catapult magazine

Read this issue’s Bible study verses: ../issues/backIssue.cfm?issueid=24#study

Read the creation account. What was the nature of God’s rest on the 7th day? Has God rested since then?

To be sure, work is a good thing. Culture is a good thing, and I agree that it has great value for life on earth. It adds both meaning and great enjoyment to life. But, at the same time, who would deny that marriage is also good? In fact, James M Boice argues that even culture stems from the first marriage. So many of the things we enjoy and do in this life would be impossible without marriage. And yet, we are told that in heaven there will be no marriage.

So, from this we can learn that, though something be good for us in this life, it will not necessarily continue to happen in the afterlife. Culture is good, but for that reason alone it will not necessarily continue in heaven (though of course it may continue in heaven: the argument is not conclusive either way).

If thinking that we will rest from work is only the result of Dionysian thinking, I would cast myself far from it. But other views still distort our thinking on work. Though modernistic ways of thinking about work may be passing, the world’s thinking on work remain overly man-centered. I’m not so sure we refuse to draw our focus away from “man” in man-power.

If the chief end of man is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” I’m not sure our work is necessary to accomplish that end. Still, while we live and breath, God has given us wonderful work to do.

I repent of reducing Christ’s ministry, if that’s what I’ve done. That indeed would be an egregious error. In and of themselves, however, analogies don’t reduce Christ’s ministry. Analogy is a Creator’s way of communicating to his creatures. Who of us would claim to have the mind of God? Luis Berkhof argued that in the moment any of us had the mind of God, we would in essence be God himself. Analogies are not untrue, nor are they less true. They are a creaturely way of thinking. I think it makes sense that if God created us in his likeness (analogy?), he is also able to communicate truth to us whom He has created without having to convey his superior knowledge to us (which we, being creatures, could never understand). Analogies are God’s gracious way of condescending to our ability to understand (which is indeed great, but yet not equal to God’s ability to understand). The question, then, is not what analogies mean for a developmentally disabled person. The question is: If God had not used analogies, would even the brightest person be able to learn how to rest? Analogies are extremely useful in teaching people of all manner of cognitions. I was listening to Stephen Hawking recently and he used the analogy of an expanding balloon to explain how all planets are moving away from earth and how that does not mean that the earth is at the center of the universe (all points on the surface of a balloon are moving away from other points, but no point on the surface is at the center of the balloon).

Consider John 5:17. “Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at work to this very day, and I too, am working.’”

I came across this passage in Hendrikus Berkhof’s “Christ the Meaning of History” and found it very illuminating. I’m still trying to understand it better. Berkhof is trying to explain how the consummation of God’s Kingdom means anything for us today as we still work in the rest of God’s victory over sin and death. Berkhof says:

“Consummation means to live again in the succession of past, present, and future, but in such a way that the past moves along with us as a blessing and the future radiates through the present so that we strive without restlessness and rest without idleness, and so that, though always progressing, we are always at our destination. This is a stammering attempt to express what is above our experience, but it is no arbitrary stammering. It is grounded in the manner in which Jesus Christ (who is the same yesterday, today, and forever) has even now begun to give us time, in the lives of his believers as well as in history—in history because he delivered us from the unending cycle of naturalistic time, and keeps us from a senseless rush through an aimless, secularized time. He changes events into history because the liberating power of his sacrifice and resurrection move with us in our historical existence, and because we see the coming Kingdom dawn over us in the new reality created by it. THIS IS TRUE ALSO FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND AND CONFESS IT. Since we live ‘after Christ’, and since he has become the mystery of history, past, present, and future have approached one another in a manner which we may call a foretaste of the consummation.”

I’ve just been reading Hermann Ridderbos’s “Coming of the Kingdom” (a book i highly recommend). He expressed something similar to H Berkhof. He examined a strange situation in the Gospels: there are supposedly “signs of the times” before the parousia of Christ and yet that parousia will come “as a thief in the night.” How can this be?

He noted that in Christ’s prophecies he (Christ) fuses prediction of his suffering and resurrection with his parousia. He concluded that this means there is an intimate closeness between Christ’s resurrection (the sign of the times) and his parousia (second coming). Hence, we live in a special interim time in which we have recieved the signs of the parousia (Christ’s resurrection, NT miracles, transformed lives of the saints) and yet the parousia has not occured. Christ has already gained victory, yet he has not yet completed it. In fact, the intimacy in Jesus’ predictions between his resurrection and parousia mean that the parousia is mysteriously present and meaningful today.

Likewise, Paul says taht we are NOW seated in the heavens, and at the same time eagerly await being received into the heavens.

In studies of this phenomenon people have been tempted by the extremes. Either they focus exclusively on the “present” reality, so that we have little to look forward to, or exclusively on the “future” so that that future has little meaning now.

H Berkhof seems to be dealing with both in an appropriate way. At the same time his talk is “interim” talk. That is, he’s talking about the present meaning of the future (and how this causes us to work restlessly and rest without idleness), and not describing what our rest in heaven will be like. I think the proper way to construe rest (esp in light of God’s rest in Genesis) is to understand it as consummated rest (enjoyed fully only in the future) that is somehow mysteriously present today. Likewise, in the Gospel the “kingdom of God” refers to the consummation, and the mystery is how it is at the same time a present reality. I think this best accords with the “already, but not yet” idea of our present situation.

Even though H. Berkhof is talking about our own present reality, or “interim”, it is still a radical thing to realize that we already have been given rest, even while we labor. Since we know God is victorious, we do not feel hurried to make the most out of our short lives. We have already given ourselves to the time of Christ. And that is rest for the weary.