In our last two blogs, we’ve been exploring the New Exodus theme found throughout the New Testament. The disciples of Jesus were Jews who cherished the grand story of how God had rescued the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. These Christians saw the pattern of the exodus repeated in story of Jesus and his people.
(1) Jesus was the lamb whose sacrifice turned away the wrath of God.
(2) Whereas Pharaoh was the villain of the original exodus, now the great enemies of God’s people were sin, death and even Satan himself.
(3) Just as Israel came through the waters of the Red Sea, so Christians were brought into the covenant community through baptism.
(4) God had given the Torah as the way of life Israel needed to remain faithful to the covenant. Now the Holy Spirit provided Christians the power they needed to offer God the obedience he requires.
This brings us to the final stage of Israel’s journey. After many travails, Joshua led the descendants of Jacob into the land of Canaan, the land “flowing with milk and honey.” This begs the question: what in the Christian life corresponds to the promised land?
This question is trickier than you might think. Most Christians would say that their ultimate hope is to go to heaven when they die. But many followers of Jesus don’t have a clear idea of what this means. Some might envision themselves dressed in a dazzling white robe, sitting on a cloud, strumming a harp while singing praises to God. Thoughts about heaven are often quite vague; believers just know that it will be a place of joy, free of sickness and sorrow. They will experience eternal life in the presence of Jesus himself.
Some of these notions are gloriously true. However, many common conceptions of the ultimate Christian hope are misleading.
Many Christians draw a very sharp distinction between their physical body and their spirit or soul. They realize that as we get older, our bodies sadly wear out. Even for those in relatively good health, age brings with it the gradual deterioration of the body. Aging eyes weaken and require glasses to see clearly. Older folks are often embarrassed by their inability to hear the conversation or remember names. They certainly can’t run around the athletic field like they could in their prime.
Sometimes physical decline is much more sudden & tragic. Car accidents leave many people maimed or crippled. Others suffer strokes, depriving them of their ability to speak or walk. Still others are diagnosed with terrible diseases like cancer.
Faced with such harsh realities, many folks think that salvation must involve leaving the physical body behind, allowing their immaterial soul to escape to a heavenly eternity. According to this perspective, when we die, our bodies are committed to the corruption of the grave, but our soul is liberated from this dark & distressing world. Our spirit passes on to an ethereal realm of light and life.
The strict separation of the physical and nonphysical world is called dualism. (Caution: dualism is a tricky term; it can pertain to any situation where two basic realities are contrasted with each other.) Although this scenario envisions a basically happy ending, it falls far, far short of the Biblical concept of salvation. In fact, the divorce of the body from an immaterial, immortal soul is an idea which fits much better with Greek philosophy than the Jewish & Christian scriptures.
The Greek philosopher Plato was born in 428 BC and lived in Athens until his death in 348 BC. Plato embraced a dualistic scheme of reality. He believed that there existed a superior realm of pure ideas or concepts unsullied by the messy physical world. For better or worse, Plato was a massively influential figure who left a deep imprint on Christian thought.
The concept of dualism is wholly opposed to the worldview of the Bible. The Jews uniquely affirmed that the God of Israel was the one true God who created all things. And because the entire cosmos was the handiwork of God, it was inherently good. As Genesis says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
Moreover, God formed humankind and granted them sovereignty over his creation. It’s true that sometimes the scriptures speak about different aspects of human beings, such as our body, our will, our intellect, our mind or our soul. This language can sound a bit like Plato. But in the end, the Bible ultimately views people as a unified whole. All of our various attributes come together and define who we are as a creature of God. Our material bodies were never meant to be discarded in favor of our soul. Like any other part of creation, the human body is a great gift from the only wise God.
In the very earliest years of the church, a heresy arose called Docetism (from the Greek word dokein = “to seem”). These false teachers vigorously denied that Jesus was a true human being. They claimed that he was a mere ghost or phantom who only seemed to have a physical body. But such a position rejects the central tenets of Christianity: that Jesus suffered on the cross and was raised from the dead on the third day.
In the second century, a powerful heresy called Gnosticism threatened Christianity. Much of what we know about the Gnostics comes from writings of Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon in Southern France. In 180 AD, Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies, a work which sought to refute the errors of Gnosticism.
The Gnostics embraced dualism. They regarding the material world (including the human body) as corrupt and evil. The Gnostics believed in a supreme deity, along with a vast array of inferior spiritual beings called “emanations.” They denied that the creation is the work of one true God. Instead, they taught that the physical universe was a mistake, the product of one of those flawed, lesser beings who they equated with the Old Testament God of the Jews.
For the Gnostics, salvation involved obtaining secret knowledge (Greek gnosis = knowledge). This hidden insight would allow people to escape the cruel chains of matter and enter the realm of pure spirit. The supreme god had sent his emissary Jesus to impart this crucial gnosis to mankind. Like the Docetists, the Gnostics held that Jesus was not a true physical human being but only a spirit.
This minor historical survey reminds us of an important lesson: the material creation and our physical bodies are not obstacles which need to be overcome. According to the Christian worldview, the chief problem is that God’s creation has been ruined by human rebellion. The sin of humanity has derailed the entire cosmos.
The solution to this problem does not require the rejection of creation in favor of a nonmaterial existence in “heaven.” Rather, salvation involves the rescue of the created order – the physical universe in which we now reside! And central to this rescue is the redemption of human beings, God’s image bearers.
This world of thought was beautifully expressed by the Apostle Paul, “The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.”
In other words, when humans are set right, then the whole creation will be set right too! Christians needs to stop thinking about salvation in terms of departing from the present world and going to heaven. Our true hope is that God will one day raise his people from the dead. And when that happens, the creation itself will experience its own “resurrection.” The world will be cleansed of sickness, suffering, pain and death.
Note how Paul relies heavily on New Exodus language. Just as God brought the children of Israel out of bondage and into freedom in land of Canaan, so he will someday set his people in authority over the whole earth. That is our promised land.
