In Genesis chapters one and two, we find God creating the world as he intended it to be. As we listen to the Creation story in chapter one, we can begin to feel the beating of God’s heart through the rhythm of the days of creation. “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”(1) Here we can already sense that God is up to something more than just making a world. He is speaking an entire world into existence that echoes the movement, nature, and character of the One who creates it. At the end of the sixth day of Creation, we read, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”(2)
In the second chapter of Genesis, the camera changes angles and zooms in for a different view of day six, and we see a more intimate description of the creation of human beings. It is here that we are introduced to Adam and Eve and Eden’s garden. We hear for the first time about the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We read of a beautiful garden where God and humans dwell together.
We also discover an integral part of our nature as beings created in the image of God. As God considers Adam, who was created to work and keep the garden of Eden, he says “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”(3) Eve, the ideal helper, comes from within Adam. It is though the creation of the woman, who completes man through relationship, that Creation reaches its climax. Things are as God intends them to be in the world.
Making All Things New
Starting in chapter three of Genesis, sin enters the picture. When we view it in the context of the Creation narrative, we can gain a more clear understanding of sin. While many people seem to believe that sin is a list of limitations God has placed on man, sin viewed through the lens of Creation takes on a different meaning. It is not primarily a violation of some arbitrary law, although the first sin did go against God’s advice to Adam and Eve. Rather, sin revealed fracture in the relationship between Creator and creation. By rejecting the relationship with God, Adam and Eve damaged not just their relationship with God, but also the relationship of God with all of creation. In Romans, Paul reiterates this when he writes:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.(4)
God’s dream for the world has been damaged by the broken relationship between humans and God. As a result, the curse, which is more consequence than punishment, reveals a world that must now deal with the implications of sin.
However, God’s dream is not forgotten or completely destroyed. Instead, through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, God enters the world and lives as a true human.(5) As Andrew Root says, “If our humanity is to be transformed, we need a fully human God. We need a God who bears our reality and takes it fully into Godself.”(6)
Through Jesus Christ, there is a significant turn in God’s plan for the renewal and restoration of creation. Paul hints at the import of the Christ event when he writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed; behold, the new has come.”(7) This is a glimpse of God’s final plan for creation. It is in John’s Revelation that we read the final realization of God’s dream:
And he who is seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new…Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.(8) (Emphasis mine)
Engaging God’s Creative Imagination
So what are the implications for the missional church? We revisit Paul and his words of encouragement and challenge to the Corinthian church. He reminds them, and us, that our task as the body of Christ is to carry on the work of Jesus Christ: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation…Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”(9)
Missional theology embraces this idea of engaging in God’s continued work of reconciliation through the renewal and redemption of creation. We are called to partner with God, seeking to restore creation as all things move towards the eschaton. Scot McKnight supports this view of the role of humanity when he writes, “As the Bible moves forward into the New Testament, though, ‘Eikon’ morphs; it shifts from denoting a ruling-representative function to a redemptive role.”(10) Our purpose moves from the original role as seen in the first couple of chapters of Genesis to the one envisioned throughout the New Testament writings.
This re-imagined role causes our function to have an already/not yet nature. When we acknowledge that we are not escaping the world, but seeking to work with God to restore it, we must revisit what salvation and hope really mean in the Kingdom of God. Since our ultimate hope is not to leave this world, but to see it’s potential fully realized(11), we join with God today as his preferred future breaks into the present through the work of the Holy Spirit.
This requires us to take a fresh look at what it means to be a part of God’s Kingdom. We are not saved solely for the benefit of some future reward. Rather, we are called to actively engage in God’s future today by determining what God is already doing in the world and joining him in those efforts. Church is not a place to wait for God’s future salvation; it is a place where God’s salvation is revealed now in anticipation of the total fulfillment that awaits us in the eschaton.
God’s heartbeat is embedded in Creation. We witnessed it in the opening lines of Scripture and it continues today. Human beings, and this creation, are separated from the tree of life since sin continues to fracture our relationship with God. In the end, we will once again stand in the presence of this tree and the One who created it. Until then, the missional church must continue to pursue the inbreaking of God’s dream for the future in the midst of this broken world.
Notes
(1) In Genesis 1:3, we see the first of six repetitions of God’s rhythm in the Genesis 1 creation narrative. This phrase appears five additional times in Genesis 1:8,13,19,23,31. (ESV)
(2) Genesis 1:31 (ESV)
(3) Genesis 2:18
(4) Romans 8:20-22
(5) I owe much of my understanding of God as true human to Andrew Root through the ideas presented in his book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. In this work, Root examines Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology as a framework to explain the significance of the incarnation.
(6) Andrew Root, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 91.
(7) 2 Corinthians 5:17
(8) Revelation 21:5a; 22:1-2
(9) 2 Corinthians 5:18,20a
(10) Scot McKinght, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 19.
(11) In Romans 8:23 and 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, Paul advocates a bodily resurrection for all humans in the eschaton. The redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:23) is the hope in which we live. It is in this hope that all creation will find its rescue and rest from the bondage and destruction of sin.
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