Holiness to the Lord

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger.

Thank you for your patience if you’ve been waiting for us to release an episode. David and Gretchen and I just got back from a month-long road trip to visit family across the country, so it’s been a while since we recorded. How have you been, Greg?

It’s been a month, but we’re here and we have the word of God, so we go forward.

Indeed. We are in the book of Zechariah today talking about his apocalyptic vision, his vision of the spreading of the gospel into all the world, his vision of God’s kingdom. We’re also going to talk about horses’ bells, which is fun.

Horses’ bells? I was looking at my screen at the other side of the room and was trying to make out the title. I got some and couldn’t figure out how horses and bells fit in here. Then I realized now for the first time, “Oh, it doesn’t say the bells of the horses. It says the victory of the kingdom. Huh,” so apparently that’s what we’re talking about.

We have two different titles. There’s the title in the file and there’s the title of the file.

Well, there you go. We are indeed in Zechariah, which means we’re almost to the end of the Old Testament. We’re in the restoration era. Zechariah and Haggai were prophesying during the construction of the temple, so historically Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther come later, and so does Malachi, but we’re almost there.

As God’s people have returned from captivity and are thinking about building the temple and then eventually decide to build the temple and then build the temple, Zechariah is prophesying, and Haggai too. Haggai’s message is short and pointed and generally amounts to, “Get back to work and stop worrying about things that God’s got covered.”

Zechariah’s are far more difficult, far more intricate. The imagery is drawn from Old Testament history and liturgy, and sometimes the images are complex. Sometimes they’re sharp and pointed and we can say, “Oh wait, a king coming on a donkey. I know what that means. 30 pieces of silver, I see that,” and some of the others are like, “I’m not sure what this means.”

This is the one with a lady in a basket being carried by storks. That’s a little more obscure.

Yeah, and there are others that are obscure. Some are pretty plain, at least in what the message is, although some of the details may be hard to track.

There’s a Peanuts cartoon where Sally comes to Charlie Browne, who’s watching TV, and announces that she has to do a book report on Zechariah. Charlie says, “Well, let me know if you need any help. In a unique way, Zechariah is one of the most important books in the Old Testament.” That’s the entire cartoon. I’m not sure what Charles Schulz was trying to accomplish, except maybe he had read Zechariah and thought it was worth a mention.

It is an important book. It does lay a lot of ground for the book of Revelation, so if we want to understand what Israel thought they were thinking about Messiah, and then what Jesus told them they should be thinking, and then what the book of Revelation says, this is it. Here it is all laid out in more visions. We would do well to learn a little bit about Zechariah. We’re not going to talk about the whole book. We’ve talked about bits and pieces already, but we’re coming down to the last few chapters and Zechariah is getting exceedingly messianic in his visions.

In chapter 11 we have Messiah presented as a shepherd who looks after God’s sheep, and he dismisses the bad shepherds, and he hates them and he doesn’t like them, but even the flock in the long run isn’t okay with any of this. The shepherd throws in his staff, as it were, and says, “Fine. I’m done here. Weigh me my price or not, I don’t care,” and they weigh for his price 30 pieces of silver.” The Messiah says, “Wow, cast it to the potter in the house of the Lord, this goodly price I was prized at.”

All of this found a more or less literal fulfillment when Judas betrayed Jesus for the 30 pieces of silver, the price taken out of the temple treasury, and then returned by Judas in frustration when he threw it back into the temple. The Sanhedrin used it to buy a potters’ field, so the money did end up passing through the temple and going to a potter, so that’s all background.

As we come into the chapters that follow, we see that war is coming, a war of epic proportions, and God’s going to defend Jerusalem. There’s not a lot of specific detail, but it’s going to be a real battle between good and evil. Interestingly enough, that being the case, this from 12:9 –

And it shall come to pass in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.

That’s Armageddon. Josiah, the last great wonderful promising godly king, had died at Megiddo when he did not obey the word of the Lord. The Lord had said, “Don’t mess with this king that’s passing through,” and he messed and he died, and Israel wept for him and continued to weep for him. There was great weeping.

The prophet says, “The day is coming when this battle is going to come, and the heart of this battle is me pouring out upon the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and supplication when they look on me whom they have pierced.”

Again we can all say, “Wait, wait, we know that. That’s the cross. That’s the Roman soldier piercing Jesus’ side.” Yes, it is. “They will look on me whom they have pierced.” They pierced Jehovah. They pierced God. In the midst of this there is great mourning, and the gospel of John records the beginning of it. Many people mourned at the time. There would be mourning both for Jesus – “Oh, look what we did to our Messiah” – and there would also be mourning because of Jesus. Those who do not receive him will mourn when the judgments come.

As we go into chapter 13, the theme of the spirit being poured out continues –

In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.

Now the shift is from the Spirit being poured down to a fountain bubbling up, but the idea is the same. It’s for sin and uncleanness. This great war, this great tumult at the end of the old covenant age spins around this Messiah whose death – his side is pierced – opens up a cleansing fountain for sin and uncleanness and enables the outpouring of the Spirit.

That in itself would be just incredibly wonderful, but then we come to chapter 14 and we’re told a little more. This is where we’re going to spend a little bit of our time. Let me read some of this and we’ll talk about it.

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee. For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle. And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah: and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.

And it shall come to pass in that day that the light shall not be clear, nor dark, but it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day, nor night: but it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light.

And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem; half of them toward the former sea, and half of them toward the hinder sea: in summer and in winter shall it be. And the Lord shall be king over all the earth. In that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one.

The image of war comes up again, and it’s very clear why this is coming. God gathers all nations against Jerusalem. This is chastisement, this is punishment, and yet it’s not the end, because as the city is taken there is a divine intervention. God intervenes.

The image is of Messiah standing on the Mount of Olives and Olivet before the temple, and the hill splitting and forming, as it were, an escape route so that people can flee the destruction. Then we kind of back off and see the big picture.

The whole universe changes. Everything is suddenly twilight and gray, but night doesn’t come. As we move toward when it should be night, things are getting lighter and brighter. By the time we reach midnight, everything is light and bright. It’s full day.

At the same time, waters begin to pour forth from Jerusalem, both toward the Mediterranean and toward the Dead Sea, and the Lord will be king over all the earth.

Now, there’s more but it might be a good time to try to understand some of what the prophet is saying.

First of all, the standard dispensational interpretation is this has not literally happened yet, and it must literally happen, so after the tribulation period and after God has punished Jerusalem during that time, or allowed the Antichrist to punish Jerusalem, however that’s played out, then Jesus will come again. He’ll land, as it were, on the Mount of Olives. The mountain will physically split and people will run through it, and then these other phenomena will kick in, presumably as the millennium progresses.

Now, if this were the only chapter in the Bible that talked about these things, you could probably make an argument for some of that. The first problem, though, is it falls hard upon Christ’s death. It doesn’t say 2,000 years later or more. This is all wrapped up with this age-changing advent of the Messiah. Messiah has come, and that coming sets all of this in motion.

But this is not the only book we have in the Bible, and some of these images by now should be really familiar. Let’s take the easy one, water pouring forth from the temple. We have seen this before.

In the tabernacle there was the laver, a rather small basin from which you could drain out water to wash your hands and perform ceremonies. In Solomon’s temple there was this huge bronze sea, which contained lots and lots and lots of water, and there were little chariot things that carried lavers of water. At least in theory they looked like they could. They had wheels. So there’s the idea that there’s more water, and the water at least is pictured as moving and maybe it actually could move, although there was no obvious reason for it to.

By the time we get to the minor prophets, this vision comes back of there being a fountain open in the house of the Lord and water springing from it. Then of course Ezekiel’s vision during the captivity, which would not have been that terribly long before Zechariah, of a renewed temple with water pouring out from under the temple walls and going out and becoming greater and greater and bigger and bigger as it goes, but that water only went one way. It went to the Dead Sea, but wherever it went it brought life and it grew trees of life.

Here the image is a little different in that water is going both ways. In other words, it’s going to the ends of the earth. And if we’re going to let scripture interpret scripture, when we come to John’s gospel we should remember the words of Jesus. “Whoever thirsts, let him come to me and drink. As the scripture has said, out of his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.”

By the time we get to Revelation we see the water of life proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb and going out into the world, so this is a standard image. We don’t get to sidetrack it just because it makes sense to us to literalize it and say, “No, it’s water. There’s going to be a lot of water, and that’s significant for some reason.”

And there’s also Jesus saying it outright standing in the temple. “Here I am. I am the fountain.”

Right. If we go a little bit further in the prophecy it says this –

All the land shall be turned as a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem, and it shall be lifted up, and inhabited in her place, from Benjamin's gate unto the place of the first gate, unto the corner gate, and from the tower of Hananeel unto the king's winepresses.

That’s again a little odd. Jerusalem and the area round about is going to be lifted up like a mountain. Of course, Jerusalem already is kind of a mountainous city to begin with, and the temple is on Moriah, which is a mount, but here the whole area is lifted and exalted.

Remember, the water is still flowing, so apparently as you get higher and higher with this thing the water is plummeting down over the edges and going two different directions.

One writer on eschatology who I read years and years and years ago said that he visualized all of these details very literally, and he sat back and said, “Why?” If that’s what God is going to do, that’s God’s business, but literally speaking what good does it do anybody to turn Jerusalem into Mount Everest? And what good does it do to have rivers flowing from it to the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean? Why is that such a big deal? That it’s light all the time, okay, we can kind of see why that might have some physical effect, but the why is still there. What is God getting at?

Here again is an image that we’ve seen before. We’ve seen it in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4, where Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are exalted above all the hills and all the mountains, and all people flow up to them, and people say, “Come, let’s go to the house of the Lord and worship him and learn his ways,” so we’ve seen this image, the Temple Mount being exalted or all Jerusalem being exalted. It’s exalted above the other hills and mountains.

In other words, the kingdom of God is going to be where it’s at. It’s going to be the most important of all kingdoms. It’s going to dominate and tower over (there’s a nice figurative line for you) all other kingdoms. Visually something is really high. “Hey, look at that mountain! Let’s go climb it. Oh look, there’s that city, and there’s waters flowing from it. Let’s go check that out. Oh look, there’s light coming from it, hmm.”

God is giving us through visual metaphors the idea that he’s making this thing, this kingdom, this worship very visual, vivid, prominent, so that people will look at it and see it and say, “Whoa, that’s something to be reckoned with.”

It’s a home for the lost, too. If you get lost in the wilderness, you follow the water upstream to the top of the hill.

Yes, you go for the high ground because when you get there you can see what in the world is going on, so it’s very practical in that sense. Again, we’re tapping metaphors that the Bible itself has already built.

This is a fundamental rule of hermeneutics that some people don’t get. One way of approaching hermeneutics – how to interpret scripture – is “Well, the first thing that comes to my mind when I read it is obviously what it’s about.” You’re not an ancient Hebrew and you probably don’t know all the prophets that have written before, so that’s not necessarily a great rule for all time.

In one sense the Bible was written for you as an individual. In another sense it was not written for you as an individual.

Yeah, it’s written for the covenant community, and you need to listen to what other people have heard and seen and believed and read. Some of it is very plain. Some of it you can read and get it right off the bat. “Thou shalt do no murder,” that’s just easy. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” It doesn’t require a lot. But then, “Christ? What’s that? What does believe mean?”

We need to read the Bible. We need to read it in order. We need to let the Bible develop its own ideas and themes and patterns. When we know them and we come to a new section and we see things we’ve seen before, the strong suggestion is that God’s been leading us here, building things bit by bit, and we need to follow the breadcrumbs.

We’ve seen light before. We’ve seen water before. We’ve seen mountains before. Nothing here is new, and in fact some of them have appeared pretty much in the same visions before. This is just a very elaborate vision.

Things that are clear are there’s a time of trouble coming that’s described here as war, and may of course simply be a literal war. You can think of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. But when that time of trouble is over, God intervenes and the result is this rising kingdom that centers around worship, and it’s reaching out with waters to the ends of the earth, and the whole universe is turning from twilight to light to lighter to broad day. The light is growing and the Lord is king over all the earth.

Here we can stop and think of Jesus saying, “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go make disciples of all nations.” So as we stand in the flow of what the Bible has said and what we know it’s going to say, because yes we have read the New Testament, then this becomes easier to parse out.

It may not have been easy for the Jews, and given the fact that they tended to dislike political kingdoms and political power and fleshly means of approaching God it is likely they did not understand it, but that wasn’t God’s fault. God had the clues in their hands and they had to see where this leads.

Let’s go on a little bit further into the chapter.

And men shall dwell in it, and there shall be no more utter destruction, but Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.

That would be a great encouragement to the people of that generation. When Ezra and Nehemiah were trying to put things together, the city was kind of empty. It took a while. But beyond all of this, this new city, this final version, Jerusalem 7.0, is going to be full of people. It’s not going to be a sparse remnant.

And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem.

God was the one who had gathered the nations against Jerusalem, and now God turns to war against those very nations. There’s a plague here.

Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.

Hal Lindsey said, “That’s what happens to a body when it’s hit by a nuclear explosion.” Thanks, Hal.

I don’t think of those as the chief things that would happen.

No, it’s not. Again, if we’ve been tracking the Old Testament all along we know that when God comes to his enemies he destroys his enemies, but what we’ve learned – and the lesson doesn’t come out completely clear until we get to the New Testament – is we’ve had hints that there are two ways that God kills his enemies. First, by physically killing them, executing them and sending them to hell. Secondly, by killing the old man and resurrecting them to newness of life, by bringing them to be God-fearers. Sometimes the prophecies seem very bent on, “Take a sword and hack these people,” but when we get to the New Testament the apostles say, “Yeah, the sword of the Spirit.”

We can think here of the Council at Jerusalem, where they’re looking back at one of the last prophecies of Amos. Amos speaks about Israel possessing their enemies, and every good Jew would say, “Yeah, military conquest!” but James reads it as coming to Christ. If you didn’t read the New Testament you might not see that.

So what is this? God deals with his enemies is the point. He may destroy them. As my teacher once said, “Where are the Hitlers? Where are the Mussolinis?” and one 7th grader said, “Who?” and he said, “Exactly.”

There’s a song that I’m going to quote incorrectly. “He’s walked by the graves (or something like that) of the fallen kings who opposed him, and yet he’s still reigning.” That’s the point here. No matter who comes up against Messiah, he’s going to deal with them. He may convert them. He may destroy them.

If we look back at World War I and World War II and say, “Wow, wasn’t God out of control then? God just lost it, and the devil was ruling…” No, God was smashing apostate Europe for their apostasy. What he will bring out of it in the end we still don’t know. We haven’t lived long enough, but God’s not out of control. God knows what he’s doing. God has a plan and he smashes his enemies, or he brings them to faith in Christ, and that’s kind of what follows.

And it shall come to pass in that day that a great tumult from the Lord shall be among them and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour. And Judah also shall fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all the heathen round about shall be gathered together, gold, and silver, and apparel, in great abundance. And so shall be the plague of the horse, of the mule, of the camel, and of the ass, and of all the beasts that shall be in these tents, as this plague.

So it’s a mixed thing. There’s war. There’s conflict. And yet the treasures end up going to God’s people, and the instruments of war – we would say tanks and submarines and missiles; they say mules and horses and asses – are destroyed, and we’ve seen this before, too. God promises that after he rebukes strong nations afar off that these nations will beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks.

So it’s not a slowly expanding Utopian age. There are fierce battles to be fought. The central one was the one that Jesus fought on the cross, and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem follows in its wake and throughout church history there have been more conflicts and more wars. Think of the Reformation, for instance.

Or the councils.

Or the church councils and the evangelism of northern Europe. There have been many kinds of battles on many levels, and yet God keeps funding his kingdom, and God’s people inherit the wealth of their enemies in the long run. Little by little, God plans on getting rid of the weapons of war.

This is the final version –

And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles.

That’s powerful. It all comes back to worship.

Yeah. The victory is that they’re worshiping Jehovah, who in context is Messiah. They’re worshiping the Messiah who is the Lord, who is Jehovah, Yahweh, and they come to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

Now, the New Testament has abolished the old shadows, that’s very clear, so is God going to revive them? Well, dispensationalism says yes. God’s not done with Israel, so the temple will come back and the sacrifices and the festivals. Um, no. Read Hebrews. God’s done with that.

“Well, it will be there sort of as a memorial.”

We have a memorial. It’s called the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s day. We don’t need to go back to the shadows. We need to see a symbol for a symbol, an image for an image.

And why the Feast of Tabernacles? Why not Passover? Because the Feast of Tabernacles was the feast that celebrated the ingathering of the Gentiles, which reaches from Paul’s missionary journeys to the end of the age when God resurrects his church.

You can pick up a standard hymnbook and you will find songs that compare the missionary harvest to grain harvest, Thanksgiving songs, and you will find songs about the resurrection that also speak of a harvest, because the New Testament age is the fulfillment of Tabernacles. So it’s appropriate to use that as the backdrop for all these Gentile peoples coming to worship Jehovah. But still, there may be people even then who will get stubborn.

And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain. And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain, there shall be the plague, wherewith the Lord will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles. This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

So God continues to judge. It’s not the Utopian golden age that some people have described. It is a victory for God’s kingdom, but there is dissension and there is rebellion and there’s apostasy and God whacks it down real fast, and his kingdom continues to grow, until finally – and these are the closing taglines and this is where the horses and their bells come in –

In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE Lord; and the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.

Holiness to the Lord was written one place by divine authority in Israel. It was written on the golden band on the high priest’s mitre, his turban or crown, because he was the human equivalent of the Holy of Holies. If you wanted to find that, that’s where you went. If you want to find holiness in the Lord you went and tracked down the high priest when he was wearing his formal garments. Yet here we’re told it’s on the horses’ bells. Why do horses have bells?

In Narnia, the Pevensie children heard the sound of horses and they panicked. They thought it was the White Witch, but then they heard that there were bells on the horses and they knew it was Father Christmas coming to give them celebration.

There you go. You put bells on horses so you can find them in the dark.

That’s true too, but there’s no dark. It’s all light.

Yeah. Otherwise, you use it for ornamentation or because sleighbells are cool.

Because you’re Father Christmas, not the White Witch.

Yes, exactly. That matters here because the point is these are minor things. If he had written, “And upon the capitol building shall be Holiness to the Lord,” or “Upon every hospital shall be Holiness to the Lord,” or even “Every car manufacturer shall have Holiness to the Lord,” we could work with that, but when you say horses’ bells…

They’re completely unnecessary.

Yeah, they’re completely unnecessary. They’re just there for entertainment or to find them in the dark, but that’s how pervasive the reign of Messiah will be, that even these ornamental things that really don’t matter will be touched by holiness. They’ll be separated unto God. They will all serve God.

Of course, Saint Paul says something like this when he tells us that whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. There’s nothing beneath God’s notice. There’s no little corner or private little part of our lives where we can say, “Well, God doesn’t care about that. I can do what I please over here.”

And it’s just not the extra luxurious things, too. It’s every pot. There are a lot of pots that do not have honorable uses.

There are indeed. It says –

…the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts…

So there’s two things. There were the pots that served the altar directly – catching blood, sprinkling blood, functional with regard to the altar, part of sacrificial worship, we might say communion cups – but then there were other vessels that didn’t do that. They were used for something simple like you have a peace offering and you want to eat it? Here’s a glass. Pour yourself some water or some wine. But everything within the temple precincts is now going to be as holy as the place where worship takes place.

Every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein…

The one before that says the pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar – similarity but not exactly identical. This doesn’t mean that every activity now becomes a valid worship activity in the sense that you bring it into the Lord’s presence on the Lord’s Day, and just before communion you trot in your horse and ring its bells, or you drive in your Volkswagen and go <beep beep>, or you drive your Harley up on stage. “My Harley is holiness to the Lord today.” Yes, it is but not like that.

It is, but it’s not meant to be directly involved in corporate worship.

No, it’s not for corporate worship, not for formal worship, not worship around the Word and sacraments, but even your Harley and your Volkswagen and your horse were to be dedicated to the service of God, because Jesus claims everything. Again Kuyper’s great line – “There’s not one square inch in all the universe of which Jesus does not say, ‘It is mine.’”

And whereas Kuyper said that, he was never quite sure that it would ever be fulfilled, because that would take like a worldwide spread of the gospel, to the conversion of millions and the discipling of nations. And whereas he saw what that might look like, he never was convinced it would happen, and the Dutch tradition since then has been less and less convinced.

They’ve drawn up wonderful plans – sometimes wonderful, sometimes not – for reforming this area and that area, but if you ask them, “So is this going to happen?” they say, “Well, we can make efforts.”

“Yes, and should. But is this ever going anywhere?”

Zechariah says it is. Zechariah sees this not as a possibility, as a potentiality. He sees this as reality. When it is eternal day, when the waters reach the ends of the earth, when the Lord is king and all opposition is put down, then every area of thought and life will be consecrated to God, even the little extraneous things, because Jesus does not want any idols in our heart. He does not want us to have even little idols or little things that seem unimportant or neutral that somehow we would think, “Well, being God and all, he surely doesn’t care about…” – fill in the blank.

Rather, being God and all, and being omnipresent and omniscient and all-powerful, and having died to save the world, he actually does. He actually cares about it all. So this is a call away from any kind of gnostic approach to Christianity, where we’re just concerned about saving souls and thinking spiritual thoughts, to a robust Christianity that says Jesus came into the world to save the world.

I was talking to a friend of ours last night at Bible study. We were talking about the classes he’d had in seminary and about his class in eschatology. He had some good criticisms of the classes he took, in that they seemed to be too detail-oriented about one specific chapter of the Bible. I said, “Really eschatology is the outflow of your soteriology. Once you decide what it means that God is going to save the world, that will tell you what your eschatology is. If it means he’s going to save a handful of souls for heaven, that’s going to give you one sort of eschatology.”

“Well, he’s going to save one sort of souls for heaven and pieces of land for the Jews.”

“Okay, that’s a very different eschatology.”

“And he’s going to save everything that Adam lost and give it back, and more besides.”

“That’s a very different kind of eschatology again.”

My own belief is if you’re going to study eschatology, you don’t start with eschatology. I did when I was about 14. I was handed books on eschatology by a friend of mine, an older man, and I read them all. That’s not the way to learn the Bible. It really isn’t. God used it to kickstart me, and the forms were there, the pieces were there, but I had a lot to learn before I could come back and say, “Oh, that’s why they’re there. This is how this fits.” A few things had to go, and some things got reoriented, and some things were, “Yeah, that’s right, because Jesus saves the world,” and that’s what this vision is about.

Jesus is saving the world, and that means it reaches down into our heart, and out of our hearts come the issues of life, ideas have consequences, and all of those phrases. Kuyper’s own phrase was, “Life in its fullness is religion,” or “Culture is religion externalized.” Who we are as transformed believers in Christ necessarily is going to affect everything, and the more we grow in Christ, the more it will.

The mistake here that some have made is to look at the Bible and draw up a plan of, “Well, what will that look like? Now, let’s get there somehow.” That’s mechanical and that’s often the work of the flesh, and that can easily become Utopian.

What we need to do is become more Christ-like and want others to become more Christ-like. We look at the Bible to see what Christ-likeness is like, and as he grows us then we’ll start paying more attention to some of the horses’ bells and the cars’ horns and the cars’ bumper stickers. It’s not enough to write on your car “Holiness to the Lord.” Our driving habits need to be holiness to the Lord, along with everything else.

Isn’t that comforting, that we don’t have to make the plan. Our job is to do our job.

Yeah. I was asked by a gentleman, an old friend of mine, not long ago about, “I see where our culture is going, and I see the dangers that are coming upon us and how bad it could be. What decisive thing ought we to do as Christians right now, so that we can leverage it all and change the world?”

I said, “Do your job. Be you. Be the person God made you to be. You have these skills – use them.”

Jesus isn’t magic. Magic and Jesus don’t work well. There are no secret magic tricks to save the world. Jesus has saved the world. We work it out with fear and trembling, a little at a bit, one day at a time, with what God has put in front of us. That is so contrary to the flesh that no one gets it, and when they hear it they say, “Oh, you mean a political takeover.”

I did not say political takeover anywhere in this whole thing, but that’s what people hear because that’s the only way we know of gaining power and changing things, because we’ve bought into that system of the flesh for so long.

Back to the gospel light, the gospel waters, hastening to Jerusalem to worship. That’s how God is going to change the world.

Amen. That’s great news. Let’s have some recommendations and wrap up. I’m supposed to go first.

I recommend road trips. It was a great time. We saw a lot of country. We saw some new roads that we had not seen. We came through the Bridger-Teton National Forest, which was quite lovely. That’s western Wyoming and into Idaho. It was really cool.

Then I will recommend something not as cool, but a little more human. What you just described is what God made. Now let me recommend something that men made – Humphrey Bogart movies.

In class we finished The Maltese Falcon, and it was interesting to see a new generation see it for the first time and be very confused by it. They had a horrible time following the plot and understanding the nuances, and they concluded partly it was because the language style was so artificial, the transatlantic accent and all that. We actually had to go back and talk through what had happened and why it happened and what this meant and what that meant, but when it was done they enjoyed it.

Then we went directly into The Caine Mutiny, which they seemed to have no trouble understanding, and they were cheering and booing all over the place. One of my students said, “I thought this was going to be a boring movie, but this was exciting. I was into it the whole time!” so good. Both of these are standard Bogart and they are well worth your time.

The thing about The Caine Mutiny that I’ve appreciated, and the kids felt the force of it today, is that for most of the movie you see it as a typical American. The guy in power is crazy. We have every right to defy him and bring him down. It’s not until the end that you get slapped in the face and are told, “If you had helped him, that would not have been necessary.”

“Oh.”

That’s kind of the plot twist, isn’t it, not that it’s a spoiler. I think everyone who has heard that will still enjoy the movie if they watch it, but the lines’ ability to change your perspective on everything that came before it is really remarkable.

There’s a short little speech by the lawyer who says, “Yeah, I got you off because you weren’t the one to blame, he was, but let’s look at what really happened.” In just a very few lines everybody sobers up and says, “Oh boy, we weren’t the heroes here, were we?”

It’s a very anti-American attitude kind of thing. We’re used to the big guys are in power, they’re crazy, they’re doing things wrong, we have the right to bring them down. Well, you know what? Generally we don’t, especially when they reach out and say, however poorly, “I need help.”

And of course you can continue with Casablanca, and then maybe Key Largo or one or two others. If you have a family and your kids have never seen these, these are good movies to stop and watch together as a family and then talk it through. Of course, you do that with any movie, I would trust. Hollywood is not Christian when it’s producing these, but sometimes they do have valuable insights into how humans move and think.

One of my kids asked today, “So who was the hero in this?” because he was expecting a black and white – there’s a hero and there’s a bad guy. “I lost the hero. Where’d he go?”

“Well, there is kind of one, but it depends what you mean by hero and what you’re looking for.” There is a guy who shines the light in and makes everything clear, but we don’t like him that much. Then there’s the guy we really like, but it turns out that he probably made a huge mistake in all of this.

So things to think about – Humphrey Bogart movies – and if the people I’m talking to don’t know who Humphrey Bogart is, whoa, you’re overdue. And my wife includes Sabrina, the original.

Yes! We watched that not too long ago.

Can I take a minute to complain about a plot twist that changed my perspective, but not in a great way – the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Why do people like that book?

We should have my wife on to answer that question, I think.

It was a compelling story. The plot twist does change your perspective on everything that’s happened, but also you still don’t like anyone.

It’s 20th-century literature. You’re not supposed to like anyone.

I want to like somebody.

It’s not Dickens anymore, I’m sorry, or even Mark Twain.

Certainly not Charlotte Bronte.

We will end there. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband and road trip buddy. Thanks also to our transcriptionist. The transcript for this episode is available through our Substack, if you want to subscribe to that and get us in your inbox every week.

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