November ADVENTures
10:30 am, Sun, Nov 6, 2022 - J G White / FBCA
(Haggai 1:15b – 2:0)
Is your glass half full, or half empty? That’s what I asked my staff at
our meeting last week. There are a lot of ways to play with this image. In the
end, I decided that I see things this way: the glass is full!
A thousand times in the Bible, and a dozen different ways, there is a
message of hope. Things will be better.
Everything will be fixed and made right. One day. These Bible hopes are held,
even as centuries and centuries go by. The Bible is strangely optimistic.
One picture that is painted a dozen times is of The Temple. After an
early point in biblical history, the promises and hopes of a great House of God
take centre stage. God speaks through the voice of the prophet Haggai, for
instance. 3 Who is left among you who saw
this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your
sight as nothing?
For centuries, the Jewish people had their hopes set on having one
temple, one place, as the focus of
where God and heaven met earth, and touched the people. With Moses and the
people camping for forty years, there was a holy tent, the Tabernacle. In the
Holy Land, once they had kings, Solomon saw to the building of a stone and wood
temple. It was spectacular! It was destroyed in about 586 BCE by King
Nebuchadrezzer and the Babylonian empire. Seventy years later, the people get
back to Jerusalem, and build the Second Temple – not quite as grand as the
first. Hence the words in Haggai today.
9 The latter splendor
of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts, and in
this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.
Did that Temple become so amazing? No, not quite. And this second temple
got destroyed about forty years after the time of Jesus, 70 CE.
Yet all the scripture language fills the Christian imagination with
hopes... even hopes for the end of all things. That’s why we read these texts now, and in Advent. The Temple and the City
(called Zion or Jerusalem) still fill traditional Christian hymns.
Glorious things of
thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our
God.
City of God how broad and far
Outspread thy walls
sublime!
I'm just a pilgrim in search of a city,
I want a mansion, a harp and a crown.
Like the Garden of Eden, the Temple in the Holy City is the place where God and the heavens meet
humans on the earth.
The unfulfilled hopes of Haggai, long ago, are given a new promise in
Revelation. Remember the final scene of the New Holy City that comes down. And
what does that vision hold? 22 I saw no
temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.
23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God
is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
The Bible
pictures of a splendid future Temple are pictures, simply pointing to being with God, forever. It is a
glorious future. The glass? More than half full.
When Is the End? (2)
When Is the End?
(2 Thess 2:1-5) Children’s Time
My second little message is a children’s sermon.
Here is one of my favourite clocks.
It is beautiful. It makes wonderful sounds.
It helps us know what time of day it is, right?
Preacher and the peppermint...
Before there was a clock in the church, or watch.
Put a peppermint in his mouth.
When it was done, it was time to end the sermon.
One day, he talked, and talked, and talked...
Oops,.. a button was in his pocket!
Now, let
me offer the grown-up part of this segment: When Is the End? Again, this week,
I found professor Rick Durst's online summaries helpful. He gives a helpful
view of four contemporary ways that Christian scholars think about The END.
1.
Radical: Albert Schweitzer wrote and suggested Jesus was an 'end times
prophet,' proclaiming an immanent change, but got it wrong. By sacrificing
Himself, Jesus did not manage to force God the Father's hand to make the end of
the world happen.
2.
Realized: everything has already happened and been fulfilled, with the fall of
Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE. Lots of cartoonists have a scene with some
fellow in rough robes, and a beard, holding a sign that says 'The End Is Near.'
But one cartoon had the fellow declaring 'The End happened in 70 AD.' All the
Bible end of the world stuff happened back then, within forty years of Jesus'
lifetime.
3.
Inaugrated: already, but not yet. The End started when Jesus was raised from
the dead. It is here now... but more is coming, much more to come. I think, to
be simplistic about it, this is where I am, how I deal with what gets called
Biblical prophecy. We are in the Last Days, of course, because the Last Days
started almost 2000 years ago.
4.
Futurist: all of these prophetic promises must be fulfilled, and we need to
watch for that. It is all starting to happen now. So many evangelical preachers
and scholars take this view. Perhaps on TV you have seen Jack Van Impe, or
David Jeremiah, or John Haggee?
Well... more
about The End next later, and Sunday, and the one after that.
When Is the End? (3)
Our Resurrection
(Luke 20:27-38)
Third mini-sermon: Our
Resurrection. How does our afterlife happen? Our standard statements of faith
in Christianity say things like this: I believe
in... the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the
body: and the life everlasting.
This seems to tie two things together: dead people (the saints) being
somehow still available to us here, and
dead people coming back to life later.
Nowadays, so many of us seem to want the best of all worlds. A beloved one
dies, and we want that person to be
1.
in heaven immediately, with loved ones.
2.
nearby here, ghost-like, seeing us, helping us.
3.
in their final resting places: cemeteries, ashes in urns, or nicely
scattered in a favourite place.
4.
ready to rise up at the return of Jesus and meet Him in the sky.
Our Christian hymns are all over the map on this subject. Oh when the saints go marching in,
Lord,
I want to be in that number.
Some glad morning,
when this life is o’er,
I’ll fly away.
When the trumpet of the Lord shall
sound
And time shall be no
more,
And the morning breaks eternal bright
and fair
When the saved of earth shall gather
over on the other
shore
And the roll is called up yonder I'll
be there
Today, we heard Jesus answer a trick question, posed by some of his
fellow Jews, who were of a specific group that did not believe what other Jews
did, that there could be a resurrection of dead people. ‘Who is married to
whom, in this theoretical afterlife?’ they asked Christ. ‘It’s not like that –
relationships are not the same in the resurrection.’ Read farther into the New
Testament, and you discover that the early disciples of Jesus we awaiting a
resurrection after death. 1 Corinthians 15 is a whole page or two answering
questions and misunderstandings they had.
I was asked a very important question recently: “At the rapture, the
dead in Christ will rise. Does that mean our loved ones are sleeping and not in
Heaven now? I find it comforting to believe they are there already.” (KF) Almost
everyone seems to find that comforting, and so many try to believe that. That
the dead are not resting somewhere, waiting to arise, they are already together
in the final destination.
We are
going to have to keep our thoughts in
conversation with all the Bible teachings about Jesus’ resurrection and ours.
God is
the God of the living, Jesus said. We are
‘children of the resurrection.’ But this also includes the reality that those
who died before are still alive, like Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. ‘Asleep in
Jesus’ we can say.
What does
John McCrae’s famous poem suggest?
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Next
Sunday we shall explore our afterlife in greater detail. Until then, let us
pause to meditate upon these things.
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