Heavenly - Mindedness (15)

 

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

 

This is a hard series to write because Vos’s message overwhelms me. It is so dense and rich that it is difficult to choose the length of an excerpt – it is tightly woven to the point of seamlessness and it is impossible to do justice to the depth, intricacy, and soaring wonder of the vision Vos casts from Holy Scripture. But then, isn’t this a mark of the Word of God rightly communicated? Doesn’t the Bible draw us back again and again to behold the wonder of Christ? Are there not words that have been written and spoken, birthed from the Bible, that have been with us down through the ages?

 

When we read or hear of the glories of Christ in His People and find it difficult to relate to them, we can either say, “That’s not for me,” or we can say, “O Lord Jesus, reveal Yourself to me as You have promised!” A fundamental decision I came to many years ago was this, that if I encountered a disconnect in the Bible between my own life and the life promised to me in Christ, or a disconnect between the life of the Church today and the life and calling of the Church in the Bible, that I would not rationalize away the disconnect, that I would not excuse the discrepancy, but that I would acknowledge it and seek the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I fear that much of our personal and corporate theology is based on rationalized excuses rather than on the Bible – we excuse our disobedience, we excuse our lack of heavenly – mindedness, we excuse our compromise with the world, we excuse our lack of witness…when Christ continually calls us to behold Him in His glory and to be transformed into His image…the image of God and not the image of fallen man.

 

Let me assure you that if you find the following passage to be foreign to your experience, that Jesus Christ wants this heavenly – mindedness to be normative in your life. How do I know this? Simply and prayerfully read John chapters 13 – 17; this deep and holy place is how I know. Allow Jesus Christ to draw you into the depths of His Being, into the holiness of the Trinity. We can trust the all – enveloping and purifying love of God in our Lord Jesus Christ to restore our souls, to teach us to live together in Christ, and to teach us to be a blessing to those around us.

        

“In the heart of man time calls for eternity, earth for heaven. He must, if normal, seek the things above, as the flower’s face is attracted by the sun, and the water-courses are drawn to the ocean. Heavenly-mindedness, so far from blunting or killing the natural desires, produces in the believer a finer organization, with more delicate sensibilities, larger capacities, a stronger pulse of life. It does not spell impoverishment, but enrichment of nature. The spirit of the entire Epistle shows this. The use of the words “city” and “country” is evidence of it. These are terms that stand for the accumulation, the efflorescence, the intensive enjoyment of values. Nor should we overlook the social note in the representation. A perfect communion in a perfect society is promised.

 

“In the city of the living God believers are joined to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and mingle with the spirits of just men made perfect. And all this faith recognizes. It does not first need the storms and stress that invade to quicken its desire for such things. Being the sum and substance of all the positive gifts of God to us in their highest form, heaven is of itself able to evoke in our hearts positive love, such absorbing love as can render us at times forgetful of the earthly strife. In such moments the transcendent beauty of the other shore and the irresistible current of our deepest life lift us above every regard of wind or wave. We know that through weather fair or foul our ship is bound straight for its eternal port.

 

“Next to the positiveness of its object the high degree of actuality in the working of this grace should be considered. Through the faith of heavenly-mindedness the things above reveal themselves to the believer, are present with him, and communicate themselves to him. Though as yet a pilgrim, the Christian is never wholly separated from the land of promise. His tents are pitched in close view of the city of God. Heaven is present to the believer’s experience in no less real a sense than Canaan with its fair hills and valleys lay close to the vision of Abraham. He walks in the light of the heavenly world and is made acquainted with the kindred spirits inhabiting it.

 

“And since the word “actual” in its literal sense means “that which works,” the life above possesses for the believer the highest kind of actuality. He is given to taste the powers of the world to come, as Abraham breathed the air of Canaan, and was refreshed by the dews descending on its fields. The roots of the Christian’s life are fed from those rich and perennial springs that lie deep in the recesses of converse with God, where prayers ascend and divine graces descend, so that after each season of tryst [intimate private time with God] he issues, a new man, from the secrecy of his tent.” G.Voos

 

I’m going to ask you to ponder the above. What challenges you? What resonates with you? Do you know what it is to commune with our Lord Jesus in the “secrecy” of your tent (an allusion to Moses communing with God in the Tent of Meeting)? Are you entering into your closet to commune with your heavenly Father (Matthew 6:6) as a way of life?

 

Do not be afraid to ask your Lord Jesus to reveal Himself to you in an intimate and personal way. Trust Him. Spend time with Him. Pray to Him. Talk to Him. Give yourself to Him (Romans 12:1 – 2). In Christ you are called to be a child of another world, and that world is beautiful and glorious because in it is the glory of God and of the Lamb – it lights the entire City (Revelation 21:22 – 23).

 

I’ll return to this excerpt in my next post.

 

Love and blessing in Christ Jesus.

Quotes and Questions

 

 

“The idolizing of material prosperity characteristic of Rome [Rev. 3:17] characterizes a whole church.”

 

“What the Nicolaitans and Jezebel are urging is not some minor accommodation to the ways of pagan society Christians have to live in, but complicity in that denial of the true God and his righteousness which characterizes the forces of evil incarnate in the Roman system. No wonder Jezebel is said to “deceive” Christians (2:20) – a word used elsewhere in Revelation only of the devil, the false prophet and Babylon…”

 

“Their [the Nicolaitans and Jezebel] teaching made it possible for Christians to be successful in pagan society, but this was the beast’s success, a real conquest of the saints, winning them to his side, rather than the only apparent conquest he achieved by putting them to death.”   Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, pages 123 – 124. Italics mine.

 

 

Richard Bauckham – On Babylon in Revelation:

 

“The hyperbole makes clear what is at stake in the conflict between the church and the Empire. The conflict truly concerns the coming of God’s kingdom. But the hyperbole also shows that what is at stake in the ultimate conflict of that time is what is always at stake in the church’s history. The beast as the Roman Empire never held truly universal power, but what the beast represents, in a thousand other historical forms, contests the control of God’s world until the coming of his eschatological kingdom. Therefore also the street of the great city, in which the witnesses to God’s truth lie dead at the hands of the beast, need be neither in Jerusalem or in Rome nor even in the cities of Asia. It may also be wherever the unprecedented numbers of Christians martyrs in our own century have died. The eschatological hyperbole gives these symbols intrinsic power to reach as far as the parousia. Furthermore, it is not only the hyperbole that gives the images this power. Because John’s images are images designed to penetrate the essential character of the forces at work in his contemporary world and the ultimate issues at stake in it, to a remarkable extent they leave aside the merely incidental historical features of his world. There are enough of them to make the reference unmistakable; Babylon is built on seven hills (17:9) and trades in a very accurate list of the imports to first-century Rome from all over the known world (18:11 – 13). But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon’s condemnation.” Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, pages 155 – 156. Italics mine.

 

Now that we’ve read the quotes, here’s a question, “What society is wearing Babylon’s cap today?”

 

Here’s another question, “Can you think of a more remarkable victory for the beast, than that of seducing the professing church into the adulation of Babylon?”