Heavenly Mindedness (33)

 

Continuing our reflections on Geerhardus Vos’s Message on “Heavenly Mindedness” from Hebrews 11:9 – 10:

 

“For heaven itself is subject to a process of preparation, so that its full content became accessible only to the patriarchs through a projection of their faith in time. The heaven for which they hoped was the heaven of redemption, enriched through the ages, become peopled with the successive generations of the saints of God, filled with the glory of Christ, the recreated paradise, towards which all the streams of grace springing up in time send their waters. The believer requires this new heaven, not simply the cosmical place that resulted from the first creation. Hence his heavenly-mindedness can never destroy interest in the unfolding of the ways of God throughout the history of the present world.” G. Vos

 

Continuing with the question from our previous post, what does it mean that “heaven itself is subject to a process of preparation”?

 

Have you ever considered that American Christians tend to think upside-down when it comes to Biblical prophecy and trajectory? While the Bible’s focus is the ever-expanding Kingdom of God, the growth of the Temple of God, the glory and purification of the Bride, the maturation of the Body of Christ, and the formation of each member of this Body into the image of Jesus Christ; our focus tends to be on the trajectory of evil, the headlines of evil, what (we think) the Bible says about evil. This is what aviators call “spatial disorientation.” Our mindset often is, frankly, that evil wins and we must escape; rather than the Biblical trajectory of Daniel Chapter 2 - the Stone conquers and brings the kingdoms of this world, all its kingdoms and political entities, to an end.

 

This upside-down thinking is a challenge to understanding Vos’s “heaven itself is subject to a process of preparation” because we are unaccustomed to seeing what God in Christ in glory is doing, we are rather accustomed to focusing on evil; buying books that purport to interpret headlines about evil, satisfying our curiosity about evil and darkness. May I gently point out that we do not see in darkness, we see in light, and there is only one true Light that we can truly see by, that of Jesus Christ and His glorious redemptive work on this earth – a work that, while it does contain judgement, is focused on the glory of God, the perfection of the saints, and the deliverance of Creation from the “bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

 

Our upside-down thinking is a disability that only an unrelenting focus on Jesus Christ can deliver us from (Hebrews 12:3), a focus that our Fathers and Mothers have maintained throughout the ages (Hebrews 11).

 

As we saw in our last post, Vos notes that elements of the process of preparing heaven include redemption, enrichment, and people. We touched on “redemption” in the last post; what might “enrichment” mean? I imagine there are many facets to the answer, I’ll share what comes to my mind and you can ponder others than come to you in your meditations.

 

I see two paradigms, one in Ephesians 4 and the other in Joshua 1. In Ephesians 4 we see that the “Mature Man” is growing up into the “measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ,” into “all aspects” of Him “who is the Head, even Christ.” We see that every member of His Body is “being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the Body for the building up of itself in love.”

 

This is certainly a portrait of enrichment. It also may be a challenge for us as we consider the likely disconnect between the Holy Spirit’s vision of the Body of Christ and our vision and practice. Sadly, many (most) of us who have been academically trained for vocational ministry have either lost sight of the fact, or have never known, that our calling is to “equip the saints for the work of service/ministry, to the building up of the Body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11). We are products of a system that spans virtually all traditions, that thinks upside-down in terms of those called to elder-type service and the rest of the Body. This is a primary reason that I do not use the term “laity,” the clergy – laity dichotomy is a dichotomy of death, along with the sacred – secular dichotomy.

 

But let me be quick to say that this upside – down thinking is embraced and defended by most congregations, by most people, because it is much more comfortable to place the burden for ministry on the few, rather than to expect the members of the congregation to actually know the Bible, live the Bible, and be devoted to Jesus Christ. We want the professionals to take care of religious things, and to serve us the way we want to be served, to entertain us the way we want to be entertained, to be our therapists. Let’s recall that it was the Man who washed the feet of others Who was crucified – thus it shall be until that Man comes in the fulness of His Kingdom.

 

The leadership of a parish once criticized me in an annual review for expecting them to “read too much.” I wanted them to read because I wanted to equip them to equip others, and my reading requests were modest – but what was a child’s toy pail of reading to me, was a front-end loader’s bucket of sand to them. I have worked with small groups in which I’ve received the same pushback, we simply do not want to “till our land that we may have plenty of bread.” We want others to feed us. (I am amused when I hear Protestants accuse Roman Catholics of seeing the priest as a mediator – Protestants are no different.)

 

Perhaps this is enough to ponder for now, I’ll circle back to Joshua Chapter 1 in the next post. In the meantime, what do you see regarding enrichment in the Kingdom of Heaven in Joshua Chapter 1?