one another, taking up the character of God’s relationships in our relationships — but holding this as a furious opposite with the truth that we are not God, and our love will have human limits.

We can run into big problems when we try to map our life onto the life of God. We are brought into the Trinitarian life and love of God — but we are not the Trinity. We are not God the Father.

We can end up trying to live without limits; trying to be infinite when we are finite; trying to be God — or to use our tools to become gods — when we are not. We can stop sleeping, and dissolve boundaries between ourselves and others. We can stop self-care. We can be pulled by technology to care for things a world away where we cannot offer the same embodied love God demonstrates in the incarnation. We can be disintegrated by thinking we are God, rather than being still and letting God be God. We have limits and these are good and God-given.

We do not need to learn to be gods from God — we need to learn to be human, from Jesus; and yet, we are not Jesus. We are not the Messiah — we are not crucified for people, nor can we save, nor are we the authors of the lives of others. We do not even have to self-justify; because Jesus’ love for the Father, and his coming in the flesh, in birth, death, and resurrection, justifies us, and liberates us.

We are not the Spirit; who conforms anybody to the life and pattern of God, or unites people under our own power. We do have the Spirit working in us to unite us to God, and to each other so that we can love one another with love that comes from God.

Our relationships are loving; like God’s, but we can get into trouble if we try to map the Trinity onto the life of the church, or into gender roles — there are stacks of books that try to do this but almost always end up crafting a God in our own image, who justifies our own social program or ideals.

We live in a world that the triune God created, that is sustained by his love, through his powerful word, and that is being reconciled by him as God authors the story. You do not have to be in control. His is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Life is found in being connected to the God who is love, and this is actually freeing — it frees us to enjoy God; to love; to be still and know that he is God, even when everything around us is complex and fast moving and threatens to disintegrate us.

We cannot solve complex issues like how to get all the raw material, or parts, for your computer, or smartphone. And it is all going to get faster and more complex as more stories are told that offer more visions for how to be human, and more choices for you to make to help you be you. And that is a storm that might tear us apart or overwhelm us if we are not standing somewhere solid.

We either need to recognise that we belong in a complex system that is going to disintegrate us by pulling us in hundreds of different directions, or find life in a complex and dynamic system that is love and gives you your personhood.

Tish Harrison Warren is a writer I love, who writes columns for the New York Times, exploring the way the pace of modern life — our need to self-author in the midst of complexity, and the way technology works — pushes us beyond our limits. She is brilliant. She will come up a bit in our series. Here is her answer for how to shape ourselves to be truly human in a world pulling us away from God, a world of complexity, fast pace, noise, and technology: rejecting the complexity and noisy pace of the world and responding by embracing our limits and drawing near to the triune God in contemplative silence and prayer.

“Contemplative silence and prayer becomes the means by which we learn the limits of words and action, and where we learn to take up the right words and actions. It’s where we learn to slow down and then to work again at the mysterious pace of the Holy Spirit.”
— Tish Harrison Warren, ‘Want to Change the World? First, Be Still,’ New York Times

This teaches us that God is God, and we are not. It is through gazing at the God we meet in Jesus, speaking to him, and meditating on his word that we live as those who come to the Father, because we have been made children by the Son, and are now shaped by the Spirit living in us, and drawing us into God’s life and love. Our prayers are how the prayer of Jesus is answered.

This is not just a practice for time together in corporate worship, but something we maybe need to build into the rhythms of each day as an act of resistance: a way of recentering ourselves in God’s story, when we feel the pressure to author our own, or be swept up in someone else’s — or the pressure to buy into one of the many heresies flying around our heads.

Part of being human is delighting in the Trinity and rejoicing in Christ — finding ourselves caught up in the life and love of God.

August 27, 2025 Add Comment

Red Letter — Prayer that gives life

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

What are you praying for — and what would the world look like if your prayers were answered?

If, as the old saying goes, our eyes are a window to the soul, our prayers, I think, are a window on what we think heaven, whether God’s version or ours, looks like…

Our prayers, like our eyes, shape how we live, the heaven we are hoping to create on earth. You might have heard people dismissing “thoughts and prayers” as an alternative to actually doing something to fix problems with the world.

But Jesus challenges that idea…

He has been talking about the good news that the kingdom of heaven is arriving (Matthew 4:17, 5:3, 10, 19, 20).

And now he is talking about what that means when we pray (Matthew 6:5-7).

And how to pray as part of his kingdom (Matthew 6:9).

That is what the Lord’s Prayer is — a prayer for God’s kingdom to come — and a description of what that will look like — his will being done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:9-10).

Is this how you pray?

Not just repeating the Lord’s Prayer as a ritual — but praying the way Jesus teaches us to pray — for God’s kingdom to come?

There is lots to unpack here, starting with where Jesus locates the Father — and so directs our hearts and eyes and words as we pray…

Our Father in heaven…

Now we have done plenty about heaven and earth in the last couple of years — this idea that there is this realm — the heavens, where God rules as the Most High, and where there are beings who do his will in heaven — and some who have rebelled — and there is this mirror situation on earth.

God created both “the heavens” and “the earth” in Genesis 1, and both are brought together in Revelation 21… And the story of the Bible — and the Gospel — is the story of how that happens.

And when we pray “your kingdom come,” it is an acknowledgment that this has not fully happened yet, but that this is the story we are brought into.

We are not just praying for the end of the story, though, but the here and now, as well — for bits of God’s bringing heaven and earth together to break out in little pockets…

Little cities on mountains…

We are praying that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven — through people partnering with him, representing him as image-bearers who reflect the heavens in the earth.

We have seen how mountains play an interesting role in the story of the Bible — that Jesus is on a mountain while showing people how to pray is significant…

The short version of what we have seen so far is that mountains, high places, are meeting points between the heavens and the earth.

And through the story, mountains are where people go to be in God’s presence…

Even right from the beginning in Eden — which the prophet Ezekiel calls the holy mount — have you pictured Eden on a mountain (Ezekiel 28:13-14)?

When Israel passes through the Red Sea in Exodus, escaping Egypt and starting their journey to live as God’s people among the nations — his kingdom — they sing about how God is going to plant them on a mountain — the dwelling place God made for his dwelling… A sanctuary (Exodus 15:17).

And on the way, we get those mountaintop scenes, meetings between Moses and God, where Moses speaks to God, then brings his shining glory down to earth (Exodus 19:11).

Then, when Solomon builds the temple on the mountain in Jerusalem — God’s dwelling place on the mountain he chose as Israel’s dwelling place — God’s glory descends into the holy of holies.

He prays that God’s name would be present and glorified — that God’s eyes would be opened toward the temple on the mountain so that he would hear prayers people pray towards the temple. The temple is a sort of meeting place with God, so prayers make their way through it, to the heavens as people prayed mountainwards (1 Kings 8:29).

Solomon asked God to hear, from his throne in heaven, the voices of his people when they pray, and then to forgive (1 Kings 8:30).

The kingdom of God comes down from heaven, and in the Old Testament, the mountain is a sort of bridge where his dwelling place is placed so he can hear our prayers…

And this might seem like just a little geographic detail we get, a physical setting, but Jesus, the new Moses, a son of David who will bring a new temple and kingdom, is on a mountain talking about the kingdom of heaven turning up…

And a “town on a hill” — which is a pretty understated way the NIV puts it. It is actually the same word used for where Jesus is sitting — and this could be translated city on a mountain — which is a good name for a church (Matthew 5:1, 14).

This is a heavenly city that Israel anticipated, not just coming out of Egypt in the Exodus, but coming out of exile…

Jesus is talking about a restored holy city, a place where heaven comes down to earth… God’s kingdom come (Matthew 6:9-10)… Like in Revelation… but people who live as citizens of that city now…

He is talking about the prophets being fulfilled.

You are either bored with this mountain talk, or you cannot wait to go climb one… but here is a fun thing: where Ezekiel, who gets called the son of man, is told to prophesy, not to the people, but to the mountains themselves (Ezekiel 36:1-2).

The enemy thought he had the ancient heights — and maybe we saw a little of this in Satan’s mountaintop temptation of Jesus. But God is still in control. And he has plans to reconnect the heavens and the earth.

Plans for the mountain dwelling of God — where people will be fruitful and multiply as they dwell on the mountain (Ezekiel 36:11-12). This is Eden language; A mountain garden where people live — and fruitfully multiply.

We skipped this bit of the Lord’s Prayer — hallowed — holy — be your name — but it is also a picture of what God’s kingdom does, like the temple — glorifies God’s holy name.

God’s people failed to make God’s name holy. And this is exactly why they are in exile…

Ezekiel says Israel was booted from the mountain, dispersed down into the nations for worshipping idols, instead of drawing the earth up the mountain to God (Ezekiel 36:19-20). Then, out in the nations, they kept profaning God’s holy name rather than glorifying him; they gave him a bad name on account of their actions, and the consequence is exile. Now, the restoration of the kingdom will be God’s doing. He would bring them back; they would not choose to make his name great. God acting to save means all glory would clearly be for him — so that his name would be hallowed once again — he says, “I had concern for my holy name,” and, “I am going to restore you for the sake of my name, as a witness to the nations where Israel has been profaning it” (Ezekiel 36:21-22).

He will show the holiness of his great name — which is why this is something we pray for, rather than something we do to get a pat on the back (Ezekiel 36:23).

It has to be God’s doing so that the nations will know that God is the Lord.

As he gathers back his people — those exiled from the Eden mountain and the Jerusalem mountain — and recreates them as his city on a mountain (Ezekiel 36:24).

He will put his Spirit in people — so it is clear he has done the recreating; the restoring; the saving (Ezekiel 36:27-28).

That it is not on us, it is not our choice, there is no glory for us in this… God will recreate. God will put his Spirit in people. God will put them in the land — just like he did in Eden and Jerusalem…

God will be God. And everyone will know it. His name will be hallowed. And the mountains will become like Eden, there will be this new city (Ezekiel 36:35). A new Eden; heaven and earth merging together under God’s rule. And if we repent and prayerfully follow God’s King, we will get to live there. With God.

But now, like Israel between Egypt and Jerusalem, we live with that hope, but also with God’s presence leading us on a journey. We are not exiled from God anymore, or even exiled and being trampled by the forces of darkness. We are citizens of heaven on a journey with God to this destination, which means, like Israel in the wilderness, we rely on God to sustain us, providing our daily bread (Matthew 6:11).

This can be read literally — that it is about food. And it is not less than food; Jesus will go on to talk about God delighting in providing for our needs.

But bread in the Gospel stands for God’s good provision for his people. Jesus gives heavenly bread through the story, like when he feeds the 5,000. And the literal wording of this verse is actually something like “give us the bread of tomorrow today” — and that can be read eschatologically — as though it is about the future — the feast with Jesus in the kingdom. And that is also a good thing to be praying for.

And it can also be read Exodusly—as a prayer for provision of heaven in the here and now. There is already bread from heaven in the story of God bringing his kingdom of heaven to earth; back when that was Israel’s job. In the Exodus, when God sent bread from heaven to provide for his people (Exodus 16:4).

In this story, there was even a bread of tomorrow—bread collected the day before the Sabbath as a reminder of the holiness of God’s Sabbath rest (Exodus 16:23); a little taste of Eden and God’s provision to his people without their need to work the ground.

On that day, God gave “bread for two days”—the “bread of today” and the “bread of tomorrow” — bread of rest (Exodus 16:29-30). So maybe that is part of the ‘bread of tomorrow today’; a prayer for not only provision but Sabbath rest; a prayer for Eden-like “heaven on earth” — relying on God’s provision and hospitality, to take His presence into the world—like when God gave people fruit trees and said “be fruitful and multiply” and “take and eat.” Even this prayer for bread is not simply a prayer for food—but a prayer for heaven to break into earth, for Sabbath-like Eden life with God. For God to give us life.

We will see a couple more ways this is fulfilled as Jesus shows us what an answer to His own prayer looks like. But just briefly — Jesus’ prayer moves into how God’s kingdom coming for us— via forgiveness of sin — impacts how we live as his people as we pray this prayer, as forgiven people who forgive others (Matthew 6:12). And how life in the kingdom means following his example, rather than Adam’s and Israel’s—the examples that lead to exile from the mountain — and left Satan thinking he was king of the mountain — right up till his failure to tempt Jesus — so we pray that we might not fall into temptation, but be delivered from evil, by God, in order that his name be glorified (Matthew 6:13).

I wonder if you have ever pondered—whether reading or praying these words—what it would look like for your life if God answered them.

Well, an easy answer is that it would look like the Sermon on the Mount being put into practice… because it looks like Jesus. God’s King, arriving to end our exile from God and restore God’s kingdom — God with us — bringing the forgiveness of sins, and restoring God’s name.

Jesus is both the pray-er and the first picture of what the answer to the prayer looks like.

We might pray for the bread of tomorrow, the bread of heaven, a taste of the heavenly feast, salvation—like in the Exodus—at the Passover.

Jesus gives us the bread of heaven, not only the bread on the table at the meal, but his body, given for those who will join his kingdom; God’s life (Matthew 26:26).

We might pray “Your will be done” when we pray the Lord’s Prayer; these words are on the lips of Jesus as he prays before he goes to the cross (Matthew 26:39).

To bring the forgiveness of sins — God’s forgiveness of us — through his blood, the blood of the covenant, poured out for many for our forgiveness (Matthew 26:28).

For Jesus, prayer is not empty. It is not doing nothing. These words shape his life. They see him give his life to seeing God’s kingdom coming… to fulfill the prophets, as a new King, who leads us on a new Exodus as we journey with him until the end of the age. When Jesus teaches us to pray, it is not a choice between praying or doing something; it is about praying in a way that gives ourselves to God, because God gives us the bread of tomorrow — his life in us.

And one more bonus Ezekiel fulfilling fun fact—it is not in Matthew, but in the story of Pentecost.

Pentecost was a festival of bread. At Pentecost, the people who have put their trust in the risen and ascended Jesus, who rules in the heavens, are filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1, 4, 33).

And Peter says if we hear Jesus’s command to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus, we receive both the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit; becoming bridges between heaven and earth (Acts 2:38). The prayer is answered in us as God’s kingdom comes.

We do not have a tradition in our church community—or, so far as I have gathered, in the Church of Christ—of praying the Lord’s Prayer in our gatherings, or probably regularly in our lives. So let’s come back to what you are praying for.

Do your prayers look anything like the prayer Jesus teaches? Does your version of the kingdom of heaven breaking into earth look like His?

Does your life—shaped by your prayers—look like His life?

If it does not—and when I think of my own prayers—they sound nothing like the prayer Jesus teaches—they are often not even shaped by the prayer Jesus teaches, let alone my life lived as I seek to see my prayers answered.

And if that is you too, then we need to repent.

It is one thing to try to avoid the empty ritual of praying the Lord’s Prayer, thinking it is a template for fresh expressions of prayer—that we can do better in our own words—that might be fine if we actually were doing better.

So maybe we need to ask if what we have pushed away as empty rituals are actually practices and words—a bit like the creed—that give us a reality-defining, life-shaping language. What if these are words that give life?

Maybe it is not the repetition of these words that makes them a dead ritual, but that we do not have the incredibly rich reality behind the words in mind as we pray for a new Eden, for the end of the world’s exile from God—for our lives to be radically transformed as God’s kingdom comes on us, by the Spirit, so we might do his will and radiate with his glory.

If you want one take-home application from today—one practice—try praying the Lord’s Prayer multiple times a day, with this big vision—this story of heaven and earth being fused together shaping your heart as you pray; not dead letters or an empty ritual, but a living word that will shape your life as God answers your prayer. See what happens to you.

The idea that prayer does nothing only works if, when we pray, God does nothing to us, but also if, when we pray, we then do nothing from lives and hearts shaped by God answering our prayer…

This is a prayer embedded in the Sermon on the Mount; praying like this is a practice we are commanded by Jesus to embrace. As God’s city on a mountain — his kingdom coming as we prayerfully seek his will—bringing glory to Him through our good deeds as we are freed by Jesus to practice his righteousness as we imitate the way he lives as citizens of his kingdom.

The reason Jesus gives for praying like this is to live for God’s kingdom and glory, not our own. It is to avoid the hypocrisy of those claiming to live for the kingdom of heaven, but really living for the kingdom of earth—the hypocrites we will meet in Matthew (Matthew 6:9).

Prayer is an action, but this prayer without action—the sort of action commanded by Jesus for those in God’s kingdom—is another form of hypocrisy.

Jesus will go on to say that our eyes are what let light in—what shapes our hearts… so that we can reflect the light out (Matthew 6:22).

Prayer is a gazing into the heavens—it is approaching God—and, by the Spirit, it is us entering his court to ask our Father for things…

This is such a profound part of the Lord’s Prayer—that not only does Jesus call God Father, but he teaches us to approach heaven calling God Father… to enter the heavenly throne room and call God Father…

And to do this knowing God is not distant from us, but with us— he sees us, he knows us, and our needs, he rewards his children, he forgives us, he feeds us, and he delights in giving good gifts to us—in giving us a kingdom and his presence with us for eternity as his beloved children (Matthew 6:4, 6, 7, 14, 26, 32, 7:11); and all this brings him glory because he is the one who acts.

God will not just give us bread; he will give us himself—his Son, the Spirit, life with him, a kingdom (Matthew 7:11).

For his glory. What would it look like in our lives if we prayed not just any prayer that looked like the Lord’s Prayer—but if we consistently prayed the Lord’s Prayer?

If we gazed into heaven at God, our good Father, and in seeing his glorious light, reflected that in the world… Setting our hearts on heaven, and so treasuring life in God’s kingdom, storing up treasures there, investing our time and energy there, rather than investing ourselves in the kingdom of earth and things that will fade (Matthew 6:20-21).

We would look like people who seek first his kingdom and his righteousness—the first action in seeking God’s kingdom—to bring heaven to earth, is to enter God’s presence—to pray (Matthew 6:22).

We would look like Jesus. Prayer like this is one of the commands of Jesus we are to practice and teach—as we seek to be “great in the kingdom of heaven”—to be like our King, bringing God’s glory to earth as people saved by him to represent his name (Matthew 5:19).

The Sermon on the Mount ends the way it begins—with Jesus calling us to the wise life; the life lived hearing his words and practicing them (Matthew 7:24).

Seeking his kingdom and living lives shaped by prayerfully fixing our eyes and hearts on heaven, as we await the day when heaven and earth become one and we live with God in a new Eden.

Maybe if you are out of practice praying like this, or praying this prayer, you might join me in doing it in a moment as we share communion together.

September 7, 2024 Add Comment

Red Letter — Cutting to the heart of the Sermon on the Mount

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

If you were given the ability to cut out anything in the modern world to fix it, where would you be pointing your blade?

What political issue or system would you tackle to bring about righteousness?

Maybe, this week, you are feeling like it is religious freedom? Maybe it is modern economics?

What would you cut down that gets in the way of heaven on earth? Jesus has been talking about the kingdom of heaven at every turn (see Matthew 3:2), and he keeps going in this passage today. Jesus is still speaking on the mountain (Matthew 5:1-2), as the new Moses.

Moses would meet God on the mountain (Exodus 19:3, 24:18, 34:4). Mountains are a meeting place between heaven and earth. Mountains are places where God’s people would meet with God (like Jerusalem would become with the Temple) and then take God’s kingdom down to earth. When Moses did this, over time, he was transformed by being in God’s presence, till he began shining with God’s glory (Exodus 34:29).

And now Jesus describes a restored Jerusalem — a whole city of shining Moseses — people who are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-15), whose light shines, visibly — so people see our good deeds, they get a glimpse of heaven and of God and instead of glorifying us for our goodness — they see God in us and with us — and glorify Him (Matthew 5:16). He’s come to create a kingdom of Moseses.

One way to think about “glorifying” is the idea of “shining the light on” — our good deeds do this because we are carrying the light of heaven — radiating God’s character, imaging Him. This is a little picture of the kingdom of heaven; this shining people. Jesus keeps using this phrase the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:19, 20). It’s what Israel is waiting for. Jesus says he has not come to get rid of the old, not to replace Moses, or the Old Testament law — or to get rid of the prophets — but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17); fulfilling their hopes for a Kingdom.

Now, we might file these bits of the Bible — law, and prophets — separately, but Jesus groups them together and says both have a purpose or a telos — or something, or someone they are pointing to — and he is it.

What follows is one of the most intense bits of Jesus’ teaching — it looks like he takes the law and makes it harder to obey — or some people think it is to teach us how impossible the law was to keep, so we rely on grace alone — and it is true only one person has fulfilled the law perfectly… and that he offers us forgiveness for where we fall short, by grace, through faith.

Jesus says those people who want to set aside these commands will be called least in the kingdom, while those who practice them and teach them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:19).

Jesus is not changing the law. He is showing how the law has been misunderstood — to show people are not pursuing righteousness, because they are not pursuing God. They are not a bunch of rules with nothing to do with being the kingdom of heaven — the city on a mountain — They are not an impossible standard to ignore. They are a way of life we are invited to practice in the freedom that comes from being God’s children; those liberated to join Him in His kingdom.

Sometimes in our rush to reduce the gospel to the good news about how we are saved by Jesus — “justification,” we miss that the gospels — like Matthew — are a story that is also about what we are saved for, “sanctification,” how we are called to become like Jesus as we imitate him. This idea that we should teach these commands — and obey them — comes up again in the Great Commission — we are not just told ‘make converts by preaching the Gospel’ — we are told to take people through a new exodus — baptism — and to make disciples who will obey these commands (Matthew 28:18-20).

Back on the mountain Jesus drops this bomb. He says the kingdom of heaven requires a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20).

He is playing with the expectations first century Israelites have about the kingdom. The Pharisees believed God would not send a Messiah to end the exile until Israel was cleansed. There is a document from the late first century BC called the Psalms of Solomon, reflecting their thinking about Israel’s restoration and the end of Roman rule. For this to happen God had to cleanse Israel before this day of mercy and blessing when he would bring back his anointed:

“Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of David. At the time in the which thou seest, O God, that he may reign over Israel, thy servant. And gird him with strength that he may shatter unrighteous rulers.”

“And that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample her down to destruction. Wisely, righteously he shall thrust out sinners from the inheritance.”

“And he shall not suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in their midst, nor shall there dwell with them any man that knoweth wickedness, for he shall know them, that they are all sons of their God.”

For this to happen, Israel would have to cut out their unrighteousness. The wicked would be removed and only children of God would remain — there would be no more enemies. No Romans.

This idea of righteousness meant the Pharisees created a bunch of extra laws going beyond the Old Testament — to create a righteous Israel, so the Messiah would come. There were other groups too.

The Zealots; they hated the Romans, and some of them even started assassinating them in the streets using a special sort of knife called a Sicarii. They wanted to bring the kingdom by literally cutting out God’s enemies.

The Essenes, who cut themselves off from those they saw to be a corrupt Israel — waiting for God’s king to lead them home. The Dead Sea Scrolls found in a place called Qumran — were probably from the Essenes. They were waiting for a priest-king who would bring a shining, glorious, kingdom. Here is an excerpt from one of the scrolls (4Q541). This Messiah would speak words from the heavens, bringing a shining light that triumphed over darkness:

“His utterance is like the utterance of the heavens, and his teaching is according to the will of God. His eternal sun will shine, and his fire will burn in all the ends of the earth, and over the darkness it will shine.”

And the Sadducees were wealthy rulers who ran the priesthood in Jerusalem. They were pretty legalistic, and it seems they majored on the Torah — the Old Testament law. They were prepared to cut out sin, literally. There is an ancient source that talks about a book of decrees they had with guides for how to literally apply the “an eye for an eye, a hand for hand” law from the Torah (Exodus 21:23-25). Other groups had tried to put a money value on restoration, the Sadducees wanted to get the knives out.

All these communities came with different pictures of what a Messiah — the promised king — would be like; how he would wield the blade; and who would get cut. When Jesus says he is fulfilling the Old Testament, all these groups have different ideas (Matthew 5:17). Jesus starts unpacking where they have got it wrong. He repeats this little pattern six times in the chapter — “you have heard…” “but I tell you” (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44).

And the stakes on getting the kingdom right are high — not just about the political future of Israel, but cosmic questions of heaven or hell (Matthew 5:19, 20, 22). There is even what we might call cosmic geography built into some of the commands — do not swear by heaven — God’s throne — the earth — his footstool — or Jerusalem — the mountain city of God’s Messiah — when he talks about oaths, there are kingdom categories we do not typically have in mind when swearing an oath with our hand on a Bible (Matthew 5:34-35). And then Jesus goes into some examples to reveal the heart of the law — the way God’s people were always meant to understand it. Starting with anger (Matthew 5:44-45).

Righteousness is not just about actions, but about the heart — the inner person — Jesus is not coming to cut away at people’s actions, or different political groups — he is coming to cut hearts.

We can be like the Pharisees, thinking about righteousness in terms of controlling our actions, making rules or systems to stop ourselves sinning — and self-control is great — but the kingdom does not need new rules to shape your behaviour, new systems in place — it needs new hearts.

It feels odd to need to point it out — but harboring anger in your heart is absolutely less sinful than murdering them. He is not saying ‘if I am angry I may as well do more.’ Jesus is not equating the two — there is a whole heap of intersecting sins caught up in the murder of a person involving the theft of a life — a person who belongs to God and others — that means both the consequence and the offence is greater — that is not actually Jesus’ point.

Jesus is revealing that the law was always about the heart; not about being righteous through actions, but becoming righteous through the pursuit of God.

Think of it like a house — the “do not murder” a law — is the floor of the house. When you cross that barrier you are not part of the house. You are unrighteous. But walking around not murdering people is not the same as righteousness. It is the floor when it comes to writing a law, but God’s law was not just written to define the floor. In the law, and the story the law is embedded in, in the Torah, we are meant to meet the righteous and loving God behind the law — and to become like Him.

That is the ceiling.

Jesus is not changing the rules as much as saying that by looking at the floor, and making sure you do not fall through it, you have missed the ceiling.

And maybe anger is an area where you are happily not violating the floor — not murdering — maybe even putting up laws or strategies that stop you getting angry — but how are you going at loving people, rather than being angry at them.

It is the same with lust (Matthew 5:28) — adultery is much more costly than lusting after someone in your heart — but lust is already a failure to love. We are already missing the principle at the heart of the law about being like God and seeing other people like God does; we are already slipping into seeing people the way Satan wants us to see people.

God’s law is actually — and has always actually — been about hearts that are devoted to God, that produce lives that look like God, that reflect and bring glory to Him. That is the righteousness the law requires — that we actually be image bearers of God.

And this stuff is serious — it is worth cutting out. Jesus even says we should be prepared to take the knife to ourselves (Matthew 5:29-30).

Now — there have been people in history who have taken this idea of cutting off body parts that lead to sin quite literally with drastic consequences — and maybe they would be appropriate if our eyes or our hands actually caused us to sin…

But we know they do not. Do not we?

In fact, Jesus is going to say that all this stuff — anger — lust — the stuff we might blame our hands and our eyes for — murder, adultery — and other sins — comes from the heart (Matthew 15:19-20).

It is our hearts that need to go under the knife.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

The Pharisees wanted to change Israel — to produce righteousness —through new laws governing behaviours, but they missed the heart… The Zealots thought the problem to be cut out was other people — fix the system and righteousness would flourish… Get rid of the Romans…

And the Sadducees — they would chop bits of sinners to produce righteousness rather than their own bits… Jesus upends their expectations too… In case the crowd watching on has not got the point Jesus goes straight for the bit in the law the Sadducees loved (Matthew 5:38-39).

And maybe the idea driving the Zealots in their pursuit of justice through violence — and he says do not — and even — do not resist.

Overcome evil with good. If they slap you on the right cheek, turn the other one…

Now again, this is the teaching of principles — It is not actually a good idea in a whole bunch of situations to let people punch you or hit you — the point is to not retaliate with retribution, or even with justice, but with love and mercy. Taking the cost of making peace upon yourself — And, if someone wants to sue you for your shirt, give them your coat, and go the extra mile when someone is forcing you on a journey (Matthew 5:40-41).

You sense the Zealots going cold here.

The Messiah has not come to destroy Israel’s enemies — but to love them (Matthew 5:43-44).

He has not come to chop up sinners or stab Romans. He has not come leading a rebellion with swords and spears, but to lead people — even Gentiles — even the Romans, back to God.

The Pharisees might have thought Israel needed to be cleansed of wickedness — of enemies — in order for the children of God to be revealed (Psalms of Solomon). Jesus teaches that it is those who love their enemies — those who persecute us — who will be children of God (Matthew 5:44-45). And then, here is where Jesus reveals what the law was always about — the ceiling — Jesus says the task here is to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

Or as Leviticus puts it — be holy, because God is holy (Leviticus 20:26). It is this reflecting the nature of God that was meant to set Israel apart as God’s kingdom.

There was never a way we could hit the ceiling. The law was designed to produce godliness, by driving people towards God; depending on His grace and mercy and forgiveness. Moses became shinier the more he went back to God after Israel sinned, after he had failed, trusting in the goodness of God.

Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17) by bringing heaven and earth together — mediating between us and God, and speaking for God, the way Moses and the prophets did.

He fulfills the law by more than just keeping the law — even being perfectly holy and like God — he fulfills the law in the same way he fulfills the prophets.

He is the one the law points to — the sacrificial system, our need for God to save, the Exodus story and the idea of a kingdom of image bearing priests who would fill the earth with God’s presence.

He even fulfills the idea that the knife needed to be turned on our own hearts. Moses promised a return from exile would happen when God changed hearts — circumcised — cut them — so we might actually love God, and in loving God, find life (Deuteronomy 30:6-7). We will see Jesus pick up this language in Matthew. Then the idea of new hearts and a new covenant was picked up by the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:33).

Who said God’s law was going to be written on his people’s hearts — recreating a people, a kingdom, for himself — which is what Jesus comes to do, as he brings heaven and earth together by baptizing with the Holy Spirit and bringing the kingdom of heaven. Showing us it is our hearts that need cutting first — not others. Ultimately the Pharisees and Sadducees will throw their lot in with Rome — staging an insurrection against God’s king. Coming with swords to arrest him and turn him over to the Romans.

And they do this at the exact the moment the Zealots have their own insurrection — an uprising — against Rome going on in Jerusalem — that is what Barabbas, the guy whose place Jesus takes, and the thieves crucified next to him were guilty of —

And as Israel reveals what it thinks the kingdom of heaven is going to look like,

Jesus is revealing God’s kingdom. In his death and resurrection we see the heart of God, as Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets —

You want to know how the law is fulfilled, or the prophets, look at Jesus.

You want to know what the kingdom of heaven looks like, and what righteousness looks like, and what God requires in an image bearing person who radiates his glory, look at Jesus. Crucified.

This is where we see him as the one who fulfills the Sermon on the Mount — loving his enemies, praying for those who persecute him, turning the other cheek.

He does not cut up the enemies of God, but has his own skin pierced, to love his enemies and make us God’s children — bringing those who receive him as king and savior into his kingdom.

Jesus comes to show us that the problem with the world is not out there — it is not just the Roman Empire and Satan pulling the strings. It is in us. It is our hearts. He brings forgiveness of sins — cleansing — and new hearts; fulfilling the Law (Deuteronomy 30), and the Prophets (Jeremiah 31).

Whatever bringing the kingdom looks like, it is not fixing some out there thing first, but having the knife applied to our hearts, having God’s law written on our hearts, so that we pursue the God we meet in Jesus and are transformed to become his shining children, the light of the world; a heavenly city of shining ones, whose transformed lives, and utter dependence on God to save — will glorify God (Matthew 5:14-16).

Right at the end, as Jesus sends his disciples into the world — people who follow and walk with the king — he takes them up a mountain (Matthew 28:16), and sends them — and those who came after them — into the world teaching one another to obey his commands; as shining ones (Matthew 28:19-20).

When we think about how we would fix the world, we can operate like Pharisees or Zealots or Sadducees. We can be keen to reach for the knife, to take out our enemies, or cut off bits of people who have wronged us, to do our bit to create laws that will fix things; fighting some culture war, and so forgetting about the real battle, as Jesus frames it; to live lives from hearts that have been cut by God so that we obey him.

Are you prepared to make the cuts to your own heart?

To live as shining people who practice and teach the commands of Jesus, not because they save us, but because we are saved to live this way as those whose lives reflect the glory of our God and his king.

Imagine what we would look like if we practiced these commands from the Sermon on the Mount; not perfected them, but just making them practices that drive us to the heart of God (Matthew 5:44-45).

Imagine if we worked hard at being peacemakers when we have conflict with our brothers and sisters in Christ — as a training ground for how we love our enemies.

Imagine what it would look like if the church had a reputation not only for sexual purity — which we often do not — but for being a place where we do not objectify and lust not only after those in our communities — our brothers and sisters — but those outside.

Imagine if we took Jesus’ words seriously on porn, or our thought worlds, and worked harder to cut out that habit? Not chopping your hand off when it causes you to sin, or gouging out your eyes but having God change your heart, so you see those men and women as those made in the image of God who are meant to reveal his glory, but more, so that you hunger and thirst for righteousness; for God.

Imagine if we cared about our own hearts, and bringing them into alignment with the heart of God, more than the actions of others.

Imagine if we were not known for using courts or legislation to protect our rights and police the righteousness of others, but for being generous, including to those persecuting us.

Imagine, for a moment, one of the more popular scenarios in the culture wars — a Christian baker being forced to make a cake for a gay wedding cake at the threat of legal action… Whether being asked genuinely, or as part of the culture war being fought by others.

Imagine if that baker instead of doubling down and refusing to give his shirt, made two cakes, or catered for the wedding.

Imagine if we took these words of Jesus seriously, rather than putting them in the too hard basket.

Obeying them will look different for different people in different contexts — these are little stories that are not likely to happen to you tomorrow, but the principle is what we are trying to figure out. Those are the sorts of good deeds that shining people might do as we reflect a little bit of heaven on earth.

April 18, 2024

Red Letter — Blessings on a mountain

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch it on video here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

We took the kids to the Brickman exhibition at the museum last week. Amazing. The wonders of the world, built in Lego — recreations of icons from human kingdoms built around the world and through history — it was crazy clever.

Here are the crown jewels made from Lego.

We do not think much about belonging to a kingdom anymore. Rumblings about a republic are getting louder, in part because this idea of royalty seems so passe. Because the royals do not seem to do anything for us. They just make trouble.

But I wonder what you would do if you were king or queen for a day — or if you actually had power and could rebuild the world. Creating wonders.

Or maybe if someone turned up promising to rebuild your life for the better.

If a king or queen — or a politician — or a CEO — or a pastor — turned up tomorrow and said they were going to rebuild the world. Or rebuild your world. And they could build a kingdom like Brickman and his team build Lego.

What would they build?

Who would it serve? Would it be like Egypt?

Where the people of the kingdom enslaved others to build their wonders… and where only the Pharaoh was the “image of God”… Or like Babylon? With its hanging gardens — built from plunder and wealth pillaged from the surrounding nations…

Who would it serve? What sort of kingdom would you build with your blood, sweat, and tears — your time, and your money?

What does fullness — or fruitfulness — or happiness look like for you, or for others made in the image of God there with you? And maybe more importantly — who is missing out? Who is pushed to the margins? Enslaved. Dominated? Not recognised as the “image” of God…

These are questions about kingdoms, really — places where our gods are revealed as images of these gods represent them in the world. We saw how the kingdom idea is there in Genesis 1 last week.

What if you imagine God building a kingdom now — what would he fix?

Who would he exclude?

And what might that reveal about your heart — how much do you think your picture aligns with the character of God?

This “kingdom” language might feel foreign for us now but it is a very real question in the first century when Jesus turns up preaching that God’s kingdom has come near (Matthew 4:17). Now, at this point in the story we readers know where this is heading — the cross, and Jesus declaring that all authority has been given to him (Matthew 28:18). But, for those who have just started following Jesus, they are wondering what it is going to look like and imagining what is coming for them in their immediate future; building little kingdoms in their minds.

They are thinking they are on their way to the top. I want you to imagine that you are the disciples. Living under Roman rule — after many generations living under foreign kingdoms — hearing Jesus announce blessing is coming with this kingdom that you get to be part of, God’s heavenly kingdom (Matthew 5:3,10).

What you would be imagining — and how different that might be to what Jesus offers?

They have got certain things they are imagining here — as first-century Jewish people — but their picture falls to pieces pretty quickly as Jesus speaks. His words are about to expose their hearts, because he is going to expose God’s heart, and show that his kingdom is turns their expectations upside down.

Matthew sets the scene for these words with some vivid Old Testament imagery — first up, geography matters — Jesus has just been in the Jordan, where Israel’s exodus into the land happened. He has been in the wilderness. He has been in the temple and on high places.

And all this scenery matters because it is part of him reliving big parts of Israel’s story. Here Matthew wants us to see Jesus as a new Moses — someone arriving to lead God’s people into God’s kingdom. When Jesus goes up a mountainside (Matthew 5:1-2). This might seem like a good decision to make for acoustics or something, but it is significant too. It is Moses-like. This phrase in Matthew is one that occurs just over 20 times in the Greek version of the Old Testament — and 11 of those times are about Moses on Sinai. It is the same phrase we get here — when Moses goes up a mountain and meets with God (Exodus 19:3), before being sent by God to his people to deliver the law — the basis of the covenant.

He hears the Ten Commandments — then God tells him to come up the mountain again and meet him and he will get the Ten Commandments written on stone as he meets with God on a high place — a little bridge between earth and heaven. He is there 40 days and 40 nights (Exodus 24:18), like Jesus in the wilderness. He gets the tablets and comes down from the mountain after and finds Aaron leading the people in idol worship with the golden calf, and when he finds out Israel has broken the covenant — the promises that mark them out as God’s kingdom — he goes up the mountain again; to make atonement for sin — to try to turn God’s judgment aside as he represents their cause to God (Exodus 32:30). And he goes up the mountain again for another forty days and forty nights as the one who does not live off bread, but off God’s presence (Exodus 34:4, 28). Just like Jesus, who spent 40 days and 40 nights fasting and then quoted Moses to tell Satan that we do not live off bread alone, but God’s word.

Moses receives God’s words of the covenant — his description of how to be God’s partners in the world — his kingdom. And all this happens on a mountain — a leader of God’s kingdom goes to meet God, so that he can speak for God, and he comes down from the mountain representing God and inviting people into partnership with God in the world. Moses becomes more and more the shining image of God; a mediator between heaven and earth. He gets to see God’s goodness and hear God’s name from God himself. And Israel is waiting for a new Moses — because way back in the words of Moses, in his second reading of the law (that is what Deutero — two — nomos — law — means), Moses says when God’s people are trying to figure out how to get back to God, another intercessor will come along, to represent humanity’s case to God, and God to humanity. Another prophet will come along, speaking God’s word — and when he does, they have got to listen (Deuteronomy 18:15). Because he is going to speak for God. He is going to speak God’s word (Deuteronomy 18:18-19). He is going to be like Moses — the same Moses who went up a mountain, over and over again, and then met with God. Matthew uses this phrase, off the back of Jesus quoting scripture — quoting Moses — after forty days and forty nights of fasting. Going up mountains and down mountains and then up a mountain. Where he begins to teach.

The Moses bell is meant to be ringing in their heads.

Moses is not just the law receiver, or law giver, he is a mediator who goes to bring heaven and earth together by meeting with God, interceding with God on the people’s behalf, and then offering the terms by which heaven is going to get brought down to earth as God’s glorious, shining, image-bearing people represent him. We will see this again in the transfiguration later on — another scene on a mountain, where Moses actually shows up. And Jesus shines with God’s glory.

But here we have got the guy Matthew has called God with us, teaching people on a mountain. Teaching people about God’s kingdom. Speaking God’s word. Bringing a new covenant.

And whatever little brick picture they have built with their metaphorical Lego, he shatters it into pieces. Because here is a little glimpse into what God’s people are expecting — from the words of Moses — they were the people of blessing — in the land — their idea of being “God’s kingdom” is being “set high above all the nations on earth,” (Deuteronomy 28:1-2). It is about blessing and prosperity and power. Moses tells them they will receive blessing over and over again — and if you wanted a summary — this is a pretty good one — abundant prosperity. It will be like Eden and like being fruitful and multiplying (Deuteronomy 28:11). And the nations around them will fear them (Deuteronomy 28:10).

Maybe this is what we imagine when we think of being blessed as God’s people too? If they do not obey, they will get curse (Deuteronomy 28:15). It will all turn upside down, instead of prosperity and fruitfulness there will be poverty and famine (Deuteronomy 28:18). Hunger, thirst, nakedness, poverty (Deuteronomy 28:47-48). They will be cursed and turfed. Sent out of the land — captured and dominated by nations like Egypt — like Babylon. And this is what happens — as we saw last week — exile. A powerful nation coming against them, and Israel is hoping for a reversal.

Israel is hoping for a king who will come and upend the status quo — turfing out the enemies who oppress them and restoring their fortunes. It turns out Israel wants an Eden without God — they do not want to listen to, or worship him. They want something that looks a whole lot like Babylon. A worldly picture of prosperity. And maybe that is us. They want a king like Pharaoh, rather than God ruling as king.

And they get it. That is what exile is… And when Jesus says the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 4:17). And he starts teaching about who it belongs to — they are thinking “yes please”…

They have all these projects they are imagining. Only the picture of the kingdom he paints in his words — it does not sound like the blessing they have been hoping for…

It sounds more like curse…

And it turns out that the people pursuing blessing like Deuteronomy describes it, on their own terms — without God in the picture — they end up looking a whole lot like Egypt and Babylon.

We have already met Pharaoh… I mean Herod… But the message Jesus wants his disciples to take out into the world, bringing fruitful relationship with the world as he mediates between heaven and earth — like Moses did — and represents God, and is with us always; the message he wants his disciples to teach as they invite people into a new exodus — through baptism — is the message he teaches them. The message he begins to teach them — his disciples (Matthew 5:2) — here on a mountain as the new Moses, revealing God to his people. Only, this is not just a human mediator, this is God with us. And Jesus’ teaching begins with this series of blessings (Matthew 5:3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

Now — I have referred to the Greek version of the Old Testament a couple of times — because it is the Old Testament it seems most people at the time of Jesus were familiar with, and the New Testament authors often quote from it, as they are writing in Greek, this word blessed that he uses a bunch of times in a row, it basically means “happy” — and it is not the word for blessing from Genesis 1, or even the one that is commonly used in Deuteronomy — where this one is used just once, towards the end of Deuteronomy, in Moses’ last recorded words. Words about being a people saved by the Lord, and a promise that God will deliver them (Deuteronomy 33:29). It is the word that launches the Psalms — and is used over and over again in the Psalms to speak of the people who listen to and delight in the word of God (Psalm 1:1-2). An idea picked up in Psalm 119 — that famous psalm about the place of God’s word — his law — in the heart of his people (Psalm 119:1-2). In those who celebrate God’s rule as king, who kiss his son — who take refuge in him (Psalm 2:11-12).

And remember it is this that Israel absolutely fails to do — they want all the pictures of blessing from Eden, without the presence of God, without him there as the source of blessing. Without listening to what God says he requires.

And I wonder if that is us sometimes?

Jesus goes up a mount as a new Moses, and then he speaks words loaded up with royal meaning — the Psalms are connected more to David, than Moses — which is interesting, a bit, because God’s king — the son of David — was meant to lead God’s people to blessing in God’s kingdom, by taking his word to heart — carrying a copy of God’s word everywhere… So here, God’s word who gives life, turns up looking like Moses, to speak a word about life in God’s kingdom, listening to his word…

And the disciples are thinking blessing is going to pour out as the king turns up.

But Jesus is going to flip their ideas upside down.

They think being in the kingdom of God means receiving material blessings from God — Jesus says, actually, blessing — happiness — in the kingdom of God is about receiving God.

Just like people do not live by bread alone, but by the word of God, so people are not really blessed or even wealthy, unless they get God — blessing, happiness, is grounded in God, so that you can endure anything the world throws at you. It is not going to be those who think they have it all, and can build God’s kingdom on their own back, that will bring God’s kingdom.

God’s kingdom is going to come from God, and for those who realize they bring nothing to the table; the “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). It is not those who find joy in the state of the world — exile from God — and try to build happiness on their terms — who will receive comfort, but those who mourn the state of the world, the oppressive empires, and their own sin, who will be comforted (Matthew 5:4).

It is not “happy are those who are happy” either — blessing, paradoxically, comes not from seeking our own happiness, but seeking God. It is not those who seek to dominate others — who use power to secure their kingdom who inherit the task of ruling the earth with God, but those who love and serve — God and neighbor — without trampling others (Matthew 5:5). It is not those who hunger and thirst for the things of this world, but for the character of God — righteousness; and that righteousness filling them so it might fill the earth — it is those people who will be filled (Matthew 5:6). We have just seen Jesus demonstrate this hunger in his temptation.

The kingdom cannot belong to those who hunger and thirst for the things of this world — the hunger that led to exile from Eden for Adam and Eve, to sin in the wilderness for Israel, and to exile for Israel as they hungered after the gods of the nations — and it cannot belong to us when we are hungry for the things that lead us to sin, and away from God — because the very nature of God’s kingdom is receiving life from God himself — hungering for him.

And I wonder if that is how any of us can describe ourselves? It is not those who take revenge and act harshly who display the character of God’s kingdom — but the merciful (Matthew 5:7). Jesus will pick this up later when he says we will be judged by the standards we used, and forgiven when we are able to forgive others. It is those who are pure in heart — not operating from divided hearts, hearts that love other gods, or people, or the world in the place of God, who will see God (Matthew 5:8). And those who bring peace — peace with God, and with others — who will be called children of the God who seeks peace (Matthew 5:9). And here is the real sting in the tail — the second time Jesus promises the kingdom of heaven to those who will be made happy by God — and this time it is those who are persecuted because of righteousness (Matthew 5:10).

That is not the picture of happiness a Deuteronomy reading Israelite has in their head, and Jesus doubles down on this one with his summary of the upside-down kingdom he is bringing. I want you to imagine you are one of the disciples who has just started following Jesus hearing this. You think he might be the Messiah. You have heard him say the kingdom is coming.

You have been schooled in Deuteronomy and the vision of the blessing and kingdom of God being abundance and prosperity and you are hearing Jesus saying “you have missed the point” — the point of blessing and the kingdom was not the material fruit of your belonging, but the relationship with God and your love for him.

And here is Jesus promising they will be insulted, persecuted, and people will say evil about them (Matthew 5:9), but they should rejoice and be glad while they suffer, because the fruits of this pursuit are life with God in the kingdom of heaven — and faithfulness has always looked like this because just look at how Israel treated the prophets. Jesus gives a whole list of the characteristics — the posture and character and virtues of those whose lives align with God and his word — the characteristics of a person who knows that God is God. And what God is like.

It is a list that does not sound like the victorious and materially prosperous fruitful people of Deuteronomy 28 — but that is because that fruitfulness flowed out of covenant relationship with God, expressed in these characteristics — and what people get if they are blessed like this — is God.

The disciples might be thinking happy are those who are wealthy and feared by all the nations. But Jesus says happy are those who are marked by God’s glorious presence in the world.

And when that list is full of stuff we do not want — maybe it reveals something about our hearts, that we do not want God — we do not want his kingdom — just the benefits. Happiness. Prosperity. And we want it now. Because Jesus says who live with this character — the object of this way of life is God, and relationship with him — that is what drives these behaviors — a heart given to God. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They will be comforted. They will inherit the earth. They will be filled. They will be shown mercy. They will see God. They will be called children of God.

The key to blessing is a relationship with God — receiving comfort and an inheritance. Being filled by God — rather than their own hands, or Satan — compare all this to the promises of Satan in chapter 4, from last week — receiving mercy from God. Seeing God, like Moses — who only saw God’s back, but face to face — as God’s children in his kingdom of heaven.

This is what it looks like to be part of God’s kingdom — it is to receive God as our God. The alternative — the alternative way of living — pursuing happiness without God — it will produce an alternate set of qualities. Imagine an anti-Matthew. Anti-beatitudes. Flip the qualities and you see both why Jesus’ words are so revolutionary and so compelling.

Imagine a world built on these values.

Blessed are the proud. Those who cause mourning. The powerful. Those who are self-righteous and hunger for glory. The harsh. The self-seeking in heart. The warriors. Victorious because of unrighteousness. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan.

You actually do not have to look hard — because it is the world around us — and it is the world our heart often wants to build for ourselves without God — if we are honest and we are sitting there with the Lego blocks of our lives imagining the world we would like, and the way other people would view us and treat us. And our success.

But these are the behaviors that lead to curse. To exile. To death. Flip those promises that God will give us himself — and all the benefits and blessing that flows from that — and you get a picture of the sort of life Jesus comes to save people from as he brings God’s kingdom.

Cursed. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan. They will be rejected. They will be cast out. They will be emptied. They will receive justice. They will be cast from God’s face. They will be called children of Satan. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan. But here is the thing — the dilemma for the Old Testament people of God is that it is their hearts, not the politics of the world around them — that lead them away from God. The empires outside Israel are just empires built from the human heart — attempts to build Eden without God — and Israel does not love or listen to God — so they do not live according to his word.

The dilemma for a world living in exile from Eden — and for Israel living in exile from the land is that heaven and earth are at odds with each other. And our hearts just keep wanting the things of earth instead of the things of heaven. Which is what led humanity, and Israel, into exile.

We keep trying to build heaven-away-from-heaven. Heaven-without-God.

And so we need a new intercessor — someone to go up the mountain and meet with God, to reveal what God says and to lead us — but we also need God to come down onto the mountain to meet with us to speak, and to invite us into life with him — and in Jesus we get both — the son of God, and the son of Man — the king of heaven and earth.

And so in this moment, as he goes up the mountain, and speaks these words from God, and as God — as this mediator between heaven and earth — he is giving us a picture of what it looks like when heaven breaks into earth, and we get swept up into the kingdom of heaven. It looks like God’s character shaping people who want God. Not what God gives, but God. And then these words become the pattern he displays as he lives an obedient human life, life in the image of God, life listening to God.

As we work through Matthew these are going to be themes that come up in his teaching — teaching we are called to obey — but they are also patterns that come up in his life. This could easily be a description of Jesus’ trial — as Matthew records it — where Jesus is beaten, mocked, crowned with thorns, found guilty of claiming to be exactly who he is — by both the Roman Empire and Israel’s leaders — persecuted just like the prophets. Jesus turns up and lives the life of the kingdom, as the new Moses, and the new David — the king who will lead God’s people home to God.

But the people are not interested in this sort of upside-down kingdom. They want the kingdom of the earth, the kingdom of Satan. They want Eden without God’s presence. Babylon’s gardens or their own little kingdoms. And just like Herod tried to kill Jesus as an infant — a new Pharaoh — the Israel who will not get with the program of the kingdom conspires to kill Jesus. This is what happens any time we have a picture we want to build of the world — the life — we want to build for ourselves that does not treat God as God, that is not us joining in his kingdom.

We look for a leader who will give us what we want — like Satan — or we will become that leader. Jesus is the righteous one who brings God’s righteousness and is persecuted for it because he pursues the kingdom of heaven — and the bringing together of heaven and earth — above all else. Because he is the one who truly mediates — truly bridges the gap between heaven and earth — and is truly the righteous one who fulfills God’s word.

What we get a taste of as he goes up the mountain in our passage, like Moses, we see fulfilled when he bridges the gap between heaven and earth on the cross. Where he goes up to make atonement for sin through his death; a death he takes that models the meekness of the beatitudes in the face of Satan’s power, and the world’s might, so that he might model receiving the kingdom of heaven, and so he might inherit the earth.

And a death he takes on to invite us to cross over from the kingdom of Satan — the kingdom of this world — into the kingdom of heaven through him, and through the baptism of the Spirit, where we receive forgiveness of our sins, and God’s presence, and new hearts, and the ability to start listening to God and living a life of repentance — a life that sees God’s kingdom through eyes given to us by God.

And he is the one who does this so he can bring in God’s kingdom as the one who has all authority in heaven and earth — the new Moses has arrived to lead a new exodus — are we going to listen to him? And the words of Jesus from chapter 4 should be ringing in our ears as we see the character of God’s kingdom spelled out in the red letters of the beatitudes, and poured out in the red blood of Jesus on the cross.

This is what God is like. He would go to these lengths out of love for you because he is not like Satan, and his kingdom will not be like the grasping and destructive kingdoms of the world. This is what his kingdom is like. He is the God who gives life because he gives his life to people.

And when we see God this way, and his kingdom. We need to repent. We need to have our false values and dreams and kingdoms exposed. Of our Babylon projects — attempts to build Eden without the presence of God.

Attempts to secure blessing without the word of God having anything to do with how we live. Repent of the gods we make in our own image — just like Israel with the calf — gods delivering blessing on our terms, according to our designs, rather than us imaging God as we listen to him and live according to his design.

And for Christians — this means repenting of our Lego Jesus’s — the Jesus’s of our own making who come to bless our own wondrous building projects. The ones we build and shape to justify the kingdoms we want.

If we have a plastic Jesus — a Jesus of our own making, and not the Jesus we meet in the gospel, and at the cross, then we will end up with a plastic kingdom. One that has no substance and will not deliver happiness or blessing, or life with God. Smash all those pictures, and see life and God’s kingdom through God’s eyes, and join his building project.

The things you build are likely to disappoint you, likely to damage people around you, and unlikely to last — unlikely to be memorialized in a Lego exhibition in thousands of years — and even if they do, it is God’s kingdom that lasts for eternity; and life pursuing God’s kingdom — because God has pursued you — that delivers happiness for you, and it delivers blessing to those around you, and it delights God.

Smash those false images of false gods, and false kingdoms, or a false Jesus and realize that we bring nothing. When we come to Jesus in the spirit of the upside-down kingdom we are pursuing his righteousness, not our own. When we pursue our own righteousness we become self-justifying and self-righteous. When we come to Jesus and his kingdom as it is these words do not just become words fulfilled by Jesus, but give and shape our lives. Words that help us realize the pictures of happiness and fruitfulness the world gives us are empty because they are not just disconnected from God, but they take us away from God.

And follow Jesus towards the heart of God, love him with all our heart, and mind, and strength, so that his heart is revealed in our actions. And when we repent — when we turn to Jesus from false kingdoms — when we are saved from those kingdoms and their consequences.

We will not live up to the standards of the Sermon on the Mount, or the beatitudes — we will fail — and we are not saved by displaying these characteristics. We are saved because Jesus did. We are not saved by these characteristics — not in ourselves — but we are saved for these characteristics, saved in order that God might produce these characteristics in his people as heaven breaks into the world, led by the king who is God with us, as his disciples — his image-bearing people who represent God to the world because we are reconnected to the heart of God — as we receive God’s Spirit — and as we obey all that our king commands. Then we will share in this blessing, this happiness — to live in his kingdom, to be happy, as our love for God — our union with him — changes us as we become disciples and listen to his teaching and are changed. Because of Jesus, and because if we trust him and follow him as the king who brings heaven and earth together, we become one with him. In communion with him. Ours is the kingdom of heaven, and this can shape the lives we build here on earth.

April 3, 2024

Red Letter — “The Gospel of the Kingdom”

Well, this morning, we’re kicking off a journey through Matthew’s Gospel. It’s a series where we’re going to zero in on the message of Jesus. The bits that sometimes come up in red letters in your Bible.

This isn’t because the red letters are somehow more important than the life of Jesus—his actions—or even the narrative that provides the context. In fact, the last time we did Matthew together as a church, we covered the ‘big story’ of the Gospel…

But it’s because we do want to understand the message of Jesus—what he came to tell us, and what he came to call us to do—because that’s part of our Great Commission—part of what we’re sent into the world to do as we seek to be and make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20). These last recorded words of Jesus in Matthew—that tell us to make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the father, son, and Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus.

To be a disciple is not just to believe that Jesus is “God with us” and the resurrected king who brings forgiveness of sins, but to obey the commands of Jesus. To listen to him—this is what faith looks like. So if you had to sum up the message of Jesus—in Matthew, or in any of the Gospels—I wonder what you’d say? What do you think Jesus commanded most?

What is the essence of these words of God’s word in the flesh—God with us—that give life?

Maybe it’s a call to repent?

Maybe it’s a command to love?

How would you sum up the message of the Gospel? What Jesus came to tell us? Here’s a fun thing… Back when ‘wordle’ was a tool to make a word cloud from a bunch of text rather than an addictive word puzzle game, I made this wordle of the red letter parts of Matthew’s Gospel… The size of the word indicates how frequently it’s used.

You might’ve guessed “love” was at the heart of the message of Jesus?

It’s there just between one and tell. You might have guessed ‘forgiveness’ or ‘sin’ were at the heart of Jesus’s message—and they’re important—but they aren’t marked as important by their frequency in his speech. This sort of word cloud thing doesn’t weigh words based on when they’re said, just how often.

But it is probably worth us paying attention to the fact that Jesus talks about “the kingdom of heaven” and “the kingdom of God” more than anything else in Matthew’s Gospel. It’s a topic he speaks about 50 times in the Gospel.

And here in the passage we’ve just read, as Jesus begins to preach, it’s his priority — both in chronology and in Matthew’s summary of his preaching, as he calls people to repent — to turn from their prior way of life towards him — because the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 4:17).

We are dipping into Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 4 as Jesus launches his preaching about the kingdom… and it’s probably worth quickly catching up on the context for these words.

Matthew opens with a genealogy, a family tree, showing us how the story of Jesus connects to the story of Israel — God’s nation — his kingdom. Jesus is positioned as the Messiah — which means the anointed king — who is the son of David and the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1). And Matthew gives us three key points in Israel’s story to help us understand Jesus; Abraham—who is the father of Israel, the man God promised would be the father of his nation, the nation he would use to restore blessing to the world, and the reign of David — the king whose family tree God promised would produce a king who would rule God’s kingdom forever, and the exile to Babylon — that moment when God’s nation, Israel, was taken into captivity in exile— cut off from God’s blessing and his presence— so that they’re wondering what God’s kingdom even looks like now, and where this king would come from (Matthew 1:17).

After the genealogy, Matthew describes John the Baptist turning up as a prophet; a voice from the wilderness — preaching the same message Jesus is about to preach; a message that exile is about to end because the kingdom of heaven is about to turn up (Matthew 3:1-2).

In a little picture of this happening, we had Jesus turn up to the Jordan — the river that Israel crossed as they became God’s chosen nation (a kingdom) in the exodus, so that he might be baptised by John (Matthew 3:13).

Jesus is re-enacting Israel’s story here.

The first words Jesus speaks are at his baptism. He says he wants to be baptised in order to “fulfill all righteousness,” he’s showing what the real Israel, the real people of God — his real kingdom — will look like in contrast to those who’ve come before (Matthew 3:15).

He goes down into the water and comes up, and there’s this scene when the heavens open, God’s spirit descends onto Jesus (Matthew 3:16). And a voice from heaven declares this is God’s Beloved son (Matthew 3:17). There are echoes here of what God says of Israel back in the Exodus story. As Israel is being called out of Egypt, God calls his people his son (Exodus 4:22).

We’re just going to take a quick dive into some Old Testament background here to see how exactly Jesus is fulfilling all righteousness both in his baptism, and in what comes next. Later in Exodus, Israel is called his treasured possession in all the earth—his kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:4).

The exodus is God’s creation of a people — people called through the waters of the Jordan to become his kingdom of priests; called out of Egypt; out of the nations; out of the kingdoms of this world… to be his holy nation.

In Deuteronomy, this role comes with a responsibility—to worship God only, to not worship idols, the gods of the nations or created things (Deuteronomy 4:19), because they’ve come out of the smelting furnace — the sort of process you’d use in the ancient world for metalwork or to make an idol statue — they’re an image of God, is living ‘smelted’ idol statues. They’ve come out of Egypt, and they’ll go through the waters of the Jordan and become his people, his kingdom; his image-bearing nation (Deuteronomy 4:20).

But, if they disobey, if they don’t listen to God but are tempted to worship like the nations, God’s going to scatter them among the nations. That’s the exile we see in the genealogy—it’ll be like they’re back in Egypt. They won’t be God’s special people anymore; his kingdom (Deuteronomy 4:27).

They won’t be his blessed people who bring blessing. The prophet Jeremiah picks up this language from Exodus and Deuteronomy to say that instead of being blessed, those of God’s people who disobey the commands that come with God’s covenant—those who don’t obey him and do everything he commands—those people will be cursed instead of blessed (Jeremiah 11:3-5).

And Jeremiah says Judah, the southern kingdom, like Israel, the northern kingdom before them — is going to experience this curse. They’ve been warned over and over again.

But they didn’t listen to God.

They did not pay attention.

They did not obey.

They followed their evil hearts, and so now God is bringing the curses of the covenant on them (Jeremiah 11:7-8).

Exile.

Being scattered amongst the nations.

The people haven’t listened. Israel and Judah have both broken the covenant (Jeremiah 11:10-11). They failed to listen to God. They did not live as God’s kingdom of priests—his image bearers—and this is the background when Jesus arrives. This is why when John the Baptist says the kingdom is near, and then baptizes Jesus, and then the heavens open and God says “this is my son whom I love” this is why this is so important. The exile is drawing to an end.

God’s kingdom is about to be launched again with the arrival of God’s righteous king who listens to God. And we see this in the passage we read together this morning. Jesus as the son who listens to his father. Jesus as the true Israel. The one who shows us what God’s kingdom looks like. The image of God. Cause then we get another little exodus re-enactment. Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, here Jesus goes out into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights (Matthew 4:2).

This isn’t the only “40” symbolism in the Old Testament. In the Noah story, the rain comes for forty days and forty nights.

It’s an interesting rabbit hole that we won’t go down to see both the Noah story and Israel’s entry into the promised land as ‘new eden’ moments—moments of re-creation where we’re getting a chance for a new humanity that might replace a broken pattern of humanity where people have stopped listening to God. A humanity broken because it listens to the temptation of the devil and so gets exiled from God’s presence, being replaced by a humanity re-created through passing through waters… A bit like baptism…

There are rich Old Testament themes we’re being called to hear in the setting of this back and forth between Jesus and the devil. They actually go all the way back to the beginning… To what humans were made for… See these ideas of kingdom and sonship actually begin back in Genesis 1—where humans are made as God’s image bearers—there’s a bunch to this idea, and one of the concepts caught up with being an image bearer is being a child—a chip off the old block—and another is this task of representing and ruling. This idea of filling the earth and subduing it—being fruitful and multiplying God’s image is the idea of kingdom (Genesis 1:28).

This has often been called the cultural mandate—this instruction to make culture and pursue fruitfulness—but it’s also a kingdom commission; A call to spreading the kingdom over the face of the earth as you spread the rule of God and the presence of God over the face of the earth…

This idea of God’s kingdom was the very heart of God’s project for humanity—being God’s people, exercising God’s rule over creation with him. That required being in a relationship with him as his image-bearing children… And it required God’s blessing. So with that background, we’re asking if Jesus is going to repeat the mistakes of the past—Israel, who were meant to bring God’s blessing but turned to idols, Noah, who fell to disobedience almost as soon as he got off the boat and was told to be fruitful and multiply, and Adam and Eve, who were created to do the same and placed in Eden but didn’t listen to God and so were able to be tempted into sin by Satan, who showed that Adam and Eve hadn’t really listened to God… When he asked “Did God really say” (Genesis 3:1).

Adam and Eve didn’t respond with God’s actual words. They failed. They sinned… And that led to curse instead of the blessing and fruitfulness and flourishing partnership with God with his provision of all those fruit trees back in Genesis 1 (Genesis 3:17). And to being banished from the land God had given them to rule and expand (Genesis 3:23), just like Israel in the promised land later. So we’re asking: will Jesus do better?

Better than Israel? Better than Noah? Better than Adam and Eve?

Will he listen to God and show what it is to worship him? And the three back and forths are meant to show us exactly that…

His words—these red-letter words—are all straight from the pages of the Bible. Straight from Deuteronomy, in fact… So when Satan—the tempter—turns up and says “don’t trust God to feed you when you’re hungry here, take matter into your own hands… Take God’s place yourself” (Matthew 4:3), Jesus says “”It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”” (Matthew 4:4).

He’s modeling living on the word that comes from God because these words come straight from Deuteronomy 8:3—referring back to God providing bread in the wilderness—for his people, and that was meant to teach them—to rely on God’s word for life. And then the devil takes him to the roof of the temple—the pinnacle of this building that was on the top of a mountain—a building that represents heaven meeting earth—and Jesus and the devil are on the highest point… The point closest to heaven… And he says “throw yourself down from the heavens… God will catch you…” (Matthew 4:5-6). And again, Jesus replies: “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test'” (Matthew 4:7), which comes straight out of Deuteronomy 6, another passage that tells the story of God saving Israel from Egypt that comes right after a command to “fear the Lord your God and serve him only.” And so again Satan takes him up to this high point—a place where all the kingdoms of the world could be seen—there aren’t many places on earth physically where this could be. This is again a blurring of the boundaries between heaven and earth—Satan is offering him the key to all these earthly kingdoms—which of course, are going to be Jesus’ anyway, much like ‘being like God’ was what Adam and Eve were created to be.

He says “you can have these without the cross—without the costly obedience—if you bow down and worship me instead”—if you re-order the heavenly courts and the earthly kingdoms this way (Matthew 4:8-9). And Jesus says “Away from me, Satan, for it is written” (Matthew 4:10). And again he quotes Deuteronomy, from earlier in chapter 6. Over and over again… “it is written” (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). This is the mantra of a faithful son of God—one who listens to God and so speaks the word of God as the language of his heart.

The one who listens to God and so knows God so well that he knows the father, who he loves, is not holding back his goodness. That he isn’t a miser. That the grass isn’t greener on Satan’s side. That idols don’t deliver they just deceive and pull us from God.

This is a king—a son of God—an Israelite—an image-bearing ruler—who shows us what it is like to reflect God’s nature and rule in the world in partnership with God, as he models worshipping God. Jesus even goes and picks a new town to live in to model this obedience and knowledge to the word of God. To fulfill what is written in the prophets (Matthew 4:13-14). And then he starts preaching the message of the Gospel. Repent. God’s kingdom has arrived (Matthew 4:17).

Because God’s king has arrived.

To lead us out of exile from God, away from the clutches of Satan, and the idolatrous empires that destroy us… and into a new exodus, into a new promised land—the kingdom of heaven. So what do we do with these words of Jesus—both the example we see in his red-letter words in his interaction with Satan—and his command to us as he begins preaching…

These words that give life — repent.

Repent. For the kingdom of heaven is near.

Now we often think of repentance as turning around— turning away from the wrong way we were living —and it certainly involves that — but here we’re invited not just to turn away from the lies of the tempter that we might listen to and live — words that bring death. We’re not just invited to turn away, but to turn to the kingdom. To turn to and receive a king who will lead us out of exile, and into a new exodus — a new way to life. Life as God’s people — his kingdom — again. Jesus is inviting us to recreation; to head towards Eden again, and life with God. Repentance is going to mean being able to say no to the tempter— something Israel couldn’t do, even with God’s word in their scriptures. Something that Adam and Eve couldn’t do — even with God’s words ringing in their ears.

Repentance is going to mean being able to answer those who want to twist God’s word to lead us away from God; those promising to give us what we want — what our sinful hearts want — by making us believe God is for something that he is actually against, or that God is holding back something that he should be giving us. This is what temptation looks like. A twisting or rejecting or spinning of God’s word.

This is what leads to sin—to disobedience—but this isn’t just about believing the wrong thing. Believing that God says something he doesn’t, or doesn’t say something he does.

Ultimately this is about loving the wrong stuff. Temptation works by tapping into our desires—desires that are so often sinful because they come from sinful hearts that are broken by the curse; sinful hearts that want to replace the living God and the life he gives with all sorts of things — idols — that are dead and lead to death.

This is the dynamic at play any time you want to put yourself in charge of your life — or that you want the Bible to say something it doesn’t in order to justify the longings of your heart — or you just don’t even care what God says, or the Bible says, because it’s at odds with what you believe to be good and you don’t want to embrace costly obedience.

And when we don’t listen to God — just like with Israel and with Adam and Eve — it leads to curse — the curse that comes with sin is death; and exile from God’s presence.

But God has sent Jesus to lead us back into his presence as his kingdom of priests; his image-bearing people who are called to be fruitful and multiply as we make disciples.

Have you repented? Turned to Jesus as king, and this new way of life?

If you have, you are united to God’s son — you’re a child of God. How will you take up the example of Jesus — God’s king — his faithful son?

What are you doing to so soak yourself in God’s word that you know God’s word — so that you know God and his goodness and love — in order to say no to the schemes of the tempter, who wants to pull you to worship anything but God?

You aren’t going to know it unless you read it — or listen to it — or sing it — or talk about it — and you’re not going to have it come to the tip of your tongue in these moments unless you’re both marinating in it and delighting in it — not just reading out of some sense of obedience to some sort of religious rule about quiet times, but reading it because you want to know what God says because you love him and you know he loves you.

What is it that leads Israel astray? That leads Adam and Eve astray? What is it that Satan tries to use to pull Jesus away?

Their hearts. Hearts that want to love and worship anything other than God. Desires for something they think God is holding back from them because they can’t see the big picture.

What is it that pulls us away from God?

Our hearts.

We keep loving stuff God says is forbidden — in his word — we keep using our own words to self-justify and listening to people who say “did God really say”.

And this leads to disaster—and the solution in those moments is knowing what God actually says. And not just knowing — cause Satan quotes God too — but obeying in relationship — as God’s people who love him.

So repent. Turn to God and listen to his word. Hear this command of Jesus to repent. Turn to God and worship him. Stop worshipping other gods, stop being led to death by your evil heart and by Satan, and be led to life by the words that give life —the words of Jesus. Because not only has the kingdom of God come near in Jesus — it has now come.

The one who speaks the word of God because he is the son of God — because he is God with us — the one who speaks the words that give life — the one who is the word who gives life, gives his life as the ultimate demonstration of obedience to God, to “fulfill all righteousness.” The one who says “not my will but yours be done” trusting that his father will raise him from the dead. And in doing this — as he is crowned and raised up before a world that gives in to the temptation of the evil one — God’s kingdom does come. God’s king is enthroned — first on the cross, and then as he ascends in glory.

Exile from God is over for children of Abraham and children of Adam who put their trust in Jesus and are united to him as part of God’s kingdom in this exodus. This is what Jesus means when he says in the Great Commission that all authority has been given to him.

We’re invited to join God’s kingdom — to become and make his disciples — if we put our faith in Jesus —God’s son — as our king; if we’re united to him so that we share in his death and resurrection — so that we receive his spirit, so that God with us is with us as we pass through the waters of baptism — our own Jordan — our own exodus — our return from exile — beginning a new life in his kingdom, listening to and obeying his word as people of the new covenant brought through his blood. We are no longer exiled from God, but God is with us always, leading us to life with him in the promised kingdom of heaven.

April 1, 2024

Revelation: Choose your city, choose your king

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 37 minutes. This is the final sermon in the Revelation Series.

Revelation is like a good movie.

Throughout this series, as we have been looking at John’s apocalypse, his unveiling, I have been thinking about “The Wizard of Oz” and how when the curtains get pulled back, he is a bit of a disappointing little man with a machine.

And of course, our series title has a connection to the classic “Beauty and the Beast” – where the Beast was a guy who was cursed to become beastly until he could learn to love, and he loves the beauty, Belle, and is restored.

Today, I could not help but think of Disney’s “Tangled” – it is telling of the Rapunzel story; you might know it. Beautiful princess. Locked in a tower where her golden locks – her magic hair – becomes a ladder for prince charming. In Disney’s version, her golden hair is magical, and the wicked witch uses it to stay young and beautiful; she treasures this youthful vitality and guards this treasure by locking Rapunzel up in her tower. Until it all goes wrong for her and we discover what she really looks like. Underneath the magically beautiful exterior, she is a wicked witch. She is quite beastly.

You do not want to be on her team, or embrace her way of life. Rapunzel is the hero; the beauty.

Revelation is a bit like a movie – pointing its lens at all sorts of characters and inviting us to see life differently.

Its big focus is inviting us to decide what to worship – to see that our pattern of worshipping demons – spiritual beings – and the idols they use to corrupt us – and the political and economic systems these idols create, and the behaviors that this idolatry produces – violence, sexual immorality, theft, and magic arts – demonic spirituality (Revelation 9:20-21). Just remember this list because it will come up later. Revelation wants us to see these patterns are beastly, and to worship God as we see him revealed in the book instead (Revelation 14:7).

We have to choose between two kingdoms. Two heavenly cities.

God’s city, or Babylon. One rises and the other falls (Revelation 14:8).

From chapter 14 onwards, we start to see the downfall of the beastly city of Babylon – which is not the actual city of Babylon, it is picking up Old Testament imagery for the most beastly regime opposed to God’s people. The city of exile. The destroyers of the temple. The beast-worshipping enemies of God.

And it is inviting us to see other cities that share Babylon’s violent, greedy, idolatrous patterns as Babylons too. Babylon is the city of beast worshipping – and those who choose citizenship there face judgment; the “wine of God’s fury” (Revelation 14:9-10).

By the end of the book, it is clear Babylon the Great is not that great (Revelation 16:19). God’s judgment gets poured out. And the story invites us to choose our city; to choose our citizenship.

And we will see how Revelation unveils these cities – but it uses a pretty awkward metaphor to do it. It is an M-rated metaphor that draws, again, on the Old Testament…

Cities are not just presented as places to live – but as women who choose to use their bodies in particular ways as they choose who to become one with – the beauty of the lamb, or the beastliness of Satan and his beasts. So in chapter 17, we do not just meet Babylon, a city, but a great prostitute – who the kings of the earth commit adultery with (Revelation 17:1-2). An intoxicating temptress – just like lady folly in Proverbs; who leads the world astray with her intoxicating nature. The woman sits on the blasphemous beast – she is dressed as a royal queen. Purple. Red. Gold. Precious stones – she is a parody of the bride of Jesus we read about in chapter 21; the heavenly city (Revelation 17:3-4).

She holds a cup filled with abominable things; the filth of her adulteries.

The beast she is sitting on has seven heads. We will come back to that. Like the book said would happen, the beast’s name is written on her forehead. She is marked by Babylon (Revelation 17:5).

She is a beast worshipper, she has given herself to Babylon and has become one with Babylon – we are told she is drunk with the blood of God’s people; the ones who bore testimony to Jesus (Revelation 17:6).

So, if we are thinking cities, we have already met a city like this last week (Revelation 11:8).

This woman is sitting on a seven-headed beast, and those seven heads are seven hills (Revelation 17:9). Now, we have seen a bit of Rome in the background of John’s vision for first-century Christians – and Rome is a city famously built on seven hills. This woman has become one with Rome. Rome is Babylon the Great and it has marked her as his. And this woman who looks like a queen on the outside, is corrupt and beastly.

And the problem for this woman is that when the final conflict comes, Rome does not love her – the Beast does not love her – she is just going to get destroyed. Revelation describes this cosmic battle between Satan, the Beast, and his minions – and the lamb (Revelation 17:14). Things are going to be alright for the people of the lamb, because the lamb is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, and he just wins.

But they are going to be horrid for the woman. She is surrounded by all the peoples, the multitudes – the kingdom of the false king – but the beast – that Roman power – is going to turn on her and destroy her (Revelation 17:15-16). That is what beasts do. You play with beasts and you get exposed and devoured and burned up.

That is what beasts do. And now we get another decoding moment; the woman is the great city (Revelation 17:18).

Now, there are three viable options here – I think – for what the great city is – Babylon is obviously a thing of the past when the letter is written, and these three are not exclusive – it could be all of them.

The first option is that the woman is the city of Rome, and the beast is the empire – but we have just been told the empire – the beast – hates and destroys the city.

The second option is that the woman is Jerusalem, and there’s some cosmic geography at play here where John is seeing the rule over the kings of the earth as a mirror of the lamb’s rule; idolatrous Jerusalem actually set the course for everyone else by rejecting Jesus. It became Babylon.

The third option is that it’s a lens that fits any city that opposes God in this way so that those caught up in its economic, political, and religious systems—like the kings of the earth—will be judged.

The unviable option, I think, is that it’s either a literal Babylon or a specific and particular future city way beyond the horizon of the original audience. I lean towards it being symbolic, and to John seeing all these so-called great cities coming together as Babylon—but also that this symbolism has to include Jerusalem because it is the city where Jesus was crucified. And that John is drawing on some pretty significant Old Testament imagery to condemn Jerusalem for being in bed with beastly Rome, and warning Jerusalem that Rome will turn on it and destroy it, because you can’t tame a beast.

This idea that Jerusalem—and as a result—God’s people—become unfaithful and beastly Babylon—a prostitute—is found everywhere in the prophets.

Isaiah 1—the faithful city—Jerusalem—has become a prostitute (Isaiah 1:21).

Jeremiah 3—you—Israel—have lived as a prostitute with many lovers (Jeremiah 3:1). In fact, it’s both Israel and Judah—the two kingdoms within Israel—commit adultery with idols—idolatry is spiritual adultery (Jeremiah 3:9-10). In Ezekiel, the accusation against God’s chosen people is that they prostituted themselves to the beastly empires around them. Egypt, Assyria, and then Babylon—the land of merchants (Ezekiel 16:26, 28, 29). That’s interesting language that’ll get picked up in Revelation.

You might have wondered why I keep zeroing in on capitalism and the economy and greed here, when I’m talking about beastly systems not other things like sex—which is where we might feel like beastly regimes oppose God’s kingdom, it’s because economic realities—worldly wealth—seem to be at the heart of beastly power, while how we use our bodies and pursue pleasure is part of the package. Sexual immorality is part of the picture Revelation talks about. It’s wrapped up in an idolatrous grasping over the pleasures of this world. It’s the metaphor here of adultery, rather than faithfulness, but the lure seems to be about luxury and wealth and power rather than sexual pleasure.

And what could be a bigger example of Israel being unfaithful—jumping in bed with worldly power—than that scene we saw last week from the trial of Jesus; “we have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15-16). That’s from Israel’s religious and political leaders.

Well.

It’s all coming down. In this choice, Israel’s leaders chose the wrong city. The wrong empire. The wrong king. The wrong gods. In John’s vision, Babylon is over—it’s a dwelling place of demons and unclean things that must be destroyed (Revelation 18:2).

And it has pulled all the nations with it (Revelation 18:3).

And with the Old Testament background in the mix—this is exactly what the nations did with Israel.

Jerusalem was meant to be the center of God’s rule—the city that drew the nations in to discover God’s love, and wisdom, and peace, and blessing…

But instead, it’s a city where people conspired to kill God’s Messiah, as its leaders jumped into bed with the rulers of Rome.

“We have no king but Caesar…”

And again it’s wealth and luxury that is part of the pull for the “merchants of the earth.” And it’s all coming down.

These cities opposed to God will fall. They’ll be judged. And God calls his people to come out—to disconnect from Babylon—to avoid being swept up in her sins (Revelation 18:4); to not give our hearts and our bodies, to come out of the religious system of Jerusalem, and of Rome, and of any regime opposed to God.

And so to not receive the judgment that falls; plagues reminiscent of the plagues in Egypt—the Passover—the exodus—God’s people must come out and be created as a new nation; a kingdom of priests again. Or when it all falls down, it’ll fall on you.

What’s your Babylon? What kingdom or false god is pulling you from Jesus? It will topple. It will disappoint. It will come under judgment and will not stand. Come out. Flee.

This false city; this false woman; like Lady Folly she’s a false queen who will lead you to destruction in her pursuit of glory and luxury if you get intoxicated (Revelation 18:7).

She thinks she’s a queen, but she’s a wicked witch.

Her pride comes before a fall. Babylon is coming down. And when this destruction comes there’ll be weeping and mourning from everyone in bed with this beastly regime (Revelation 18:9). The kings and rulers, they’ll weep. They’ll come undone.

The leaders of the economy — the market — the merchants — those who get rich from idolatrous grasping of the things of this world — John gives a whole list of the things they buy and sell — gold, silver, precious stones, purple, scarlet cloth — all the stuff the prostitute dressed herself in as she jumped in bed with Rome — all the things that pulled her in. These merchants will be sad because the whole system comes crashing down (Revelation 18:10-11); with all the stuff they loved and put their hope in. Even the captains of their ships will mourn (Revelation 18:17). We met the beasts of earth and sea — here’s the people who get rich riding on their backs.

But the whole system crashes. The whole economic and religious and political regime comes under judgement; and it all gets revealed as hollow. Empty. A house of cards. It’s riches to ruin in an instant.

It’s exposed. It’s empty. Ruinous. Beastly.

Get out (Revelation 18:11). The city is collapsing — the important people. The wealthy. Those who create the idolatry that pulls people away from God — that leads beastly powers to kill God’s holy people… his faithful witnesses (Revelation 18:23-24). Revelation exposes this system. And it says God is coming as saviour and judge.

The great prostitute who has — by her corruption — corrupted the earth — leading the kingdoms of the world away from God, rather than towards God, has been condemned (Revelation 19:1-2). Revelation puts the lens on Babylon.

On Rome.

On Jerusalem.

On any false heaven and false city, and it says there is no life or future there….

Do not put your trust in princes or princesses. Do not put your trust in the market.

Do not be lured in by the bright lights of the cities of this world.

Do not give your hearts to that.

Do not be pulled there by your passions and desires and loves.

Life is not found there.

Babylon is coming down.

But the message of the book does not end with judgment on Babylon.

And a new kingdom is coming up, as a heavenly city comes down.

The false bride of God is going to be destroyed with her lover.

The real bride of God will come down.

The old Jerusalem is being destroyed to be replaced with a new Jerusalem.

And we have to choose.

The beauty or the beast. The prostitute or the bride. Because God’s victory involves a new bride. A new woman — not lady folly who leads to destruction, but the bright and clean glorious bride of Jesus, the lamb (Revelation 19:6-8).

The wedding of the lamb has come, and he is not marrying the prostitute riding on the back of the beast, but a new people… dressed in white, given by God, rather than the trappings of idolatry, bought from the merchants. But first we see the groom — the one who is called faithful and true (Revelation 19:11).

The one who rules with an iron scepter — this is the baby the dragon tried to devour — the one called the king of kings and lord of lords (Revelation 19:15-16).

This is Jesus — the lamb — but revealed in glory.

The serpent slayer. In Revelation’s climactic scene, the beast, the kings of the earth, all the powers and principalities opposed to God — Babylon in all its might — line up against the rider (Revelation 19:19).

And maybe we are used to the idea that spiritual warfare is evenly matched; that the forces of good and evil are held in some sort of delicate tension. Ying and yang.

Chaos and order.

Light and dark.

But they are not. The fight is a non-event. Babylon comes down. The beasts are chucked in the fire (Revelation 19:20). And it is not just the beasts, but the dragon.

Just when the battle lines are drawn and God’s people are surrounded — it is not a big battle like at the end of a movie. There is no moment when it could go either way.

Fire comes down and devours God’s enemies (Revelation 20:9-10).

The devil gets chucked into the fire with his cronies. The victory is breathtakingly fast and total.

The choice should be easy. Babylon or the new Jerusalem. Live like the harlot or the bride. Choose the beauty or the beast.

It is not a new choice; there is an Old Testament context here — this has always been the choice facing God’s people. Be God’s beloved bride, or be unfaithful. Isaiah describes God, the maker, the almighty, as the husband of Israel (Isaiah 54:5). Through Jesus, he invites the nations to be his covenant people too — his bride.

To be his covenant partners, like in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 16:8),

Clothed by God, beloved by God, dressed in fine linen by God (Ezekiel 16:10) — the vision we see again in Revelation 19 of the people of the lamb, dressed in white.

Israel is described as God’s beautiful queen, drawing the nations in on account of their beauty and faithfulness and relationship with God (Ezekiel 16:13-14).

We can choose to embrace this reality as the bride of Christ — the bride of the king — or be the beastly queen who gives herself to the nations instead of God.

The beauty, or the beast.

Choose who you unite yourself to — where you turn for metaphorical clothing, who gives you meaning and purpose and satisfies your heart, who you worship.

God, or the world.

The lamb, or the dragon.

This is the story of the Bible, but presented as a stark choice.

The prophets call Israel to return to faithfulness, to be the bride, because God is the husband (Jeremiah 3:14), but when Jesus, the bridegroom, turns up, they kill him.

Jerusalem chooses judgment and God gives his kingdom, his presence, his Spirit, his glory, to those who accept the proposal. And those from Israel who recognize Jesus as king are returned and restored, while the kingdom expands to include the nations. The prophets long for a new Jerusalem in this moment of restoration. They see Jerusalem as the great city at the heart of the world. Jerusalem is meant to be the throne of the Lord, the meeting point of heaven and earth. The city all the nations come to to know God’s name and be healed, where they will receive new hearts (Jeremiah 3:17). And the prophets picture Jerusalem rebuilt by God as a city encrusted with jewels and precious stones (Isaiah 54:11-12).

And this is what John sees at the end of his vision, at the return of Jesus, the bridegroom, as he delivers this victory and destroys the beastly regimes and the dragon, Satan. As he reverses the curse and brings not just a new Eden but a new creation (Revelation 21:1). This is Genesis 1:1 all over again, only without the chaos sea in the picture. And in the new creation, John sees a new city, a new Jerusalem, a new woman, a bride prepared for her husband (Revelation 21:2).

Not a beastly woman, but a beauty. It’s a picture of the restoration not just of the peace of Jerusalem, where God dwelled in the temple, but the peace of Eden, where God dwelled with all humanity (Revelation 21:3).

The sad things are coming untrue.

The curse of Genesis 3 replaced with the blessing of Eden.

It’s a happily ever after. The victorious king killing the dragon and uniting with his princess in love forever (Revelation 21:4). It’s restoration and recreation without the threat of the serpent or anything that might pull us from God, because Jesus is the victorious king, and God, the almighty, is reigning unopposed (Revelation 21:5).

The victorious Jesus comes to give life to his people, satisfying our thirst, fulfilling the desires of our hearts that leave us drinking from all sorts of other wells.

I can’t help but think, in this moment, of the woman by the well in John’s Gospel, the woman who meets Jesus and suddenly finds what she’s been looking for so that she is restored to life (Revelation 21:6).

That woman is us, if we also come to Jesus like a fairytale princess coming home to her beloved king. But those who choose Babylon and idolatry, they are shut out; all those demonic idolatrous practices, we saw this list before, to live that way is to choose the beast, to choose Satan, and to choose his destiny (Revelation 21:8).

Destruction. This is what happens to those who worship the beast and its image (Revelation 14:9-10). Those who choose the beast, like the prostitute of Babylon, and live in his city.

And so we meet the new bride, the restored Jerusalem, the city of God. And we’re invited in (Revelation 21:9). It’s a city that has all the beauty and riches that pulled the unfaithful woman, the idolatrous people, away from God. Fake heavenly cities echo this real deal.

It’s a city that fulfills the vision of the prophets. Isaiah with a city covered in precious stones (Isaiah 54:11-12, Revelation 21:10-11). And even Ezekiel, which sees these same jewels as echoes of Eden, the garden of God on his holy mountain (Ezekiel 28:13-14, Revelation 22:1-2).

And John is picturing Eden restored with this jeweled temple, and the river of the water of life surrounded by the tree of life, where God dwells.

The choice is stark, choose between the city of destruction that will be destroyed; all its worldly riches, and idols, and violence.

Or choose the city of life, the new Eden, and the presence of God, and living water, and beauty and glory.

Choose the false city and its false gods, and Satan behind the curtain pulling the strings, and share in its fate, his destruction. Or choose the city of the lamb, and share in his life (Revelation 20:10, 21:8, 22:1-2).

Choose to be the ugly witch in the story who destroys others for her own sake.

Or to be the princess, to join together with our king forever.

So there are two imperatives from all this.

First is to come out of Babylon (Revelation 18:4). Don’t give your heart to idols. To wealth. Power. Sexual immorality. Pleasure. Figure out how to not live as citizens of a city opposed to God, a beastly regime. Refuse to bow the knee to the beast, don’t share in its sins.

And come in. Come into God’s new city. Become the bride (Revelation 22:17).

That’s the message of Revelation. It paints the choice facing all of us in stark relief.

It exposes life as it really is, not just the desires of our hearts, and where they take us, but the nature of those who offer to satisfy these desires and the kingdoms they create.

And we have to choose, worship Satan, chase the things of this world, chase life without God, become beastly and be destroyed.

Or worship Jesus, take your thirst, the desires of your heart to be known and loved and satisfied, to him, and receive life as a free gift forever. The beauty or the beast.

Which will you choose?

February 13, 2024

Revelation: whose heaven on earth project?

If you were brought before someone and asked to stand for Jesus or die, would you do it?

That is the situation facing the earliest readers of this letter. Remember, it becomes official Roman policy to execute anyone who refuses to worship Caesar; to fall before him. This is how Pliny describes his procedure to the Emperor Trajan:

“I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed.”

Would you stand for Jesus if you were confronted by the beastly power of Rome? What about in the beastly empires from Daniel?

Over the last few weeks, we have seen this theme of beastliness at work in any empire and kingdoms opposed to God’s rule.

Do you think you could stand for God in the pressure cooker of these empires? Like beastly Neduchadnezzar, who commanded worship of his image with the threat of fire (Daniel 3:5-6).

Or beastly Darius the Mede, with the threat of lions or beasts; the famous Daniel in the lions’ den story (Daniel 6:7).

Would you worship the empire, or worship God?

I know what we like to think. We would like to think we would stand.

But what about when that command is coupled with the bright lights and the big city?

The ‘heaven on earth’ offered in the gardens of Babylon? Or the peace of Rome?

The food, the parties, the feasting of the senses, the sex, the promises on offer if you leave the safety of your family home and set out on a big adventure into the city to discover your true self?

The bright lights of our own garden city, and its (food) courts [note: this is clever because our local Westfield was, until recently, named Garden City], and its promise of fulfillment if we buy and sell and work and participate in an economy that is seeking heaven on earth.

Temples were little ‘heavens on earth’ wherever you went, and we still have temples. Garden cities offering a vision of heaven to us if we will just buy into a system of worship.

And now we can do this online too.

The theologian William Cavanaugh wrote a book called Being Consumed, it is great, and so is this article about Amazon as an idolatrous empire. He talks about the way Amazon dehumanizes people, it commodifies by disguising the human involvement in our purchases. We just see the thing, and its price, and have no idea who made the thing, delivered the thing, or even packed it in the warehouse, and we do not care.

Amazon does not even have warehouses; it has fulfillment centers. An interesting choice of words.

Garden city. Fulfillment centers. These are little attempts to build heavens.

But, workers in those centers, like other real workers behind our digital heavens, like the people who decide what images are too much for us to see, these workers are invisible. And Amazon wants its human workers to act like machines. They have even patented an electronic wristband that will monitor efficiency, setting timed goals for them to go through the motions; like machines; like animals. Inhuman.

To serve those in the kingdom, who are the haves, the buyers, the consumers. These workers are probably enmeshed in the system too, using their pay to buy more stuff from Amazon.

It is like the story of the prodigal son and the way he is drawn by the bright lights but ends up living with the pigs and eating their food.

And this is all to fund Jeff Bezos’ dream to create a heavenly future, away from the earth, where we all live in utopian communities on spaceships built and serviced by Amazon. And then there is the idea of digital paradise that is becoming more and more real, especially this week with Facebook’s launching of its little digital heaven. The metaverse.

I do not know if you saw the promos, but the idea is we can escape and be our true selves in these paradise-like virtual environments, and maybe one day we will be able to digitize our brains and live forever in a computer.

And this sort of utopia is a vision perpetuated by every technology ad that tells the story that we can build heaven either on earth or escape to a virtual heaven. One of Facebook’s Meta promos even has a predator lying down with prey, or a weird two-headed beast from Revelation; you decide.

Either way, it is apocalyptic imagery. But as we will see today, this is also because fake kingdoms like Fakebook present fake heavens as part of their appeal. When a beastly empire comes knocking, it is not just with the threat of the sword, but these false heavens, with their beautiful beastly cities and their false messiahs.

Will you stand? No matter the cost, no matter what it means missing out on?

Will you be a faithful witness?

Like these two witnesses, who stand and speak for God, prophecy, dressed in sackcloth, dressed for mourning, not glory.

The Greek word for witness here is martyr (Revelation 12:3). Two martyrs.

John calls them two olive trees (Revelation 11:4). Two lampstands standing before the Lord. Now, there is rich Old Testament background both for olive trees and lampstands, but John has already pointed his lens at some lampstands to tell us who they are.

Remember, this is a letter to seven churches (Revelation 1:4). And in the opening of the letter, there are seven lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13). John tells us they are the seven churches (Revelation 1:20). And, when Jesus addresses these seven churches, he says the ones who do not hear and respond, instead of blessing, they will receive curse. Their lampstands will be removed from God’s presence; they will be exiled (Revelation 2:5). Jesus, through John, calls five churches to repent (Revelation 2:5, 16, 22, 3:3, 19), while he tells two churches to keep holding on, keep being faithful, while beastly forces push against them (Revelation 2:10, 3:11).

Revelation is asking that same question we are asking ourselves today. Will you stand in the pressure cooker of the big city, the false heaven, the beasts surrounding you. Will you speak for God? Now John points the camera at two faithful churches living in the bright lights and big cities of the beastly kingdom of Satan, with all their false heavenly allure and power.

Where these faithful witnesses give their testimony. Prophecying about Jesus.

And when they finish, the beast roars out of the abyss and kills them (Revelation 11:7).

And you have heard about Christianity in the public square. This is what it looks like when truth is made public; not worldly power, but crucifixion (Revelation 11:8).

This is part of our testimony in the public square, martyrdom, being killed, just like Jesus, not living or politicking like the kingdoms of this world, but like Jesus. John sees this in the great city, figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, cities in the Old Testament, that were enemies of God and his kingdom, and experienced his judgment, fire from heaven, plagues, the Passover (Revelation 11:8).

Only this time, the great city is where Jesus was crucified. Here John is identifying Jerusalem, because of its rejection of the Messiah, and the judgment that brought, with the beastly cities of the world. He will go on to talk about the great city of Rome, the new Babylon, and so he is painting Jerusalem as just like these cities, as being in bed with beastly powers. Which is what we see in John’s account of the crucifixion.

It is interesting to read this through the Revelation lens.

Jesus, on trial, declares his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). It is not like the beastly kingdoms of the world, because, if it was, his people would have taken up swords to prevent his arrest by the Jewish leaders. There is an implication that they are of the beastly system here. Jesus’ kingdom comes from elsewhere.

And then the Jewish leaders are the ones who drive the crucifixion even when Rome’s political authority, Pilate, is looking for a way out (John 19:7).

They want Jesus killed because he claims to be the Son of God, and they cannot lose their hold on power or influence, their place in the big city of the world.

Still, Pilate wants to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders keep shouting, and they appeal to beastly human power (John 19:12). If you let him go, you are no friend of Caesar. “Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”

When crunch time came, these leaders of God’s people did not stand and worship God.

They did not prophecy about the Messiah.

They proclaimed Caesar as king (John 19:15-16). It is clear which empire they belong to, which king they serve. What God they worship.

These leaders chose to stand with Caesar. To be friends with Caesar; friends with the world; friends with Satan.

And so, those who stand with Jesus can expect to be treated like our king.

The bodies of these witnesses become a spectacle in the midst of a celebration, a fake heavenly party. There is the giving of gifts (Revelation 11:8).

There are people from every tribe, language, and nation, coming together in a celebration of beastliness; the kingdom of the earth and its vision of heaven. Babylonian heaven. Roman heaven. Beastly heaven.

Instead of gathering around the slain lamb like in Revelation 7:9, these inhabitants of the beast’s kingdom gather round his prey, slain Christians, and celebrate in a beastly parody of heaven; a scene we will see repeat in chapter 13.

The city of God, the city of peace, Jerusalem, has become the city of Satan, and death. It needs renewal.

And indeed, John pictures that renewal coming. The journey to the new Jerusalem begins with the resurrection and recreation of God’s faithful people secured by his victory and the day of the Lord. Salvation and judgment.

The faithful witnesses do not stay dead. They are vindicated (Revelation 11:11-12).

They are re-created by the breath of life from God. They stand up again. They are glorified in the face of their enemies, and in John’s vision, there is an announcement.

The kingdom of the world has been replaced by the kingdom not of this world (Revelation 11:15).

But when does this happen?

Is this a future point about some future church, the church in the last days, or is it a picture of reality for every faithful church living in the world marked by Jesus’ victory and awaiting his return?

That is the million-dollar question, and yet, I think Revelation has already answered it in its picture of God and the slain lamb ruling from the throne, and the glorious Son of Man having entered the heavenly courts as king. It has become this.

John wants faithful churches who hang on to Jesus and anticipate life in his city, in the new Jerusalem, to know that this future is already secure, that we are already raised with Jesus and seated with him in the heavenly realm. That Jesus already reigns as king (Revelation 11:17). That judgment has already fallen on Jerusalem, that it did at the cross, and in the way the temple curtain was torn, and in the way the day of the Lord came when God’s glorious presence was poured out on people through the Holy Spirit arriving to unite us to Jesus and raise us with him, and in the way it also came for the Gentiles, because Jesus is now king of kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus is both Lord and King and Judge, and faithful witnesses secure rewards, while those who oppose God face judgment. Destruction. Not simply for persecuting God’s people but even for the beastly way of life that destroys the earth (Revelation 11:18).

Now, John turns the camera on these beastly kingdoms.

We meet these new characters, and it is a little cosmic retelling of the story of the Bible, centered on the birth of a chosen king and the defeat of Satan.

It is a Christmas story like you have never heard it before. Make sure you have got a dragon in your nativity scene this year. Because we meet this pregnant woman with 12 stars on her head, and when you see the number 12, think Israel pictured as God’s glorious people, a bride even, clothed with the sun (Revelation 12:1).

This is a picture of Israel, pregnant, ready to deliver God’s chosen king to the world.

And she is met, in her labor, by an enormous red dragon, and when we see crowns and horns, their symbols of power and authority (Revelation 12:3).

This dragon is beastly, and like Herod when Jesus was born, or Pharaoh when Moses was born, he is ready to devour this child. That is beastly, right, the moment it is born (Revelation 12:4).

He knows what is at stake if his rule is challenged.

And Israel gives birth to a promised king who will rule all the nations as the prophets promised, and before Satan can sink his teeth in, this child finds himself in God’s throne room (Revelation 12:5).

And that seals the defeat of Satan — the ascension of this king — restoring people of every tribe, tongue, and nation, back to life with God — this ends the power and dominion of Satan (Revelation 12:9).

In John’s vision, this has happened.

The dragon has been hurled down — like lightning — the kingdom of God and his king, the Messiah, has come with salvation and power because Satan has been defeated, and all people can come home (Revelation 12:10).

And how did it happen? How was this heavenly victory won?

By the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 12:11).

Just when it looked like Satan’s minions in Rome and Jerusalem were getting together to kill Jesus and win, they lose.

And how does this victory keep being hammered home?

By the word of the testimony of the faithful people of God who are prepared to bear witness even to the point of death.

And so now, it is not party time in Jerusalem, in a false city of false gods, offering a false heaven — over the death of the faithful witnesses. Now it is party time in the heavens.

And trouble for those who might fall victim to the lure of a defeated dragon and his empty promises about power and glory.

He is on borrowed time. A dead dragon walking.

And what is the call to those of us who live here on the earth and believe that the lamb has won? That he rules on the throne? While this dragon thrashes about and wages war on God’s people — trying to devour us? Hold fast to your testimony about Jesus (Revelation 12:17).

Hold on.

Stand.

When the pressure comes — whether from the sword or the carrot — the lure of false worship, or false heavenly cities — hold on.

Be the two lampstands. The faithful church. Even to the point of death (Revelation 11:4).

Will you stand?

Because beastly empires are going to make it hard. They are going to come for you. They might even hurt you.

But you know what hurts more? Letting go.

John turns the lens on these beasties and invites us to see what is at stake here. He wants us to see the powers and principalities in this world that are not of the kingdom of heaven, but the kingdom of the world — the violent, grasping, dominion systems that dehumanize and devour — even as we worship beastly things that conform us into their image — he wants us to see them as they are, and to stand against them as we stand for Jesus.

So we see these beasts coming out in service of the dragon. First, a beast from the sea. It has ten horns and crowns — just like the dragon — a picture of power, and each head with its crown has a blasphemous name (Revelation 13:1). Each crowned head proclaims itself a false god; a false Messiah. Each invites us to be ruled by someone other than Jesus.

It is beastly — like the beasts in the Old Testament — and it is given its power, and throne, and authority, by the dragon (Revelation 13:2).

Satan gives these kingdoms power to oppose God — he backs their blasphemy.

And remember a few weeks back we looked at how Revelation might work like a lens that helps us look at the world, rather than a code that helps us to see direct links to people; the rubber hits the road on this here.

I think it is a lens that helps us see worldly kingdoms opposed to Jesus as they really are — tools of Satan — but that this lens worked for its first audience as well, and it works for us when we see how it unveiled the powers and principalities at work in the life of the first readers.

And so while I think there is reason to be suspicious about some readings of Revelation that see Rome everywhere through odd mathematical stuff and weird reconstructions around Nero’s death and fears he might return, there are plenty of direct links without having to get out a decoder ring.

Because what is it that reveals that something is beastly or satanic?

It is when people worship these powers or systems or kings instead of Jesus, because of their incredible might, “who can wage war against it” (Revelation 13:4)? Who can resist?

It is empires and systems that are blasphemous — that do not simply operate to bring order and goodness to the world, restraining evil, but that claim the place of God, even through good intentions — slandering His name, and His dwelling place, while trying to set up utopian visions of heaven and heavenly cities without God in the mix (Revelation 13:6).

It is the people who want Eden, only without the presence of God — where actually the presence of God is what makes Eden, Eden.

It is those kingdoms built around shared loves and shared visions of the good life that exclude the lamb — and so inevitably choose violence, like the kingdoms of the world, rather than sacrificial love, like the kingdom of the Lamb who was slain before the creation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

And the message of Revelation is that to choose the beast is to go into captivity — into exile — out of Eden — to not be God’s kingdom and priests — but to be destroyed by the sword (Revelation 13:10).

To be devoured by the devourer — but more than that, to be judged by the one who defeated and will judge the devourer.

And so the faithful witnesses are those who stand.

Those who endure.

Those prepared to be outcasts — humiliated — executed in the public square, in order to bear testimony to the lamb who was slain (Revelation 13:10).

That was the message to the faithful churches… remember…

Be faithful and hold on (Revelation 2:10, 3:11).

Stand.

And then there is a second beast — and this maybe is the one that is the most famous bit of Revelation. This beast from the earth that looks a bit like a lamb, but speaks like a dragon — which I think is again a picture of how much fake kings will set themselves up to mimic the real king, while being serpent-tongued (Revelation 13:11).

So, it can be hard to spot the beastliness if you are not careful.

This second beast makes everyone worship the first beast — it orders them to set up an image to be worshipped — it gives life to the image the way God gave life to people (Revelation 13:14-15).

There are all sorts of possible fits for this beasty for its first readers — lots of commentators identify the first one as Roman political power — the crowned heads with blasphemous names as the emperors — and then this second beast as the imperial cult. Other people see the first beast as Rome’s political power — secured by the sword — and the second as Rome’s economic power.In either case, the idea is that you cannot buy or sell or participate in the heaven-like city of the kingdom without worshipping the king, and John is exposing this heavenly vision for what it is; beastly.

And inviting us to carry the name of the beast, as worshippers, or the name of the lamb, as the people of God who worship him.

Rome is definitely defining the experience of the first readers — but I think we make it too much of a code, and not enough ‘lens’ if we think it is all about Caesar and laws around who can buy and sell in the marketplace using coins with his head on them…

That is a type of beastliness, but it is the political manifestation of a bigger spiritual reality that we will get while the dragon thrashes about.

I think there is a sense that all those forms of power were so deeply embedded, that is the point — but there is also some cosmic stuff going on with these two beasts — they are a bit like the sea and land beasts — Leviathan and Behemoth we see in Job (Job 40:15, 41:1); pictures of the cosmic powers and principalities that we cannot reign in, but that only God can; pictures of the intersection between the spiritual world, idolatry, and the political systems that all creates.

In Job, these big strong beastly powers could only be controlled — defeated — by God himself; its strength was beyond us, and yet puny for God (Job 40:19).

In Jewish thought — and these beasties get quite a bit of airtime in Jewish religious writings outside the Bible — these two beasts were symbolic of the powers of evil, and God was going to destroy them in the final judgment, and this is also part of Isaiah’s vision of the day of the Lord.

God bringing his sword against Leviathan, the gliding serpent monster of the sea — the chaos beasty (Isaiah 27:1).

There is even a belief in the Jewish religious texts that these beasts will be what gets eaten at the feast of celebration that happens; God’s big banquet; his celebration of the undoing of beastliness at the wedding supper of the lamb.

So it might be better not to think of the beasts as Rome, and its emperors, but that John is trying to help us see how Rome and its empire, with all its false worship, is just another in a long line of political regimes animated by this sort of serpentine, beastly, force, and to see these forces all being brought to heel by God through his victorious king.

So what happens when we look at the world through this lens?

When beastly empires want to throw Christians to the lions? Or the fire.

Or kill anyone who will not join their worship?

Where do these forces work for us?

I think they are at work in any political, social, or economic situation — any city or agenda — that offers a false vision of heaven, with false messiahs — false kings, or saviors, with promises that we can take part in that economy if we just worship that way, if we just give ourselves.

It is in the metaverse, or the eschatological vision of Jeff Bezos and others who think we can build heavenly cities — here, and in space, using human ingenuity…

It is the bright lights of the garden city — the promises of advertisers and corporations that they are the path to your happiness if you just consume; devour; destroy the earth —

The new idolatry that invites us to experience satisfaction — build our own little heavens — at the click of a button.

Seeking fulfillment while dehumanizing the people on the other end of the mouse click — turning them into beasts, or robot-like drones who service our desires.

It is the invitation to end up being beastly, dining with the pigs — rather than glorious, dining with the lamb.

It is in the political forces at work in our world — not just in countries where owning the name of Jesus leads to death, but where being faithful leads to ridicule or persecution in the public square; the pressure to conform to the world’s view of sex, or money, or power, or progress, or growth, or politics, to chase Leviathan, and become beastly.

If we can avoid letting go of Jesus to grab these beastly regimes, then we might become faithful witnesses.

We might become martyrs; those who testify to the crucified king as those living in their false heavens pursuing a false Eden — a garden city — without the gardener king mock us, and perhaps persecute us.

If the persecution is not happening — then that is something to be thankful for, but maybe we should also ask if it is not happening because we are not being faithful? If it is not happening because we are being lukewarm?

February 12, 2024

Revelation: Pointing the lens at the throne room of heaven

You can tell a lot about a king — or a kingdom — by the throne and the throne room, and who is in it.

Like the throne in “Game of Thrones” — a throne made of swords — to remind anyone who sits on it their rule is secured by the sword, and will be ended by one.

“Game of Thrones” is a hyper-violent show based on a series of books that are a deep dive into the violence at the heart of modern empires.

It is a bit like the Netflix sensation [current at the time of preaching] — “Squid Game” — the hyper-violent series aiming to expose and critique the violence at the heart of capitalism, where the haves capitalise on the have nots, in the show the super-wealthy sit on thrones watching people indebted by the system give their lives in violent games, hoping to win financial freedom.

The catch is we are so enmeshed in the system these shows critique that instead of being shocked, and exposed, we find ourselves sitting in this same chair, embracing the fruits of the system and the entertainment it uses to keep us from revolution.

Empires built on immersive violence as entertainment are not all that new. In fact, this was part and parcel of the Roman empire around the time Revelation was written.

The person occupying the throne in Rome embodied the worst of the political and economic realities “Game of Thrones” and “Squid Game” unpacked, but when you were enjoying the show it was hard to escape… The throne needs to be seen from a different angle.

And that is what this Revelation does.

John’s vision now zooms in on the throne in heaven (Revelation 4:2). There is some imagery that carries over — seven lamps are blazing — seven lamps perhaps sitting on the seven lampstands —these lamps are the spirit of God blazing; shining light on the throne. Thunder and lightning are rolling out (Revelation 4:5).

There are twenty-four elders around the throne, or, literally, twenty-four Presbyterians (Revelation 4:4), and we will see more of them later. Then we zoom out on these four living creatures who are “covered with eyes, in front and in back…” one is “like a lion”, the next “an ox,” the third has “a face like a man,” and the last “was like a flying eagle” (Revelation 4:6-8). They sound weird, but we have met them before.

They were in the heavenly throne room in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:5). There are some little differences, but in both scenes they are these critters that are this mix of the human and beast; the same animals (Revelation 4:6-8, Ezekiel 1:10). In Revelation these critters have six wings, but in Ezekiel, they had four. We are told the identity of these heavenly creatures in Ezekiel.

These weird lion-man-cow-eagles are cherubs. Cherubim is the Hebrew plural for cherubs.

You might picture a cherub like this.

But according to the Bible, they are beastly creatures who look more like this:

And the thing is — this picture of these heavenly beings that serve and worship Israel’s God — these did not come from a vacuum. The prophets in the Bible are making a point here.

It is not that cherubim actually look like this; they are a visual commentary, drawing on the thought world and gods of the nations to make the point that worshipping lesser spiritual beings from God’s divine court makes no sense when it is actually God who is on the throne.

Remember, these empires around Israel worshipped images of beastly gods — serpents, dragons, weird hybrid animals like this Babylonian picture.

Their stories were violent and bloody and their kings were supported by beastly supernatural beings — gods — who triumphed, tooth and claw, over other beastly gods.

And we saw how Daniel makes the connection clear, even with Nebuchadnezzar running off to the wilderness looking like the beast gods (like the cherubim) Babylon was tempted to worship in the place of the Almighty (Revelation 4:7-8, Daniel 4:33).

These cherubim are an amalgam of these beast gods, only, they are not superior beings, but servants of Israel’s God; worshippers of Israel’s God. To worship them would be a big mistake. Isaiah does the same thing with some six-winged critters; the seraphim (Isaiah 6:2).

John’s vision brings the cherubim and seraphim together.

We might picture cherubs as little angels with wings, but seraphim — the word means both burning as a verb, and snake, as a noun, and there is a good case to think that seraphim are actually flying fire serpents. The word might have its origin in cobras who spit venom. These winged snakes were a popular religious image in Egypt — where they were a cosmic symbol of divine authority.

Pharaohs even had them on their crowns. But Ezekiel and Isaiah – then Revelation – picture these beastly heavenly creatures not as objects of worship, but as worshippers of the Almighty who sing praise to him (Revelation 4:8, Isaiah 6:2).

Why would you worship other spiritual creatures who sing “holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty”?

John’s vision pulls together these threads to show the position God occupies in the heavens; as absolute ruler over the so-called gods of the nations.

But there is more, because the cherubim had a job. They were divine gatekeepers, keeping sinful people out of God’s presence.

When humanity gets exiled from God’s presence — in Eden — cherubim guard the way (Genesis 3:24). When Israel operates as God’s priestly kingdom, carrying God’s presence with them in the tabernacle, cherubim symbolically separate people from God’s presence in the holy of holies (Exodus 26:30-31). The curtain in the tabernacle, and then the temple — the one that tore when Jesus died — was a cherubim guarded barrier between God’s holiness and the people — part of it tearing at the death of Jesus was because that barrier is now broken, but part of it was also a picture of God declaring he will not live in that temple. Statues of cherubim framed the Ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:27). The Ark was a physical picture of the throne of God, and the cherubim were keeping the people from God’s presence, except a priest, once a year, keeping humans away from the presence of the holy, holy, holy, God.

Here in Revelation these cherubim are not excluding people from God’s presence. They are these powerful awe-inspiring cosmic beings who draw the eye — but we are not meant to gaze at these crazy critters. Because their gaze is fixed on someone else.

We might be tempted, by all this descriptive language, to keep our eyes on the weird heavenly beings.

Especially if they represent some sort of powers or rulers of the kingdoms of the world who might impact us. Where Ezekiel’s vision ends with the camera pointed at this glorious figure “like that of a man” on the throne (Ezekiel 1:26), John opens with our gaze firmly on the throne; on this figure (Revelation 4:2), who like in Ezekiel, is surrounded by rainbows and light and glory (Ezekiel 1:27, Revelation 4:2-3).

The lens zooms out on another miracle — Presbyterians moving their bodies in worship (Revelation 4:9-10). When the cherubim and seraphim worship the one on the throne, these twenty-four elders join in. Now there is a lot of debate about who these elders represent, whether they are spiritual beings who are part of the divine council that gets mentioned in the Old Testament a bit — or glorified humans — ruling with God — but these creatures have crowns, and they lay them down in recognition of God’s rule… and say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” (Revelation 4:11).

I think these are probably also meant to be spiritual beings; the powers and principalities the Old Testament pictures ruling over the nations, and those who Jesus now rules over as the king of kings and Lord of Lords.

I recognise how weird and otherworldly this all is, but remember this is a letter written to real churches in the first century and this sort of vision of the cosmos was bread and butter. Especially with an emperor claiming his ancestors had ascended to the heavens to rule as gods within a council of gods.

But there is an Old Testament background here too. Isaiah the prophet anticipated a day of the Lord, when judgment would be dished out on the earth; not just on people, but any powers and principalities — those beastly nations — who had stolen Israel’s hearts through false worship. Isaiah anticipates this day when God will come in judgment, laying waste on the earth (Isaiah 24:1), and punishing the cooperating rebels on earth and in heaven – the powers in the heavens, and the kings of the earth (Isaiah 24:21).

And on that day, the heavenly bodies — that is how ancient people viewed the moon and the sun, as part of the heavenly realm; the heavens will be dismayed and ashamed for this rebellion, and the Lord will reign from his throne. Remember this was in the Temple, on the ark, in Jerusalem (that’s how God is described dwelling in the temple “reigning between the Cherubim”), and in heaven. He will reign before the elders (Isaiah 24:23). This is not definitively heavenly or earthly, and in some ways it could be both — it is just that humans will come later in the piece in John’s vision. But, again, these elders are looking at the one on the throne. And that should be our focus. Not the weird beasties or the heavenly dancing Presbyterians, and not, in this next bit, the things in the hands of the people on the throne; the scrolls and seals.

The lens is pointed at the throne.

If we look at the other weird bits and worry about the scary stuff that worry can consume us and distract us, and remove our confidence in the one ruling on the throne. John’s lens wants to keep drawing our attention to him.

These heavenly characters are not just circling God’s throne, but the slain lamb standing at the center of the throne (Revelation 5:6); the one who sends God’s spirit into the earth; God’s life giving, glorious, presence.

The Lamb takes a scroll from the one on the throne — God, and when he takes it the elders fall before him in worship. They make us look at Jesus again. These heavenly elders are God’s servants, John also sees them serving God, before the throne, holding on to the prayers of God’s people; bringing the people of God into the presence of God (Revelation 5:8). And it is not the contents of the scroll they draw our focus to — but the worthiness of the lamb who was slain who by his blood purchased people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:9).

And made them one kingdom — a kingdom of priests who will reign on the Earth, the way Jesus is now reigning in the heavens (Revelation 5:10). The King of Kings who rules over the powers and principalities has brought people from all sorts of other kingdoms into his own kingdom of priests.

The heavenly host expands — 100 million angels join in song — praising the lamb (Revelation 5:11-12). The King. The one who was slain and is now worthy to be worshipped; to be honored, glorified, and praised in song. And then we get the super wide shot — each transition the lens is expanding to include more people and creatures — from the center — the throne — outwards; from the one on the throne to every creature in heaven and earth glorifying both the one who sits on the throne and the lamb (Revelation 5:13).

Whatever you want to make of the next bit — the opening of the scroll in chapters 6 and 7 — we are meant to know that God and the slain lamb are in control. They are ruling over what comes next.

So when the scroll is opened and the four horsemen of the apocalypse trot out in Revelation 6, they are not sinister figures opposed to God, but the ones who bring his judgment — the day of the Lord — anticipated by the prophets, and even earlier, in the law. All the plagues and pestilence and destruction the horsemen bring are the punishments promised by God for people who turn their backs on him and worship false gods in Leviticus.

The first rider brings the sword; turning people against each other; leaving us playing the game of thrones, dominating people to get what we want, like we are all caught up in a squid game (Leviticus 26:17).

The second horseman — the black horse — is a picture of economic destruction; inflation, the land working against people, scarcity, and no bread (Leviticus 26:26).

Then it is the pale horse — death and hades — bringing death; even through attacks from wild beasts (Leviticus 26:22). This is where beastly worship leads. He also brings the sword, wars, and plagues (Leviticus 26:25). There is a reminder of Egypt here too, and this is a picture of judgment, exile from Eden; curse; for breaking relationship with God.

This is Jesus bringing the day of the Lord promised by the prophets. This lines up with Jesus’ proclaiming judgment on Jerusalem as he approaches the cross, and his promise that the temple will be destroyed and God’s kingdom removed and given to others; a picture he, and John, both drew from Leviticus, Isaiah and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 9:2).

When Israel experiences this exile from God’s presence, when the sword is unleashed, in that moment, in Ezekiel, the cherubim, who had been gatekeepers of God’s glorious presence in the temple, they move from the Holy of Holies to the threshold, and some guys with swords turn up. God sends this bloke with a writing kit along with the sword guys (Ezekiel 9:2-3). His job is to mark out God’s people — like at the Passover — to spare them from the judgment that is about to be dished out. Those with this mark on their foreheads will be protected (Ezekiel 9:4). This is a new Passover, only it is happening in Jerusalem — and it is imagery we see in Revelation too. Once that judgment is carried out, Ezekiel pictures God and his gatekeepers, the cherubim, taking off; departing (Ezekiel 10:18-19).

Exile was the beginning of God’s judgment on religious and political Israel for not being his priestly kingdom — a judgment finally sealed for them when its leaders kill Jesus, and the curtain tears.

John is showing how exile in Babylon – for Israel — was just a shadow of the exile that comes when you kill God’s lamb, which comes on all the nations.

I know this is a lot.

So let’s just take stock.

In the Old Testament the Cherubim and Seraphim were heavenly beings — like the elders — powers and principalities. The Bible depicts them as the sort of beastly figures worshipped by the nations — and condemns Israel, in particular, for worshipping these beastly gods rather than the God they serve — the Lord of Hosts.

These divine creatures though, they were gatekeepers of God’s presence. They kept people out. Out of Eden, out of the Holy of Holies. And when the exile happened — when judgment came on Israel — they took off with God.

Now, in the New Testament, John is using all this same imagery to say the same judgment that came on Israel in the Old Testament is — like the prophets anticipated — about to come on Jerusalem and the nations.

Jesus, the slain lamb, has won a victory over the powers and principalities, which means the nations, and the spiritual realm, are now called to worship Jesus as king. He is creating a kingdom of priests from all nations, not just Israel, by inviting people to come out of those nations — to be marked by him — rather than the beast — and so to be saved from God’s judgment. Because when Jesus — the slain lamb — comes as judge, and unleashes God’s promised consequences — that bit in Isaiah is fulfilled — all the kings, the princes, their mighty armies and the powerful economies that sustain them — everyone not marked for life, they face the terrifying prospect of realizing they have stood against God and his king (Revelation 6:15).

And it is terrible. They do not want to see God’s face, or feel his wrath.

In Revelation this judgment — this Passover — does not just fall on Israel. It is coming for all people, and those who are marked by the lamb, rather than marked by the beast, will live in God’s presence (Revelation 6:16-17).

Exile from God’s presence or Exodus to be made a kingdom of priests. Beast or Beauty. Those are the choices.

This is the lens we are given — the lens is often on the horses and horsemen, and the punishments, and trying to figure out where we are in history, rather than on the one who unleashed them, and how we should respond.

Then the lens points at people.

Suddenly the cherubim are not keeping people away from God’s glory — people are now joining their song. First the 144,000 (Revelation 7:4). Now. Lots has been said about this, lots of people have guessed what is going on — but I think it is a picture of a restored Israel — Israelites who put their trust in Jesus — not a literal number that has to be filled up, but multiples of 12 as a picture of completeness.

This is not all the people who are saved ever. It is not those of us who are gentiles — also saved and marked by the lamb, because we come next.

This is the bad stuff in the Old Testament coming untrue; the exile of Israel, the destruction of a bunch of the tribes, and the exile of the nations and us all being handed over to other powers, and humanity’s exclusion from Eden; from life with God.

Now, all humans everywhere are invited to be God’s glorious people again; to become part of this great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9).

Calling out:

“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:10).

We are invited to look at the throne and join the chorus of heaven; worshipping God as one (Revelation 7:11). This great multitude is the people saved by the blood of the lamb — like in the Passover — washed, cleansed, glorified — marked as his (Revelation 7:14).

We are invited to join in; to be saved by the Lamb, to no longer be separated from God by swords and judgment, but be brought into the presence of God — back into the place sealed off by the cherubim — whether at the gateway of Eden, or the curtain temple. Our exile is over (Revelation 7:15).

We now enjoy blessing — covenant blessing — rather than those Leviticus curses for false worship (Revelation 7:16), being led by the Lamb, as our shepherd, to living water and a world beyond curse — there is a nod here to the new creation pictured at the end of the book (Revelation 7:17).

John sees things Old Testament anticipates like the choice between exile from God, or restoration through God’s anointed king in a new Passover; or between death separated from God’s presence, and life in the new Eden, a restored creation — centered on the lamb.

John invites us to share his vision of the throne room, and to choose the throne we serve.

We might not have beastly gods. We might not worship spiritual powers and principalities — heavenly beings who actually rightly serve God. We might not even have categories for cherubim and seraphim.

We might not have a tyrant on the throne — like Nero — a beastly ruler who killed his own mother to hold his throne; who commanded citizens of his empire worship him and his ascended ancestors.

But we face the same temptations that people pulled to beastly worship by the imperial cult faced.

This was a significant pressure in the world Revelation was written to. My old college principal, Bruce Winter, wrote a book Divine Honours for the Caesars, about how pressure from the Roman imperial cult was profound for early Christians, and how this pressure was not just the sword. It was cultural. The beastly empire of Rome had a beastly violence at its heart.

Emperor worship was propped up by blood. He wrote:

“Imperial veneration was also combined with other public activities, including spectacles such as gladiatorial and wild beast shows, athletics, chariot races and public feasts, such was its assimilation into the life of cities in the Roman Empire.”

Beastliness was embedded into the religion, the politics, the economy, and the entertainment and culture. It formed the imagination of the people.

So what sort of thrones shape your imagination?

Probably not Game of Thrones — but almost certainly the world it tried to unveil — a world where might makes right and violence solves problems; a world where entertainment is embedded in the same system it sometimes tries to critique, so we are never sure if we are escaping it, or escaping to it.

These systems are so compelling — just like Rome’s culture of games and feasts — that even critiques of the system become part of the system; things that feed our hearts, but also make the people making the critiques stacks of money. It is a vicious — beastly — cycle.

And the solution — the solution offered by Revelation — is not more escapism into beastly throne rooms, or onto your couch where you join in glorying in violence and cultivate desires that pull you from Jesus.

It is to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the Lamb at the center of the throne of heaven (Revelation 7:17); to worship him as king; to find ourselves deeply embedded in his story, having our view of the world shaped by gazing upon him. The challenge is to fill our eyes — and our vision — with this throne room. This king. This kingdom. Rather than having our hearts shaped by the beastly world around us. That does not mean not watching super violent shows, or the art or entertainment from the world, but it should prime us to see critiques and push for change; rather than reveling in the violence and misery.

We should be moved to want more of God’s kingdom to come when we are confronted with the stark reality of the kingdoms of this world.

But it does mean not just watching the world through the lenses it provides.

It means not being caught up in beastly regimes through bread and circuses.

It means finding things — the Bible, art, people who live in ways led by the Spirit — that centre your life on the throne; and finding ways to feast on those things so we keep our eyes on the Lamb.

One way I do this — and we do this as a family — is with the Bible Project. Their videos are fantastic — they love the big story of the Bible — our kids love watching Bible Project with us.

But they have also got a podcast that sometimes moves me to tears as it keeps me finding new ways to see the glory of Jesus and the wonderful intricacy of the Bible’s story. They have fantastic content on Revelation. So does the Naked Bible podcast. It gives me fresh eyes as I am engaging with God’s word, and it is full of rich stuff on Revelation going at a much slower pace than we are.

We also train our hearts as we sing like they do in the throne room — singing words joining the chorus of heaven. All the songs we sing are on a Spotify playlist so you can soak in them, sing them in the shower — do whatever it takes to focus in on the Lamb.

And of course, we are about to share in the feast of the Lamb together — the picture of a new Passover — that marks us out as Jesus’ priestly kingdom [note, we share communion together every week after the sermon].

January 22, 2024

Revelation — A letter to seven (real) churches

Imagine getting a letter like the book of Revelation in your mailbox — or read out at your church one Sunday. In the last post/sermon I suggested Revelation is a mix of three genres — it’s an apocalypse — which means an unveiling; it starts by pointing a lens at heaven, and then looking at the world and its events from a heavenly perspective. It’s a prophecy — John positions himself as someone bringing a word from God — Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s a letter to seven real churches in the province of Asia — but because the number seven to signifies completeness, it’s also a letter to all the churches (Revelation 1:4); to every church Jesus represents in the heavenly realm as the Son of Man — the Priest King — who walks among the (seven) lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13, 20).

The book opens with seven meta-letters within the letter (Revelation 2-3). These seven letters follow a common structure. Each mini letter opens with this reference to the angel of the church in — and then the gap is filled in with the city from Asia Minor — modern-day Turkey and surrounds; these are all significant regional centres within this province (Revelation 2:1, 8, 12, 18, 3:1, 7, 14). There are two ways you can read “angel” — it literally just means messenger — it could be addressed to the human leaders who would pass on these messages to each church, except that chapter 1 has just said that the seven stars held in the hands of Jesus are the seven angels of the seven churches, and given us this picture that they might be spiritual beings lined up in the heavens to act on behalf of the churches (Revelation 1:20), that said, for a long, long time I just read this as “messenger” — and you should feel welcome to do that if you don’t want to go down a rabbit hole where these are spiritual beings who have some sort of relationship with each church. This spiritual being is addressed on behalf of the churches, which is interesting because the contents of each letter speaks directly to the earthly life and behaviour of the humans in the churches.

There’s more to the formula. In each letter to each church, John grounds what he has to say by pointing his lens not at the church, not at its problems, but at Jesus picking up descriptors of Jesus from his vision in chapter 1.

When he speaks to Ephesus it’s to remind them that Jesus is the Priest King walking with his church (Revelation 1:13, 16, 2:1).

To Smyrna it’s that Jesus is the Living One — the First and Last — who died and rose (Revelation 1:17-18, 2:8).

To Pergamamum it’s that Jesus wields a heavenly double-edged sword (Revelation 1:16, 2:12).

To Thyatira it’s this picture of the glorious Son of God who is just like God — eyes blazing and burnished feet (Revelation 1:14-15, 2:18).

With Sardis, John does something a little different. He pictures Jesus not just holding the seven stars that are seven angels — but the seven spirits — which we saw last week is a picture of the Holy Spirit before the throne of God. Jesus is the one who spiritually unites the church to God’s Spirit (Revelation 1:4, 16, 3:1).

With Philadelphia, well, now he goes off script a bit. He pictures Jesus as the one who opens and shuts doors that no one else can with “the Key of David” (Revelation 3:7). The figure in Revelation 1 held different keys; the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18).

Finally, in Laodicea, it’s Jesus the “faithful and true witness;” the ruler not just of the kings of the earth, but all God’s creation (Revelation 1:5, 3:14).

The lens becomes more expansive, but John is also showing each church an aspect of Jesus’s rule — his dominion — the way he triumphs over the beastly powers threatening to steal their hearts. He shows them things about Jesus that are particularly relevant to each church’s situation. But then the lens is turned onto the churches, and we get Jesus’ vision of the churches. He “knows” (Revelation 2:2, 2:9). He “sees.” In a creepy horror movie vibe, for Pergamum, he “knows where they live” (Revelation 2:13). This refrain is repeated (Revelation 2:19, 3:1, 8, 16); “I know…” Jesus knows and is about to unveil some key things in each church.

There’s a pattern within this set of seven churches; the first and last are in big trouble. They’ve utterly compromised and need to repent to avoid sharing the same judgment we’ll see dished out to the beast; their lamps will be removed, while the second and the sixth churches have got things pretty together. They just need to hang on. The third, fourth, and fifth churches are a mixed bag — in danger of losing their light if the compromisers in their midst aren’t brought to repentance, or if their bad influence spreads. Five out of the seven churches are unhealthy so they are called to repent.

Let’s have a look at the diagnosis of these churches; and the things that pull the church away from Jesus.

Ephesus has forsaken its first love (Revelation 2:4-5). It’s at risk of losing its lampstand. Just like the lamp of Israel’s temple was removed; they’ll be exiled, and no longer God’s priestly people.

Smyrna is holding on. They’re facing persecution from not just the Romans, but the Jews, those who because they have rejected Jesus, their king, because they teamed with Rome to crucify God’s anointed one. They’re now not the house of God, but the house — or synagogue — of Satan (Revelation 2:9-10). This isn’t about Jewish people — John, himself, is Jewish — it’s about the political and religious system of the first century that failed to hear the words of the prophets, failed to recognise the coming king; failed by turning to Rome to remove the threat Jesus posed to their earthly kingdoms and so now have had God’s kingdom pulled from their grasp.

And so the same people who made Jesus suffer are now persecuting his church, and the church in Smyrna is wearing the cost. Pergamum is experiencing the same pressure; they’re like the home city of Satan, where he has his throne (Revelation 2:13), but they’re holding on. And we know “Satan lives in their city” in this apocalyptic sense because faithful witnesses to Jesus, like Antipas, are being executed. That’s a pointer to things being not ok. But it’s not all good in the church. There are compromisers; people standing in the tradition of the Old Testament character Balaam — the guy with the donkey — who tried to convince Israelites they could be God’s people while worshiping foreign idols and joining in their religious approach to food and sex (Numbers 22-24, Revelation 2:14-15). It seems the Nicolaitans might be a group doing that too — the name “Nicholaus” means “conquerer”, and it’s possible there are some people saying you can be fully Roman and fully Christian; citizens of both kings. Worshippers of both gods. And Jesus says no.

The church in Thyatira has the same issue; there are compromisers in their midst. Here Jesus throws back to another Old Testament character — Jezebel — another false teacher who led Israel to destruction through idolatrous worship (1 Kings 16). There’s a modern-day Jezebel in their church doing the same thing; luring Christians away from Jesus through false worship, calling them to give their hearts and their bodies to someone else while seeking heavenly pleasure on earth (Revelation 2:20).

Sardis looks alive but is dead (Revelation 3:1). It’s like a whitewashed tomb. While the other two churches have some bad eggs amongst the good, Sardis has some faithful people, amongst the bad (Revelation 3:4). The rest have to learn from them what it is to be pure — to worship Jesus — to be clothed in white and worthy (Revelation 3:5). The point here’s they should become like them — repenting — so they don’t worship their way out of the kingdom of God and into the kingdom of the beast, and worse, into the judgment of Jesus.

Philadelphia is another church facing persecution from the Jews, but Jesus promises them vindication if they just keep holding on and not denying his name (Revelation 3:8-9).

But Laodicea. It’s in trouble. The citizens in this incredibly wealthy city are comfortable. Rich. They don’t feel like they need anything because they are materially sorted. But the spiritual reality — when the heavenly lens is applied; they’re wretched. Poor. Blind. And naked (Revelation 3:16-17).

They need to see things God’s way and store up heavenly treasures — to be dressed in heavenly clothing. There’s an interesting throwback to Genesis 2 and 3 here with the idea of shameful nakedness, where to be restored to God is to not be naked, but clothed in the glorious white clothes we see heavenly creatures wearing, and that we see Jesus wearing. The Laodiceans need to see the world differently; to see Jesus differently; to stop being lukewarm and get their stuff together.

The lens being turned on all these seven churches — it’s a lens being turned on God’s church — isn’t it? We know by looking. Looking not at other churches “out there,” though there are plenty that aren’t healthy. Looking not at others in this room. But by turning and applying this lens to ourselves — our own lives. We know that there are times we want to go with the flow of the world; to avoid hard things by joining the world, not holding on to the name of Jesus like we should. We know that we want to worship and give our lives to all sorts of other little gods for the sake of their little promises of pleasure and comfort. Sex… Food… Parties… Money… Power. Not just at a national level, but in the workplace, or in our relationships.

What do you think Jesus would write to us?

To the church in ______?

To our gathering — and to you — if we were unveiled. What would Jesus say to the 21st century Australian church?

Jesus knows where we live. He knows when we live. He knows the pressures we are facing. He knows what beastly regimes are pulling the strings of our hearts to tempt us to renounce his name.

He knows.

He knows what you’re watching that is forming your imagination — whether that’s the news you’re consuming that shapes your vision of people and events, or the entertainment that shapes your vision of the good life and feeds your desires, and your fantasies.

He knows what you’re browsing online — the stuff you want to buy to bring happiness. The people and their naked bodies you want to consume thinking a little sexual immorality won’t hurt. That nobody is getting hurt. That there’s nothing beastly here. That you can have a foot in both camps and give your heart to both God and your fantasies.

He knows what you’re spending your money on as you buy your own little Laodicean kingdoms. He knows how we store up wealth for ourselves and build our own little castles — our own little heavens — our own little dragon piles of treasure that we won’t share with others.

He knows who we’ll include or exclude from our communities as we use power — where we might turn into little synagogues of Satan by seeing Jesus’ victory only occurring for people like us, so we build little church communities of comfort and create cultures and behaviours and set ourselves up as judges who won’t let others in.

He knows the little values we hold that don’t come from him, but from human cultures and practices that we put up as barriers; the idea that people have to be, or look, or dress a certain way before they can be welcome here.

We might think we’re afflicted and impoverished — and we might think this reminder that we are spiritually rich — in Christ — is for us. But we’re not. Mostly. Some of us — this is true — that we’re in poverty.

But many of us are profoundly wealthy. Rich. Caught up in capitalism and consumerism and individualism as beastly empires we don’t want to walk away from. Living without needs — just with wants and a beastly empire that tries to tell us — with its impressive propaganda machine — that uses algorithms to tell us our wants are needs.

But we’re blind.

And the dangers in these warnings for the churches pulled off the rails by the world — they’re not just dangers when Nero is stomping around with an army.

They’re dangers when Bezos and Musk and our billionaire pinup boys are sending wealthy people into space, and getting us into electric cars using batteries made from resources pulled from the world’s poorest countries while exploiting their workers. They’re dangers for us.

When we love all this stuff — it pulls us away from loving God.

We’re in just as much danger of being pulled away from faithfulness to God in an individual era of sexual liberty — where we want sex with a swipe right, or simulated stimulation as we project our wildest fantasies into a search bar and have them projected back to us by our screens; or even just sex where we consume others like objects, without the deep covenant commitment to mutuality and service of one another in the context of marriage.

In (an earlier series on the wisdom literature that I may eventually post) we saw that sex outside of marriage isn’t God’s design. It’s not wise, it’s not what will produce flourishing. Sex that we pursue for ourselves, or to wilfully satisfy some other person, outside of marriage – sexual immorality — is also idolatrous disobedience that’ll pull us from God. Even if our sexual immorality isn’t in idol temples, like the first century, it still has the same impact on our hearts. The world bombards us with idolatrous messages about sex — and we want to believe them.

We want to be like the first century citizen hanging out at a pagan temple, enjoying some idol food and some sexual debauchery while also claiming to follow Jesus.

Heaven on earth.

A foot in both camps.

It’s not on.

For so many churches — and so many of us — we might have a reputation for being alive — but when we try to have it both ways — serving the beauty and the beast — we’re dead (Revelation 3:1).

Just like the beast.

And the cost of lukewarmness — what you get when you try to live in both worlds, which means you’re not actually worshiping Jesus; it’s serious.

Jesus will spit you out (Revelation 3:16-17).

You can’t serve both God and Money.
You can’t serve both Jesus and Caesar.
You can’t worship Jesus and Satan.
And Jesus knows.

He knows not just the behaviors we are pulled away by, but where they are pulling us.
He knows the empires that tempt us to bow the knee in order to secure their benefits.

One way to think of empires or kingdoms is to think of them as systems.

Where have we bought into the systems — the isms — of our day that aren’t the system built on the rule of Jesus? What are the isms that claim your allegiance?

This is what idols do. They create isms. Systems. As people join together in worship.

Capitalism. The worship of money. The idea that security and happiness come from amassing wealth; that greed is good. That perpetual growth is sustainable and desirable. We tend not to critique that. You won’t find many Christian lobby groups pushing for the end of systemic greed. We’re often too busy talking about sex.

And yet sex is a god too — especially one tied to hedonism — the worship of pleasure, and individualism, where we decide we are the gods of our own little kingdoms and others exist to serve us. Where nobody defines or owns me but me. Where I don’t belong to anybody so I don’t answer to anybody, so I’ll chase what I want, have sex how I want to have sex, live how I want to live.

This individualism, combined with capitalism, creates a sort of consumerism where we believe the things we buy, the objects we possess, will deliver heaven for us. But we turn people into possessions and use power – whatever power we can, whether it is purchasing power or social capital – to make others do what we want, regardless of the cost to them. We consume media and use technology without considering what that media is doing to us – our brains, imaginations, our hearts, let alone what it is doing to those on our screens – their bodies, their mental and spiritual health.

This behavior is beastly.

So is racism. It is not just the idea that you, as an individual, treat other people differently based on their race, but also that you fail to recognize how different groups benefit from the historic and ongoing mistreatment of various ethnic groups. It is not just Australia’s history regarding the dispossession of our First Nations people, or the stolen generation and how our government systemically traumatized whole groups of people, but also how inherited wealth compounds while inherited dispossession does the same, creating a gap that needs to be closed, possibly requiring sacrifices from us.

And it is not just our First Nations people. One thing COVID-19 has revealed is the inequality in our system. Workers on the frontlines in vulnerable places, such as aged care, or working as security guards in hotel quarantine, or delivering our comforts to us in our suburban homes, are often migrant workers. They work for low salaries, live in high-density housing, making them more susceptible to a transmissible virus than the middle class.

Sexism is also a problem. It is the idea that one sex is superior to the other, ingrained in our society where might makes right. Men can use their physical strength to dominate women, whether it’s related to patriarchy and its impact at home, on sex, on sexual violence, or in the workplace, or even in the management of churches. Strong men can impose their strength on others in a room, not with an explicit threat of violence, but just in the way that domineering personalities get rewarded so that narcissism produces success.

Nationalism, especially Christian nationalism, is problematic too. It is the idea that everyone should act like they are part of the kingdom of Jesus, even if they are not, and we sometimes pursue this by acting politically just like those around us.

All sorts of -isms have captured the church in our age. All of these are forces, systems of sin, synagogues of Satan, used by him to pull us from God, and into exile, through false worship. We need an unveiling. We need to be exposed. We need to repent. This is Jesus’ call to 5 of the 7 churches (Revelation 2:5, 16, 22, 3:3, 19).

Repent – turn from false gods; from the things that pull you away from Jesus. Turn back to the glorious one we meet in chapter 1, and faithfully hold on (Revelation 2:10, 25, 3:11). Cling to him. Worship him. This is his message to his faithful people. Citizens of his kingdom.

Stay the course. Remain faithful. Do not be lured by the bright lights, the false gods, the counterfeit gospels, or the threat of harm. Trust the one we meet in chapter 1 to deliver you, even as you step back from the beastly world and its glamorous promises. Remember chapter 1 – those who hear and take to heart what is written to the church, from God, are blessed (Revelation 1:3).

Each letter concludes with a call to listen. To hear (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22) and so to be blessed if they hear what Jesus is saying. What they hear is to worship Jesus, not false gods. What they hear is to stop thinking you can have one foot in Caesar’s world; the material world; the beastly world following the beastly pattern of grasping hold of the things that tempt you; a life of consuming or devouring. You can’t have one foot there and one foot in God’s world — the kingdom of Heaven.

You have to choose.

And the choice is not just about pointing the lens at Jesus in the past. In each letter the lens is pointed forward to the hope that Jesus brings as the living, resurrected, king who will make all things new.

Each church gets a promise for what life with God will look like if they stay the course—and each picture— each little vignette — is a scene from the end of the book and John’s vision of the New Creation; that vision of God’s blessing; the benefits of his victory overflowing to those who share in the victory of the king; those who repent and turn to him as king—worshipping him—and then hang on and so become victorious (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 26, 3:5, 12, 21).

For Ephesus, it is a promise they will eat from the tree of life; a picture not just from the Garden of Eden, but the new Eden that God will bring (Revelation 2:7, 22:2).

For Smyrna—those who repent will not be hurt by the second death—which Revelation 21 says is the fate that awaits those who are lured by false worship—idolaters and those who are disobedient—destruction and death in a lake of fire (Revelation 2:11, 21:8).

For Pergammum. Well. This one comes out of nowhere a bit. In fact, just about every bit of this verse (Revelation 2:17), with its reference to “hidden manna” and “white stones” and “new names” has been unpacked and debated and packed up again and filed in the too hard basket. Obviously, the manna is a reference to the wilderness wanderings and God’s heavenly provision in times of suffering — and so there is a promise of heavenly provision — a feed — and people do see this as a nod to the wedding supper of the lamb at the end of the book. But the white stone is just weird. I have read 20 theories and am convinced by none of them, or all of them. The symbolism is lost on me, and maybe it is a dead metaphor. It could be a Roman meal ticket — you would sometimes get a stone as a ticket for a temple banquet. It could be a jury stone, where you would be found guilty or innocent in a vote given using white or black stones. It could be a jewel — it kind of means ‘bright stone’ — and a reference to a part of the priestly garment. It could be a nod to the stones Israel painted white — with lime — in Joshua when they entered the promised land.

And then the name could be their name — a new name for individuals — it could be a new name for God’s people, or it could be a new name for God, or a new function of that name. The “known only to the one who receives it” could be about the name only being known by the person who gets the extra-special new name, or it could be about the people who get the rocks will know this new bit of information from God.

I am inclined to think that some clearer bits about names from the surrounding passage help give us a picture of the significance of this promise—not only that God knows our names, and has written them in the book of life (Revelation 3:5). And that Jesus will write God’s name and the name of the city — which will come down from heaven like manna, and his own new name on us (Revelation 3:12). So I think it is a new name for Jesus connected with a new reality of life of provision in God’s new Eden

And there is another scene later in the book where Jesus is presented as a warrior king defeating Satan and his beastly minions — with a name written on him that nobody knows but himself — and then we are told his name — his name is the Word of God; the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Revelation 19:12-13, 16). Now. We do know this name because we are in churches that have been reading this book for two thousand years, but this was an unveiling moment. This is another put the lens on Jesus moment. This means I think there is a pulling through of an image from the end of the book here in the letter to Pergammum too, where the at-this-point-in-the-letter-unknown name of Jesus is written on the foreheads of those who will dwell with him forever (Revelation 2:17, 22:4). Whatever the symbolism that we lose in the dead metaphor, the meaning is connected to God providing for us because his name is written on us, so that we are his and he is ours. It is this name rather than the name of the beast marking the faithful churches who have not denied the name of Jesus.

For Thyatira, it is a promise that they will rule with the king of kings and lord of lords, as part of the victory of Jesus and the vindication of God’s people against all those who persecuted him—a promise that we will be given the morning star—which is another potentially weird image, but something Jesus uses to describe himself right at the end of the book (Revelation 2:26-28, 22:16). The iron sceptre image comes from the Old Testament, but also gets picked up as the absolute victory of Jesus is described—with his army dressed in white, in chapter 19 (Revelation 19:15).

For Sardis, it is the promise that we will be this army — but also the bride of the lamb — those at the wedding feast who are dressed in white (Revelation 3:5, 19:7-8), and those whose names are in the book of life (Revelation 21:27).

In the letter to Philadelphia, it is a promise that the church will be part of the eternal temple of God — part of the building — never leaving God’s presence, with his name on us, as the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven (Revelation 3:12, 21:2).

The image of the father and son sharing a throne is all through the book — and here Jesus promises that his faithful people — those united with him so that we share in his victory, will share in his rule. We will be part of the royal family, not just servants who are more like slaves, but worshippers who will be with the God we love, and who loves us and gives us abundant life (Revelation 3:21, 22:3).

In each letter to the seven churches John puts the lens on Jesus — his vision of the victorious King of Kings who rules from heaven from chapter 1, then he puts the lens on the churches to show how destructive worshipping other gods or living in other empires can be because they are tools of Satan and his beasts, then on the future secured by the certain victory of Jesus and our share in the kingdom he creates. For John, this is a victory already won by Jesus’ death on the cross, his resurrection, and his ascension. John is inviting his readers to overcome whatever temptation we might feel to worship other kings and gods; whatever temptation we might feel to become beastly, and to listen to Jesus. These letters to the seven churches are letters to those churches—but they are also a letter to us.

All seven churches got to read what John said to each of them; so did all the churches this letter circulated to, and we know it circulated pretty widely because we are reading it today. Each letter ends with the call for “whoever has ears, let them hear” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22).

So.

Are you listening?

Are you hearing?

This is God speaking, through John, to his church.

If we — those of us in God’s church — hear his words and take them to heart; if we are prompted to worship; to repent — which means to turn from false kingdoms, false gods, false isms — by turning to Jesus and his kingdom, if we hang on to him then we will receive a place in his kingdom. The kingdom of the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus who gave his life for ours, and gives God’s Spirit to us so we share in God’s life. If we cling to him, then he clings to us and we receive the blessings secured by his victory — the new creation, where there is no more curse.

Jesus asks us to choose.

Will you turn from false gods and worship him with your whole heart? Your whole life?

January 15, 2024

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