THE FINAL MARRIAGE?
“The Apostles’ Creed”, is my favorite ‘declaration of faith.’ It is compact, to the point, and devoid of dualistic notions. Its ending is simple and unambiguous: “I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and Life Everlasting.” In the new Creation, I should add.
My thoughts, celebrating my 97th birthday this past week, and thus entering my 98th year, have centered increasingly on the end of not only my life, but equally, on the life of the current civilization, our modern ‘way of life’, rapidly showing a great element of finality, to put it cautiously.
Books, dealing with this situation, are becoming increasingly popular, witness GOLIATH’S CURSE, citing 4 immediate threats: Fiscal fragility, resulting in economic collapse, ecological overshoot, such as Climate Change, AI = computer overreach, and Political and legitimacy crises. Each of these can do us in: imagine a combination of the four!
Two more books.
First, there is Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, a birthday gift from my oldest son, AGAINST THE MACHINE, with as subtitle, On the Unmaking of Humanity. In it, Kingsnorth describes how the Machine, in the name of progress is destroying the earth itself, and reshaping us in its image, in the process causing us to lose our humanity.
And then there is Eliezer Yudkowsky, American computer scientist, who released a new book, co-written with Nate Soares, called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” referring to AI.
In it, he’s trying to make this argument to the public — a last-ditch effort, at least in his view, to rouse us to save ourselves before it is too late.
Back to Jacques Ellul.
These books remind me of Jacques Ellul, the former professor of law, in Bordeaux France, and his prophetic book: “The Meaning of the City”. In it he describes how, “The City is the world of man: the City is his creation (made in his image) and has become his pride because it reflects his culture and his civilization. The City is also a place of absurdity, of chaos, and of man’s power over Nature, a place of slavery par excellence.”
Ellul recounts how, through the course of the Bible, the birth of the city opposes God’s Paradise: that’s why Esau founded ‘the City’.
However, God has placed us in a garden because this is our natural place, the place to which we are best adapted. But we, the new Esau humanity, want to separate us from God/Creation and determine our own destiny, now all too obvious.
Much of aboriginal thinking heralds a return to nature, a return to the original Paradise state, looking forward, as the Bible anticipates, to the perfect city, the New Jerusalem, as attested in Revelation 21: 2: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
Yes, the New Creation is the Bride! And we, the New Humanity, are the Groom! With Jesus being among us as ‘the First among Equals!’
That text affirms Isaiah 62:4: “And the land will be married.”
That new marriage will be between ‘the land’ and humanity! That is what the Bible teaches us! “The Land which God called ‘good’ seven times.
The city is precisely the place created by man. It is the affirmation of man taking his life into his own hands, independently of God; it is the expression of man’s rebellion against God. God has placed humanity at the garden, a place adapted to him. But we refuse the life for which God has destined us, and have gathered and organized ourselves to depend no longer on nature.
Each morning I start with reading the applicable Bible Readings for the day. Lately Jeremiah’s prophecies of the Looming 70 years exile, are daily among its passages. God’s warnings then were ridiculed by the ‘pious’ in Jerusalem, just as today the avalanche of warnings is ignored as ‘nonsense’, lack of faith in technology.
Ellul presents the Christian hope, which leads from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem foretold in Revelation. But before that happens, before the new era arrives, we must listen to what the land is telling us. And what is the land is telling us? We’re definitely in the ‘pyrocene’ — the time when fire dominates Earth.
Michael Wara, who studies wildfire at Stanford, says, “It’s so tempting for people to think that the cause of these enormous catastrophes is the person who drops the match, who drops the cigarette.” But, he says, “that’s just wrong.” What holdover fires teach us more than anything else is that the ignition doesn’t matter nearly as much as the buildup of fuel does. “What can burn will burn.”
Well, on good authority – both on the Bible – the written Word – and on Creation – the Created Word, I can, in confidence, write, that we must, joyfully, prepare ourselves for the New Marriage to come: The Groom being the New Humanity, headed by Christ, and the Bride being The New Earth. Rejoice: A marriage made in heaven!
“As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Daniel 12: 13.