immanence

Immanuel, Part 5: Forever

December 19, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Creation | Part 2: Covenant | Part 3: Marriage | Part 4: Turning the Page

As we’ve seen in this series, God has always wanted to dwell with his people. From the very beginning he made humans in his image and apparently walked with them in the Garden. Throughout the biblical narrative there are people who “walk with God,” and the storyline consists largely of God’s choosing a people for himself: first, a nation (Abraham, Moses, David) and then a spiritual kingdom, the church, which, following Jesus’ Great Commission, will take his story, and the opportunity for fellowship with him, to the ends of the earth.

We find ourselves in the process of fulfilling that Commission, waiting expectantly for his return. Though we don’t know when that will happen, we do know that it may happen at any time. We don’t know how far away the tape is in this race.

But one day he will come. Some Christians (amillennialists and postmillennialists) think that eternity will begin right then. Others, including me (premillennialists) think there will first be a thousand-year earthly reign of Christ, the Millennium, during which sin and death will still be operative, but righteousness and justice will prevail under the perfect King. And then, eternity.

The Bible doesn’t seem to have a lot to tell us about the eternal state—though it speaks much, in my opinion, about the Millennium. (My premill assumptions are showing here.) Most of what we can read about eternity is in the last two chapters of the Scripture, Revelation 21 and 22.

So I pose a question. Will this fellowship, this walking with God, his dwelling in the midst of his people—will that continue beyond time and into eternity? Is history just preparation for an eternal dwelling with God?

Let’s survey those two chapters.

After the Millennium (Re 20) and the Great White Throne judgment (Re 20.11-15), which ends with the “second death,” when “death and hell [are] cast into the lake of fire” (Re 20.14-15), the eternal state begins. And it begins with the presentation of the new heaven and new earth. Note the matrimonial language here: the New Jerusalem is “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Re 21.2), and eventually an angel calls the heavenly Jerusalem “the bride, the Lamb’s wife” (Re 21.9). It’s no stretch to see this as a continuation of the marital language God has used to describe first Israel and then the church. This is the realization, the consummation, of that intimate relationship.

And how is it described?

The tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God (Re 21.3).

After a description of the city, John says,

I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it (Re 21.22).

And again,

The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: ⁴And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads (Re 22.3-4).

And finally,

The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely (Re 22.17).

And there is our answer.

God dwells with his people not just for time, but for eternity.

That has always been the plan.

So the Bible is, in literary terminology, an inclusio: it begins and ends with the same theme of God’s desire to dwell with his people in the most intimate and eternal of relationships.

It will be done.

This Christmas season we’re reminded of the completeness of God’s commitment to this relationship, and the certainty that it will happen.

Immanuel.

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Immanuel, Part 4: Turning the Page

December 16, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Creation | Part 2: Covenant | Part 3: Marriage

Has God given up on his people? Has he divorced them with no hope of reconciliation?

In the account so far, we have reason to think otherwise.

At the dedication of the Temple, Solomon had prayed,

Now therefore arise, O Lord God, into thy resting place, thou, and the ark of thy strength: let thy priests, O Lord God, be clothed with salvation, and let thy saints rejoice in goodness (2Ch 6.41).

Solomon, who will be worshiping idols in his old age (1K 11.4-8), invites God to reside in the house he has built in Israel’s capital city. Will God refuse the invitation because of how he knows Israel will behave?

Perhaps surprisingly, no.

Now when Solomon had made an end of praying, the fire came down from heaven, and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the Lord filled the house. ²And the priests could not enter into the house of the Lord, because the glory of the Lord had filled the Lord’s house. ³And when all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the Lord upon the house, they bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped, and praised the Lord, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever (2Ch 7.1-3).

God wants to dwell in the midst of his people, in spite of everything.

Four centuries later, when some of the Babylonian exiles return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, God promises to make this Second Temple, admittedly an inferior one (Hag 2.3), even greater than Solomon’s (Hag 2.4-9).

We’ll get to how he does that in a little bit.

And a prophet, Micah, in the midst of lambasting Israel for their sin, writes,

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
And what doth the Lord require of thee,
But to do justly, and to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with thy God? (Mic 6.8).

God wants, he really wants, to dwell with his people.

By his providence, the Protestant canon of the Old Testament ends with the word curse (Mal 4.6)—and it is a threat.

But as I noted last time, there’s a page to turn.

Let’s turn it now.

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Mt 1.1).

That first chapter of Matthew demonstrates that Jesus is indeed the son of David (Mt 1.6) and of Abraham (Mt 1.2), and then it demonstrates even more: that this Jesus is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy (Is 7.14) of one to be born of a virgin (Mt 1.18), one who would be “Immanuel” (Mt 1.23)—and Matthew kindly assists his Greek- and English-speaking readers by translating that Hebrew word: “which being interpreted is, God with us.”

God has been silent for 400 years, since Malachi’s “curse.” But now he speaks, and his words reverberate through the halls of history with an assurance: God still wants to dwell with his people.

He is so committed to this intimacy that he himself, in the person of God the Son, takes on human flesh and becomes one of us.

One of Jesus’ closest earthly disciples put it this way:

The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth (Jn 1.14).

He walks among us.

As a baby, he is presented to the Lord in the Temple—a renovated Temple, yes, but still the Temple that Haggai’s people had built.

He will teach and heal in that Temple, in Solomon’s porch, and he will clear the neighboring plaza of moneychangers and profiteers.

He experiences deprivation—hunger, thirst, sorrow, and physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.

He is in all points tempted just as we are, but without sin.

And one Friday afternoon, as he delivers his spirit to God from a cross, the veil of that Temple will be torn in two, from the top to the bottom, opening the way for all to see that the Holiest Place is empty of a physical Ark, but access to God is open as it had never been before.

God with us.

He lives here with us for 30 or 35 years, and then he ascends back to heaven and takes his seat at the Father’s right hand.

Is that it? Less than 4 decades? Or will he dwell with us forever?

Next time.

Part 5: Forever

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Immanuel, Part 3: Marriage

December 12, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Creation | Part 2: Covenant

After the wedding, as they say, comes the marriage. And we all know that in human marriages, there are ups and downs, times of bliss and rockier roads.

God’s marriage to his people is half human; his people are sinful beings, and this marriage exhibits that kind of instability—due not to any instability in God, but rather to the deep brokenness of his wife, his people.

The trouble begins before we even get out of Exodus. There are multiple instances of Israel’s unfaithfulness, most notoriously that of the golden calf, which the people worship even before Moses has returned from the mountaintop. Soon after, they refuse God’s wedding gift of the land of Canaan, fearing that their new husband is not powerful or faithful enough to defeat the land’s imposing inhabitants on their behalf. Forty years they wander in the wilderness, slow to learn of their husband’s goodness and strength.

Eventually God returns them to their gift, and they take the land. But they refuse his command to destroy the inhabitants, setting up centuries of unfaithfulness in worshiping the various Canaanite gods.

How stupid do you have to be to worship the gods of people you just defeated in battle?

Once in the land, they stumble into a government of sorts, entrusting their fates to judges who they believe will protect them from the enemies that surround them. They have not learned, apparently, from God’s defeating of the Canaanites. But the judges, while sometimes temporarily successful, are generally disappointing—Samson the most—and by the end of the judges era their land is chaotic and dysfunctional.

And so they look for a king.

Now, God has always wanted them to have a king; Jacob had prophesied on his deathbed that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah … until the one to whom it belongs² comes” (Ge 49.10). But the Israelites, once again, are focused on the strength of their enemies rather than the strength of their God, and they go for the tall guy. (Don’t get me started.) He has no heart for God and little to no personal character, and after a full 40-year career God rejects him—and his line, as represented in David’s friend Jonathan.

This should not be a surprise; Saul, the people’s choice, is from the tribe of Benjamin, and Jacob’s prophecy has identified the royal tribe as Judah.

So God chooses Judah’s David, a man after his own heart. And at the anointing of the young shepherd boy by Samuel, we’re told that “the Spirit of God came upon David from that day forward” (1S 16.13). There are a dozen or so people of whom the Old Testament says that the Spirit “came upon” them—warriors and prophets, mostly—but it is said of no one else that the Spirit came upon them “from that day forward.” I suspect that David was the only person before Jesus to experience the permanent indwelling of the Spirit.

God dwelt with him.

The rest of the Old Testament is largely a story of frustration. David and Solomon both fall into great sin; the kingdom is divided. Then every single king of Israel is evil, while most of the kings of Judah are evil as well. The prophets present countless examples of the Israelites’ unfaithfulness to God, their husband. Israel goes into exile in Assyria; Judah in Babylon.

In Jerusalem as Nebuchadnezzar’s army approaches, Jeremiah writes God’s message:

And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also (Jer 3.8).

Living in the exile community in Babylon, Ezekiel describes a vision in which the glory of God—the pillar of cloud and fire—departs from the Temple (Ezk 10.18).

Divorce. Departure.

But, my friends, the divorce is not final.

God’s final prophetic word to his ex-wife is “Curse” (Mal 4.6).

But there is a page yet to turn.

² The KJV famously renders this as “Shiloh.” That’s the underlying Hebrew word, and it may be a proper name. But if it is, the Bible gives us no further information about the person, and it never refers to Jesus with that name. Several other translations parse the Hebrew word as a contraction of sorts, consisting of “sh,” a possible contraction of asher, meaning “which,” and “l,” a preposition meaning “to,” and “h,” which as an ending in Hebrew often means “him.” Thus “which to him,” or “which is his.”

Part 4: Turning the Page | Part 5: Forever

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Immanuel, Part 2: Covenant

December 9, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Creation

God begins our story by emphasizing that he wants to fellowship intimately with us. The book of Genesis contains many indications of that idea not mentioned in the previous post—his fellowship with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob most notably, a story punctuated with the building of altars and the offering of sacrifices that speak of such fellowship, and indeed of love.

As we move into Exodus, the theme continues.

God has promised Abraham that he will give his descendants a certain land—the land God has directed him to, and on which Abraham has already walked—the land of Canaan. As Exodus opens, Jacob (Israel) and his handful of descendants have left the land of promise—because they were in danger of starving in the famine—and have relocated to Egypt, at the clear providential direction of God through Jacob’s son Joseph. And under Joseph’s protection, they flourish there.

But dark times come. A new Pharoah arises, who knows nothing of the centuries-old stories of Joseph, the savior of Egypt, and who sees Jacob’s descendants as simply a supply of free manual labor.

So the Israelites become slaves—toiling under merciless taskmasters, and for free.

But God sees, and he hears their cries, and he raises up Moses, providentially raised in Pharaoh’s very courts, to take a message to Pharaoh:

Let my people go.

Did you hear that?

My people. Mine.

Family. Intimacy. Love.

And through a series of plagues, which are clearly direct attacks on and defeats of Egypt’s many gods, the LORD brings his beloved people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea to Sinai, where he meets with their leaders—face to face with Moses—and enters into a covenant with them. That covenant is rich and multifaceted; he is their Lord, their King. But he is also their Husband.

He marries them.

And during an extended period with Moses on the mountain, he gives extensive instructions for a Tabernacle, a tent where he will dwell among them. When Moses returns down the mountain, his face shines with the intensity of his fellowship with God.

And with the energetic cooperation of the people, skilled and gifted craftsmen build the tent to the exact specifications God has given. They call it “the Tent of Meeting,” because in that simple edifice both Moses and the high priest can meet with God. The Tabernacle is set up in the very middle of the camp.

And as the crowning element of this marriage ceremony, the visible light of God’s presence, the pillar of cloud and fire¹, descends and hovers over the tent, directly over the Holiest Place, the section of the tent where the Ark of the Covenant is placed.

This Ark is a gold-plated box containing the Ten Commandments—the marriage license, if you will—and Aaron’s rod, the symbol of priestly authority. Its solid-gold lid, the Covering or Mercy Seat, features images of two cherubim facing each other, and God says that he dwells there on the Mercy Seat, between the cherubim. It is there that the high priest, once a year on the Day of Atonement, sprinkles the sacrificial blood that will cover the sins of the people for another year.

God dwells among them.

He has married them, and now they move in together and set up house.

Next time: the theme continues.

¹ In my loosely held opinion, there were not two pillars, one of “cloud” during the day and another of “fire” during the night, with daily transitions from one to the other. Rather there was a single bright white pillar, which looked like a bright cloud during daylight hours and then, with darkness, appeared more luminescent, like fire. The cloud is referred to as a “pillar [singular] of cloud and of fire” in Ex 14.24. This seems consistent with Solomon’s statement that the Lord “would dwell in thick darkness” (1K 8.12 // 2Ch 6.1; cf. Ex 20.21; Dt 4.11; 5.22).

Part 3: Marriage | Part 4: Turning the Page | Part 5: Forever

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Immanuel, Part 1: Creation

December 5, 2024 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

One of the key pursuits in Biblical Studies is discerning the central theme of the Bible. In Biblical Theology, which is essentially the study of the Bible as literature, this question is the end of the entire discipline, the goal toward which all the other work is pointing. In German scholarship it’s called the Mitte, or center.

Over the years several candidates have been suggested. A popular one is “kingdom”: Thurman Wisdom and Thomas Schreiner have both recently favored this idea in one form or another. Another popular suggestion is “covenant,” suggested influentially a century ago by Walther Eichrodt. And recently Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum have combined the two ideas.

For a time I toyed with the idea of “Messiah” as the central theme. I noted that the Hebrew Canon has three parts—the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings—each of which introduces us to offices (priest, prophet, and king, respectively) that were filled by disappointing people, all anticipating the perfect Prophet, Priest, and King who would lead without disappointment. He was, of course, the Messiah, the Anointed One—and all of these offices typically involved anointing.

I think that’s a defensible suggestion for a central, governing theme; it seems comprehensive, with good explanatory power for all the biblical contents.

But lately I’ve been meditating on another possibility, a theme that has been observed and commented on by a number of other students of the Word.

It’s the idea of God dwelling with, among, his people.

I’d like to spend a few posts tracing that idea through the Scripture.

__________

We begin, of course, in Genesis, in the primeval history. The first thing we learn is that God is the author of creation; he made all things (Ge 1.1). Later in that first chapter we see him creating the first humans and distinguishing them from the other living creatures: they are in the image of God (Ge 1.26-27). In fact, rather than just speaking them into existence, as he had other living things (Ge 1.11-12, 20-21, 24-25), he intervenes personally, seemingly physically, to form Adam from the dust of the ground (Ge 2.7) and then to form Eve from one of Adam’s ribs (Ge 2.21-22). This seems much more intimate, much more personal, than the way he created the animals. Along the way we hear God give Adam and Eve dominion over all the earth (Ge 1.28), intending them to use plant life for their sustenance.

Now, I need to deal with a misconception. I suppose this misconception was most artfully rendered in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones:

 And God stepped out on space,
 And he looked around and said:
 I’m lonely —
 I’ll make me a world.

Johnson’s work is worthwhile reading by every American for its cultural and historical significance, its lyricism, its artistry. It is a remarkable piece of literature.

But God was not lonely.

God is, and always has been, completely satisfied in himself. There is no lack, no need, no shortcoming in him.

And thus he did not need to make us.

And yet, he wanted to.

Why? If he didn’t need us, why did he make us at all?

We get a tiny, possible hint shortly later in the narrative. Adam and Eve have sinned (Ge 3.6) and then tried to cover their newfound shame (Ge 3.7), and

they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day (Ge 3.8).

Now, we’re not told that this had been a daily practice. Perhaps God, knowing that his creatures have sinned, is coming to announce their judgment (Ge 3.16-19)—and their eventual glorious deliverance (Ge 3.15).

But this does speak of God desiring to be in company with Adam and Eve—perhaps even to walk with them in the beauty of the Garden, to point out its delights, to savor the wonder and joy in their faces as they realize what he has given them.

Of course, sin has changed all that.

But even so the fellowship continues. Just two scant chapters later, we find Enoch “walk[ing] with God” (Ge 5.22), and in the next chapter, Noah doing the same thing (Ge 6.9).

God wants to fellowship with his people, to interact with them in loving and friendly and intimate ways.

From the beginning it has always been so.

And as the story continues, the evidence will continue to accumulate.

Next time, from a family to a nation.

Part 2: Covenant | Part 3: Marriage | Part 4: Turning the Page | Part 5: Forever

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