Attempting to make our world a better place is about as natural for us as springtime follows winter. Yet this was not always so.
Israel’s contribution to religious sensibility is generally thought to be confined to their belief in monotheism (one God) and/or their identification and codification of ethical norms (the Law). Neither, however, was unique to them.
Ethical codes were common in the ancient world. And Egypt had an earlier belief in one God. Rather, what distinguished Israel was its groundbreaking insistence that God is involved in human history.
Prior to this discovery, life on earth was random and chaotic, at the mercy of the gods. The actions of these gods had a decisive impact on humans but, and this is key, they couldn’t have cared less how their actions affected us. In fact, had they cared, they’d be disqualified as gods.
When Adam and Eve misuse their free-will, deny the limits of what it means to be human, and try to make themselves gods, they are banished from the Garden, flaming swords preventing their return. From now on humanity is consigned to live “East of Eden,” where sin and evil rage and lust. Humans have been left to their own devices.
Not content, however, to allow His children to suffer, or to deny them the perfection and peace intended at Creation, Israel’s God devises a plan. Beginning with Abraham, God initiates what modern scholars have dubbed “salvation history.’ Henceforth time has meaning and purpose, and actually moves towards something. It has been granted the dignity of both a beginning and an end. History now matters.
As such, what we humans do, our actions, have newfound import. We have responsibilities. And we are judged on how faithfully we do them. As individuals and as a civil order we are to reflect God’s righteous will, knowing that to do so is to invite harmony and peace. We are commanded to seek God’s goodness in our world.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Promised Land. God was eliminated from the equation. With the advent of Darwin’s evolutionary ideas and the “God is dead” movement (along with other 19th century misdeeds), the impetus to seek the good became a secular one. Humans were fully in charge.
The biblical witness, found in both the Old and the New Testaments, possesses two basic themes. One is the prophetic, and the other, the apocalyptic.
The prophetic relates to certain individuals called out from the group to set forth a godly vision, usually when things have gotten off track. The prophetic voice calls the people back to God, and to the tasks God demands for the common good.
But the other biblical theme is as important, if not more so, at least within our current context.
The apocalyptic says that just as there was a beginning, there will be an end. For Israel this meant the “Day of the Lord,” that time in the future when God would restore life on earth to its ideal state. The long-awaited Messiah would come. Evil and sin would be banished forever.
The New Testament anticipates the same thing, though here Israel’s long-awaited Messiah already has come in the form of Jesus Christ. Then begins a new interim phase, from the time of Jesus’ appearance to the establishment and duration of the church, as the world prepares for Christ’s return and the final consummation. Biblically, we live in that interim time.
But this is mostly forgotten or rejected today, even in our mainline churches. Instead we focus almost exclusively on the prophetic, that is, on creating a better world in the here and now.
Yet in dispensing with the apocalyptic, we risk violating the essential biblical truth that only God can fully and properly repair our world. Without a healthy and sobering awareness of human limitation, we end up, in our conceit, thinking we can create a heaven here on earth by means of human agency, the very same sin committed, ironically, by Adam and Eve. One can see how this fits in, albeit unwittingly, with the secular project that has left God out almost entirely.
So once again to the question: “Are we then to do nothing (about making our world a better place)?”
The Christian answer, the biblical answer, relates to our station in life. Properly, we are exiles, strangers in a strange land, pilgrims “on the way.” This world is not our truest home. Heaven is. From which we are temporarily exiled.
Analogously, exiled from Jerusalem and forced to live in ancient Babylon, a “homeless” Israel receives word from God, through the prophet Jeremiah, in the form of these instructions:
“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29)
The message here is this: while we wait for God finally to establish “heaven on earth,” when we shall return to our truest home, we are to work for the welfare of the place in which we live, for “its welfare is [our] welfare.”
The difference, of course, between this approach and a humanly-secured heaven should be obvious. We are to do what we can, knowing our limitations, and trusting in God finally to make it right. In God’s time and in God’s fashion.