God Gets Everything God Wants by Katie Hays

Author:Katie Hays
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

CATCHING ON, CATCHING UP

You know how some movies are teed up for a sequel in the final scene, and as the credits roll you find yourself anticipating how much fun it will be to catch up with characters whose arc clearly has a distance yet to travel? Or how some books cry out for another installment with an updated setting and better cellphones? The Bible is like that: there are plotlines begun within its pages that aren’t really wrapped up by the canon’s closure.

That is to say, there are things God starts in the pages of scripture that God hasn’t yet finished within the pages of scripture. That whole conflict between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, for example, doesn’t actually get all the way resolved with James the Elder’s announcement in Acts 15. We can see that one playing out in Paul’s epistles to the churches he started, where the ongoing theological rift has the potential to become interpersonally contentious* and to damage the church’s loving reputation.

But the ethnic division between Jesus’s followers was far from the only manifestation of the fragmentation of the human family playing out in our ancestors’ culture and church. The generalized instruction throughout the Bible to “love your neighbor” required specific correctives along the way to help them (us) see that the better part of love requires liberation from the power differentials that keep some people up and some people down, or hold some people in while forcing some people out.

And in several cases, the prescriptions for resolving the imbalance are like arrows launched from a bow—the arrow is launched in the Bible’s pages, but it has not landed by the time you turn the last page.* Our ancestors in faith could point to possibilities for equity and equilibrium as features of God getting everything God wants, but they hadn’t achieved those aims just yet.

They were waiting, as it turns out, for it to seem good to the Holy Spirit and to … us. Yep, that’s right—a couple thousand years down the road, some arrows launched by our ancestors in faith are finally landing. Here are three cases where I’ve seen it.

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