Russell D. Moore: A Purpose-Driven Cosmos: Why Jesus Doesn’t Promise Us an ‘Afterlife’

From Christianity Today online.

There’s a cemetery plot, somewhere out there, waiting for your corpse. Regardless of who and where you are, you will one day be quite dead. And in 100 years, chances are no one will remember your name—including the people carrying your genes in their bloodstreams. We see our mortal future in everything from the natural forces that sap our hair color to the bacteria that eventually grind our bodies to a maggoty pulp. The universe rolls around us frenetically, and, in every single case, it eventually kills us.

That’s not just a matter of our individual destinies. If we are honest, the world around us seems pretty good proof that the gospel isn’t true. Doesn’t the cosmos seem to be just as the nihilists describe it: a bloody, merciless machine in which power, not goodness or beauty, is ultimate? What, then, is the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of history? If it’s all heading nowhere, then what difference at all does my existence make?

The gospel of the kingdom doesn’t shy away from such questions, but our preaching tends to swerve around the answers it gives. Often we Christians start our gospel proclamation with triumph over sin. Fair enough: The gospel of Christ is indeed the reversal of sin, and of death and hell. But without a broader context, such teaching can treat Christ as a means to an end, a step from the alpha of Eden to the omega of heaven. In a truly Christian vision of the kingdom of God, though, Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a hoop we jump through to extend our lives into eternity. Jesus is the kingdom of God in person. As such, he is the meaning of life, the goal of history, and the pattern of the future. The gospel of the kingdom starts and ends with the announcement that God has made Jesus the emperor—and that he plans to bend the cosmos to fit Jesus’ agenda, not the other way around.

…Perhaps we dread death less from fear than from boredom, thinking the life to come will be an endless postlude to where the action really happens. This is betrayed in how we speak about the “afterlife”: it happens after we’ve lived our lives. The kingdom, then, is like a high-school reunion in which middle-aged people stand around and remember the “good old days.” But Jesus doesn’t promise an “afterlife.” He promises us life—and that everlasting. Your eternity is no more about looking back to this span of time than your life now is about reflecting on kindergarten. The moment you burst through the mud above your grave, you will begin an exciting new mission—one you couldn’t comprehend if someone told you. And those things that seem so important now—whether you’re attractive or wealthy or famous or cancer-free—will be utterly irrelevant.

One of the best pieces I have read and worth your time to read and reflect deeply on.

Reflections on the Shootings at Chardon (OH) High School

From Fox News.

One student was killed and four were wounded during a shooting early Monday at an Ohio high school, authorities said. A suspect, whose name has not been released, is in police custody. Civil deputy Erin Knife with the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office said the shooting was reported around 7:30 a.m. Monday at Chardon High School. The suspected gunman, believed to be a student, fled the school on foot and was later apprehended after turning himself in. Authorities have not released the juvenile’s name because he has not been charged yet.

Read it all and weep over this sad, sad story.

UPDATE: Tragically, two more students have died. A terrible tragedy gets worse. May God have mercy on our souls.

Once again evil has reared its terrible ugly head, this time manifesting itself in another school shooting. Every time we hear stories like these, we ask the question, “Why did God allow this to happen?” Even with all our technology and enlightened thinking, we still don’t know what to do with the problem of evil when it confronts us.

What follows are my own theological musings on this question. I don’t claim to have all the answers and the Bible is quite reticent about addressing this question. We are told, for example, that the serpent tempted Eve and caused the downfall of the human race. But we aren’t told why the serpent was in paradise in the first place. Having said that, I do think there are some partial explanations for why God allows evil to happen, especially when the evil is directly tied to human sin as in this awful story.

In my recent sermons I have talked about God’s purpose in creation and how human sin turned away from God’s creative purpose for us. God created humans to be his image-bearers, to reflect his goodness and love out into the world as wise stewards of his creation.

Like it or not, understand it fully or not, this is the main way God chooses to interact with his worldthrough the wise stewardship of humans who reflect God’s goodness and love.

Sin occurs when humans fail to live up to these tasks of being God’s image-bearers and wise stewards, when we seek to reflect our own damaged image out into the world (or reflect the world’s brokenness instead of God’s goodness back to itself). When that happens, sin also serves as a conduit for evil of all kinds. Thus we see kids shooting other kids, among other things. No one, I repeat, no one, who is God’s true image-bearer would do what happened today.

That, I think, is primarily why God allows evil to exist–because God operates mainly through wise human stewardship and we are more often than not unwise. God allows evil to exist, not because he doesn’t care about us or is a distant God who is far removed from the activities of his creation and creatures, but because God has given us the freedom to be stewards in the manner he created us. Otherwise we would be slaves and not human at all. And if that were the case, we would be incapable of having a real relationship with God. Of course that would be directly antithetical to God’s good creative purposes for us. So when we abuse the freedom God gives us and fail to be wise stewards and/or outright reject God’s call to us to be his image-bearers and turn almost completely inward on ourselves and our own brokenness and evil (as the shooter clearly did), evil is allowed to happen. To the cognate question as to why God has chosen to establish the ground rules for interacting with his creation in this manner, I wouldn’t have a clue.

Sin caused the world to fall under a curse and we are called to bring God’s healing love to others by being God’s true image-bearers by following Jesus in the power of the Spirit. The more we know God, the less tolerable sin is for us and the more we are enabled by the Spirit to reflect God’s love and image out into his world. Simply put, we become what we worship. Clearly the shooter did not have any remote image of God in him, at least when he did his heinous work, and we see what happens when we refuse to be the humans God calls us to be.

None of this is going to be of any comfort to those who have lost loved ones today or who have wounded children fighting for their lives in the aftermath of these shootings. Neither does it negate or diminish the terrible tragedy that occurred today and our hearts our broken as we grieve for the family of the dead students and pray for those wounded in this attack. Likewise, God’s heart is broken because this is not what he created humans for. When I am overcome by grief over evil like this–as I am today–I try to remember the cross, where Jesus, God himself, suffered and died for us to defeat evil and show us the way back to being truly human, the way God intends for us to be human, and so to bring his healing love and redemption to a world created good but now terribly broken and weighed down by sin and evil. And yes, that means we need to be praying for the shooter as well, that God turns his heart back to God.

A suffering God like that surely takes no pleasure in murder and surely grieves with us all on this dark day.

Let us pray. Merciful God, hear the cries of our grief, for you know the anguish of our hearts. The evil behind these shootings is beyond our understanding and more than we can bear. Accept our prayer that as Daniel, Demetrius, and Russell have been released from this world’s cruelty so may they be received into your safe hands and secure love. We pray that justice may be done and that we may treasure the memory of their lives more than the manner of their deaths. For Christ’s sake. Amen.

Love

The following is an appropriate follow-up to yesterday’s sermon on the love of God. I am not a big poetry fan, but this poem speaks to me. George Herbert was an Anglican priest in 17th century England and he is one of my heroes. He is one after whom I try to pattern my own ministry. May his work speak to your heart and mind too.

From here:

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

—George Herbert, Love

Too Little Piety?

We often hear the criticism that the Church is afflicted with piety, but the real trouble is that its piety is not deep enough! An important contribution would be the liberation of the term “piety” from its present damaging connotations, reinstating it as a term of respect. We, indeed, have a little piety; we say a few prayers; we sing meaningfully a few hymns; we read snatches from the Bible. But all of this is far removed from the massive dose that we sorely need if we are to be the men and women who can perform a healing service in our generation.

The seat of our disease, says Helmut Thielicke, “is not in the branches of our nerves at all but rather in our roots which are stunted and starved.” The eloquent German points out that Martin Luther prayed four hours each day, “not despite his busy life but because only so could he accomplish his gigantic labors.” Luther worked so hard that a little desultory praying would not suffice. “To work without praying and without listening,” continues Thielicke, “means only to grow and spread oneself upward, without striking roots and without an equivalent in the earth.”

—Elton Trueblood, The New Man for Our Time

How are your roots doing these days? Might this be an area in which you exert a bit of Lenten discipline?