What if we are in the early church? Such a question would have appeared absurd to me not too long ago, but no longer. I’m now inclined to answer in the affirmative. As I no longer believe we’re necessarily in the “end times” (i.e., Jesus coming back any day), I now have a longer time horizon on things. The reason is because I think He’s only just beginning to build His church to populate His redeemed new heavens and earth (Rom. 8:18-22). That’s kind of a mind bender, isn’t it.
Psalm 2 speaks to Christ’s Messianic reign among the nations, the peoples, the kings of the earth, and the rulers. They rage, but the Lord assures us they plot in vain, thinking they can break the chains and shackles of the Lord and his anointed. History is littered with the futility of such mortal hubris. The one enthroned laughs and scoffs at them. Why?
7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”
And when the Son asks, the Father gives.
Since I became a Christian over 4 decades ago, I’ve always believed Christianity is a minority report. It started out with a small band of peasants in an outpost in the Roman Empire, and against all odds became a worldwide religion and transformed the world. Yet, even in ostensibly Christian nations, Christians were not necessarily the majority of the populations. And while there may be upwards of two billion people today who call upon the name of Jesus, the population of the world is upwards of eight billion. But what if we’re just in the first inning of what turns out to be an overtime game?
Until recently I interpreted these words of Jesus to mean in the end few would be saved:
13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
That seemed to fit my experience, so it must mean few will be saved in the end. Well, maybe not.
A critical biblical hermeneutical principle is that the Bible was written in a specific historical context, and it’s primary meaning must be taken from that context. Until recently, I took these words of Jesus completely out of their historical context (not good) as if they applied to all times. I’m now convinced they absolutely do not. They were spoken by Jesus to Jews in first century Palestine, of whom John said in the first chapter of his gospel, “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” By taking the words out of their proper context we end up distorting their meaning. In addition, it is critical that we do not take our experience, what seems to be the case from our perspective, as the interpretive framework for Scripture. That is also not good.
Yes, Jesus’ words could have some spiritual meaning for fallen humanity and how easy it is to give in to sinful human nature, and how hard it can be to fight against it, but that was not what Jesus was saying. He was not saying this about all fallen humanity for all of history, and that only a very few would ultimately be saved from their sin and reconciled to God in Christ. Yet that’s what I believed! Why?
The answer is simple: I was living by sight and not by faith.
Which brings me to God’s promises to Abraham in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 respectively:
* I will make you into a great nation . . . . and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
* He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
* 5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you.
Keep in mind this was before Abraham and Sarah bore Isaac. Then when Isaac was a teenager, the Lord told him to sacrifice his son, and when he was willing to do that the Lord doubled up on the promise (Gen. 17):
15 The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”
Even before my recent eschatological transformation, I felt a cognitive dissonance between Jesus’ words in Matthew 7, and these promises to the first Patriarch. Over the years I’ve come to believe God’s mercy and grace is far more capacious than I had originally thought, but I didn’t have the theological justification for that intuition. Now I do. It is impossible to lay out my argument in a short blog post, but I’m convinced Psalm 2 give us that justification in light of the rest of the redemptive history we find in our Bibles, including:
- The Lord’s prayer
- Kingdom language throughout the gospels
- The Great Commission
- Paul’s declaration of Christ’s authority over all things in Ephesians 1
- Quotations from Psalm 2 and 110 in the New Testament, among others
In Ephesians 1, Paul says, “God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.” The coming of God’s kingdom, the Kingdom of heaven, it’s blessings of righteousness and peace, are for the purpose of Christ populating his church and his eventual reconciled universe.
Looking back at Psalm 2, it’s clear the devil doesn’t stand a chance. It’s now unimaginable for me to believe Almighty God would allow the majority of those creatures created in his image to end up eternally separated from him. The metaphors of stars in the sky and sand on the seashore were not throwaway lines by Yahweh. Think about this imagined conversation between them:
“You do get what I’m saying, Abram, right? It will be lots and lots of people, kinda like sand on the seashore and stars in the sky. But of course, I’m just using language metaphorically, so you get the idea. I certainly don’t mean that many people.”
Well, maybe Yahweh didn’t literally mean every single grain of sand and every celestial ball of light, but it is way, way more than I thought when I misinterpreted the Matthew 7 passage. And we know now that Abraham had no idea just how many stars in the sky there really were, but the Creator God sure did.
I’ll end this post with a quote from Revelation 7. John is told by an angel about the 144,000 sealed by the living God, 12,000 from each of the tribes of Israel. I see those numbers as symbolic for the stars in the sky, and the sand on the seashore, the uncountable great multitude:
9 After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”11 All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying:
“Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honor
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen!”
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