Where are we going and are we there yet?

This is an essay I originally posted about a year ago and then after a while I took it down because it was feeling stale to me. This morning I had a lot of thoughts running through my head and was about to start a new post when I realized I had already said all this before. So I decided to just repost the original essay (although, I might edit it here and there)

Disclaimer: None of these ideas are original or unique. They pretty much all come from a combination of the teachings of Dallas Willard, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and more recently, Greg Boyd. That being said, if any of this makes you mad or sounds like heresy, don’t blame these guys, I could very likely have misunderstood them. On the other hand, if you want to read more expansion on any of this, may I suggest reading any of their books.

I’ve been doing some thinking, reading, listening, and learning that are all pointing to a question and then that question has sent me into much more thinking, reading, listening and learning. I’ve posed the question to a few people in a very non-scientific survey to see what other people were thinking on this and I’ve gotten some expected and unexpected responses. Here’s the question: Looking at the whole of human history, is the whole story going downhill, going uphill (as in getting better), or staying the same?

Some said definitely downhill, a few said uphill, I think one person said the average was staying the same because some aspects of humanity had improved while others had declined. My suspicion is that if I continued to ask people this question, there would be far more down hill or staying the same answers than uphill. My answer to my own question is that I believe that the whole of the story of humanity is on an ultimate uphill trajectory; that this is God’s plan for the world; that God intends to redeem the world and turn it ultimately into the creation intended from the beginning of the story. Some days, this is more a matter of faith than a matter of actually witnessing the evidence of such a claim. I think this question, and what one believes as the answer, is crucial to how one lives one’s life and specifically how one lives their faith.

If I believe the world is generally going downhill or at best staying the same, the whole point of life becomes how can I survive this world, escape it to a better place some day, and maybe, how many people can I bring with me? But if I believe the whole story is moving toward redemption, rebirth, recreation, then the point of my life becomes how can I help bring this about? In case you’re getting squirmy that I’m talking about us all hunkering down and fighting tooth and nail against the evils of the world to somehow fix all the problems in the world by our own strength and cleverness, let me assure you that I believe the redemption of the world will be done by God through Jesus. But I want to clarify what I mean when I say redemption of the world. That’s a phrase that gets tossed about a lot in Christian circles and I don’t think we all mean the same thing by it. I don’t mean a complete destruction of the world to be replace en mass by God (like an exchange policy at Target for a broken toy). I don’t mean the individual redemptions of all the individual people of the world but in another place from here (the sinking ship idea, but where everyone gets into a life boat). What I do mean is that the world, this world we live in, all of creation including all the people, will be recreated because everyone chooses to have God recreate them and all of the evil in the world is wiped out because every person is living in the Kingdom of God on this earth and the ultimate culmination of all of that is a new Earth and the Kingdom of God existing everywhere and in everyone.

OK, that was a pretty loaded statement. Let me try to unpack at least some of it. First of all, the kingdom of God as Jesus describes it throughout the gospels is not so much a place as a realm – wherever it is that God’s will is reality. It is not a future-only reality but a present reality that is now available to everyone. The most dominant message I see when I read the gospels is this: Kingdom of God is available! That’s what Jesus came to announce. That’s what “at hand” means – it is here, available, as close to you as the air you breathe. All you have to do, according to Jesus, to gain access to such a kingdom is to put your faith in Him. More on that in a minute – first more about what this Kingdom is. If there is a Kingdom of God where what God wants to happen, happens, there is also a kingdom of Satan, where what Satan wants to happen, happens, and then of course there are the 6 billion kingdoms of people, where to one extent or another what each of us wants to happen, happens. We have the choice at every moment to align our own little kingdoms with God’s or to do it our own way, or in more dramatic cases, to align with Satan. I believe the redemption of the world will be here when all people choose always to live in God’s kingdom. It will be a redemption, then, not just of individual lives, although that will certainly also be true, but of the systems of life and humanity also aligning with God’s kingdom. Where the marginalized are no longer, where the oppressed are no longer, where everyone is loved and has enough, where the resources of the earth are everlasting because good stewardship has allowed them to become self-perpetuating. Where the very Earth itself is healed and brought back into balance and health (or one could just call it "life") that we crave for our own bodies.

If the redemption of the world begins with people learning to live in the Kingdom of God, it would be most helpful to know how one gains access to this kingdom. As I said before, Jesus says it is available and that we can enter it (learn to live in it) by putting our faith in Him. So what does that mean to put my faith in a person? I think we can use our whole life to completely understand and put this into practice, but at least one part of this is to believe that what Jesus said is true. What he said about himself being God’s son, what he said about how to make life work, what he said about the characteristics of a person who is living in the Kingdom of God. And then, if I believe all that to be true, to act on it – to do what he said I should do, to make life work, to become transformed into the kind of person who lives naturally in the Kingdom of God. Of course any changes in my life are going to come up out of changes in my inner being, and those kind of changes are not going to happen because I simply will them to happen but because God wills them to happen and I cooperate by training to affect those changes in my inner being. It starts with knowing and understanding what Jesus was talking about when he describes life in the Kingdom of God, and then with knowing and understanding the way into said kingdom as Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching his apprentices to do.

I believe the most important part of what makes us human is our God-given ability and right of free choice. So when everyone in the world freely chooses to cooperate with God in their own inner transformation into a Kingdom person, then the world, as we know it now, will no longer exist but a pure, redeemed version of it, the one God has planned from the beginning, will take it’s place and that will truly be a beautiful thing.