God’s New World
Isaiah 65:17-25[1]
The three most
important Christian virtues—faith, hope, and love—challenging to all of us. But
I think hope may challenge us in special ways. We’re people who need something
almost physical to hang onto when it comes to our spirituality. With faith, we
have Jesus, and with love we have other people. But hope is something that
seems to be just “out there.” Of course, we have a tendency to frame hope in
ways that are specific. Most of us focus on being reunited with our loved ones.
I can identify with that, and it’s a part of my hope as well. For my part, I
look forward to being able to stand face-to-face with Jesus and experience his
love in person. I look forward to the smile on his face and the comfort of his
arms.
“Going to heaven” when
we die is the point of hope for most of us. And with good reason. The church
has been teaching that version of the Christian hope for about 800 years.
Before that time, the church focused more on the view that we would all share a
common destiny, a view that’s grounded in Bible passages like our lesson for
today. But in the 13th Century, in the “High Middle Ages,” church
leaders and wandering preachers started urging people to take their faith more
seriously. And the way they did that was by teaching that each of us face our
destiny alone.[2] They taught that we should be thinking about what will happen to us
individually when we die. In this way the church used the fear of death and
judgment to try to motivate people to become “better” Christians.
To some extent, we
might say that effort succeeded. The fear of death and judgment those medieval
church leaders introduced has deeply affected generations of people to try to
be “good enough” to “go to heaven.” But I would have to say that in the end,
using fear as a motivation cannot truly inspire anyone to live a more godly
life. Jesus called for people to embrace the ways of God’s kingdom, the ways of
love for all, even our “enemies,” the ways of caring and sharing, the ways of
freely giving our lives for the sake of others. If we’re really going to “be
Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his word and sharing his love,”[3] we’re going to have to find a better reason than fear.
I believe that’s where
passages like our lesson from the book of the prophet Isaiah for today come
into play. They speak of God’s future for the whole human family, and beyond
that, the whole creation. The hope that the prophet holds out for us is a
beautiful vision: a whole new heaven and a whole new earth. Isaiah describes
the destiny he saw as the ultimate outcome of God’s saving purpose for all
people together. It’s a vision of all children thriving, and of all people
living full and fulfilling lives. It’s a vision of houses built, and vineyards
planted. It’s a vision that includes even natural enemies in the animal kingdom
living together in harmony. Isaiah virtually breaks into song over the
awe-inspiring future God has in store for the whole world.
Isaiah’s vision is
filled with the language of God’s love, God’s freedom, God’s joy, and God’s
life.[4] In a setting where conquerors continually displaced the people, taking their
children away from them, throwing them out of their homes and off their own
lands, Isaiah sees a people returned from exile to live free from fear. But
Isaiah’s vision doesn’t just concern Israel; their restoration leads to the
restoration of the whole world. Beyond that, this vision of restoration and
renewal extends to all creation—even the animal kingdom will be transformed
when God liberates all people. Isaiah’s vision is that what God will do at the
end of all things will be consistent with what God did at the beginning: create
a world full of beauty and love.
I readily admit that
all of this may be incredibly difficult for us even to imagine. As the prophet
put it, this hope for God’s new world would be something that doesn’t even
compare with the “former things” (Isa. 65:17). While that may seem too much of
a “pie in the sky” dream to put stock in, it’s entirely consistent with other
promises about God’s future in Scripture. Promises like “I will wipe away every
tear” (Isa 25:8), and “they will all know me, from the greatest to the least” (Jer
31:34), and “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ,” (1 Cor
15:22), and perhaps my favorite, “I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5).
These and many more
promises point us to a future in which we all experience God’s salvation
together with the whole human family, indeed together with the whole creation! While
it’s true that the good news creates for each of us a renewed experience of
God’s love on an individual level, that’s only the beginning of what God is up
to in this world, not the end. In fact if we focus our hope of salvation only
on ourselves, we’re selling short God’s purposes and the power of what he has
done for us in Christ.[5] From the biblical
perspective, our faith is about more than just the hope that we get to “go to
heaven” when we die. It’s about the hope that the power to raise to life one
who was imprisoned in death is a power that can restore everything and everyone
to the goodness that God created in the first place.
It’s true that the
hope of “going to heaven” when we die has a long tradition in the history of
the church. And it’s also true that there are some Scriptures that speak of our
destiny in individual terms. But I would say that one of the failures of that
approach to the Christian hope is that by thinking about our own destiny, it
turns us in on ourselves. Perhaps a bigger problem is that it leads us to assume
that we don’t really have to take seriously the problems in this world because
we’re looking forward to leaving it. But that makes the promise of God’s
salvation “too small a thing” (Isa 49:6). Our hope in the risen Lord Jesus
Christ points toward nothing less than God’s new world, a world of love, and freedom,
and joy, and life for all. We put that hope into practice as we invest our
lives through faith that looks forward to more than we can imagine and through
love that empowers us to give ourselves away in service to others.
[1] ©
2022, Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/13/2022 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/ZAT-qQdT6sM
[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 67-68.
[3] Book
of Common Worship, 2018, 422.
[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 124, 178.
[5] Jürgen Moltmann, Way of Jesus:
Christology in Messianic Dimensions, 284-85.
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