The Presence of the Future (The Church Part II)

In an earlier post (Back to Life), I mentioned that the Jesus-event, the church, the Holy Spirit, mission, and the end times (Christology, ecclesiology, pneumatology, missiology, and eschatology) are deeply interrelated. In short: Jesus’ life and mission—culminating in His resurrection, ascension to heaven, and in the revelation of Him as divine Lord—fulfilled the part of the Jewish people’s redemptive-historical vocation that required their separation from the nations, and inaugurated the future promised to Abraham that he would become the father of many nations. The new, multi-ethnic gatherings of believers that formed around the Mediterranean world became known as churches. God’s mission for the church was to announce the good news of Jesus’ lordship—His triumph over sin and sin’s chief consequences, death and alienation from God—to the ends of the earth, a process that would leave a trail of new churches in their wake. The church exists for mission. The purpose of mission is to establish churches. As Emil Brunner said, ‘The church exists by mission just as fire exists by burning.’ This, in extremely abbreviated form, is the link between Christology, ecclesiology, and missiology.

But we need to look again at this connection through the lenses of pneumatology and eschatology—the Holy Spirit and the last days. As mentioned in The Church Part I, biblically speaking, the resurrection of the Messiah and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit were definitive signs that ‘the last days’ had arrived. As God threw open the doors to membership in His people beyond the borders of ethnic Israel (another biblical promise associated with the arrival of ‘the last days’), the Jerusalem Temple no longer fit with the global orientation of God’s mission. Instead of God’s Spirit dwelling in a single location, God’s Spirit would now indwell both individual believers and also the corporate gatherings of believers. This is one of the significances of the tongues of fire resting on the heads of the 120 gathered in the upper room on Pentecost. Throughout the history of Israel, fire had been one of the authenticating signs of the presence of the One True God. As God was now sending His people to the ends of the earth, He again used fire—this time to indicate that His presence was going with each one of them. This presence meant that all the functions of the Temple—the facilitation of an encounter with God (including instruction, calling, worship, and reconciliation)—had been transferred to the followers of Jesus. The intersection between heaven and earth was no longer the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but every individual disciple of Jesus, and, especially, every community of disciples.†

One of the most dramatic results of the Holy Spirit’s accompanying and indwelling His people is the occurrence of manifestations of God’s power. In the life of the church, the Spirit gives empowerment in the form of miracles and other spiritual gifts in order to validate the message of Jesus’ followers. If you think about it, nothing could be more practical or sensible. One way to paraphrase the Gospel is: ‘You’re wrong about everything you believe. As a result, you’re living the wrong way. You need to believe in Jesus—which translates to following Him as Lord—so that you can be adopted into God’s family and saved from condemnation on the day that God judges the world.’ Why would anyone—in the ancient world or the modern one—believe this, without the working of the Holy Spirit’s power to assist in confirming the truth of the message?°

So the arrival of the last days (eschatology) means that God will gather in people from all nations (missiology) to form worshiping communities (ecclesiology). The Holy Spirit indwells these corporate gatherings to make the community the foretaste of heaven, and empowers individual believers with supernatural power (pneumatology) to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth (missiology). It takes a little effort to hold them all together in your mind, but, in essence: if the Messiah has not come, it is not the last days and there is no need for the church, because the people of God do not have a mission to announce the Gospel to all nations, and therefore they do not need the power of the Holy Spirit to accompany them, confirm their message, or to make their gatherings the foretaste of heaven. Christology, ecclesiology, pneumatology, missiology, and eschatology are, essentially, a seamless whole.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER? It matters because the answer to the question ‘What time is it?’ and the answer, ‘It’s the last days: The Messiah has been raised from the dead and the Spirit has been poured out,’ means that every follower of Jesus should expect both to be empowered with the Spirit for mission, and to experience the foretaste of heaven in each gathering of the worshiping community. It means that your primary purpose in this life is to image the Kingdom—both as an individual being conformed to the character of Christ and as part of a church that models the reconciling, healing, and peaceful Kingdom whose corporate life and mission mirror that of the trinitarian God. It means you should expect the power of the age to come—or, in G. E. Ladd’s memorable phrase, the presence of the future—as you tell people about Jesus, pray for people in the name of Jesus, and gather with God’s people to worship and get instruction in the way of Jesus.

Another reason this matters is that it forms part of the answer to the question: Why don’t we see miracles today? (…at least in the United States—Christians in Africa, Asia, and South America see them much more regularly than we do.) I think there are two primary answers. First: we don’t expect to see them. We don’t believe it is the last days, so we don’t expect to see all of the signs that the biblical prophets said would accompany them. As a result, we don’t ask God, and God doesn’t answer. (This isn’t the place to detail it in depth, but you can make a strong case from the Bible that there is a connection between expectation and miracles.) Second, and this might be at least partly a result of the first reason: (because we don’t believe it is the last days), we aren’t engaged in the mission of announcing God’s Kingdom. We’re not attempting anything for God that will be impossible to do without power from God. When was the last time you prayed for a miracle? For incurable cancer to be healed? For a blind eye or a deaf ear to open? For restoration in a relationship seemingly broken beyond all hope of repair? For a major hurricane to lose power or a destructive wildfire to die out? When did you last expect God’s power to manifest in the gathering of your church that people who didn’t believe in God would drop to their knees and confess, ‘Surely God is in this place’ (1 Cor. 14:25)? When did you last pray and expect God to answer at all?

However you answer these questions, I want to ask you one more: are you satisfied with the level of the Holy Spirit’s activity in your life and in your church? If not, I encourage you to ask God for an increase in expectation. He is described in the New Testament as the God who is able to do exceedingly and abundantly beyond all we can ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20). Is the extent of your thoughts and imagination inviting Him to do something truly and astonishingly wonderful—in your own life or in the life of your church? If not, you are settling for less than your inheritance in the Spirit as a follower of Jesus and a child of God. How different could this world be if God’s people stopped settling…?

° I have heard it said that miracles don’t produce faith. Miracles do not produce mature faith. But anyone claiming that miracles don’t produce faith is ignoring not only the emphasis that the New Testament puts on miracles in general (Matt. 12:28, Luke 5:17, Acts 2:4, 43, 3:12-16, 5:12, 6:8, 8:6-7, 39, 9:17-18, 10:38, 13:9-11, 14:8-10, 19:6, 11-12, 28:8, Rom. 15:18-19, 1 Cor. 2:4-5, 12:4-11, 2 Cor. 12:12, Gal. 3:5, 1 Thess. 1:5, Heb. 2:4), but also, in particular, the incidences where miracles are said to result in belief (John 2:11, 2:23, 4:46-54, 6:14, 11:45; Acts 8:5-8, 12, 8:9-13, 13:6-12, 14:8-18, 16:25-34).

† This is not replacement theology. The Bible is clear that Israel still has a place in redemptive history. I’m referring here to only one aspect of Israel’s vocation being fulfilled.