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A New Heaven and a New Earth - Dr. J. Richard Middleton
200 Plays1 year ago
Dr. J. Richard Middleton joins the podcast to discuss “A New Heaven and a New Earth”, his book exploring the future hope of Jesus-followers according to the Bible. Nick presses Dr. Middleton on what the Bible has to say about the Image of God and culture creation, the “sacred/secular” divide, the joy of God’s world, the earthy future hope of believers, the intermediate state, the resurrection of animals, and finally, the politics of others-centered love and the importance of social engagement while we await Jesus’ restoration of all things.
Resources: A New Heaven and a New Earth by J. Richard Middleton
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the Repaired Eye podcast, and today we're excited to share a conversation that I was able to have with Dr. J. Richard Middleton. He's a professor of biblical worldview and exegesis at Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan University
Ancient Hopes and Eschatology Discussion
00:00:27
Speaker
Thanks again for coming on and talking about the book with us. It is my pleasure to be here. It's not a brand new book, but we think it's a very relevant one, probably for all time, and one that evangelicals need to continue to grapple with, and that is reflection upon what the ancient Jewish and early Christian hope is for our future as believers in Messiah Jesus. The subtitle of the book is Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology.
00:00:55
Speaker
And I kind of wanted to frame this up by asking, what is a biblical theology approach to eschatology? How does that differ from kind of systematic approaches? Well, the first thing is that title was chosen by the publisher. It's accurate to what I was trying to do. When we learn eschatology in theological studies at seminary or Bible college or so on, it's a separate category by itself. What is to happen at the end?
00:01:19
Speaker
either about the individual and your destiny or the destiny of the whole world. Whereas I view that eschatology in the Bible is the forward movement of God's purposes from creation through sin, through the coming of redemption, to its final culmination. And so eschatology is really inextricable from an entire biblical theology. So the question is, what's the Bible a about?
God's Purpose and Humanity
00:01:40
Speaker
The Bible is ultimately about God's purposes to dwell in the created order with humanity and the rest of creation, which was blocked by sin, because human beings have disobeyed God. And so as the image of God meant to manifest God's presence in the world, we've blocked the presence of God. So God decided to become present to Israel in the Tabernaclean Temple.
00:02:01
Speaker
and then ultimately in the incarnation, and then in the church, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and finally in the new creation where the fullness of God fills all creation and it's all redeemed. So eschatology can't really be separated biblically from the rest of the story.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, and that's good. I like that. instead of Instead of simply referring to end times by the use of the word eschatology, you're much more tracing through the the forward-looking hope of the biblical story of the the patriarchs of the Israelite story of the early Christians, the forward-looking hope in God's promises.
00:02:36
Speaker
What does the the story or the narrative of the Bible tell us about God's purposes and creation, if you want to dig into that a little bit more? So I think of two aspects of it, which I touched on one just a while ago. So biblical eschatology involves God's desire to renew the world.
00:02:55
Speaker
In the Jewish tradition, that's known as tikkun olam, which means literally to establish the world, because it's on shaky ground right now. The world shakes because of sin, but God's going to reestablish creation by redeeming the world, by redeeming all things, reconciling all things to himself. Colossians 1 and many other texts, and there'll be a new heaven and a new earth.
00:03:14
Speaker
So the very creation of God, which has been destabilized by sin, God wants to bring to its fruition, which has never reached that fruition before. And that fruition is a renewed world in which God is in intimate relationship with us and not not simply God in heaven and we on earth.
00:03:31
Speaker
But when you get to Revelation 21-22, the voice from the throne, which is usually in heaven in the Old Testament, is actually in the New Jerusalem speaking. God is in the midst of His people. And as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, God will be all in all. And that's not pantheism, that's temple language. yeah God will indwell this sacred world.
00:03:52
Speaker
It is now a world which is not sacred. It's become, um you know, negatively sacred. it's It's contaminated by sin, but he will renew the world and make it beautiful again. And that comes through the atoning death of Jesus. And then it's it works through the church as the foretaste of God's redemption until all creation, which is yearning for and looking for the day when the children of God be revealed.
00:04:17
Speaker
then all creation will be renewed, liberated from its bondage to futility, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. yeah So creation involves two things, the renewal of earthly life and the dwelling of God with us. That's how I understand God's purposes, and that's what eschatology is primarily about. Restoring that, which was the intention in the beginning that was lost. it never Never got realized, yes, never got realized. okay Yeah, so on that temple language, New Jerusalem, ah you said in your book on page 165, you say, the human purpose was to mediate God's holy presence from heaven to earth precisely through faithful cultural development of the earth as the human race continued to multiply and increase. So how is cultural development of the earth part of God's purposes for humanity?
Cultural Development and God's Plan
00:05:05
Speaker
So let's put it this way, we we know as Christians, God wants us to be holy people, to be righteous, to be obedient to his will in all things. Well, in all things, involves all the things we actually do day by day. So the Bible does not envision a sacred and a secular split in life, but everything we do the way we use technology, the entertainment we consume, the way we spend our money, the the way we vote, the way we raise families, the way we think about things, our engagement with the world, our artistic engagement, our technological development,
00:05:38
Speaker
This is all a part of what we call the cultural mandate. And Christians sometimes look at that and say, okay, that's really great. That's about you know the the secular. And then the sacred is we must ah obey God and be faithful and be spiritual. But no, they're not two separate things. The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians,
00:05:54
Speaker
is is about human character that needs to be become conformed to God's will. We must manifest that character in everything we do, in our work, in our play, in our family life, in our academic work. In everything that we do, we must manifest Christ's likeness. And the Church too much separates those into separate categories, but the Bible does not. So you look at, for example, the the law, the Torah, and the covenant in the Old Testament,
00:06:20
Speaker
And even though we're not applying every detail of that to Christian life, the principles are pretty clear. God has a will for every dimension of Israel's life in the Promised Land. And that's saying that God has a plan and a purpose for every dimension of human life in the earth, which is our Promised Land.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so we need to submit all of life to God's will. No splits between sacred and secular. Yeah, isn't that also essential to what it means to be the image of God? That everything we are to do is to ah come into alignment with being God's caretakers, co-regents, however you want to put that. In the ancient mindset, obviously the king was that actor on behalf of the gods, but in the Hebrew Bible, it's all humanity that's supposed to care for creation on God's behalf.
00:07:07
Speaker
And if we see our day-to-day lives, the way we develop culture, the way we work, the way we caretake, take care of humans, animals, the land, anything else, if we see that all is fulfilling our vocation, doesn't that kind of sacralize everything we do? Yes, it certainly does. And um I want to emphasize not just the the royal aspect that we, like a king in the ancient world, represent his deity, we represent our God on earth, but there's also a sacramental or priestly side to it.
00:07:34
Speaker
Because the two things in the ancient world that were called the image of God were the king and the idol in the temple. yeah And they had the same function. They not only represented the the deities, the pagan gods, but they manifested the presence of that God who was living in heaven to earth. And the human task is by the way we exercise our agency and our power in a Christ-like way,
00:07:56
Speaker
we manifest God's presence on earth and so that people have a sense that God is here. You know, we talk in the evangelical church about this was a God thing. We use language like that. You sense something special is going on there. That's because someone was manifesting the presence of God by their love. um and And Christ is a paradigm image of God. You want to know what the Imago Dei, the image of God really is? Look at Jesus. He exercised power.
00:08:22
Speaker
through love on behalf of others, even sacrificially. Well, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Well, God so loved the world that He gave us His presence to manifest in our lives. So from creation to eschaton, from creation to redemption, we are in the presence of God, and we are mediators of God's presence. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. So we talk about in the church that the priesthood of the believer.
00:08:49
Speaker
which is a kind of a redemptive idea that we are each part of the body meant to manifest God's presence because we have direct connection to God through Christ. Well, that's rooted in the image of God. To be the image of God is already to be a priest and a king in God's world.
Resurrection and Cosmic Restoration
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, so starting to connect some of these ideas then with future hope, how does the resurrection of our body connect, you know, Christian hope to restoration of the of the cosmos and of the earth as well? So if God's purpose, when he created the world,
00:09:19
Speaker
is to put human beings on earth and have them live on earth holy lives, tending the garden of creation, developing it, um bringing out new possibilities that weren't there before. But that's been blocked by sin. Redemption cannot be wiping out the earth and taking us to an immaterial realm. Redemption has to be restoring the purpose of which we were made.
00:09:39
Speaker
um I always say that salvation, which is a bigger term in the Bible than redemption, but we use them in our theology equivalent, and that's fine. Salvation or redemption is both getting rid of what blocks our purpose, that is sin or something else. The exodus from bondage is viewed as salvation in the Old Testament. Bondage was preventing Israel from being who they were called to be.
00:09:59
Speaker
So you get rid of the blockage, but there's a second aspect of salvation or redemption, restoring us to our original purpose. And without that restoration, you don't have salvation. So for example, when Zacchaeus is up in that tree, and he says he's going to ah bring restitution for anybody he has defrauded, and and Jesus says, today's salvation has come to this house. Protestant evangelical Christians think that means he's been saved by his faith.
00:10:26
Speaker
Well, that's not not denying that, but what are he's saying is he showed by his actions to live out salvation that salvation has come. That's the restoration side. Yes, the blockage of sin had to be released so that he could come to know God, but he had to live that out and become a full-fledged human being again. And since he was a tax collector, his sin had to do with defrauding others in the name of the Roman Empire.
00:10:49
Speaker
So his restitution, his redemption had to do with restoring what he had defrauded. And if we are not sanctified to use good Christian language, we haven't experienced the fullness of salvation. Because salvation is not just getting rid of sin, it's also restoring us to what we're meant to be. And if we're meant to be God's image bearers in creation, tending this earth to his glory and honor,
00:11:12
Speaker
then that's what it's going to be in the end. And so you have this vision in Revelation 5, a great number that no one could good number around the throne. And they are made to be priests of our God, and they shall reign upon the earth. That's the restoration of the Magu day. That's the fulfillment of Genesis 1, priests of God in the new creation reigning righteously upon the earth.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, that point's been made, I mean, by theologians for some time. And we've tried to make that point in the podcast several times. If this idea of ah restoration of this earth, is if that idea is kind of new, because you're more used to this otherworldly type of hope, which we'll talk about in a second. If that idea is new, just read Genesis 1 and 2, and then read Revelation 21 and 22. And you'll start to get the picture that the Bible has been put together in this type of grand narrative where the end is restoring sort of what God intended in the beginning. To press you a little bit though on the on the specifically the resurrection of the human body, I mean the Jews and the Christians, we we affirm that there will be a a restoration or a resurrection in the end. We Christians say it's going to look like the resurrection of Jesus as he's the first fruits according to 1 Corinthians 15.
00:12:24
Speaker
Are we looking forward to the same type of resurrection or renovation of this planet too? How are those two ideas connected if they are at all? That's you know that's a great question. i am As a biblical scholar who wants to be faithful to Scripture, I have to say sometimes I don't know the answer to certain things because the Bible isn't very clear on it.
00:12:45
Speaker
I think the Bible is clear that he used 1 Corinthians 15 language, which Paul uses, that the resurrection is about um a state of immortality. We will never die. um Bodily, we will be immortal. The Bible never talks about either of an immortal soul, but it's an immortal body in the resurrection. Will the new creation also be immortal in that way with the non-human world? I don't know. Or will it be some new state that will be renovated but not quite the same as a resurrection body? The Bible isn't very clear on it.
00:13:15
Speaker
I get a lot of questions by email and letters from people who've read the book asking me about specific details about the new creation, and I have to respond, you know, I don't know. That's a great idea. It could be true, but I don't know. The Bible doesn't say. One of the questions you get is, will all animals be resurrected? Well, what do you mean by an animal? You know, in in modern biology, a coral is an animal.
00:13:36
Speaker
I know like that those lines start to be blurred between the animal world. and we Do you mean one example of every animal? There have been a lot of animals living in the world already, or every single animal. The Bible never says that. C.S. Lewis thought that it's only pets who would be resurrected because they were connected to redeemed people. That's right. So if you had animals, maybe a farmer would have his cows resurrected, but just wild animals wouldn't be.
00:14:00
Speaker
They had a relationship to humans, and I think in Lewis's words they they that the pet owners or farmers or whatever, they sort of humanize the animal to such a degree that God may resurrect them. It's kind of funny. yeah I think maybe more than that will will happen, but we don't know. The Bible doesn't specify. The Bible does not give us eschatological details to satisfy our curiosity. Whatever it says about the eschaton, about the last things, is meant to motivate us to live towards that vision.
00:14:29
Speaker
So it's ethically oriented, it's not primarily about figuring out details. Yeah, i more on that in a second here. But I wanted to pause here and just talk a little bit about that sort of otherworldly hope that, to be honest, I mean, just a lot of evangelicals that you talked to, they're faithful, they're really trying to do the right thing, they're really trying to abide by what has been passed down to them, as far as theological systems are concerned, and and they are trying to be faithful to that.
00:14:54
Speaker
you get the sense that people really don't like the planet, don't want to be anywhere near this earth, and want to be in and sort of an unembodied, ah ethereal state, or they think that's what we're supposed to want. Even if that sounds horrible to some of us, ah they they think the biblical faithfulness is to try to hope for that otherworldly type of state. I wanted to drop in a quote here that you had from your book on page 58. You said,
00:15:22
Speaker
close attention to the unfolding biblical story reveals that there is simply no role for heaven as the final destiny of the righteous. And we'll unpack that a little bit, but what does scripture actually tell us about the final destiny of the righteous? You touched on this a little bit already.
00:15:40
Speaker
So you could say it's resurrection, um but you have if you have resurrection of the body, you have to have where will the resurrection be? Will you be floating in an ethereal space somewhere? No, you'll be on terra firma, but a new earth. A body does you no good if there's no like environment to be embodied in.
00:15:58
Speaker
There's actually an early church father, Methodius, who though is inconsistent on this. I have a quote in the book from him where he says, if there's going to be a resurrected body, it's got to be someplace. So we've got to have ah have a new earth too, which just logically makes sense, right? You see, I'm drawing on my experience now, which I think may be the experience of many people in the church.
00:16:17
Speaker
that we are taught, especially by worship music and by hymns, and I quote a lot of hymns to show how it brings us out in the book, that we are taught that the final destiny is someplace else. We call it heaven, and I'll just put a parenthetical comment here. What we mean by heaven is not what any passage in the Bible ever meant by the word heaven, but that's a different question.
00:16:39
Speaker
But anyway, it clearly is not the final destiny of the redeemed in the Bible, which is a new creation. But what we mean by heaven is someplace which is intangible, invisible, um immaterial, someplace else a dimension. We think of it as a dimension. this Unless you are more concrete oriented, then you can imagine it someplace like an immaterial version of this world, which I don't know what that would mean. but We have this, we grew upon this, I grew upon this. And then we have in the back of our minds,
00:17:08
Speaker
2 Peter 3 and Revelation 21, I saw a new heaven and a new earth. So we know there's a new creation, but we don't know how to connect these two.
Heaven and New Earth Explained
00:17:17
Speaker
And I remember thinking that I have these three ideas in tension as a 20-year-old theology student, an otherworldly destiny, we're going to heaven to be with God forever, resurrection of the body, how that works with heaven, I don't know, and then a new heaven and a new earth, and I have no idea how to put those together, and those drove me to study Scripture.
00:17:36
Speaker
And as I studied scripture, I looked especially for what did the Bible describe as the final destiny of the righteous. And I found that it never used the word heaven in any context for that final destiny. So as a bit bit of a brash 20 year old leading a Bible study at my church, I said, but okay, here's the $20 bill. Come back next week and bring a Bible passage that says we're going to live in heaven forever and you've got the $20 bill.
00:18:01
Speaker
After about three or four weeks, we realized that there were no such passages. Every text someone brought, we read it and said, it doesn't actually say that. We're just assuming that's what we call heaven. And you said in your book that you still have all your money.
00:18:14
Speaker
And so I sell out all my money. And i but I started doing that when I started teaching undergraduates at Robis Westium. After about three years of teaching my course, word on the street, the oral tradition in the university was, don't take his bet, because he is right and there are no such passages. So that teaching moment passed, but it was very helpful to pose it that way. Find me a text that says, we're going to live in heaven forever. No one could find any, because there aren't any.
00:18:42
Speaker
But just to reiterate your point too, when the biblical author says heaven, they are not referring to the exact same thing that we probably have on our brain when we say in English heaven. We're getting our ideas probably from medieval Europe, which is is slightly different. Maybe we can leave that one aside.
00:18:57
Speaker
I just made the comment then that the phrase, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, Hebrew has a plural. It's actually a dual heavens. Look at translated heavens, singular. Any time a translator thinks it's referring to an immaterial realm, but it never is. It's is's a physical realm. It's the the universe out there. Praise the Lord from the heavens, Psalm 148. Angels, waters above the heavens, stars moon above us.
00:19:23
Speaker
above us. What we would call sky from being on the ground. So sky is a perfectly good translation for heaven. yeah I even think of C.S. Lewis in his um science fiction novels. He calls the universe, apart from earth, the heavens. yeah That's what he calls it, but it's the physical universe. So the new heaven and the new earth is the new physical universe. And heaven is only symbolically where God's throne is. That's why you know the Soviet cosmonauts went out in space. and We didn't see God out there,
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's not literalistic. It's also not an immaterial realm. It's saying, just as we don't easily get to heaven, because the sky is way above us, it's transcendent. God is also transcendent. Yet the the paradox is, at the end of the story, God comes to dwell on earth fully imminent. He's already imminent in Christ, um the incarnation of the Word. He'll become imminent on earth. He'll be with us in the new creation.
00:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, so what's up there? Where, you know, where God dwells up there, that kind of becomes a euphemism, then you can just say heaven as a euphemism for wherever God is, which the ancient thought was up there somewhere. So we call God heaven, you know, ah heaven-funded meant God spoke, right? Yeah. So what will the the the righteous, the redeemed, the resurrected people be doing in the new creation. So based on that hint in Revelation 5 that we as priests, we will reign a rule upon the earth. I think that what it means is that we will embody the fullness of being human that God intended for us for the first time without sin.
00:20:55
Speaker
Which is, that's why Paul says what God has planned for us is beyond human imagination. No eye has seen, no ear has heard. Never enter the heart of man, what God's planned for us. How can you imagine engaging in ordinary human culture in an urban society? New Jerusalem is a city, right? um With technology, we have you know precious gems in in the gates and the walls of the New Jerusalem.
00:21:19
Speaker
This is an amazing place, and people are going to be engaging in their royal agency as the image of God, doing wonderful things without sin. I cannot imagine that. yeah An economy that doesn't build itself on the backs of the oppressed, like every single economy does. yeah that's right yeah yeah Yeah, that will be something. And to your point earlier, it's it's impossible to really put exact, precise language to it because the Bible doesn't do that. And don't I don't think we're supposed to be probably dwelling all hours of the day and night on the precise details, rather than it is good. It is a good, created order again. And it should motivate us to want to live lives now that do not contribute to evil in the world, but that do good to bring blessing by everything that we do.
00:22:06
Speaker
I want to circle to that again, for sure. But I wanted to drop in this quote, too. You you include this this wonderful little comic from John Hart, I think, in your book, where one character says, oh my goodness, the other goes, what? The other one goes, the Bible says, one day the earth will be destroyed, to which the other responds, do the meek know this?
00:22:27
Speaker
obviously playing on the the Sermon on the Mount there, but the the comic kind of draws out the contradiction that in the Bible from the Old Testament all the way, you know, through to the Sermon on the Mount, through to Revelation, the hope of God's people is always this earthly. And to think that God will destroy it and wisp us off someplace to some unembodied state is kind of a strange turn, and it actually doesn't coincide with even some of Jesus's words.
00:22:55
Speaker
In addition, if God's plan is really to destroy his creation instead of redeeming it, this is kind of my question. I've thought about this one for a while. On a narrative level, the scriptural narrative level, if the primordial adversary, the Satan, if he achieves his desire to disorder God's good ordered world, then doesn't he kind of win on a narrative level?
00:23:22
Speaker
yeah If God has to discard the world because of evil that comes from the demonic, then God's lost. But but love is stronger than death. I mean, the the Song of Solomon says love is as strong as death, but New Testament suggests love is stronger than death, and life will overcome, and God is going to redeem the world because evil has not won and will not win. and I remember hearing a pastor many, many years ago, oh gosh, 30, 40 years ago now, say the key point of the book of Revelation is Jesus is going to win.
00:23:51
Speaker
yeah even would be overcome. So start living that way now. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, perhaps we sometimes think, well, God's discarding of the old earth and creating a new one. That is his way of winning. And maybe you could kind of argue in that direction, but that still bothers me on a narrative level. It really does because of what God says in Genesis, that his everything he made is good, good, good, good, good. And then at the end of this story seven times, sorry, I only said it five or six times.
00:24:20
Speaker
At the end of this story, if he has to trash the thing and restart, it's like, oh, I think the devil won. Like he got the creation. He disordered it. He disrupted it. Yeah. that There's a statement that we sometimes make the people of a low self-image. God doesn't make junk. You're important in God's sight. And one of my professors said, not only does God not make junk, God doesn't junk what he makes. And that's about the whole creation being redeemed. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Symbolism of Destruction and Purification
00:24:47
Speaker
good.
00:24:47
Speaker
But there are passages that people will go to, like 2 Peter 3, where you have a description of of the elements of the earth being destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare, or in some other translation will be burned up. There's a there's a textual criticism problem with that, but yeah.
00:25:07
Speaker
the heavens will be destroyed by fire, the elements will melt in the heat. So many Christians, I mean, understandably, they they take these passages and they think it's describing the end of creation. But if God's plan is actually a restoration of creation and of earth in particular here, what are these passages actually teaching? Because there's others as well.
00:25:30
Speaker
Right. So the the second Peter 3 passage, very important passage. i I come to it three times in the book. It's that important because it's misread easily. So that it actually says that the elements and the heavens will be destroyed or melt the languages of fire burning. um But it never says that about the earth.
00:25:48
Speaker
In fact, the earth and all the works of it, the works done in it will be found. That's literally what it says. And it's the same passive of the verb to find that is used a few verses later when it says, make every effort to be found blameless before the throne when Christ returns. So if we're to be found blameless and the earth is going to be found after purification by fire, then that's a different kind of image. That's an image of cleansing. Because let's face it, the Bible is very clear there will be judgment.
00:26:16
Speaker
And some people's works using 1 Corinthians Paul language would be burned up like hay, stubble, and wood. But other works like gold precious metals will go through the fire and be preserved. And so this is ah this is a picture of smelting of metal, which by the way happens to be done in a foundry, which is where you find the purity after you burn off the dross. Paul uses this language in Corinthians.
00:26:41
Speaker
Yes, yes. So I think that that that the picture there is of the cleansing of the world. Now, why are the elements and the heavens be destroyed? um The Old Testament picture, which is drawing on, is that God in heaven has to first part the heavens to bring judgment on the earth. It's rolled up like a scroll. There's language like that in the Old Testament cited in the gospels also. It's not about destruction. It's about preparing judgment.
00:27:05
Speaker
And because the power is in the heavens, and there is, of course, war in heaven, to use language from Revelation, there are corrupt powers in the heavens, the demonic forces, the principalities and powers. It's not just God in heaven, and God has to judge them. Many Old Testament texts say God will judge the powers in the heaven, and then the kings upon the earth.
00:27:23
Speaker
Those are the ones abusing power. So to judge the earth first, there was a destruction in the sense of a judgment on the heavens, but then the earth will be cleansed and purified. And then what we find, says Peter, is a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness is at home. Because right now, righteousness is a stranger upon theory. Righteousness has been fleeing a refugee. That's why we're going to go to heaven. We're going to get out of this terrible place. There is evil here, of course.
00:27:51
Speaker
But God's purpose is to restore it and redeem it after judgment. That's so good, and your point that you made. and And I picked up on some of that language of ah God melting the elements or or the the heavens basically passing away. I i didn't ah didn't connect that first point you made of God parting it and making a way before before Judgment Day, but I did connect with that kind of ancient worldview that the gods are up there.
00:28:18
Speaker
and We might call them demons, but the ancients called them gods, Elohim. We could say small g gods either way, but you you made that point that it's not only the most high god, it's not only Yahweh up there, it's these other beings, which obviously the Jews came to believe were created by God, but they're a lesser. lesser beings. and Just a little plug here for our audience, the importance of taking biblical context and the the the ancient worldview seriously, because then all of a sudden you start to realize, even having insights into the New Testament, based on ancient Jewish understandings of the gods of the world that were sometimes associated with stars or the the heavens up there, This language in the New Testament has even helped by understanding that that's going on in the background, in the in the cognitive environment of the authors. So I have a whole chapter earlier in the book about this, this judgment theophan is in the Old Testament where God seems to be judging the heavens or the deities, and it looks like the earth will be destroyed. But no, it at the end of the judgment it says, and from the ends of the earth people praise the Lord.
00:29:22
Speaker
because they've got rid of the evil, you know? yeah And then this gets applied by Jesus and and others in the New Testament, like the Olivet Discourse uses language from these judgments, theophanists. The very language found in the New Testament about the stars falling from heaven is actually the Septuagint Greek translation of an Old Testament text which says that God will bring down the false gods from heaven. Ah, yes.
00:29:45
Speaker
So the context is not about physical stars falling, it's God judging the evil powers in the heavens. And in the book of Revelation, the angels are called stars, and a third of the stars fall down because God has judged a third of the angels. That's right. Yeah, that's right. We think of stars quite literally as balls of flaming fire, right? Helium or whatever.
00:30:05
Speaker
The ancients thought of stars as points of light that were divine in some way, like deities or angels. They never made that distinction that we do. No ancient person in biblical times would have ever thought that stars were physical objects.
00:30:20
Speaker
ah get our heads around that. They think differently than we do. yeah And connected to their ancient cosmology where these things were probably located in and around the that dome, but we'll talk about that in a different episode. but There are several New Testament passages then that describe something being prepared in heaven for God's people. God is going to take believers to go to that place that he's preparing for them.
00:30:47
Speaker
So how would this type of language of preparation, I'm thinking like in John, I go to prepare a place for you. How would this language of preparation have been understood within Jewish eschatology?
00:30:58
Speaker
Right. So I would distinguish two things you said. There is a lot of texts in many different parts of the New Testament about God is preparing a place, a city, a salvation, an inheritance, all sorts of language like this. But nowhere does it say He will take us there. and One of the key passages is in Philippians, which talks about our citizenship is in heaven.
00:31:19
Speaker
fully correct or citizenship is not in earth because earth is corrupt but we are expecting a savior who will come from heaven and transform us and our body is to conform me to his glorious body so he's coming from heaven and the analogy that tom wright the new testament scholar loves to make in many different places is if i tell my kids when they were younger they're grown up now if i tell them i've got some christmas presents for you they're in the attic when christmas comes you don't have to go into the attic i'm going to bring them out and give it to you down in the living room. So what is prepared in heaven will be manifest or revealed on the last day. That's the pattern, which I call the um apocalyptic pattern, because the word apocalyptic actually comes from the word to reveal or unveil. So what is hidden, our life is hidden with Christ and God right now.
00:32:06
Speaker
Who we are is not fully revealed. What God has prepared for us, no one can see yet, but it will be it's being kept securely with God in His heaven, whatever that means, to be revealed to us on earth at the last day. So the direction of salvation is from heaven to earth, never from earth to heaven.
00:32:26
Speaker
I'm glad that you distinguished that I sort of misspoke there because even in John 14, which I was sort of quoting, he says, I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself that where I am there, you'll be also. The implication is actually where he will be is here because he is coming back.
00:32:47
Speaker
Right. It also you know doesn't specify exactly where he will be. The implication is here. But if you are if you live within Jewish and Old Testament um framework of thinking, you know he's going to be here. God came from heaven to dwell with Israel in the temple.
00:33:03
Speaker
God promised to return to the temple in the last times. The new New Testament says God came back in the person of Jesus. Then He sent the Spirit to the church to live with us. And by the way, in John, the idea that He says the Spirit will come and make His home with you. It's the same word for home used in the John 14 passage. and But I'm going to prepare a place for you that is going to be your home, basically. So it's coming from heaven to earth to renew earth to transform earth. But we're not going there.
00:33:30
Speaker
yeah Again, I've got my $20. I'll raise it to $100 if anybody wants to address that, but I'm pretty sure about that now. There's got to be a college student somewhere that could use $100. So I did, I have for those interested, I have two entire chapters later on in the book, looking at every single passage that people have brought to me and some that nobody has brought to me that I thought of, that you could say these passages speak of the destruction of the earth and going to heaven. And I show, I think, reasonably in each case, none of them actually says that.
00:34:01
Speaker
and And that slows down the argument of the book, but I think it's important for those who are interested in those passages to go look at them. Very much. I think probably a major reason why we just kind of have this assumption that we're going somewhere else and that is the final restoration state of existence. I think
Eschatology's Impact on Ethics and Actions
00:34:19
Speaker
a large reason why is because of our theology of what happens after we die.
00:34:24
Speaker
you know, what theologians call the intermediate state. Many of us, we have, you know, kind of hope for a heavenly out of worldly existence between the time of our death, awaiting resurrection to come at some point in the future. To quote you in your book again on page 236, you said, having studied the relevant texts,
00:34:44
Speaker
I'm surprised at how little evidence there actually is for an interim state in the New Testament. In the end, however, it doesn't matter. Authentic Christian hope does not depend on an intermediate state. So especially upon the death of a Christian, our loved ones.
00:35:01
Speaker
a post-mortem sort of heavenly hope, it gives us a real sense of encouragement and consolation. and And we always quote, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And we, you're thinking, you know, in heaven. So just to make this a point here, you've spoken at funeral services before you say in the book. So what do you say at these type of services?
00:35:25
Speaker
So at the last one I spoke at, which was my mother-in-law's funeral, the sermon I preached, I explicitly said, the Bible doesn't talk about hope in heaven immediately after death. What the Bible talks about is a new creation, a resurrection. And I expounded that And two sisters of my mother-in-law about her same age in the eighty s late 80s came to me afterwards and said, when we die, would you preach that at our funeral? Because that gave us such hope. To be with Christ is in the new creation, in the resurrected body. That's what I think Paul is talking about. that That's to be present with the Lord. and And I found that that can give hope. So for me, these ideas about eschatology are not just ideas.
00:36:05
Speaker
to prove a point. They motivate us to live in this world with hope, trusting that God is greater than the evil around us. We talk a lot these days about deconstruction. I've been in deconstruction all my life. This book is an act of deconstruction. I never knew that term because I don't just want to destroy bad ideas. I want to put better ideas in its place. I want to get back to what the Bible really is saying because it's much more powerful and inspiring for my life.
00:36:31
Speaker
than some of the half-baked ideas that I have been taught along the way. So the metaphor that I use is many of my students and readers are standing upon a threadbare rug of theology. And I'm not going to yank it out from out of them. I'm going to say, here's a plush carpet. You want to step over? I've got something better.
00:36:49
Speaker
Well, getting rid of that red beer rug, you can say that's deconstruction, but I want to really do reconstruction. I want to ground us more deeply in biblical faith so we become better Christians and more biblical.
00:37:03
Speaker
That's how we've landed on the on the term that we've kind of coined, reparadigm. We're not trying to toss everything out, but we want to just kind of shift the focus yeah back to a more biblically-based faith, something that's rooted and grounded in original context as best we can. I mean, let's face it, 90% of what evangelicals believe is right. We've got some misunderstanding of some framework ideas which mislead us. We need to retune, reparadigm those. But we've got a lot of good doctrine under there, so let's not worry about that.
00:37:32
Speaker
but the But the doctrine will make even more sense when we have a better paradigm. Yes, and it will influence our ethics because I am kind of convinced we start to get ethics a little bit off or we have some strange ideas about it. You said in your book, you said ethics is lived eschatology. That was really striking ah to Matt and I. we We both sat with that for a while and that's good. so So why is eschatology so important for our ethics in the here and now? yeah So when I said that, I put a caveat right after I said I don't mean that the ideas you have about the rapture and the antichrist and this and that are going to affect your ethical life. That doesn't normally affect people's lives. Those are just speculative ideas. is What do you really yearn and hope for as God's purposes for the world? That's your eschatology. That will affect how you live.
00:38:21
Speaker
yeah and I think most Christians really do want to care about this world, but they're conflicted, yes because they have this other yearning, and so they're double-minded in a sense. We need to get clarity on that. And you think if we had a more biblically accurate, eschatological hope, we wouldn't have such a contradiction in beliefs. We wouldn't hope, on the one hand, for new creation, and kind of be comfortable with the way the world is, as messed up as it is, injustice, warfare, etc., etc.
00:38:50
Speaker
And I think a word to pastors is important here. James chapter three verse one says that not many of you are to become teachers and teaching is central to the pastor vocation because you'll be subject to stricter judgment. The reason is because if you're teaching people a framework for living that's going to affect their lives and they'll be now misaligned with God's purposes, boy, are you in trouble. and So preaching,
00:39:12
Speaker
Liturgy, worship, the whole thing, the whole pastoral ministry ought to be putting people on the right track to live according to Christian discipleship and not misaligning our hopes so that we live the wrong way. So it's not just a matter of what you preach, it's a matter of how do you even shape a worship service and what songs do you sing and how do you scripture in that and how do you counsel people and so on and so forth.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, to be more specific than if if we could, what what aspects of God's redemption activity are we missing out on when we get so fixated on going to heaven when we die?
00:39:48
Speaker
Well, we're missing out on, let's say, two kinds of things. We're missing out on the the actual joy of the world. I mean, my thinking about Christian eschatology really started when I was 20. Before that, I had a kind of otherworldly spirituality that feel I just learned from the church. And I grew up in Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, a gorgeous island. did i Did I go to the beach much? Not very much. Did I go mountain climbing? We've got a beautiful mountain ranger. Not much.
00:40:14
Speaker
Starting at age 20, I started to do mountain climbing and going to the beach. About a few years later, I looked back and I thought, no, why did I do that? Ah, because I started to realize the world was God's good creation. So it affected my joy in the world and my enjoyment. And I also was in in high school an art student, but I went to seminary to study theology because I thought that was more spiritual than art. But I started to use my artistic abilities later in life when I realized this is part of what it means to be made in God's image.
00:40:43
Speaker
So so it it brought the joy and um beauty of the created order back to me. The other thing that we miss out on is that we do not believe, really believe that we can change the world for good by our compassionate sacrificial actions. We don't believe that. To the extent that we believe we can change the world, we think we've got to use the world's techniques for it. And that's where a lot of the the political infighting in America comes from. yeah What? Jesus overcame the devil by sacrifice. Now, you get these quotes. I've heard them um on social media a lot that that pastors have said, well, we tried that, but the Jesus model didn't work. So now we've got to take over the world for Jesus. Really? That means you're not a Christian, basically. Right. Jesus isn't actually the supreme authority, which means Jesus isn't Lord, which means you're not a Christian. so so
00:41:33
Speaker
but To think that we could really make a difference in the world for good by our individual and communal actions, but actions that are done out of love, seeking the good of our neighbor, I think we miss out on that also.
00:41:46
Speaker
the first thing you said, the missing out on joy, that's really key. And I've personally seen that too, where Christians who kind of have this, well, hold on until the rapture comes type of mentality can honestly be very hopeless and not engage in the world with ah with a sense of joy, gratitude. And then to your second point, and also like not be motivated at all to do anything in the world that would involve sacrificial service to actually try to bring more good, more order into the world. Kind of a loser mentality. Like, I just hope I stay faithful until Jesus raptures me. This whole thing is going down into the hellhole. Now, even if someone has that attitude, they have to engage in the actual world. They have to make a living somehow. and they're One way or another, they will. So they will. So the question is, by what principles will you do that? What's your motivation?
00:42:39
Speaker
So we actually end up living in the real world, doing all kinds of things that we do not connect with our faith. So we do them according to the spirit of the times. And we are sucked into that mentality. And we're not being Christians in those areas of life. We limit our Christian faith to certain a little spiritual slice of life.
00:42:58
Speaker
That's damaging then for the way we live our life to not get the eschatological hope correct. We actually can easily succumb to just worldliness, the patterns of the world. However, our culture is thinking about stuff. We'll just kind of glide into that because there's no real Christian eschatological hope that's forming our identity in the here and now.
00:43:20
Speaker
I'll give another quote
Resurrection Hope: Challenging the Status Quo
00:43:21
Speaker
here from your book. You said, resurrection means that the present world order will not last forever. Resurrection turns this world upside down. In your book, you note that the Sadducees, who kind of had positions of power, they had a good relationship with the Romans, they objected to this resurrection hope that had developed specifically in Second Temple Judaism.
00:43:44
Speaker
And for much of its history, the church has kind of worked to seize power and sort of be relevant as well, kind of like the Sadducees did with the Romans. The church has kind of tended to do the same thing. We try to carve out an existence for ourselves that is comfortable.
00:43:59
Speaker
with the dominant powers of the world. Is this historical quest that the church has embarked on repeatedly, is this quest for power connected to the church's de-emphasizing of ah hope and bodily resurrection, do you think? That's interesting. um It sounds from your what you're saying, I would say that, yeah, probably it is connected, but it may that that may not be the only connection.
00:44:25
Speaker
The way that resurrection arose, but as far as we can tell in the ancient world, is and within the Bible. so You don't have explicit resurrection in the Old Testament, but you have a few places where it suggests that death is not the end. But it doesn't say what's the end, right? um Like Psalm 49, a wisdom psalm, that um evil people are going down into the grave, and the grave is going to swallow them. But God will take me.
00:44:48
Speaker
and ransom me from the grave." Okay, how? What? It doesn't say. And so you get by Daniel chapter 2 that um some of the righteous will arise to immortal life, resurrection life. It just says some. It's the beginning of a doctrine or explicit resurrection. By the time you get to the time of the Maccabees, where people are resisting, um the you know, the Greek Empire and their attempt to subjugate the Jews, one of their motivations for resistance is, you can kill me, but God will raise me up with the last day.
00:45:18
Speaker
So resurrection, the belief in resurrection, allows you to go against evil, even at your personal death, because you trust in something bigger than yourself. So that in that sense, if you really believe in resurrection, the way it's functioning in the Old Testament, let's look at Jesus. He went to the cross willingly because he knew the resurrection. He was willing to sacrifice himself.
00:45:40
Speaker
If we truly believe in the resurrection, that we are we want to work for change in this world, and we will not simply accept the world as it is, the status quo. The crucial thing to say is we need to work for change according to the model of Jesus. And Paul, Christ, participation in Christ, and not the ways of the world, which is about taking power to bring about change on our own behalf. No.
00:46:04
Speaker
One of the important phrases that's being used these days, Tom Wright uses it, others use it too, is we're not building the kingdom of God. We're building for the kingdom. We're doing things that will contribute to it, but God brings the kingdom. I love that language of of being signposts to that coming world. I love that language that he uses as well. It's very helpful to me.
00:46:25
Speaker
Even if someone has kind of the the view that the earth will be fully destroyed, but then God will remake a new one, those details are still a little bit gray. We don't know how much of this world transfers into the resurrection world, whatever. So we can argue about that if we want. But even if you have that view that this physical world will be gone, God will recreate a new physical world. Aren't we still obliged to embody the way the new world will be as best we can in the here and now. And doesn't that give kind of our preaching about that new world conviction as people can see it, can feel it in the community of Jesus? So I think that, you know, people are not always consistent in their beliefs and their actions. There are many people who have an otherworldly eschatology who try to live very humbly and sacrificially in the world today and seek what is good. There's no doubt about that.
00:47:18
Speaker
And there are people who have a new creation, eschatology, who live aggressively and are are not according to Christ's standards. So there is no simple one-to-one. The way in which we hold to the eschatology will affect us. So yes, um you know, I was shaped by Hal Lindsay before the Left Behind books. You know, the title Left Behind probably comes from the Larry Norman song, I Wish We'd All Been Ready, because it talks about people being left behind.
00:47:43
Speaker
But Hal Lindsey, in his book, The Late Great Planet Earth, i mean I did a study of that book when I was writing a Maschatology book. You know, Hal Lindsey, being a f ah dispensationalist theologian, believes in a new heaven and new earth. They do, but it's a replacement one, in his view. And apart from about two pages where he spends on that,
00:48:02
Speaker
He doesn't touch on the idea of a new creation at all in the rest of the book. It's primarily about the rapture, the tribulation of the rapture. So that's, even though you believe in a new creation, a new heaven and new earth, if it doesn't grip your imagination, you're focused on something else, that's what will shape how you live. And I think there are a lot of people who believe intellectually in a disembodied heaven hereafter, but they are gripped by a vision of following Christ in the present.
00:48:29
Speaker
So their ethics is better than their formal eschatology, but i would it's even better if they have a deeply embedded vision of the future that affects their lives for good. Kind of coming to a conclusion then here, I loved one quote in your book on page 71. You said, God's elect cannot be expected to delay being human and until the eschaton.
00:48:52
Speaker
Even though we believe that all things won't fully be restored to their original state, to their intended good state, until Jesus returns and until resurrection happened, we still do have the privilege and the opportunity, and like I said before, perhaps the obligation to, by the Spirit of God, demonstrate a little foretaste of that new world. Do we not?
00:49:20
Speaker
You see that comment that we couldn't delay being human until the Azkitan. It's really a comment on Revelation 5, that the last vision that we have is of human beings as priests in God's world ruling over the earth. That's not just for the future, but until now we just live sacrificially, then we get power.
00:49:38
Speaker
yeah We have to use power sacrificially in the world every day. have to full So it's like you're justified by faith, use Christian language, and the final day you're resurrected. What happens in between a process of sanctification as we are transformed into Christ-likeness?
00:49:55
Speaker
That's about being human. We have to actually live that out in the present. It's not just for us to justify then glorification. No, between the process has to be take root in our lives as we are changed into Christ's image, as we are fully human in all the things that we do. That's really my vision that I think that's why I wrote this book to help Christians live better.
00:50:15
Speaker
I wanted to touch on one more thing that you had brought up, and that is the connection between the resurrection hope and the ability to love. The way we've explicated this on the podcast is that the resurrection hope gives us the liberty to live in an ethic of love. And what I mean by love is like is forgiveness, is self-giving on behalf of the other. But the resurrection hope frees us from the cycle of fear of death, frees us from these tribal mentalities.
00:50:45
Speaker
that we can willingly lay down our life, if need be, or in a million small ways, do that. Because there is restoration coming, and not only that, but even according to Paul's theology, God rewards and God will carry through into the future all that is done in love. There are things that are not wood, hay, and straw.
00:51:08
Speaker
that get burned up, but there are things that carry through to the new world somehow. So those two those two things together, the role that the resurrection hope plays in providing us the the the means and the um ability to live in a genuine love ethic, an ethic that looks like Jesus going to the cross, those two ideas have been very powerful to me.
00:51:31
Speaker
yeah Yeah. What you're getting at here is that the end doesn't justify the means. Right. There's no shortcuts here. Yes. So I am willing. So that's it. We're not going to say where your readers or your listeners are on the political spectrum. But suppose the the government that you don't want gets into power.
00:51:50
Speaker
It's not the end of the world. There is a future beyond that. We don't have to stick our lives on any intermediate result. Even if we suffer personally, that's okay if we're doing this out of love. And because God will would be the victor in the end.
00:52:07
Speaker
So I don't have to be anxious just about whether I'm going to die in persecution. That's probably not going to happen to most Christians in America today. But we may just say lots of little small deaths were to give up. You know, in a spiritual relationship with with your wife or your husband, you have to do a lot of sacrifice to make that relationship work.
00:52:23
Speaker
That's what love requires. Love requires sacrifice on behalf of others. Otherwise, nothing good will ever happen. If you just get your own way, you're going to destroy other people's lives. And Christians need to become aware of that because the discourse in America today suggests that we aren't aware of that. We don't really believe that. We don't really believe in the power of the resurrection. We believe in our power to make change in this world, which is good, but that's not final and that's not definitive.
00:52:52
Speaker
I think we're also open to being seduced by, let's just say the powers of the world. You brought up the political landscape. We are easily seduced into kind of lending our support and our unwielding, like never questioning admiration to people who say they'll protect me and people like me.
00:53:13
Speaker
Is that not living in kind of a fallen way of being? Living in know in a way that says, my life is ultimate, I need to protect it at all costs. What did you say? The ends justify the means. yeah But that that maybe tips us off that we're not living with ah with a ah genuine sacrificial love for our neighbor, with a genuine forgiveness type of ethic, even if it should cost us, because we know there's ah there's a resurrection state coming.
00:53:41
Speaker
You see, I am willing to vote on behalf of certain political representatives who will do good for other people, but not for me. That'd look a little bit like Jesus of Nazareth, I think. Yeah. Because I don't necessarily want the politician to do what's in my best interest, but what's in the best interest for most people in this country, especially for those who are more disadvantaged. That's what I care about more.
00:54:05
Speaker
That's powerful. Well, thanks for the discussion. Do you have any final words, reflections or just your overall desire that that this book would have and that these reflections would have on our evangelical church in the United States here?
00:54:18
Speaker
I'm a biblical scholar and I do my serious research, but I always do the research for the sake of the church. Even when I'm giving an academic paper at a conference, I'm hoping that it will touch people's lives, that they will come to trust the Bible more. I just really want the church to believe in the good news of the gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, to really believe it and to live it out. That's much more important to me than you agree with me on every issue that I've raised. Much more important.
00:54:51
Speaker
publications or anything like that coming out soon or no? um I'm halfway through a book on
00:55:07
Speaker
Yeah, we'll look forward to that again. The topic of our conversation primarily today was your book, A New Heaven and a New Earth, and we would recommend to all of our listeners to pick up the copy and sit with you with some of these deep and interesting and needed questions that we need to be asking. So, appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.