Slow Mission and the Old Testament

(From Your place in God’s world)

‘The time has come.’

These were Jesus’ first recorded words–as we have seen–as he started work on his Messiah start-up project.

He was capping the well of history: everything before was now ‘Old’ testament; from now on it was new.

How to summarize what he so neatly ended? Old Testament history can be read as picking out shapes in a stormy landscape.

The storms are the squalls of judgement and mercy, of alienation and return that sweep across history. The shapes underneath are the outlines of God’s coming kingdom: a King, a Shepherd, a healing of waywardness, a heart transplant, the flow of ‘living water’, peace being made,  a people flourishing, a spreading multitude of followers.

Then the storm clears, and Christ, the Kingdom embodied, steps into the waiting sunshine.

 

 

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