Pepperdine Bible Lectures 2016 - N.T. Wright (Part 1)

thanks so much Mike and if this is a class I'm not sure I've ever addressed a class of this size before but there we are it's very good to be with you throughout this week and enjoying so many things I I wish people in my tradition would just sing spontaneously like that I mean a lot of people in my tradition do know quite a few hymns but they normally require somebody to be playing something to give them a sort of sense of and but once you once you lose your inhibitions and discover that you can do for part a cappella then why not because it's terrific it has a good a good resonance to it yeah absolutely my only problem is that I'm always inclined to sing along a bit too loudly and then my singing voice is not the same as my speaking voice and as you heard last night I get a little frog in my throat so I'm just going to tank up with some water here and what I want to do today is is to take you back to an early Christian reading of the Old Testament in other words when the early Christians talked about the Messiah dying for our sins in accordance with the scriptures how were they reading the scriptures what was going on how did that play out for them and that will work back from first Corinthians 15 where that summary of the gospel comes and then work forwards to the Last Supper where Jesus himself is doing things which say this is happening in accordance with the scriptures so that's what we're going I'm going to take a drink of water then we're going to pause and pray and then I'll launch in okay let's just be still and braved gracious father there are many places in the world where if a bunch of Christians got together and started reading the Bible they might be persecuted or handed or vilified and we are amazingly privileged that we can sit here this afternoon and think about your word without being frightened of what people may think of us we pray that we'll use this privilege to your glory and that you will help us to get deeper and deeper into what scripture teaches about the way that you from the beginning planned and purposed to redeem humans and the world so that we can celebrate more appropriately and live from that Redemption we pray in Jesus name Amen there's a puzzle when we go to the Last Supper and say what's going on there and of course it's difficult for those of us who have a liturgical tradition because we know the story because we say it week by week sometimes day by day at the Eucharist but when we just read the Last Supper story the first thing that strikes us of course is that it is to do with Passover there's a debate as to whether it is actually a Passover meal or a sort of Passover meal I think Jesus intends it to be seen as a kind of Passover meal but of course a Passover meal with a difference but when Jesus says this is my blood of the Covenant show the New Covenant shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins or the remission of sins this is not a Passover theme I had a graduate student two three years ago finished now he's Japanese student very bright he's back in Japan and he came to me with this question which I'd never quite faced up like that before and this is one of the great things about having PhD students they rub your nose in the issues you'd quietly avoided and he said he said he said professor right Passover is not a festival about forgiveness it's a festival about liberation it's how the slaves get free nothing to do with forgiveness there's nothing in the exodus story which says that the reason Israel was enslaved in Egypt was because they had sinned they were there because Joseph had gone down to Egypt ahead of them there was a famine and they ended up there and there they were and then they were enslaved and so when God rescued them that wasn't a forgiving act so why does it get joined up with forgiveness and you can trace this through in the New Testament the New Testament talks about Jesus death sometimes in terms of Passover sometimes in terms of the sin offering these are not the same thing and I think we in the Christian tradition have often just collapsed all sacrificial reference into some sort of miscellaneous sacrificial meaning which we hope is universal and we can be Passover it can be Day of Atonement it can be this it can be that dangerous to do that because first century Jews probably knew the meaning of these feasts and fasts a lot better than we do how does that work how do they go together and this is increased the the puzzle of this is increased the more I think we know about sacrifices and what they meant in the first century and I grew up in a world which I suspect most of us did where the idea of sacrifice was quite simple the worshiper laid his or her hands on the animal confessed their sins then the animal was killed and that meant that their punishment for sin was taken by the animal problem is that's precisely what doesn't happen the one animal that has sins confessed over it is the goat that is then driven out into the wilderness on the day of atonement precisely because since its bearing the sins of the people it's now unclean and would be unfit to be offered as a sacrifice and people have been writing about sacrifice in recent years and thinking of Jacob Milgram's commentary on Leviticus which is quite famous now and have been saying that isn't what sacrifices were meant to do and until we stand back from our late Western interpretations when you know I'd suspect that nobody in this room here has ever actually killed a sheep or a goat or an ox or anything I hope you know maybe you have it tell me after is what a confessor but I doubt if you've ever done so as a religious act intending something to happen as a results or something to be expressed coram Deo in the presence of God as a result and so we are out of touch with how that would work and what that would mean and somehow we have to we have to stand back I'm not an expert on the letter to the Hebrews one of my colleagues in st. Andrews is a lifetime Hebrews expert and he tells me yet it is more complicated than we've made it in the past so I'm not gonna go to the Hebrews and say there is a puzzle there and it's not reg is 'le solved in the old ways there's different sacrifices have different purposes and Thanksgiving offerings guilt offerings sin offerings they're all doing different things and the slaughter of the passover lambs is not a sacrifice in the same way you take it home and you eat it and you commemorate them you commemorate the exodus and they don't kill the animals on the altar either and they kill them somewhere else and then it's the blood that gets poured onto the altar whereas in pagan sacrifices you would normally kill the animal on the altar significant difference and not all the sacrifices are animal sacrifices anyway some are grain offerings and things like that and as I say on the day of atonement you have the two goats and the sin offering is killed and the goat over whom you confess the sins is not it's driven off into the wilderness I'm simply problematizing the whole thing and I I'm not an expert on this I merely observed that these are puzzles which most of us in the Western tradition have not even really begun to address and I suspect that we haven't begun to address them because we have put the whole thing into the wrong narrative the narrative that I refer to loosely as the works contract I know that some reformed theologians use the phrase which comes from the Westminster Confession the Covenant of works that means different things to different people but I think that many many Christians in the Protestants and evangelicals editions including traditions I come from have basically thought of a biblical theology in terms of God creating us giving us a high moral bar and saying that sort of want you to jump over if you're going to be my friend for now and forever and then we all of course fail and so God says that's too bad I'm gonna have to kill you and then actually Jesus comes along and he's good at jumping high bars so he does it and he dies for us takes up so so now that's all right I don't a caricature but I've been around churches a long time and I think this is what a great many people basically here whatever it is the preacher actually says I'm in a more nuanced fashion and I want to say this really isn't how certainly not how the early Christians understood the Old Testament it's the wrong story so what is the right story and the other thing which has nudged me into asking these questions in new ways is since I wrote surprised by hope which was what well I was working on that stuff ten or a dozen years ago I think it came out in 2008 and trying to reconsider collage of the end game instead of saved human beings going up from earth to heaven emphasizing with the whole New Testament that the point is thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven and the last scene of the Bible as you know is not saved souls going up to heaven in Revelation 21 and 22 it is the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth so that finally heaven and earth are one that's the aim but if you say that that's the goal then as I was hinting last night maybe the means to the goal shifts subtly as well and that's what I'm in trying to explore so when in first Corinthians 15 Paul says this is our tradition as you know the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures I have Bibles with cross references and the cross references tend at that point to say Isaiah 53 Daniel 7 Psalm 22 two or three other paths it may be may be Genesis 22 if you're lucky and as though that's what according to the Scriptures means that there are half a dozen proof texts and maybe some more if you got your spectacles on the right way and that because of that are that's what it means I will say no cat at us graph us in accordance with the scriptures means that the entire scriptural narrow of the purposes of the creator and covenant God have come rushing together like many streams converging with a great wave and a splash and something has now happened in which that entire narrative finds its fulfillment because the Bible the Old Testament is not a sort of spiritual version of Aesop's fables where you tell a story about Abraham or Moses or Joshua and you have a little moral at the end it just doesn't work like that and actually there's a lot of puzzles that come when people treat it like that and then they discover some truly dreadful things going on in the Bible that yeah we had a children's Bible for my kids when they were young and amazingly in a children's Bible they included the story of Jephthah's daughter and you know when you read this to your of five and three-year-old I remember doing that and I used to turn to page daddy why have you turned over that page what what because that merely draws attention to it but um and actually the New Testament as well I remember one time when I was Bishop of Durham and speaking in a church while my son and daughter-in-law and their little boy Joseph who was then about four attended the church and we had the story of the the the the the vineyard owner who then sends servants and finally the son to get the fruit and the tenants of course throw them out and they kill the son as a shocking story and in church were used to this story so we somebody reads this story as that as the reading in the in the scripture and there's a short pause after the reading and in this church in the middle of the quiet a voice comes from my four-year-old grandson that's not a very nice story I said you're absolutely right Joseph this is not a very nice story what's it doing in the Bible the Bible is not a book of nice stories the Bible is this wonderful but very dark book of how the Living God loved the world so much that he wanted to come and rescue it and so came into its story and the Bible is a single great story and we have to read it as such and when it says bad things yeah actually we know this world this is our world thank God that God comes into that world anyway so how did they read it I was think this saying this to somebody just just now before one of the books that's really helped me in the last ten years is John Walton who teaches at Wheaton College on Genesis the lost world of Genesis 1 and he's written wanted to have the lost world of books as well John is a brilliant ancient near-eastern scholar and a fine Christian teacher and he has taught many of us to see that as you read Genesis 1 and 2 you should see the creation of heaven and earth as the creation of a temple a temple is a place where heaven and earth come together where the gods and the humans get together in the pagan world and in Israel's world where the One God meets with his people strangely dangerously and the heaven earth creation is the creation of a temple with humans as the image within the temple functioning as images should to gather up the praises of the worshippers and to communicate the presence of the deity to those around as many other things going on in Genesis 1 and 2 but that has really helped me because again and again the New Testament looks back to Genesis 1 and 2 and says that we are now the people of new creation but it's new creation it's a heaven and earth world with humans as image bearers and the point is not that in Genesis God creates humans and says now here is this high moral bar I want you to jump over he says I want you to be fruitful and multiply and be my image bearers in the world look after my world for me name the animals get do the stuff this is the same vocation that comes through in Romans five when Paul says those who receive the gift of righteousness will reign by the new Suisun it's a royal word in Romans 5:17 or in Revelation five when the the heavenly choir sing you redeemed people said that they could be kings and priests that comes in Revelation one and five and twenty as well this is this is the human vocation and it's not about are we behaving well or not of course if you're going to be the royal priesthood then you jolly well better get your life together and if it isn't together the you know something needs somebody who rescue you that's right but he rescues you not simply so that you can be God's friends hopefully you will be you'll be reconciled but so that you will be genuine human beings how toward looking bringing God's love and life into the world I see all that in Genesis 1 and 2 and then the problem of Genesis 3 as Bonhoeffer said putting the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God it's a remarkable thing and it's idolatry it's listening to the voice of the serpent I think when Paul sums up the human plight in Romans 1 I think he's channeling Genesis 3 at that point they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator they turned their minds away and they went with what the world was saying to them rather than with what God was saying to them humans were supposed to be reflecting God into the world and if they reflected the world back to God that was to be in praise of the Creator not in challenging his decrees and his purposes but then the way that the early church read Genesis is the way that many many Jews then and subsequently read and read Genesis namely that in Genesis 12 God calls Abraham to sort out the mess of Adam and the parallel between Abraham and Adam is quite remarkable that God said Adam be fruitful and multiply says to Abraham I will make you exceedingly fruitful and multiply you exceedingly and he says to Adam you must if you will start this family and you will look after the garden he says to Abraham I will give you a family and I will give you a guard a land it's fascinating isn't it that when God wants to fulfill that Adamic purpose of being fruitful and looking after the land he chooses a childless nomad in order to make it quite clear that this is not simply a will we'll have another go this is a pure gift this is pure grace all the way through the family and the land and that's what it's about Genesis 15 where the covenant is made when Abraham believes the promise that God will give him a multitudinous family like the stars of heaven that's what the promise is all about not Abraham if you believe you if you behave yourself or believe then you'll go to heaven is that my phone or yours oh it's your phone that's right there's always somebody that's alright and preachers among you will know that sooner or later a phone is going to go off might just be a message from God that's good Genesis 15 is again about the family and the land the family and the land and in Genesis 15 Abraham is promised that his family will become slaves in a land lock there's and that they'll be rescued and brought home so that already from Genesis 15 we see the Exodus in view so that when we then get Passover and Exodus we know that this is as the text says the fulfillment of the Covenant and again I say the Passover is not about the forgiveness of sins it's about the people being given the land and like Abraham knowing that this is a gift of grace because they've had to be rescued in order to get there have you ever been in that situation I bet you have as a family in a church whatever where you really believe that God has got something for you to do or something you need to develop into whatever and there seems to be a major brick wall in between you and that and you try and you can't do anything and eventually you do you should have done to begin with which is you pray and you get friends and you pray about it you pray about it again and then suddenly something unexpected happens which means that the blockage is removed and then you know praise God that this is what he wanted you to do because you've prayed about it and been given it as a gift I I found that experience a few times and I know many others who have it's as though we have to get I think that's what's happening with the Exodus the people can't just inherit the land as though they could just march in and and take or take it on without bothering it has to be the divine gift but then with the Passover what God says to Moses and Moses says to Pharaoh is that what we have to do is to go and worship God in the desert and for years I used to read that and I thought yeah yeah they just want to get out of there and get off - to the promised land and this is just an excuse where we need to go and pray and it's got to be I don't think so because the climax of the book of Exodus is the creation of the tabernacle it's not the giving of a Torah Torah matters but the whole book is driving towards the setting up of the Tabernacle in the wilderness so Exodus Redemption from slavery the plagues the crossing of the Red Sea see all of this is important for the New Testament the whole story it's not just bits and pieces the way it comes through is that at the end of Exodus they create the Tabernacle in the wilderness and there is a sense of closure from Genesis one two and three to Exodus 40 because the tabernacle is a micro cosmos a little world it's designed to be a representation of creation it is where heaven and earth come together and at the place in the middle of that there isn't an image of course it's an an iconic thing but actually Aaron the high priest takes the role of Adam and Eve in the original creation there's a sense already Genesis and Exodus that they sit together and they make sense and the sense that they make which is so important for understanding the New Testament is that God is determined to bring heaven and earth together with humans at the middle of that picture and God is determined that he will come and dwell with his people but if the tabernacle is the micro cosmos the little world that means it's an eschatological sign it's pointing forwards to God's intention to fill the hole earth with his glory cutting a long story very short think of the end of Psalm 72 think of Isaiah 11 think of Habakkuk 2 the earth will be full of the glory of the Lord of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea I've said it a thousand times how do the waters cover the sea the waters are the sea go and inspect them if you damage just outside the window here imagine the earth being full of God's knowledge and glory like that and so the temple where the presence of God comes to dwell is the sign of what God is going to do for the whole creation actually you don't need to go much further than that you can do most of New Testament theology right out of that God rescues his people so that his promise to Abraham can be fulfilled because the promise was not just for one strip of turf in the Middle East read Psalm 2 read Psalm 72 I will give you the nation's as your inheritance the uttermost parts of the world is your possession the promises to David and to Great David's greater son turn the original promise to Abraham into what they were always it what it always was designed to be which is a promise about God's claim on the entire creation and there is a line all the way from there to Romans 8 to John 20 to Revelation 21 and 22 and so the rest of the Pentateuch I mean that the key thing I think about the rest of the Pentateuch and the way the early Christians read it is the way the early Jews read Deuteronomy 27 to 30 and then 30 to 27 to 30 is a long-range prediction of how the Covenant is going to work out and there's good news and then there's bad news and then there's good news again the good news is if you obey if you do what's supposed to be done you will be fruitful you will multiply you'll have a great time in the land but if you rebel and if you commit idolatry then you'll find that the curses will come upon you and the greatest of the curses is of course exile because you're exiled from the promised land that's how it works it's a sign and imagine somebody editing the pentateuch during the exile in Babylon you see how it works Israel is acting out on a grand scale the smaller truck drama of Genesis 3 they disobey they get kicked out it seems to me this is endemic in the way the Jews are reading the text I think it's exactly how the early Christians read the text - so that then the question is what's going to happen next you tirana me 30 says that then when you turn to the Lord with all your heart and soul he will renew you and restore you exactly the passage Paul picks up in Romans 10 and then Deuteronomy 32 the great song of Moses looking ahead you are the chosen people of God you have been rescued God has made the covenant with you but I know that you're still hard-hearted and stiff necked and here is the puzzle of the Old Testament it's not just a bunch of people back then some of whom believed in some of whom didn't it's this this is the family who have been given the promise of God through which the world is to be redeemed the promise through which the time will come when the whole creation will resonate with the presence and glory of God but this family also carries the problem it's there from Abraham onwards and so again long story very short the Exile is what then happens that through the period of the monarchy things go from bad to worse glorious moment with David and Solomon there that - shot through with really bad problems as you know but it gets to the point of Exile and then the Exile produces some of the greatest writing that the world has ever seen passages like Isaiah 42 55 and the amazing book of Ezekiel and it colors so many of the Psalms the way they're then then edited and sung and so on and that the whole point of this is that the Exile was seen and many of you will know this from my work in the work of many others the Exile was seen as an ongoing thing okay they came back some of them came back not all but some of them came back rebuilt the temple but from Daniel 9 we see the perception that so many of them had that exile was continuing yeah we're back in our own land say Ezra and Nehemiah but were slaves because other people are ruling over us the Persians the Greeks the Syrians the Egyptians and finally by Jesus day the Romans and as long as that is going on God is not being king in the way that he wanted and those great promises of Isaiah 52 and 53 52 your Watchmen lift up their voices and shout for joy because in plain sight they see Yahweh returning to Zion lots of wonderful promises they know that that hasn't happened yet Malachi written after the exile the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple it's not happened yet they're straining for word they're in an in-between time and this is the point at which those great prophets say yes you went into exile because of your sins of course if you're slaves in exile whether internal exile or external or whatever you need a new Passover but this Passover will also be the forgiveness of sins you see in that context and only in that context Passover day of atonement can come together you can hold them together and I see the Jews of that period straining of this that they know they need a new Passover that's why Passover remains the great freedom festival but they also need the forgiveness of sins it's there in lamentations is there in Jeremiah it's there in Ezekiel sins caused exile there for forgiveness of sins equals end of Exile not just that in some sociological sense leaving the personal sin and personal forgiveness out of the question of course not this is not an either-or let's not get hung up on that and so Isaiah Daniel together these books point to the hope that one day God would do the new thing God would do the great new Passover and this would also be the redemption for dealing with sins and somehow somehow I find myself using the word somehow quite a lot it seems a good theological word somehow it means something's going on here we probably don't have good language for it yet and that's actually it's not a bad place for a theologian to be we have to be pressing and probing and trying to find out but somehow the way this is gonna happen will involve suffering and that's a strange thing which goes back at least as far as Hosea but actually goes back to the memory of the act of the of the slavery in Egypt and then the exodus that it's when Israel was suffering and crying to God that then God acted and this sense of going through the pain and then having the Passover that gets repeated as an increasing pattern and some people have written about this Albert Schweitzer did this a century and more ago using the phrase the messianic woes which is an odd phrase which means that at the time of the Messiah there will be a time of intense suffering and it's through that suffering that the deliverance will come not all Jews saw this in the same way in fact it's impossible to generalize out of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus and Philo and all the books of that time but it's a strand that comes through again and again that somehow Israel will suffer there are the stories of the martyrs at the time of the Maccabees and the martyrs say things like we are suffering now but God is going to use our suffering somehow as a means of redeeming his people second Maccabees 7 the martyrs that are being torn apart and fried in a pan in horrible horrible scenes and then second Maccabees 8 once that's happened then judas maccabees starts winning victories and the temple is cleansed isn't that interesting it's as though they have this perception at the time that it's not just that suffering is something through which you will pass to the redemption but somehow suffering is something because of which you will pass to the redemption and they don't formulate this exactly and nor do they read Isaiah 53 in the sense of a coming Messiah who will suffer some Jews of the period read Isaiah 53 in terms of the martyrs suffering but not a messiah and others read it in terms of a messiah who will come but they alter the text this is in some of the rabbi's so that it is said that the Messiah isn't the one who's suffering they they read it in the light of Psalm 110 and so on where the Messiah inflicts suffering on the enemies of God which is a fairly radical rereading of Isaiah 53 but it's as though they have to hang on to texts which say that God will deliver his people but there will be a time of intense suffering and somehow somehow again there we are this is how it's going to come and so the hope is for the kingdom of God Isaiah 52 again how lovely on the mountains are the ones who bring the published salvation who shout to Zion your God reigns Malachi Logica your God reigns and what does that mean it means Babylon has been overthrown that can only be because your God has decided ok it's time to sort this out we're going to get on with the job and get these stupid pagans out of the way and it's because you are now going home and because Yahweh is coming back to Zion coming back as king coming back to reign in glory over the whole world and as you chased that through after the fourth servant song in Isaiah 53 the promise of new covenant in 54 which leads to new creation in 55 one of my favorite parts of the whole Bible though that phrase could apply to quite a few passages in addition I guess but the whole point of this is that God coming back to be king summarizes all of that everything I've said about Passover about return from exile about forgiveness of sins about the earth being full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea because when yahweh comes back to the temple this too will be a sign that actually his purposes are for the whole creation the tabernacle and the temple are not a little holy place away from the rest of the world so that we can be holy and enjoy god's presence while everyone else just doesn't know about it it's a sign it's pointing forwards and that's how Jesus takes it my house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations and so when we look at the last days of Jesus and we see Jesus talking about the Scriptures that had to be fulfilled and when we see him then on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection explaining at length to the disciples that the Messiah had to suffer these things and enter into his glory because beginning with Moses and all the prophets this is how you are to read scripture this is not just dotting around and saying there's a verse in Genesis 3 which says this and there's one in Isaiah 53 which says that this is the entire scriptural narrative coming rushing together and at the Last Supper Jesus does and says things which are basically Passover like but instead of pointing back to the Exodus he is pointing on immediately to what is about to happen and he construes that in the light of Jeremiah 31 the New Covenant which of course is about the forgiveness of sins but it's the forgiveness of sins not as oh god that's alright because now I can go to heaven no it's the forgiveness of sins as the great story of Israel which has got stuck in Babylon like the story of the human race got stuck at the Tower of Babel until God called Abraham in the next chapter the great story of the human race and of its royal priestly vocation to be God's image bearers so that the earth would be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea this project can now get underway once more at last that's why the Gentile mission happens when it does and in the way it does this is so much larger my friends then that old thing of we got it wrong God punished Jesus that's all right then I'm not saying that's totally wrong because as I said last night there is a doctrine of penal substitution in the New Testament but it's framed within this a biblical narrative which is not about getting rid of earth so that we can go to heaven but about the tabernacle the temple and then Jesus and the spirit being the means by which the earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea this is all there in the Gospels the New Covenant the renewal of the Covenant so that then when Jesus takes his disciples to the Upper Room as I said last night but let me emphasize it when Jesus wanted to explain to them what his forthcoming death was gonna mean he didn't give them a theory he gave them a meal that is so important it's something you do because what matters is not simply what you hold in your head as you may detect I'm rather keen on what we hold in our head and getting that all sorted out but it's about real life real bodies real food real land the real world God's world about creation and about the fact that in Jesus God is doing the great Passover the great atonement the great forgiveness of sins and so when Jesus sits there with his disciples we are to read that it seems to me in terms of new Passover as I said last night new Torah a new commandment I give you that you should love one another as I have loved you and the new tabernacle that the story of Exodus climaxing with Exodus 40 when the divine glorious presence comes and lives in the temple we are to look at this scene and say this is how the divine glorious presence came back in fulfillment of the promise that was made in Isaiah 52 and many other places as well and so when we fill in that picture just a little bit for instance in Luke 19 Jesus comes to Jerusalem and he tells a story about a king or a master who's gone away left his servant stuff to do and then comes back again and the churches routinely read that in terms of Jesus saying to his followers I'm going away and then one day I'll be coming back and I'll see how you've coped with what I'm telling you to do it's not what it's about at all what Luke 19 is about as it goes on to say is that this is the moment when Israel's God returns to Zion nobody quite knew what it would look like I mean in the wilderness it was a pillar of cloud and fire very mysterious very strange very scary in the beginning of Ezekiel it was those whirling wheels flashing about with with angelic creatures darting this way and that what would it look like when the divine glory came back the whole New Testament is written from the perspective that what it would look like is a young Jewish prophet whom some believed to be Messiah riding into Jerusalem in tears on a donkey announcing destruction for those who persisted in their rebellion celebrating a strange new Passover with his friends speaking about forgiveness of sins a new covenant and then going out to die as if he was a brigand to die the death of the unrighteous so that God's new creation could happen that's what it looked like when the glory came back that is of course the message of John as I was saying last night we beheld his glory when did you behold his glory well the way John has written his gospel is all the signs leading up to the crucifixion narrative itself this is the presence of Israel's God in person this is what it looks like when Yahweh comes back and so in the light of that what I'm suggesting to you this week is that we should read the New Testament saying this whole story of ancient Israel which I mean you know what could have an entire course of lectures on that and I've done it rather breathlessly in half an hour this entire story is necessary because it's drawn on at point after point and only when you see that do you prevent atonement from collapsing into I've been very bad God punished Jesus therefore I go to heaven heaven is not the point I've said it often enough probably here before I'm not sure heaven is important but it's not the end of the world and you know that the the the new the new creation is about new heavens and new earth Ephesians 1 God's purpose was to sum up all things in the Messiah things in heaven and things on earth God's purpose is to bring his creation back to where he intended it to be from the beginning that of which the tabernacle and the temple were the advanced signs so that during Jesus ministry we see him doing and saying things which look as if he is implying that everything you would normally get through the temple or indeed the Torah you will now get through him he forgives sins out there on the street said it again often enough that's rather like somebody on the street stopping you and offering to issue you with a driver's license or a passport you should go to the government department to get that no here you are it's yours forgiveness of sins is something you get at the temple you'd go and you'd offer the sacrifice and your sins would be forgiven Jesus is offering that to Zacchaeus having lunch with him to the scandal of some to those tax collectors and sinners who are clustering around him at the beginning of Luke 15 why notice what happens in Luke 15 you know the prodigal son chapter Jesus is accused of eating with all the wrong people and his answer is there's a party going on in heaven and we should be sharing it it's a heaven and earth moment the angels are celebrating and so are we you see what the claim is this is what the new temple looks like and this is what it looks like when the image of God is there in the new temple it's no surprise that in Colossians 1 Paul says that he is the image of the invisible God those who had eyes to see looking back at Jesus strange public career could see that going on and that's why of course there was a celebration because it was about forgiveness it was about new life it was about new starts and ultimately it was then about resurrection this my son was dead and is alive again was law this your brother was dead and is alive again was lost and is now found the gospel is all there in Luke 15 and it's there because Jesus is coming to the place where the world is in pain where people are in shame where people are being named as sinners Jesus comes to where they are so that the party of heaven may be happening right there you see in the Gospels and I'll develop this more tomorrow and just gonna wind this up now and then point ahead to tomorrow in the Gospels the way that we've read the Gospels in the church and the way that scholars have read the Gospels it tends to fall apart you have all the stuff about the kingdom and we've often not been quite sure what to make of Jesus preaching the kingdom and then you have all the stuff about the cross and I've often said it when I was Bishop and going around my parishes in the diocese there were lots of those parishes which I thought of as basically Kingdom parishes these were people who had seen the stories of Jesus helping people healing people looking after people and bringing new hope to people who had no hope and these parishes are places where they say this is wonderful we're Kingdom people we're going to copy Jesus and we're gonna house the homeless and we're gonna feed the hungry we're gonna help people off drugs and do all this neat stuff but hang on what about the end of the story and you'd get me I don't think I ever heard anyone say this but the impression was what a pity who died so young you know surely his ministry had only just begun couldn't he have gone on done it what was the point of all that and such parishes would often react against sort of hot gospel parishes who would only talk about the cross and because they would only talk about how to get people to heaven these people would say no we're Kingdom people Jesus was doing all this stuff and we're gonna do it with him and those other parishes would say no that's that social gospel stuff we leave that to the politicians and the social workers because the real thing is where are you going to spend eternity so we'll focus on the cross because that helps us Matthew Mark Luke and John know of no such division as far as they're concerned the kingdom work is what comes to completion when the king of the Jews is dying on the cross Jesus himself says that the Last Supper I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until I drink it new with you in the kingdom in other words he thinks that what he is about to go and do will somehow complete the kingdom work that he's been launching during his public career and vice versa as he starts his kingdom work as I said last night almost immediately there are demons shrieking at him in the synagogue's there are Pharisees and Herodians plotting about him and against him the kingdom and the cross go together it's a major challenge for the church of our times to see how to preach atonement meaning by that God becoming King and how to preach the kingdom meaning by that the victory which Jesus won on the cross resulting in the forgiveness of sins what I'm trying to do this week with you is to hold together what should never have been separated because the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that's what we'll continue to explore tomorrow sorry we have to stop there but see some of you you

Channel: Pepperdine University

Views: 37,933

Keywords: Pepperdine, University, Christian, Malibu, California, Seaver, Graziadio, School, Business, Graduate, Education, Liberal, Arts, Law, bible lectures, pbl, pbl16, pbl2016, cruciformed, living, light, jesus, story, worship, church, n.t. wright, nt wright

Id: jV65zBa9xgg

Length: 44min 53sec (2693 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2016