If two people spoke two different languages, communication would difficult. Some would be possible. If one were hungry, for example, communicating this would not be particularly difficult with subtle hand gestures. If one wished to communicate her desire to curl up with a novel of realistic fiction set in 1920s prohibition-era Minneapolis while drinking a chai latte and listening to gentle Dubstep music lightly thumping in the background, I cannot imagine the hand gestures necessary.
There are concepts that are difficult to communicate even when both people speak the same language. If you were trying to explain a difficult interaction with a coworker to your boss and you said to her, “I told him I thought we should try a different way and suddenly it was like I was fusing iron!”, your boss almost certainly wouldn’t understand. You see, when a star begins fusing iron in its core it begins collapsing at nearly a quarter of the speed of light, resulting in that star going supernova because the fusion of iron requires mor—you get the point. Just because you both speak English doesn’t mean you have the same frame of reference or the same vocabulary to communicate effectively.
In my lifetime I’ve seen a rapid shift in cultural understanding of “Christian language”. For example, I remember being in third grade when the class began discussing the John 3:16 man. Rollen Stewart—the Rainbow Man—had become famous for holding up signs with “John 3:16” on them during football games. Only one or two kids in the class, myself included, could not recite John 3:16, even though most of us did not attend church regularly. The words “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son” were simply part of the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, Christian or otherwise. Today more folk are far more likely to know “Austin 3:16” than John 3:16.
Christians have the most important message to communicate with others. As Peter said to Jesus in John 6, Jesus alone has “the words of eternal life”—words entrusted to his people to proclaim. How do we communicate the truth of God in Christ with people who increasingly know less and less of the Bible and concepts such as sin and atonement and justification and salvation? In many cases we might as well be speaking different languages!
I shared a few weeks ago that I was asked to speak at a funeral a few weeks in which a number of unchurched folk would be in attendance. I knew many would hear the truth of Jesus for the first time. Funerals often provide a great opportunity to share the gospel, but how does one share the truth of God in Christ to people who have no real knowledge of the Bible or the Trinity or even an understanding of sin? It’s not hard to recognize the difficulty of a specialized vocabulary in explaining the gospel to folk who don’t know the particular vocabulary. Last week a member here at New City asked me to share what I said at the funeral so I’ve decided to share it with everyone.
The truth is we live in a broken world. Everyone senses this world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Children should be loved by their parents, protected and nurtured by them. Husbands and wives are supposed to remain committed to one another. No one should go to bed hungry. There should be no racism or sexism or classism. In the world God created there shouldn’t be natural disasters like earthquakes and famines and droughts. In the beginning, when God first created the world, he declared his world was “very good”—it was free of these things.
It was more than free of bad things. It was a world that provided for human flourishing. All that humans would ever need or desire would be produced by the earth itself. Men and women were to take the world’s abundant resources and seek to improve God’s very good world.
Something interrupted this. Something brought pain and misery, suffering and death into God’s very good world. That something is us. It began with the first humans God created: Adam and Eve. God gave the entire world to Adam and Eve and gave them just one, lone restriction: they could eat from whatever tree they would like, except for one. When Adam ate the forbidden fruit he brought death into the world. When we read this story in the opening pages of the Bible, we’re left wondering what the big deal was. It was a piece of fruit! Adam didn’t kill someone. He didn’t rob a bank or start a war. He didn’t abuse someone. He ate a piece of fruit knowing God told him he could not.
Adam and his wife and all their future offspring were free to enjoy God’s very good world. This world was created to be a paradise and it was theirs! They could enjoy this world and all that it offered, except for this one tree. This tree would be the thing that reminded them that with all this freedom and all this authority God himself gave them, they were not God. They were his image-bearers. That is, they were created to represent God and bear incredible authority over God’s very good world, but this tree and its fruit would remind them they were not God.
We read the story and we’re still left wondering why it was a big deal. It’s just a piece of fruit. The truth is that Adam, without prior example of evil, without knowledge of suffering and pain, without any provocation on the part of others, without any prior trauma influencing his decision, without reason or cause or complaint against God or against anything in God’s very good world, Adam chose to rebel against his Creator.
Again, why is eating a piece of fruit such a big deal? Consider the very next act of rebellion against God recorded in the Bible: Adam’s son Cain murdered his brother Abel. The brokenness introduced by Adam’s rebellion against God brought murder into the world. From a human perspective eating a piece of forbidden fruit and murder are not anywhere on the same level but the truth is both were acts of cosmic rebellion against God.
Here’s the thing: whether we want to admit it or not, we actually agree with Adam’s rebellion. We agree every time we choose to lie or cheat or steal. We agree every time we gossip or commit violence. We agree every time we allow our pride to rule over us. From God’s perspective, eating a piece of forbidden fruit and murdering your brother and gossiping are all acts of cosmic rebellion against him, for none of these things is an accurate reflection of who God is or what he is like. This is our task in the world! We are to demonstrate what God is like and when you and I act in a manner that is unlike God we lie about God and thereby express our agreement with Adam in his act of cosmic rebellion.
When we look at all the brokenness of this world we can be overwhelmed by it. Whether you have money or not, we all share an identical poverty: we all have limited time. This is a major reason we seek to amuse ourselves to death. Since we can’t add time to our life’s bank account, we seek distractions with what little time we have. What if there were a better way? What if there were a way to add time to our life’s clock? To answer that we have to understand something about the world God created.
The world was meant to be a place of flourishing, a place of plenty. It was a world where poverty couldn’t exist, for the earth itself would provide all that we would ever need. Men and women were supposed to live forever and grow and develop and create and make the world even better than they found it. They were supposed to invent and discover and create new art, new technology, new cultures. Think of it: if God created 400,000 species of beetle, why would we think he would be satisfied with one cultural expression or one style of music or one language?
God created his very good world with built-in diversity and he put us here to cause this diversity to grow. We were supposed to spend forever enjoying him and his very good world and developing new cultures but when Adam rebelled against God he brought poverty into the world. Suddenly every human life had an expiration date, known only to God. Suddenly the earth’s resources were limited. Adam and all those who descend from him would scrape their existence from the surface of the earth, dealing with sweat and aching muscles and thorns and thistles. The struggle that you and I experience, the lack of resources that you and I have, the aches and pains that seem to increase with every passing birthday all come from Adam’s rebellion against God—the very rebellion we agree with every time we choose what is evil over what is good.
God wasn’t content with this. He cast Adam and Eve out of the garden he had created for them, so that they could not eat of the Tree of Life and live in their broken and sinful condition forever. Then he showed them their condition wouldn’t last forever, that one day God would fix what Adam had broken. To cover their nakedness God offered the very first sacrifice. With the skins of some animals God covered them. In short, God showed them that some animals died that day so they would not. It was a simple exchange: the animal’s life for their own. God was hinting at what he himself would one day do for them.
If you jump ahead to the end of the Bible, you can read how the Bible describes God’s ultimate goal for his people and his world, and you see that once again there will be a garden. This time, however, the garden will cover the entire earth. In the beginning it was a smaller garden and Adam’s job was to expand it. The apostle Peter described this goal for the world by saying we wait for a new heaven and a new earth. God will one day re-create the world. It will be new in quality, not new in quantity. He won’t replace the earth; he will remake the earth.
This re-created world will once again be a place of flourishing. There will be no more racism, no more sexism, no more classism. No wars, no drive-bys, no corporate greed. There will be no scandals by politicians and no scandals in relationships. It will be the world that you and I have always dreamed of. Hear the words of the apostle John as he describes this new world that is coming.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
Revelation 21:1–4
When John says “the sea was no more” he doesn’t mean the ocean. In the imagery of Revelation the sea represents the darkness of this world, the chaos of this world’s system. It represents the unequal distribution of resources, the suffering and pain of loneliness, the heartache of loss. It represents the powerlessness you and I feel far too often. John says it will be gone. This is why God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for God will cause these things to pass away.
How do we get there, though? The gap between the original garden of Eden and the new heaven and the new earth is huge. How do we get from one garden to the other? Right in the middle of the Bible—at least logically—there is another garden, a very different garden. In that garden the Lord Jesus was praying and while he asked his Father if there were another way to save his people from sin and death, he did what Adam refused to do and prayed, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
When God sacrificed animals to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve, he was hinting at what it would cost him to undo all the death and destruction Adam and Eve brought into the world. God had given the people of Israel a system of sacrifices to cover their sin, their cosmic acts of rebellion, but he knew this would not be enough. These sacrifices couldn’t actually fix the problem, for the problem is us.
God’s plan was, from the beginning, to come to this world as a human to do what humans were supposed to do. In a truly incomprehensible act, God became one of us, human in every way, that he might live the life you and I were supposed to live, a life of complete faithfulness, without sin, without any acts of cosmic rebellion. He would be a new Adam, a new representative for humanity. After living the life you and I were supposed to live, he died the death we were supposed to die.
God had come to be the sacrifice that takes away the sin of his people. He embraced death for them, that they might experience life—true, eternal life. Just as with an animal sacrifice in which the animal died rather than the person, so the Son of God—the Lord Jesus—would die so his people would not have to. This was more than a physical death he suffered. He endured his Father’s just wrath and anger for sin. He paid the full penalty for cosmic rebellion he himself did not commit. In the words of the apostle Paul, God made him, the one who knew no sin, to be sin. Thus he suffered for our sin.
Then, after three days, in the most amazing miracle of all, he conquered death and walked out of his tomb, demonstrating he had accomplished salvation for his people. In this he was indicating death itself was coming undone. Death would no longer be the thing that controls this world. Death would one day die.
If you ask most people if they will get there, if they will end up in heaven when they die, they will respond with something like, “I’m a good person” or “I’ve never hurt anyone”. We have this idea that if the good we do in our limited time outweighs the bad we do then the scale is tipped in our favor. If tipping the scale were a matter of doing more good than bad, then Jesus didn’t need to die. It is clear from his death that tipping the scale is not enough. We treat doing good as if it were currency and we treat the bad stuff we do as debt. If we have enough currency—money—to pay our debt, then we’re all good, right? The problem with this is the only currency God accepts is faith.
As much as it pains us, we don’t want this life to last forever, for this life is filled with misery and suffering. We want a life free of these things. We long for something more. Even the attempt to distract ourselves with mere amusements is an implicit acknowledgment that it shouldn’t be this way.
There is hope for this life. No, we cannot extend it, beyond eating healthy and exercising and such. Maybe leave skydiving off the list of activities. We cannot actually extend this life, but we can, through faith in the Lord Jesus, receive the gift of eternal life—not life on a cloud somewhere playing a harp. Until the Lord returns we will all experience physical death. Part of eternal life means life with the Lord in heaven while waiting for him to come back to this broken, fallen world when he will remake it. On that day this world will finally be everything you and I hope for and dream of, everything we long for. On that day all those who trust in him will be resurrected, just as he himself resurrected. We will have new bodies that never break down, never wear out, never need new knees or hips, never need vaccinations or cancer screenings. We will never grow old and die, ever. The real hope for this world is resurrection.
Real Christian hope is not just a future hope. The remarkable thing is that as you follow the Lord Jesus in faith, the hope that is ours in Christ begins to invade this life, changing us, changing our perspective. In a real way, eternal life begins now, even though our bodies remain mortal until the resurrection. Following Jesus won’t suddenly take away the pain and suffering of loss, the pain and suffering of illness, the pain and suffering of broken relationships, the pain and suffering of death, but it will begin to fix our biggest problem: us. One day this world will be fixed, and even though that day is not today, that day is coming.
What God calls us to do is trust him. God calls us to follow him. Real faith compels us to live our lives for him and for his honor. Real, genuine faith in God causes us to seek to undo the cosmic rebellion and begin to represent him as we were created to do.
This is good news. The world needs to hear it.