There are two sides to the Christian life.
The norm – and this cannot be said too strongly, because Jesus seemingly said it strongly so that it would lodge in our thick heads!- is that God answers prayer. The `kingdom’ has already arrived through Jesus, and we are called to pray in the light of that; God’s reign and God’s power have arrived on earth, putting things right.
But: in our lives we do face a `not yet‘ about the kingdom too. (As Jesus did, with his Gethsemane prayer to his Father not being answered, immediately after his strong affirmations about prayer being heard in John 14:14, 15:7, 15:16, and 16:23.) We live in what is still a fallen world; the reign of God’s grace will not be fully completed until the second coming, what Peter calls `the time for God to restore everything’ (Acts 3:21). And so there are times when God’s power is not putting everything right. They are the exceptions, not the norm; but all of us encounter them periodically; and sometimes they are `serious’. `In this world’, Jesus warned us, `you will have trouble’ (John 16:33).
But here comes a complication – and a vital one for us to understand. The new testament uses the term `kingdom’ in an almost technical sense, as it speaks of God’s reign coming in a far clearer, more active way than before, with Jesus’ arrival and the subsequent spread of his Church, his Word and his Spirit, repairing the tragic consequences of the Fall. But that cannot mean God was absent before. Even before this `kingdom’ came at the start of the gospels, God, obviously, was in control. His `reign’ was expressed more in terms of the outworkings of his law: that is, sin creates a sphere of alienation, futility and death (Rom 6:23), where humankind lives away from God amid a natural order rendered tragic by rebellion; condemned to an existence that is in many ways outside the sphere of his blessing. That is not how God’s reign would be expressed with the coming of the new testament `kingdom’ grounded in his forgiveness through the cross, and displaying more fully his presence, his love, and his transforming power, `on earth as it is in heaven’. But those earlier outworkings of God’s law were still the marks of his control; still his rule had been the fundamental, underlying reality. Who gave humanity bread to eat? Who sustained the physical laws that kept their planet in place?
And this is true even in the darkest moment of the old testament. Insofar as the `kingdom’, the `manifested’, restoratory reign of God, was revealed before Christ’s coming, it focused especially on God’s house in Jerusalem. (See particularly 1 Kings 8, with its emphasis on things being put right as people pray `towards this temple’.) But there came a tragic moment when that temple was ransacked and razed. And God did nothing. The miracle-narratives of Israel’s past had told how people had been struck dead merely for touching the temple’s contents (eg Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6). But now nothing happened: the soldiers of Babylon carried off the temple’s treasures with impunity and put them in the temple of their own god. If ever a book opened on a note of the absence of the power of God, it is Daniel (1:2). But if we read through Daniel and write down a key lesson or two from each chapter, one theme will recur again and again: the Lord is in control, `heaven rules… the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men’ (4:25-26,32). When Jerusalem falls, God is still almighty; what has occurred is the outworking of his laws by which he reigns.
Even in the darkest moments, then, the Lord is ruling: but there is a different mode in which he manifests his rule. And here is the issue for us. As Christians, our bodies are the point where heaven’s kingdom intersects earth. Our bodies, now, are the dwelling-place of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19). Already we are (not `will be’) seated in heavenly places in Christ (Eph 2:6); the kingdom is in our hearts. And the gospel we preach is the `good news of the kingdom’ (see eg Acts 8:12, 20:25, 28:31): through the cross God invites humanity into a sphere where his reign begins to be revealed in a new way, `on earth as it is in heaven’. So through the Word, through the Spirit and his fruit and gifts, through prayer, things begin to be put right on earth; the `kingdom of heaven’ pours into the world through us as his channels.
The `norm’, then, is one where heaven extends a step ahead of us, flows out in transformation through us. But it isn’t always so. In us, heaven enters a world shaped by the results of human rebellion. And so at times our own hearts are, we may say, the frontier of the power of heaven; it doesn’t extend beyond them, not yet. Around us is the world of tragedy; things go `wrong’; and God’s reign is manifested in the way his strength enables us to go on living, by faith, amid the desperate anarchy of events the healing `kingdom’ has not yet touched. At worst there are the `Gethsemane’ moments; the moments when we are caught up, as Jesus was, in the horror of a fallen world alienated from God: massive hunger and savagery; miscarriage or cancer; assault or rape. And here, ultimately, the only way to survive is by faith; somehow finding the strength to believe still that `the Most High reigns’, to `let God be God in the way that he chooses’. (Like Job, amid all his anguished questionings: `Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him’.) It can sometimes be almost unbearably hard; then it is only by taking in, becoming armed with, the grace, the strength, of God that we can live. `Only by grace’; in the `exception’, then, as much as in the `norm’, everything depends on the varied expressions of the strength, the reign, of God.
Peter himself experienced this `change of mode’ in Luke 22. Jesus asks the disciples in v35, `When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?’ `Nothing’, they reply; as they had gone forth (this is Luke 9), the `powers of the kingdom’ had seen to everything. But now something different is happening, says Jesus. There is going to be a time when God’s loving action will seem absent: `But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one’ (v36). Now would be a time of far more intense conflict, indeed of the apparent withdrawal of God’s power as his own Christ is arrested and killed. We have shifted mode; as Jesus tells his assailants just seventeen verses later, `This is your hour – when darkness reigns’ (v53). Such times are permitted, within the overall loving sovereignty of God. Job knew them; Daniel knew them; so did Peter. Normally prayer is answered and what we need is given us as God’s power is released; but there are times when it is not.
We do not know which of these `modes’ God has in store for us at particular phases of the drama. `If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it… But even if he does not – ‘, Daniel’s friends tell Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3:17). `Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean’, prays the leper in Matthew 8:3; and that is enough for Jesus. Faith isn’t about the ability to look over God’s shoulder and know for certain what he will do. What we are sure of is what he can do – his love, and his power, and his wisdom. Biblical faith prays on the basis of passionate certainty about these things.
Perhaps we may say, then, that the Christian lives, under God’s sovereignty, on a spectrum of experience between two poles: `kingdom’ and (to use the Daniel picture) `exile’. The norm is for us to live in his presence; sometimes, however, we learn to live by faith, growing in faith as we’ve seen in Habakkuk, through his apparent absence. On the one hand, the kingdom of heaven is already in us, and spreads out through and around us. Ephesians has this perspective; or if we seek an old testament parallel we might look to Joshua, the story of Israel’s growth and victory in the promised land, the land where the promises came true. But on the other hand, the kingdom is not yet fully come; we are not yet `at home’, and meanwhile we face experiences of the wilderness – because God has chosen to put us there for the time, and/or because of the sin, stupidity or lack of faith of ourselves or others.
From the old testament, many people would read Numbers this way. (In Numbers 1-13, by the way, they are in the wilderness because God has chosen to put them there (cf Ex 13:17-18); from Numbers 14 onwards it is because of their own sin and failure to live by faith. Numbers educates us, we may say, in both alternatives.) And a new testament book that can help us with `living in exile’, `living away from home’ as `aliens and strangers in the world’, is this one we’re going to look at now, 1 Peter (1:17, 2:11).
Not surprisingly we’ll find it a very personal letter. Don’t Peter’s own experiences lie at the heart of what he writes? Don’t we sense memories of his own moments of despair, as we watch him seeking to guard his readers (4:1) from failures like his own denial of Christ in Luke 22, and to strengthen them for experiences of suffering – such, indeed, as he knew lay ahead in his own future (John 21:19)? Don’t we sense echoes of his last (and probably life-shaping) encounter with Jesus in John 21:15ff, as we read his concern that God’s `shepherds’ care for God’s sheep through tough times (5:1-2)? So much to help us here…
Father, please help me to be strengthened, and to learn to strengthen others, as I feed on this book…
