Rome too much. Everywhere, from governors and procurators over provinces up to Caesar, rulers and citizens of the Empire made one fatal mistake: All kneeled in cultures of entitlement that made up cruel copies and suicidal imitations of the Commonwealth to deities the existence of which impossible to verify. Even Israel, the post-exilic Church, exploited an earthly reign, its Second Commonwealth, to replicate Jesus’s rule. He, however, through his calling from the Father slowed down and turned away in Philippi any destruction by the competing powers, Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic, to recreate his own eschatological rule, his people alive in the Spirit for the adoration of the Father. Thus the eschatological way of the Lord Jesus the Apostle revealed from a Roman prison to the congregation of the Christ at Philippi.
The Contemporary Way
All in the world, whether two thousand years ago or currently, know and live amidst civilizational powers impossibly strong, from a human perspective. Whatever local, regional, national, or continental differences in cultures, citizens of the world live in subordination to a ruling class or tyrant. Paul recognized those circumambient revolutionary airs of the Roman Empire, despite its favorable influences of stability and security characteristic of the pax Romana. Now Western civilization with its many rulers—feet of iron and clay, Dan 2:43—and in its unflattering as well as temperamental disintegration domineers citizenries. Each competitive of the world rule normalizes its own trendsetting religious laws, languages, historical records, thought patterns, recollections, and celebrations. Whatever differences from continent to continent and age to age, these constitute at core the familiar, the known, and the expected, always determined by the in the world and of the world roots of covetousness.
Breaking away from and out of paradigmatic boundary markers ascertained by always current worldviews, the Apostle long ago opened all believers’ primary residence, “our commonwealth is in heaven,” the only eternally stable habitation. From that good place, the Commonwealth, the Lord Jesus rules righteously and justly. In that good place all creatures adore the Creator, Savior. Out of that good place the almighty and gracious Lord governs the heavens and the earth for the sake of the Church.
Because of his promise to return, all living members of the Church await the Lord Jesus, not now in terms of redemption, the pardon authority he earned on and imputed from Calvary, which salvation he accomplished unrepeatably, once for all; believers now long for his return to see the God and the Savior, Jesus Christ, Tit 2:13, the Judge, glorious, face to face. In fact, from Phil 1:11 onward Paul advanced the eternally valid hope of perfection for which in this dispensation he summoned all in Christ to imitate him with the integrity of living in the world while no more qualified by anything of the world, by any civilization or culture, each with its shameful past, each with its contemptible denouement.
In the Eschaton, the Savior and the Judge, Jesus, will release his own finally from numerous covetously sprawling tentacles of religiosity operative in the world. In the ages before the Day, he preserves the Church, in Paul’s time from the sequestering yokes of Caesarism, Hellenism, Sadduceism, and Pharisaism. Specifically with respect to Pharisaism, its once critical hungers for self-righteousness meant nothing; for Paul in Christ that convoluted self-justification turned into the meanest refuse. From his conversion on the Damascus Road while persecuting the Christ, religiosity from whatever origin and with whatever ulterior lusts counted for nothing, or less than nothing, which standard he summarized for all of the Church at Philippi to emulate. This summoning motivated also Timothy and Epaphroditus; the three spoke as one. Only the grace the Father revealed in the Son applied, translated into an intensity of commonwealth living, the expressive yearning for the Parousia.
In the Church, contemporary self-understanding hence runs on eschatology; living means striving for the Consummation, which Christ followers perceive shaping in each covenant communion. At the life-focusing intersection of two phenomena—the future alive in the present and the present alive for the future—the rule of the Spirit amplifies hope; he stimulates and prods yearnings for the Eschaton, to hear what Jesus declared on the Cross and to live before him in his glory. Salvation henceforth means for all of the Church to stand before the Judge of heaven and earth to discover with finality and in the fear of the Lord the ultimate powers of grace.
For the perpetual benefit of believers at adoration before the Judge who is the Savior, God the Father invokes the grace the Son merited, Phil 3:10–11, “. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” In fact, this judging the Lord Jesus revealed as an ever-present factor, an event “at hand,” Phil 4:5, marking off all not of this world while still alive in this world. Longing for him and living for the final, overpowering benediction centers in the Church, the always ready and disciplined beginning of the Commonwealth. In the Commonwealth, Christ’s glory and majesty denounce all strange religions surfacing throughout the ages, from mightiest idolatry to meanest coveting. Long ago, the Christ placed the incandescent glory of the Commonwealth in the Church, while throughout the ages all pagan backlashes interjected endless ideological/idolatrous inflammations against the Judge.
Church life, therefore, opens up the fact that all believers at adoring the Lord and Savior, though in the world, are no more of the world; this clarifies beyond all doubt that Christians for now inhabit time and eternity, tensions intense.
All in All
Obviously, the in the world/not of the world mystery moves far beyond the utility of a facile catchphrase. Jesus’s John 17:15–16 petitioning assures believers of the integrity of his power and authority:
“I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world,
but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one.
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
For new generations with compelling commitment to Christ, this always uncomfortable teaching gathered impetus since Abraham’s calling into covenant community with the LORD God. Jesus’s paradoxical assertion bears heavily on Church History, without let up throughout the Millennium. Every provocative measure of this paradox hurts and cleanses the Body of Christ for praising the Trinity in the vastness and the beauty of the Commonwealth.
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ABRAHAM
The LORD God promised Abraham Canaan, Gen 13:14–15, all lands visible north and south, east and west. Always he and Sarah moved about, shepherding. Once they broke the in the world/not of the world tension, misusing a slave girl. Though the heir of the world, Rom 4:13, nevertheless, Abraham never actually owned “even a foot’s length,” Acts 7:5, of the Promised Land. Always, after the LORD called him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, Abraham with Sarah knew the time-eternity tensions.
2010/2015
18. Beginning with Jacob’s twelve sons and Israel’s subsequent tribal allegiances, the Twelve remained a constant. Matthias took Judas Iscariot’s place, Acts 1:26, and upon the James’s martyr death, Acts 12:1–5, Christ Jesus added Paul, the least of the Apostles, to the Twelve, maintaining the viable base of this number. Hence, even upon the dismissal of the Iscariot, I respectfully refer to the Twelve.
19. Thus far, John little accounted for Hellenism and Caesarianism, the latter only briefly, 11:48, that is, fear of Rome’s military intervention to quell riotous violations of the pax Romana in Jerusalem.
20. Lev 26:41; Deut 10:16; Ez 44:7, 9 develop this analogy with respect to the heart, Jer 6:10 with respect to the ear.
CONFESSIONAL
