Let me pray then we'll begin. Father I pray for each of us today as we have gathered and again we come from different circumstances different mornings different challenges different places. But I pray that you will bring us together and by your spirit make us of one mind and heart that as we are physically present in the same room that you will bring us together in the shared life and mind, the shared resurrection that we are a part of in Jesus our Lord. Make us one, Father, as you and the Son are one. And as we are one in Him, I pray that we would be gathered in one mind and one heart and that your spirit would lead us into a common understanding, that this time would greatly enrich our faith, our joy, our sense of resolve, our confidence, that you would give to us steadfastness, as Paul said, in the knowledge of this resurrection is the stability and the settledness of life, the continuance in this good news. that will ultimately see its triumph in the resurrection of the last day that we ourselves will be party to if we are those who continue in this good news, who hold fast to it, who walk it out, who live in light of it. So instruct us today, Father, not only in the truth of the glory of this resurrection, but in its significance for us, not just as individuals, but collectively as your church. So meet us and encourage us. Build us up in this most holy faith. We ask these things for the sake of Jesus our Lord for the sake of our devotion to him. Amen. Well we've spent many many weeks considering this theme of incarnation as we've come into the Gospels and the coming of Jesus and we've considered just a theology of incarnation, how to even understand it, how the scriptures understand it. Then we've looked at incarnation in terms of the life of Christ, the living out of incarnation in his own life with the Father in his own ministration, ultimately then considering this thing of atonement in relation to incarnation, how to understand Atonement in terms of God's purposes. That brought us to the cross, and now we come to this thing of resurrection. I want us to understand and consider the resurrection in the light of all that we have examined thus far, the foundation that we've laid, because that's really critical to understanding resurrection as the scriptures understand it. And I mentioned in the notes, as I've said before, I think often we tend as Christians to minimize resurrection, even if we acknowledge the fact of it and even the importance of it, the necessity of it. We do still tend to minimize it in the sense that we say, well, the cross was all about just Jesus making satisfaction for sins, dealing with the guilt that we have before God so that God can forgive us. Therefore, the resurrection is simply the way in which we know for certain that Jesus did make that satisfaction and that God has received it and God is satisfied with the sacrifice of Jesus. End of discussion. Let's move on. And so we depreciate really the significance of what resurrection is all about. I want to consider it today in terms of two things primarily incarnation as it really is the capstone of incarnation. And then secondly, how it pertains to this idea of the kingdom of God, resurrection and kingdom. And then conclude as we prepare for the table today with us stepping back and saying, okay, what does the resurrection mean for us? Who cares? Why is it important? What does it mean to us as Christians? What does it mean to the gospel that we proclaim? So I'd like for us to consider this thing of being a resurrection people. But in terms of this theme, then, of resurrection and incarnation, just to pull us kind of back from where we've begun and get us up to this point, we've seen that the scriptures teach that the incarnation, and I've made this point repeatedly, hopefully we all agree with it at this point in time, the incarnation was the essential fulfillment of God's intent for the creation. In incarnation, we see God accomplishing, in essence, this atoning work and ultimately even the establishing of his kingdom. In the incarnation, we see the substance of what it is that God had purpose to do. We don't find atonement starting with the cross. We find atonement actualized in substance in the very conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. Atonement is about reconciliation. It's about dealing with alienation and estranged relationship, not just between God and human beings, but between God and the creation itself. In incarnation, we see the bringing together of God and the estranged creation, specifically God and Adamic man. Jesus as a son of Adam, right? In the intimate conjoining of God and Adamic man in Jesus, and by Adamic, I mean man as he is in Adam, man as fallen, and we've talked about the importance of that, so I'm not going to rehearse all of that, but in that conjoining of God and Adamic man, we see in substance this work of divine human reconciliation. That's where the essence of it is. All other levels and extent of reconciliation are just the flowing out of that essential reconciliation or atonement, if you will, that happened in Jesus himself. So Jesus' life then, the life that he lived as a man, was the outworking and perfecting of that reality. What was accomplished in the womb of Mary in the bringing together in the being of God and the being of man in the person of Jesus is worked out in the actual practical relationship between the father and the son as Jesus lived his life as the true Israelite. It's this servant idea again. Remember the servant of Yahweh is an Israelite who is faithful to the Lord himself. We saw the baptism of Jesus where God affirms that this Israelite who is showing solidarity with the Israelite people is in fact what Israel is not, his beloved son in whom he's well pleased. And then Jesus goes out into the wilderness to relive in himself Israel's own historical testing, but in order to succeed as the faithful son. Jesus lives his life as the faithful Israelite, and in that way he's working out and perfecting this union of God and man, specifically in the scriptural sense. Incarnation, again, is about the union of the God of Israel and Israel itself. The I in you and you in me ontological, which means in the very being of God and the being of man, the I in you, you in me ontological union achieved in incarnation was fully actualized in the relational union, the daily living practical relational union of perfect communion between Divine Father and human son. So in that life of faithful sonship, Jesus was day by day, moment by moment, putting to death in himself the estranged humanness into which he was conceived. He was constantly contradicting, opposing, and condemning, in a very real way, putting to death the Adamic humanness into which he himself was conceived, and in that way bearing witness to the reconciliation that was embodied in the fact of incarnation. But we saw also the need for the cross was that reconciliation between God and man wasn't to be limited to one individual Nor was it to simply be Jesus dealing with this in himself. But the goal God had was to completely eradicate human alienation. Not just in the one person, but in the whole Adamic race. Adamic man needed to die so that man, mankind, could become the image son that God intended. A new kind of human being sharing the life and likeness of a new Adam. Well, the scripture shows us that the resurrected Messiah is this new Adam. So what's the point? Resurrection fulfilled incarnation. Resurrection was the goal towards which incarnation was moving. Resurrection is the ultimate truth of incarnation. In resurrection, we see the full realization, the full truth of incarnation. And ultimately, not just concerning Jesus himself, but all of creation. As I mentioned here, this is the sense in which Paul proclaimed Jesus, the resurrected Messiah, to be the first fruit of God's new creation. First fruit. Remember that idea of first fruit was in the harvest when the crop just began to come in. The very beginning of that harvest was taken and set apart and offered to the Lord. Not only just to say, okay, God deserves the first and the best, But more importantly, it was to honor and worship God by showing that God is faithful and believing that God is faithful. We give him the first of the harvest because we believe him for the rest of the harvest. It was an act of faithfulness. It was an act of trust. Jesus is the first fruit. That's why I wanted to read 1 Corinthians 15. That's what Paul says. Resurrection has its substance in Jesus, but as the first fruit. He's the beginning of that harvest. He's the beginning of the reality of resurrection. So incarnation, as it was fully realized in resurrection, both attested and also served God's design for creator-creation intimacy, the end of alienation, So both Incarnation and Resurrection have their existence and their ultimate meaning in this idea of new creation. That's what they're all about. So Resurrection and Incarnation go very, very tightly together. You can't separate them in any sense. And if we tie Resurrection simply to, okay, Jesus made satisfaction for sin in the sense of paying for the debt of our guilt, then we've really cheapened and minimized and lost the true significance of resurrection. It completed the human renewal that began with the act of incarnation. But God intended that renewal to reach beyond Jesus to find its fullness in a human race that shares in that same incarnational dynamic. As I said before, we're not incarnate sons and daughters in the sense that Jesus was. but as sharers in his resurrection. If resurrection is the full truth, the completion of incarnation, if we share in his resurrection, then we also are partakers in that incarnational reality. I in you, you in me. So God's intent was a new human race of imaged children born of a new Adam. Not just an Adam who gets us back to Eden, an unfallen Adam, but a consummate Adam. The first Adam was a beginning point and a kind of picture, a starting point of where God was going, but he wasn't the end. So the new Adam is not simply getting us back to an unfallen Adam as we had in the first instance, but a consummate Adam. a new kind of human being, something even different than what Adam was, and we're going to see in the weeks ahead specifically how that was the case in relation to this idea of the Spirit. So God's intent was a new human race, but for the sake of the human vocation. Not just a bunch of people who are a different kind of people, but under what end, for what purpose, that they would fulfill the reason for which God created them. The truth of a thing is when function and nature and form come together perfectly. When a thing conforms in its function to what it actually is, you have truth. You have righteousness. And so God's intent for a new human race is that they would fulfill the actual human vocation. As I say here, that man the image bearer would be true, would be righteous by authentically living out and fulfilling his calling to be image son. And that sonship amounts to human beings manifesting God's life and presence in the world. When you see the son, you see the father. We've talked before about that biblical image of son of. If you're talking about a worthless person a Hebraism would be to refer to that one as a son of worthlessness, son of Belial, Ben Belial. Well, there's no such thing as worthlessness as a living person that bears children, but a son of worthlessness is something that bears that essential quality of worthlessness. And so a son of God is one who bears that essential likeness to God such that when you see the son, you see the father. A son is of the father. So the human sonship vocation is manifesting God's life and presence in his creation, but also in the sense of administering his sovereign lordship. These are all things we've discussed over and over and over again. This takes us back to Genesis 1, right? The human vocation Genesis 1, the creation account, is not about how did God do it and how many days did it take, but what is the reason and purpose and goal of creation? What is the significance of man in God's creation and its purposes? So both the inscripturated word – by that I mean the scriptures – and the incarnate word, we see in both of those the fact that the human vocation is royal priesthood. royal priesthood captures both aspects of the human vocation. From the royal side, man is the one who administers God's sovereign lordship in his creation. From the priestly side, priesthood is a mediatorial role, right? Priests are mediators. Man is the point of mediation of the relationship between God and his creation. We see this in Genesis 1 and 2. So man, from the royal side, is administering God's lordship. He's God unto the world. From the priestly side, he's the creation back unto God. Man is the one who, in a sense, gathers up in himself and carries back to God the creation's own devotion and faithfulness and service to God. You see this captured in the Psalms, right? So man's vocation is royal priesthood. And we see this, if that's man's created design, if Jesus is resurrected as true man, he should be the preeminent as firstfruits priest-king, right? And that's what we see. Throughout the New Testament, he's portrayed in that way. Paul says in Romans 8, Christ Jesus who died, yea rather is raised, is seated at the right hand of God, continually interceding. Even the picture of this branch of David in Zechariah was that he would be enthroned as a priest. He would be a priest on his throne. Peter talks about the fact that just as Israel as son of God was called to be a royal priesthood, so now those who are in the Messiah, who is the true embodiment of Israel, the true royal priesthood, the true priest-king, those who are in the Messiah are themselves a royal priesthood, priests and kings to our God. This is the human vocation. All of that points then to the relationship between resurrection and kingdom. If the resurrection results in the Messiah taking on the human vocation of priest and king, kingship involves a kingdom. And if our share in resurrection to become truly authentically human in him involves us involved in this priestly kingship, then kingdom is a reality that pertains to us as well. Jesus' resurrection perfected the divine human union and communion that began with incarnation, but ultimately looking beyond that in Jesus himself to the creation's reconciliation and renewal. So as I say here, God joined himself to man in Mary's womb, not with a view to a sinless person who can die for other sinners, full stop, end of discussion, but with a view to becoming all in all, 1 Corinthians 15, through all of creation being summed up in the perfected image, the resurrected, exalted Messiah. That's the kingdom the scripture holds out from the point of creation through the spirits outpouring at Pentecost, which we're going to consider next time, and all the way up to the end with the parousia and the resurrection of the last day. This is the great storyline. This is the trajectory that the scripture establishes for us. This is the way we need to frame and understand resurrection. So Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, and Kingdom are all inseparable and interdependent. When people want to say, oh yes, the Kingdom's to come out in a future thousand-year millennium, they're breaking apart things that can't be broken. They're saying, I really don't understand Resurrection. I really don't understand Incarnation. I really don't understand Kingdom. I really don't understand Atonement. They cannot be separated. They cannot be understood except together in relation to one another. As I have already alluded, I think the great indication that resurrection means kingdom is the fact that Jesus' resurrection had its own completion or climax in what? His enthronement. I have already mentioned Romans 8. Christ Jesus who died, yea rather is raised, is seated at the right hand of God. And before Jesus is taken to that place, and by place I mean metaphorically, before he attains to that exaltation as he stands there with his disciples, he says what? All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. That's a statement of lordship. All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. And then you see Paul in Ephesians 1 talking about Christ The power that raised him from the dead has seated him at the right hand of power above all rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that's named in this age and the age to come. In Acts 2, Peter talks about David. and how David recognized that even in saying, you will not allow your holy one to undergo decay, David understood that this messianic individual, the son of David that would come from him, would triumph over the grave. Peter says, David died, his grave is with us to this day. So what was David talking about when he said, you will not allow your Holy One to suffer decay? He being a prophet, he looked into the future and he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that God would not allow him to undergo decay. And he tells these Israelites and these other Jewish proselytes, all of these Jews from all over the world who've come to Jerusalem for Passover, He tells them, know for certain that God has made this one whom you put to death both Lord and Christ, Lord and Messiah. He has been enthroned to the place of all authority and dominion. This is the way Hebrews begins. After he made purification for sin, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. The resurrection is about enthronement. Resurrection means kingdom. That's the point that I'm making. But when we understand the kingdom in that way, we have to understand it as existing in an already-but-not-yet way. Because if you were to say to someone, yes, Christ reigns over all. He is seated at the right hand of the Father above all rule and authority, power and dominion. All authority in heaven and earth is his. He is king over the world. People would say, really? I don't see it. Where is that? How is he Lord over the earth? All things continue as they have from the beginning of time." That's Peter's thing, right? The scoffers. All things continue as they have. Where is that? Well, when we understand it in this way, we can see how it isn't already, but not yet. This is the kingdom that is defined by creational renewal. It's the kingdom of new creation. Well, what's the point? Well, with respect to the already, this kingdom has the resurrected Messiah as both its source and its first fruit, as well as its Lord. If Jesus is raised, he is the beginning of the new creation. The kingdom of new creation, therefore, already exists. because he is the Lord of it and also the substance of it. He's the beginning of it. He's the first fruits. It has been inaugurated. If he is resurrected as new man, image, son, priest, and king, then the kingdom of new creation has been inaugurated. But that renewal is not complete, either at the human level or the non-human level. So with respect to human beings, Christians, those who are in the nature of the case, the definition of being Christians in truth, the way the scripture understands it, maybe not the religion of Christianity as we might think about it, but those who are Christians are in Christ, which means they share in his resurrection life through the enlivening power of his spirit, the spirit who raised him from the dead. And yet, our resurrection is incomplete. We are made alive in the inner man, raised up with Christ, inhabiting the place he inhabits, but our bodies remain bound over to corruption, decay, and death. If you keep reading in 1 Corinthians 15, beyond where we read, you see that. Corruption must put on incorruptibility. Death must be swallowed up in life. And Paul says in Romans, he says, we are not in the flesh anymore, meaning defined by that old way of being human. We don't live that existence anymore. We're not that kind of human being anymore if we are in the spirit. But whoever doesn't have the spirit of Christ doesn't belong to him. But if Christ is in you, how so? By the Spirit of Christ. If Christ is in you, then though the body is dead because of this reality of sin and alienation, the inner man, the Spirit, is alive because of righteousness. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of Christ who is Christ in you, the hope of glory. but the body still remains. Paul says that in 2nd Corinthians, right? We don't look on what is seen, but what is unseen. What is seen is a part of what is passing away. The outer man is perishing, but the inner man is being renewed day by day. So the physical creation, both the human physical creation and the non-human physical creation, by the human physical creation I mean our bodies, All of the physical creation is still awaiting its participation in Jesus' resurrection. And that will not occur, Paul says, until the parousia, the manifesting of the Messiah at the end of the age. Then the new creation, the kingdom of the new creation, will be established in full, such that God will be all in all. So now comes that application part. Okay, what does this mean for us? and I want to kind of walk through this in kind of a methodical way. If it's true, if the resurrection is true, and if the resurrection means that Jesus is the first fruits of God's new creation, then we have to say that his resurrection has inaugurated the everlasting creational renewal. But that renewal isn't just, again, a polishing up of the apple or applying the paddles to a dead body to get the heart started again. It's not resuscitating or reviving or rejuvenating the old order of things. What Paul is arguing in 1 Corinthians is that the Jesus that came out of the grave was not the Jesus that went into the grave. There was a physical conformity of the latter body and the former body such that you could see the wounds in the hands and the side, and you could look and recognize that it was Jesus. But yet it wasn't him. It was different. It was him, but it wasn't. It was a transcendent physicality. And remember, in the gospel accounts, you have the disciples sitting there looking at each other, and they're afraid to ask him because they know that he's different, but yet it's him, but it's him, but he's different. It's not just the resurrection of a corpse, or that wouldn't be resurrection, the resuscitation or reviving of a corpse. It's a whole different physicality, a transcendent physicality. He could eat. He could drink. You could touch him. You could handle him. And yet, he could be present in a locked room and then not be present in a locked room. A transcendent physicality. So this new creation is not the polishing up of the old order. That's the important point that I'm trying to make. a whole different order of things. The order of things that God actually intended from the beginning and that started in Eden but wasn't in place even before the Fall. That's why I say the new Adam is not just getting us back to the old Adam before the Fall. The creation's history from the scriptural standpoint consists of two ages, and a new creation supplants the old creation and its nature and its order. The scripture looks at this thing of creational history from a two-age standpoint. The hinge point, the transition point, being the Christ event. Movement from the age of promise to the fullness of the times. from the age of the creation's curse and death to the age of liberation and life, from first creation to new creational kingdom of God. This is just some of the language that the scripture uses. And we saw that again in the depiction in Isaiah 65. When this new heavens and new earth are depicted, it's an order of things that has never existed in the world that we've known. We've never seen the end of all enmity all alienation, all me versus you as defining the creation. Not just at the human level, but at the whole level of all created things. So the resurrected image Son, the enthroned image Son, is the beginning and the substance of that new creation. If we want to know what the new creation and that kingdom of new creation is about, we look at the resurrected Jesus himself. He's the essence of it. All who are joined to him are participants in that new creation. So to be a Christian is to be resurrected in Christ to inhabit a new creational realm that he inhabits and presides over. That's what Paul means when he says, when you were dead, you were raised up in Christ, that we are seated in the heavenly place. Well, wait a minute. I'm seated in a chair. I'm not seated up in heaven. What is Paul talking about? Oh, he's saying one day you'll go off to heaven. No, that's not what he's saying. Heaven as referring to the realm that God inhabits where Father and Son are together. He's saying you are there inhabiting that realm. It's not a place. It's a way of being. I in you, you in me. Wherever the Messiah is, we are because we are one Spirit in the Lord. We are the dwelling of God in the Spirit. That's what Paul is getting at. But Jesus experienced that renewal in one step. We experience it in two steps, two stages. Inner man, outer man. Inner man, outer man. There is only one resurrection. Jesus didn't just get raised from the dead. He said, I am resurrection. That's what he said. when Lazarus had died. I am resurrection and life. So how do we get raised from the dead? By sharing in his resurrection. He is resurrection. But we undergo it in two steps. The inner man at the point of the new birth. The inner man at the point of salvation, if you will. The resurrection of the outer man at Jesus' parousia. So the new birth, the resurrection of the inner man, the sharing in Christ resurrection of the inner man is the Arabon of the Spirit, the down payment of the Spirit, the promise of that redemption of our bodies that is to come. There can't be the renewal of the inner man and not the renewal of the outer man. It doesn't work that way. Both are essential to human renewal. And there are Christians who don't believe in a bodily resurrection. But then you've defined man as something other than what God says he is. Man is body and spirit. Jesus as true man was resurrected body and spirit. It can't just be about souls going off to heaven. If it is, then we've just denied the fact of resurrection, right? Because it's body and spirit. It's not souls going off to heaven. That's a pagan idea. In ancient cultures, including pre-Christian Greek culture, the goal was to be rid of the body. The body was a weight. It was dead weight that you had to drag around. The real self was the inside self, and the goal was to get rid of your body so the true you, the self, could be liberated from its prison house to go off into the ether to attain to its perfection in whatever way that was conceived. The goal was to get rid of the body. That's a pagan idea, and there's a lot of that even in Christianity today. Both body and spirit resurrection are critically important. And because of the role for which God created mankind, the vocation of human beings, that human renewal, body and spirit, is under creational renewal, a new heavens and a new earth. Heavens and earth is the way in which the scripture refers to the creation. It's not heaven where God is and earth where we are. It's in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It speaks to the two realms, the one in which God is present and related to his creation, but a creational idea, and then the realm that we inhabit or that the creatures themselves inhabit. So a new heavens and a new earth means a new creation. So the renewal of human physicality, the resurrection of the body, looks to the renewal and in fact necessitates or ultimately has to depend on the renewal of the physical creation. That's Romans 8. God isn't just renewing us so that we can float around on a cloud forever. This is about human beings fulfilling their created vocation, which involves body and spirit, physical existence, exercising God's lordship, God's presence, God's rule in a physical creation. A new earth, a renewed earth, a renewed creation. But here's the issue then. We share in the Messiah's resurrection in two stages. The inner man is alive. The outer man is perishing. The inner man is being renewed day by day. The inner man is being transformed into the likeness of Christ from glory to glory. Beholding is in a mirror the glory of the Lord being transformed into the same likeness. The outer man is heading for the grave. The outer man is perishing. And so also the rest of the physical creation still operates under the curse, awaiting its own day of renewal. What does that mean? Christians live their present lives in two antithetical worlds. Two antithetical worlds. We bear witness to the reality of new creation, not just by the things we say, not just by what we do, but by being ourselves new creation. If Jesus is the firstfruits, we who share in him are a part of that new creation. If we are truly Christians, we are the living, walking embodiment of new creation, the kingdom of God. We are the evidence of the kingdom that we proclaim. If people say, where is this kingdom? Where is this dominion? Where is this lordship? Where is this ruling Christ? We are the embodiment of it. We, the church, are the evidence of that new creation. But we bear that witness in ourselves in a world that still exists and operates according to the nature and pattern of the alienated and cursed creation. And that understanding brings a radical definition and a radical prescription to the Christian vocation, our mission, and our testimony. The language of the New Testament is, once you were, but now. Put off the old self, put on the new self. that has been created in God, dying to the elementary principles that govern the world, even morality and ethics as they govern the world, dying to those elementary principles. Being strangers and aliens, Peter talks about, light in the darkness, Paul in Philippians and elsewhere. This is the way the scripture talks about the Christian life. It's not just you're saved and forgiven, It's that you have been taken out of one realm of existence and translated into another. And that's what you're to manifest in a world that exists in contradiction of that. And this shows what I think is the profound error of this gospel that fills the proclamation of the church out there of salvation unto eternity in heaven. Our spirits going off to heaven to live in heaven forever. or even a gospel that calls people to retreat from the world, to forsake the world. This is all going away. It's going to burn up. God's going to do away with the world. We're going off to heaven. That's our home. Or even the idea of the Christian mission is to put a prom dress on the pig, to buff up the apple, to reform the present order of things. That's not what we're called to do is to reform the present order. We are to proclaim by our existence, our words, our deeds, the kingdom of new creation as by living out and manifesting in ourselves the evidence of it, and the radical nature of its newness. It's not just a polished apple. It's a whole different reality. So for our meditation, getting prepared for the table, I put these couple quotes in here from Torrance's book on atonement and I just want to read this with you and let this kind of rattle around in your head as we go to our time of meditation listening to this song and then we'll take the table. But here's what Torrance says and hopefully this will make sense to you and even again kind of shape the way we think about what it is to be Christians in this world and to be faithful. witnesses and bear evidence to the resurrection of the Messiah. Proclaim that gospel. He says, Though risen with Christ and already a partaker through the Spirit in the new creation, the church is sent like Christ into the world. Remember what Jesus said, As the Father sent me, so I am sending you. The church is sent like Christ into the world as the servant of the Lord, humbling itself and containing itself in kenosis. This kenosis is the idea of being emptied of prerogative and self-interest. This is drawn from Philippians 2. Though being in the form of God, Jesus did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. Being found in human nature, he humbled himself. Paul says, have in your mind the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. What mind? That mind. that canonic mind, the mind of kenosis. That's what Torrance is getting at. The church acts as Christ in the world, humbling itself, containing itself in kenosis. In other words, being emptied of its prerogative and self-interest. But doing that within the limit and the laws, the principles, is what he means, that govern this world. in order to proclaim the gospel of reconciliation and to live out reconciliation within the conditions of fallen human existence. As such, the Church is the new wine through which the old wineskins will be burst, and the whole framework of the ages will be changed. This is why the New Testament calls the Church and its members to redeem the time. This is what it's getting at. redeeming the time. Not to live as those who are dead in a sleep, rigid with the fixities of dead time. In other words, not to live out our hours and our days according to an old paradigm, because even time and circumstance and the creation itself have taken on a newness in the resurrection. To live in this new kind of way of being human. It's not about what you do with this minute or that minute or the next minute per se, but living into a new kind of time. not to live as those who are dead and asleep, rigid with the fixities of dead time, but to keep vigil as those who are already risen with Christ and await his coming for their final release, like Lazarus from the shrouds of the grave, and yet not like Lazarus freed merely from the shrouds of the grave, but freed from the shackles of the past, the old creation, all that holds us back at this time from entering into the fullness of our inheritance in new creation. When Christ comes again, it can only be to make all things new and to reveal what he has already done and is even now working in and under and with all the world events in this present order of things. Then the great unveiling or apocalypse. An apocalypse doesn't mean a great nuclear war on the planet. Apocalypse means an opening of the veil so you can see what's really going on behind the scenes. Then the great unveiling or apocalypse will take place. The judgments of the cross at work throughout history will be brought to their consummation in unveiled finality, and the salvation of Christ that has been proclaimed throughout history will be brought to its fruition in the unveiled glory of the new creation. It is by the man Jesus that resurrection and new creation will finally burst upon the whole old creation. This is talking about the Romans 8 idea, the renewing of the whole creation. And then at last, the vast cosmic significance of the incarnation of the word. of the reconciliation through the sacrifice of Christ, and of the resurrection of our human nature in Him, all of that will finally be made clear and manifest to all, and we shall at last know as we are known. Until then, the Church and all its members live between the times, between the time of resurrection in Pentecost and the time of the final Advent. Then they participate, or I'm sorry, they participate in the time of this ongoing world, and yet they already participate in the time of the new creation through the spirit of the risen Christ. And in conclusion, then he says, the church of the risen Christ has no right to be a prophet of gloom or despair. For this world has been redeemed and sanctified, set apart by Christ, and he will not let it go. The corruptible clay of our poor earth has been taken up in Jesus. It is consecrated through his sacrifice and resurrection, and he will not allow it to sink back into corruption. Hence, the whole creation groans and travails, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, looking forward with eager expectation to the hour of final liberation and renewal in the advent of its risen Savior, Romans 8. The church must learn to take into its mouth what is our good news. What do we proclaim? What do we take into our mouth? We have to learn to take into our mouth the good news of the resurrection and new creation, for that must be its primary note, one of limitless joy and thanksgiving. The involvement of the church in the suffering of mankind, which we do, which we have, The involvement of the Church in the suffering of mankind, we live in the same present world, must never be allowed to stifle that supreme note of resurrection triumph or to smother the eschatological joy at the astounding events that have broken into history in the Christ event. The life, the incarnation, the resurrection, the glorification, the ascension and enthronement of the Messiah. Those astounding events that have broken into history and have pledged for mankind the final day of regeneration of all things. That's the importance of resurrection, not simply that my guilt has been dealt with and God is now not unhappy with me. That's such a trivializing, almost to the point of lying against the truth of what God has really accomplished. So this is the glory of the resurrection and how it brings to a climax this work of incarnation, and ultimately how it will see its own full fruition in all things being summed up in the Messiah. We don't despise and abandon this world. We work with the spirit and view of the creation's renewal. We work out and work toward new creation. That's what we proclaim. That's our gospel. Father, I do pray that you would enable each one according to his understanding, according to his own maturity in the faith and even his own growth in Christ our Lord. I pray that by your Spirit you would enable these things to sing out, to ring true, to be exultant in the heart and the mind of each one here. These things truly comprise the good news. This is the message lived out. in the lives of the early Christians as they together did life in an entirely new way. Not just a polishing of the apple, not just better laws, not just better morality, not just better service to one another, but an entirely different way of living life and living life in community that was on display before a watching world. And that new way of being human in community turned the world upside down. It was good news. It wasn't good advice. It was good news of what the living God has done. A God who is jealous for his creation, who would not let it go, who is determined to gather it back to himself and ultimately to sum it all up in himself. by taking up the creation's broken life in the incarnate Son, and seeing through Him the ending of all alienation, all corruption, all defilement, death itself, so that in the end our God would realize His eternal design to be all in all. Father Jesus, the Resurrected One, is the first fruits. He's the truth, the substance, the sure proof of that accomplishment. And we, if we are sharers in Him, are the fleshing out of that truth, the making manifest of that truth in this world. In a very real way, we are the Christ that the world sees. And I pray that we would be diligent and committed to manifesting this new creation in the world, in our homes, in our work, amongst those with whom we have to do. In this way, when the world sees us, they will truly see the Christ that we proclaim. May we be faithful testifiers of Him. And bless us, Father, even in our contemplation as we prepare to take the table now. May it enrich us, and may you work through it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.