Today I am continuing my series on the church, it’s mission, and the work of the Holy Spirit—particularly as it relates to the supernatural manifestations or gifts of the Spirit. In my last post I began by defining the gospel (what God’s mission actually is), and that this mission to “save his people from their sins” is much bigger than just a individual’s personal salvation. It is in fact a mission to redeem the whole creation from sin and its curse, including mankind, and to restore the cosmos to fundamental peace and harmony under the government of his Son—Jesus.
We read in Genesis chapter 3 that when sin entered the world through Adam, it did not just bring about enmity between God and man. It also brought enmity and division into human relationships—between wife and husband, parents and children, young and old, and between the nations and races of the earth. And it also brought enmity between the material world and humanity, so that now it fights against us until eventually in death it consumes us.
The gospel then is that through his Son Jesus, God is undoing the Genesis 3 curse of sin. Which must mean that in order to “save his people from their sins” Jesus must deal with all the consequences of sin—including the material ones. Sickness, pain, famine and drought, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and physical death are all the result of a creation under the curse of sin. Against this then, as Jesus came proclaiming the gospel, we see that the sick are healed, thousands are fed from a few pieces of bread, storms are stilled, and the dead are raised to life.
God’s salvation is therefore outworked in these three areas—bringing peace between ourselves and God, bringing peace in our relationships with one another, and bringing peace between ourselves and the material world in which we exist.
Let me just address for a moment what I previously called the “Willy Wonka” view of heaven and eternal life. My guess is that if you were to ask most Christians what heaven and eternal life is like, they would describe a place that is somewhat “other” than our material world, where we live with God either in an eternal church service—singing worship songs for a very very long time—or not really doing anything meaningful except being very happy hanging out with Jesus. Sadly, somewhere along the line the Christian hope of the resurrection became the Christian hope of an ethereal place called heaven—not living for the day that Christ returns, but living for the day that we die and escape this world.
There is a big difference between these two.
God is redeeming this world, so that Christ’s return does not represent God’s last foray into enemy territory before retreating to heaven forever with his people—but rather the final purge of his enemies (Satan, sin, and death) from the cosmos he loves. It is not so much that we go to heaven, but that heaven comes to us. Isn’t this what Jesus taught us to pray? Let your kingdom come, and let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven?
It is important that we understand this as we see the purpose of the church, the faith we can and absolutely should have for miracles today, and the fact that whatever works we do today by faith in the Lord Jesus are not detached from eternity. Our missional work to bring about the kingdom of God is not just for a spiritual reward that we will receive one day in another place called “heaven”—but they themselves will stand and endure for eternity in this growing kingdom of God.
I had hoped in this blog post that I would get more specific in defining the mission of the church, but I think I shall wait until my next post. Stay tuned!
