Start Here: What Do We have To Look Forward To?
March 20, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
John 12:12-19

Today we’re continuing our series of sermons looking at what we believe as Christians, and we’re sort of using the Apostles Creed as our skeleton. We’re going to talk today about what we believe about what is to come, what the future holds for Christians, what we believe about the future. Our Scripture today is the Palm Sunday story from the Gospel of John as the disciples are with Jesus and the crowds as he comes down the Mount of Olives just outside the city of Jerusalem. Listen now as we hear the Gospel read from the Gospel of John.
The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,
“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—
the King of Israel!”
Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written:
“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
sitting on a donkey’s colt!”
His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him. So the crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him up from the dead continued to testify. It was also because they heard that he had performed this sign that the crowd went to meet him. The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!” (John 12:12-19)
If I were to ask most Christians, I’d say most of you at any rate, what Christmas meant you’d be able to answer that and be able to articulate that it’s when Jesus was born and God became flesh and lived among us. If I were to ask you about Good Friday you would be able to say that it was the time Jesus gave his life to save us from our sin. You may not be able to articulate why. It’s hard to do so, I’ll be honest. If I were to ask you about Easter, you would be able to say that Jesus rose from the dead and that we, too, when we die will go to heaven by the grace of God.
But if I were to ask you what the future holds, what does it mean to say that Christ will come again, could you answer that? Could you articulate that? I suspect you’d stutter around a bit more than you would with the other doctrines.
What I want do today is two things really. One, I want to talk about what the Christian faith has said about our future. It’s really sort of the beginning of a two part sermon. We’ll talk more about life after death, the life everlasting, next week on Easter. But today I want to talk about what is it that we believe about the future of the world, about creation. Then I want to talk about what difference that means for us.
Let’s pray together. O God open us up, open our eyes that we might see, our ears that we can hear what you have for us. You might have something for us to hear today. You’ve prepared each one of us to hear something just for us. Open our hearts that we might feel. And then O Lord, may we respond to your word by opening our hands to serve. Amen.
I want to focus on one particular verse, so I’m going to teach just a little while about our doctrine before I really begin preaching. The focus on one verse here says, “Do not be afraid, Daughter of Zion. Look! Your king is coming!”
The “Daughters of Zion” were not the women of Jerusalem. It was only a number of years ago I discovered this. The Daughters of Zion were the little villages that were around the city of Jerusalem. These were called the “Daughters.” Every major city had daughters, little villages where those who were not affluent enough to live inside the city itself lived, those who couldn’t afford to live inside the Loop, inside the walls of the city. They were the “281-ers” and they lived out in the suburbs. They lived off the economy of the city. They were part of the greater Jerusalem metropolitan area, I guess. Bethany, Bethlehem – a number of villages all around.
And what would happen would be that in times of war if there were ever an attack, those people would come from outside into the walls of the city. Those were called the “Daughters of Jerusalem” or the Daughters of Zion. The word Zion is just another name for the Holy City, the city of Jerusalem.
Imagine this is where this is happening. It’s outside the walls of the city. They’re coming down the Mount of Olives. Jesus has been in Bethany, one of the Daughters of Jerusalem, where he has stayed with Mary and Martha and has raised Lazarus from the dead. He’s coming into town. The Scripture says, “Look, Daughters of Jerusalem!” These are the people around, the people of these villages. Look, Daughters of Jerusalem, your king is coming!
Now what does it mean to say “Your king is coming?” You have to understand that there had been a prophecy since very early in Israel that there would be a day – this is important - try and learn this. Get this in your heads. It’s hard for us to get. They believed that there would be a day when God himself would reign as king on the earth, that there would be a kingdom of God that God himself would establish and he would reign as king.
Way back in I and II Samuel, those of you who’ve taken Disciple Bible Studies this might send a little click in your mind. Way back in I and II Samuel and I and II Kings there is a big debate about whether Israel can have a king. They didn’t have a king, they had judges. Some people said, “We can’t have a king. God is our only king.” Others said, “We have to have a king. How are we going to get by? We have to make treaties for us to be a real power. We’ll have to have a king.”
That last was the party that won, so Saul was the first king of Israel, and then David, then Solomon and then many others after that. But throughout all of that there is a prophecy that there would come a time when God himself would reign as king. Well, you can’t look God in the face. They believed if you looked God in the face you would die. So how can God himself reign as king?
Well, he can only do so through the Son of God, through the Messiah who would be God reigning as king on earth. And so when they say, “Look, Daughters of Zion! Your king is coming!” they’re saying, “It’s time. The Kingdom of God will be established on the earth. And this shall be your king.”
Now indeed Jesus came to be that king, but it wasn’t quite the same as they had expected. Jesus proclaimed a very different kind of kingdom, what we call an upside down kingdom, a kingdom that begins in the hearts of women and men, a kingdom in which those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last, a kingdom that is ruled by humility and not arrogance, where being a servant is first and being served is last, an upside down kingdom.
So that’s what we have come to understand. That Jesus would be the king of our lives, king of our hearts and would reign in our lives forever and ever. And too often what we do as Christians is that we stop there. But the truth is the prophecy and the teaching of Jesus and the disciples and Paul is far beyond that. There’s still a sense that God is not finished yet.
In seminary I learned that we talk about the Kingdom of God as both already and as not yet, that the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated, has begun in Jesus, but is not yet consummated or fulfilled. And we live in that in between time in which the Kingdom of God is growing like a seed that is planted and is growing toward the great harvest that is to come. So there will be a time in which God finishes creation, and it is culminated.
A number of years ago I went to Turkey with an interfaith group of Christians, Jews and Muslims. And it was a neat trip, I learned a lot. Turkey was very different at that time than it is right now. We actually went to the birthplace of Abram, the father of all three of those major religions. It’s right down near the border of Syria. And in the midst of that time I had a conversation with one of my Jewish friends. After you got to know each other and trust each other you could have these kinds of conversations. I said, “So why would you not believe that Jesus is the Messiah? Don’t you see all prophecies and, etc., etc.?” We were right there on the border of Syria. So he looked at me and said, “Why would you believe Jesus is the Messiah? Do you see the Messianic age? Do you see those refugee camps? Does this look like justice and peace and prosperity for all? How can you say Jesus is the Messiah?”
I stuttered around a bit and of course said to myself, “Why did I begin this conversation?” I finally responded in the same way I have responded to many of you in similar times. I said, “God’s not finished yet.”
When you say to me, “Why did this terrible thing happen? Why did this child die or there was this heartbreak in my life? How could there be a God who’s of love when this is happening?” And my answer is, “God’s not finished yet.” We live in that time in between when the Kingdom of God as it should be has been inaugurated, is growing around us. We have chosen to make God sovereign in our lives, that Christ would be sovereign in our lives, and yet it has not come to pass. So we hold fast to that promise of what is to be, that one day justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, that one day the lion and the lamb will lie down together, that one day no one will hurt or harm on my holy mountain. We’ve been seeing those pictures. That’s the prophecy that is before us, that is what God is to be.
That’s why you and I, when we say the Apostles Creed, we say, “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead,” quick being the living. When a woman is pregnant the first movement she feels in the womb is called the “quickening.” To judge the quick – the alive – and the dead, he shall come. It’s not that God sits in heaven and judges us, it’s that Christ shall come to judge us, to bring justice to the world, to make things right. That’s why we say, if you come on Thursday and take Holy Communion, in the liturgy we say “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” that there will be a day when Christ comes and makes things right.
That’s why we say – and often this part is misinterpreted – we say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” So in the Christian faith in a sense we have a two-part promise. The first part is that when we die we are with God. In some way we don’t quite understand? That our spirits are with God. That’s why Jesus says to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
But the second part of that is that there will be a day in which there is a general resurrection of the dead, and at that time “the trumpet shall sound…” The book of Revelation says it this way, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth coming down from heaven.” It isn’t just that. And at the time of the general resurrection we are raised and given a new body. I don’t want my old one. I don’t want the one that when I get up in the morning takes little short steps. I want that new body. The Scripture says that we don’t know exactly what kind of body it will be. God gives a body that he has chosen is what the Scripture tells us in I Corinthians 15. But there’s that time when the world is restored, recreated and the Scripture says that we get to be a part of that in the flesh. It’s a physical thing.
The purpose of God in Christianity is not simply to get souls to heaven; the purpose of Christianity is to get heaven to earth. You just said it a moment ago when you prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is on heaven. Come, kingdom!” It’s here. It’s not just up there someday, it’s here.
Now that’s the promise that’s before us. That God will one day make things right. Now we don’t know exactly how that shall happen. There’s a great Christian song by Mercy Me called “I Can Only Imagine.” It’s just a beautiful song. It’s about heaven. I can’t really imagine what it’s going to be like. There will be many who will want to tell us exactly how it’s going to happen, who want to use the Bible to interpret signs though Jesus makes it clear. Don’t bother. You won’t know. You can only imagine.
I have a stack of books in my study that I like to look at sometimes. They are all about how Christ shall come again and exactly when and what it’s going to be like. My favorite one is One Hundred and One Reasons Christ Will Come in 1988. I have had it for a while. I did get it and read it – in 1987 just so I’d be ready. But some of you have The Late Great Planet Earth, or you read the Left Behind series and those are fiction. They’re designed to help us imagine something, that we don’t know exactly what it will be like.
Pretend that you’re a small child and that your parents come to you and say, “We’re moving to a new place. And it’s going to be great; it’s going to be awesome.” And you say, “What’s it going to be like?” And they give you little snippets. The truth is that they don’t give you all of it, because they know you can’t understand it all. So you imagine, you think. You take what they have said, and you build things around it in your mind. And even in the midst of your anxiety about what is to come, there is this sort of sense of peace because you trust your parents. You know that it will be okay.
What God says to us is, “I’m going to make this right.” We don’t know exactly how that’s going to come to pass. But God’s going to make it right.
Leah King was a deacon who used to be on our staff and she liked to quote Julian of Norwich who was a 15^th century mystic. Her most famous quote was, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Beautiful poetry, it’s just a simple statement that says, “Look, it’s okay, God will come and make it right.” Not that everything that happens is somehow God’s will, but that someday it shall be well. God will make it right.
Now what does that mean for us, for how we live? We live in the here and now. What’s going to happen someday, probably after you and I die? How does that impact how we live right now? That’s what matters.
I would tell you if you like to think of terms of now and then, our then shapes our now. What we believe about the future has a huge impact on how we live our lives right how. Like if you believe that – you know what – you live then you die, and that’s it, then you can do whatever you want. You claim whatever joy you can, you claim whatever happiness you can, you’ll do things for the people you love. You’ll do things that make you feel that you’re doing what’s right. Then you die and you think, “That was a good life. Maybe.”
If you believe that you live your life here, and then when you die your soul goes to heaven, you’ll live your life in a little different way. You’ll live your life knowing of God’s love and knowing that this is all there is. You won’t fear death because you know you’ll be with God in heaven. And you’ll do everything you can living now to experience that grace that God gives you.
But if you believe that you live your life now, that when you die your spirit is in heaven, and that one day God will finish the work that you were a part of when you were here, then you live a very different kind of life. Now you make your time here being a builder for the kingdom, because you know that God is going to finish the work that you have begun or that God began in you. So that’s why Paul says in I Corinthians 15 when he’s talking about the general resurrection and he finishes it by saying, “Be steadfast, immovable, knowing that your work is not in vain.” The things that you do will be a part of what God will finish. The chaff will be burned away, and the wheat will be left.
David Horton, who preaches at our Gethsemane Campus were talking about this this week and he gave me a wonderful phrase. I promised him I’d give him credit. He said, “We as Christians live with a defiant hope. We can look at the world around us and say, ‘You know, it doesn’t look like the Messianic age to me.’ But we live believing that one day God will fix it, and that God will make it right, and that God’s not done yet.”
Tim Keller gave me some great illustrations when I was listening to his sermon on this. He said, “Imagine that two men are put in a dungeon for ten years. And one man is told, ‘Your wife and child love you and are waiting for you when you get out.’ The other man is told, ‘Your wife and child are dead.’ Do you think it will make a difference in how they experience the dungeon for ten years? Of course. The man who thinks he’s got nothing ahead will waste away. But the man who believes that someday he will see his wife and child, he lives an entirely different life.”
Here’s another picture, a little sillier, superficial one. Let’s say that I put you in a room, and say, “You’re going to work for one whole year, 12 hours a day, and you’re going to put widgets on wadgets. Every day you’re going to work for 12 hours a day putting widgets on wadgets. And at the end of the year I’m going to pay you $10,000.” You say, “That’s not enough. That’s not worth me putting widgets on wadgets for 12 hours a day.” So you’re going to work like this (slowly).
But if tell you that for a whole year I’m going to pay you $10 million, does it change how you work? Now you’re working must faster. You’re whistling and singing, and you’re putting widgets on wadgets, and you’re saying to people around you, “Isn’t this awesome? It’s so great to put widgets on wadgets!” That’s because you have a different picture.
See it’s so important to understand that we’re on a road. We’ve been talking about roads today. We’re on a journey somewhere. And if you don’t have any sense, if you think this isn’t a road, it’s just like a treadmill, that’s no good at all. But if you do believe that this road we’re on is heading somewhere, you walk in a very different way.
Howard Thurman was a great African-American theologian. He was the first African-American to give the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard in 1947. He chose as his topic the Negro spiritual. There was a great deal of attack on Negro spirituals at that time, because critics said they were so “other- worldly.” The spirituals were focused on “Getting that long white robe!” and that there was no sense in that you’re going to stand up for yourself. People said that they kept the slaves docile and submissive.
Thurman responded to that, and I loved when he said. “The facts have made it clear that this sung faith served to deepen their capacity for endurance and their ability to absorb their suffering and taught a people how to ride high in life, how to look squarely in the face of those facts which argue most dramatically against all hope, and to use those very facts as raw material from which they fashioned a hope that their environment with all its cruelty could not crush. This enabled them to reject annihilation and to affirm a terrible right to live.”
Friends, we don’t experience that kind of suffering, but we all have our challenges. And the roads we walk are sometimes difficult. And we can look around us and say, “You know, I don’t see the Messianic age around me at all.” We could say that. But we are a people who live a defiant hope. We believe that Scripture tells us that Jesus began a kingdom that will one day be completed. And that that which is broken will be fixed, that which is wrong will be made right.
“Do not be afraid, Daughter of Zion. Look! Your King is coming!” It is the kingdom that was inaugurated on Christmas morning, that was accomplished on Good Friday that was guaranteed and assured to you and me on Easter just before dawn, and one day will finally, finally be fulfilled. “Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion. Look! Your King is coming”
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we ask that you would show us how to live as a people with a defiant hope, who continue to work and be about the business of building your kingdom, being a builder for your kingdom, and knowing that one day you’ll come and finish that work, so our labor will not be in vain. We pray all this in the name of Christ, our Lord. Amen.