Regis Nicoll is a retired nuclear engineer and a fellow of the Colson Center who writes commentary on faith and culture. His new book is titled Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters.
| “Jesus and His Disciples on the Sea of Galilee” painted by Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Oesterley in 1833 |
In the space between the Cross and the Parousia, we are prone to wonder: What really happens when we die? What does it mean to be absent from the body and present with the Lord? What is heaven like? Will our deceased pets be there? At the resurrection, will we be raised at the age we were at death or as children, teens, young adults, or some other age? When will the Eschaton be upon us? Has it already begun?
A Great Mystery
This is all quite natural. As creatures made for eternity, we have an irrepressible curiosity about the “there” and “yet to come.” It is an existential itch that finds little relief in the here and now. The pages of Scripture, where we expect to find answers, reveal teasing clues but sparing details; what they do disclose only further piques our interest: “No eye has seen nor ear heard, or mind conceived what God has prepared for them who love him.”
“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.”
“Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
The Bible frustrates our “need to know,” leaving specifics about heaven, the afterlife, and the end times largely to the imagination. I’ve often said that you could put a dozen theologians in a room and hear two dozen opinions on any one of those topics. Still, while much of the “there” and “yet to come” remains a great mystery, the greater mysteries are about the here and now. The first relates to what we are, rather that what we will be.
Divine Options
Creation could have taken any number of turns. Foremost, God could have opted out of it altogether. Fully complete in the eternal community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God didn’t need creation or humanity to fulfill him in any way.
Once the decision to create was made, he had several options: a race of automata programmed to conform to his will, thereby eliminating the possibility of sin, evil, disease, and death; a category of species, much lower than the angels, governed deterministically by the laws of physics and chemistry; or a strain of stimulus-response organisms slavishly controlled by their instincts. Given the pathological results of man’s free will, those options would seem to have much to commend them.
Instead, God created little replicas of himself—tripartite beings of body, soul, and spirit fashioned in the pattern of the Godhead and sharing a trace of the divine nature—namely, personal, rational, relational, moral, and creative creatures. Because of our design, every person is the visible image, although blemished, of the invisible God such that, even without the benefit of special revelation, we can know something of God by looking at ourselves and our neighbor.
After creation, God could have absented himself, leaving humans to their own devices while he turned to other creative pursuits, become a spectator Deity watching the drama on earth from a perch an astronomical unit removed, or been a contractual (versus covenantal) God, making man a partner in his divine enterprises according to the terms and conditions of a contractual agreement.
Instead, he chose to be our Father and make us his children. Reacting to the wonder of this, the apostle John writes, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.” Then, as if at a loss of saying anything more profound, John adds, “And that is what we are!” If you are not similarly dumbstruck, it is time to pause and let John’s words sink in for a moment.
In the created order, children are cared for by parents who provide them with everything within their means for leading full and productive lives. Sadly, this is not the reality for the many children who have parents that are abusive, neglectful, or detached physically, emotionally, or spiritually. But despite the failures of our earthly parents, our heavenly Father is a stay-at-home Dad who is involved, loving, and empowering.
It is a marvelous mystery revealed that God takes up residence in each and every believer. (“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?”) Through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, God is there for his children, at all times and in all places, to comfort them, guide them, and equip them. More marvelously still, he empowers them to accomplish “greater things than these.” Truly.
Greater Things
When Jesus told his disciples that their accomplishments would surpass his, I can imagine a few shared glances across the Passover table. Considering Jesus’s formidable list of doings—changing water into wine; healing the blind, lame, and infirm; exorcizing demons; feeding 4,000, then 5,000; and raising Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter—it must have seemed the unlikeliest of predictions. But shortly they would see it happening.
After three years of preaching, teaching, and miracle-working, Jesus attracted scarcely more than one hundred followers. But in a matter of weeks after his death, the disciples added 5,000 to their number, plus women and children. By 300 AD, what had begun as a fringe sect of a dozen followers had become a prominent community of several million.
Yet, nothing in the curricula vitae of the disciples would have pointed to this outcome. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more unlikely band of misfits to launch a world-changing movement.
By education and vocation, the disciples were largely blue-collar. During their apprenticeship, they seemed to have developed little for the mission they were being groomed for. Instead of practicing what they were taught (i.e., denying self and carrying their crosses) they were often doing what they were warned against (such as obsessing over their pecking order) or doing nothing at all (like sleeping when they should have been praying).
On top of that, they were frequently—if not typically—slow on the uptake, as if afflicted with a collective learning disability. Not only did they continually fail to comprehend Jesus’s teachings, they often failed to understand his patient—and sometimes repeated—explanations of them.
Yet, with nothing more than a profession of faith, a foot-in-the-mouth fisherman was given the head-swelling authority to “bind” and “loose.” Soon after, Peter and his cohorts were liberating people from the grip of sin and knitting them together in a community united under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Two thousand years later, the work they began has led not only to a worldwide community of two billion members, but to a host of cultural changes that shaped Western civilization for the betterment of mankind. This points to another “greater” mystery, one that the apostle Paul suggests was kept secret for ages past.
A Cosmic Stage
In the third chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul discusses his evangelistic ministry and how it fits into God’s larger plan: “that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”
From Paul’s passage, it is not hard to imagine Christians as players on a cosmic stage surrounded by an unseen audience intently absorbed in the developing drama—one that Peter reveals “even angels long to look into.” And what those watchful eyes have witnessed is the invisible kingdom becoming visible through the mystical Body of Christ, the Church.
Indeed, as believers in every era have incarnated the gospel through proclamation and practice, they have been restoring what was lost in the Garden, in the run-up to the final act when the curtain is drawn and the Author steps onto the stage to finish the divine makeover.
The truly great mysteries are not about what we will be, but what we are; not about the “there” and “yet to come,” but the here and now; and not about what remains to be revealed, but what has been revealed: that we are children, bearing the image of our Father who abides in us and has entrusted us to impart his glory throughout every dimension of human existence until God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Why we are so privileged is the greatest mystery of all.