Imagine you went to see a play. This play consisted of five acts and many different performers. You are there, sitting in the dark when the curtain opens and the play begins.
Act one finishes with the dilemma of the drama reaching its full height.
Act two closes with the appearing of the hero who will rescue the drama from the dreadful plight.
Act three is breath taking as the hero displays justice, beauty, and power, but concludes in the oddest of ways: the hero dies by the hands of the enemy. You are taken aback. Is this a tragedy?
Act four bursts forth with an unforeseen twist: resurrection! The hero has won. He has conquered, resurrected, and now will finally deal with the antagonistic enemy. But strangely enough the hero and the actors begin to walk out into the audience and grab people. Eventually grabbing you and bringing you onto the stage. They are looking at you to finish the play.
What information do you need to participate? A script? Yes, but what part of the script? The most important would be the end. The last Act would be the most necessary to inform you on how to finish the play.
This is the context of Christianity. Christ has come, died, resurrected, conquered and ascended and has invited all of humanity to participate in His mission. We speak of ‘missional’ church but often our mission is not shaped by how the story ends but by what will make our church grow. The question is not to be a missional church or not, but rather what informs our mission? The answer: how we think the story ends. The theological word for how things will end is eschatology. We must have an eschatologically informed mission.
In the middle ages, we adapted a rather odd view of eschatology. Mainly that we would leave earth and either go to heaven – white clouds, harps, and little angels singing to God for all eternity – or a “Dante’s Inferno” version of hell. But what we see at the end of Revelation is a new heaven and new earth, as Peter would say in his presentation of the gospel in Acts 3:17-21, “Jesus Christ…whom heaven must receive until the restoration of all things” and Paul in 1 Cor. 15:25, “Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet.”And then Christ will hand over the kingdom to God and God will be all in all.
The bible gives a very hopeful ending to the story: a new beginning, a resurrection as it were, for the people of God and the earth itself. It’s at this point one of my theological friends might say, “This guy does not believe in hell.” I do actually, and heaven too. Heaven is for real; it just isn’t the end of the world. But what I see Jesus, Paul, the writers of Hebrews (etc.) constantly pointing to is not the saving from a ‘hell’ but from sin; that which has made God’s world different than He intended, has been dealt with in Christ. New Creation has begun for anyone in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). The earth is groaning awaiting its full liberation into the ‘sons of God.’ (Rom. 8:19-21)
The rather platonic view of the ‘afterlife’ (clouds and harps) completely ignores God’s deep value for creation and His original intent in making Adam and Eve. The good creator God made a good world, and placed humans as His image-bearers in that world. Sin entered through Adam and Eve resulting in death which spread to all people and to the cosmos itself (Rom. 5:12-13). God called Abraham and made Him a promise that God was going to restore the whole thing. This reaches its climax in the coming of Jesus Christ, who through His life and death has conquered sin and death. In conquering sin, which has ruled every man, Jesus has become Lord over all. In His resurrection He is announcing the beginning of New Creation. Those who believe in Him are enlisted into His mission, which has been from the beginning to restore all things. Those ‘justified ’or ‘put right with God’ are now those through whom Jesus will continue to ‘put the world back to right,’ reaching fulfillment in the return of Christ and the full consummation of His Kingdom.
Therefore an eschatologically shaped mission is one that calls all men out from the rule of sin, which has put humanity and the world in its present condition, and into the life of the rule of God through the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, this mission is shaped by dealing straightforwardly with the effects of sin wherever we encounter it: taking care of the poor, the broken, the captives, the hurting, the homeless, and so on. And to care for and cultivate this world that God has created and will resurrect.