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IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD

Revelation on uncomfortable in the world/not of the world teachings gathered impetus with Abraham and his immediate descendants. Since, this paradoxical assertion in a large way always bears directly on the troubling history of Christ’s Church, also now throughout the drawn-out ages of the Millennium, the ascended Lord Jesus’s one thousand-year reign. The provocative measures of this paradox—in the world/not of the world—marks all post-Abrahamic Scriptures with its currents of anguish in the covenant community everywhere, worldwide.

Obviously, this inescapable paradox constitutes more than a platitudinous obfuscation.

1–4

John 15:1–27 (18–19)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.

If you were of the world, the world would love its own;

but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,

therefore the world hates you.”

IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD

A LOVE-AND-HATE PARADOX

New generations in Christ, attentive to this paradox, start reflectively, caught by increasing awareness of living in the world, yet not being (a part) of this world. The Lord Jesus in clear language commanded that all his honor this uneasy process to the fullest. The disciples, however, seated at table after the Passover celebration, John 13:1–20, struggled with this quandary, searching out in quiet obedience its hidden distinctions and growing marvels of relevance.

After the solemn commemoration of this Passover, the Christ created the lengthy teaching moment recorded in four unwinding chapters throughout which he, sovereign, claimed undivided attention. By this liberating instruction on love and hate, he communicated the uncomfortable in the world/not of the world environment, contrasting thereby the sweeping commandment to the Twelve18 for loving one another to overcome the world’s animosity. To flex the beating heart of this paradox: Jesus called for love to oppose the malice of the world against him and his own. Thereby, throughout his ministry, he proceeded to instill agapic life within the Twelve as children of God, John 1:12, that is, to his own, the foundational members of the New Church and leading citizens of the Kingdom. In fact, by means of this paradox, he summoned the charter members of the ongoing Church out of a sorry existence to the covenant promise of life. Once more, then, the Lord and Savior pushed the covenant community and the world farther onto contrary trajectories. To the disciples at table with him he prohibited conformity, incremental and/or reckless assimilation, to the world, thereby to diminish pains of rejection imposed by anti-Christian authorities.

CHRIST HATE

To the unified instruction inscripturated as chapters 14–16, the Twelve listened intently; they sensed, without pretending to understand Jesus’s prophecies with respect to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, tremendous events and immediate dangers in the making. In these unknown regions of tension, they nevertheless applied themselves to this complex question, this seemingly contradictory divine injunction, which the Teacher claimed to be true. How could and should the gripping in the world/yet not of the world dividing-line sanctify them as the company of Christ followers? For approximately three years to gain apostolic formation, they walked about Canaan following the Messiah through the well-fed hates of Pharisees and Sadducees. Simultaneously, they were sharply aware of Roman contempt as well as Hellenist scorn for Jews. Yet, they had not made this paradoxical distinction. In that solemn hour after the Passover, however, they slowly absorbed with vexation of soul that they were not of the world. More specifically, the Twelve had crossed a line: Christ headed them as the first of the New Testament generation out of the world. This shared understanding that Jesus commissioned them the point men of the Recreation bonded that company for laborious apostolic work ahead.

The observable world Jesus identified consisted of three concentric circles, which the Teacher with prophetic instruction located as unsatisfiable acrimonies of hatred. The broadest, Hellenism, circumambient polytheistic religions and cultural forces ancient in wickedness, promised with many smiling faces a self-serving life—satisfaction, enjoyment, gratification, in short, a life pulsing with all sensual pleasures of hedonism. Hellenists had no love for the God destructive of all gods. Closer in and present everywhere, Caesarism, brute military might, frowning, on the prowl, far too prone with the cold forms of repression—occupation, tribute, and death threats. Rome’s governors had no love for an all-conquering king.19 Third, the worst, Judaism imposed the unprecedented dominance of the Oral Law. Fearsome with the wagging finger of excommunication—loneliness, hopelessness, worriedness—Judaism largely enacted arrogant powers of damnation. Together these three enemies Jesus called the world, in the Fourth Gospel the Jews the foremost. At that toxic stage in history, all Jews still constituted the Church—corrupt, treasonous, gathering momentum to kill the Lord and Savior.

For emphasis, of these open enemies the Jews exerted on Jesus and the Twelve the most censorious authority. They were the Church coming out of the Old Testament dispensation.

• Only, long before the Incarnation, they had replaced in worship the LORD God with a monotheistic deity.

• Only, they had over the intertestamentary centuries exchanged the Decalogue for the Oral Law.

• Only, they had unreasonably altered righteousness in the hope upon the Messiah for a pagan illusion of self-righteousness.

With a passion they resented the Lord Jesus for beginning the New Church in their hyper-competitive midst; therefore, he shunted them with finality off to the sidelines of history. Over some three years, Jewry’s jealousy and wrath burned hot and high—against their only Messiah.

Christ’s three chronologically immediate enemies—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism—envisioned variant kingdoms, each true to its own aspirations and ambitions. Seducing Hellenists longed for a rule culturally infiltrated with sensual pleasures. Ironclad Caesarists perceived a global power of military overmight submissive to the reigning Caesar. Outnumbered Jews dreamed of a kingdom of law starting at the time of the general resurrection of the dead, they in supreme control. Each outmoded enemy force fomented a rulership at war against the Lord Jesus and his Kingdom. Each eschatologically oriented competitor to the Christ saw the future in an eternally authoritative identity isolated from the Lord and Savior.

This world, according to the Fourth Gospel, enclosed a three-fold realm of suffocating evil, each a powerful evolution of power, which brooked no opposition from the Christ and his Kingdom. Throughout, then, in the tortuous calamities of that time Jesus testified in different ways to the world’s hatred, its detestation of, its abhorrence at his Person and work, and its reprobate refusal to believe him in the strength of the Spirit of truth. This detestation of and abhorrence at the Lord and Savior began within Jewry. John 1:10–11, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” Hence, he prophesied, John 14:19p, “Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more.” John 14:22, “Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” In answer, the Savior prophesied that the bad-tempered world’s enmity only increased with aging.

Therefore, with the first half of a general conditional, for instance, John 15:18a, “If the world hates you . . . ,” Jesus posited a vital part of a statement of fact—with a future emphasis. The Lord revealed this violence of resistance as a burden of existence for the Twelve, a continuous action always on the increase. In the Gospel according to John, the Apostle pointed to the gathering enmity to kill Jesus, which the Twelve witnessed from nearby. This ill intention spread wide. Earlier, John 9:22, yes, “. . . the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess [Jesus] to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.” This stain of excommunication with or without due process forced a person into inevitable and unenviable placesof alienation. Overall, before the Acts, the Jews unloaded little evidence that they hated any of the Twelve, except they accompanied Jesus. All Jewish abhorrence before the Crucifixion tightened about the Messiah. Later, in the Acts of the Apostles, snobbery of hatred agitated with willfully blind intervention—jailing, scourging, and death.

In this conditional, a general statement of fact, Jesus said, John 15:18b, “. . . know that [Jewry] has hated me before you.” This “before you” earmarked in point of time that the world hated Jesus before the Twelve. Second, this “before you” escalated in terms of priority an unimaginable deep hatred from out of the soul of the Old Church, which enmity the Apostle documented unapologetically from the Fourth Gospel’s beginning. That is, first, the Jews refused to acknowledge and bow before him as the Lord and Savior. John 3:11, “. . . you do not receive our testimony.” Not his. Not the Father’s. Rather, they persecuted Jesus with increasing vigor, plotting to kill him. John 7:1, 30, 32, 8:40, 44–45, 59, 10:31, 33, 39, 11:50, 57; etc. Jewish determination to do him in knew no restraint. From within the narrow perimeters of Judaism, they perceived nothing of the glorious vistas of the covenant life the Lord revealed.

This must be stressed: the world, all flesh, beginning with Jewry, hated Jesus before the Twelve, not only in point of time, but more intently, out of unintelligible conviction; the antithetical world of the Jews, as well as the Caesarian and the Hellenistic, tolerated absolutely no room for the Lord of the Church, Savior. Hence, out of a limiting principle, they detested him. For his origin as the Son of God was not from below, out of any old-line civilization, and his ruling as the Holy One did not derive out of any sphere of unbelief. In every way, all flesh perceived him an intrusive alien, unwelcome, a disturber of human plans for and dreams of world conquest. He himself was in the world, but not of the world, of any sphere created by unbelievers. For instance, to Judaists on the attack he declared, John 8:23, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.” Later, in the great prayer that is now John 17, he spoke to the Father with a pastoral eye on the disciples, vs 14, “I have given them thy word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” As accurate descriptor, Jesus tarnished these enemies forever.

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During this extensive teaching phase, the Lord Jesus prophesied that the Twelve too had better count on this hatred. Such was the groundbreaking education of disciples soon to be apostles. In this world of cascading pressures and hardening enmities they lived, always squeezing and seducing them to conform to cultural roots deep within reprobation.

WORLD LOVE

Jesus plainly and dominically informed the Twelve of the world’s eschatological negativity; in the ongoing historical process of the Church, they too faced forbidding pain. John 13:16, 15:20a, “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.” Under the teleological forces inherent in Christ’s rulership over heaven and earth, they also had to absorb man-eating persecution, a view of the future to soak into all depths of soul. In the meantime, however, still at table, Jesus drew the Twelve appropriately into his messianic pain.

Hatred of Christ, strangely, bonds unbelievers in a love, albeit a different sort, i.e., a set of inflamed connections solely determined by striking out against the Son of God. This worldly love, actually, a friendship borne out a common enmity, bonded first the Jews together—Pharisee and Sadducee—longtime unsavory enemies. For the Crucifixion a conjunction solidified between Jerusalem and Rome; in that reprehensible friendship, the Sadducees, representatives of Hellenistic civilization, brawled as fiercely as the Pharisees. Thus, the three hateful evolutions of power sought to eradicate the Christ from out of the midst of their worlds. Whether this or that religiosity—at the time of the writing of the Fourth Gospel: Hellenism, Caesarianism, and, worst, Judaism—the threesome underwent assimilation to oppose Jesus. At Jesus’s trial, the Sadducees, largely Hellenistic in culture, and the Pharisees, main formulators of Judaism, easily joined cavalier Caesarianism to murder the Lord Jesus, seeking thereby to do away with his coming Kingdom.

To brace the Twelve for worse to come, Jesus taught, John 15:19a, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own.” By this contrary-to-fact conditional, he declared the opposite: his disciples were not of the world. Hence, they too faced persecution. They were in the world, but . . . not of the world. Hence, they were his, the New Church in her beginnings.

Nevertheless, Jesus prophesied, allowing none to forget covetous Judas Iscariot, the temptation to be of the world, Hellenism, Caesarianism, Judaism, or an amalgamation of the three, glimmered and shimmered with sunny demeanors all around. Appeal made by each religiosity and all collectively impinged attractively upon these men; perhaps not so much as they listened to Jesus in this remarkable teaching session, but later, when they experienced its punitive values. Even while with Jesus, Judas had already fallen, engrossed in a burning temptation. The worlds of man through token friendship offered pleasant release from the hatred Jesus prophesied. What intrinsic value pains of shunning and persecution, if avoidable? However, the Satan, by manifesting himself through the various religiosities of the day, the one sensually appealing, the other powerfully fearsome, and the third comfortably familiar, promised a love, a friendship to the Twelve. Friendship to people suffering pains of rejection by offering a helping hand, imposing support, or confidential affection catches at the heart. In drawing to a common front against the Christ, the world loves its own and gladly makes room for any uncommitted followers of Jesus Christ.

All drawn into the religious hopes of Hellenism, Caesarianism, or Judaism understood and helped each other. However deep or shallow this friendship may have been, adherents sensed a rudimentary belonging together. Even so, more contemporary, Roman Catholics, whatever differences among themselves, know they belong together in Papalism. Similarly, Protestants, whatever tensions among them, know an abiding bond in Arminianism, or in Dispensationalism. Humanists, too, however they differ on specific issues, know they belong together in human rights movements. Islamics as well, wherever across the globe, immediately connect in Mohammedanism. For the same reason small-c conservatives draw together into common fellowship. In addition, small-l liberals find togetherness among themselves. Whatever the religiosity, ideologists sense deep down their own places of welcome.

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All unbelievers looking at and listening to Jesus confess from the heart, while balancing on the precipice of condemnation, that he is not of this world; therefore the hate. This hatred raises antagonism and breeds resentment. Because neither he nor his disciples were identifiable with any of the world’s currents, though unquestionably in the world, the Lord and Savior summoned this occasion to place his own on guard. Earlier, Matt 18:7, he had warned his own, “For it is necessary that temptations come . . .” to bond with one of the spiritualties of this earth. This he declared to test all of the Church.

CHRIST LOVE

Through the parable of the vine, the Lord, Gethsemane-bound, summoned his own to abide in him and bear fruit. Both activities, abiding in him and bearing fruit, made the living branches different from all who sought life in the world, which the Father cut off for burning in eternal fires. Therefore, the Lord and Savior commanded his own to bear much fruit, John 13:34, that is, love for one another, not in terms of secular friendships, but in the agapic way. Powerfully, then, he addressed the interactive foundation stones of the New Church with the deep rhythms of the love commandment. John 15:12–17,

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another.

With apostolic force John interposed the living source of the Twelve’s love, the Lord and Savior himself. John 13:1, “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” That love infused the disciples with accountability for one another, through which they demonstrated that they loved the Lord and Savior above all. In this faith-demonstrative love for the Lord and Savior as well as for one another, they kept the commandments. John 14:15–17, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” This the Lord reaffirmed. John 15:10, a general conditional, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” These commandments, of course, constitute the entirety of the Decalogue, which comprehends the boundless substance of love. All aspiring branches of the vine, which abide in Christ and bear abundant fruit, the Father prunes to make them bear more. By this pruning, the Father cuts away all submissions to religiosity. On the other hand, every branch susceptible to the excitable temptations of any current ideology, the Father cuts away and relegates to the eternal fires of damnation, forcibly expelled to the common inheritance for unbelievers.

To demonstrate this love? Christ Jesus placed his own first; beginning with the disciples as the foundation of the Church, he sacrificed his life for his own on the Cross, bearing the punishment for their guilt accrued by breaking the Commandments. The disciples demonstrated this love for the Christ by hearing and obeying him only. Thus, they, toiling out of sight, deployed the power of salvation within them. As well, beginning with the disciples, all living church members love one another. With primary care, unostentatiously, they place each other first in the witness to love the Lord Jesus above all and neighbors in Christ as themselves. The gracious strength of this love Jesus revealed in the sin-shattering prayer that is John 17, vs 12, “While I was with them, I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me; I have guarded them, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled.” Christ alone, by his power and authority as the Son of God/Son of Man, holds the Church together throughout the ages. Even though she is in the world, through dominically imparted love she is not of the world.

This love of Christ for his own, this love of his own for him, and this love of his own for one another in the Church antagonized the world—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism then. These restless and pernicious friendships proliferated from below, out of the world, subversive to the Christ and the Kingdom. Therefore, Jesus exhorted the men at table with him and still listening intently, to hold them in the strength of the Gospel, “This I command you, to love one another.” With that agape he instructed his own to answer the world’s hatred, in fact, to undermine and supplant every secular defining of love, i.e., the friendliness of religiosity that draws unbelievers ever deeper into sins of disobedience and concentrates unbelieving church members into colluding fellowships known for leaky conviviality. Falsifying powers of sin that draw members of the Church into the world is stronger than any one of the Church living apart from the Faith. The agapic patterns he created, the Lord taught, persisted beyond any sort of ideologically conditioned friendship.

To prevent triumphalism in the New Church and deflate airs of superiority among his own, Jesus recapitulated morally corrosive sequences of persecution coming. John 15:21, “. . . all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know him who sent me.” Such not knowing exceeded by far disobedience to the Commandments; it emphasized the fact that the Church then worshiped a strange god, a monotheistic deity in competition with Jesus Christ himself and his Father. Therefore any persecution that starts simply with shunning humbles, and humbles again. This future for the Church in the world the Head projected for his own.

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Not that all obscure gods of the world with unity of command set out a valid excuse to hate him or the New Church. The Lord prophesied hard times coming, John 15:22–25, because all warring factions out of reprobate human nature abhorred the light shining into, penetrating their darkness to expose the religiosities and ideologies’ insecure hiding places, regardless of misleading friendships involved. Yet this seething backlash of evidence-based hatred Jesus conveyed first to the circle of disciples. He willed through the “love one another” that they stand strong with an inexpressible joy. Integrally motivated as well as morally inviolable, they thus formed the close formation of brotherhood—internally unpretentious and externally impressive—to respond to all secular hatreds tiresomely fired up to consume the almighty love of the Christ. The future for all of the Church moves through many generational shifts into perilous processes of persecution.

CHRIST HOPE

Emphatically, Jesus stressed that beginning with the Apostles his disciples were not of this world, a choice he made. He called them, commanded them, to follow him, although not by their choice. In that calling, he changed their respective wills; hence, they wanted to be with him, in his company. Dominically, therefore, he declared, “You are not of this world.” Thus, he created in his own the faith to believe him, the Lord and Savior; at the same time, he created the hope to be faithful, regardless of circumstance, safety concerns secondary. In that faith and through that hope, they belonged to him, eternally, believing and innovating the new life in the world, but never more of a world troubled by human caprice.

Over fast-moving years and decades, the Twelve experienced the world’s hatred for Jesus and themselves. As they matured in their sense of identity in Christ and for the Church, they found that all outside the Lord and Savior, as well as apart from the Church, moved to isolate, banish, and/or kill whom the Son of God/Son of Man separated in praise of the Father.

Now yet, at table, bound by the prudent voice of the Lord and reluctant to move into unknown depths of hatred, these imagers of Christ listened, internally struggling to apprehend existential insight into the—immediate—future. Slowly, they grasped the sin of human intervention into the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The other Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, at Jesus’s last Passover celebration in all truth imaged the institution of the Lord’s Supper. John, on the other hand, wrote of the Passover. For a reason. In the original Passover, Exod 12:1–27, the LORD God revealed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm the release of his people from out of Egyptian captivity and the start of a long journey through a “great and terrible wilderness,” Deut 1:19. So here. Jesus released his own from the restrictive hatreds of this world and started them off, though they remained in the world, on the long history of eschatological tensions in the New Church, journeying into the future of hope. The Twelve awoke thereby with growth in comprehension to the immensity of the moment.

For the Twelve to grow in the Faith Jesus declared hitherto concealed eternal depths of his love for the New Church; he had chosen the Twelve out of the world with all the powers of predestination, which he intended to certify publicly upon the Cross. Because of this Christ-given faith and hope, the disciples were no longer citizens of any hate movement such as Hellenism, Caesarianism, or Judaism. Now they were the New Church, in fact, foundation stones for the Church on which all of Christ journeyed (analogically) through the Millennium, Eph 2:20, functionally different, radically in Christ: never again to hate him, but to love the Lord Jesus and his own, all of the one Church, trusting the Savior at his word. They thereby constituted the Church, the beginning of the new world, the Recreation, or Matthew’s, 19:28, the regeneration.

Given the world’s animosity from its myriad components of religiosity, no one volunteers or opts for church membership. Entry into the faith and hope of the new and eternal life is by election only. Omnisciently and omnipotently by an act of eternity the Lord Jesus sovereignly chose his own. Because of this divinely initiated predestinarian activity, the world obstructs both election and reprobation, seeking to this day to reconstruct the Church into a social organization to mishandle her not of this world origin. John 15:16. All who hate the Christ, even if ensconced in a congregation, demand by ways of Arminianism, Semi-Pelagianism, or outright Pelagianism, to control the present and the future, which confirms the main intent of religiosity in its numerous ideological embodiments. Fearful of the Christ’s lordship, in fact, of the Son of God/Son of Man, the Judge, they insist upon total control. However, even the hatreds of the world against Jesus resurrected and ascended cannot destroy an ultimate fact: out of the darkness of hatred the almighty Lord of heaven and earth elected for himself first the Twelve whom he for every generation since bonded and bound as the initial manifestation of the New Testament Church.

Day after day, seven per week, the disciples experienced the world’s hostile reception centered on Jesus Christ; therein they knew experientially external and internal pressures to conform: let Jesus go his own way, and they then assimilate into Judaism. Except for the overriding power of predestination, they had every opportunity to entomb themselves in a friendship with high-minded Christ haters and there through escape multiplying pains of persecution.

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Since that timely teaching session, the New Church in every day consciously suffers from similar malice and spite: constant crowding to accommodate to the world, unclench pains of shunning, evade mockeries of hate, and prove Christianity’s irrelevancy. Instead of Judaism, Caesarianism, or Hellenism, revolts against the Church stem from, for instance, secularism, post-modern relativism, and capitalism’s covetousness. Disorders of the day slowly grind stronger against all of the Church to assimilate other, all-penetrating moral values and economic comforts, in this manner suppress and turn the rush of history into the visions of any number of ideologies. Each ideology, even fear of climate change, laden with the dull momentum of religiosity, presents itself with cheery faces, illusions of friendship, and inscrutable hopes of self-fulfillment.

Through revolving doors of numerous ideological promises for friendship agapic weariness, if not collapse, sets in; love for the Christ fades and vitiated neighbor love moves to the edges, with the result that . . .

• Fast-spreading Roman Catholicism strips away conviction with respect to the legitimacy of the Reformation.

• Reformed brokenness impairs works of rightful ecumenicity.

• Persistent secularism with its hatred for Christianity degenerates integrity to speak out and stand up for the Lord Jesus Christ and his church-gathering work.

• The onslaught of thin-skinned small-l liberalism, Modernism, in the Church presently to determine the rationalistic future of Christianity now mutates into late twentieth century, early twenty-first century Postmodernism with its baffling relativistic values difficult to evade.

• Strengths of Neo-Conservatism mislead into revolts of disobedience against Christ Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom.

• Lay armies of the Islam moving into every country put Christianity on the defensive.

• Phoenix-like, Nazism draws renewed popularity from a generation unfamiliar with its hateful destruction and death.

• The Religious Right flies its political flag only over reactionary battles, discrediting the name of the Lord.

Furthermore, proponents of society at large pride themselves on secular and multicultural political systems, liberal democracies. With foundational values changed into the religiosities of multiculturalism to accommodate all, everyone must honor religious aspirations, each with its distinctive demands involving a host of reactive communities. The rise of the secular state pushes the lordship of Jesus Christ into a corner, all the while with patronizing intent seeking to please religious communities with some sort of equal status—as if political legislation may dominate the Lord of heaven and earth, and determine the place of religion in public life.

These and more rebellious turbulences depress, make uncomfortable, in fact, question Christ’s claims to headship in the Church and lordship over the earth. Worse, each at ground-level revolution presents a pleasant face and offers friendship: assimilate and ameliorate tension by focusing on our vision of the future. Each such hole of lamentation dark with fatal confidence holds up freedom from the Christ and underpins the roaming rights of human autonomy.

For many of the Church, hearts grow colder; amidst circling enmities, love of neighbors in a missionary way and on a local scale slides away. Enough is enough, and therefore the old way into covetousness on its unstable ground takes over. Cross-carrying? No, self-serving! As numb devotion immerses in complacency, more fall asleep in church, so much the wiser than the Christ; on slow drifts into conformity with the world and unstoppable in reprobation, they lock into every enemy force. Rather than love for church neighbors manifested by holding the Christ first and high through doing the Commandments, social, financial, and political ambitions offer a nice as well as ravishing environment in which all care for themselves and get along driven by cumbersome forms of toleration. This other eschatology, however, since long ago and in each generation still breaks off from the main road. Primary care for oneself and a few choice good works for neighbors and friends produce a lukewarm sort of civil religion—Christianity on the outside, revolution in a fury on the inside.

In every generation, as the world’s hatred for the Christ manifests itself always the same; with hustling and bustling in design, the pressure is on against the Church doing the new commandment, “Love one another.” John 13:34–35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 15:12, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” This love for one another that Jesus drew from the Old Testament and reinitiated within the Twelve he applied to the entire Church all through the centuries and millennia of his one thousand-year reign—until the Parousia. By this neighbor love, he demonstrates his mighty agape in and for the Church. On a directly personal front, John 14:21, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” This agape separates the Church from the world’s multiform ideological hates. Christ’s all-consuming love for the Church and this all-consuming love of the Church for neighbors manifest the humorless difference between the Church and the world. Repetitious proclamation of this love sharpens discipleship and penetrates hearts of flesh with reformation.

As Jesus took salvific suffering obediently upon himself for the Church, unrestricted manifestation of his church-saving work, so too on the way ahead the Twelve took up and congregations take up whatever persecution Jesus Christ deems necessary to the glory of the Father.

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By the entire in the world/not of the world paradox, the Son of God, the LORD God, at the covenant reformation with Abraham separated the Church from the nations and the ideologies/idolatries. However, throughout the Old Testament dispensation, the Church chafing to be comfortable in the world identified with and bowed before the expansionist idols of the times. During the Middle Ages, the Church dominated the political processes, bearing witness to the spirit of the Roman Empire. As recent as the twentieth century, those who claimed they follow the Lord Jesus, Savior, nestled comfortably in Western culture, fearful of being perceived different, which marks in every generation the dark side of Church History. Nevertheless, at the end of his ministry, notably at the Passover celebration with the Twelve, Jesus reasserted the Church’s calling to be in the world, but never of the world. To this day, all in Christ confront and live this paradox.

2–4

Exod 5:22–6:27 (6:10–13)

“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the people of Israel go out of his land.’ But Moses said to the LORD, ‘Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?’ But the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a charge to the people of Israel and to Pharaoh king of Egypt to bring the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt.”

IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD

A FREEDOM-AND-SLAVERY PARADOX

The LORD, Savior, whom God the Spirit, Luke 1:35, later revealed as God the Son, executed Israel’s release from Egyptian slavery, thereby accomplishing a prophecy he granted Abraham, Gen 15:13–14. During the Exodus from out of the house of bondage, the LORD, God Almighty, Exod 6:3, recreated for the full force of salvation his dominion over heaven and earth, all of which he brought to bear only on Abraham’s numerous descendants. Throughout, the LORD persevered for and in Israel’s freedom from slavery, however much the sacrilegious Pharaoh and even Israel shamefully balked at his omnipotent grace. When hell-bent Egypt and the people of the covenant confused freedom with slavery, the LORD God revealed a paradox—freedom in slavery—for the liberation of the Old Testament Church at that time.

Much later, by mystifying slavery with freedom, Caesarianism suppressed the Church; at the same time, Pharisaism and Sadduceism confined the Savior’s own in a legal perversion of liberty, the Tradition of the Elders. During the Middle Ages, Scholasticism oppressed the Church with another cunning design. More recently, the Enlightenment and French Revolution infatuation stifled the faith of the Church, relegating Christ Jesus to private opinion. Now, secularism aided by humanism and Postmodernism strangles the Faith by touting freedom from the Lord and Savior. As at the time of the Exodus, the Lord Jesus Christ, almighty over heaven and earth, always perseveres to release his people from a freedom actually slavery and for a slavery actually freedom.

New generations of Christ in the tangible Church caught by the ageless in the world/not of the world paradox confront this eschatological perplexity between freedom and slavery. In the Exodus, as the paramount work of liberation in the Old Testament dispensation, the LORD revealed for all unsettled skeptics his perseverance in recreating the Church.

REPETITIONS OF A COMMAND

Egypt, dominant in the lapsed world, expected all people equally ensnared in the world to submit to its tyranny, a degenerate enough fantasy, specifically the yoke of slavery for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The reigning Pharaoh resisted the Exodus to the death, determined to oppose the LORD God.

In many ways, Israel submitted to this worsening repressive regime and presented brawling obstacle upon obstacle to the Exodus, preferring death in slavery to life in freedom. Exod 14:10–11a, 15:22–25a; etc.

Exod 6:10–13, therefore, reiterated past commands, both to the offending Pharaoh and to unruly Israel; the LORD willed the provocative Exodus, adding to the extensive body of evidence that his people lived in the world, yet were not of this world. Because the LORD had heard the groaning of his own and remembered the covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for life, food, and space, he reversed Egypt’s religious violence and dark compulsion to violate the Hebrews. Exod 2:23–25. With pastoral intensity and incorruptible commitment, he listened. “In the course of those many days the king of Egypt died. And the people of Israel groaned under the imposed bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition.” To achieve the Exodus, the Lord clarified with determination his mandate to Moses and to the callous Pharaoh.

To begin the Exodus, Moses and Aaron in the name of the LORD commanded the ruling Pharaoh to allow Israel initially a brief respite from slavery in order to call upon the Name in communal worship. Exod 5:1, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” Over centuries, deplorably pressured by servitude, the numerous descendants of Abraham had lost the sacrosanct ethic of worship. Seven days of slaving per week washed away freedom to call upon the name of the LORD. Obvious to the Egyptians, this people differed from all others; even under the hard conditions of enforced labor, they resisted assimilation. Circumcision and multiplication marked them a cohesive people. Though the Pharaoh ordered the immediate death of newborn sons by drowning, the Hebrews grew numerically, for the Egyptians at an alarming rate. With the initially, “Let my people go,” the LORD, the Almighty, for Israel’s liberty planned to reveal to the observant world along the Upper Nile and far beyond his omnipotence in salvation.

At this stage of history, Egypt dominated the known world; all proximate nations and peoples bowed before the Pharaoh. At Genesis’s end, Joseph’s vice regal rule revealed the far-flung and subduing powers of the Egyptian king. He, conscious of his authority and god-like confidence, responded blasphemously to Moses’s command. Exod 5:2, “Who is the LORD, that I should heed his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” God Almighty did not belong in Egypt’s pantheon and Israel, as far as this Pharaoh was concerned, belonged in the world subject to him alone in the large space he dominated by force of arms, his to do with as he pleased.

Moses and Aaron, Aaron speaking, Exod 4:16, refused the Pharaoh’s negative response. In the name of the God of Israel and commissioned to represent him, these two spoke once more. Exod 5:3, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us; let us go, we pray, a three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to the LORD our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” When the LORD God speaks at any time he expects obedience, not only from his own, also from all outside the covenant boundaries. The foolish king of Egypt, however, had his own ideas about the LORD’s commanding presence. Exod 5:4, “But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why do you take the people away from their work? Get to your burdens.” Thus he concluded that first confrontation uneasily bulging with disaster.

Slavery for Israel meant: serving the king of Egypt, a god (so-called), a recent member to the ancient collaboration of sinister deities worshiped in Egypt; thereby all of the LORD, even if forced and unwilling, served multitudinous Egyptians idols by constructing store-cities, Pithom and Raamses. Exod 1:11. Slavery in this instance also required submission to the Egyptians’ legal system as imposed and enforced by the reigning pharaoh. Long days the Hebrew men slaved, dawn to dusk, seven per week, preparing bricks and building cities under watchful eyes of whip-carrying taskmasters as well as coerced Israelite overseers.

Under these aristocratic pressures, worshiping the LORD God faithfully fell away, except for the circumcision rite, the only aspect of covenant obedience mentioned. However, for this servitude God Almighty had not called Abraham, nor for his descendants to slave away in subservience generation upon generation, uncertain of life, maltreated into the wild factors of unbelief.

The Pharaoh out of formidable reverence for his gods and for himself was a man hard to persuade. Instead of acquiescing to the LORD’s command, combatively he increased Israel’s crippling workload. Exod 5:6–9, “The same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their foremen, ‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But the number of bricks which they made heretofore you shall lay upon them, you shall by no means lessen it; for they are idle; therefore they cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.’ Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words.’” Hence, in addition to already burdensome and life-robbing toil, the men also had to gather necessary straw for brick making. With bottomless contempt for the Hebrews, the cantankerous man on the throne burdened Israel’s tyrannical yoke more, its pace and pattern unmanageable.

Whatever hopes of liberation Israel undervalued before Moses and Aaron’s arrival, the leaders of the people of Israel, resisting, resented Pharaoh’s increasing oppression, and responded to Moses and Aaron. Exod 5:21, “The LORD look upon you and judge, because you have made us offensive in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have set a sword in their hands to kill us.” Rather than marveling trust in the Savior of Israel to accomplish his ineffable promises of life, food, and space to Abraham, these woefully unfocused elders of the covenant community rebelled, intent on saving their own lives. Better slavery in the world with ignominious death than freedom and life in the LORD.

At this point, neither the Pharaoh with his people nor the Hebrews listened to the LORD’s commissioned men. This may reasonably be expected of an Egyptian king. But of the Church? Exod 6:9, “Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel; but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel bondage.” Despite the general negativity generated by acute suffering, the LORD God held Moses fast to his commission; he persevered to reveal that his own were not of the world.

Contrary to collective manifestations of negativity in Egypt and in Israel, the LORD nevertheless commanded Moses to proceed, “Go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the people of Israel go out of his land.” The God of Israel had, Exod 6:5, heard the tortured groaning of his people and remembered his covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Exod 6:6–8, “. . . I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.” This royal affirmation shaped unfolding events with untrammeled authority, an anxious thing, for all on the wrong side of the old divide.

The intemperate king of Egypt, however, challenged the LORD God to combat, whereas the Lord of all creation omnipotently intended to renew his covenant promises of life, food, and space:

• By way of the Exodus, the LORD promised to remove his people from death within the house of bondage to life first in the wilderness, then in the abundance of the Land of Promise.

• By way of the Exodus, the LORD promised in comparison to the fleshpots in the land of Egypt the remarkable sustenance in the land of milk and honey.

• By way of the Exodus, the God of Israel promised to settle his people in Canaan, precisely the inheritance long before allotted to Abraham.

However much irreconcilable Pharaoh lashed out to govern events, the Savior disclosed to Moses, Exod 6:1, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for with a strong hand he will send them out, yea, with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.” To that end, in effect, and gloriously, the LORD accomplished his purpose. Exod 3:7–9, ”I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.” The LORD God, almighty, alone planned and accomplished the events and movements of the Exodus history.

In the process of succumbing to repetitious commands, Egypt changed. The LORD God convulsed the squalid world order, which calamitously collapsed. In the worst of that dreadful punishment, the unbecoming deities of Egypt found out that before the Almighty they were no gods at all, only imposters of a prodigious kind. Throughout, this convulsing world the LORD revealed that Israel was not of the world. Did in the process Israel change, reform? Faced in the wilderness with the fear of the unknown, they of the covenant proved remarkably un-covenantal—a people of inconsiderate zeal, at its core often motivated corruptively.

REPETITIONS OF DISOBEDIENCE

That a pagan nation refused to listen and hold the LORD’s command in derision, however inexcusable, comes out of a reason, one demonstrated many times and at length throughout Old Testament history, idolatry. Israel had no such pretext, Deut 4:15–24, which Apostle Paul readily recognized for all times of the Church. Rom 1:20–23,

Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.

Egypt over many generations proved the point too. The pantheon of these pagans resembled every known animal, whereby they dismissed the reality of the LORD God. Rather than face the truth of the existence of Israel’s God, the only LORD of heaven and earth, they took to an offensive, underscored by deceit and artifice. At eradicating the covenant people, they planned also to rid themselves once and for all of the God of heaven and earth. Therefore, throughout the Exodus history, the Pharaoh lied, broke his word, and finally attacked with genocidal potential by force of arms. Repetitious refusal to listen marked then the end of that Pharaonic regime, disconnected into a fringe state.

International Disobedience

By means of the covetousness of self-righteousness, i.e., pollution by the deep-grounded sin of the beginning, the whole of Mizraim moved as one to grapple with the God of the Hebrews, the LORD of heaven and earth, for which he held that entire nation meticulously accountable. Exodus-moved, he assured the destruction of Pharaoh’s dominion, therewith mocking and embarrassing its heavily populated pantheon, none of which or together could halt the Savior’s perseverance in liberating his own. Exod 15:11, 18:11. After the discredited Egyptians, subversive Amalekites refused to heed the fact that Israel was not of this world, but holy to the LORD, Exod 17:8–13. Venturing to oppose the LORD headlong, then Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan sought to tear Israel to pieces, Num 21:21–35. Balak tried, with the assistance of a Balaam, to stop Israel short, Num 22:1—24:25. As prophesied, in Canaan, Exod 3:8, the incorrigible Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites strove to waste the people of the covenant.

Israelite Disobedience

Israel’s heart-breaking refusal to hear and obey the LORD, Exod 6:9, by far less inexcusable, God managed in a different manner, only out of faithfulness to now age-old covenant promises. The Almighty heard and saw the oppression of his people, Exod 2:23–25, 3:7–12, in fact, “. . . God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Out of this harmonious remembering only he moved heaven and earth to execute the Exodus.

After the first confrontation with the Pharaoh, also Israel refused to listen, less than eager to leave slavery behind, less than eager to stop serving Egyptian idols. Abraham’s descendants, the covenant people, displayed also thereafter a history of rebellion, which aggrieved Moses voiced before the LORD, Exod 6:12, “Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?” Here the LORD’s point man expressed two perceived problems, one broad-based, one narrowly defined. 1) Israel’s refusal spoke of indiscrete fearfulness, which Pharaoh had cause to exploit. Moreover, Israel’s backwardness at hearing the LORD’s command to come out uncovered layers of unbelief, none of which complimentary to the covenant people. 2) Moses then admitted to an uncircumcision,20 not of the foreskin, but in relation to a speech defect. With this analogical usage of uncircumcision, Moses claimed that he spoke with difficulty, literally, with heaviness of lips. Exod 6:30. For decades, he had worked the silent life of shepherding, labor far removed from confronting kings and leading belligerent people. Specifically, Exod 4:10, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou hast spoken to thy servant; but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” This second excuse the LORD counteracted by commissioning and equipping articulate Aaron to speak for Moses; together, the brothers had to lead Israel to Mount Sinai, and beyond.

If Pharaoh resisted the LORD’s command to let Israel go, in this convincing narrative the people of the covenant balked as well. To be precise, the Egyptians in the frightening night of the tenth plague, bewailing the deaths of numerous first-born, forced the LORD’s own to leave. Exod 12:31–32, “. . . [Pharaoh] summoned Moses and Aaron by night, and said, ‘Rise up, go forth from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the LORD as you have said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone; and bless me also!” In fact, they of Egypt became desperate, Exod 12:33, “. . . the Egyptians were urgent with the people, to send them out of the land in haste; for they said, ‘We are all dead men.’” Even stronger, Exod 12:39, with Egypt’s ideological scaffolding shattered, Pharaoh, for a moment in touch with reality, thrust them out of the land. Were the maddened Egyptians forceful, the LORD even more; he compelled his reluctant people to leave the proximity of death—proving they were not of the world. No more were they to be comfortable and free among pitiful gods generated by a pagan nation.

Demonstrating that Israel’s sojourn in the world ended suddenly and forcefully, the Savior by various ways revealed the Exodus entirely his dominical doing; in the uproar of Egyptian agony, he hurried his people off in early dawn not to another day of slave labor, but into the beckoning darkness of an unknown future:

• Exod 12:42, “It was a night of watching by the LORD, to bring them out of the land of Egypt.”

• Exod 12:51, “. . . on that very day the LORD brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.”

This fact Moses called Israel to remember. Constantly throughout the Exodus book, Moses pointed to the LORD who delivered his people to the not of this world life. Some excerpts:

• Exod 13:3p, “Remember this day, in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out fromthis place.”

• Exod 13:8, “. . . you shall tell your son . . . ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”

• Exod 13:9p, “. . . for with a strong hand the LORD has brought you out of Egypt.”

• Exod 13:14p, “By strength of hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.”

• Exod 13:16, “. . . for by a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt.”

Instead of Israel voluntarily and eagerly striding away from the house of bondage, on one level the Egyptians, on another the Savior pushed them hard, away from the Nile Valley and into the wilderness, Exod 13:18, “equipped for battle.”

Cognizant of Israel’s argumentive disposition, the Almighty led his own into faith-shaking desert wastes beyond the Red Sea, not the much easier and faster sea route through Philistia along the Mediterranean coastline. Exod 13:17. Then, at the western shore of the Red Sea, Israel’s defiance collapsed. All at once, faced with the pursuing Egyptian army, the land of bondage looked safer and better than the Land of Promise, the hand of the Pharaoh stronger than the LORD’s. Exod 14:10–11a, “When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were in great fear. And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD; and they said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians”? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.’” Therewith they depreciated the third covenant promise. The bountiful space the LORD promised in the far away faded in favor of the harshness of slave life along the Nile. Within three months of leaving Egypt and before arriving at the Sinai, Exod 19:1, the untested Hebrews complained almost unceasingly about food and water, and life, constantly preferring an existence in the world to life not of this world. The people abused the covenant promises, the Gospel; God-given life, food, and space they arrogantly trampled underfoot.

• Exod 15:22–24, at Marah, they complained about water supplies.

• Exod 16:1–3, after Elim, the people again murmured. “Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

• Exod 17:1, at Rephidim, the people again complained about water sources.

Throughout, of course, this murmuring and whining stressed defenseless dissatisfaction with the LORD God and the life he promised; carried downward by a stubborn illusion, the Israelites were not impressed with the future, not with salvation thus far. The complaining recorded so far occurred before the people of the covenant arrived at the Sinai; constantly they balked at the actuality of the covenant promises, the Gospel. Rather than rely on the Savior and his promises, they preferred death in slavery to life in the covenant. In the world shone brighter and happier than not of the world. Repeatedly, they yearned for the familiar, to settle down in simpler times, there in slavery to die. All new generations of the Church in this day and long hereafter must know: Israel exercised powerful yearnings for accommodation, conformity, and complacency, tiresome pressures of the heart to live in the world and at the same time, somehow, worship the LORD, Jesus Christ and through him the Father. For the Church, it was painful to be different.

For Israel, in his morose awareness of vulnerability, what did it take to trust in the LORD?

Nevertheless, the LORD of the Hebrews, faithful in his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, headed his people into a future he only knew and shaped, in which his own had to be different from all in the world peoples and nations.

• Exod 19:5–6, “Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

• Exod 19:16–18, “On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God; and they took their stand at the foot of the mount. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.”

• Lev 19:1–2, “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Say to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “You shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy.”’”

• Deut 4:32–35, “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him.”

Daily, therefore, the LORD God persevered; with the Exodus, in defiance of political tradition he demonstrated to a pagan nation and a watching world the consequences of refusal to listen. At the same time, he broke through Israel’s hardness of heart and lawless obstacles: his own were not of this world.

REPETITIONS OF FREEDOM

Despite the contrariness of Egypt and even more of Israel, the Almighty repeated his mandate for the covenant people, one to let go, the other to go out. Therefore, he charged Moses and Aaron to speak again to the Church-in-reformation and to the Pharaoh. The LORD ordered both men not be lax in office, but with resolve and singleness of purpose to press on, whatever hazards and obstacles.

Moses, grappling with the pharaonic pyramid of confidence, at first saw little light and much darkness in the LORD’s unconquerable strength of will to lead his people out. Nevertheless, the Savior had delegated both Moses and Aaron to advance the Church into liberty.

Hence the genealogy, Exod 6:14–27, Moses listed only descendants of Jacob through Reuben, Simeon, and Levi—Levi, Jacob’s third son by Leah—with concentration on himself and Aaron; in this manner, no one mistook the identity of the two, true descendants of Abraham and Isaac, Moses three years junior to Aaron, Exod 7:7. These Levitical sons had to walk Israel into freedom.

What is freedom?

Freedom is the exercise of justice and the absence of fear, life according to the Commandments out of reverence before the LORD God, serving him only, i.e., to love him above all else, and neighbors as oneself.

Israel, however, perceived freedom as slavery. Constantly they sought to return to Egypt in the conviction that slavery served freedom, a coping strategy devoid of hope.

In every instance, firmly, the LORD God pursued his mandate to Moses and Israel—to debase Egypt and exalt the Church. With firmness of command he destroyed the Pharaoh and his people to achieve Israel’s release. Both people had worked, the one commandeering, the other slaving, to enhance the Egyptian pantheon, in the limiting options through which the Church had slowly under grinding forces of accommodation and hardening conformity bowed before these idolatries.

• Exod 32:1–10, the spirit of idolatry Israel carried within his bosom; given a momentary opportunity they compelled Aaron to fashion a golden calf to worship it, contrary to the Second Commandment. With no end to anxiety and cheap rejoicing, immediately after the flashing radiance of the Sinai, the covenant nation ignored the renewal of the promises and obligations.

• Lev 17:7p, once free of Egyptian control, the LORD issued commandments to eschew idolatry: “So they shall no more slay their sacrifices for satyrs, after whom they play the harlot.”

• Lev 17:8, “And you shall say to them, Any man of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, who offers a burnt offering or sacrifice, and does not bring it to the door of the tent of meeting, to sacrifice it to the LORD; that man shall be cut off from his people.”

• Josh 24:14, “Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.”

This praise-making in idolatry, which Moses and later Joshua strove against, Israel leaned on, a secondary trust formation undermining the LORD’s word.

For the Exodus, the LORD revealed his name—at that time, in that manner—as the I AM THAT I AM. Exod 6:2–3, “And God said to Moses, ‘I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them.” Not with Adam, Noah, and Abraham had he revealed himself in glory and majesty as with the Exodus, thereby demonstrating his power of salvation; he willed forever a people for himself.

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Since that time and to this day, forcefully, the LORD took his people out of the world. In the easygoing decay of Western civilization, struggling gods strive for mastery: Hindu atavars, the Buddha, one Allah, Mother Earth, even as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, social conservatism, etc. This Western civilization consists now of a seething mass of religiosity, a rising and falling of decadent powers, the known and familiar home territory. Herein all face voluminous problems: the care of the earth, hatred of war, brokenness of tribalism, loneliness of individualism, covetousness of human rights, etc. Into this globally wide brokenness, worlds in which all except the Church seek comfortableness, masses of humanity sink away. The temptations of Roman Catholicism, the fears of Islam, the horrors of Nazism, the appeals of secularism, and looming shadows of Chinese communism fight each other for international control, grinding nations into dust. All sense deep down the chaos of dissolution in the known world. All, unhappy spirits, within these grim confines care only for survival of the fittest.

However, against all ideological pressures at conformity and accommodation, in fact, against all pains at being different, Christ Jesus reveals that his Church, though in the world, is never of the world. This Israel learned. This the New Israel still learns—the hard way. At one time the LORD Almighty in an entirely eschatological revelation demonstrated the majesty of his glory, wherein the redemption of his people, to the nervous astonishment of surrounding nations and empires.

Living generations of the Church, genealogical roots deep in the Old Testament, back to Abraham, moving through the Exodus, experiencing the resistance to the Word, headed forwards through the history of the Cross and the Resurrection, in every place and age to found finally a culture and a civilization conformable to the praise of Christ Jesus.

3–4

Phil 3:1–21 (17–21)

“Brethren, join in imitating me, and mark those who so live as you have an example in us. For many of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD

A TIME-AND-ETERNITY PARADOX

New generations look into the perplexity of this paradox: Living in the world without essentially belonging to this world. For, post-Pentecost, the Lord Jesus placed believers on notice: as forebears of coming generations, they too lived simultaneously in-the-time-and-the-eternity tensions of the Commonwealth—politeuma—that created community in which grace enlivened all. New Testament documents, the Pauline specifically, revealed a marvelous level of access to this constantly intriguing paradox, and not only for the younger in Christ.

To honor these time-eternity tensions: In the world concentrated in and about Philippi, Romans, Hellenists, and Pharisees squeezed the newborn congregations seven days per week into assimilation with the then relevant religiosities. Constrictions pressed, or attempted to press, congregations of Christ into drab modes of accommodation and conformity, hereby to assume overarching control. However, the Lord of heaven and earth vindicated his rule, the Commonwealth, the community active in the Kingdom within which the epicentric Church. Since the Church represents the Commonwealth’s heart, her members inhabit both time and eternity beginning, then, in the first European congregation, Acts 16:11–15, Paul with companions exhorted Christ believers in Philippi to live in the new creation, the Commonwealth.

BELIEVERS ALIVE TO ADVERSITY

Paul, salutary, addressed all saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi. With the confirmatory “brethren” designation he reinforced this communal bond with its time-eternity tensions to live beyond covetous rotes or exuberant rites to please impossible gods. For a commissioned man of the Lord, the Apostle willed believers to imitate him, 1 Cor 11:1, even in the face of dire adversity generated by moving about in adversarial modes of existence. Paul insisted upon this imitation—that is, commitment in faithfulness to the Lord Jesus—because of explosive signs visibly creeping into the congregation; these idolatrous forces required the believers communally to assert the ground rules and boundary markers of the Faith.

The Exemplary Way

Paul lived intensely, more so after his conversion; with recreated conduct of heart, soul, intelligence, and body the Lord committed him irrever­sibly to serve in the Church and in the Kingdom. Striving pastorally with an eye on the maturing Philippian congregation, her wholeness, Phil 2:1–10, 2:12–18, and her total Christ-centeredness, the Apostle summoned the believers to honor with him the covenant promises, dedicating life, food, and space to Jesus, and obedience according to the Commandments, thankfulness with the same tireless dynamics as he, the Apostle, served. Speaking authoritatively, as apostle, Paul called the entire liberated Philippian congregation, free as fellow imitators, to implement Christ Jesus’s humility. Phil 2:5–7,

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

In that exemplary humbleness the Lord Jesus lived prophetically, looking to the Resurrection, even beyond; throughout his life preparatory to the Crucifixion, the Lord and Savior endorsed for his own primarily the first covenant promise, the resurrection life. Paul, too imitating the Lord and Savior, lived prophetically; from out of his central core he strove for entry into the Commonwealth’s totality. Simultaneously, the Apostle intended that all believers at Philippi follow him. Both the emphatic “brethren” and the imitation summons served to motivate everyone actually in Christ to pursue from the heart the Christian tradition of grateful living—the gratitude flowing out of salvation. From that workable beginning the Apostle called the living members of the Philippian congregation to acknowledge unity in mind and love, producing predictive evidence of salvation, thereby with him setting the eschatological pace.

Forcefully, then, Paul incited the Church at Philippi to copy the example, which he, Timothy, Phil 2:19–24, and Epaphroditus, Phil 2:25–30, placed before them, to replicate the thankful response to the Gospel as intensively. Therefore, the exhortatory, “. . . mark those who so live as you have an example in us.” With supportive companions Paul willed the entire Philippian congregation to duplicate them in Christian believing and living.

The Militant Way

Paul, for the commanded emulation cited two rivals, anti-Gospel forces, both endangering that congregation.

First: Approximately four hundred years earlier the Church—returning post-exilic to Jerusalem—consciously slipped away from the gratitude of the Return and the covenant promises the LORD God thereby reinitiated. Once more, rather than attributable to pagan deities, they received life, food, and space on his terms. And from out of gratitude the summons to honor the Commandments. However, in place of gratitude the Church originated the Second Commonwealth, considering David’s rule the first. This Commonwealth formed a kingdom motivated by the Tradition of the Elders and energized by the Oral Law, the Oral Law whereby adherents gained self-righteousness. In effect, the Second Commonwealth in imagination replaced the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus. The leaders of the Second Commonwealth, initially the Pharisees, later with the Sadducees, invented a self-righteousness only superficially similar to the gratitude shaped through living the Commandments.

To escape misidentification: Paul distinguished Christ’s Commonwealth from what the Jews called the Second Commonwealth, a kingdom and a communion intended to crowd the Kingdom out of existence. The post-exilic Jews, arrogant, imagined themselves capable to create another Davidic reign, as extensive and as glorious. However, they founded only another anti-messianic rule. In that large-scale disparagement of the covenant promises, they worked with life, food, and space against the Lord Jesus; they took the promises for growing the tough Oral Law tradition. In and throughout this post-exilic process of covenant breakage, the Church misrepresented the Old Testament tradition of gratitude inspired at the Sinai and moved by the Holy Spirit. That misrepresentation unconverted Jews in the Church at Philippi sought to synthesize with the original commitments of Christianity; these Jewish members wanted re-imposition of circumcision and lead all into achieving self-righteousness, the very self-righteousness the Lord and Savior had with awesome finality condemned on the Cross. Because of the long tradition of the Oral Law the congregation at Philippi had no example in Christ to follow and became easy victims for the unbending pharisaically hearted; earning self-righteousness appeared more attainable than in the Faith bowing before the Lord Jesus.

In that complex cultural interplay of competition the Head of the Church at Philippi incited Paul to make his exemplary living the new norm for Christian sanctity, until first stirrings in the covenant tradition gained purchase. Therefore, Paul exhorted the congregation to scrutinize closely the way of living he created, since yet no such tradition of the Christian life existed; effectually, the Apostle with companions had to start living in Christ anew, for themselves too and as example for the congregation—against virtuous-in-appearance only pressures to Pharisaic conformity. Many of the congregation whom the Christ had drawn out of the Tradition of the Elders remembered the striving for self-righteousness and easily enough found the simplicities of the old way appealing.

To dispense with the Jewish danger the apostolic precedent intensely and intensively inspired the believers in Philippi to walk in Christ Jesus with heart, soul, mind, and strength, always within the circumambience of the Commandments. Despite pressures of succumbing again to self-righteousness the Lord Jesus willed the covenant way for the Church entering the New Testament millennia.

Second: To consolidate the Philippian congregation in replicating his believing and living the proprietary Apostle solidified also other wavering members—those drawn out of Hellenism—to withstand and overcome another revolutionary elemental force on the loose in that covenant communion. Even though imprisoned, Paul remained on constant alert for the well-being of Christ’s Church, also in Philippi. Therefore he called the faithful to beware of rebellious members who attempted to ease the congregation by a process of synthesizing again into the libertine ways of Hellenism; these adaptors sought measures of accommodation with the world from which the Christ had drawn them and import into the congregation/Commonwealth ways of Hellenism to decrease the time-eternity tensions; such members sought less emphasis on the not of the world and more on the in the world. Discomforts of residing in two worlds at once proved irritating. The Apostle’s militant call to arms came none too soon.

“For many,” Paul declared, had betrayed the Christ by becoming a confrontational menace to the integrity of that congregation. The Apostle concentrated on those who, spurning the Lord Jesus’s reformation, sought excesses germane to Hellenism, to cater along with the world to the demands of the flesh, such as the seven deadly sins; prideful, envious, angered, slothful, greedy, gluttonous, and lustful, they compelled Christian liberty onto different stages of immoderation. Gal 5:13. Those members still wanted what Hellenists assumed as freedom, thus to eat away at the life in Christ Jesus and the destruction of the Faith. While bearing the name of the Savior, Hellinizers cherished sins of self-indulgence. Under the guise of Christianity these hypocritical souls aggravated the covenant community with libertine lusts, whether Epicurean, or Stoic, Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, Gnostic, Mithraic, etc., the whole of Hellenistic religiosity controlled and commended by Caesarianism. This Hellenism encircled the Church and through neo-Hellenists penetrated into the Church at Philippi.

Often, Paul claimed, while founding this congregation he had alerted the first generation followers of the Christ to the execrable afflictions deformative of the Faith from among which the Savior had forcibly drawn them. Were many and more now to return to those deadly sins? Such evil men, imposters, members in the congregation, advocated synthesizing, agitating for antinomian living under the name of Christ. The Lord Jesus, unerring Head of the Church, drew those antinomians into the communion of the Philippian congregation to reveal his dominion. With all authority over heaven and earth the Christ willed a number of these evil workers into the community to display his omnipotence over unbelievers and to test the commitment of believers. On account of this admixture—unbelievers among believers—the Philippian congregation fought internally also against old-world religiosities and philosophies; in that Roman city Jesus Christ gathered as his own, in addition to Judaists, also men of habitual wickedness, inclined to all evil in libertine ways. These connoisseurs of sinfulness proved themselves for all in Christ to see and judge a source of grievous tribulation, and for the congregation also public humiliation, unless through the office bearers the living members called those sinners to account, either repentance or excommunication. Such enemies of the Cross, men with constricted hearts, and insensitive, mocked the Savior in his work as they, tempting, sought assimilation for the congregation to Hellenism, at that time the other illusive face of covetousness. Singly as well as collectively those men presented detrimental exampling to budding generations, to say nothing of the Christ’s reputation in the City of Philippi and surrounding territory to the north and to the south. Sworn-to-evil trouble makers intended to live in the world and compel all of Christ to synthesize with the ways constitutive of Hellenism.

The Tearful Way

Paul, composing this letter while confined to Roman imprisonment, with urgent entreaty wept at the internal tribulations in and the public damages to that beloved body of believers the Lord Jesus had instituted; “even with tears” the Apostle implored the members to hear him out. From within socially low and despicable imprisonment the Apostle fought against Christ-opposing and time-bound members who, Judaist or Hellenist, resisting the Holy Spirit and the Word, willed the congregation into conformity with and assimilation to the world, thus synthesis. Awareness of the intrusive enmities within the Church moved the Apostle to tears, as a father grieving for wayward children. Acts 20:19, 31; 2 Cor 2:4. Apostolic tears in this instance proved a hard warning to the synthesizers. Those whom Paul thus specifically confronted through this missive pretended to walk the straight-way of the Faith; actually they had strayed onto devious courses into the restlessness of religiosity. He, therefore, warned the believers against any complacency by tolerating the evil-workers at synthesis, further harming Christ’s congregation. The apostolic tears revealed the depths at which Paul suffered in anguish because of the sins mushrooming in that congregation, signifying that the sinning had gone much too far and the believers’ resistance much too weak.

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In the congregation at Philippi two streams of evil coursed among the members, both of which gave occasion to Paul’s tears. Judaist self-justificatory ethics and Hellenistic self-gratificatory ethics fought over the communion’s soul. Paul had sized up the conflictive currents and imminent dangers. Hence, he warned the congregation through the overseers and the deacons to oppose those adversities, the Jewish self-righteousness and the libertine arrogance. By means of deception Judaists and Hellenists under pretensions of Christianity strutted and/or sneaked about as enemies of the Cross; recoiling from the word, hostiles who squashed within the Church at that place the liveliness of the Gospel and stalled reformation according to the Scriptures.

By duplicitous pressures from two streams of Christ-haters, notably the legalistic temptations of the Jews and the carnal temptations of the Greeks, those enemies of the Gospel condoned every day, seven per week, conformity to the world, wherewith they threatened the wholeness of the congregation. Paul’s serious weeping indicated that these movements to synthesize the congregation and the world muffled the communion’s integral voice of faith. The immorality of the pagans and the hostility of the Jews with respect to the Commandments moved the congregation as a whole out of the time-eternity tensions into the world. Paul, militant, exhorted Christ’s members to clarify the dividing-line, which separated the living and the dead, thus illuminating the strains of being in the world while not of the world. The Gospel had to counteract the idolatrous voices. No one, and never in the Church, possessed privileges to confuse Christianity with license, not to the detriment of the Gospel. Therefore, the Apostle’s commendable appeal, ever adaptable, to blunt and block the malice of the fractious.

Since the definitive judgment begins in the Church, Paul fingered the destroyers of the congregation’s wholeness and pointed to the most dreadful of all possibilities awaiting unbelievers, eternal ruin for hypocritical types. Phil 1:28. Whatever pretentions to the contrary, avant-garde lifestyles, Greek or Jewish, Christ Jesus appointed to everlasting punishment all immoral and wicked, first those in one of his congregations. Rom 6:1, 21, 23; 2 Cor 11:15; etc. The Judge of the entire world through the Apostle demonstrated also in the Church at Philippi the universal justice of his condemnatory word, mitigating nothing of continuing torment in eternal death.

Concentrating on the Hellenistic ethics of excess—“their god is the belly”—and on the Jewish ethics of legalism, Paul in Phil 3:17–21 shouldered both diabolical longings to the surface. Such intolerable brands of religiosity and those devotees of ancient idolatries thus faced the inevitable consequences. Rom 16:18. Licentiousness they advocated to subvert Christian liberty? Legalism they endorsed to deflate Christian gratitude? To the predictable detriment of the simple, the converts, the youngsters, and much of Christ Jesus’s reputation, revolutionaries of both sorts crippled the congregation’s missionary capacity. Without control over and supervision of physical and moral appetites, Rom 8:13; 1 Cor 9:27; etc., shapeless living according to the flesh cast aside the self-denial Jesus Christ himself exampled, for one strain the yearnings for the seven deadly sins, for the other the easy rules of the Oral Law. Since the physical bodies and the working minds of Christ’s own constituted temples of the Holy Spirit, 1 Cor 6:19–20, none of the living in that congregation dared contravene the Commandments for moralities other than revealed in the Scriptures for the Church. They who deceptively persisted in alternative ways, the notable Apostle interposed, knowingly suffered ignominy of the worst kind, for denying the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Gal 5:1, 13; 1 Pet 1:21; etc. However, while those devotees of the belly and those legalists of the mind misaligned the congregation vis-à-vis the Savior from the inside, the believers caught between obedience and disobedience were enfeebled.

Through sullying the Church’s repute in Philippi and soiling the new life in Christ, those infuriating libertines and irksome legalists gloried in shame. While in the one case they found immorality the way and in the other law-keeping the future force, Paul prophesied ruin for both, adamantly. Sins of the flesh and sins of the mind end in consummate disgrace. Paul, pastorally moved, with tears certified the approaching condemnation in eternity for all who moved off the covenant course.

The Prophetic Way

In contrast to the restrictive in the world living for Hellenists even as for Jews, Paul alerted believers to the prophetic opening of history by emulating him and companions because “love of Christ constrains us,” 2 Cor 5:14. This unsettling in the world/not of the world measurement inaugurated by working out the Commandments vindicated faithfulness in Christ; by moving in both dispensations simultaneously, life on earth, in the world, and in the Commonwealth, not of the world, the Faith rises reliably to adore in Jesus Christ the Father, the whole moved by the Spirit. Thus the concurrent mundane and the heavenly shaped the one legacy for all Christianity.

Longing for the totality of living in the Commonwealth presented no workable evasions from the world, no escape from anguish and anger in the world, and certainly no unsightly running away from responsibilities, personal and/or corporate, but validated generational living in the world. However uncomfortable believers became due to the damaging excesses of Hellenism and its trending into hedonism and however frustrated living members of the congregation became because of Jewish self-righteousness, the deplorable rise of these deceptive worldviews in the congregation moved the hopes of all the redeemed to serve the Lord and Savior; this service stood out prophetically too. Before arriving at the totality of the Faith, what necessity confronted the faithful? To uphold the good confession in the midst of the Commandments, which none in Christ repudiates.

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With mutual surveillance Paul summoned the believers to overcome ancient energies, the Greek and the Pharisaic. Such prophetic living stood out first in the way of Christ-centered self-denial, then in obedience to the Commandments, no matter how painfully reformative.

BELIEVERS ALIVE IN ADORATION

Schooling in perseverance unhinges church-destructive idolatries, at the same time amplifying the trinitarian adoration.

The Eschatological Way

Eschatological forces in the Scriptures as a whole and in the Phil 3:17–21 passage specifically reveal unadorned the Church’s in the world/not of the world integration into the Commonwealth. Christ Jesus’s leading-edge dominion broke through every civilization of man at the time Paul founded the congregation in Philippi large with the strength of the Spirit and in the name of the Christ this Apostle aided by companions gave undeniable evidence of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Recreation. To reclaim his Kingdom in person the LORD God entered the world at Bethlehem as the Son of God. Before the dominant world government of that day he witnessed to his priority in global rule. John 18:36, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world.” Therewith the Lord and Savior summoned in every generation of the Church since, as in Philippi, never again to adore any passing power, that is, any ideology or idolatry, each one pointless and inconclusive, except destructive even of the common good.

Christ Jesus’s eternal rule, despite its hidden complexities prophetically foreseen in Eph 2:12’s politeia and based on the opening of history recorded as Gen 3:14–19, Paul called the Commonwealth the Kingdom in contrast to and supersession of the Jewish Second Commonwealth, and also the Roman Empire. The Jews with a monotheistic system of theocratic government developed in the post-exilic centuries intended to marginalize, then nullify the Incarnation, and later, by processes of assimilation draw the Church back into the world, first into the Tradition of the Elders, to make the Lord’s followers obey the Oral Law. Against this and also all Roman/Hellenistic interference with respect to the priorities of history the Apostle forcefully revealed and identified the Commonwealth, the royal as well as omnipotent reign of Jesus Christ. Out of every culture then—Roman, Jewish, Hellenistic—the Lord and Savior called forth those whom he commanded to bow before him, in Philippi too, every one caught up in the radiance of adoration, to the glory of the Father.

Since the Fall, political and cultural turbulences typically developed characteristics and spirits of temporary sorts, always in the context of Adam’s covetousness, seeking to parody the LORD God, Jesus; against the eschatological way these rebelliously high levels of activity—again, Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic—attempted to establish temporary in the world and of the world dominions, in the historical framework under consideration citizens proud of Roman accomplishments, Hellenistic license, and Jewish legalism. Distinct from Roman conceit and Greek permissiveness all inside the Tradition of the Elders self-importantly lived the Oral Law without irritating the government in Rome too much. Everywhere, from governors and procurators over provinces up to Caesar, rulers and citizens of the Empire made one fatal mistake: All kneeled in cultures of entitlement that made up cruel copies and suicidal imitations of the Commonwealth to deities the existence of which impossible to verify. Even Israel, the post-exilic Church, exploited an earthly reign, its Second Commonwealth, to replicate Jesus’s rule. He, however, through his calling from the Father slowed down and turned away in Philippi any destruction by the competing powers, Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic, to recreate his own eschatological rule, his people alive in the Spirit for the adoration of the Father. Thus the eschatological way of the Lord Jesus the Apostle revealed from a Roman prison to the congregation of the Christ at Philippi.

The Contemporary Way

All in the world, whether two thousand years ago or currently, know and live amidst civilizational powers impossibly strong, from a human perspective. Whatever local, regional, national, or continental differences in cultures, citizens of the world live in subordination to a ruling class or tyrant. Paul recognized those circumambient revolutionary airs of the Roman Empire, despite its favorable influences of stability and security characteristic of the pax Romana. Now Western civilization with its many rulers—feet of iron and clay, Dan 2:43—and in its unflattering as well as temperamental disintegration domineers citizenries. Each competitive of the world rule normalizes its own trendsetting religious laws, languages, historical records, thought patterns, recollections, and celebrations. Whatever differences from continent to continent and age to age, these constitute at core the familiar, the known, and the expected, always determined by the in the world and of the world roots of covetousness.

Breaking away from and out of paradigmatic boundary markers ascertained by always current worldviews, the Apostle long ago opened all believers’ primary residence, “our commonwealth is in heaven,” the only eternally stable habitation. From that good place, the Commonwealth, the Lord Jesus rules righteously and justly. In that good place all creatures adore the Creator, Savior. Out of that good place the almighty and gracious Lord governs the heavens and the earth for the sake of the Church.

Because of his promise to return, all living members of the Church await the Lord Jesus, not now in terms of redemption, the pardon authority he earned on and imputed from Calvary, which salvation he accomplished unrepeatably, once for all; believers now long for his return to see the God and the Savior, Jesus Christ, Tit 2:13, the Judge, glorious, face to face. In fact, from Phil 1:11 onward Paul advanced the eternally valid hope of perfection for which in this dispensation he summoned all in Christ to imitate him with the integrity of living in the world while no more qualified by anything of the world, by any civilization or culture, each with its shameful past, each with its contemptible denouement.

In the Eschaton, the Savior and the Judge, Jesus, will release his own finally from numerous covetously sprawling tentacles of religiosity operative in the world. In the ages before the Day, he preserves the Church, in Paul’s time from the sequestering yokes of Caesarism, Hellenism, Sadduceism, and Pharisaism. Specifically with respect to Pharisaism, its once critical hungers for self-righteousness meant nothing; for Paul in Christ that convoluted self-justification turned into the meanest refuse. From his conversion on the Damascus Road while persecuting the Christ, religiosity from whatever origin and with whatever ulterior lusts counted for nothing, or less than nothing, which standard he summarized for all of the Church at Philippi to emulate. This summoning motivated also Timothy and Epaphroditus; the three spoke as one. Only the grace the Father revealed in the Son applied, translated into an intensity of commonwealth living, the expressive yearning for the Parousia.

In the Church, contemporary self-understanding hence runs on eschatology; living means striving for the Consummation, which Christ followers perceive shaping in each covenant communion. At the life-focusing intersection of two phenomena—the future alive in the present and the present alive for the future—the rule of the Spirit amplifies hope; he stimulates and prods yearnings for the Eschaton, to hear what Jesus declared on the Cross and to live before him in his glory. Salvation henceforth means for all of the Church to stand before the Judge of heaven and earth to discover with finality and in the fear of the Lord the ultimate powers of grace.

For the perpetual benefit of believers at adoration before the Judge who is the Savior, God the Father invokes the grace the Son merited, Phil 3:10–11, “. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” In fact, this judging the Lord Jesus revealed as an ever-present factor, an event “at hand,” Phil 4:5, marking off all not of this world while still alive in this world. Longing for him and living for the final, overpowering benediction centers in the Church, the always ready and disciplined beginning of the Commonwealth. In the Commonwealth, Christ’s glory and majesty denounce all strange religions surfacing throughout the ages, from mightiest idolatry to meanest coveting. Long ago, the Christ placed the incandescent glory of the Commonwealth in the Church, while throughout the ages all pagan backlashes interjected endless ideological/idolatrous inflammations against the Judge.

Church life, therefore, opens up the fact that all believers at adoring the Lord and Savior, though in the world, are no more of the world; this clarifies beyond all doubt that Christians for now inhabit time and eternity, tensions intense.

All in All

Obviously, the in the world/not of the world mystery moves far beyond the utility of a facile catchphrase. Jesus’s John 17:15–16 petitioning assures believers of the integrity of his power and authority:

“I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world,

but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”

For new generations with compelling commitment to Christ, this always uncomfortable teaching gathered impetus since Abraham’s calling into covenant community with the LORD God. Jesus’s paradoxical assertion bears heavily on Church History, without let up throughout the Millennium. Every provocative measure of this paradox hurts and cleanses the Body of Christ for praising the Trinity in the vastness and the beauty of the Commonwealth.

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ABRAHAM

The LORD God promised Abraham Canaan, Gen 13:14–15, all lands visible north and south, east and west. Always he and Sarah moved about, shepherding. Once they broke the in the world/not of the world tension, misusing a slave girl. Though the heir of the world, Rom 4:13, nevertheless, Abraham never actually owned “even a foot’s length,” Acts 7:5, of the Promised Land. Always, after the LORD called him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, Abraham with Sarah knew the time-eternity tensions.

2010/2015

18. Beginning with Jacob’s twelve sons and Israel’s subsequent tribal allegiances, the Twelve remained a constant. Matthias took Judas Iscariot’s place, Acts 1:26, and upon the James’s martyr death, Acts 12:1–5, Christ Jesus added Paul, the least of the Apostles, to the Twelve, maintaining the viable base of this number. Hence, even upon the dismissal of the Iscariot, I respectfully refer to the Twelve.

19. Thus far, John little accounted for Hellenism and Caesarianism, the latter only briefly, 11:48, that is, fear of Rome’s military intervention to quell riotous violations of the pax Romana in Jerusalem.

20. Lev 26:41; Deut 10:16; Ez 44:7, 9 develop this analogy with respect to the heart, Jer 6:10 with respect to the ear.