Dwight Moody was one of the great evangelists of the 19th century. Born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, Moody left the family farm at 17 years of age and began working in his uncle’s shoe store. As a condition of his employment, his uncle required young Dwight to attend church! Moody soon moved to Chicago aspiring to make his fortune in the shoe business. While he did gain some success in the realm of footwear, Moody was even more fruitful in organizing a children’s Sunday school through the local YMCA. The Sunday school flourished and grew, eventually becoming a church with Moody as its first pastor. These events launched Dwight Moody into a life of full-time ministry, both in the United States as well as the British Isles. He would go on to found the famous Moody Bible Institute.
Dwight Moody is a hero of the Christian faith who impacted many lives. He was full of witty aphorisms well worth remembering. But there is one statement Moody made with which I must disagree. He was fond of saying, “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said, ‘Moody, save all you can.'” I hope that readers of this blog will recognize the flaw in this statement. It nicely summarizes the evacuation paradigm of salvation: the mistaken notion that God intends to pluck his people out of this dark, evil world and transport them into an otherworldly sphere called heaven.
The truth is precisely the opposite. The entire story of the Bible involves – not us being transported to heaven – but the kingdom of God coming to earth. Indeed, Jesus taught us to pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The Christian hope is not the abandonment of God’s creation, but its complete rescue and redemption. It’s impossible to fully comprehend the story of the scriptures without grasping this vital theme.
These two views of salvation – the evacuation versus the rescue paradigm – also dramatically affect how Christians view their present task. The evacuation paradigm too often produces Christians who are only eager for the salvation of souls. These folks are prone to a bunker mentality whereby they hole up in Christian ghettos, awaiting the time when God will airlift them out of this corrupt world.
The rescue paradigm helps Christians recognize that the God who fashioned the world has absolutely no intention of giving up on his work. He is not going to let the ship go down! Yes, the world has been corrupted by sin and rebellion. But God is absolutely determined to redeem his creation. He intends to cleanse it from evil – even from death itself. God is at this very moment working to restore the world so that it can become what he intended – a place of eternal joy, peace, abundance and flourishing.
This is the narrative we must have in our minds as we read the scriptures. Let’s see how this plays out in the book of Revelation. There the author writes: John, to the seven churches in Asia: grace to you and peace from He Who Is and Who Was and Who Is to Come, and from the seven spirits who are before this throne, and from Jesus the Messiah, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 1:4-5)
This introduction follows a trinitarian pattern: John greets the churches on behalf of God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus the Son. But the author has creatively substituted his own title for God the Father: “He Who Is and Who Was and Who Is to Come.” Why would he do that? In the Old Testament, God famously revealed his sacred name to Moses as Yahweh, meaning “I am who I am” or better yet “I will be who I will be.” These titles suggest that God defies any external description; he can only be truly defined in accordance with the ultimate reality of his own divine being or in accordance with the way he chooses to reveal himself through his actions. The upshot of this is that we can best know the character of God by studying his great acts of judgment and salvation.
John’s own designation for God sits squarely within this tradition. It is far more than simply a reference to God’s past, present and future existence. Rather, it is a way of speaking about God in terms of his divine action. Based upon God’s great past acts of deliverance, we can be certain that one day God will set all things right again. So when John speaks of God as the one “Who Is to Come,” he is re-affirming the very Jewish expectation that God would bring about the coming of his kingdom. In other words, there is coming a time when God will destroy all the dark forces which stand against him. He will fully establish his sovereign rule and reign over all the earth. And just as the man and the woman enjoyed the presence of God in the garden of Eden, so the entire world will finally be able to experience the gift of divine presence.
This interpretation can be easily confirmed by noted those instances in the book of Revelation when the author alters his designation of God. In chapter 11, John writes, “Almighty Lord God, we give you our thanks, Who Is and Who Was, because you have taken your power, your great power, and begun to reign.” Here John has referred to God simply as He Who Is and Who Was, but no longer as He Who Is Coming. The reason should be readily apparent: the end of chapter 11 envisages the future time when God will have completed his rescue project. The voices in heaven have just declared: “Now the kingdom of the world has passed to our Lord and his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.” In other words, God has swept away all the evil and rebellious forces which has usurped his authority over the world. Now at last the world can flourish under the loving and wise governance of her true King.
Returning to Revelation chapter one, we see this theme repeated in various ways. For instance, Jesus is praised as “the ruler of the kings of the earth.” John is not here suggesting that Jesus is only a king just some spiritual sense. Rather, when writers of the Bible claimed that Jesus was king, they meant this in the very literal sense that God had given Jesus of Nazareth rightful authority over the entire cosmos. The true story ends with Jesus supreme over all the kings of the earth. Under the rule of Jesus, the world will finally operate the way it should. Justice will prevail. The righteous will be vindicated and gathered into God’s eternal kingdom. The wicked will be punished and shut out. There will be no more pain or suffering or weeping or death.
Note that this vision of the world set right does not mean that human authorities will no longer be necessary. The kings of the earth are not abrogated. They are not just scrapped and replaced by Jesus alone. Remember, right from the beginning, God made human beings as his image bearers, charged with exercising his sovereignty over the created order. The governance of human beings remains legitimate as long as it acknowledges that its authority is derived from God. But human rulers squander their legitimacy when they reject the wisdom of God and attempt to run the world according to their own desires. All this has huge implications for how Christians should understand their engagement in the political sphere.
The minds of many Christians have been seized by a scenario whereby Jesus evacuates his people from a doomed creation which spins off to its destruction. But the vision of Revelation is radically different. The Lord Jesus is not planning to take his people away to heaven. He’s coming back to fully establish his authority over all creation! God most certainly does not see the world as a wrecked ship and Jesus is far more than a life-raft. We do ourselves a great disservice when we reduce the role of Jesus to one who merely offers people a cosmic escape hatch or a get out of jail card. Let’s recover the magnificent Biblical vision of Jesus whose mission is to bring the entire creation back into alignment with God’s grand purposes. As the apostle Paul writes, “[God’s] plan was to sum up the whole cosmos in [King Jesus]- yes, everything in heaven and earth, in him!”
