There is a major problem here, American Dispensationalism, with the idea of the rapture, it has actually turned the idea of Jesus’ second coming into it’s opposite in the New Testament. The second coming is not Jesus coming back to scoop up some people and take them off to heaven with him. In the second coming passages in the New Testament, Jesus is coming back to rule and reign and transform the world and make it over a new, new heavens and new earth. There’s a couple of verses in the New Testament which instead of talking about Jesus coming, talk about Jesus appearing. Colossians chapter 1 and 3, John chapter 3. What does it mean appearing, rather than coming?
We have an implicit cosmology in which heaven is a long way away, probably up in the sky and then we think of earth as all the way down here. So we think of Jesus as coming like a spaceman having to make a long trip from somewhere else. There are a lot of people who take that as completely literal language, as though heaven is a space within our cosmos. That is not how the Bible uses the word heaven. The word heaven has a multiplicity of meanings, but in this sense, heaven is God’s space, and God’s space is supposed to be eventually integrated with our space, earth.
The point is that at the moment it is as though there is a great curtain hanging down through the middle of ordinary reality. So that at any point in any place, God is not far away, Jesus is not far away, it’s just that they’re currently invisible, but one day the curtain will be pulled back, and it won’t be like coming, it’ll be appearing. Imagine the gasp as if somebody were to yank a great curtain back there and we suddenly realized all sorts of things going on behind that curtain, that were actually integrated with our reality and we didn’t realize it.
Now, part of the difficulty here, is that some of the passages in the gospels which have traditionally been taken as predictions of Jesus coming back after a long period, they are predictions of the fall of Jerusalem. In Mark chapter 13, it doesn’t begin with the disciples saying, when are you coming back, it begins with Jesus saying, all this stuff’s going to come crashing down. And the disciples saying, when, when will that be. The difficulty is that the language which they used to describe events like that was what some people have sometimes called apocalyptic language. That is to say, things like the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon will be turned into blood and the stars will be falling from heaven.
Now, generations of Christians have thought that Jesus was predicting the end of the space-time universe. However, when you trace that language back into the Old Testament, and that bit about the sun and the moon and the stars comes from Isaiah 13, it isn’t talking about the collapse of the space-time universe, it’s talking about the fall of Babylon, which was the greatest empire of the day. Because when this huge empire which has dominated the horizon suddenly falls with a crash, what language are you going to use? What poetry can you use to signal that? And when it’s Jerusalem, and if you’re a Jew who believed that was the city where God had promised, eventually to come and live forever, if that falls with a crash and the temple is burnt to the ground, you’re going to talk about the sun and the moon and the stars. Even in our political discourse, we talk about landslides, and we all know that’s a metaphor, they all knew that this language was a metaphor.
The great dream of a detached or disembodied heaven as our ultimate destiny continues unabated. People assume that the word heaven denotes uncomplicatedly, the ultimate destination of the people of God, a destination which most people hope they will find right after their death. It’s fascinating to see how powerful that tradition is, because as some of you know, it is completely contrary to what we find in the New Testament in general, and to Paul in particular. The Jewish vision of God’s ultimate future was never that people would leave this world and end up somewhere else called heaven in the company of God.
There are hints in the Psalms of a life after the present one. Psalm 73, you’ll guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me with glory. But when esquetology comes into full focus as for instance in the book of Daniel, it is all about God’s kingdom being set up on earth as in heaven, and indeed on earth by means of heaven, there is a God in heaven and he is going to set up his kingdom on earth, that’s what Daniel’s all about.
In the Bible, heaven and earth are not a long way apart, they overlap and they interlock particularly in the temple and in the great visions of Daniel 2, heaven, which are so important for the New Testament. The point is that after the terrible tyrannies of the wicked empires, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which cannot be shaken here on earth. The Jews were creational and covenantal monotheists, it would make no sense to deconstruct that at the last minute. That’s why it’s so dangerous to think about apocalypse writing as dualistic, it isn’t, it’s about the way in which the true God is rescuing his creation from the ushering monsters.
Psalm 72 is especially important within this expectation, the coming king in Psalm 72 will have a particular care for the poor and needy, and under his reign, peace and justice will come down like rain and due, transforming and fruifying the present world. One of the briefest statements of this is Psalm 2, which Paul makes central to his expositions of Jesus’ Messiahship and which universalizes the promises to Abraham. God declares to the Messiah, his son, that he will give him the nations as his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the world for his possession. This is an echo of the Abrahamic promise, but instead of it just being this piece of territory here, it’s the whole world. The coming Messiah will claim the entire world as his own. And to give that up, to abandon it either to the forces of human wickedness or simply to entropy and decay, that would be to spoil the entire Biblical narrative.
We have an implicit cosmology in which heaven is a long way away, probably up in the sky and then we think of earth as all the way down here. So we think of Jesus as coming like a spaceman having to make a long trip from somewhere else. There are a lot of people who take that as completely literal language, as though heaven is a space within our cosmos. That is not how the Bible uses the word heaven. The word heaven has a multiplicity of meanings, but in this sense, heaven is God’s space, and God’s space is supposed to be eventually integrated with our space, earth.
The point is that at the moment it is as though there is a great curtain hanging down through the middle of ordinary reality. So that at any point in any place, God is not far away, Jesus is not far away, it’s just that they’re currently invisible, but one day the curtain will be pulled back, and it won’t be like coming, it’ll be appearing. Imagine the gasp as if somebody were to yank a great curtain back there and we suddenly realized all sorts of things going on behind that curtain, that were actually integrated with our reality and we didn’t realize it.
Now, part of the difficulty here, is that some of the passages in the gospels which have traditionally been taken as predictions of Jesus coming back after a long period, they are predictions of the fall of Jerusalem. In Mark chapter 13, it doesn’t begin with the disciples saying, when are you coming back, it begins with Jesus saying, all this stuff’s going to come crashing down. And the disciples saying, when, when will that be. The difficulty is that the language which they used to describe events like that was what some people have sometimes called apocalyptic language. That is to say, things like the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon will be turned into blood and the stars will be falling from heaven.
Now, generations of Christians have thought that Jesus was predicting the end of the space-time universe. However, when you trace that language back into the Old Testament, and that bit about the sun and the moon and the stars comes from Isaiah 13, it isn’t talking about the collapse of the space-time universe, it’s talking about the fall of Babylon, which was the greatest empire of the day. Because when this huge empire which has dominated the horizon suddenly falls with a crash, what language are you going to use? What poetry can you use to signal that? And when it’s Jerusalem, and if you’re a Jew who believed that was the city where God had promised, eventually to come and live forever, if that falls with a crash and the temple is burnt to the ground, you’re going to talk about the sun and the moon and the stars. Even in our political discourse, we talk about landslides, and we all know that’s a metaphor, they all knew that this language was a metaphor.
The great dream of a detached or disembodied heaven as our ultimate destiny continues unabated. People assume that the word heaven denotes uncomplicatedly, the ultimate destination of the people of God, a destination which most people hope they will find right after their death. It’s fascinating to see how powerful that tradition is, because as some of you know, it is completely contrary to what we find in the New Testament in general, and to Paul in particular. The Jewish vision of God’s ultimate future was never that people would leave this world and end up somewhere else called heaven in the company of God.
There are hints in the Psalms of a life after the present one. Psalm 73, you’ll guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me with glory. But when esquetology comes into full focus as for instance in the book of Daniel, it is all about God’s kingdom being set up on earth as in heaven, and indeed on earth by means of heaven, there is a God in heaven and he is going to set up his kingdom on earth, that’s what Daniel’s all about.
In the Bible, heaven and earth are not a long way apart, they overlap and they interlock particularly in the temple and in the great visions of Daniel 2, heaven, which are so important for the New Testament. The point is that after the terrible tyrannies of the wicked empires, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which cannot be shaken here on earth. The Jews were creational and covenantal monotheists, it would make no sense to deconstruct that at the last minute. That’s why it’s so dangerous to think about apocalypse writing as dualistic, it isn’t, it’s about the way in which the true God is rescuing his creation from the ushering monsters.
Psalm 72 is especially important within this expectation, the coming king in Psalm 72 will have a particular care for the poor and needy, and under his reign, peace and justice will come down like rain and due, transforming and fruifying the present world. One of the briefest statements of this is Psalm 2, which Paul makes central to his expositions of Jesus’ Messiahship and which universalizes the promises to Abraham. God declares to the Messiah, his son, that he will give him the nations as his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the world for his possession. This is an echo of the Abrahamic promise, but instead of it just being this piece of territory here, it’s the whole world. The coming Messiah will claim the entire world as his own. And to give that up, to abandon it either to the forces of human wickedness or simply to entropy and decay, that would be to spoil the entire Biblical narrative.
