The City of God Revisited
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Today we’re revisiting a topic that we’ve touched on several times. In fact, as Greg was pointing out earlier, it’s kind of implicit in the title of our podcast, Halting Toward Zion. We’re talking about the City of God, and the reason we’ve talked about it so many times is that it’s a theme in scripture and it shows up a lot, so it seems only fair.
Today our source is Isaiah 60 and we’ve added some more layers to the sandwich, if you will, so that this time when we add more cheese it’s on top of the other meat and lettuce. This analogy isn’t really working, is it? Anyway, bearing in mind everything that we’ve talked about recently, especially the Suffering Servant and the Messiah in the Old Testament, what does Isaiah 60 tell us about the City of God?
As I was saying earlier, one of the marks of 20th century America, and probably 21st century America as well, is our tendency to reduce salvation down to the purely personal. Is Jesus your personal Savior? Now, he ought to be, that’s true, but oddly enough the Bible never uses that kind of language, as prevalent as it was in 20th century Christendom.
When God first preaches the gospel to Abraham he uses the words, “In thee shall all nations be blessed.” God’s a covenant-keeping God. He lays hold of individuals, but in laying hold of them he reckons with all the covenant connections in which they already exist – marriage, children, community, nations. And more than that, having done so, he then plants them in a new community. The New Testament calls it the church.
The Old Testament called it a number of things, Israel for one, but as the prophets look forward beyond historic Israel, they used words like Zion and Jerusalem and the City of God and the mountain of the Lord and things like that, that tell us that all along God’s goal was not simply to save random individuals unrelated to one another, who might eventually run into each other in heaven.
That’s kind of what some people, I think if you pressed them, would think of heaven, but it’s not natural. Working with teenagers, normally the questions are like, “Will I know my family? Will my friends be there? Will I know my friends? I’ve been told that you’re so changed that you won’t know anybody. It’ll be like everybody is strangers to you.” I’m not quite sure where they’re getting that.
So we want to look at this one particular passage. Yes, it comes well after the Suffering Servant, so in the flow of the narrative the child was born back in chapter 7 and chapter 8, and we get a little more about him as we go along through the chapters until finally he’s introduced as the Suffering Servant, the one who dies for the sins of God’s people and then, implied, rises again and invites everyone to come to the waters and drink, and to buy them without money and without price.
Now we’re a little bit beyond that and the prophet draws back, or the Holy Spirit does, and shows us something of the fruition of all of that. The Messiah suffered horribly, died, rose again. What’s the fruit of that?
We can look at this two ways, as I’ve already suggested. We can look at it in sheer numbers. Did Jesus die so that after say 144,000 or 144 million or whatever people have been saved, as long as we’ve got one from pretty much every nation, that God will be satisfied with that?
In the middle of Isaiah 53 we’re told the Messiah shall see his seed, and the writer of Hebrews says something similar – “For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame.” The question has to be how big was Jesus’ vision? The joy of how many saved?
The Bible, strictly speaking, doesn’t say. In fact, it so strongly doesn’t say that it says it’s a great multitude that no man can number. It mentions numbers only to disclaim them and say, “Pick a number you like and go higher and you’re still not there.” It’s an incredibly huge number.
But also the other thing is the work of Jesus limited to stray individuals who may go to these Bible clubs called churches now and then, because that’s what religious people do? Stamp collectors go to stamp collector meetings, and Boy Scouts go to Boy Scout meetings, and Christians go to church meetings because you’re probably going to run into somebody who kind of believes what you do and does religious stuff like you. Is that it? Is that the extent of what Jesus is doing? This passage to some degree answers both of those questions.
Now, before we go on, something from last time that I don’t want to belabor but I’m going to mention it. Commentators have looked at this passage in Isaiah 60 and have said, “Wow, that’s really glorious and wonderful. It just seems almost ideal, so it’s either heaven or it’s eternity. Why would we say that? Because nothing like that could ever happen here.”
Whose possibilities are we limiting here? Are we saying that God has explicitly told us he won’t do this? Has he specifically said, “Oh, this is only for heaven. This is only for eternity,” or are we reading in our presuppositions about what God can and cannot do, what he will and will not do, and using that as a hermeneutic to shape what the text says? So as we go along I just want to note some of the things the prophet says.
Is this the City of God? Yes, it’s its final realization beyond time and redemptive history and beyond the resurrection. Of course. All of God’s blessings find their fruition in eternity. For the soul who departs this life and goes to be with Jesus there’s a high increase in God’s blessings at that point as we’re freed from sin and get to see Jesus face-to-face and hang out with God’s people, but the question is, is that what this is primarily about, or are we to say, “Well, this is what he promises within history. You can try to imagine how much better it gets afterward, but don’t break your brain in the process.”
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
There is no exact time indicator here. He does not say “in the last days,” as he said in Isaiah 2 and Matthew 4, but he does give us some circumstances. It’s been dark. It’s covered the earth. It’s covered the peoples. And then God appears in light and, when he does, Gentiles come to the light, and that includes the kings.
The problem with this being heaven is there was never any darkness in heaven. Beyond the resurrection there’s never any darkness. This is about people who have been in darkness coming to the light.
And this sounds familiar, right? This is “Those who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light…” and Galilee of the Gentiles.
“…upon them hath the light shined.” He’s quoting himself pretty much from chapter 9.
Yeah, this was Jesus in his Galilean ministry. Jesus is Yahweh coming to earth, which was dark. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared…”
We wouldn’t take the rest of that song as good interpretation, but we won’t nitpick right now.
“The weary world rejoices” – that’s kind of what’s going on here, because when the light comes there is a response, and it’s a response from the Gentiles. So we’re not in the old covenant, because in the old covenant, although there were times when there were Gentile converts, and on a couple of occasions a large number – we can think of Nineveh’s conversion at the preaching of Jonah, and we can think of all those within the Persian empire who became Jews, the text says, in the days of Mordecai and Esther – but by and large there were not large flocks of Gentiles coming to join Israel. And with Solomon, again lots of people came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, but that’s not this. Those were all forerunners and anticipations, but this is something much bigger.
And yes, Isaiah has already told us about it in the person of the one who will be the light of the world, who will be the child who is born, the son who’s given, the one who will be the virgin-born Immanuel, so this is the context we should expect this to be.
Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.
This is directed to this city, and we haven’t really even been told the city yet. He’s talking to somebody, and at this moment we’re seeing things from that person’s point of view. This person is looking out over the world as light dawns around them, and out of the darkness comes streaming these Gentiles, led by their kings, and bringing people with them. The prophet says, “Those young folk over there, those are some of your daughters. There’s a daughter, and oh, there’s some sons.” They’re bringing them from very far away as the darkness begins to lift.
Now, if we were good Arminians, which we’re not, we could say, “Oh, they heard about Jesus from far away, and of their own free will they’re coming to the light.” If there were nothing else in the Bible you could do that with this, but of course what we’re talking about here is the response of the sinner to the light of the gospel.
The light of the gospel penetrates the darkness. “Open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God,” Paul was told. “I’m giving thee a light for the Gentiles,” Paul again quoting prophecies from Isaiah about Jesus, so these are constant images throughout the Old and New Testaments.
The question of course at some point is, “Wait, who’s he talking to?” The glory of the Lord is risen upon thee – singular, not ye – so we’re seeing in the vision a person looking out in the darkness and seeing all of these come, and they’re bringing with them treasures – the abundance of the sea, the forces of the Gentiles (verse 6).
The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense…
…they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the LORD.
So as these Gentile peoples are coming to our subject here, they’re bringing treasure with them of all sorts. Whatever is unique to their land, to their people, to their geography, they’re bringing – gold, incense, camels, whatever.
All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory.
So God’s going to do it. They’re bringing this stuff, and it might be easy just to say, “Well, these are pagans bringing their treasures. What do we need with that?”
It is, especially when it’s things like, oh, I don’t know, the microchip and painless dentistry and antibiotics and the internal combustion engine, although that’s not in favor right now, but there are a lot of treasures, both just in terms of money and such, but there’s technology, there’s art, there’s literature. There are all kinds of things that the Gentiles bring, and much of it can be used to adorn the subject whose name we still don’t have a name for.
Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows? Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish [that’s the ends of the earth] first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the LORD thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.
Again, people from the ends of the earth are coming. This is not just the local Mideastern nations that are responding. As far as their geographic knowledge reaches, people are coming and bringing treasure with them, but they’re bringing it for God’s sake. It’s not because our subject is so great and wonderful, although she is shining and emitting light, but it’s all about God. God is the reason they’re coming. And how did she get so shiny? “God hath glorified thee.”
And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee.
That’s a huge hint as to who this person is, because if we go back to the sections that follow the Suffering Servant – chapters 54 and on – we have run into this woman before. She is Yahweh’s bride. She in her unfaithfulness ran off. God chastened her, and yet God has promised to bring her back and to give her more children than she ever had. She’s going to lose the children she has now, but he’s going to supply children from everywhere.
In earlier passages she says, “I’ve been by myself. Where do all these children come from? I’m going to call for the Gentiles,” so these are adopted children, covenant children, children brought in by God’s grace, but she recognizes them as hers.
…for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. Therefore thy gates shall be open continually…
Wait, so she’s a woman but she’s a city! Wait a second. Haven’t we heard and seen that before? And aren’t we going to hear and see it again before the book is over? And the gate is open, hmm. That’s a description of the new Jerusalem in Revelation 21. The gates are open day and night. Why? So people can come in. Both here and in Revelation 21 the city has walls, really high powerful walls, and yet the gates are always open.
The metaphor is mixed, obviously. On the one hand she is protected by God himself, by his salvation.
Right. In fact, people are flowing through the gates. Now, in other images looked at in different ways, of course she has enemies and they’re going to be mentioned in a little bit, but that’s not the focus here. The focus is that as her light goes out, people come, they come in and they become part of this city and they bring their treasures with them.
Again, I think this is important. It’s whatever is particular to them. It’s not limited to, “Just bring your gold or just bring your silver or just bring your precious metals. You guys have incense. You guys have goats. You guys have camels. You guys do have gold, so bring the gold. We’re not going to disdain the gold,” but every nation according to what it has, what it trades in, is going to bring this to enhance this woman, this city.
…they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.
He keeps saying that, and they are kings as kings. It’s not just, “Wow, look at all these people who are flowing in. There’s a mailman and there’s a garbage collector, there’s an engineer and there’s a doctor. Oh look, there’s a king and there’s a housewife.”
We don’t get a list of all the other kinds of people who are here. The sense is lots of people of all different sorts are here, and yet he goes out of the way to mention kings repeatedly. They come as kings; that is, they come into the City of God, into Christ’s kingdom, in their ruling position, and that means that God is going to require some things of them.
Really fast you have to run ahead and jump. “Does that mean that the Church is going to force religion on the State?” No, that’s not the only option. We are so politically minded that you mention even the weakest connection between Church and State and people go bonkers.
There’s a knee-jerk reaction, and on the flip side there’s the sort of newfangled Christian anarchist perspective that says that the nation is an artificial construct anyway. No, not in the Bible. God deals with nations as nations, and when the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, they’re kingdoms. They still exist as a concept.
Or to put it differently, both sides of the anabaptist spectrum, because some of the anabaptists did go and take over cities and didn’t institute God’s laws. They instituted their own, which they thought were cooler, until finally both the Reformers and the Roman Catholics got on their case.
Yeah, together. It was one of the few times where they could agree. “These people are a problem.”
On that point as an aside, a really interesting thing was some historian/theologian on Twitter talked about how the Reformation was largely successful because you had the Reformers and the Catholics against each other, but more importantly against a third shared enemy, the Anabaptists. It gave the Reformers something to say like, “We’re against you, and just so you’re aware, we’re on your side that we’re not that.”
We can footnote and say go listen to the Dan Carlin Hardcore History about the – what’s the name of that episode?
That would be worth listening to. What we’re describing is not that. We’ll just say it up front, it’s not that, but there’s the other side of the Anabaptist movement which turned very inward and had certain Gnostic tendencies, in that it turned its back on culture and society and upon politics in particular, and retreated into their own private corners and often their own private hearts.
There’s a consistency here in the history of Christianity. These are the two between Scylla and Charybdis.
Right, the frying pan and the fire. We do not want the State to come in and be more than the State is ordained by God to be. It can’t evangelize. It does a rotten job. It draws the sword and Christianity becomes something other than Christianity, so no to that. That’s not what we’re talking about.
On the other hand, to say that Christianity is this private affair that never touches political matters or economic matters or finance or wealth or health/education/welfare, that’s not the solution either. There is something in-between which God marvelously orchestrates, being infinitely wise and all that, so that if we will read the words of scripture and heed them, we will walk between the two.
We will recognize that kings ought to recognize Jesus as their Lord, and that there are moral principles in scripture that they ought to implement that do not involve forcing people to be Christians and that do not involve slaying every sinner who pokes his head up out of the earth. They involve maintain justice and peace so the Church can do her work.
On the other hand, we have to say no to people who are ashamed to take their Christianity out into the public square, into the marketplace or into the voting booth or into the court system. We have to say, “No, God does have things there. You may exceed us sometimes in your personal piety, but you’re leaving an awful lot of ground that Jesus claims and surrendering it to the enemy.”
So this chapter keeps coming back to this theme that nations are coming, and with them their kings; that is, their political and legal structure. The gospel will change these things. The goal is not to make every nation look like Israel, but the goal is to have every king, president, parliament, judge, magistrate, mayor, dog catcher acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, trust him for the salvation of his own soul, and then submit to his word in the ordinary affairs of life, loving God and loving his neighbor and doing the practical things that the Bible says you should do if that’s who you are, and doing them not simply as a lone individual but doing them as a president, a dog catcher, or whatever, just as he says the same thing to engineers and teachers and doctors and librarians and tree cutters and whatever.
It’s the same thing for all of us. We are to bring who we are as whole persons and lay it before Christ, all of our treasures, all that we are, all that he’s gifted us with, and thereby enrich the kingdom of God.
Now, there’s nobody in charge of this except Christ himself. Yahweh is the one who is orchestrating this. There’s no human leader to whom we turn. There’s no Pope. There’s no divine magistrate who we need to set up so that we can get this done. This is something that comes as an automatic internal to external response as the light of the gospel pierces the darkness.
The light changes us. We become children of the light, so we run to the light – to borrow some lines from John 3 – and then these things happen. We don’t need to set up the State to make them happen for us. That’s dangerous.
I think this idea of us as whole persons serving the kingdom of God, serving Jesus, is so important and so freeing, because the alternative is I have my Christian hat and I have my engineer hat, which means that my engineering is somehow cut off from Christ, which would mean it’s not as good as whatever I’m doing when I’m wearing my Christian hat, because Jesus is the most important, so why would we put on that second hat at all? But if our engineer hat is also Christian, it leads to all of life being worship, which leads us to enjoy the life that God has given us to live. We don’t have to partition our soul off in different ways.
Exactly. I think there are a lot of Christians who, if you explained it to them that way, who would say, “Yeah, that.” But sometimes our theological terms and paradigm get in the way and we say, “Well, that sounds good, but what we really mean is…”
Okay, stop. That was good. That was clear, and I think the average Christian could follow what you just said, Emily, and do something with it.
What it does not say is that Zion is going to go out and attack those other kingdoms with nuclear weapons and blow them up. How will they perish? Because God will withdraw his mercy and send his judgement, and Christ sitting on the throne will take his rod of iron and smack them. That doesn’t mean that everyone in them necessarily is going to die. It means they will cease to exist in that political form, and Jesus will keep stirring the pot until they’re ready to turn to him. Some will die in wars and plagues. Some will survive.
You can look at any spot in the world, and most spots have undergone radical changes of government more times than anybody can count, and Jesus will keep – to borrow a line from Ezekiel – overturn, overturn, overturn it until he comes whose right it is to reign.
The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee [those are cedars], the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary…
So Zion is also God’s temple. It’s the place where God is and ought to be worshiped.
I will make the place of my feet glorious. The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee;
See, there were enemies. Again, this is one metaphor, one parable of the kingdom of God, and in others there would be a stronger emphasis upon the warfare, but this is not the warfare paradigm. This is here’s a city and everyone is coming to it, much like Micah 4 from last time. So there were enemies, and oddly enough the sons of the persecutors are the very persons coming and bowing down.
…and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet;
It is easy as Christians and Americans too, perhaps, to look at the bad guys and say, “They’re bad guys. If we do anything at all, we pray that God will judge them.” Earlier generations of Americans were perhaps the opposite extreme. “Oh, we should pray that they know Jesus.” Yeah, actually, you know we should, because that’s what Isaiah is promising, that the bad guys – a lot of them, and their children – are going to come over to our side. It doesn’t say when and doesn’t say how, but since God’s promised it it’s a thing to pray for.
All this time we’ve been reading about that city that the prophets and the psalms called Zion. It’s the City of the Lord. It appears under the image of a woman once deserted, now overflowing with children, and appears as a city into which the whole world can fit in due time.
…so that no man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.
This again is God. This is not some utopian social gospel where if the Church does X, Y, and Z Utopia will arrive. This is God’s grace through his gospel, through his light, calling the world and people responding, because God has the sovereign power to do that. It’s called effectual calling, regeneration, monergism.
Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings…
…and thou shalt know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.
This is all proof that God really does save. He doesn’t just save a few people here and there. He’s saving nations, covenanted communities.
For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thy officers peace, and thine exactors righteousness.
Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.
At this point, unless we missed it, we should figure out that this is not a literal city of concrete and steel and asphalt. This is a community. This is the covenanted community. This is God’s people as they worship and serve in this world.
The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.
This is what Jesus said. “I am the Light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life.” The new Jerusalem in Revelation 21 and 22, much the same thing is said.
…the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself.
Wait, is there no moon or is there is a moon? If we try to take it literally we run into a contradiction, but we understand the point. The point is you’re going to have light all the time, both directly from God himself, because we all have again the personal relationship with Christ and he reveals himself in his Word, but there are also these ordinances and institutions he’s put in our world – church primarily, and family – that bear his light, as the sun and moon did in the original creation, so they’re going to be there.
The institutions that he has put here for us to depend on, he’s not going to lose. The Church is not going to perish from the earth. Churches are not going to perish from the earth. God will always have institutions and anointed servants to declare his Word and to worship him.
There is something that I’ve seen quoted quite a lot lately, and it’s a positive quote. It is that grace does not destroy nature, but it does perfect it. That is very much the kind of image we’re seeing. Yes, the gospel comes and there are natural things that are broken and dysfunctional, most blatantly obvious – and I think all the reformed would agree with – is the image of God in man is deformed because of sin, and grace comes and restores it. It does not destroy it and give you something that is completely different. It gives you a new thing that is a restoration of what was, and it’s more glorious.
So like you’re saying, nature has these institutions of God. There’s marriage as a creation ordinance. There’s the State. There’s the Church. There’s the family. These things don’t just get thrown into the blender and dispersed to the four winds. Each of them is restored in their own functions to something greater.
And Abraham Kuyper would be saying amen. The quote of course that you gave us – grace does not eradicate nature but perfects it – is from Thomas Aquinas. I’m pointing that out in case anyone says, “Wait, do they know they’re quoting Aquinas?”
We know that. We’re not Thomas in our theology, but occasionally if you look at something that people say and you’ve disdained it long enough, sometimes you turn around and look at it from a different angle and there are ways it can be very true. And taken in that sense, absolutely. That is exactly the truth of the matter.
Unfortunately, far too many have taken it to mean that in perfecting it they actually do mean destroying it, turning it into something wholly different from what it is, pulling man out of nature into the realm of grace, which is not biblical but it’s also not exactly what that quote says in any case.
It’s kind of like every time I read Thomas Jefferson, I’m like, “Dang it, I hate it when he’s right.”
There’s an Onion article that every once in a while gets shared, just the screenshot of the title. It says, “Heartbreaking: Man You Hate is Correct.”
I’ve been in those situations where you start arguing with someone about something, and someone you know and trust jumps in and isn’t on your side. “I’m not sure what I think of this. Should I be thankful that you understand what’s going on here? Or should I be worried that maybe I don’t?”
Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the LORD shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.
For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.
They shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.
None of this is all about us. It’s not so that we can have an easy happy life, that we can have everything we want, that our world will be at peace and experience prosperity. Those are side things. The primary thing, the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy himself forever.
A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the LORD will hasten it in his time.
We’re not going there right now, but the next chapter opens with “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.” So I think perhaps that having seen that, we walk away or turn our backs and say, “Wait, this is incredible. No man could do this!” Exactly.
So in the next chapter the Messiah says, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.” How is this possible? That, because Jesus has received the Holy Spirit without measure. The prophet never lets us get far from Jesus. Every time he shows us something marvelous, seemingly miraculous, seemingly inconceivable, he immediately brings us back to, “How is that possible?” Jesus. It’s all about Jesus.
If we want to change the world, if we want this kind of worldwide community where all nations are rushing to serve and worship our God in Christ and receive his righteousness, then it’s to Jesus we have to point them.
Sure, there’s some legislation we need now and then, and there’s some educational institutions we probably should build, and some things we should probably see get off the air eventually, but that’s clean-up. The heart of the matter is the people need to know Jesus, and until that happens all that other stuff is at best waving away the vultures that gnaw on a rotting culture. We need resurrection, and anything short of that will not do.
In summary, to draw us back, again God shows us a community. It’s a worldwide community. All the ethnic and geographical and linguistic barriers are down. People are united in the worship of God and their service to God. They’re dedicating their culture, their treasures, their civilization to God, and this is the work of God. This is not a social gospel.
Yeah, we want things sped up. 2,000 years from Jesus’ ascension to here, we would be idiots not to see the progress of the Church and of the gospel and the corresponding positive changes in our culture, but we’ve got a long way to go. We don’t need to put on rosy glasses and ignore the two world wars of the last century, and the various police actions and little minor wars that followed, the 70-year reign of the Soviet Union, and the decline of American culture and morality. Those are all real things and they’re probably not going to go away right away. They’re things we have to wrestle with. But the solution still and always is to point people to Jesus.
While we do that, we need to remember that we’re not simply offering them a one-way personal “you get your own coach and no one will be there” ticket to heaven, but we’re offering them a part in a body, a citizenship in a huge city that’s not like Los Angeles or San Francisco where nobody knows your name.
It’s like Cheers where everybody knows your name. People are going to be there that you know and love. They’re going to be there for you. That’s what we’re building.
Yes. It appealed to something in us that said, “This is how it ought to be,” and far too often Christianity hasn’t been that. Church becomes either my shot in the arm to be more religious for the week, or where I get to show off my religiosity, or where I get to go through things that define me as being a religious or spiritual person, rather than a community living out life together at the very center of life, worship.
Yeah. It’s not that Christians don’t believe these things. It’s just that we so easily forget and deemphasize.
The book you’ve reminded us of more than once, The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, could you just remind us a little bit about that right now? What’s the basic theme and idea?
Rosaria Butterfield was a liberal college professor in a lesbian relationship and met Jesus through the friendship of an RPCNA church plant. I believe it was the pastor who directly interacted with her. Her basic idea is that one of the reasons that people in the LGBTQ community – or the reason why there is a community in the first place – is that they see other people like them get, in their words, shunted off, rejected by the rest of society, and they say, “Alright, you’re under our wing now,” and everybody rallies around this one person that’s new to the group and helps them. So her whole mindset is that’s actually that that community has that reflects Christ. It reflects the kind of community that the Church should be.
So when you give the gospel to somebody, when you are approaching them even as an evangelizer, they’re not a Christian yet, that gospel you give them comes with a housekey. You’re supposed to say, “My house is open to you because I want you to be part of my family. You’re going to be part of my friend circle, my family circle on earth now, and that’s why you get this housekey along with the presentation. But also more ultimately, we want you to be part of the ultimate family, which is in Christ only.”
The emphasis that it begins now is terribly important in this age. When people don’t care about doctrine and don’t care about morality, what hooks do we have left? We have what the early Church had, love. “See how they love one another, and see how they love us.”
Does that mean that we give in to everything they want and buy into their… of course not, but there are ways to be sweet and winsome and polite and kind and loving and still say, “Here’s the line that God draws. We’d like you to be on this side with us because we love you and because it’s good for you and because there’s joy here.” But if there’s no joy, if we’re just a bunch of critical creeps, what’s going to move them?
“Oh, it’s the sovereign power of God and the gospel that saves people!” Yes. Ever notice that God uses human situations to make the gospel work? Jesus sat down with the woman at the well and talked to her like she was a real person. A chapter earlier he sat down with Nicodemus and talked to him like he was a real theologian and pointed out that he really wasn’t, but you know.
He did, and he did not compromise his holiness by doing it, and he didn’t rail. The people he railed against – and railing is not the right word, but he spoke loudly against in very negative metaphors – were the religious people who thought that they were holy and perfect and upright and despised others. Everyone else he talked to.
Even members of the Pharisaic party, they invited him to dinner and he came. Whoa! So if a liberal churchman invites you over for dinner, you know what? This may be an opportunity, or not. You never know, and that’s the point. You do not know.
Yes, it’s the gospel that changes people’s hearts, but God uses us as true humans with all our humanity to reach out to people. And if we fail in this, we’re not going to have an audience. No one is going to listen. There’s nothing here that’s denying the sovereignty of God. He can in fact save someone out of the blue when we’re being complete idiots and spazzes, but that’s not the recommended way for it to happen, shall we say. It’s not how Jesus behaved.
It’s kind of a cringey phrase that gets overused – “We want God to show up” wherever something is going on where we want the gospel preached. We can criticize that phrase all we want, but at the same time a lot of the people who say that and are being cringey about it are the ones actually showing up and preaching the gospel to people. So we should try to outdo them in that first, before we criticize the method necessarily.
I don’t want to take off without clarifying the shade that I threw earlier on the hymn O Holy Night. I just did some quick googling to find that the person who wrote it originally, the author of the French lyrics – I’m reading from ClassicFM.com – was a wine merchant and poet, it says, and he was never particularly religious, so he’s not even a Christian writing this song. That was in 1843.
And here’s where my antenna always goes up when I hear the song, is that the person who translated it into English was minister John Sullivan Dwight, who should sound familiar to you if you’ve studied Unitarianism and transcendentalism. He’s one of those. I’ll point out the third verse –
Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother,
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Which is fine, as far as it goes, right? Those are great biblical images, but what decade would you guess that this was written in?
1850s, so this is actually preaching a social gospel of that time. He means something very specific by those words, which is what always gets under my skin about it. Like I said, if you can separate it from that – I just can’t.
But think of World War 1 and the truce and playing soccer and the tenor belting out “O Holy Night” in the midst of the darkness. Anyway, I hear what you’re saying.
Fair. I think you should do it in your own country. I’m going to get flack for that, but that’s okay. That’s why I’m on a podcast, right? You don’t get to make a podcast without catching flack, and that’s okay. Shall we have some positive recommendations before we go?
I’m going to recommend a TV show that I watched as it came out. It’s not the one I recommended previously. I recommended Psych before, because I did the same thing. Apparently this is the year of rewatching shows that I watched as a younger child or teenager and didn’t understand much of. This one doesn’t quite fall in that account, it’s just another show that I happened to watch called Warehouse 13.
It's about two Secret Service agents who encounter somebody while they’re protecting the president at the Smithsonian Museum in D.C. Essentially, one of the museum workers pricks his finger on a Mayan statue of a head that has crystalline teeth, and it basically activates it. It’s an artifact and it starts possessing him and driving him to try to kill people at the museum.
Anyway, they get wrapped up in this and they both get hired to work for the secretive government institution called Warehouse 13. It’s a giant warehouse in the middle of South Dakota with nothing around for miles. The nearest town is 300 people large and it’s 20 minutes away.
Recommendation: Warehouse 13The whole idea is a little bit steampunk science fiction mysticality. Everything is hodgepodge. It’s all there, anything you can imagine from popular ideas of the universe shows up. It’s not a Christian show, but essentially it houses all these artifacts from across history, and the artifacts are things that were around people and were basically imbued with something specific to them that they were obsessive about. There’s a mirror that has Lewis Carroll’s subject Alice stuck in it, because Alice was actually a real historical person who murdered people, and then they wrote these whimsical stories to cover it up.
Basically, that’s the idea of the show, and what makes it fun is it’s got really good character chemistry between the leads and is just genuinely fun and light-hearted. I remember watching it and just loving it, and I’m rewatching it. I think I’m almost done with the first season at this point and it’s the same feeling. It’s just fun wacky entertainment, so that’s my recommendation.
I’m going to recommend murder mystery parties. I’ve been to one or two of these. I think they come in a kit. I’ve only been a guest. I haven’t ever hosted one, but you’re assigned a character and you dress up and you role play it. It’s like acting and having dinner at the same time. It’s a lot of fun, even if you don’t consider yourself a person who likes acting or anything. It’s a mystery and you get to be part of it and it’s fun.
Recommendation: Murder mystery partiesI don’t know why I thought of that. Here was my train of thought, and you can tell me if this is a valid train of thought. The community of the City of God is an actual community, and when you have actual community you have people who enjoy spending time together and you bond, and this is a great way to bond with your fellow Christians. I mean it’s not as strong a bond as worshiping the Lord together, but it’s a thing you can do with friends.
In my short life I have created two types of mystery games. I created one where I actually created the characters and I detailed 10 minutes by 10 minutes what they did the whole night, from before the murder to the end. And of course one of them says, “Congratulations, you’re the murderer.”
Then they get to ask each other questions and then try to figure out what really happened and who’s lying and who’s kind of telling the truth and what the motives are, so it’s very organized.
Much later in life I came up with more of a roleplaying variation on it where I would just say, “Here’s your character. Here’s some stuff you know. Go have dinner and talk to people, and if anybody shows you this symbol you’re dead. Die dramatically,” and those were fun.
We did one on the Titanic or some ship, and sea monsters come. We did one in the Old West and there are goldminers and ghosts – maybe there are, we’re never sure. We did three or four a long time ago, and our friend Joseph Rose continues to do something similar today. Are you going, by the way?
So not nearly on that level but something far easier for most of us, I’m going to recommend, if I haven’t already, a card game called Rook. When I was in college and then years after when I got to know a number of people in my church and had evenings to spend with them, we would play Rook.
It’s kind of like Hearts, kind of like Spades. You deal out the deck and there are four suits. There’s a trump card and you bid on points. You pick a trump and pick a partner. “The 13 of green is my partner” and then you go around in traditional card-like fashion, laying down cards and trying to win the hand.
It’s a lot of fun and doesn’t require a lot of concentration. You can talk about all sorts of things and have your sodas and your snacks, and it can go on for hours and it can get really silly as you try to bring each other down.
No, it’s not. You could play it with a traditional deck, but – and I don’t know if this is true – but I’ve been told that it was invented for those Christians who have a problem with a traditional deck. It’s just numbers 1-14 and a bird called the Rook because there’s a bird on the card. It can be a trump card, high, low, middle, whatever you want.
There was a time when a lot of families in America on a Friday or Saturday evening would get together with neighbors and they’d play cards, and it need not be a horrible waste of time. It can be a productive way of developing fellowship. It doesn’t involve gambling and it does involve snacks, so you know, that’s good. And you can begin to bring your older children into it because they like to win. It’s a lot of fun, so there’s my recommendation.
Remind me to recommend sometime the book that would not fly with Christians who don’t like playing cards. It’s a really fun book – not a great book, but a fun book.
Thank you so much, both of you, for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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