Emily Maxson: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion,
the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the
Promised Land and talk about life, the universe,
and everything along the way. I’m Emily
Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger, and today
we’re talking about the chaos/order dialectic
and ancient origin myths. How are these two
things related, Greg?
Greg Uttinger: Let’s back up to our previous
conversation, where we saw that there are
only two worldviews ultimately. Either God
created the world the way he said he did,
and in the time it took him (recently), and
we have an earth that exists in finite time,
at least in one direction, or the world’s
always been here. The world is self-existent,
self-defining, but seemingly then always changing,
unless the change is an illusion. Then we
have hard questions of, “By what standard
are you going to tell if the change is real
or not?” but we can come back to that later.
As we look throughout the pagan world, we
see lots of mythologies that tell us how this
phase of the world began. But Emily, you were
correct in calling them origin myths. They’re
not creation myths because none of them speak
of a creator. There is no sovereign God who
called the universe out of nothing into existence.
There’s a world ocean. There’s a cosmic
egg. There’s yawning chaos. There’s a
huge gap between fire and ice. There’s something
already there, and these origin stories tell
us how we got from there to here.
The common philosophy of the ancient world
is that having gotten from there to here,
we may find ourselves cycling back to there
eventually. A view of circular time was certainly
common in the ancient world. We rise out of
chaos and we return to chaos, and then we’re
re-born again.
What does chaos and order have to do with
the ancient way of thinking? Pretty much everything.
We have pre-existent matter, which may or
may not contain some element of sentience,
if you even want to make that distinction.
What exactly is sentience anyhow? Then it
changes. It develops and becomes something
more, or it seems to if you’re a pantheist.
In such cases, the changes are illusory. They’re
not real. They’re going to collapse back
into the final whatever we want to call it.
We’ve been trained to say God, but it’s
not God. It’s the universe. It’s the all-ness,
the one-ness of everything, Rama.
Emily: Greg, last time we talked about time
and it having a definite beginning, when the
Bible says it did. God created the world.
The world is not eternal and self-existent,
whereas every pagan origin myth posits that
the universe has always been in existence.
They have origin myths, not creation myths,
because everything is made up of things that
were already there. Where do chaos and order
stand in all of this?
Greg: More generally the origin myths put
chaos at the beginning of everything. Why
that should be is a little odd. I can only
assume it’s something about the nature of
the image of God in man. We look at this,
the world we have with what we call its order,
beauty, and structure, and we say, “This
is better than a garbage dump. This is better
than a pile of rocks.” We have progressed
out of some kind of original chaotic existence
to this order, but the ancient world had no
confidence in that order. They felt that as
time looped around, it would all fall apart
again.
There are certainly contemporary echoes of
this in the oscillating universe theory, where
the universe explodes in the Big Bang, accelerates
away from itself until gravitation catches
up with it and pulls it back in, and you have
the Big Crunch that returns everything to
its original singularity and then explodes
again forever and ever and ever.
But there is this hidden presupposition that
we can distinguish chaos from order and that,
for some reason, this order thing is better
than this chaos thing. Why we’re able, and
by what standard we’re able to make that
judgement is a curious question, and why it
should happen is also curious.
Emily: I just finished Jordan Peterson’s
book, which we’ve talked a little bit about
in the past. This philosophy, as you mentioned,
with the Big Bang idea and the oscillating
universe theory is very much alive and well.
Peterson, especially towards the end of his
book, really makes explicit his presuppositions
that chaos and order are the ultimate fundamental
only sure things in the universe. They’ve
always been, will always be, and everything
that happens, happens in terms of them, including
the Bible.
Interestingly enough, he pulls the Bible along
with other texts and says, “This has been
the unfolding of human consciousness from
the beginning, as we try to sort out chaos
and order,” so he takes the Bible seriously.
He uses the Bible and actually interprets
it fairly well at certain points. He brings
out some ideas, because he’s thinking archetypically,
that I think a lot of Christians miss, but
it’s never to the point where he thinks
it’s actually true in a historical sense.
That’s just sort of where it falls off.
I’m like, “Oh, this is so disappointing!
It’s so close!”
Greg: Are there traces of Karl Jung here?
Is he seeing the human mind leaking out its
contents into the various sacred texts so
that we get a glimpse of what’s really behind
everything, or am I missing something?
Emily: I think that’s exactly it. The results
of that Jungianism is this looking to chaos
and order as ultimate, I think, for Peterson.
I don’t know if that’s the way it goes.
I’m not familiar enough with Jung to say
that that’s how it always goes, but for
Peterson it certainly does.
Greg: There’s only so many possibilities,
and we can trace this kind of thinking back
to Plato, who looks for the ideals and archetypes
that somehow define all reality, but Plato
himself had no idea why or how exactly that
worked. There are these ideas that are – and
now we’re falling into Greek categories
– form, order – but where they came from
and how exactly they get imposed upon matter
is apparently, for Plato, anybody’s guess.
He suggests kind of allegorically that there’s
some little – who’s the character in Wreck-It
Ralph who keeps saying, “I can fix it”?
Emily: Fix-It Felix.
Greg: Yeah. There’s this little god-like
Felix character who can go around and try
to force the universe, the chaos – and we
keep saying “universe.” That’s a loaded
word, too. It implies unity. You can say cosmos,
but cosmos is a Greek word that means an ordered
system – that tries to force the chaos into
some kind of order, but where do these archetypical
ideas come from? What makes them archetypical
and why should anyone listen to them?
I have thought about clouds. There’s a wonderful
Peanuts cartoon that I should have brought
along with us, and I didn’t. Lucy and Linus
and Charlie Brown are looking up at the clouds.
They’re lying on a hillside and watching
the sky, and Lucy asks Linus what he sees,
and he describes a couple of incredibly detailed
historical scenes, ending with the stoning
of St. Stephen.
Lucy says, “Charlie Brown, what do you see?”
and Charlie Brown says, “I was going to
see a ducky and a horsey, but I think I’ll
– never mind.”
We look at clouds and we see patterns oftentimes,
but as big grown-up people we know, “Oh,
it just looks like that.” So how do we know
on a larger scale that when we look at something
and call it beauty or order or pick an archetypical
word – how do we know that that’s just
not a passing mood of chaos?
You can throw out glitter or I Ching sticks
or whatever, and in a moment, as they pass
through time, they can take on all kinds of
pretty shapes. They can look like a ducky
or a horsey, but then they fall apart. We
say, “That’s just illusion.” Yeah. What
about everything we see? How do we know that
there is something archetypical behind this?
How do we not know that this is just one of
the many moods of chaos that’s here for
100 years, 1,000 years, a million years, against
the vast backdrop of eternity?
Why is that form? Why is that order? Why is
that any more than cloud gazing, and by what
standard are we going to assert that? How
do we know that order is orderly? And how
do we know that it is of any significance,
and why should we value it, beyond perhaps
the fact that we are used to it?
Oh, but who are we, anyway? Aren’t we part
of the very chaos that got spat out from the
universe in the first place, and why do our
judgements count? Aren’t we just used to
these things? Aren’t we chemical reactions
coexisting with other chemical reactions in
ways that seem to produce something that we
register as acquiescence or pleasure or consent
or familiarity? But when our bones are moldering
in the grave, where’s the order?
There are vast assumptions and presuppositions
that work behind us, and yet pagan cultures,
having no place else to retreat, keep wanting
to find order. They want to find truth. They
want to find beauty, but they’re starting
with chaos. How do you bridge the gap? And,
of course, that’s the nature of the dialectic.
Dialectic by definition is something where
you have two different principles, abstract
ideas or forces held together but at war with
each other, like trying to hold two positive
magnets together. They’re constantly repelled,
constantly pushing away. What is the force?
What is the oneness that binds them, except
the basic continuity of being? All is one,
and is that one just at bottom chaos?
If you’re a materialist it’s atoms in
the void, atoms in motion, or energy particles
or whatever you want to call them. If you’re
a pantheist then you don’t even have that
exactly. You have some kind of spiritual essence
which does not exist in discrete bits, except
as we take the illusion seriously, and that
in the end will pull everything back into
itself.
What is this order thing anyhow? Why is it
so important and why do we keep looking for
it? Why is Jordan Peterson seeing clouds in
the Bible and in the other sacred texts? Why
does he say, “Oh, this is important. This
is an archetype. This is something to take
note of. This is something we should listen
to.”
As Christians, we need to look at him and
say, “Why?”
“Well, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, but not because of your reasoning.
Your reasoning makes no sense. You’ve got
where we are, but you cheated all the way
along.”
We read the text as a text that tells us certain
things about a true God who exists outside
of this realm you perceive as chaos and order,
who in fact governs the world in such a way
that it is neither chaotic nor some kind of
static order, but it is the providential work
of a storytelling God who’s working all
things together for the good of his people
and for his own glory.
We do have change, real change. We have real
development. We have a story that’s in progress,
and the order is intentional. It’s imposed
by the very God who brought the matter into
existence in the first place, to be exactly
what it is. It’s not an accident. These
things are not at odds with one another. They
are both aspects of God’s providential rule
over the universe, stemming out of his eternal
council of predestination.
We’re quite comfortable with all this, and
we’re not surprised to see our Father’s
hand, even down to saying, “Isn’t it great
that God just made that cloud that looks like
a dragon, so we could smile at it and laugh
for a second,” because he really, really
did, the things that fall by seeming accident
into some pattern that we recognize.
Sure, we can talk about Brownian motion and
all of the physics behind the accidental fall
of the glitter or the paint, and yet as Christians
we can also say, “God has a sense of humor.
Look at that smiley face that just showed
up when everything fell. God did that,”
and both are true, so we have answers that
are consistent within our system.
Jordan Peterson and people like him, the pagan
world in general, they want order. They sense
a need for order because they are made in
God’s image and are living in God’s universe,
and order kind of is.
You could, in theory, say, “I am just atoms.
My thought processes are just atoms. I’m
just spinning here in the void. Nothing matters.
There’s no real line of distinction between
my atoms and the atoms of that freight train
bearing down on me,” and you could try to
live like that, but nobody does. We all see
the train coming and we get off the tracks,
unless we have suicidal impulses, because
we know the way the world works.
We know about momentum and inertia and big
huge iron things smacking us at 70 miles an
hour, and what that does to biological units
like ourselves. We’re very familiar with
that order and we can plead all we want that
it’s an illusion or that we are just atoms
and it doesn’t really matter, and yet we
move anyhow.
As the image of God we take the order seriously,
but in rebellion against God we don’t want
to admit that he’s the source of that order,
so we have to do something with it. We can
pretend it’s not there, but more generally
pagan cultures have begun by saying, “Well,
there was this chaos and then something happened.”
We could walk through all of the origin myths
from Sumer to Egypt. My favorite, of course,
as you probably can guess, is the Norse mythology
and the huge gap between Niflheim, the land
of ice and snow, and Muspelheim to the south,
the land of fire.
Here’s this huge cosmic gap between these
two huge cosmic realms, and they’re just
all sitting there being cosmic and all, and
somehow sparks from the land of fire, from
Muspelheim, reach into the land of ice and
melt them, presumably imparting – let’s
assume that the Norse meant more than they
said and that somehow these sparks are some
kind of divine energy, imparting sentience.
Somehow when fire and ice get together weird
things happen, and out comes this giant with
this cow – this cosmic cow. My students
have always laughed at Audumbla, the cosmic
cow.
To the Norse, “Why do you need the cow?”
“We need the cow because we need cows to
provide milk and stuff.”
It didn’t seem funny to them. It seems hilarious
or silly to us. Then as the cow licks the
ice – and how the cow gets nourishment from
the ice is another question, but she does
apparently, salt and water – she uncovers
the young gods. What does that mean? Does
that mean they were there buried? Why? How?
Does that mean that her tongue shapes them
into existence?
We’re not told. It’s just a story. We’re
not supposed to inquire too closely. But she
uncovers these gods, the chief-est of whom
was Odin, and the gods turn on the giant and
dismember him. Then his flesh becomes the
earth, and his over-arching brow the heavens,
his bones the rock, his blood the rivers.
I don’t remember it all, but they create
Midgard in the middle of the cosmos between
the two previous realms, and above that they
set Asgard, which will be their home, and
connect it with glimmering Bifrost bridge
and all of that.
By the way, I have a video someplace on YouTube
where I sum that up better than I just did.
Here’s everybody’s homework. Go look for
it and see if you can find it.
Emily: I love that you brought up Norse mythology,
because Neil Gaiman, in his recent retelling,
brings up a point that I think Christians
have been bringing up for a long time. What
sets Norse mythology apart is that it has
not only a beginning but an end.
Greg: Yes, it has an eschatology. That’s
technically true. I think it’s better to
say it’s the only one that spends much time
admitting that it has an eschatology, largely
because they didn’t want to contemplate
the other end of things, because we know what
the other end of things is. Even the gods
die. The Greeks and Romans and Egyptians just
didn’t think about that a whole lot, nor
did they want to. They assumed eternal recurrence.
The Norse myths go a little better in that
when Ragnarok is finished and the heavens
and earth that are sink into the sea – there’s
the sea again – what rises out is the new
heavens and the new earth. And depending on
how much credit you’re willing to give to
the manuscript evidence, there comes a new
great God who will rule over all and set up
law and justice.
Of course, the pagan scholars, humanist scholars,
say, “That’s a reference to Christianity.
It was obviously added later,” which is
possible, or it may be that they had some
kind of hope for something, or that some of
those myths were not put in their final stage
until they encountered Christian missionaries
or some kind of early Jewish influence.
We don’t know, but they did certainly have
a positive hope. The gods die, and yes, the
gods can be reborn. But again, this is the
basic cycle, the myth of the eternal return,
that everything will come back again in some
form, maybe even in the exact form.
We may have lived this life and had this conversation
a billion, billion times, and we’ll never
know it and never remember it. Isn’t that
exciting? How’s that for hope?
Emily: Is that Nietzsche speaking?
Greg: Nietzsche picked up on it, but it’s
hardly original with him.
Whereas over against that, Christianity acknowledges
that time has a beginning but it does not
have an end, and Christians miss that sometimes
with a little bit of sloppy exegesis. There’s
a passage in Revelation where the seventh
angel blows his trumpet and swears by God
that there will be time no more. But what
the Greek is actually saying is “Time’s
up.”
It’s a reference to the persecuted martyrs
who’ve been calling out for judgement. They’re
told they have to wait a little while until
the other martyrs are killed, and when the
seventh angel blows his trumpet he’s saying,
“Okay, the time’s over. Time’s up.”
Emily: “Hurry up, please. It’s time.”
Greg: That Eliot reference just completely
lost me.
Emily: Sorry. I’ll save T.S. Eliot for later.
Greg: Yes, Emily’s T.S. Eliot’s reference.
But once we understand that and we look at
what we see, what we call eternity future
is still temporal because man cannot exist
outside of time. Man is a temporal creature.
Only God is trans-temporal. Only God is not
bound by time. Only God exists outside of
its confines.
Just as we will always be creatures, we will
always live in time. We will always live in
the material world. We will always live in
3-dimensional space. These are givens for
our existence.
Emily: There will be a time when we’re wearing
crowns, and there’s a moment when we cast
them down at the feet of the Lord, even in
eternity.
Greg: Exactly. There’s progress. We will
be reigning, which is an activity, not a static
state of existence. So as Christians we’re
not afraid of time, but we do recognize that,
since the fall, time carries with it some
very negative things because of the curse.
The whole creation does groan and travail
together in earth pains, waiting for the redemption
of the sons of God, the redemption of our
bodies, and the transformation that will accompany
the whole world when that happens – Romans
8.
So we have a positive view of time. Jesus
has bought back time. He is blessing time.
Time is now the field of God’s operation
for redemption, and it’s not something we
are to moan and groan about, as if that’s
bad, as if some kind of abstract stasis, some
kind of neo-platonic timeless existence would
be better. It’s not.
We’re not made for that. We can’t handle
that. We wouldn’t understand that. Time
is eternal in one direction, on into the future,
and eternity is something we can’t cope
with. That’s one reason that when the Bible
talks about eternity it doesn’t tell us
a whole lot.
This is something that I have fun with sometimes,
just thinking about it for a minute and then
giving it up. But if we look back on this
last century, if we were to take our current
technology – well, not mine or the Amish,
but the kind of stuff that you two carry about
with you all the time, your cell phones and
laptops and such – and you were to step
back into say 1870 and your devices still
worked, people would think you were probably
witches, sorcerers, possibly creatures from
another world – there were a few people
who were open to the possibility of alien
life even then – or possibly frauds.
I’ve heard of people who went into the 1930s
and 40s who would not have televisions in
their houses because such things obviously
are impossible and thus must be of the devil,
and they were completely serious.
My grandmother on my mom’s side was born
at the tail end of the 1800s. Her mother was
a little girl during the last days of the
Civil War. My grandmother lived from the late
1800s to see the moon landing, and died a
few years after that, but imagine the world
she saw change – from horse and buggy, basically,
maybe just the very beginnings of the automobile
– it wasn’t a common thing yet – up
through Neil Armstrong setting foot on the
moon.
At that point we didn’t have microchips
yet. The computers that sent men to the moon
were not as powerful as the computers we’re
working with right now. If you’ve ever seen
the movie Apollo 13, which I would mostly
recommend – there’s one or two awkward
scenes up front – you see that when they
get into trouble, they do calculations with
pencil and paper. You have astronauts up in
space trying to figure re-entry angles and
such, using little golf pencils and scratch
paper, and everybody at Houston Control is
doing exactly the same thing. That was 1969,
and here we are in 2019, almost 2020. You
can carry on some of your watches more technology
than those astronauts had.
What happens in eternity when the curse is
lifted? What will we become? What will we
be capable of as we continue to interact with
the world of infinite possibilities? I think
there are very good reasons that God did not
tell us. It would be completely meaningless
to us. “You will be as angels.” Okay,
that’s great. It will be wonderful. All
of our abilities and talents will be tasked
to the maximum. We will enjoy it infinitely.
We will offer it as praise to God.
Technology will go exponential for eternity
– not 1,000 years, not a million years,
not a billion years, but without end, so there’s
some things to factor in in a Christian philosophy
of time. We hit an exponential curve very
quickly after Jesus returns that we can’t
even begin to fathom, and we just have to
trust God and say it will be incredible. It
will be wild. It’ll be fun, but it will
be Christ-centered and it will bring honor
to him.
In the meantime, this time is the time for
sanctification, for testing, for trial, for
facing up to hard things and overcoming by
the blood of the Lamb. Jesus said though he
were a son, yet learned he obedience by the
things he suffered.
There are things that even Christ himself
could learn only in the face of suffering.
There’s a kind of maturity that comes in
time, in history, as we face hard things and
overcome them in faith. Once Jesus comes there
will be growth of a sort, but it’s not the
kind of growth that happens here.
This time, before Jesus comes, though it is
hard it is a sanctified time that has as one
of its chief purposes the creation, preservation,
sanctification, and growth of the church.
And although it can be very hard and at times
very sad, we can approach it with joy, knowing
that God has a purpose and it’s only, compared
to eternity, a brief time as for a moment.
These are some of the things that are going
to play into a Christian philosophy of time,
whereas our pagan friends are left with a
collapse back into chaos, the fear that the
death of the universe is a really horrible
thing, and the death of their own bodies is
a really horrible thing. But we still have
to ask them, “What makes you think so?”
I remember a TV show called It Takes a Thief.
Nobody needs to go look it up, but there’s
a scene where the hero, a thief, is held by
even badder guys. He’s talking to his young
lady friend and she says, “You’re not
afraid to die?” and he says, “Yeah. I
don’t know what comes after this life. Nothing?
Annihilation? Punishment for some of the things
I’ve done? I don’t know, but I know that
life is very sweet.” Well, there’s the
pagan world. Life is sweet.
Socrates was honest enough to say, “I go
to death, you to life. Who knows which is
better?” because he really didn’t know.
He thought he was going to go to an after-life
where he could hang out with Achilles and
Odysseus. He’d get to go see all the great
heroes of the past. Well, he did, but not
the way he thought.
Our pagan world looks at death mostly with
fear. They look at the end to the universe
as a horrible terrible thing. To them, hell
is the destruction of the planet. Atomic war,
ecological crisis – this is the hell of
the humanist – again a God-given concept,
an inescapable concept. The eschatology is
inescapable and the eternal sanctions are
inescapable.
But whereas they don’t have a God who inflicts
these things, they trust man to inflict them.
Man can save man if we give the State enough
power, but if we get it wrong we’re going
to ruin the planet or we’re going to blow
up the planet.
Emily: Be on the wrong side of history.
Greg: Yeah, and there’s nothing worse than
that! Right. The scary thing, of course, is
that there are now those in the Green movement
who are saying, “Well, but the planet would
survive, and we as the cancer would no longer
be there. That doesn’t sound so bad to us.”
But even in their view, eventually the moon
falls and the sun grows cold and there’s
nothing.
They cannot handle the nothing, so they keep
trying to enforce some kind of meaning, some
kind of order, and they want to believe that
that meaning, that order that they’ve created
– even if they freely admit, “Oh, we created
it but it’s better” – we still have
to ask “Why? It’s going to be short-lived
and you are going to die. Is that all you’ve
got? Is that all there is?”
Emily: To circle back to Jordan Peterson,
like I always do, as you say, this pagan concept
that the world has no hope – Jordan Peterson,
with all of his good advice and the centuries
and millennia of Christian society that he’s
building on that gives him a borrowed foundation
for his good advice, there’s really no hope
there because he doesn’t know that Christ
wins in the end. That has to be our ultimate
hope, is in Christ.
Even though this world has suffering in it,
and we are promised trials and suffering and
persecution, our hope is not in the moments
of beauty that we find when we pet a cat as
it walks across the street. Our hope is in
Christ and his return and his triumph. Ultimately,
we have this joy to look forward to, this
unimaginable eternity of working to God’s
glory.
Greg: I think there are a couple things we
need to say, and I’m going to say the least
important first, because you mentioned petting
a cat. Why am I thinking of Nick Fury?
Those moments can be beautiful, are beautiful,
precisely because Christ redeems them. They’re
one of the Father’s good gifts to us. They’re
that little Sabbath in the midst of the struggles.
They’re the Father smiling around the corner
and reminding us of his love, and they are
encouragements and they are glimpses of glory,
glimpses of the beauty and creativity of our
Heavenly Father. Because we know that Christ
wins, these are not throw-away things, and
in some sense they’re never lost.
There’s a line in Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm, whose author is a Christian. It’s
a passing thing where the narrator adopts
just for a second a theological voice and
says, “And as nothing is ever lost in the
King’s dominion…” and I forget where
she goes from there. The point she’s making
is that no good thing ever passes away. God
remembers it and we’ll remember it.
That moment of beauty that we experience has
changed us, has touched us and echoes through
our being, and we will be talking of that
cat that we petted possibly for eternity,
depending on how God orchestrates these things.
But it’s a good metaphor at least for what’s
going to happen.
Schaeffer, in a couple of his books, addresses
the Buddhist idea that man steps into the
pond and leaves no ripples, meaning he has
no effect on history or anything, because
nothing’s real. Schaeffer says, “No, we
must insist that man makes ripples that go
on forever.” This, too, we have to insist,
and we must insist it of the smallest things.
A cup of cold water in Jesus’ name, the
Lord says, will not lose its reward.
So the end, in a very different sense from
the way we usually use the word, does justify
the means, the steps to it, because the end
is God’s end and his divine sovereignty
and predestination overrules all of our sins
and brings beauty and glory in the smallest
kind of expression of who he is – whether
it be a child’s finger painting or the petting
of the cat or an evening’s sunset or a storm
breaking over the Swiss Alps. All of these
things – Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star – are
things that are true and real and beautiful,
and their meaning is not just transitory,
because Jesus lives.
Here’s the other thing. We keep talking
about this Jesus person. We haven’t gotten
there. We haven’t even gotten technically
to sin. It’s just possible that someplace
along the line there might be some non-Christian
who we haven’t completely offended and driven
away by the things we’ve said, or someone
who thinks they’re a Christian and maybe
isn’t quite, or doesn’t quite get it,
saying, “So when I was a kid I walked forward
in this church and I asked Jesus into my heart,
but I don’t know what in the world that
has to do with what you’re talking about.”
So let’s take a moment and make things very
clear as to who Jesus is.
We’ve spoken already in previous podcasts
of this God who exists eternally, a self-existing
God who is three persons – Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. The Father begat from eternity
the Son, the Son being begotten, the Father
and the Son eternally communicating, loving
one another, and breathing back and forth
their love in the Person of the Holy Spirit,
who is also fully and completely truly God,
so that these three are one, but these three
are three.
It is the second Person of this Trinity – the
second Person of the Godhead, the Son – who
in the Father’s good will and according
to his eternal plan to save mankind and to
glorify his son, sent his son into the world
as a ransom, as the redemption price for those
who have rebelled against him and deserved
hell, who deserved eternal wrath.
It’s about Christmas season now. We just
passed Black Friday so there’s that ominous
thing. Jesus, the Son of God, came into the
world, taking to himself a true human nature
so that he is God in man, but only one person,
and that one person being God and man, has
a life whose value is infinite. He has the
ability to withstand the full wrath of God
against sin, but he’s also human, capable
of suffering, capable of dying, and capable
of representing man.
This God-man went to the cross and died a
penal substitutionary death in the place of
sinners so that those who trust in him do
not have to suffer the wrath of God. He did
that for us. Then Jesus came back to life.
He rose from the dead. He was really clinically
dead and then he stopped being dead. His brainwaves
came back online. His lungs began respirating
again. His synapses started firing. He got
up and walked out of his tomb. He was really
alive. He beat death.
And because of this, that resurrection power
is available to us first as he breathes forth
his spirit into our existence, into our lives
and our hearts and gives us new life and makes
us new creatures. He changes us and gives
us victory over our rebellion, but ultimately
it is that same resurrection power that will
raise our bodies from the dead and that will
transform the world.
The world is alive with resurrection life.
We’ve turned a corner. Things have changed.
Things are not what they were. There was a
time when entropy seemed to have the final
word, when sin and death seemed to reign,
and there were only the faintest sparks of
God’s grace in some little obscure corner
of the world called Palestine. Now we’ve
turned around and life and light are spreading
through the world, bringing about the restitution
of all things. That’s Jesus.
Emily: How do we receive this power?
Greg: We are told that, “As many as received
Him, to them He gave the authority to become
the sons of God, even to those who believe
on His name, who are born not of blood nor
of the will of the flesh nor the will of man,
but of God.” So on our side of things it’s
the very simple thing of believing the promise.
All these things that we’ve said, we need
to believe that they’re true and that it’s
a promise that Jesus intends to keep. We trust
Jesus to keep his promise. We trust him to
forgive our sins. We trust him to change us
and to give us new lives. We trust him to
take our souls to heaven when we die, but
far beyond that to also reunite body and soul,
to raise us from the dead when he returns,
and put us on this exponential spiral toward
glories we cannot understand, joys we’ve
never experienced and we can’t imagine.
We trust him for all of that, even in the
face of very hard times.
The other side, of course, is that this is
the sovereign work of God. You can’t make
someone a Christian by simply giving natural
birth. It is not something that the human
will comes up with on its own. It’s not
of blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the
will of the flesh. Someone else cannot do
it for you.
You can’t make someone a Christian. There
are no wands of conversion where you smack
somebody and, wow! They’re a Christian.
It is a personal covenantal relationship with
the Son of God who made the universe and who
became a baby in the virgin’s womb in Nazareth
and was born in Bethlehem about 2,000 years
ago.
That’s the message of the gospel and that’s
the message of the Christmas season. If you
read the Christmas carols or listen to them
sung, and you read the Christmas prophecies,
they are full of the language of transformation.
One of my favorites, Joy To The World, says,
“No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor
thorns infest the ground. He comes to make
His blessings flow far as the curse is found.”
Isaac Watts, when he wrote that, was thinking
of the Second Coming and yet it’s interesting
that it got shifted to being a Christmas hymn,
because it is.
Jesus, in coming to this world, came as a
second Adam. The new creation began when he
entered our world, so that if any man be in
Christ he is presently a new creation. Old
things have passed away, all things are become
new.
We’ve chosen as our name Halting Toward
Zion. The book of Hebrews tells us that we
are come unto Mount Zion, the city of the
living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an
innumerable company of angels, to the church
of the firstborn who are written in Heaven,
to God the judge of all, to Jesus the mediator
of the new covenant.
This is a reality that has already entered
our reality. The new Jerusalem is already.
The new creation is already here and it will
continue. The newness and the light will continue
to grow in time and in history until finally
when Jesus comes it will become explicit.
Everything will come out from the shadows,
from hiding behind the trees, as it were,
and we will see the glory of God, so this
is a time and a season to rejoice in all of
these promises.
Over against that we can think of the neo-Platonic
view that slips into a very few of the carols,
where the virgin birth becomes a sort of Never-Never
land where the baby’s glowing and the stars
are shining down on him and the baby never
cries and it’s a silent quiet night, despite
the fact that children are being butchered
by Herod’s soldiers. It just becomes this
other-worldly kind of thing, which is the
last thing it was. It was God stepping into
our bloody filthy history to reclaim it, and
we would do well to remember that at this
time of year.
Emily: I have a pet peeve about Christmas
hymns that are written between about 1840
and 1870, because they all do that. They’re
the worst.
Greg: Yes, and the timeframe is about right.
Somewhere along the line we began to get some
better ones, but interestingly enough they
came out of the Charismatic movement oftentimes.
Think about it. What’s the emphasis of the
Charismatic movement? The power of the Holy
Spirit.
Whereas as Reformed Christians we wouldn’t
buy into everything our Charismatic brothers
believe, certainly we can agree that the Holy
Spirit is sovereign and powerful and does
incredible things. So when they wrote about
the bells ringing that Christ is born, we
can say, “Yeah brother, preach it!” This
is true. At least it’s a step away from
the Gnostic fundamentalism of the time period
you described.
If you go back to someone like Charles Wesley,
then we have solid scripture upon scripture
reminding us of who Jesus is, the second Adam
come to undo the work of the fall. “Born
to raise the sons of earth, born to give them
second birth.”
Emily: This parallel that you just mentioned
between the first coming of Christ and the
second coming of Christ, that we live in this
period of victory although we wait for the
greater victory to come, it’s the already
and the not yet.
Greg: I would add something. Our friends at
Westminster are very good at pointing out
the already and the not yet. What they miss
most of the time, at least I keep hearing
that same expression – already and not yet
– yes, true, but let’s look at Christian
soteriology.
The already – I’m born again. I’m converted.
I have eternal life. I have the Spirit dwelling
within me.
The not yet – I have not yet been raised
from the dead. I have not yet seen Jesus face-to-face.
Is there some major doctrine of the Christian
life missing here? How about progressive sanctification?
There is an already and there is an ongoing-ness
and then there is the in-between, which is
not a flat scale in-between. It’s not sitting
in the waiting room of the train station tapping
your foot and waiting for something fun to
happen, nor is it the in-between of the prison
camp where we are lashed to our bunks every
night because Satan is so powerful and strong.
It’s the in-between of growth in the face
of suffering, growth in the face of trial
and sometimes, when God feels like it, growth
in the tremendous outpouring of his Spirit
because he decides he’s going to give us
a head start and we get the Reformation or
the Wesley/Whitefield revivals or some of
these kinds of things, where God just says,
“You need a little extra help here. Here.
My Spirit’s going to do some pretty cool
stuff. Watch.”
It’s a mistake to think that God is going
to rescue our grits every time. He generally
doesn’t. Most of covenant life is pretty
every day, one step at a time, going to church,
raising and discipling our children, performing
our calling, and hoping and planning and trying
to make the next generation come out a little
better than we did.
Christians, and especially American Christians,
are so bad at this. “Well, I don’t see
much change.” Let’s go back and talk about
my grandma, from horse and buggy to moon landing.
You don’t see much change? That wasn’t
even 100 years.
Emily: In American culture our attention span
is so short. We can’t sit still for five
minutes, let alone watch generational progress.
Greg: Yeah, if it’s not going to happen
in our lifetime then it’s not important
and it’s not even really particularly real.
We don’t think generationally anymore. The
Christians of Europe built cathedrals, oftentimes
realizing that, as they contributed their
little piece to this door or that hallway,
they would never get to worship there, but
they believed that their grandchildren and
great-grandchildren for a hundred generations
would worship there, and in many cases they
proved right. They saw long-term.
You build cathedrals from that kind of vision.
You worship in a warehouse with a very different
sort of vision. That’s not to say that worship
in a warehouse is always bad. Sometimes there
are pragmatic reasons that that may be useful
and necessary. But if the whole church is
content to not institutionalize, not own property,
not build buildings, and not build beautiful
buildings, then culturally we’ve already
lost. We need to go back and reexamine our
theology and see what’s wrong because the
God who built the universe, the God who created
Eden, the God who’s building the new Jerusalem
does not delight in junk. He delights in beauty
and excellence.
That’s what we push for, realizing we may
not see it in our lifetime, and having to
be okay with that, having to realize that
those little glimpses of glory that we get
along the way will have to do for now. Someday
when Jesus comes we will see the beauty, the
form, the order behind all of this.
For now we walk by faith. We halt toward Zion.
We limp along in our own sins and limitations
and those of our brothers and sisters in Christ,
bearing the ways and mistakes of the church
of the past, and trusting that somehow in
all of our weakness God will do something
better according to his timetable, which may
be a whole lot longer than ours.
God says he is faithful to a thousand generations.
If a generation is 40 years or 20 years, we’re
nowhere near that time limit yet. We’ve
got a long way to go.
Again, another element of the Christian philosophy
of time – time is not going to be up anytime
soon. In the meantime we are in this in-between
time, which is a time for being productive,
for being useful, for growing, for developing
our own talents and gifts.
When Jesus comes, if I’ve learned calculus
I’m still going to know calculus. If I’ve
learned physics I’m still going to know
physics. My knowledge of biology might be
a little off because my resurrection body’s
probably a little different than my current
one.
Emily: Well, physics might be a little different,
too.
Greg: Physics might bounce around a little
bit. If I was a mortician, well, that’s
gone, but if I’m an artist those skills
carry over. If I was an actor, that comes
with me. All of these things are not lost.
We have the beginnings and then we have an
eternity to build and perfect them.
Emily: That’s encouraging for the technologists
among us, too, who work in things that seem
so temporary, but we have an eternity to grow
and develop in those things, too, untainted
by sin.
Greg: What we are seeing is the barest beginning.
Sometimes I sit back and think about these
things for a few minutes and then give it
up because it will be wonderful, but we can’t
even begin to conceive, but that has to be
there, at least as a living concept, lest
we get the idea that all of this stuff in
the in-between, all of the stuff that is progressing,
is worthless.
“Okay, we’re the children of God, and
one day Jesus is coming back, and in-between
we just kind of tap our feet and that’s
it. Nothing really else is supposed to happen.”
One writer put it very elegantly when he said,
“There is literally nothing else that God
has promised us until Jesus comes back.”
Just as a side note, this is one pet peeve
of mine. Are there people groups, languages,
clans, tribes that have not yet heard the
gospel? So they’re not included in the people
Jesus decided to die for. He didn’t die
for them. He didn’t plan on saving them.
They don’t count. They don’t have any
part in eternal glory. They’re the unwashed,
the unclean. They’re the ‘others.’ They’re
the, “Well, they didn’t quite make it,
did they?”
This is a terribly racist eschatology and
philosophy. A question I would like to ask
some people who share this form of eschatology
is, “Exactly at what point were there no
more promises to fulfill? Was it when Jesus
went back to heaven?” Presumably he was
still a spirit.
There was the expansion into the empire. That
was promised, the destruction of Jerusalem.
Maybe the fall of Rome? To Christianity or
the barbarians? 313 or 476?
So it sounds like some place by 500, about
the time that Arthur passed, God was done
with all his promises, so all of those tribes
and peoples who had never heard the gospel
really have nothing to count on and shouldn’t
expect God to reach out to them because there
were no more promises to fulfill. Really?
I assume if I got to sit down with this man,
who’s a pastor and has written some books,
and put it bluntly like that, I assume he
would say, “Oh no, that’s not what I mean.”
Well, it’s what you said, and words matter.
They matter in terms of their social implications
and they matter in terms of how we view other
people.
When we start talking about history, we are
talking about people. We’re talking about
other people. We’re talking about people
who have not been born yet. We’re talking
about people in other parts of the world that
we haven’t gotten to yet. But we’re most
certainly talking about people.
Eschatology is wrapped up in sociology and
wrapped up in that simple Christian word called
love. It does matter, and it matters forever.
Emily: I just realized that we made all these
Christmas references, but this episode won’t
be published until after the holidays. Maybe
we’ll make it in before Epiphany, though.
Greg: And that’s still Christmas for our
Greek Orthodox friends.
Emily: That’s right. We can just say we’re
on the Eastern calendar. This is Halting Toward
Zion, always on the Eastern calendar when
it’s convenient.
That is all the time we have for tonight.
Thank you so much, Greg, for this conversation.
Thanks to David, our producer and my lawfully
wedded husband. Thank you all for listening.
Send us an email with questions or feedback
of any sort at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com.
See you next time.
