“(The Apostle Paul) saw that it was paradoxically through the narrowing down of his redemptive acts to unique singularity of one single man — the Messiah, Jesus, that God opened the way to a universal offering of the grace of the gospel to all the nations.”
Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament — pp. 52-53
Try to imagine the Gospel as dense matter getting smaller and smaller, and yet at the same time increasingly concentrated, with the passing of redemptive history. Jesus arrives on the scene and with the confluence of redemptive events that characterize his life completed, the dense matter Gospel explodes, and goes super nova, having a re-creating effect wherever the impact of the explosion is felt. This is the book of Acts chronicling the initial fulfillment of the OT prophet’s foretelling of the streaming in of the nations to serve the Lord (cmp. Acts 15:15-17).
The Church, for the Glory of God, impelled by the Spirit, preaching up Christ crucified, is still to be God’s supernova re-creating institution. The Church should still have the expectation that God will use it as the agency whereby the nations and their cultures know and experience redemption. The church is not waiting for some cataclysmic end for the cataclysmic end, with its promise of a new heavens and a new earth, has already come in the death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost of Christ. The old Judaic order has passed and God’s new Kingdom order has come. In order for that present new Kingdom to progressively come as a reflection of its definitive arrival we must be adorning the Gospel w/ beautiful community life, proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus, and commanding all men everywhere to repent. Because of the Supernova Gospel we have been given a Kingdom that can not be shaken. This Kingdom is destined to make the places of this current world that are arid and hostile deserts (The lands of the Son’s of Allah, The land of the Jews, The lands of the humanist) which are the last outposts of the falls resistance into beautiful and flourishing gardens of the Lord.
However before any of this happens the church has to awaken to what it is as members of the age to come, and what the seed of the serpent is as it holds membership in this present wicked age. Until we understand this eschatological antithesis we will forever be putting up garden wallpaper on the desert spots and deluding ourselves that it has been changed by the supernova Gospel.
