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 Bringing Heaven Down To Earth
Connecting This Life to the Next
by Nathan L.K. Bierma
Chapter 4
Beating Our Swords: The Greatest Commission
• Synopsis
• Discussion Questions
• Quotation Citations
• Further Reading
Synopsis
The second verse of Revelation 21 unveils the New Jerusalem, a cultural center, as the setting for eternal life. The biblical narrative, sketching an arc from garden to city, is a progressive story. Its momentum suggests that God does not start from scratch in heaven, but salvages and integrates the cultural development of the earth into a better existence. The short answer to the famous puzzle of the meaning of life--who are we and why are we here--is answered in the cultural commission of Genesis: we were made by God to fill the earth, to shape it, develop it, to coax it into a cultural existence. Since sin entered the world, evil culture-making glorifies humans instead of God. But Isaiah suggests that God will redeem the sinful work of our hands; Micah says he will beat our swords into plowshares. We must begin to do this already in our current cultural surroundings, and must long for God to complete this transformation on the new earth.
Discussion Questions
• What do you find surprising, and what do you find appealing and comforting, about the Bible's portrayal of culture in eternal heaven?
• What examples of what the chapter calls "culture-making gone awry" are especially troubling to you?
• How would you explain Christians' calling "to be earthly without being worldly"?
Quotation Citations
• Dyrness, William. The Earth is God's. On "what we make of creation,” p. 58. On "our situation is necessarily transformed," p. 85.
• Mouw, Richard J. When the Kings Come Marching In. On " 'filled' by the broader patterns," p. 35. On "broke off a branch," p. 36. On "the 'breaking' of the ships of Tarshish," pp. 29-30. On "a disembodied existence in an ethereal realm," p. 19. On "to miss the half of Isaiah's message," p. 31. On "we should wait actively, not passively," pp. 129-130.
• Plantinga, Cornelius. A Sure Thing: What We Believe and Why. CRC Publications, 1986. p. 271.
Further Reading
Greydanus, Richard. "The Cultural Mandate and the Spirit of Agrarianism." Comment.
September 2005 V. 24 I. 3. Accessed at <http://www.wrf.ca/comment/article.cfm?ID=126>
Mouw, Richard. He Shines in All That's Fair: Culture and Common Grace. Eerdmans, 2001.
Van Til, Henry R. The Calvinist Concept of Culture. Baker Academic, 1959, 2001.
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