Tag: Ezekiel

Before the Throne — Chapter Nine — The Heavenly City

This was talk nine, and the final talk, in a series preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2024. You can listen to this sermon on the podcast, or watch it here.

We are at the end. How have you gone with all this picture stuff — engaging your imagination — your ability to make images — if you have that ability — as we have worked through these images of heaven through the Bible together?

We started out with Paul’s prayer in Ephesians — that the eyes of the heart of his readers might be enlightened (Ephesians 1:18). If you are joining us, we have been leaning into this idea from Paul, and it is just worth recapping as we set the scene today. His prayer is that we might know the hope to which he has called us — the picture of the future that drives us. This is what hope is really; an imagining of a good outcome that shapes how we live. Paul speaks of this as the riches of his glorious inheritance in or for his holy people.

He has already unpacked a bit of this earlier in his introduction to this letter where he talks about God’s plans and purposes that he has revealed in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:8–9). He speaks of God’s plan for the fulfilment of time — where he will bring all things in heaven and on earth together in unity under Jesus. This is what we read John describe in his vision from Revelation. This is the hope Paul wants our hearts to be captivated by; what he is praying we will see.

In another letter — Colossians — Paul talks about God having all his fullness dwell in Jesus, and through him all things being reconciled — being brought together in harmony — whether that is on earth or things in heaven, or heaven and earth. This is secured, ultimately, through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross (Colossians 1:19–20).

The Son of God who reigns in heaven is reigning with the purpose of bringing heaven — where God lives — and earth — together. This is what that video from the Bible Project covered — the idea that our hope, the trajectory of reality as the Bible describes it, is heaven and earth coming together as one eternal reality where we dwell with God.

We have seen that Paul says in some way this is not just our future, it is our present. Those who have received God’s Spirit so we are united with Jesus where he is now, have been raised and seated with him in the heavenly realms — we have been located in heaven (Ephesians 2:6).

So we live on earth as walking temples, where God dwells on earth (Ephesians 2:21–22). We are walking, talking, imagining, living, serving pictures of the future of all things; those who have been reconciled to God, and to each other.

Paul says because of all this we can approach God with freedom and confidence — this is what we do as we pray — we approach God in this heavenly throne room (Ephesians 3:12). This is what Paul was doing for the readers of his letter as he prayed that the eyes of our hearts might be enlightened. This is the reality he was seeing as he prayed that his readers would see.

It is the reality he was encountering in a prayer we will come back to as he describes himself kneeling before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth — all the beings who will be brought together — derive our name. That is a way of saying we owe our existence and role in the cosmos to him (Ephesians 3:14–15).

Paul ends that prayer in Ephesians 3 with this idea that even as he is kneeling before God, imagining the splendour of the throne room of God — coming before the throne — even then our imaginations are limited. We are not getting the full picture of this reality of our hope in God’s goodness. God can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine according to this power he has described — the power that has raised and seated us and that will reconcile all things (Ephesians 3:20–21).

Our imaginations will fall short, and the eyes of our hearts are always up for more enlightenment; more contemplation or imagination of the future; of our hope, through more time before the throne of God. This is so that we are more and more caught up in this calling to be living temples — heaven on earth people living in this overlap, anticipating and picturing the future in our imaginations and our lives.

There is this idea that we can spend so much time thinking about heaven as Christians that we become no use on earth. We sometimes see this in how Christians write off pursuing justice in political issues in this world, or speaking up — trading off doing “earthly stuff” against investing in evangelism — proclaiming the Gospel. Or in how we think about climate change, where maybe you have heard Christians say “it is all going to burn up so we should focus on saving souls.” Or maybe it is the idea that hope is a sort of naïve optimism that stops us confronting reality as it really is, and seeing the suffering not just in our lives, but in those around us as a serious indication of something deeply wrong with reality that should leave us grieving or crying out for justice.

But I think the opposite is the case. I think the more we spend time imagining this hope — an earth reconciled and connected to heaven — and see our calling as living like heaven on earth people, the more this time dwelling with God before his throne in prayer and worship, cultivating hope, will translate into lives that embody this hope now. It will shape lives that pursue a picture of heaven-on-earth life, and a hopeful vision of the future that frames how we suffer differently, and how we enter the suffering of others.

So the working theory this morning is that we maybe do not spend enough time hoping and picturing this future — we do not spend enough time before the throne, contemplating heaven. We would maybe be more useful on earth if we did, and even more effective in our evangelism. Priests in the Bible — those sent out to carry God’s presence in the world — are shaped by time spent in that presence; by understanding the God we represent. The working theory for this morning is that the more time we spend dwelling in this hope — imagining it, picturing it, meditating on it, prayerfully cultivating a sense of who God is, the God who will always be immeasurably beyond our imagination in terms of his goodness and love, the God who is committed to this reconciliation, this heaven-and-earth future — the more meaningful and purposeful our life on earth will be, and the better our witness will be to the world.

This is how John’s vision works in the first century. He is writing to Christians facing incredible suffering, looking at Rome enacting its vision of heaven on earth, tempted to jump ship and worship the emperor and enjoy the fruits of the empire, tempted not just by the carrot of sharing in that power and beauty but the stick of being set on fire as candles in a garden party if they do not. John’s vision of heaven is meant to reframe their reality, to hold them fast to Jesus, and to expose this Roman empire as a false, beastly, destructive vision of heaven — so they will live as faithful witnesses; God’s church, his kingdom of priests.

John’s vision ends with this picture of the end — of heaven and earth made new, the old passing away, and there is no longer any sea (Revelation 21:1).

Now — for those of us who love the beach — I do not think this means there is no more Sunshine Coast. The sea was a picture of chaos and destruction — think about the waters at the start of the story of the Bible. But in the context of heaven and earth — the sea is also that barrier separating the heavens and the earth — the crystal dome under the throne of God (Exodus 24:10; Ezekiel 1:22). Moses goes through it at the top of the mountain; Ezekiel sees it above the cherubim who are carrying around God’s throne, and it is in that giant bowl in the temple.

John describes this sea of glass in front of the throne earlier in Revelation (Revelation 4:6). I think we are meant to imagine this as the vault from Genesis 1 that separated water from water (Genesis 1:6–7). It is the dome God opened up to send the flood in the Noah story. For the ancient reader who did not have telescopes or spaceships, this was how they imagined a real physical barrier between God’s realm and ours in the sky. And that barrier is gone.

Because that barrier is gone, the holy city — the new Jerusalem — can come down from heaven into earth (Revelation 21:2). The new Jerusalem, this heavenly city, is the predominant image from what we read together. It is this heavenly city that ties all the images from our series together — the light, the mountain, the garden, the temple, the throne in the holy of holies where God acts as judge and king, and the dwelling place of the Lamb of God — the Son of God, the bridegroom as Jesus describes himself in John’s Gospel. Here we are meeting the bride — this city — prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. This is a picture of Jesus being united with his beloved church, a permanent union between heaven and earth.

A voice comes from the throne to interpret this image for us — “look, God is dwelling now with his people; the barrier is gone. God and humans are reconciled in this new heaven-meets-earth space” (Revelation 21:3). He comes as the God whose hands are outstretched to wipe away every tear from our eyes. He comes as the God who defeats all the things that harm us and separate us from God (Revelation 21:4) — no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things is dead and gone.

The one seated on the throne says, “I am making all things new.” All the sad things are coming untrue (Revelation 21:5). This is our hope, and the one on the throne says it is trustworthy and true.

Do you believe it? Can you conceive it in your imagination? Just take a moment. What would that mean for your life in the future? What does this look like, beloved of God — to dwell with him, to have all the remnants of sin and death removed from you, your grief and pain wiped away by the God who loves you?

Can you picture a hand wiping away your tears and with that swipe, removing the burden of everything you have done — and everything done to you — so that guilt, and shame, and trauma, and wounds are dealt with? These barriers that have left you feeling separated from God, feeling unworthy — gone. That shame you feel because you never measure up to your own standards, let alone the standards of others, even if only you know it. The harsh and violent words and deeds shouted in your face, or maybe worse — whispered. The indifference you have felt from those who should love you, the contempt. The never feeling like you belong. The guilt you carry because you have done the shouting, or the whispering, or the violence, or the contempt — the way you have consumed others in darkness, even just in the darkness of your imagination — dead, wiped away, as you are made new.

I know I need this picture. I know I need the comfort it offers. All things new. How might that hope shape your now?

Jesus — the one who was dead, and is now alive — joins his Father enthroned, and offers the water of life from this heavenly spring, to bathe in and be cleansed, to drink and never be thirsty — for free, without cost (Revelation 21:6).

This is what Jesus offers to those who are victorious (Revelation 21:7) — those who come to the throne and cling to him and worship him and are not lured into life — or death — with the beastly empires and destructive powers of heaven. The darkness. Children of God.

This newness can only happen as the old order is destroyed — which includes those powers committed to visiting violent suffering on others; those who have not been transformed by encountering God’s hand stretched out in embrace. They experience exclusion. This is uncomfortable for many of us, and we might hope that God is going to do that transforming work in every person whether we see it or not. But this pattern of death cannot exist in this new creation, and so the patterns — and those who live by them — are destroyed in the fiery power of the throne, in the second death (Revelation 21:8).

We might want to dwell on this idea, and it might devastate us to imagine this happening to us, or to our beloved — and I suspect it should. We should grapple with this as humans — humans who know we bring nothing to the table when it comes to God extending his embrace to us through Jesus. We know that we fall before the throne deserving whatever fate our neighbours experience. This is part of the vision that should motivate us to live as priests of the reconciling God who wants to bring all things to Jesus.

The marriage of the Lamb is totally consensual. He will not force those who reject him into this relationship, and this peaceful future cannot happen with those totally committed to ways of death that come from rejecting God, and God’s vision for life, destroying others in pursuit of their visions.

But we are not dwelling on that picture in John’s vision. John’s eyes are swept up, and so are ours, to examine this bride — the wife of the Lamb (Revelation 21:9–10). Here is where images we have contemplated come thick and fast. For starters we are on the mountain — great and high — seeing this holy city coming down, shining with the glory, the bright light of God (Revelation 21:11). It is bright like the jewels we saw in the prophets and earlier in Revelation — shining.

It has twelve gates. There are lots of twelves — it is a picture of completeness, like the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles — and there are twelve angels as well. It is a picture of heaven and earth coming together in this sort of fulfilment — filled up (Revelation 21:12). Then we start to get the hint that this city — the whole city — is a temple. Where the old Jerusalem contained both the temple and the palace so that God ruled from his throne and the Messiah from the throne in the palace, here there is one throne room (Revelation 21:15–16).

We are getting this tour from an angel who is carrying a measuring rod to help us see how this city is a square. This is a throwback to Ezekiel’s vision — also on a very high mountain — of a new temple in a city on a mountain (Ezekiel 40:2). Ezekiel also saw a heavenly figure with a measuring rod, as he saw a square-shaped building (Ezekiel 40:3). John is seeing a square-shaped city — it is huge, overwhelmingly big (Revelation 21:16).

Just as the temple in the Old Testament was covered in gold, this city is pure gold (Revelation 21:17). It is covered in precious stone, like the throne room of God. There are twelve walls with twelve types of jewels, and just in case you think “there is no such thing as twelve different jewels” — or if you are skeptical — John names them all (Revelation 21:19–20).

The gates are pearly. There is that sort of memey joke where we are meant to imagine ourselves standing before the pearly gates wondering if we get in. That is not the point here. Those united with Jesus are already in, and have already been behind the walls through the gates, in the city of gold, as those seated with Jesus (Revelation 21:21).

Because behind these walls there is no temple. This is a temple city; this is a holy of holies city. This is where God dwells. The Father and the Lamb “are the temple” (Revelation 21:22–23). This is where God’s throne is now located. The light is emanating from them. It does not even need the sun or the moon — those heavenly bodies that reflect God’s light and help us picture it. We are invited to imagine Father and Son as brighter than the sun, providing light to the nations. All the kings of the earth in this new reality — who do not serve beastly powers, but God — bring their splendour forward in worship of the one seated on the throne. They give as an act of worship, and the gates are open because there is no longer an enemy. There are no wolves lurking around at night waiting to do harm, that would make you shut the gates (Revelation 21:24–25).

Nothing impure will come in, nor those excluded who do what is shameful or deceitful. Only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life — those pulled out of death into life through Jesus’ blood, his death that makes peace and reconciles all things, offering reconciliation between us and God as heaven and earth are brought together (Revelation 21:26–27).

Then we get both a throwback to Ezekiel’s vision of the water being released from the temple, living water turning the earth into a fruitful paradise, and to the garden of Eden. Garden imagery is bursting out. We do not need gold carvings in a temple building, this is a picture of the real thing. The river is flowing through the city — like the waters flowed out of Eden and into the world — out from the throne. Not rivers of fiery judgment but watery life. Not a crystal sea working as a barrier, but life flowing from the throne (Revelation 22:1–2).

As the water flows, trees grow — especially the tree of life. It bears fruit constantly, monthly, giving life to all who dwell with God, and its leaves heal the nations, bringing peace and tranquility (Revelation 22:3). No longer will there be any curse. Nothing is separating us from God, from life in this place. We are no longer exiled from the tree, or from the gardener who plants it. Life is no longer secured through toil in a world turned against us (Revelation 22:3–4).

The throne is there and we will live before it, as God’s people, serving him. That is a worship word. He delights in giving light and life and love to us. We will see his face — a heavenly encounter impossible to conceive fully in the Old Testament, hinted at in the life of Jesus as people saw God’s glory in human flesh. Again — no more night, because God will give light, and he will reign forever (Revelation 22:5).

This is earth — all the goodness and wonder of God’s creation, heaven-on-earth spaces, being fused with heaven, all the glory and wonder of God’s throne room, and the heavenly human who rules on the throne with God, being brought together.

This is the story of the Bible — this is our hope. It seems beyond our capacity to fully comprehend, right — and I think all of this imagery is analogy — giving us images and language to shape our hope. At the heart of this hope is life; intimate life with the God who loves us and will make us new, and will give us life with him and with each other forever.

But it is not our present. Our present is life in this now and not yet. Now those who have God’s Spirit dwelling in us, so that through us — God’s living temple — God lives in the world. We are those who are reconciled to God and are a picture of heaven and earth being reconciled as we inhabit space and time. We are those who are raised and seated and can come before the throne of heaven — with all this splendour surrounding it — in prayer and worship, so that we carry the presence of the God who rules into the world. With the hope that all the curse, and tears, and pain — will pass, must pass — and that all things will be made new as we are being made new.

So what difference does this make for actual life on the ground? What difference do all these pictures make for us?

Well, for starters, I think, this changes how we understand and articulate the Gospel, and how we live as those who believe the Gospel. The Gospel is not just about our souls escaping to some cloudy disembodied life with harps. It is about God working to reconcile all things to himself — undoing the separation between us and him, and finally the separation from the beginning of the story of the Bible — between heaven and earth.

This happens and is secured through Jesus becoming human, shedding his blood on the cross, being raised from the dead, and exalted to the heavenly throne room as the Son of God and the Son of Man — the heaven-on-earth king becoming the human-in-heaven ruler.

With this comes the idea that we are not just saved from sin, but saved for life. We are saved for life with God, and life as God’s ambassadors of reconciliation; his heaven-on-earth people; his living temple who live lives that picture and enact our hope. Not because we can bring the transformation that only God can at the end of the story, but because through our witness God delights in bringing that transformation life by life through the Gospel, and bit by bit through the parts of the earth we cultivate in our work and service to tell this story.

And this salvation — this restoration and reconciliation with God — flows out through our individual lives into our communities and the things we create together as we work, perhaps in ways that give whole nations and societies glimpses of God’s goodness. It does not always. So often Christian attempts to bring heaven to earth look more cursed than blessed, and I reckon this happens most when we embrace the violent power games of the world, rather than encountering the God we meet in the crucified Lamb so that we see God brings heaven to earth through sacrificial, reconciling love that first seeks to embrace enemies, and to cultivate life not death, as witnesses to God’s nature.

I think our outworking of this story — this Gospel — goes wrong because we are not dwelling in God’s presence; in prayer, in worship, in meditating on his word — in ways that shape our vision and then our action. And it goes right, in truly beautiful ways, when we do; when our actions in the world are grounded in our life before the throne; where our acts serving God are shaped by worshipping God as God is.

But this is our job — right — bringing heaven to earth in a tangible way as temples, or as Paul says elsewhere, ambassadors, or citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20-21). This is where we belong in a life-defining way, and our hope is that Jesus, who dwells there, will bring transformation by his power — the power that will bring everything under control — and will also bring that transformation to our bodies so that they will be glorious like his body is glorious.

In Philippians this hope — this citizenship — produces rejoicing, even in suffering, and a life marked by gentleness (Philippians 4:4-6). It frees us from being caught up in the worries about earthly things. This is not to say our bodies will not experience anxiety or be marked by trauma, or that we should not engage earthly help for those real phenomena. But we do approach these threats, our experience of pain and suffering, the scars and wounds we bear, knowing these are not ultimate. We are not bound by those who would limit our citizenship to our bodies on earth, and seek to destroy us by breaking our minds and bodies and conforming us to their desires.

Instead, we live as those near to God; those who have access to this heavenly throne room even in the midst of our worst embodied, earthly moments. We are not prisoners. Paul, though, writes this letter when his body is physically imprisoned. Instead, in every moment, in every situation, we can enter the presence of God; enter his throne by prayer and petition. We can close our eyes to earth and open them to heaven; to the wonder we see described in these visions, presenting our requests to God, being healed and transformed by encountering him.

This, I think, is what Paul is praying for his readers in Ephesians, where we started all this — that we might comprehend, as much as is possible, that this reality is really our reality now. That it makes a difference. That comprehending this power is the basis not just of our hope for the future, but our life in the present.

This is what Paul models as he prays in Ephesians; a prayer we might pray kneeling beside Paul — perhaps physically — as those who come before God.

Paul prays that we might really see the one on the throne; that we might really know his goodness and love as we dwell here — that this is all about something beyond our imagination, but that grappling with this begins with an act of imagination; of opening our hearts to where the Bible says we are.

Before the Throne — Chapter Eight — Joining the glorious worship in the heavenly throne room

This was talk eight in a series preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2024. You can listen to this sermon on the podcast, or watch it here.

We are getting to the pointy end of our series — we have worked our way from the beginning of the Bible’s depictions of heavenly space to the end. We have not just moved from light to mountains to gardens to temples to the heavenly throne room appearing in the prophets to Jesus the walking, talking heavenly throne room — we have moved from Genesis, through Exodus, into the promised land, through exile and the incarnation of Jesus as the end of our exile and our invitation back into heavenly space — and now we are at the book at the end of the Bible; a climax — and the book where images of the throne room of heaven come thick and fast. It is almost like the whole reveal in Revelation is about seeing this reality at the heart of all reality, and having it shape the lives of followers of Jesus on earth.

This is a book written for followers of Jesus struggling because there is an evil empire using violence to create its own vision of heaven. Revelation will picture it as beastly power, and this beastly power — the Roman Empire — is at the beginning of a period of persecution of Christians that will culminate in the emperor setting Christians on fire as candles in garden parties. Somehow this vision John offers is meant to be a comfort. It is meant to shape a life of faithfully committing to a different empire, a different king — and a different way of life pursuing a different picture of heaven. Not a life of violence and destruction, but of faithful witness to the reality of Jesus and the picture of heaven on earth we see at the end of the story — which we will spend more time in next chapter.

It is a vision that comes with a posture and a script — not just a way of life, but a way of worship. While we have been looking at these visions of heaven together thinking about how they might shape our prayers — this chapter— and I would not want to make too big a distinction between these two categories anyway — this chapter we are thinking about how these visions of heaven are the goal of and the setting for our worship. This particular sort of worship is meant to drive our way of life in the world as we serve the God we meet in heaven.

If you have been around for a bit you will have heard me say there are multiple words in Greek that get translated as “worship” in English. One is the word latreo — it is the word for service, what a priest or priestly community does mediating heaven on earth, serving God with our bodies. The other is the word proskuneo — it is a word built on the idea of a physical posture one would adopt before a king or a god — or really, at a throne. It is the idea of falling before this power in reverence. We can tease out the relationship between the two under the umbrella of worship — it is when we see the power and goodness of the one on the throne, and give our lives to that power — falling before it, giving up our own claims — that is what motivates worshipful service as priests.

It is interesting that in the Gospel, the disciples twice offer this sort of proskuneo worship when they encounter the resurrected Jesus. In Matthew 28 they fall at his feet and worship him the first time they see him (Matthew 28:9). And then, when they are up the mountain about to be sent out into the world as the priestly people who have encountered the one with all the authority of heaven on a mountain top, they worship him, and it is this word again (Matthew 28:16-17).

We are going to see — in this vision of the heavenly throne room — a whole bunch of worship. A bunch of images that accompany that worship — pictures of the whole creation worshipping the creator in posture and with words that come with that posture. This is stuff that will shape a priestly people; the sort of people who will represent the throne of heaven on earth. And I think the point here is that these pictures provide a motivation and a model for our worship — first in the sense of encountering the one on the throne, and then as those sent out into the world as priestly people.

Just as these images of the throne in the Bible are maybe meant to shape our imaginations as we pray — and encounter God that way — I think they are meant to form our imaginations and our hearts as we encounter God, as we praise God, and as we worship him. Whether that is when we gather for corporate worship — proskuneo style — or we are doing that alone or in smaller groups, this act — both in posture and imagination — is meant to drive how we serve God with our bodies in the world.

Does this make sense?

Just to orient ourselves before we take a look at these visions — and to set up why we are going to approach them the way we are — remember we are tackling this series through the lens that the Bible gives us as it says those of us who have put our trust in Jesus and received God’s Spirit — we have been relocated in some real way so that we are before the throne of God. We are in the heavenly throne, not just as bystanders but as people seated with Jesus, as those who have access to God (Ephesians 2:6).

And we have been doing this thing of pairing fact statements the Bible makes about this sort of thing with images — pictures the Bible gives us in passages like we are going to look at, or in stories, to help us imagine this reality. To move it from the facts part of our brain into the picture part of our brain and have those working together to shape how we approach reality.

So I thought I would start with this propositional idea. It comes from the bit in Philippians where Paul talks about Jesus — the one who is in very nature God — making himself nothing, less than nothing, being crucified. God’s response to this obedience and love is that God exalts Jesus to the highest place — in the Bible there is no higher place than the throne of heaven — and gives him the name above every name so that at his name every knee — every being — will bow. That is a worship posture.

And there is this strange bit here that pictures reality with three tiers — it is not just every knee on earth, but in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld. It is a picture of Jesus winning a victory that sees him worshipped — honoured — by heavenly and earthly creatures as well as the dark powers who the Bible depicts behind the violence and death, the stuff that infects the earth.

And not only will all these knees bow — an embodied posture of worship — every tongue will acknowledge that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:6-11).

If that is a statement of a thing that is true — that this is where reality is — Jesus being exalted — and where it is heading — every creature recognising that in worship — Revelation’s pictures of the throne room give us imagery to fuel our imaginations as we figure out how to live so this reality shapes our lives. Our posture of worship and our praise will flow out of this sort of vision, this sort of encounter with the Jesus who is exalted to the highest place — which is the picture John, who writes Revelation, opens with.

Now — we are going to skim through these descriptions from a few points in this book of Revelation — not just the bits we read. The idea is to fuel our imaginations with the imagery we get here, to start building out a picture of heaven from these readings. We will look at the postures and words modelled by the worshippers we meet there, and these might be things that flow into how we think about worship, and our bodies, and our words as people located in this place.

John hears this voice and he turns and looks. He sees the voice comes from this figure of someone like a son of man (Revelation 1:12-13). We are seeing imagery from Daniel chapter 7 here (Daniel 7:13). As we wander around the throne room as John depicts it, we are going to see his vision, his words, his way of understanding this heavenly experience aligning with earlier pictures from the Old Testament. This consistency makes me think these pictures are something we are meant to contemplate as some sort of biblical truth that is of value for us now. Only, John is doing something new. He is blending the images of God from the Old Testament with the image of God we see in Jesus.

So his description of the hair and clothing of this son of man lines up with the description of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9, Revelation 1:14). That includes the fiery legs or feet and the voice that sounds like rushing waters, which Ezekiel says is the sound of the voice of the Almighty (Ezekiel 1:24, 27, Revelation 1:15). And the son’s face is shining like the sun in all of its brilliance (Revelation 1:16).

This is not the first time we have met Jesus described this way. Last chapter we touched on the heaven on earth moment of the transfiguration in Luke’s Gospel. When Matthew records the same event, Jesus is revealed with bright shining clothes and a face shining like the sun (Matthew 17:2, Revelation 1:16).

When John sees this vision of the resurrected Jesus, he does what the disciples did when they saw the resurrected Jesus — he falls at his feet, lying on the ground in front of him (Revelation 1:17). And in case we are wondering if this is the Ancient of Days or the son of man — the figure speaks, calling himself the living one who was dead and is now alive (Revelation 1:18).

This is John encountering Jesus — experiencing this reality of the heavenly realm and modelling a response: worship. As this vision becomes our vision John is modelling a response for us.

But as the book unpacks more visions of the throne room we are going to see John is just joining the posture displayed by other creatures and people we find there.

First though, John sets the scene for us — and he keeps drawing on scenes we have looked at together. I wonder if you can let this imagery of the throne permeate your imagination — if you can picture things in your mind, and if you find it helpful maybe just close your eyes; maybe you can try sketching this out or painting it later.

John sees this throne room of heaven and the one sitting on it. The one on the throne has the appearance of jasper and ruby — precious gems — and around the throne there is a sort of river of light, a rainbow, which you can maybe imagine making the jasper and ruby sparkle. The rainbow itself is sparkling like a jewel, like an emerald (Revelation 4:2-3).

This is imagery from Ezekiel — we are picturing brightness and colour and light (Ezekiel 1:28, Revelation 4:3). If we are in John’s shoes, we are standing there and this is washing over us.

And as we turn around there are these creatures — 24 other thrones where 24 elders are seated. These elders are dressed in white, wearing gold crowns, and there is lots of debate about who these elders are (Revelation 4:4). I am not convinced they are human. I think we are seeing a meeting of that divine council, this Old Testament image we have seen in the Psalms (Psalm 82:1), or something like 1 Kings where there is a heavenly multitude surrounding the throne (1 Kings 22:19). John is looking at some of these — we will see more. In Daniel’s vision there are multiple thrones and thousands of these heavenly creatures around multiple thrones (Daniel 7:9-10). Seeing these thrones in the mix is especially helpful for John’s audience.

Anyway — back to John’s vision, and now we have to move into imagining not just imagery — lightning — but sound, peals of thunder.

And in front of the throne there is a sea of glass (Revelation 4:5-6), which I reckon, as we have seen it in Exodus and Ezekiel, is that barrier — the vault between the heavens and the earth — maybe represented by that giant bowl of water, the sea, in the Temple.

John also sees four other heavenly creatures around the throne covered in eyes and with wings (Revelation 4:6, 8). John’s vision is combining a couple of Old Testament images we have looked at together. These creatures have six wings. We met the eye-covered cherubim in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 10:12), and the six-winged seraphim in Isaiah (Isaiah 6:2). These are the powerful attenders of God’s throne, the ones who carry God’s chariot throne around.

And John sees these creatures saying — though I think we are meant to think singing because of where we are going — “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8). This is the song of heaven, this is heavenly worship. These are the words the seraphim were calling out to one another in Isaiah — words we echo in our own worship as we join the chorus.

And in John’s vision whenever these four creatures lead the choir of heaven — giving glory, honour and thanks to God — those other heavenly powers with their thrones fall down before God. They proskuneo (Revelation 4:9-10). They worship in their posture. They lay down their crowns and say — or sing — words we too often echo as we worship God in song, words proclaiming God’s worthiness to be worshipped, to receive glory and honour as the Most High God because he created all things (Revelation 4:10-11).

As people raised and seated with Jesus, when we pray and worship God — when we enter this throne room in our imaginations, or with our bodies and words here on earth, conscious of this reality — we are encountering the God who is worthy, who is powerful, who creates and gives being to all things by his will.

As John’s vision continues after that bit with the scroll he sees the figure from chapter 1 — the one who was dead but now is alive, the human ruler who he imagines as a lamb. This is John whose Gospel opens with John the Baptist declaring that Jesus is the Lamb of God. This lamb who has been slain is standing at the centre of the throne, surrounded, like the Ancient of Days, the God Most High, by all these other powers, these heavenly figures (Revelation 5:6).

And these heavenly creatures and rulers — all of them — the four strange creatures and the elders — now they fall down before the lamb. It is the same posture of worship (Revelation 5:8). And they sing — specifically — a new song, not just the Old Testament song, but a song reflecting on the worthiness of Jesus who was slain and who purchased God’s humans through his blood out from under all sorts of other foreign power, foreign gods, making a people from every tribe and language and people and nation.

He has made them what Israel were called to be at the mountain in Exodus — a kingdom of priests, people from all over the earth who will rule on earth as God’s representatives (Revelation 5:9-10). Those who dwell in his presence so they can reflect it on the earth. This is the idea of heaven on earth people we have seen.

John zooms out and sees the whole heavenly host we hinted at — the thousands upon thousands — all in expanding circles out from the throne. They are joining their voices to the chorus: “Worthy is the lamb who was slain.” We literally sing these words, do we not? “Worthy is the king who conquered the grave.” Through his death and resurrection the lamb is worthy of receiving all the honour and glory and praise his father has.

Then John sees every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth joining the chorus: “To him who sits on the throne and to the lamb be praise and honour and glory and power for ever and ever…” Again — words we sing. When we sing this we are joining our voices to this heavenly choir as those already located here. Imagine that. Meditate on this imagery. Put yourself here as we sing.

When these words are sung, the heavenly creatures fall down and worship (Revelation 5:11-14).

This scene is a dramatic enactment of Philippians 2. God has exalted Jesus to the highest place and now knees are bowing and tongues are confessing. When we approach God’s throne in worship, when we fall on our knees in praise as we pray — if we do that — we are joining in to this vision. This is where we are even now, as those raised and seated with Jesus.

Let us just break out of the vision for a second, because this stuff is weird, and I just want to try to ground it for us all. We are probably sceptical or cynical about these sorts of powers, these creatures we cannot see. But I reckon if we can just stretch ourselves we might be able to understand how when humans worship things, when we put things on the throne in our life and bow before them and serve them in the world, when we have a view of heaven — it can motivate us to do things that are real and observable.

If you are a first century Christian living while Rome, and worshippers of Roman gods including the emperor, are making a real difference in your world — lighting your friends up as candles, arresting you or your family and forcing you to choose between bowing to Jesus or bowing to the emperor — these pictures do not need explaining. You know there are powers, and you suspect there might be some sinister “bigger than human” power behind these realities dripping in spiritual imagery and postures and words.

Maybe our issue is we just do not see spiritual powers behind our worship of money, or our ideas that violence is required to bring peace, or that we should take what we want or need with a certain amount of force in competition with others. Maybe we do not see dark spiritual powers at work in racism, or sexism, or wars in places like Ukraine or Gaza. But if we did — and if we had this vision of God actually being in control when it feels like we are losing, and that he is actually going to step in to deliver us, that the lamb slain by Roman power is actually risen and ruling — that is going to change how we see those powers in our world, who we fall before, and how we use our bodies.

I increasingly believe these images represent a real spiritual reality that has power in what we see in the world, having previously been sceptical. But even if you cannot get there, these images of the throne room and these powers and principalities bowing the knee to Jesus are images that, if they shape your imagination, change the way you live and use your bodies in the world.

Let us finish by jumping back into more of John’s heavenly vision from chapter 7. First, as we do this, you might be here checking out church, trying to figure out what Christians believe, not sure about all this weird stuff and just waiting to duck out as soon as it does not seem rude. This is a picture that I reckon captures the hearts of so many of the people you are sitting here with. This is a picture of the world’s most multi-ethnic, multi-age, trans-cultural, inclusive group living connected to each other and to the God we do not just believe made the world but, through Jesus — a real human from history who claimed to be God’s son — invites us to live with him forever, and deals with the barriers between us and God: our destructive worship of all sorts of other powers, our captivity or addiction to dark things that harm others and the world, and even death feeling like the end of our story. By dying and rising and saying “we can do that too with him.” It is a big jump. We get it. But a jump that has life-changing results not just now, but forever.

For those of us who do believe this stuff — some of us will be struggling to figure out the significance of all this, and I am hoping there are some really simple things we can pull out of these big pictures and ideas as we notice the postures and images and words. I wonder if we might consider how we are pretty great at engaging with the words — we are word people — we literally sing these words. And we are pretty okay at thinking about how some of this imagery should translate into our desires for earthly gatherings. Most of us would say we want the church to be a multi-ethnic community of people worshipping God.

I am not sure we are always mindful of “where we stand” in terms of imagining ourselves singing together and meeting together in the name of Jesus meaning we are coming before God’s throne and entering this reality, or even that we have access to this reality every moment of our lives. But I am very sure that most of us do not think about the postures described here. We might stand when we sing, but we do not come from a tradition of falling on our knees to pray. We do not do it as we gather, though millions of Christians meet in church buildings where the seats are equipped with kneeling bars for exactly this reason. And I imagine most of us do not do it in daily life. It is not a necessary thing, but I wonder if it might be a good thing as it connects us to this story.

John looks and he sees a great multitude. This, we will see, is those faithfully living before the throne from across generations and nations, throughout time and space — past, present, and future — standing before the throne, where we belong, dressed in white robes, like heavenly creatures, holding palm branches and singing out together in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb” (Revelation 7:9-10).

More singing. More words of worship — not just for the Ancient of Days, but also for the lamb. They cry out “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the lamb.” These are people from many nations with powers, with visions of heaven, with methods of worship and service and loyalty, proclaiming their ultimate loyalty and belonging belongs in the hands of the God of heaven and his king.

And everyone in the throne room falls down before the throne — like John does in chapter 1 — worshipping, proskuneo-ing God, saying: “Yes. Amen. Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honour and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen” (Revelation 7:11-12).

This heavenly chorus features all those who have suffered and been persecuted, who have faced life in this world — especially for the first readers, life persecuted by the Romans. This is everyone who has been washed and made clean, made heavenly by the blood of the lamb, by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This crowd of witnesses — particularly those who have been martyred, faithful witnesses — their place, and ours, forever is this throne room, sheltered in the presence of the worthy God on his throne in his heavenly temple. This is our security, our shelter through and beyond the storms of life. If those dwelling there are as worthy as the songs we sing say, then this is a beautiful and comforting picture.

Where these people — including us — will not hunger or thirst, will not lack, will not be exposed to the brutality of the elements. Instead the lamb on the throne will shepherd us, leading his people to springs of living water, and God will wipe away all the tears from our eyes (Revelation 7:14-17).

This picture of a heavenly present and a heavenly future — that we will look at more next chapter from the end of the book — living in this reality, this grandeur, this hope, is meant to prompt our worship, us falling before the good king and offering our lives to him as he offers this life to us, and the way we serve him on this earth as other powers call for our loyalty and try to rule us while leading us to destruction.

Will you enter this reality — the throne room — and fall before this king in worship now in prayer, and as you next sing God’s praises with his people; so that we might be those who live as his priestly people ‘in heaven’ in order to carry his offer of life and shelter into the world?

Before The Throne — Chapter Five — Chariot Of Fire

This was part five of a sermon series preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2024. You can listen to this on our podcast, or watch the video.

I want you to imagine you are in the new creation — heaven and earth have merged, and you are sitting with the prophet Ezekiel.

You are having a chat — and you are trying to explain solar power to him — we just dragged these glass panels up on the roof — and they did not just reflect the radiance of the sun, they captured it and harnessed its power and transformed it into energy we could use.

And then someone from 50 years in the future — you will have to check if this is the right time frame in 50 years… someone walks up and says “wait till you see what we did with hydrogen.”

Explaining power — energy — raw unharnessed might — is pretty tricky. I wonder how you would go explaining the power generated in atomic fission — what is going on in the heart of a nuclear reaction — and what would happen if you were standing in the presence of that sort of reaction.

Lots of the power generating options with this sort of raw energy involve bringing water into the mix and creating this steam which is used to spin things really fast and transform it into energy that flows out into the world to be used. The raw power is both destructive and transformative in ways that spread energy and turn on the lights.

Anyway… Ezekiel is doing something like this exercise in what we have just read — trying to use words and images to capture the glory — the majesty — the power — of God’s presence in words people can understand. We are going to try to build a bit of a bridge back in time as we look at his imagery, just like he would have to come up to speed when it comes to the pictures we might use.

We have been on a bit of a journey over the last few chapters, and have arrived at our destination; we are looking at depictions the Bible gives us of the heavenly throne room.

We have been trying to remap our view of reality so we can live as God’s heaven on earth people — people who have got a vision of heaven driving our lives on earth.

We looked at Paul’s prayer that the eyes of his readers’ hearts would be enlightened (Ephesians 1:18-19) — like his eyes were enlightened when the heavens opened for him and he was overwhelmed by bright light on the road. He wants us to see that God’s power which was at work in raising Jesus from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavenly realms — above all these authorities and power and dominion (Ephesians 1:19-21) — is at work in us as we are raised and seated with Jesus (Ephesians 2:6). We are talking about what it means to set our hearts and minds on things above — where Jesus is.

We have worked our way towards the throne room — starting with the idea of being raised and seated in paradise; a garden — a new Eden — regaining access to this sort of heavenly space that was lost and shut off by a cherubim with a flaming sword in the beginning of the Bible’s story (Genesis 3:24). And then we looked at how heaven is pictured as a mountain top — in the heavenly Mount Zion — the temple mountain of God’s dwelling place (Hebrews 12:18, 22).

Mountains and gardens and temples are pictures of heaven — they all merge — so Ezekiel describes Eden as a mountain garden (Ezekiel 28:13-14), and the temple is decorated with cherubim — heavenly creatures — and fruit trees from the garden. It is also a picture — a copy of God’s heavenly dwelling; his sanctuary — and throne room (Hebrews 9:24). Jesus invites us into the holiest part (Hebrews 10:19); where God’s throne is represented in the “copy” by this golden box, called the ark, into God’s presence; his throne room.

Well, now we’re in the throne room, and we’re looking around — and in some spiritual sense, that is also true and real, this is where we belong. This is where the Bible says we live; where we see and encounter and speak to God, and where he sees us as we approach him in prayer and worship and devotion as his children. As people who, because God’s Spirit dwells in us on earth, and unites us to Jesus in heaven — we are heaven on earth people. And our lives on earth are meant to be shaped by this throne room being our ultimate reality. But this was not always the reality for humans in the Bible. There is a time where it appears that heaven on earth spaces are disappearing — that they are totally separate — that other powers — maybe other gods — maybe powerful people — it looks like they have won. So God’s people have to grapple with where this means God is, if he has abandoned us, or if he is really there at all, and how to live with those questions. I wonder if we spend lots of our lives feeling more like this — and how we might deliberately cultivate a different picture.

This is the situation facing Ezekiel and other people carted off to Babylon with King Jehoiachin. Ezekiel is 30 years old — he is among the exiles in Babylon (Ezekiel 1:1). This is before the full force of Babylonian power falls on Israel — that bit we looked at last week from 2 Kings, where the temple is desecrated, and Jerusalem is left in ruins. Ezekiel is among the first political prisoners in Babylon — and here God is choosing him as the spokesperson to go back to Israel and tell them what is coming for them.

This is how the scene is set for his work as a heaven-on-earth speaker — a prophet — who speaks these words, that are then crafted into a book Israel will treat as part of God’s word as they contemplate life both in exile and back in the land afterwards. We get a little third person description of the scene in verse 3 to make sure we know he is in Babylon, and that others believe the hand of God is on him in this moment. He is by the rivers of Babylon and the skies open — he gets swept up into this sort of heavenly vision — visions of God — it is a vision explaining the situation of Israelites in exile.

“In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.”
— Ezekiel 1:1

They are wondering if the looming end of the temple and maybe the kingdom of Israel means they have been abandoned by God; that his throne room is gone; that he has lost a sort of cosmic battle between ancient deities. But Ezekiel has his eyes opened and he is looking at the heavenly throne room the earthly one depicts.

And we are starting to get some visuals here — some colours and descriptions and an audio visual display it is worth taking a moment to imagine and dwell on and to see how it aligns with other descriptions from the Old Testament as we build a picture.

Ezekiel’s vision starts with a windstorm — an immense cloud with flashing lightning and brilliant light — there is a fire and the middle of it looks like glowing, molten metal — this is like a furnace (Ezekiel 1:4). It is a moving version of the glory of God that settles on the mountain in Exodus — where there is — again — thunder and lightning and a thick cloud — a sort of terrifying scene — awe inspiring (Exodus 19:16).

And the mountain in Sinai is smoky because God’s presence is like a fiery furnace (Exodus 19:18). There is nothing more powerful in the ancient world than a thunder cloud and lightning and a furnace — they did not have nuclear bombs and mushroom clouds — so when they are looking for a visual to describe this sort of raw power — well — look at some of these descriptions from the Psalms. In Psalm 18, David describes smoke coming out of God’s nostrils and consuming fire and blazing coals from his mouth as he comes down from heaven on dark clouds — mounting the cherubim — this is an image we will come back to — soaring on the wind, riding the clouds and controlling lightning — thundering from heaven — it is the same sort of picture (Psalm 18:8-13). Psalm 97 describes God reigning from his throne — where there are clouds and darkness again — and fire. His fiery heat is the sort of smelting furnace that melts mountains — or makes them smoke as he comes down. Mountains are the biggest thing they could imagine smelting (Psalm 97:1-5).

And — not for nothing — this raw, smelting, fiery power — approaching the presence of God — it is meant to be transformative. There is a risk it is deadly and consuming, but even approaching the foot of the mountain and this fire — Moses says — even not seeing God as he speaks out of the fire has a refining impact. God has no physical form in encounter — he was raw transforming power — and this encounter is meant to shape how they use power; their own smelting fires. It is meant to stop them forming images of gods in the world that deform them as they worship; to avoid corruption, because they are formed by this fire (Deuteronomy 4:11, 15-16).

We have got to be careful — I reckon — even as we are trying to engage our imaginations and picture this heavenly reality — realities described in picture language — and as we seek to encounter God; to behold his glory — that we are being transformed rather than deformed by wrong images.

Encountering God’s raw power — these heavenly visions are meant to transform and transfix Israel so they will worship this powerful God, not use their own smelting fires to make idols. We are not meant to make images to worship because as soon as we reduce God or our object of worship to humans or animals, or the bright lights of the sky — worshipping them — or the things given to other nations to worship — we become deformed in that worship, instead of being the people formed by God. God’s people are those formed by encountering his power and might. God is the furnace, and his worshippers are his image bearing heaven-on-earth people in the world (Deuteronomy 4:16-20).

This is the goal: to approach his presence — his throne — so we radiate his glory in the world.

This is what is happening for Ezekiel — he is learning some worship-shaping perspective that will shape his life in the world as a prophet. Ezekiel is seeing the God from Sinai, and the Psalms and the temple — seeing him enthroned — but he is in Babylon, when the skies open and he sees God’s throne on the move. It is mobile — it is a chariot throne being pulled around by these strange creatures. Now — we started with Ezekiel’s vision from chapter 1, but he records an almost identical vision in chapter 10, and we are going to pull some bits back from that to make sense of what we are seeing.

So there are these four living creatures — they have got four faces and four wings. They have got gleaming bronze cow legs and human hands. The wings are touching, and their four faces are animal and human. Now — we can get into all sorts of knots trying to picture these things (Ezekiel 1:4-10). Or asking an AI image generator to picture this description for us and they become wild and wacky alien figures — which I have done, so you do not have to.

This joins a long tradition of trying to capture the imagery here — here is someone’s attempt from the 16th century — and I reckon when we do this we might be pointing the camera at the wrong bit of the picture — but also I think we are trying to represent beings from a reality outside ours in ways the descriptions do not quite let us. Ezekiel is stretching language to its limits to describe images he saw — and there is this word that is at the heart of what we are trying to do with our imaginations this series that is important — Ezekiel is imagining and trying to describe something ineffable; something beyond our ability to describe in words — but using evocative picture language to spark our imaginations and push us to our limits.

But the thing is — people reading or hearing this vision in the time Ezekiel is speaking know exactly what he is describing. This is where we need a bridge — it is as foreign to us as solar panels are to him.

Israel’s neighbours all had versions of these winged creatures — and lots of them played a task of being the chariot pullers for god-kings. So here is an inscription image from Megiddo — a city that will ultimately become part of Israel — where a member of the royal family is riding a chariot pulled by a winged creature.

But — more importantly — people from Israel know what these four creatures are, because they are living, flying versions of the creatures from the throne room of God. They are cherubim — which is what Ezekiel will actually call them in chapter 10:

“Each of the cherubim had four faces: One face was that of a cherub, the second the face of a human being, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.”
— Ezekiel 10:14

And there are four of them because in the holy of holies — around God’s throne — there are four cherubim (Ezekiel 1:8-9). The two giant ones covered in gold (1 Kings 6:23, 28), whose wings touch above the ark (1 Kings 8:6). And there are two on the ark lid whose wings reach over the lid and touch as they represent holding up God’s throne (Exodus 25:18, 22).

Ezekiel is seeing the reality represented by these statues. This is why we are seeing four cherubim — and in his vision these are burning too; the fire and lightning that accompanies Yahweh as he travels on the cloud in the thunder is flashing among them as they speed around (Ezekiel 1:13-14). And they have got a job to do which has to do with these weird gyroscopic wheels. Wheels within wheels that are beside them — the wheels are sparkling; jewelled; majestic (Ezekiel 1:15-16). These creatures are chariot pullers — pulling this platform — on these crazy wheels that are also full of eyes. Where the cherubim go, the wheels go. There is a sort of spiritual bluetooth connection between the cherubim and the wheels of the throne-chariot (Ezekiel 1:17-20).

Above them there is this vault — a sort of crystal dome that might also get called a sea — and it might be part of what separates the heavens and the earth and the ground and sky waters in Genesis 1. The vault is sparkling and awesome.

This whole scene is vivid and multicoloured and multimedia and it is meant to stretch the language about power and beauty and grandeur to its limits (Ezekiel 1:22-23). God’s throne is on the vault, and there is the same blue crystal — lapis lazuli that Moses sees on the mountain top.

Our eyes are drawn upwards from the creatures, to the vault, to the throne, so we are not looking at the weird ineffable creatures — but this figure like that of a man. Now — it is tricky to know how to picture God — right — we are wrestling with something ineffable here because on the one hand we are told God is the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being of raw power — who has no form — a sort of infinite and omnipresent grounds of being — and then at the same time, right from the first page of the Bible we are told humans are made in his image and likeness — and here Ezekiel is seeing this heavenly figure who is human-shaped — but not human. From his waist we have got the sort of molten metal that was at the heart of the cloud — full of fire — surrounded by the brilliant light we imagined in week 1. He is radiant; like a rainbow breaking through storm clouds. Overwhelming radiance.

And Ezekiel is in no doubt that this is the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord; the personified glory of Yahweh. And so when he sees it he falls facedown — this is a picture of absolute awe-filled worship. Reverence. A certain sort of fearful respect (Ezekiel 1:26-28).

But he is encountering this vision of God’s glory not in his temple on Zion, but in Babylon.

God’s throne is mobile; it is not limited to the temple on the mountain — just like the ark went with Israel wherever they went between the exodus and the construction of the temple — God is able to move.

And actually, this encounter — this vivid vision of the ineffable God and his chariot throne in all its fiery, cloudy, lightning glory — with the colours of crystals and light and rainbows flashing around, as Yahweh is carried by his cherubim-throne pullers — this is a perspective setter for Ezekiel.

He is commissioned to go from meeting the glory of God in this vision of his heavenly throne room — in Babylon — to being sent to Israel — a rebellious nation — to tell them that their rebellion means God’s throne room is leaving the temple (Ezekiel 2:3). And Ezekiel could be terrified of these Israelites still in Jerusalem; their might and their power to harm him. But this perspective is meant to make this human opposition to God’s power and might small (Ezekiel 2:6).

And I wonder if sometimes this is the sort of perspective we are lacking — when human power, and humans who loom large in our lives, feel terrifying; like they have got too much control over our lives and our fates. We get caught up in people-pleasing or people-serving, or not being prepared to speak truth to power for God’s sake, or for the sake of the poor or the oppressed, because of the cost we might face in our earthly lives. Ezekiel’s antidote to this fear — and he is going to have to do a lot of confronting, symbolic stuff to carry this message to Israel — is this encounter with God’s glory and the knowledge that God is still enthroned and still ruling even as Babylon and its massive army crushes Jerusalem and the temple, and even as the political leaders of Israel reject his message and so also are crushed. Ezekiel is not to fear them because he has this perspective that God is enthroned among the cherubim; ruling not in a shadowy temple but in cosmic reality.

This picture of life before the throne — this encounter with the awesome, majestic, mountain-melting God — is what gives him perspective.

It is also a vision that is meant to give Israel perspective when they are in exile; when it looks like Babylonian power has won, and the gods of the nations — these other possible supernatural powers — might be more powerful than Yahweh. Ezekiel’s vision of God ruling — enthroned in heaven — even while his people are in Babylon is a vision shared in the book of Daniel — in Daniel 7 — which expands our vision of heaven.

This connects with an idea Paul touches on in Ephesians — that Jesus has been raised above all powers and dominions (Ephesians 1:19-21). It is a bit of a category breaker for us, but changing our understanding of heaven can challenge us to worship God; to fall before him, and to put the powers at work in the world — and the idols or other things we might choose to worship rather than worshipping God — into perspective.

The Old Testament talks about Yahweh not just as “Yahweh” — the name he gives Moses on the mountain — and not just as “Elohim” — a word for God — but as the Most High God. In one of the psalms we looked at earlier, he is “Yahweh Most High” (Psalm 18:13). Yahweh — Israel’s God, the maker of heaven and earth — is the ruler of all the heavenly beings, not just the earthly ones; the ruler of other powers that nations of the earth might have turned into gods and worshipped.

In Daniel, we get this vision of God ruling in the heavenly courtroom — the throne room — as the nations who worship these other powers go to war. Thrones — plural — are set in place, and the Ancient of Days — another way of speaking about God — takes his seat. It is a heavenly council meeting (Daniel 7:9; cf. Psalm 82:1). He is glowing and bright — clothes white as snow; white hair. His throne is flaming with fire — and it has wheels; this is his chariot throne like in Ezekiel — the wheels are ablaze (Daniel 7:9). A river of fire is flowing, and he is attended by hundreds of thousands in this heavenly court (Daniel 7:10).

As judgment is handed down — as God’s rule is displayed — a figure enters the throne room: one like a son of man who comes with the clouds of heaven — like Yahweh does in the visions in the Psalms and in Ezekiel. This is a human who looks like the glory of the Lord in Ezekiel. He is led into the presence of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:13), and this Son of Man is given authority and power over all nations; a dominion above every dominion. The rule that had been enjoyed by these other powers — now subjected to judgment — is given to this Son of Man (Daniel 7:14). As Daniel explains his vision he talks about a spiritual force that will rise up and animate armies to oppose God’s people, but the court will sit, and that power will be taken away and destroyed, and the rule given to the holy people of the Most High under the Son of Man who will rule an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:26-27).

For God’s people in Babylon, and then under foreign rulers, hearing these words — capturing this vision of God’s throne on wheels and God as ruler over all the other powers, gods of these nations — it is a reminder that they are where they are because they rejected God’s rule. But it does not mean their God is not the Most High, or is not ruling.

All of this could be empty if the kingdom had fizzled out in Babylon; if these words and images had just died out and been lost to history. But they have not. And while many want to take this heavenly vision and push it to a distant future with bits yet to be fulfilled, fulfilling this mission was the mission of Jesus — the human Son of Man — the heavenly human.

Have you noticed how Jesus picks up this same imagery from Ezekiel’s fiery clouds of glory — a sort of heavenly chariot — to describe his coming as the ruler of the heavenly court, commanding angels? In Mark’s Gospel: “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens” (Mark 13:26-27).

This is not just a picture of his return to make all things new — there is a fun thing where the Greek word for “coming” can also mean “going.” In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus talks about a time when he, the Son of Man, will be like the lightning — more Ezekiel imagery (Luke 17:24). He says, “From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of God” — Daniel will be fulfilled (Luke 22:69).

In Acts, Luke leans into the coming/going idea as he describes Jesus ascending in the clouds to heaven, while the disciples gaze into heaven. Two heavenly men appear and ask, in effect, “Why are you looking into heaven?” They say this same Jesus who has been taken from earth into heaven will come back in the same way. He has not abandoned them; he is committed to this heaven-on-earth project (Acts 1:9-11).

As Acts unfolds, one of Jesus’ followers, Stephen, is killed — and it looks like worldly powers are winning. In that moment Luke tells us Daniel has been fulfilled: Stephen looks into heaven and sees Jesus there, the Son of Man enthroned with the glory of God (Acts 7:55).

Our vision of heaven is different to Ezekiel’s now because it includes this human king enthroned — as Ephesians says — above all the other powers that might try to shape our lives on earth (Ephesians 1:19-21). The writer of Hebrews describes Jesus as the radiant reflection of the glory of God — a high king enthroned in heaven, victorious and worthy of our worship (Hebrews 1:3).

This vision is meant to teach us that God has not abandoned us; that he is powerful and victorious — that consuming fire — but also that this power can now be approached without fear that we will be destroyed, and in a way that transforms us. We are invited to dwell in this power and have it set off a reaction in us — so that we are like metal that melts and is formed into living images of God; or like turbines that spin next to a nuclear reaction and turn on the lights in the world. We are invited into the throne room of God to encounter this power on the throne in ways that stop us worshipping — giving our hearts — to any other bright light or imagined power. This helps us see humans not as terrifying people who can rule our lives — even if there is a threat of harm — but to have the eyes of our hearts — our minds and imaginations — filled with the power and glory and majesty of God in ways that consume us and destroy, or refine away, the bits of us that do not reflect him, or the image of him we now see in Jesus.

I want to encourage you to pray; to enter the throne room, and to consider how when we pray we are coming to God’s throne in worship; and how when we sing — as those who sing before God’s throne; singing words like those in the Psalms that help us capture this imagery of God’s majestic power, it’s designed to transform our hearts and send us out into the world like electricity from a nuclear reaction.

Before the Throne — Chapter Four — The Heaven on Earth House

This was part four of a sermon series preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2024. You can listen to this on our podcast, or watch the video.

What should God’s house look like?

If you were building a physical thing on earth to teach yourself, and others, what heaven looks like — or what heaven on earth looks like — dwelling with God — somewhere you could go to visualise this reality — what would you build?

This is the dilemma that has faced church architects for centuries — right — from the time Christians met in houses, to when we could meet publicly in halls, to when we could build structures.

And part of that dilemma is: are our churches temples? How should they relate to the temple in the Bible? The temple is often called God’s dwelling place in the Bible — but what is a temple? What does it mean for the God of heaven to dwell on earth anyway — especially as we are looking at how followers of Jesus are raised and seated in the throne room of heaven, so our lives on earth reflect this reality (Ephesians 2:6).

Back in week one we touched on this idea that we — God’s “heaven on earth” people — are his temple (Ephesians 2:21–22).

So how do we be a temple?

What pictures should shape our imaginations? What vision of heaven should shape us as we live in space and time? How do the passages in the Bible about temples shape what we become?

This is not easy. What we are going to do today is a little ambitious, and this theme is so broad and rich that really it is just an example of the sort of meditation on some imagery in Scripture that we are trying to practice together this series.

There are lots of other rich threads you might pick up over a lifetime. I reckon you could pick any aspect of the design of the tabernacle or temple in the Old Testament — or its furnishings — to contemplate, and see how they are fulfilled in Jesus and point to the ultimate heaven on earth reality he brings us into. Not just our current location in the heavens with him, but the future reality of heaven and earth being brought together as one as we live in God’s presence — his house — forever.

We have also got some limitations in our tradition when it comes to thinking this way. If you were answering this question — about what God’s house might look like — both anticipating heaven, and looking back to the story of the Bible as someone in the Orthodox tradition, sitting — or standing — in church — you would just have to look around.

In the Orthodox tradition churches are built to tell this story — right from the ground — the floor plan, which maps out who lives where on earth — to the ceiling, where you might find a dome as a picture of the heavens above.

In a traditional Orthodox church, those not part of the church yet — those not baptised or received into the life of the house — remain in the narthex, while the members of the church gather in the nave, and the priests and bishops “mediate” heaven to earth from the sanctuary, which is where the Eucharist is served from as Jesus’ body and blood are given to the congregation. It is separated from the nave by a wall with doors that is covered with icons — imagery of saints — those in heaven.

You go to church in this sort of space and it teaches something about their view of heaven and earth. It functions a bit like the temple.

We do not tend to think about imagery or architecture like this — and we are often worried about idolatry — but there is a danger this stunts our imagination, leaving us just with the words in the Bible, without aids to picture what those words describe. This is tricky territory to navigate, especially if part of our task as image-bearing people is to live in ways that picture heaven-on-earth life now. And maybe it leaves us with fewer tools than God’s people in Israel, who had a whole architecture and set of rhythms to teach them life as God’s people; architecture fulfilled in Jesus, pointing to him.

The writer of Hebrews draws heavily on imagery from the temple and the life of Israel — and connects this to the story of Jesus and our place now in a heavenly temple. They say Jesus is a high priest — the king seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven also serves in a sanctuary — the “true tabernacle” — that is a dwelling place — built by God, not by humans (Hebrews 8:1–2). This is the temple we now have access to through Jesus as those raised and seated with him. They also say some things about the reality of the previous dwelling places of God… and the earthly temple in Jerusalem before it was destroyed by the Romans…

The writer of Hebrews tells us that these Old Testament designs — built by humans — were, right from Moses with the tabernacle, attempts to build things on earth that reflected this heavenly dwelling of God that Moses sees on the mountain. They are tools designed to reflect what heaven is like, what God is like, and how to live as people who dwell with God. They are “a copy and a shadow of what is in heaven” (Hebrews 8:5).

The tabernacle that belonged to what the writer of Hebrews calls “the old covenant” — an old way of doing business with God, in relationship with him — is contrasted with the new covenant described in a bit we skipped, which quotes Jeremiah talking about God writing his law on hearts, rather than on stone tablets they keep in a box, where people will not need a temple to teach us how God works because they will know him (Hebrews 8:10–11), where sins and wickedness will be forgiven and made no more (Hebrews 8:12).

For the writer of Hebrews this happens as the perpetual sacrifices in the temple are replaced with the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. The old covenant had patterns of worship — rhythms of coming before God — and architecture — a sanctuary with a floor plan, and furnishings that lined up with this way of doing things, helping people picture and live out this arrangement between heaven and earth. It had a holy place and a most holy place, and furniture that helped people move from one place to the other — or a priest to do this — through sacrifices and being made symbolically clean — in order to enter heaven-on-earth space. There was a golden altar and a golden ark of the covenant, and above the ark there were these cherubim — pictures of heavenly creatures from the throne room of God — which the writer of Hebrews does not dig into — and maybe preachers like me could learn from them (Hebrews 9:1–5)… because we are going to dig into the details a bit… but let’s finish the Hebrews thread first, which stresses how old covenant priests did a bunch of business in the outer room, but could only go into the most holy place once a year, with blood offered as an atoning sacrifice on behalf of the people. That word atonement — it is a word about restoration of relationship, not just forgiveness — a sacrifice so people could keep living with God at the heart of their community.

The Holy Spirit was using this imagery — this architecture, and these rhythms — to show that the way into life with God, the most holy place, heaven on earth, was not open, and could not be while this first dwelling place — the tabernacle, and then the more permanent temple — were functioning (Hebrews 9:7). Which I guess means whatever architecture and rhythms we take up would have to help us see how the way is open. This was an illustration — a picture — an image — of the first covenant being inadequate for actually transforming a worshipper into a heaven-on-earth person. Not just the people, even the priest. A picture fulfilled (Hebrews 9:9).

But now, Jesus the true high priest has made a way into the true temple — the heavenly dwelling place — the place we are trying to imagine ourselves in now (Hebrews 9:11). He did not enter through animal sacrifices offered up once a year, but his own blood — as the Son of God — obtaining eternal redemption and opening up access to this most holy place — not just the illustration, the shadow, but the heavenly reality (Hebrews 9:12). So those cleansed by his blood are actually able to receive this new covenant, forgiveness and life with God — so that we can actually serve the living God as his priestly people who actually live in his presence in order to reflect it (Hebrews 9:14).

If we go a little past Hebrews 9, we are told Jesus enters this heavenly sanctuary — a sort of heavenly temple — in order to represent us in God’s presence; in his throne room (Hebrews 9:24). So that, as Hebrews says later, we can now — now, not just in the future — come behind the curtain into the most holy place — through this new and living way — not just the dead body of Jesus cleansed by his blood, but his living body because we are united to him and that is where he is seated.

We can now draw near to God with sincere hearts — changed hearts — hearts of the new covenant — cleansed by sprinkling, like the priests would sprinkle the altar, having our bodies washed with pure water (Hebrews 10:19–22).

This is where we now live. This reality is our reality. We might just need to open our minds up to see ourselves behind this curtain and understand what this means. And to do this, we might dip back into the Bible’s story; to look at the shadow or illustration to get a clearer picture.

A shadow alone lacks detail, it is two-dimensional. But when you add shadow to a picture it makes it three-dimensional, it gives it depth. If you think of an illustration like a guide for making flat pack furniture — the picture is not the real thing, but it does help you picture what the real thing should look like and build it.

So we will look at some of the architecture of the temple, and how the story of the Bible picks up these things and shows them fulfilled in Jesus in order to furnish ourselves with some pictures to contemplate as we live lives behind the curtain, anticipating the future the temple points to where the whole earth becomes like a temple — which is where the story heads — with that vision of a new heavenly city coming down from heaven (Revelation 21:10).

Only, there is no temple in this vision because God himself — and the Lamb, Jesus — are the temple (Revelation 21:22–23). God is dwelling in his new creation where heaven and earth are one, the heavenly reality merges with our reality — so there is no need for a halfway house to teach us what heaven-on-earth life looks like.

There is some imagery from the temple picked up in this vision though that is fun to think about and to guide our imagination now; an example of things we might contemplate or meditate on as we open our eyes to heaven.

We get the plans and patterns for the tabernacle — the tent dwelling of God — in the book of Exodus. If you were with us last year we looked at these in depth, and if you were not those talks are online. So we are going to jump in to when David’s son, King Solomon, builds a house for God in Jerusalem.

It is a house — a temple — built on a mountain to evoke images of the garden, and of heaven. It has a floor plan that the writer of Hebrews describes, marking out holy space from the most holy space. And it is built from incredible materials. If you want to try to picture life in the temple — it is full of gold; it is shining brightly everywhere you look. Everything is overlaid with gold: the walls, the chain ropes, the interior of the inner sanctuary, and the altar (1 Kings 6:21–22).

The walls are decorated with cherubim — heavenly creatures — and palm trees and flowers and fruit — and these are covered in gold. It is a golden Eden, and the sanctuary, guarded by cherubim and walled off, is a picture of paradise lost — the dwelling place of God is still not accessible even if people can come really close… except, once a year, by the priest (1 Kings 6:29–30).

The description of the temple includes a bunch of time devoted to this huge bowl of water — it is called the sea (1 Kings 7:24). It sits outside the holy place. It is bronze not gold, and there is a bronze altar where sacrifices are offered as people arrived at the temple. This sea is weird to imagine — it is a giant bowl decorated with pumpkins, gourds — propped up by twelve bulls facing outwards (1 Kings 7:25).

It is like a giant flowercup and it holds two thousand baths (1 Kings 7:26) — or 44,000 litres — which, for scale, is what you could carry in this truck.

This sea is placed on the south side of the temple — specifically in the southeast corner (1 Kings 7:39). Remember that.

Second Chronicles tells us this sea is for the priests to wash themselves (2 Chronicles 4:6). It is not just about having clean hands, this washing is part of cleansing themselves as they move towards heavenly space, from the earthly space outside the temple.

It is a bigger, more permanent version of the bronze bowl Moses puts in the tabernacle, next to the altar, where the priests had to wash themselves when they entered the tent of meeting — the tabernacle —

so they would not die. They had to be clean any time they were going to carry something from earth to heaven in the form of an offering to God (Exodus 30:17–21).

Now look, you might be lost — so let’s re-orient for a second. We are zoomed in on the part of the temple used for washing people clean, next to the part of the temple where people would spill blood to deal with their sins.

These are shadows of what the writer of Hebrews says happens for us through Jesus that allows us to draw near to God (Hebrews 10:21–22). We will just look at two more details from the temple setup in 1 Kings before tracing the story through.

The priests bring in the ark of the covenant to the inner sanctuary, the most holy place — God’s throne room on earth (1 Kings 8:6). This is a special box built when the tabernacle is built — it is a picture of the throne of God — it symbolises his heavenly rule on the earth:

“There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.”

— Exodus 25:22

Moses meets God there “between the cherubim” (Numbers 7:89). And God is often described seated on the ark or enthroned — ruling between the cherubim (1 Samuel 4:4; Psalm 99:1). When this throne arrives in the centre of the house at the top of the mountain, God’s glory cloud fills the temple of the Lord. He comes to live in his house. And things look good for God’s people (1 Kings 8:10–11).

They live before the throne of God; you would think they would learn, with this holy architecture and this furniture, how to live like God’s people. But they do not. Their hearts are not in it. The old covenant does not transform them from the inside the way the new covenant does. This temple is not enough to teach them.

And the story of the Old Testament is a story of deconstruction of this heaven-on-earth space. We get stories like the story of King Ahaz, who gives all the treasure of the temple to the king of Assyria (2 Kings 16:8). Then he goes off to their temple and sees a fancy altar to their gods, and has that altar copied and built in the temple. Where Moses saw the tabernacle designs in the heavens, he is getting his blueprints from idol temples (2 Kings 16:10). He moves the sea (2 Kings 16:17).

One of his descendants, Manasseh, goes further — he builds a bunch of altars in the temple to the starry hosts — the bright heavenly lights God created — who, even if they are imagined as being like cherubim, are not meant to be the objects of worship (2 Kings 21:4–5). And he puts an Asherah pole — a symbol of another god — in the temple where God’s name is meant to dwell; where he is enthroned (2 Kings 21:7).

Even when King Hezekiah gets rid of these altars and idols and smashes them to pieces (2 Kings 23:12), these insults were enough — God is going to move out (2 Kings 23:27). And this happens as Babylon moves in. Nebuchadnezzar takes all the treasures that have not been given away (2 Kings 24:13). His generals set fire to the temple (2 Kings 25:9), and break up the altar and the bronze sea and take it all off to Babylon (2 Kings 25:13).

And losing this temple and furniture — well — that is also meant to teach God’s people something. They are not living in his presence anymore.

The prophet Ezekiel provides a sort of from-the-heavens view of these earthly events. He is operating around the time these events are happening — as King Jehoiachin is taken into exile by Babylon (2 Kings 25:8, 12). Ezekiel starts seeing visions in his fifth year of captivity (Ezekiel 1:2).

And then in year six he sees this vision from heaven of an idol in the temple (Ezekiel 8:1, 3), and of God’s glory going above his seat between the cherubim and heading stage by stage to the exit — from the ark to the threshold, and the cherubim take off too. It is no longer a heaven-on-earth house (Ezekiel 10:18–19). In the midst of this, Ezekiel promises a return — with an echo of Jeremiah’s promise of the new covenant — that God will give his people an undivided heart and a new spirit; restoration to life with him as his people (Ezekiel 11:19–20). Before the cherubim and God’s glory — his throne — take off as a sign of the spiritual reality of exile (Ezekiel 11:22–23).

When Israel returns from Babylon to rebuild the temple in Ezra, they start with the altar. But there is no ark, there is no sea, there is no glory of God in the temple (Ezra 3:2). And as they lay the foundation, those who saw the first temple weep (Ezra 3:12). The glory of God is not there. Even as, at the order of the Babylonian courts (Ezra 6:3), the treasures are returned to the temple, there is still no ark, and no sea — which is significant because it is not a house that is teaching people how to live in God’s presence, before his throne anymore (Ezra 6:5). It is a bit hollow. It is not the renewed temple Ezekiel describes as he sees God’s glory returning to dwell with his people, entering the temple and filling it again, coming to sit on his throne and live with his people again in a heavenly home (Ezekiel 43:1–7).

There is an altar, but it is not the temple with water — the sea — in a bowl cleansing priests so they can approach the throne — or where this water flows out as a picture of transforming life. Here is a fun thing. Maybe.

“The man brought me back to the entrance to the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east).”

— Ezekiel 47:1

We looked at Ezekiel’s vision of water flowing from the temple when we worked through John and saw Jesus — the walking temple — call himself living water over and over again [I haven’t posted these, but here is a link to the podcast]. Here is this picture in Ezekiel of a renewed temple and I want to suggest there is no sea in this picture. The bowl has been overturned and the cleansing flood is washing down the mountain and transforming the world into something like the garden — because — remember where the sea, used to purify the priests, was placed in the temple; in the southeast corner (1 Kings 7:39). As Ezekiel looks at this living water flowing out of the temple it is coming from the southeast corner (Ezekiel 47:1) — under the threshold toward the east, but from under the south side, south of the altar — where the sea was placed.

This water turns the salt water into fresh, so abundant life emerges; so where the river flows everything lives (Ezekiel 47:8–9). Fruit trees grow on this overturned sea, bearing fruit monthly because the temple waters them, healing and feeding those by the waters (Ezekiel 47:12). It is like a garden. Paradise. Eden.

This is a sort of heavenly temple — the heavenly temple depicted again at the end of the story — when John sees the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:10). The old temple was this square building covered in gold; this is a city of pure gold (Revelation 21:18). In the heavenly picture there is no temple because the Lord Almighty and the Lamb are the temple (Revelation 21:22–23). Their throne is in the centre; providing glorious light to the world (Revelation 21:23). And water flows from the throne — just as water flows out of the temple — as this river of the water of life, surrounded by the tree of life. This is the heavenly temple (Revelation 22:1–2). This is the “behind the curtain” reality where Jesus now sits, enthroned with his Father, that we have access to as we come before the throne now.

The sea of water — where priestly people had to be cleansed with water to approach the throne — instead, turning salt water into living water, there is no longer any sea (Revelation 21:1), but a river of the water of life flows from the throne room bringing life (Revelation 22:1–2).

This is a view of the perfect tabernacle (Hebrews 9:11). And our way into this most holy place is to be cleansed by the blood of the Lamb; the king and high priest who makes a way through a new and living curtain, which is his body (Hebrews 10:19–20). A cleansing we illustrate with our baptism — our bodies being cleansed, washed pure by water — and as we receive the living water — which Jesus says is God’s Spirit — becoming not just a kingdom of priests but a living temple — the dwelling place of God on earth (Hebrews 10:21–22).

The glory of God did not turn up to live in another temple building, but as Jesus ascended, he joined his Father in pouring out his Spirit on his people — making us temples (Acts 2:2–4).

It is the community of people worshipping God in the “holy of holies” together; as those who have been baptised not just by water, but his Spirit, entering God’s presence — through Jesus’ body — in prayer and worship — being transformed by his Spirit into his likeness — picturing life united to the heavenly temple — and so living heaven-on-earth lives who are the architecture that teaches us this story here on earth. And it is entering this reality through prayer and worship, setting our hearts and minds on things above, that teaches us the story from a heavenly perspective — and this is what we do together as we gather.

You might be reading as someone who, in an Orthodox church, would be left in the courtyard, looking on. I want to invite you to enter a church community; to join God’s people, to meet Jesus with us, and in us, as we gather, to see this story and be swept up into it.

You might be wondering where you belong as someone who follows Jesus — someone who has been cleansed by his blood and washed in water — a priest, a temple. The trick is, if this story is right we do not belong in some “less than sacred” place. We all belong through the doors, past the wall, in the holy of holies, at the throne — the heavenly temple — with our high priest and king.

And if we want that design to shape us — or to design our lives and spaces on earth to teach us this story — well, the writer of Hebrews’ point last week remains: we should keep our eyes on Jesus; on the throne; in the holy of holies as the author and perfector of our faith; basing our life there — and we should be gathering as this living temple.

Where we meet, we do not have the gold walls or the altar or the candles or the giant sea. We have a communion table and a baptism pool and God’s word, and our houses, and our tables, and each other — glorious people filled with God’s Spirit being transformed into the likeness of Jesus together. Which is why, I think, the writer of Hebrews follows up this thing about us having been brought into the new covenant, with forgiven sins and cleansed hearts, by calling us to draw near to God with this instruction to help us live heaven-on-earth lives as those who dwell in the holy of holies — holding on to our hope of a heaven-on-earth future while tasting heaven-on-earth life now (Hebrews 10:23).

And we should keep meeting with other heaven-on-earth people — to spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, but encouraging one another all the more as we see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:24–25).

This is what “God’s house” — the temple — looks like on earth as we draw near to God in heaven through Jesus and the new and living way opened for us that is his body.

So let’s imagine ourselves entering the most holy place, coming before God’s throne as we pray, and in gatherings where we enter physical space and come together to the Lord’s Table — with no barrier to cross — remind ourselves that Jesus has made a way for us to enter the heavenly temple through his body and blood.

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?

We beat darkness by bringing light

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. — John 1:4-5

Reading the news (or the newsfeed) over the last few weeks has left me feeling pretty dark about the world. This statement could be made about any week — but I’ve had my heart smashed by the death of Eurydice Dixon in the dark hours of the night in Melbourne, the separation of refugee children from their parents in the United States, the ongoing humanitarian crisis on our watch in Manus and Nauru, and the ongoing tragedy in the gap between the life expectancy of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians… and there’s always more.

It’s dark.

And in all this, I’ve despaired as I’ve watched what passes for leadership in these times — political leadership, church leadership, thought leadership… it all seems so polarising. Our leaders trade on anxiety — they feed it and feed off it — like wolves who fatten up the sheep so they can enjoy lamb stew for dinner… They use our fears to bolster their power. Instead of dealing with the heart of increasingly complex realities (like the refugee crisis) our leaders create solutions that would be unravelled if our populace was compassionate. Leaders now are feeding on darkness, and so feeding the darkness, rather than bringing light into a dark world.

What deepens my despair is my growing conviction that none of the human solutions to these problems are adequate. There’s a fundamental failure to grapple with the real nature of darkness — we can’t simply defeat darkness by appealing to the ‘better angels’ of our nature. I’m glad there are a bunch of Christian leaders who want to stand against the darkness — on all fronts (or, it’d be nice if it was on all fronts not just on single issues).

But what is distinctively Christian about our stand? What particular insights might we bring to this darkness?

What do we know about light and life that we might bring to the table as our distinctive, and that might shape our particular response both in how we participate in the political and social structures of our world and in how we operate as a counter-political and counter-social structure living out our own solutions built by following King Jesus, as children of the light?

That’s where I’m struggling.

Even the Christian leaders who are calling darkness what it is seem to be limited to tackling these examples of darkness with purely human weaponry — we’re so bought into the secular age and its frame — which includes the supernatural (the idea that God is at work in his world) — that we think these bits of darkness involve the best natural response we can muster (the idea that God works in his world only through natural means).

When it comes to the experience of women in our world — a world systemically stacked against them because it is largely designed and defined by sinful (dark-hearted) human men — we’re left telling men to stop being sinful, or to revolt against a system set up to protect our self interest.

It’s like we’ve assumed the prophetic voice means that we’re speaking to Israel — people who have a particular calling in the world as a kingdom of priests — rather than speaking prophetically to people who have fundamentally and explicitly ignored that calling. But also, if we’re going to talk about the prophetic voice it’s worth looking at how the prophets spoke to Israel’s leaders when they had become just like the nations and what solution the prophets saw for that (hint — divine judgment and intervention).

When it comes to responding to the predatory behaviour of wolf-like men, we’re left asking them to behave like sheep instead.

It’s like we’ve assumed that we can appeal to directly to the image of God in someone without seeing how that image has been twisted and distorted by the conforming worship of other images (idols). It’s a naive theological anthropology that doesn’t see how being made in the image of God was a vocation built from a relationship with God — and how much the restoration of that image is the work of the Holy Spirit.

You can’t tell a wolf to act like a sheep — all you’re doing there is teaching wolves how to dress in sheep’s clothing. You can’t even train, or modify, the behaviour of a wolf in order to pretend it’s a sheep, no matter how good your approach to cultural change or education is, unless the wolf has a total change of heart.

At this point I want to make it clear I’m not playing the ‘not all men’ game here, to suggest that only the truly monstrous figure is wolf-like, but rather to suggest that all humans are inherently capable of monstrous, predatory, behaviour — and this plays out in a particular way in a society shaped by power and violence and a consumer mentality where the good life is not about self-denial but self-gratification.

Until we’re dealing honestly with the human condition — and thus less optimistically — we’re not going to come anywhere near human or natural solutions to the problems plaguing our world.

I quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pretty regularly, for good reason. Solzhenitsyn survived just about the worst darkness humanity can imagine in the Soviet gulags and lived to write about it. He had time to grapple with what it was that produced the sort of systemic evil he experienced, and the evil individuals — the predators — he came face to face with. He came face to face with darkness — and this is his diagnosis:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” 

The darkness in the world mirrors the darkness in our hearts — and until we start talking about heart change as Christians, in our public response to darkness, we’re just the blind leading the blind. We might sound good and compassionate as we do it — as we point out systemic and individual darkness, and hold out the ideal of a pure ‘light’ heart that can be achieved by any or all of us if we just work hard enough — but who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? The thing about this dynamic, Biblically, is that the divide between good and evil isn’t 50-50 for every person all the time, the more we cultivate one or the other the bigger it is. In fact, in Romans 7, Paul suggests that without the Spirit, the darkness wins most of the time even as we still know what good is, and still want to do it… Let’s call the ‘good’ part in the heart the product of us being created in the image of God and the evil the product of our pursuit of things other than God (our idols, or our self-gratification). When we talk about acts of evil we’re talking about people whose hearts have been shaped in such a way that their deeds reflect their hearts, and the heart-destruction required to fix that evil becomes closer and closer to the eradication of the self. Who wants to do that?

There are plenty of examples of this sort of human solution offered to what is truly a spiritual crisis. But at the moment I’m fixated by how our leading public Christian voices (in the political realm) are both falling into the same trap — offering secular solutions to spiritual problems; and specifically, not offering the work, victory, and example of Jesus as the basis for a way to bring light into darkness. Often we’re offering the natural fruit of Christianity as the solution without the root, or the tree. We want wolves to behave like sheep without offering them the good shepherd — and we want to deal with the existence of wolves without following the example of Jesus the shepherd who used his strength to stand between Satan, the prince of darkness — the father of wolves, and the sheep. This is true of both the Australian Christian Lobby on the right and its oddly mirrored alternative on the left, Common Grace (though at least their name explicitly limits their field to a particular application of an understanding of God’s relationship to nature).

The Gospel of John calls Jesus the light of the world. John witnessed a different sort of darkness to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the crucifixion of God’s son — the light and life of the world — by people who should’ve welcomed him with open arms. A world of wolves desperate to cling to power and to stay in the darkness. Here’s John’s record of Jesus’ version of Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. — John 3:19-21

If Jesus is right about the human heart — and what is required to change it — then our social media activism, or those times that we restrict ourselves to merely human arguments based on merely human accounts of the problem won’t fix anything or anybody. His solution to our dark human hearts is new hearts — not just renovated hearts but being ‘born from above’.

There’s hints of the prophet Ezekiel in Jesus’ words in John. Ezekiel has a similar diagnosis of what drives wolf-like behaviour to Jesus (and Solzhenitsyn). It’s a problem of the heart — a problem that leads to a system set up to propagate predatory behaviour (sound familiar?). Princes, priests, and prophets colluding to destroy those they’re meant to protect, and to deny justice.

There is a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion tearing its prey; they devour people, take treasures and precious things and make many widows within her. Her priests do violence to my law and profane my holy things; they do not distinguish between the holy and the common; they teach that there is no difference between the unclean and the clean; and they shut their eyes to the keeping of my Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. Her prophets whitewash these deeds for them by false visions and lying divinations. They say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says’—when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice. — Ezekiel 22:25-29

And what’s the solution Ezekiel offered to this problem? To take up arms? To tell people to stop and change. To create a new human system without addressing the heart? No. Where Ezekiel lands after this diagnosis is what Jesus says is required to enter his kingdom — changed hearts.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. — Ezekiel 36:26-27

Jesus is the solution to the darkness in our world — and we, the church, his kingdom, are to model that solution as the light shining into the darkness. There are all sorts of ways we can bring light through human structures as we participate and are present in them — but unless there’s heart change involved we’re just asking people to destroy a piece of their own heart rather than offering a heart changed by God, by his spirit. It won’t work.

John’s account of Jesus’ use of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ is fascinating. It develops through the Gospel, right from the prologue. He consistently introduces little narratives and interactions with people by orienting us as to whether it’s light or dark — Nicodemus comes to him in the cover of night, the woman at the well meets him at mid day (exposed by daylight), the disciples are terrified in the boat in the dark when he walks on water, the women come to the tomb ‘while it was still dark’… Darkness is bad. But on the other hand Jesus says:

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” — John 8:12

And his invitation is to walk with him and so become children of light. To receive the Spirit and be born again as children of the light.

“You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going. Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.” — John 12:35-36

At that point he was predicting his death, but also forecasting his resurrection. When John then writes to the church after the resurrection he keeps going with the ‘light’ theme — and he suggests that as a result of the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit darkness’ days are numbered.

Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. — 1 John 2:8

Matthew’s Gospel also famously has Jesus saying some stuff about light in the Sermon On The Mount.

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” — Matthew 5:14-16

The public perception of the institutional church in Australia isn’t this — it’s that we’re part of the darkness. But our own view of the world as we read the papers, and perhaps experience the fruits of this perception, seems to be that darkness is winning. We’re an anxious system perpetuating an anxious presence in the world. When we could be so much more.

We could be people who face up to the reality that the wolf doesn’t just lurk outside the door — but inside all of us.

We could be people who aren’t naive about the human condition and what it takes to protect sheep from wolves — or change wolves to sheep.

We could be people who know that the change required for all of us doesn’t simply come from rediscovering the image of God within us, or having it ‘educated’ into dominance, so that we’re restrained from evil just by common grace (which is better by far than unfettered evil), but from being re-created in the image of Jesus.

We could recognise that the doctrine of common grace means that our society, apart from us, might find some solutions to restrain the darkness of the human heart, but we Christians have the solution, the light of the world. And to not explicitly offer that is to do less than love our neighbours. It’s to give a rock when they ask for bread.

The line between darkness and light — evil and goodness — cuts through every human heart, and defeating evil requires our death and rebirth. Any other solution — individual or systemic — is a bandaid on the heart.

We could be people who believe the teaching of Jesus and so follow the example of Jesus offering our lives, our selves, to bring light to the world confident that even when darkness surrounds us, or takes us, light wins.

We could rebuild the trust people have in Christians and the church by being an institution that focuses on the needs of others — bringing light to the world, rather than self protection — hiding in darkness.

This requires a different sort of leadership and emphasis on different sorts of solutions — solutions that grapple with the heart of the problem and the Spiritual realities at play.

I don’t know how to make the darkness safe for any woman who wants to walk alone at night. But I do know light beats darkness — metaphorically and in actuality. Darkness is the absence of light, it’s not a thing in itself.

I don’t think we can change ‘wolves’ — or deal with the evil in the heart of humans — simply by tackling the culture, system, or environment around us. The dynamic between the culture around a person and the orientation of their heart and imagination is complicated and circular (our behaviours create cultures which reinforce and normalise behaviours which shape our hearts which drive behaviours which create cultures…) — but the Bible is pretty keen to suggest that our actions in the world are a product of our heart, and that a new heart comes from God, not just from education programs.

Or let me put it another way… cultural change driven outside the re-creating work of God on the hearts of people will not replace darkness with light but darkness with different darkness. Cultural change is important — and the church itself, the kingdom of God in this world, is a ‘culture’ that brings change to those within it in the way light changes darkness… and the job of this kingdom is, as Jesus says in Matthew 5, shine beyond itself as ‘the light of the world’ (which is why it’s so important the church sorts out its culture internally on abuse and domestic violence before we can be trusted to shine into the world). If we’re offering a solution to darkness that is not the kingdom of God then we are not really offering a solution at all.

The push for cultural change from many women is one that men should heed (here’s a good place to start — an uncomfortable (deliberately) read for men); but as Christians we have something more to say about the human condition and what solutions look like — and something more to do if we’re going to be a light in the dark world.

It’s not enough just to listen to and champion the voices of women on areas of cultural change we need — if we were going to be the sort of leaders in our community who follow the example of the good shepherd then we’d find ways to position ourselves between wolves and sheep to keep the night safe.

We’d be on watch. We’d walk beside people in the shadows. We’d set up services like Uber where we offer safe passage home — and we’d do it in ways that ensured the service operated above reproach (Uber can’t claim that). We’d open our churches and our homes as safe houses and sanctuaries— beacons of light in a dark world.

We’d call out darkness for what it is in little moments, not just big ones… and more than that — we’d point people to where light really is found (not just offer merely human solutions to a spiritual problem).

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. — John 1:4-5

The _____ captivity of the church

Sometimes I think we Christians after Christendom think we’re William Wallace. That we’re in front of a shield wall firing people up for the battle we face… when, actually, we’re already not just prisoners of the enemy, but serving the empire we think we’re standing against. We talk about the world now being ‘Babylon’ and don’t always confront how much Babylon already infects our hearts. Here’s a piece, in part, inspired by Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity Of The Church

“Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live — at least a while. And, dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” — William Wallace in Braveheart

Freedom.

Religious freedom.

Freedom of speech.

It seems we Christians are a bit obsessed with questions of freedom at the moment. We’re positioning ourselves like an army of Scots ready to fight to maintain our independence from the empire. We’ve got thought leaders who are bracing us for impact, telling us that we’re in the middle of a battle that will decide our future; the battle for our freedom. These freedoms. Hard won freedoms. Freedom from the tyranny of Babylon. Freedom from bending the knee to Caesar and his rainbow sash.

The problem is we talk about religious freedom and how important it is, while we the church are captives in Babylon; and if we think freedom looks like Babylon-lite we’re in big trouble. If we think freedom is simply the ability to maintain a distinct sexual ethic we don’t realise just how much we’ve already been captivated by a world that is an entirely different kingdom to the one we live for if we follow king Jesus. We’re so focused on sex, that we fail to realise that we, mostly, already belong to ‘Babylon’.

We’re captives.

We’re political captives.

We’re economic captives.

We’re captivated by a counter-Gospel. We’re narrative captives, enthralled by Babylon and its shiny promises and explanations about who we are, and what we’re for; blinkered so that we don’t often look beyond our defaults; the status quo of our immediate context and culture.

We’re captivated in our hearts, and our minds, in our desires and in our imaginations.

But still. We picture ourselves as William Wallace, just without the face paint (and so we end up looking a whole lot like Mel Gibson, it’s ok to be a raving lunatic if you’re in character, elsewise, not so much).

We think our freedom is at stake; that it is under attack.

Apparently our real enemies; the ones who will decide our fate, are those who’ve risen up from the margins of the empire who now threaten to take control of everything, or at least to wield disproportionate influence as they capitalise on our collective guilt and shame at how our culture has treated those who are different. We don’t feel guilt, or shame, not in any way that manifests itself in sitting down at the table to make reparations and to reconcile, anyway. We might have changed some of our practices so we don’t do conversion therapy any more or kick out our same sex attracted children (hopefully); we celebrate celibacy for those in our community who are same sex attracted, sure, but we’re not particularly on the front foot explaining to same sex attracted folk outside our community how Jesus is the best possible news for them, and better than any desire for earthly things, including sex, we’re not particularly interested in how life in a contested, pluralist world might be safe for them. It’s not just Christians, or the last vestige of christendom/Old Testament morality that cause bullying, or discrimination, or the world to be unsafe for those who statistically, are not normal. It’s the human heart. It’s the beastly part of the human heart. We’re like chicks, who turn our beaks on the little bird in the clutch who is different, and peck at them until we feel secure, and they are broken beyond recognition.

Well. Now these marginalised folks are at the head of an army; they’ve rounded up the forces of Babylon, both the politicians, and the market forces — corporations — and they’ve brought that army to our shield wall.

“They may take our lives… we might say, but they’ll never take our freedom.” 

We get these bracing call to arms type blog posts on all the big Christian platforms. We get books trying to chart a strategy for the church going forward in a hostile world where our freedom is under threat.

Freedom.

Religious freedom. That’s our shtick; and partly because we so value it for ourselves, it’s one of those things, those common goods, that we want to fight for for everyone else. We tend to see ourselves as the warriors fighting the good fight for freedom on the frontline. William Wallace in a battle raging against the ‘secular’  empire. And by secular this is the sort of hard secularism that sees no place for worship, rather than secularism as ‘no religion is favoured’ pluralistic secularism.

“They may take our lives… we might say, but they’ll never take our freedom.” 

Only we can’t really say that. Or rather, we can’t really say that and mean it. Because our freedom is already gone. We’re already captives. When it comes to Babylon, they’re not at the gate banging on the doors using the new sexual revolution to break down the walls. We’re already captives, and have been for a long time. This stuff on sexual difference is just, perhaps, the last defence to fall before we capitulate, bend the knee to Caesar and kiss the ring. And that we don’t realise we’re already captives makes our resistance pretty pathetic and futile.

We think we’re fighting the good fight here on same sex marriage and safe schools. But the truth is, we’re already captives to Babylon in so many ways that this resistance is pathetic, and unless it leads us to seek freedom in a whole bunch of other areas where ‘Babylon’ has infiltrated, we’re in a bit of trouble.

But the other truth is that Babylon in the Bible isn’t just judgment from God (as we’ll see below); it’s opportunity. It’s an opportunity to reach people outside Israel, and outside the church. Babylon is our mission field, and always has been. And the thing that keeps us focused on the main thing — joining with God in bringing dead people to life through the Gospel — is realising that we’re in Babylon, not Israel, that our neighbours are facing death for rejecting God, and that we’ll be part of God inviting them out of Babylon into a new kind of citizenship.

If we really want to resist Babylon in order to be part of winsomely calling people from death to life, there’s a whole lot of stuff we might need to free ourselves from first. We have to figure out how we’re distinct from Babylon (or should be) in order to reach Babylon with the Gospel (oh, and we need to remember that because we’re not Jews, we’re actually converts from Babylon, Babylonians who’ve decided to follow a different king, that our job isn’t first to identify with Israel and its story, but to appreciate that because of the one faithful exile, Jesus, we are brought home to God and made citizens of something new); we also need to be clear about what ‘Babylon’ means as a metaphor in a Biblical sense (beyond the exile).

There is a sense that God’s people being scattered into Babylon is both vital for his mission to see his image bearers spread over the face of the earth (Genesis 1), and judgment for failing to do the job of being his image bearers in the world; a case of God achieving his purposes through judgment. There’s also a sense in which exile into Babylon is judgment giving people a taste of what it seems they desire — to not live like his people; it’s a purifying thing. This is where his judgment in response to the impulse at Babel — where a bunch of people didn’t scatter, but instead stayed together to build a big, central, tower — probably an ancient ‘ziggurat’ (a staircase into the heavens to make themselves gods) — fits in with his plans for the world. These people rejected his call to go into the world, they built a tower for their own name to make themselves gods ascending to the heavens, and were scattered as a result. It’s this moment, in the Biblical narrative, that creates nations like Babylon, and there’s some pretty interesting historical ties between Babel and Babylon, so that in the first century, the historian, Josephus, says:

“The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion”

The Babylonian captivity of Israel

When Israel was carted off into exile in Babylon the first time around, what got them there, what got them in trouble, was they were already Babylonian at heart before the armies arrived. They were captivated by Babylon before they were captives in Babylon.

They’d already rejected God, and what should have been their distinctives as his people, and they’d turned to idols instead.

They’d signed up with their hearts, and exile was a case of them becoming what they loved. In the book of Ezekiel we get an explanation read by people in Exile about why they’re in exile in the form of the words of the prophet who warned them what was coming.

There’s this scene where a group of Israel’s leaders rock up to Ezekiel to ask him what God says, and it turns out they’re in trouble because they’ve ‘set up idols in their hearts’ — abominations one might say… it turns out they’ve already deserted God. They’re already captives in this sense, even if the physical takeover is not yet complete (though it is for the first readers of Ezekiel)…

 When any of the Israelites set up idols in their hearts and put a wicked stumbling block before their faces and then go to a prophet, I the Lord will answer them myself in keeping with their great idolatry. I will do this to recapture the hearts of the people of Israel, who have all deserted me for their idols.’ — Ezekiel 14:4-5

The heart reality, the ‘Babylonian captivity’, is going to become the real deal though.

“Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: ‘Because you people have brought to mind your guilt by your open rebellion, revealing your sins in all that you do—because you have done this, you will be taken captive.

“‘You profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! The crown will not be restored until he to whom it rightfully belongs shall come; to him I will give it.’ — Ezekiel 21:24-27

Exile is a judgment from God on those whose hearts have already gone from him; those who are already captives. The end of this Babylonian exile, according to Ezekiel, is the restoration of the crown to a rightful king of Israel. That’s Jesus. This restoration would also include a restoration of the heart, and a return from exile.

 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.” — Ezekiel 36:25-28

The first Babylonian captivity of the Church

The ‘Babylon’ of Revelation is, first, Rome. It’s the Babylon Israel are still enthralled by; to the extent that when Jesus came, they joined the Romans in executing him. Israel is still in exile, they don’t have new hearts, and they haven’t recognised God’s king. They’re part of this Babylonian kingdom. It’s a picture of a beastly kingdom that has set itself up in total opposition to the kingdom of God. The kingdom we see launched by the death and resurrection of King Jesus. It’s a kingdom whose values are both the opposite of Jesus’ values, and that are so totalising, coherent, and integrated, that once you let just one bit creep into your heart, it’s a trojan horse that lowers your ability to fight the rest. When John starts describing ‘Babylon’ in Revelation he paints this vivid picture of a powerful and beautiful woman who rides a beast, and seductively takes people away from God:

The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery:

Babylon the great

the mother of prostitutes

and of the abominations of the earth.

I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus. — Revelation 17:4-6

This isn’t some mystery where we need a decoder ring, or to get in touch with our inner Nostradamus…

“The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.” — Revelation 17:18

For John, in his day, this is a description of Rome. Rome who loomed large as the totalising persecutor of Christians, but also as a compelling, integrated and coherent picture of civilisation; where order was kept and maintained and the seduction of beauty and power was never far away from the stick of its military. The carrot and stick of Rome were the threat to Christians aiming to maintain their distinction as citizens of heaven who bow the knee to Jesus, not Caesar, so we have a little exchange between governor Pliny and Emperor Trajan where Pliny is trying to figure out what to do with the Christians, and Trajan says “if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it — that is, by worshiping our gods — even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance.” And this lure, which caught Israel, also threatens the church — when John opens Revelation by directly speaking to the churches who first read this apocalyptic (revealing) text; that showed the real lay of the land, he warns the churches ‘not to forsake their first love’, not to be lured by Jezebels and the promises of false worship, not to become ‘lukewarm’ because of their own economic might within the empire… people in the church are in danger of forsaking Jesus and ending up in judgment, in Babylon.Everyone is an exile — you’re just either exiled from God, or from the beastly Babylon. Whatever happens their lives are lived in the physical reality of Babylon. They’re not home. And they’re treated like exiles too, by the world. The church is facing persecution for not bending the knee to Caesar.

Escaping persecution was so simple. You just had to sign up, totally, to the empire. To give in to Rome; to the empire; to Babylon; was to become an abomination; to become “children of the mother of the abominations of the earth.” Now this is pretty strong language, and for a long time the church has got itself in a spot of bother by using versions of the Bible that seem to single out sexual sin as the only sort of ‘abomination’ and abomination as a particularly insidious different type of sin. All sin is fundamentally an abomination to God. Stuff we might give a hall pass to out there in the public square — like greed — but also stuff we’re thoroughly conscripted into and captivated by as Christians — like lust, gluttony, and, umm, greed.

An ‘abomination’ was something put in the place reserved for God — in the Temple, at the altar, but also, fundamentally, in our hearts. An abomination is anything you replace God with. It’s the thing that turns us, as it conscripts us and deforms our behaviours (and so the image we bear in the world), in such a way that we become more like Frankenstein than human. We become vaguely human, in terms of what God’s kingdom looks like. The whole Roman enterprise — though much of it looked beautiful, ordered, and admirable — was built on an abominable rejection of God as God and Jesus as king.

When the Maccabees revolted against the Seleucid Empire (a hellenic kingdom), they were motivated, in part, by that empire fulfilling what they thought were Daniel’s prophecies about the abomination that causes desolation. It was all about God’s temple, and the altar, and the purity of whole-hearted worship that Israel was able to offer to God. So 1 Maccabees describes this abominable moment:

Now on the fifteenth day of [the month] Chislev, in the one hundred forty-fifth year, they erected a desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering. They also built altars in the surrounding towns of Judah — 1 Maccabees 1:54

This sacrilege is later described as an abomination.

… that they had torn down the abomination that he had erected on the altar in Jerusalem; and that they had surrounded the sanctuary with high walls as before, and also Beth-zur, his town. — 1 Maccabees 6:7 

The Romans, when they destroy Jerusalem in 70AD, build a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple. And some believe this is what the ultimate abomination Rome is going to carry out looks like. It’s abominable, no doubt.

But I think the ultimate abomination was what Rome — and ‘captive’ Israel — did to God’s ultimate temple. They executed him; utterly rejecting his rule; holding up a mirror to what the beastly kingdom looks like against the face of God’s king. The great irony is that this is where king Jesus is enthroned and his kingdom begins — the kingdom that would ultimately be the undoing of Roman rule and the downfall of the Caesars (if you take the long term view, and of course, the eternal view). We repeat the abomination that causes desolation whenever we put anything but God in the place of supremacy in our hearts — we were made to bear the image of God; to be walking ‘temples’ for whatever it is we worship (the things we love and serve).

The church’s job, according to Revelation, is to bear faithful witness in Babylon as people distinct from Babylon because we bend the knee to a different king — the king described in Revelation 1 who brings the kingdom described in Revelation 21-22, after Babylon is destroyed. In the meantime we’re to be faithful witnesses (see the letters to the churches at the start of Revelation), who call Babylon to repent; who speak truth to power; even to the point of sharing in Babylon’s treatment of our king. Or, as Revelation 11 puts it, when talking about the faithful ‘lampstands’ (which is what the churches are depicted at in the start of the book):

Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them. Their bodies will lie in the public square of the great city—which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt—where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days some from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.

But after the three and a half days the breath of life from God entered them,and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here.” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on. — Revelation 11:7-12

Avoiding ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in the early church

Avoiding Babylonian Captivity after Jesus is a matter of right worship; it’s a matter of being part of the return from exile promised in Ezekiel (and because we’re not Jews, most of us, a return from the exile where we’re humanity was kicked out of Eden). It’s a matter of participation in God’s kingdom, the church, following his king, Jesus, and having him rule our hearts via the Spirit; a removing of the ‘abomination’ of false gods that rule our hearts.

The point is — it’s not sexual sin per say that is the ‘abomination’ (it’s a form of it), it’s idolatry. It’s the participation in worship of things other than God, through undifferentiated participation in kingdoms that are not God’s. It’s captivity. And the thing about Babylon, ‘the mother of abominations’ is that it’s not just sex that captivates us and so makes us captive; it’s not just the ‘sexual revolution’ that aims to restrict our freedom… there’s politics (power), and economics (money), and philosophy/wisdom (education and a vision of the good life) in the mix too.

Early Christians, knowing what was at stake, were more William Wallace like in their ability to avoid this sort of captivity. They refused. They maintained a distinction that included sexual fidelity, and an approach to marriage that was counter cultural in the Roman world, but it included much more than this. Here’s a passage from a second century document called the Letter to Diognetus. It’s about how the Christians avoid being caught up in the trappings of Babylon.

Instead, they inhabit both Greek and barbarian cities, however things have fallen to each of them. And it is while following the customs of the natives in clothing, food, and the rest of ordinary life that they display to us their wonderful and admittedly striking way of life.

They live in their own countries, but they do so as those who are just passing through. As citizens they participate in everything with others, yet they endure everything as if they were foreigners. Every foreign land is like their homeland to them, and every land of their birth is like a land of strangers.

They marry, like everyone else, and they have children, but they do not destroy their offspring.

They share a common table, but not a common bed.

They exist in the flesh, but they do not live by the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, all the while surpassing the laws by their lives.

They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned. They are put to death and restored to life.

They are poor, yet make many rich. They lack everything, yet they overflow in everything.

They are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor they are glorified; they are spoken ill of and yet are justified; they are reviled but bless; they are insulted and repay the insult with honor; they do good, yet are punished as evildoers; when punished, they rejoice as if raised from the dead.

The writer of this letter says some other stuff too, including this passage on the stupidity of the idolatry of ‘Babylon’ from earlier in the piece…

“Are they not all deaf? Are they not all blind? Are they not without life? Are they not destitute of feeling? Are they not incapable of motion? Are they not all liable to rot? Are they not all perishable?

You call these things gods! You serve them! You worship them! And you become exactly like them.

It’s for this reason you hate the Christians, because they do not consider these to be gods.”

This is what it looks like to really fight for freedom — to be poor and make many rich, to be lowly, dishonoured, without power, marginalised, but to bless, honour, and do good. To be sexually distinct, to share a common table, to be living a different story because we follow a different king.

Getting out of Babylon now (or getting Babylon out of the church)

I look at how we play politics as the church and feel like there’s not a huge amount of difference to how politics get played by other ‘religious’ groups. The politics of power, of zero sum games where it’s our way or nothing. The politics of picking the people who best represent our views, rather than the people most qualified for the job. We try to play politics with everyone else, we’re just not very good at it (bizarrely, perhaps, because other people have cottoned on quicker that we’re more shaped by our loves than by ‘knowing the facts’, and so they tell better stories).

I look at how I approach money, and career, and security, and experience, and toys, and I think that there’s not much difference in my approach to consuming and my pursuit of luxury, than anyone else in my life (except perhaps that I earn slightly less because of career choices, but this just means I crave slightly more in an unrequited way).

It’s not just about sexual difference, this Babylon thing — though that is important, and our marriages should be rich testimonies to the love of Jesus, and we should love and nurture our kids. And we should fight the temptation to sexual immorality and the corrupting of our imaginations by a ‘sexular society’… but there has to be much more than that in our kit bag.

If we want to be people who aren’t captives, people who live as though ‘every land is like a homeland’ and a ‘land of strangers’ we need to be people who are so caught up in the vision of a kingdom greater than Babylon and a sense of certainty that our future is greater than the present, and the past. That the picture of life in Revelation 21-22 doesn’t just surpass Babylon, or Rome, but Eden.

This will mean a totally different approach to politics that is not wedded to a sort of conservatism where we’re trying to restore paradise lost (and end up building Rome)but a progressivism that shoots for the kingdom of heaven — the kingdom we are citizens of even now.

This will mean, in some corners of the world, divorcing ourselves from worldly political establishments (and not shooting for a wedding with any particular political party here in Australia).

This will mean we don’t seek to be at the centre of the empire culturally, or politically, or economically — to be at the centre would require the ’empire’ being at the centre of our hearts — an ‘abomination’ and a form of captivity… like Spiritual Stockholm Syndrome. We won’t seek to be at the centre, but nor will we seek to be at the margins to the extent that we don’t participate in life with our neighbours. But we do need to be close enough to those at the margins to bless the people there, hear the people there, and be champions for the bringing about of change for the benefit of those Babylon treads on. Our distinctives on these fronts are to be prophetic and the noticeable and part of our appeal (think Daniel in Babylon).

This will mean listening to voices from the global church, from marginalised communities (from people who aren’t white blokes with multiple university degrees).

This will mean a totally different approach to economics. When John describes the downfall of Babylon he describes it with reference to its material prosperity — its luxury — and in terms of the downfall of a worldly economy built on the powerful controlling the goods of this world for their own benefit (and at the expense of other people — like those sold as slaves (Revelation 18:11-13) — and of the world itself which John says is “corrupted by her adulteries” (Revelation 19:2-3). The Babylon lost when God judges is not just built on sexual excess (though that is part of the picture), but on economic and political excess — a beastly and abominable approach to God’s world created by the worship of these things in the place of God. This sort of idol worship is totalising

This will mean a different approach to arts, and culture, and storytelling. The appeal of Babylon, in any form, rests in its counter-gospel and the way its gods are dressed up as appealing counterfeits to the real God. It’s no coincidence that even the word Gospel is ‘Babylonian’ (in the Roman sense); the proclamation of the marvellous victories of king Caesar. We need to be people who proclaim a different king in ways that call people to worship the one who ends our exile from God; the one who brings us out of captivity.

This will mean a different approach to personhood, discipleship, and education, that doesn’t see us just as solitary brains to be educated towards sanctification, but worshippers whose worship is cultivated in the ‘heart’, by practices, by stories, and in community where we follow our king by imitating him together, and show and reinforce our distinctive ‘story’ together.

This will mean a different approach to being the church. One that is not defensive or inwards looking, but that cultivates hearts that in looking to the king, and his way of life, joyfully and hopefully look to the lost sheep in our world; those crushed by worldly kingdoms, and offer them good news. Our practices and disciplines and the rhythms of our life together should, like the church from the Letter to Diognetus, be aimed at ‘making many rich’…  There are plenty of people at the margins of our society where the gospels of our ‘Babylons’ are exclusionary. Get an education; get a job; buy a house; collect experiences; be ‘free’… there are people for whom this vision of the good life is a millstone pulling them into depths of despair, not a picture of freedom at all. These are the people the freedom of the Gospel is for, and yet we spend our time hand wringing because the ‘elites’ don’t like us.

Babylon is a totalising system that aims for all of us — our desires, imaginations, beliefs, belonging, and actions… much as the Kingdom of God is a totalising system in a totally counter-Babylon, counter-Rome, way. These are where some of my misgivings about Christendom as an enterprise historically are located… we like to think the church civilised the barbarian empire… and in many ways we did… but we’re not so aware of the ways that this also allowed the empire to barbarianise the Church… and this was part of what Luther was getting at, in the Reformation he launched of the ‘Roman Church’ in a text like The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. This is the scale of the challenges we’re facing as the church now, and it might not be the Benedict Option that gets us to where we need to be, but we don’t really have the option of not changing if we’re already captivated by the trinkets and baubles of Babylon and just waiting for the last little bit of resistance to crumble while we fight for ‘religious freedom’… we need to fight for religious freedom, certainly, but more than that we need to fight to be free from abominable religions that pull our hearts from God.

When Luther described his task of pulling the church out of what he perceived to be a Babylonian captivity, he recognised how hard this would be because the captivity was so entrenched by the traditions of the church…

“I am entering on an arduous task, and it may perhaps be impossible to uproot an abuse which, strengthened by the practice of so many ages, and approved by universal consent, has fixed itself so firmly among us, that the greater part of the books which have influence at the present day must needs be done away with, and almost the entire aspect of the churches be changed, and a totally different kind of ceremonies be brought in, or rather, brought back. But my Christ lives, and we must take heed to the word of God with greater care, than to all the intellects of men and angels. I will perform my part, will bring forth the subject into the light, and will impart the truth freely and ungrudgingly as I have received it.” — Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

Like many things, Luther saw the corruption of the way church was happening — removed from truths of the Gospel — as the work of Satan, work achieved through idolatry (any worship without Jesus); he says where we lose our centre — faith in Christ — we end up in judgment,  “removed from our own land, as into bondage at Babylon, and all that was dear to us has been taken from us.”

In this our misery Satan so works among us that, while he has left nothing of the mass to the Church, he yet takes care that every corner of the earth shall be full of masses, that is, of abuses and mockeries of the testament of God; and that the world shall be more and more heavily loaded with the gravest sins of idolatry, to increase its greater damnation. For what more grievous sin of idolatry can there be, than to abuse the promises of God by our perverse notions, and either neglect or extinguish all faith in them. — Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

We need to be prepared to change; we, the church, need to acknowledge where we are captives, and we need to be prepared to reform. It’s a big deal, and it’s about much more than what goes on in our bedrooms.

“But you will say: “What? will you ever overthrow the practices and opinions which, for so many centuries, have rooted themselves in all the churches and monasteries; and all that superstructure of anniversaries, suffrages, applications, and communications, which they have established upon the mass, and from which they have drawn the amplest revenues?” I reply: It is this which has compelled me to write concerning the bondage of the Church. For the venerable testament of God has been brought into a profane servitude to gain, through the opinions and traditions of impious men, who have passed over the Word of God, and have set before us the imaginations of their own hearts, and thus have led the world astray. What have I to do with the number or the greatness of those who are in error?”

Is X sinful? Some thoughts on why the answer to this question is almost always yes (and what to do about it)

Is it possible that Christians spend far too much time trying to decide whether a particular action or thought is sinful, and not enough time thinking about what sin really is, or what goodness really looks like as an alternative? We’re worried about our hands and eyes, where perhaps we should be more worried about our hearts. Is it possible that we’re obsessively worried about sin, when perhaps we should be excited and thankful that despite our inability not to sin, God forgives us and changes our hearts through Jesus, and invites us to follow his example. Is it possible this worry comes through in the way we present the ‘good’ news of the Gospel?

isxsinful

Sin and defining ‘good’

In the beginning, God looked at the stuff he made in this universe and declared it ‘good’ — but what does ‘good’ mean?

I’ve always injected a bunch of my own understandings of the word ‘good’ into the first chapter of the Bible, which typically revolve around my fairly modern assumption that goodness is a sort of material quality, perhaps even an aesthetic quality. God made a good world like IKEA does not make a good table. God made a good world like an artisan specialty coffee roaster makes a good flat white. It’s good because of what it is, and how I experience it.

But what if ‘good’ means something other than that the universe was, as declared by God, materially excellent? John Walton is a guy whose looked at what the ancient world understood the existence of a thing (the nature of ‘being’ — the fancy word is ‘ontology’). He suggests that if you were trying to define something in the ancient world, the world in which Genesis was composed, you would define a thing in terms of its function, and a declaration by someone who made something that this thing was ‘good’ would be caught up with it being able to perform a function. When God declares the world he makes ‘good’ he is declaring it good for the purpose for which he made it. Walton thinks that Genesis invites us to understand the world being created as God’s cosmic temple, with Eden functioning as the sanctuary in the Temple, and us humans functioning as God’s living images in that temple. The creation of the Temple later in the Old Testament has huge echoes of this creation week, this isn’t a controversial proposal, but it does significantly alter the way we have to read the early chapters of the Bible. Walton’s proposal is one I spent a fair bit of time interacting with in my thesis, and one that I am convinced by (and convinced has massive implications for what it means to function as God’s image bearers, or what being made in God’s image actually means). It’s interesting because our first response as modern readers is to, like I always have, read Genesis as answering ‘material’ questions about the universe, when in fact we should be answering ‘functional’ questions about the universe if we want to treat the text as a product of its world, answering questions its earliest readers were asking (as well as answering questions we should be asking).

When we’re repeatedly told that “God saw that it was good” in Genesis 1 we’re being told that the world God makes is meeting the function he has designed for it. When God makes us humans he gives us a vocation — described in Genesis 1 — which outlines the function of humanity (our function is also caught up in the word used for image, and how that word was understood, and in the description of how he forms and places Adam in Genesis 2). We have a good job to do, ruling God’s good world, according to its inbuilt purposes, for and like God. Presumably being fruitful and multiplying, and extending God’s presence as his image bearers also meant extending the garden sanctuary across the whole world. What’s important here is that the nature of what it means to be human — at least in the Genesis 1 sense — involves a created function or purpose. Our own goodness is a product of whether or not we achieve that purpose.

If you had to answer the question “what is sin?” from the first two chapters of the Bible it would be a failure to be ‘good’ in the sense of failing in this divinely appointed vocation. A failure to bear God’s image and represent him. In Genesis 2 we see Adam bearing God’s image by naming the animals (just as God has named the things that he made). All is good in the world. Except that Adam is alone.

The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

This aloneness doesn’t fit with the Genesis 1 picture of ‘goodness’ — or the function God envisages for humanity. In Genesis 1 God describes humanity’s image bearing capacity, our ability to represent the loving triune God, and ability to be fruitful and multiply caught up in us being made male and female. Not alone. So this ‘not goodness’ is fixed in Genesis 2 when Eve is introduced. Eve is also introduced in the narrative because none of the animals is suitable for the function God’s purposes require. The declaration ‘not good’ is a declaration that God’s created purpose is not being met. So God fixes things.

Proposition 1: God defines what ‘good’ is.

Then we break them. If part of God’s purposes for the world was to defeat evil — especially evil as it is embodied in Genesis 3 by the serpent — by creating and spreading his temple and presence in the world through his image bearing people then things seem to go very wrong in terms of God’s purposes in Genesis 3. Genesis 3 is where we get our first picture of sin. Our first sense of how to answer the question ‘is X sinful’ — but Genesis 3 also massively changes the playing field for answering that question because it massively changes us. Presumably prior to Genesis 3 everything about who we are as people is aligned with God’s function — our hearts, our desires, our thoughts, our actions — after this point, it seems none of those things line up with the idea of being fruitful and multiplying God’s presence as we live out his purposes. At least according to the way the story of the Bible works, from this point on, we all live out our own purposes. Our hearts and desires become evil, oriented to ourselves and to things other than God.

So if ‘goodness’ is about God’s purposes being met by the things he has made, and ‘not goodness’ is a frustration of those purposes, then what is at the heart of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3? I think there are actually a bunch of things they do wrong in Genesis 3, but the fundamental ‘wrongness’ is actually a failure to live as image bearers of God when push comes to shove. When the serpent enters the scene what he tempts them with, and what they display, is a life where its their own purposes that define ‘good’… and this, is sin.

Proposition 2. God defines what good is, sin is when we come up with our own definition of good, apart from God.

The classic answer to the question of ‘sin’ in Genesis 3 is to identify the specific act of transgression. Adam and Eve disobey God’s clear instruction and eat the bad fruit. And that’s certainly a sin. But sin is more than simply a disobedient act. I think we get into massive problems as the church — and massively confuse people about what sin is — if we run around looking for equivalent acts of transgression, rather than talking about the hearts that produce those transgressions. Here’s something interesting in Genesis 3.

Notice here, in the same words we’ve read already in the first two chapters of Genesis, it’s now Eve deciding what “good” is, and its the opposite of what God tells Adam to do in order to be meet his purposes.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Adam and Eve desired what the Serpent promised — that they would be like God (a thing they already had). I reckon they’ve failed to ‘guard and keep’ the garden, the literal instructions God gives Adam in Genesis 2:15, simply by letting the Serpent in. I think they’ve given the Serpent’s lies more weight than God’s truths, and before they eat the fruit — which is where most people think they sin — they’ve already replaced God with themselves and are living and making decisions according to their own purposes. This becomes evident in their actions, which are the fruit of their hearts. But its their hearts that are oriented away from God and his purposes first. And any action from a heart like this is an action of a person not living according to God’s purpose for humanity.

According to the rest of the story in the Bible, the result of this Genesis 3 failure is that we’re now genetically predisposed to be just like Adam and Eve. To not live like God, but to live for ourselves. Their mistake repeats in every human life, but now its because we’re born inheriting this pattern of life, and born outside the sanctuary of Eden, not image bearers formed in the garden-temple, but people with hearts ready to reflect whatever it is in God’s world that we want to replace God with. The image we’re made to carry, and God’s purposes for humanity, aren’t totally wiped out by our autonomy, that’d give us too much power. His common grace, and his love for people, means that there’s something written into our DNA that means we live and breath and love and do things that seem good, even though our motives always have something of our own interest or desire to autonomously define ‘good’ involved.

Proposition 3. Hearts that define their own ‘good’ define their own gods (and are defined by those gods).

Sin is any product of a disordered heart — a heart that sets its own agenda and produces actions according to that agenda — even if the things we do appear to be obedient to God’s purposes, even if we look like we’re living, breathing, images of the living, breathing, God, if our hearts are pointed towards our own ends as we do those acts, are those actions not infused with and given life by our disordered hearts? In the Old Testament these disordered hearts lead us to produce idols in Isaiah this is literal… and its a parody of Genesis 2 which leads to dead images (and ultimately dead people). Images and idols are conceptually linked through the Old Testament, because when God made us we were meant to be his living images that represented him in his temple — which is exactly what other religions did with their dead idols.

All who make idols are nothing,
    and the things they treasure are worthless.
Those who would speak up for them are blind;
    they are ignorant, to their own shame.

The carpenter measures with a line
    and makes an outline with a marker;
he roughs it out with chisels
    and marks it with compasses.
He shapes it in human form,
    human form in all its glory,
    that it may dwell in a shrine.

They know nothing, they understand nothing;
    their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see,
    and their minds closed so they cannot understand. 

Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him;
    he cannot save himself, or say,
    “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”— Isaiah 44:9, 13, 18, 20

The “they” here is a little ambiguous, and speaks both about the idol and the idol-maker. Psalm 115 makes this connection explicit.

But their idols are silver and gold,
    made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
    eyes, but cannot see…

Those who make them will be like them,
    and so will all who trust in them. — Psalm 115:4-5, 8

In Ezekiel we’re told idols aren’t just physical things a person carves, but the product of hearts turned away from God.

“‘When any of the Israelites or any foreigner residing in Israel separate themselves from me and set up idols in their hearts and put a wicked stumbling block before their faces and then go to a prophet to inquire of me, I the Lord will answer them myself. I will set my face against them and make them an example and a byword. I will remove them from my people. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” — Ezekiel 14:7-8

In Romans 1, Paul talks about the human condition in this way too, suggesting that our hearts are darkened because we turned away from God and worshipped the things he made instead.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. — Romans 1:20-21

In Paul’s logic in Romans all the things we might use to classify different Xs as ‘sin’ — the moral categories we might use to assess our actions— are said to flow from this fundamental cause. Us exchanging God for stuff God made.

Proposition 4. Hearts that are turned away from God are hearts that are darkened and turned towards death.

All our hearts do this. It’s why God promises to step in and replace hearts shaped by stone idols with living hearts shaped by his Spirit. Interestingly, the sort of process  described here (washing, restoring, and a sort of ‘re-breathing’ ritual) is what countries in the Ancient Near East did if their idols were taken during conquest by another nation to re-establish them in their temples. This is a promise to restore God’s people to their created purpose.

“‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. — Ezekiel 36:24-27

Focusing on symptoms rather than the disease

Just to be clear, I think the answer to the question “is X sinful” is always yes, in this world.

So long as our hearts are still tainted by sin.

Some acts that are clearly disobedient to God and his revealed standards are more clearly sinful than others, but any failure to live as image bearers of God, any failure to appropriately imitate God are failures to live up to the purpose we were made for, and that failure is caught up in the idea of autonomy, or living as though we’ve replaced God, where we live as though we get to make declarations about what the ‘good’ for a thing God has made is (including defining what we think is good, according to our own desires). These failures which definitely include those moments of direct disobedience to specific commands, but will also include disobedience to general catch-all commands like ‘be perfect,’ ‘be holy,’ and ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart.’ In Genesis 3, immediately after they’re caught, but before they receive God’s response  — the curse — the way Adam and Eve speak about their bad decision, and each other, shows that their hearts have already changed. They are acting out of self-interest, and not according to God’s purposes. They’ve defined their own good, and their judging each other accordingly.

Proposition 5. From this point on our hearts are a mixed bag. Humanity is still made in the image of God, but we keep remaking ourselves in our own image, and conforming ourselves into the image of our other gods.

A good summary of the Old Testament’s view of humanity (a fancy word here is anthropology) is that we’re a complicated mix of people made by God to do one thing, and we know what that thing looks like, but our hearts have been so frustrated by evil so that we do another. God is patient and good though, and merciful, so he keeps providing guidelines to help people try not to be evil (this just keeps looking like a to do list though). It’s unhelpful, then, to say that sin is simply not obeying the list of rules in the Old Testament law, as though its all about a moral code, when the defining principle for God’s people, following in the footsteps Adam and Eve should have walked in is to “be holy because I am holy”…

I think we get sin massively and unhelpfully wrong when we try to write a list of actions that are, or aren’t, sinful. Our actions indicate our hearts, and whose image we’re bearing, but its this question of whether or not our lives are aligned with God’s purposes that actually determines whether or not we’re sinning.

If all this is right, there are interesting implications in this for how we answer this question, especially in how we deal with the difference between experiencing the results of a broken and cursed world, and deliberate decisions to express our autonomy through actions that have no redeeming features. I can see how this could be heard as being massively pastorally unhelpful when people ask the question “is X a sin?” with an agenda or with a lack of self-insight (such that asking the question is sinful). Often this question has been used to demonise, rather than humanise, another person (and often the people answering the question have not been particularly ‘human’ in their responses). A couple of examples are when people ask “is same sex attraction a sin” or “is anxiety a sin”… it is massively unhelpful to say “yes” to these questions without the massive caveats that “all human sexuality as we experience it from autonomous broken hearts is sinful” and “all views of life in the world from autonomous hearts are sinful”… but I think its safe to say that the diagnosis of the human condition in the Old Testament is pretty consistently a diagnosis that our hearts are fundamentally oriented away from God’s purposes, and that orients us as people away from God’s function.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. — Genesis 6:5

Proposition 6. Sin is: taking a good thing (including people and abstract things like love) that God has given a good function and created to serve a good purpose and using it for some purpose other than the purpose God created for us, in line with our own hearts.

I’ll get to this below, but I think the human reality everywhere, in every heart, this side of the new creation God promises at the end of the Bible, is that every thing we do will involve some bit of our self-seeking, sinful hearts as a motivating factor.

Proposition 7. This is a universal problem and a description of the human condition for all people.

It becomes less and less a motivating factor as we’re conformed into the image of Jesus, but it’ll still be there. Everything we do on our own steam is sin. This is true for things we do for ourselves, and things we do for others. It’s true for things we do by ourselves, and things we do with others. Our collective actions will be a mix of the goodness God made in us raging war with the self-seeking (or not-God seeking) desires of our hearts.

Proposition 8. Because this is a universal problem, and we are affected, we can’t perform heart surgery on ourselves, neither can other sinners. 

 What wretches this means we are. Who can save us?

How Jesus both cures our sinful hearts, and shows us what healthy hearts looks like

Proposition 9. The answer to Paul’s question posed above — who can save us? — is Jesus.

I think, according to the above framework and the way Paul’s use of Adam seems consistent with it in Romans, that Paul’s description of human thought and life in Romans 7 is about the dilemma we experience as people made in God’s image who are infected with sin — and his cry for help is the cry of the human heart to be restored.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law;  but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. — Romans 7:22-23

Paul wants out of this way of life.

Which happens when Jesus makes it possible for us to be children of God again through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8), as we are transformed into the image of Jesus.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

One of the fundamental promises of the Old Testament is that God will intervene with the human condition to give us ‘new hearts’ — reoriented hearts — hearts not shaped by the ‘stone’ dead idols we worship, but by the living God (cf Psalm 115, Ezekiel 36:26), hearts that allow us to obey God — or meet his purposes again (cf Deuteronomy 30, Jeremiah 31).

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. — Ezekiel 36:26

Proposition 10. Jesus came to fix our hearts because our hearts are the heart of our problem, and make what we do sinful.

Proposition 11. The way Jesus talks about the problem of sin shows that it is a problem of the heart not properly loving God, not a question of a list of rights and wrongs, or Xs that are sinful, or not sinful.

Some people who operate with the assumption that sin is specific transgressions against a particular rule have a hard time accommodating Jesus’ ‘new ethic’ in the Sermon on the Mount. For these people, suddenly thought crime is a thing. But what if Jesus isn’t bringing a new ethic to the world, what if he’s showing people that they’ve got the old ethic wrong, that the way to understand the Old Testament law was that sinless humanity required imitation of God, and what if this is why the Old Testament had a ritual of atonement built into the law, because imitating God and fulfilling God’s purpose for the law is impossible for sinful us. So the rich young ruler who says “I’ve kept all the laws” might be right, but this doesn’t make him sinless? What if Jesus as God’s real image bearer, the one who sees God truly, does fulfil the law in terms of its purpose by ‘being perfect’…

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them…

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” — Matthew 5:8, 17, 48

What if the point of the Sermon on the Mount is that X is always sinful, but its the wrong question? What if Jesus isn’t worried about answering the question “is X sinful” at all, but about offering the transformed heart promised by the Old Testament so that “is X sinful” is the wrong question? What if the other bit where Jesus talks about the law and the prophets is related to this idea of fulfilment, and Jesus is the one who perfectly loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and loves his neighbours as himself?

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:37-40

Just remember, the point is not that any individual action is not sinful, but that every action from a heart that doesn’t truly imitate God is sinful. The point of the picture of humanity in the Old Testament is that nobody loves the Lord their God with all their heart, and soul, and mind. Even in their best moments. Even the best of people. And this is the ‘greatest commandment’ which helps us understand the purpose of all the other commandments, and the law, and the prophets, and so, the purpose of our humanity. This is what living life in God’s image looks like, and its what Jesus does — and in doing so, what he secures for us in him through his death and resurrection (as well as making payment for our failure as a substitutionary sacrifice. We still need atonement, just like people in the Old Testament. Because there’s a gap between how we live and how we were made to live that is expressed in our every action.

Here’s a cool thing. I’ve been grappling with this sin question for a while and wondering how what I think fits with this emphasis on the heart fits with a verse like:

If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Matthew records this bit of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, where it fits with this idea that we are imperfect from the inside out, it comes right after Jesus says:

“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

The heart, mind, eyes and hands are all connected in this picture of what being a person looks like. Matthew puts it in the Sermon on the Mount, Mark puts this bit in some of the things Jesus teaches on his way to Jerusalem. He says:

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell.” — Mark 9:43-47

The word behind ’cause to stumble’ in the NIV which is often translated as ’cause to sin’ (see ESV etc) is the Greek word which transliterates as scandalise (σκανδαλίζῃ), it means what we think it means in English, carrying a sense of causing offence. One thing to remember is that the Bible describes sin using a bunch of different words, and we lazily translate them all as ‘sin.’ These passages might seem to support the idea that sin is simply a wrong action (or thought) and leave us legitimately trying to solve for X. So that we know what to chop our hands off for, and pluck our eyes out for… except… in both Matthew and Mark Jesus lays the blame for sin somewhere else. Both Matthew and Mark record this as Jesus answering the Pharisees questions, and correcting their understanding of, the point of the law… The Pharisees are playing the “is X sinful?” game and coming up with some incredibly stupid things to ask the question about, leading them to add stuff to what God has commanded that leaves them imitating man, not God.

So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” But Peter said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.” — Matthew 15:6-20

Mark doesn’t do much more with this, he too records Jesus quoting Isaiah, and then saying:

 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” — Mark 7:14-23

We don’t need to chop off our hands, or gouge out our eyes. These don’t actually cause us to sin at all, they are instruments controlled by our hearts. Defiled hearts cause scandalous hands. We need to chop out our hearts. Or rather, we need Jesus to do that for us.

Jesus’ judgment on the Pharisees and their approach to the law — predicated on deciding that X is sinful, but missing the point of the law — is that their hearts are hard. That’s why he says Moses wrote the law (he’s specifically answering a question from the Pharisees about why the law allows divorce) in Mark 10, and again shows they’re missing the point when they essentially ask “is X sinful” (where X=divorce) and Jesus’ answer is essentially that they should be looking internally for sin…

“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. — Mark 10:5

Matthew says plenty about the heart too — and the link between who we are as people, and what we do being a reflection of who we are (though also being that which indicates who we are).

“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” — Matthew 12:33-37

What we do comes from who we are — if we’re what Paul calls “in Adam” or reflecting the image of Adam, this means we’re a mix of autonomous God-replacing desires and people who bear the image of God, if we’re in Christ it means we’re a mix of this and the Holy Spirit, which is conforming us into the image of Jesus, a transformation that will ultimately be completed in the new creation.

Jesus also rebukes the Pharisees and their approach to their God-ordained purpose in Matthew, but he makes it clear that he is the way back to a new heart he quotes Isaiah and puts himself in the picture as the solution to the problem with our humanity:

For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’ —Matthew 13:15, which is a slight adaptation of Isaiah 6:9-10 that presents Jesus as the answer to the question “how long O Lord?”

Proposition 12: Jesus came to heal calloused, idolatrous, sinful hearts, and to offer a way for people to be ‘good’ living images of God again, representing him in his world.

A healthy approach: getting the balance right between disease treatment and health

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation…  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. — Colossians 1:13-15, 19-20

There’s a bit of a conversation happening online in Aussie circles at the moment about whether we adequately present the Gospel when we emphasise penal substitutionary atonement at the Cross — that’s the thing Colossians 1 describes above, where Jesus swaps his perfection for our imperfection at the Cross, making atonement for us. The Cross certainly does this. But it does a little more than this, and simply treating the Cross as an antidote for sin leaves us emphasising sin as our problem, and may leave us asking the question “is X sinful” as we live in response to the Cross. But what if the Cross isn’t just about a substitution? One other stream of thought is that the Cross is also our example — often this is held up against substitutionary atonement, almost as an alternative Gospel. But what if we’re actually meant to hold them together, and what if our emphasis on penal substitutionary atonement is caught up in our obsession with the wrong thing? Not sinning, rather than imitating God. They’re linked. Obviously. Because God doesn’t sin, but sin is also, if the above is correct, the result of not imitating God.

If sin is a heart disease, our emphasis on penal substitutionary atonement is like fighting heart disease by emphasising the need for a heart transplant. But when you get a heart transplant you also need to know how to live. You need to know the pattern of life that comes from a healthy heart, and keeps it healthy. We can’t hold our need for atonement apart from what the ‘good’ life is meant to look like. Our version of Christianity sometimes feels more like “don’t be sick” than “this is what it looks like to be well” — and I think that’s because we tend to focus on penal substitutionary atonement, rather than holding it alongside the example of Jesus (what, in latin, gets called Christus Exemplar). Sometimes the thing we emphasise when we talk about the good news of the Gospel as substitutionary atonement is the Gospel’s implications for us (typically as individuals) rather than the Gospel being centred on Christ. It is good news about him, first, isn’t it?

Proposition 13. The Cross is where Jesus gives us new hearts to re-shape us and recommission us into God’s (and his) image bearers again while taking the punishment for our darkened hearts, and where he shows us what it looks like to live ‘good’ lives as image bearers. 

The story of Jesus’ life and his mission for hearts and minds as recorded in Matthew and Mark culminates in the ultimate expression of humanity defining its own good, of humanity rejecting God’s vision of ‘the good’ and what his plans for the world look like. The story of Jesus is not a different story to the story of Genesis 1-3. Jesus is the real image bearer, and we see Adam and Eve’s behaviour fulfilled at the Cross, where humanity collectively (but especially Israel and Rome) rejects Jesus, God’s king. God’s image bearer. We kill God’s divine son. This is Adam and Eve’s autonomous redefining of the good writ large.

Proposition 14. The Cross is sin in its purest form. This is the desire of our hearts being expressed — life without God. But it’s also God’s heart being expressed in its purest form, and his ‘good’ victory being won. It’s where the good purpose of the world is revealed.

The Cross is why Jesus came. It’s, at least according to John (see below), and Peter, the moment the world was made for. And it’s where God’s offer of healing and a new heart is made reality, the Spirit arrives in people’s hearts because of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Cross is Jesus imitating God. God’s character is defined by this act of self-giving love for one’s enemies. This voluntary sacrifice —the giving up of everything — is Jesus showing what it looks like to love God, and his neighbours — with all his heart. Perfectly imitating God and fulfilling the law. It’s also where Jesus defeats evil, and through the resurrection and its promise, Jesus re-kindles the hope and promise that God’s kingdom will spread all over the earth.

The Cross is humanity being evil, and Jesus being good, simultaneously. It is victory. It is where God defeats evil. And its an incredible picture of God’s temple harking back to creation as his image bearer dwelling in his world to give life. It’s the moment the world was heading towards, and the moment the serpent is defeated. Jesus succeeds where Adam and Eve fail. John describes this aspect of God’s plan as Jesus being “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) and in the picture John paints of the significance of the Cross he sees this being the decisive moment that guarantees that the serpent, the Devil, loses and God wins (see Revelation 20).

I wonder if the question “is X sinful,” while well-intentioned, misses the point that in this life our hearts are still tainted by sin, and still a work in progress. We’re fairly constantly called to flee particular sorts of sin in the New Testament, but every one of the sins we’re called to flee is linked to idolatry, which is linked to the orientation of the heart. The sins we’re called to flee are products of our poisonous hearts, and really fleeing this behaviour actually requires us to live life — to act — out of the new part of our heart, not simply to stop doing that other stuff. Christians are post-operative heart transplant recipients. The permanent internal change has taken place but still working their way through our bodies and our lives. I wonder if we’re better off asking questions about what the fruits of our new nature look like — the part of our humanity that is now the product of the Holy Spirit transforming us into the image of Christ.

Paul describes this new aspect of our humanity in 2 Corinthians 3. The internal work of the Spirit on our hearts is different and better than the Old Testament law, because human readers of the Old Testament law miss the point of the law without the Spirit, because our nature — our hearts— get in the way.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

… Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. — 2 Corinthians 3:2-18

We’re no longer simply a bifurcated mix of image of God and sinful heart — we’re people whose hearts are being transformed by the Spirit into the image of Jesus. To fixate on the broken bit of our humanity misses the sense that we’re also called to imitate Jesus as he imitates God, not just by not doing bad things, but also by doing good things. This, I think, is the right way to think about the social implications of the Gospel (for this to make sense, read Stephen McAlpine’s excellent review of a book by a guy named Tim Foster who suggests the key to reaching urban Australians is to move away from substitutionary atonement and towards what he describes as a telic Gospel (it’s also worth reading Tim Foster’s reflections on some of the reviews of his book, especially this one). This series of posts essentially asks what the Gospel is, and how we should preach it in our context. I know some people (like Richard Dawkins) say substitutionary atonement is an ugly doctrine, but I think our problem is that its an incomplete Gospel. It’s not ugly. It’s too individual in its emphasis, and to focused on the disease and not enough on the cure and the new life the cure brings. The life we’re inviting others to find, the life God created them for. We get Jesus’ perfect life in exchange for our diseased one, and we’re invited to join him in living it. Forever. That process starts now. We’re reconnecting with God’s vision of what ‘good’ is. This is an invitation to have a ‘good’ life.

I think, given the above, I want to go back to Martin Luther, who was big on a Christian anthropology being simul justus et peccator (which in English means simultaneously justified and sinful). I think our anthropology is threefold, and we’re calling people in our world to rediscover God’s purpose for the bit of them that still reflects his image, by connecting themselves to Jesus. In a letter to a preacher friend Luther suggested preachers need to express their real humanity in their preaching. Including their sin (rather than obsessing over is X sinful, perhaps).

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

I’d want to add, as Paul and John do, that justice does reside here a little, in the form of the love of the justified. In us. As we imitate Christ. Especially the Cross. Through his death and resurrection, and the heart-changing gift of the Spirit, Jesus frees us to bear God’s image again as we bear his image. As we imitate him.

Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. — Ephesians 5:1-2

Or, as John puts it in 1 John 3… What “not sinning” as God’s children looks like is loving like Jesus loved…

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another.

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. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. — 1 John 3:2-11, 16-24

Segways in the Bible

Here’s an idea for a marketing concept for the Segway from Ezekiel 1.

15 Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. 16 As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. 17When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. 18And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. 19And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. 20 Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. 21 When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.