MrCrowder.Com

Strike & Counterstrike

Over two thousand years removed from the life of Jesus, the time he spent walking and getting dirty with common people is often overlooked for efficiency’s sake—we make the mistake of jumping straight to the death and resurrection of Jesus because we think it best helps us explain what Jesus does for us. I think this is foolishness; there is immense value for us in wrestling with what God was doing here in our midst through the person of Jesus. The following quote has been helpful for me in struggling through what the fleshly ministry of Jesus can mean for me, one of his followers, today:

For Jesus his ministry of exorcism was not preparatory to the kingdom, nor a sign of the kingdom nor an indication that the kingdom had arrived, nor even an illustration of the kingdom, but actually the kingdom of God itself in operation (GH Twelftree).

If Tweltftree is onto something, and I contend that he is, then the actions of Jesus are far more than just preparation for death & resurrection. This is why I’ve struggled with the Protestant, Pauline view of salvation (even with Covenant theology in general)—it assumes two things I cannot reconcile with the Gospels: 1) that salvation is primarily about getting me to a heavenly afterlife and 2) not until the death & resurrection of Jesus were people able to connect with the way God “really” intends for things to be.

If these things are true, then the extraordinary life of Jesus can only be amounted to a sideshow. However, if Jesus’ life is the point, including his death & resurrection, then we have a rich calling that includes confronting evil. In the same article, Twelftree alludes also to the idea that the confrontation of the evil in the world is an indication that Jesus is beginning something that will come to full culmination in the eschaton. This is small but significant and even paradigm-shaping: our calling is one of confronting the anti-God (or evil, or Devil, or sin, or brokenness) in the world. A Gospel-bound definition, in all of its overt connectivity with the Hebraic scriptures, helps us define salvation in a community context which is fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant—something Jesus’ teaching like the Sermon on the Mount is intimately connected with. Yes, Jesus is upholding the law and showing the utmost fulfillment of it as a counterstrike to the evil men have been able to wield on one another.

And that’s the calling we have to wade into. Being counterstrikes to evil. Jesus’ incarnation, plus death & resurrection, is what pulls us into this vortex of confrontion with evil that we call salvation. We are being reformed into something we could never be without being folded into the life of Christ: the antithesis of evil.