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but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal
His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.
Deuteronomy speaks of a great coming restoration.8 Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all echo this theme: the words of comfort in Isaiah 40–55, the promise of covenant renewal in Jeremiah 31, the assurance of cleansing and restoration in Ezekiel 36–37.
The Temple was like a cultural and theological magnet, drawing together not only heaven and earth, but the great scriptural stories and promises.
The Temple was therefore also the focal point of Israel’s hope.
Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together. Worship, prayer, sacrifice, and other public rituals were designed to hold the unseen inhabitants of a city (the gods and perhaps the ancestors) together with the visible ones, the living humans, thus providing a vital framework for ordinary life, for business, marriage, travel, and home life.
place where the invisible world (“heaven”) and the visible world (“earth”) were joined together was the Temple. If you couldn’t get to the Temple, you could and should study and practice the Torah, and it would have the same effect.
Temple and Torah, the two great symbols of Jewish life, pointed to the story in which devout Jews like Saul and his family believed themselves to be living: the great story of Israel and the world, which, they hoped, was at last reaching the point where God would reveal his glory in a fresh way.
Shema Yisrael, Adhonai Elohenu, Adhonai Echad! “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one!”
The books of the Maccabees tell of zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for God’s Torah, zeal for the purity of Israel, and all of it rooted in the story that stretched back to Abraham and included Phinehas and Elijah among its key moments.7 If this was Israel’s story, this is how a loyal Israelite should now behave when faced with the same problem.
One God, One Torah; One Lord, One People, called to utter loyalty.
Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.
You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.
This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.
They were focused on what we might call messianic eschatology: the belief that the One God had acted climactically and decisively in, and even as, Israel’s Messiah. A shocking, blinding reality. The reality that would change the world.
God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”)
Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person.
(“May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth”
he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it
“whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy,”
Saul would not have held back; he would not have toned down his message. There would have been no stopping him. Either Jesus was the Messiah, or he wasn’t.
even though Saul would be at pains to insist that what had happened in Jesus and what was happening through the spirit was what the ancient scriptures had been talking about all along.
But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.
And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil.
The resurrection proved it.
through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God.
Paul, as we shall see, was challenging the dominant culture with the news of new creation, a new creation with different values.
And that new dimension, shape, and depth would produce a string of hastily written documents whose compact, explosive charge would change the world.
They believed that God’s Messiah had launched God’s kingdom and that the new energy they discovered in announcing this message was the work of God’s own spirit, poured out in a new way, ready to embrace the wider world. If the scriptures had seen the coming king as Lord of the whole world, how could membership in this kingdom be for Jews only?
many Jews would naturally have supposed that these Gentiles would then have to go all the way and become full Jews. If they were sharing in the ancient promises, ought they not to share in the ancient culture as well?
what mattered was the believing allegiance of these Gentiles; they were staying loyal to the Lord from the bottom of their hearts.
we cannot begin to understand Saul, Barnabas, and their colleagues without recognizing that as they prayed, sang, studied scripture, organized their community life, and (not least) went about talking to both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus, they were conscious of an energy and a sense of direction unlike
anything they had known before.
One of the best-known things about Paul’s thought is his view that when a person has come to faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, that event is itself a sign of the spirit’s work through the gospel, and that, if the spirit has begun that “good work” of which that faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job. That is what he says in Philippians 1:6, and it coheres with his larger teaching elsewhere, particularly in Romans 5–8. But Paul knows that this does not occur when disciples sit back, relax, and allow the spirit to do it all, with no human effort involved.
It was, so Paul declared later, a matter of “freedom”—a loaded word, a Passover word, the slogan for so much that Jews such as Saul had hoped and prayed for. But now, with the new “Passover” of Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new sort of “freedom”
Saul’s unrivaled knowledge of the scriptures, we may assume that it alerted him too to the need to understand and to articulate powerfully just what it meant that those scriptures had been fulfilled in the crucified Messiah.
A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up.
“satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,”
the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals.
It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave.
If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world.
Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.”
when Paul told the story of Jesus some people found that this Jesus became a living presence, not simply a name from the recent past.
people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out.
That’s why it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.
if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s
people.
Paul’s vision, Jewish to the core but reshaped around the messianic events involving Jesus, was a hundred percent theological and a hundred percent about the formation and maintenance of a new community. And that meant trouble. Trouble
God had come back in person and was now dwelling among and within the followers of Jesus. This belief had now taken root, providing Jesus’s followers with a strong, though controversial and dangerous, sense of identity.
would have taken a bold maverick to suggest that there might be forms of loyalty in which Israel’s ancestral traditions, focused on the Torah, would not play a central role.
