On New Creation

In my recent meanderings through books, interests, blogs, lectures, and other learning, I have seen the recurring theme popping up like a flag that captures my attention and grabs my heart. As time has gone on, this theme has latched onto my creativity. It is the doctrine of New Creation. The more that I am learning about this doctrine the more I am seeing how New Creation encompasses everything we know today in our present story and also what is to come. But open your imagination, because this requires much of it.

This isn't a radical new idea to me, for I think this has brewed and stirred in my heart all along with my love for story and creating, and how important I have always felt those things to be. Turns out, there is a lot of truth to that, and that knowledge brings me a great rush of joy.

If you take seriously the glorious promise that God created us to live forever, then what we do here and now matters far more than if this life were all.....
- Madeleine L'Engle

The aspect of New Creation I had never thought of before was that it is going on already.
It has already begun.

It started with Jesus.
With His sacrifice of the mortal kind, He conquered death. With His risen body, He became the first resurrection of New Creation.
If you are like me, you might have neglected a very big part of the story: the risen Jesus. The live body that walked around and mingled with the disciples, though different from you and me, meaning He could show up inside a locked room. Meaning, He was of New Creation. Which means that you and I are part of this New Creation as well.

I am so thankful that all my reading and learning for awhile has pointed me toward a better understanding of New Creation, because it is a seldom preached on topic. Also, it requires a great deal of imagination, which is exactly why I was so engaged by it and wanted to continue learning more.

It is exciting, to me, to have something to dig into theologically that will require story and imagination. I turn to two of my favourite books for the inspired reading that I read and re-read.
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis and Lilith by George MacDonald. These books make my heart soar on the images of New Creation. They stir my soul. They free my mind to think and expand way beyond the walls of my home and the confines of this world as it is now, imperfect. One day, this earth will be made as it was meant to be, but we cannot see it perfected yet; just hints and glimpses of it.

"God's kingdom" in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming "on earth as it is in heaven."

- N.T. Wright

This probably causes you to reshape your thinking. Do we really think about God's kingdom as being on earth as it is in heaven? Or do we think of God's kingdom as some other realm to which we must arise into?

At the end of the Narnia Chronicles, Aslan brings the children to a door, where they stand and watch Narnia die. They see the stars fall. They see the great giant Time awaken and squeeze the sun in his fist, and Aslan closes the door. But what lay before them is a marvelous land that seems so delightful and somehow familiar.

Aslan tells them all to "come further up and further in" and as they all cross the land with hearts full of joy they realize they knew the mountains and waterfalls. They were all the Narnian landscapes they loved, but somehow they were more real. More like the real thing.

When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant that Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here; just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world....And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking is from a dream. (The Last Battle)

They realized there was no need for them to mourn the old Narnia because the new Narnia was the perfection of Narnia and the country they were made for. These passages in The Last Battle have helped me imagine the utter joy of being in a perfected country in which the Creator delights and where it all comes together with no mistakes.

Yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story; in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean. (The Last Battle)

The feelings these finals chapters in Narnia provoke in me is hope and extinguishment of all fear. It is the promise of God fulfilled, and before I had read Narnia I had never heard it described as such. It was always a place up there somewhere where you dwell among the white clouds in a constant state of angelic singing. We will not be spirits floating up to a heavenly realm to strum instruments, we will be bodies among others in a perfected joined heaven and earth.

Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life - God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21-22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven, but rather the new Jerusalem coming dorm from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace. (Surprised by Hope)

It is when I began to see this ordinary life as something much more than ordinary, in fact it is hiding bits of heaven, I began to see how much everything matters here and now.

That is why what we create is so important. The words we write. The words we speak. The business we run. The art we create. The music. The peace we keep. The kindness we show. That is why we should care about the earth, its resources, its people. The suffering, the broken, the hurting.

This is why the disciples and Paul staked their lives on this and were in danger everyday. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that he would not have risked his neck everyday if he did not truly believe in the hope of resurrection and the promise of God. He did not act heroically because he wanted to look good. He did all that he did because of his complete faith in the resurrection. That is what drove him to keep on in the light amidst so much danger and darkness.

There is a nice symmetry in this: Death initially came by a man, and resurrection from death came by a man. Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ. But we have to wait our turn: Christ is first, then those with him at his Coming, the grand consummation when, after crushing the opposition, he hands over his kingdom to God the Father. (1 Corinthians 15.21-23)

Paul writes that if we do not believe in resurrection, everything we know is just smoke and mirrors. It is all just a nice story of a good man and teacher, but has no actual meaning. We would be walking around in the darkness, without real hope. But because Jesus has been raised and broke the hold of death, the greatest hope of all is available to us.

The darkness of the night is the preparation for the dawn of New Creation, waiting patiently for His coming.

In Lilith, the sleeping aspect prepares one to dream, as in Mr. Vane's case, which requires one to pass through a darkness. Dream mixes with the real and leaves me in a state of imagination where you travel into this other dimension with Mr. Vane and the possibility suddenly becomes the eventual clarity of a new dawn breaking and is more real than anything ever experienced.

See every little flower straighten its stalk, lift up its neck, and with outstretched head stand expectant: something more than the sun, greater than the light is coming, is coming - none the less surely coming that it is long upon the road! What matters today, or tomorrow, or ten thousand years to Life himself, to Love himself! He is coming, is coming, and the necks of all humanity are stretched out to see him come! (Lilith) 

The River grew lovelier and lovelier, until I knew that never before had I seen real water. Nothing in this world is more than LIKE it. (Lilith)

For now, we have images and story that expand our imaginations about what is to come. Until the day arrives, we shall lift our heads and wait with patient expectancy, know that what is coming is even more wonderful than what our most imaginative authors put in books.

For a few more musings on this topic, click below:
The Unknown, Remembered Gate
Come Further In, Come Further Up!

Resources:
1 Corinthians 15
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
Lilith by George MacDonald
Surprised By Hope by N.T. Wright