Looking Forward to the 17th Dimension

Chapter 9 of Dual Citizens is on the unworthiness of this world when compared with the glories to come. And of course this is quite right, but we still have to sort out the implications.

There are a few things that Jason asserts in this chapter that rub my fur the wrong way, but he doesn’t really develop them. I will mention them here up front in case they come into play later in the book.

First, he asserts that this world’s activities are ultimately pointless because they exist in time. “In a word, time renders all of man’s earthly pursuits utterly pointless” (p. 104, emphasis his). He appears to be making this point about the passage of created time itself, and not the passage of fallen time or fallen history “under the sun.” This appears to me to be very dangerous. It locates pointlessness and futility, not in sin and rebellion where it belongs, but rather in something that God created and pronounced good before there was any sin or rebellion.

“And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day” (Gen. 1:12-13).

God created time, and it was good. It was not subject to futility.

This creates trouble and difficulty at the other end of history as well. We will be raised from the dead as human beings, and we will live forever as glorified men and women. If the glorification of humanity entails the removal of time, it is difficult to see in what way we can look forward to it. The discontinuity between this life and the next is no longer the discontinuity between dishonor and honor, or between corruption and lack of corruption, but rather a discontinuity between life in heaven and earth, and life in the 17th dimension. In short, this equation of futility with the mere existence of time appears to confound a creational good with sin. But man fell into sin. He didn’t fall into time.

A second problem lies with Jason’s handling of the natural revelation of Romans 1.

“This god, Paul explained, does not save anyone for the book of nature reveals a naked god of law, of justice, and of seeming indifference to human pain . . . Nature’s god appears as an absentee landlord, an insignificant other who may be there, but who is certainly not here . . . And even if he is out there, he appears to be too indifferent to listen, too holy to help, too transcendent to touch, and too vengeful to invoke” (p. 108).

This is honestly hard to fathom. Jason is treating the God of Romans 1 as though he were an inscrutable power, distant and far removed. But Paul says precisely the opposite. The problem is not sinners wishing they could somehow attain to knowledge of God. They have knowledge of God, and it sticks to them in a way they hate. They cannot turn around without seeing the God who reveals Himself plainly in every leaf on every tree, and they take this truth, and they suppress it in flagrant unrighteousness. What Jason makes distant, Paul brings near. Paul uses words like manifest, revealed, clearly seen, and understood. In Paul’s assessment, there is no distance between God and man, but also no fellowship. Again, the problem is sin, not distance.

The way Jason describes the problem, we feel sorry for the sinners who have to deal with a Deus absconditus. The way Paul describes it, we see the righteousness of God’s wrath, visited upon those who insisted on having nothing to do with the God in whom they lived and moved and had their being.

I am not sure why Jason would make this kind of move, unless it is to keep the realm outside the church (which is where natural revelation preaches) free of all explicit obligations to Jesus Christ. But Paul preached the true name of the unknown God to the Athenians. And here in Romans, he was not preaching the name of the known God into obscurity. The God who reveals Himself to all men is the true God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the one who sent the Holy Spirit into the world. The God of Romans 1 is not a generic god, and He is not inscrutable. The miserable wretches described in Romans 1 only wish He were inscrutable.

That said, on to the central point of this chapter. Jason sets before us two of God’s saints who left Egypt in different ways — Joseph and Moses. Joseph came a slave and died a prince. Moses grew up as a prince and left with all the slaves. Joseph left after he died, when his bones were moved. Moses left before he died. But both of them clearly held the riches of Egypt at just the right level of esteem.

And here is where I have to commend Jason for seeing and acknowledging something that is frequently not seen in these discussions. It is at least a good beginning. He quotes the entirety of Hebrews 11:33-38, and notes how the writer:

“moves seamlessly from those whose faith resulted in their conquering kingdoms and stopping the mouths of lions to those whose faith resulted in their being imprisoned or sawn in two. The point of presenting so stark a contrast with such a cavalier nonchalance is stated near the end of this section — neither the triumphs associated with the victorious saints of verses 33-35 nor the defeats of those described in verses 36-38 are ‘worthy’ of drawing their subjects’ attention away from the enduring blessing of ‘receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken’ (12:28).

Amen. This is super important. This is hyper important. This is good old regular important.

But what I don’t understand is why the positive side of this kind of achievement “by faith” is off the table in the new covenant. Yes, there are thundering dominionists who know not what spirit they are of. When you try to do anything right, this is the kind of world where it is easy to veer off into wrong. This applies to all kinds of Christian political action. But men go to the stake in this fallen world, and martyrdom is no infallible protection against the subtleties arrayed against us. If I give my body to be burned, and have not love, I am nothing. But how could this be worked into an argument about the dangers of giving everything up for Jesus Christ? How could it be turned into an argument on the follies of martyrdom?

When you enroll in a math class, you will have math problems. Those math problems are not an argument for staying out of the class. When you resolve to follow Jesus Christ, you will have “following Jesus Christ” problems. If He gives you victory, you will have victory temptations, like Gideon. If He gives you the opportunity to doubt Him while in prison awaiting execution, like John the Baptist, you will have those kinds of problems.

We can fail at being well-fed. We can fail at being hungry. Or we may learn from the apostle Paul in both conditions. It is not the case that temptations await us if we seek to engage in the culture wars, but not if we disengage. And the possibility of spiritual failure in both directions is not an argument for not taking up the cross that the Lord assigns to us. God wants some men to be Jeremiah, and others to be Moses. He wants some to be Alfred and others Bonhoffer. Some godly men head up armies that lose, and other head up armies that win. Both are called to do what they do in the world in the name of Jesus Christ, and with true evangelical faith. The kingdom of God is not a “one size fits all” operation. This is not affected by whether the kingdom of God as a whole enjoys temporal and historical success in this world.

The bottom line is this: there is absolutely no inconsistency between wanting the nations to acknowledge Jesus Christ, and to labor for their conversion, on the one hand, and acknowledging that nothing will finally and ultimately be put right until the resurrection, even if the nations are fully converted, as I believe they will be.

So the question is — can the kind of successes enjoyed in Hebrews 11 be imitated by new covenant saints? Is this something we may do in the name of Jesus?