Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
Acts 2 looks back to the origins of the Christian movement. Acts 3, by contrast, looks forward to the destination of human history. Contrasting the biblical and pagan views of time, Rob Yule shows how important the revelatory role of the Holy Spirit is for our knowledge of the future. The Holy Spirit inspires prophecy, and prophecy is essential if we are to understand the meaning and goal of history. Rob Yule preached this sermon, clarifying where we are in God’s prophetic programme, at Greyfriars’ morning service on 22 June 2003.
When we are young, with all of life before us, we are hope-filled and forward-looking. But when we get older we become nostalgic and begin to look in the rear-view mirror.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Jesus said the Holy Spirit would show us ‘what is yet to come’ (John 16:13). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of prophecy. The Holy Spirit helps us live life forwards — not just living on past memories, but oriented towards the future.
Acts chapter 2 describes how it all began — the beginnings of the Christian movement. Acts chapter 3 describes where it’s all going — the destination of world history.
Prophecy springs from the Bible’s emphasis on history.
Pagan religions are cyclical, and fatalistic. They centre on the wheel of fate, from birth to death, from inhalation to expiration, from generation to destruction. The pagan gods are simply projections of this fundamental law of nature. Shiva, the principal deity of Hinduism for example, is both creator and destroyer. How can your trust yourself to a god like that? There’s no comfort or hope in these religions. The best you can do is be reconciled to your fate. The pagan worldview is summed up in the words of Ecclesiastes: ‘Surely the fate of a human being is like that of an animal. . . . Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.’ (Ecclesiastes 3:19-20).
In contrast to the cyclical view, the biblical view of existence is linear and forward-looking. Time is not a circle, but an arrow. It moves from a beginning to an end, from creation to consummation, ‘from inception to infinity’. Our existence is historical. We’re always moving forward, towards a goal.
History is fundamentally progressive. The biblical worldview is optimistic in the true sense: the best is yet to be. This stimulates hope. It inspires creative endeavour and great achievements. The biblical worldview is summed up in Paul’s triumphant conclusion that ‘neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, not any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:38-39).
There are two corollaries to the biblical view of history:
Life involves change. You must leave the past behind and press forward. You can’t freeze time, put the clock back, dwell in the past, hold on to what is precious. Life is a journey, a pilgrimage, an adventure, a pressing on towards the mark of our high calling in Christ. Paul expresses this in his letter to the Philippians. ‘One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining on to what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus’ (Philippians 3:13-14).
So pathos, suffering, accompanies our life in time. It is painful to leave behind loved places, cherished friendships, precious experiences. It really hurts to leave them behind. Separation and suffering is bound up with the passage of time.
Prophecy is God’s revelation of both specific events and the general outcome of future history. Prophecy is God’s comfort and direction in the perplexities and pain of our life in time.
There’s a widespread notion that prophets are severe, abnormal, eccentric, unbalanced characters. In fact, as the Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel notes, the prophets are normal human beings, specially called of God to represent God’s ways to people. They have to endure the circumstances in which God’s people find themselves and the judgements which God sends on them. The prophets are people of compassion and tenderness, not of hatred and condemnation.
We see the prophetic attitude in Peter’s words. ‘And now, brothers and sisters, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders’ (3:17). Not harsh and condemning, but broken-hearted and tender. Would that this spirit had characterised Jewish-Christian relations down the centuries. For many Jews their only experience of Jesus Christ has been contempt not compassion, not a cross of mercy but a sword of persecution. Christianity has been guilty of coerced conversions and forced baptisms, crusades and pogroms.
Peter is following the prophetic attitude of Jesus, in his lament over Jerusalem. ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.’ (Matthew 23:37). The true prophetic attitude embraces the pathos already mentioned.
The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is part God’s programme for the restoration of his entire creation. A clear sequence of events is spoken of in the four ‘Rs’ of our English Bibles, leading ultimately to the return of Jesus:
Repentance — a turning from our wrongdoing to God.
Refreshing — a great season of renewal in the Holy Spirit.
Restoration — the restoring of God’s intended harmony for the whole creation.
Return — the return of Jesus to usher in his reign over all the earth.
After my baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1981 I preached about these four ‘Rs’ in Christchurch, New Zealand. I experienced an amazing confirmation on the other side of the world. In 1982 I attended the Feast of Tabernacles celebration in the Jerusalem Conference Centre. The first address, by Derek Prince, began with these very same four ‘Rs’ I had been preaching in New Zealand. I said to myself, ‘Either this is of God — or I’m wrong in good company!’
God’s end-time prophetic programme is for a specific time. It presents us with an urgent challenge and a compelling opportunity. Bob Dylan after his conversion sang of the ‘Slow Train Coming.’ This slow train is leading inexorably to the second coming of Jesus. Now is the time to get your ticket and get aboard. Don’t oppose the current move of the Holy Spirit. To resist the Holy Spirit is to cut yourself off from God’s restorative programme which will ultimately lead to Jesus’ coming again. Make sure you catch the train.
The move of the Holy Spirit gives us a prophetic perspective on God’s global purpose. God’s purpose involves two peoples: Jews as well as Gentiles. We Gentiles need the humility to remember that the message of salvation came originally to the Jewish people. Jesus was the ‘prophet like Moses’ whom God raised up among the Jewish people (3:22, cf. Deuteronomy 18:15, 18, 19). Their failure to hear him led to Israel being ‘cut off’ for a time and the inclusion of us Gentiles, who didn’t deserve such a privilege. So it is that through Abraham’s offspring all the peoples of the earth are being blessed (3:25, cf. Genesis 22:18, 26:4).
The great twelfth century Jewish scholar and philosopher Maimonides marvelled at this mysterious providence, recognising that the Gentile Christian church was the means that the God of Israel has used to spread the knowledge of himself to the entire world:
‘All these matters which refer to Jesus of Nazareth . . . only served to make the way free for the King Messiah and to prepare the whole world for the worship of God with a united heart. . . . In this way the messianic hope, the Torah, and the commandments have become a widespread heritage of faith — among the inhabitants of the far islands and among many nations, uncircumcised in heart and flesh.’ (quoted by Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective [London, SPCK, 1984], pp. 142-143).
We Gentiles shouldn’t become proud, thinking we are the source of our knowledge of God and of the Messiah. Paul tells us in Romans, the message was to the Jew first, then also to the Greek (Romans 1:16). The Jewish root supports the Gentile branches (Romans 11:18). As Edith Schaeffer used to say, ‘Christianity is Jewish.’
We Gentiles have a unique opportunity today to participate in God’s regathering of the Jewish people to their land, as a prelude to their return to their Lord. This in turn will lead to the return of Jesus. We mustn’t miss God’s time of opportunity to participate in what he is doing to prepare the world for Jesus’ return. Let us be doers of the prophetic word, not hearers only.
In the mid-eighties I was praying for world mission and revival with a group of pastors in Christchurch, New Zealand. The perennial question came up, ‘Why don’t we see the revival we have longed and prayed for? Why does revival tarry?’
While we were praying about this, I had a vision. I saw a large spoked cartwheel, with many people straining to turn it. Then I saw why the wheel would not turn, because it was rusted to the axle. I realised that God was showing me that revival among the Gentile nations is dependent on the conversion of the Jews. The wheel of revival in the Gentile nations cannot move until the hub of the Jewish people begins to turn freely around their Messiah Jesus.
‘Replacement theology’ is the term given to the widespread view that the Christian church has replaced Israel in God’s purposes. But the Bible teaches that the Jews have a continued place in God’s purposes. Paul foresees their ultimate conversion, an event which in turn will trigger a future worldwide revival so great that Paul likens it to a resurrection and calls it ‘life from the dead’ (Romans 11:26, 15).
As Robert Leighton, saintly Archbishop of Glasgow in the seventeenth century said, ‘They forget a main point of the Church’s glory, who pray not daily for the conversion of the Jews.’ (Quoted by Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope [Edinburgh, Banner of Truth Trust, 1971], p. 75.)
Rob Yule, 22 June 2003
© 2003, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
