Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N. T. Wright

Author:N. T. Wright [Wright, N. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Religion, Christian Life, Spiritual Growth, Christian Theology, Apologetics, Christianity
ISBN: 9780061920622
Google: c1YHjMGSANcC
Amazon: 0061920622
Barnesnoble: 0061920622
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2010-02-08T22:00:00+00:00

God’s Spirit and God’s Future

The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present. That is the first, and perhaps the most important, point to grasp about the work of this strange personal power for which so many images are used. Just as the resurrection of Jesus opened up the unexpected world of God’s new creation, so the Spirit comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born, the world in which, according to the old prophets, peace and justice will flourish and the wolf and the lamb will lie down side by side. One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one (which Paul calls “the present evil age” and Jesus calls “this corrupt and sinful generation”).

That is why St. Paul, our earliest Christian writer, speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee or the down-payment of what is to come. The Greek word he uses is arrabōn, which in modern Greek means an engagement ring, a sign in the present of what is to come in the future.

Paul speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee of our “inheritance” (Ephesians 1:14). He isn’t simply using an image taken from the ordinary human transaction whereby, when a person dies, someone else inherits his or her wealth—an “inheritance” from which one might perhaps receive something in advance, an early first installment. Nor is he simply speaking, as many Christians have supposed, of our “going to heaven,” as though celestial bliss were the full “inheritance” God had in mind for us. No. He is drawing on a major biblical theme and taking it in a striking new direction. To grasp this is to see why the Spirit is given in the first place, and indeed who the Spirit actually is.

The theme upon which Paul is drawing when he speaks of the “inheritance” to come, of which the Spirit is given as a down payment, is our old friend the exodus story, in which Israel escapes from Egypt and goes off to the Promised Land. Canaan, the land we now call the Holy Land, was their promised “inheritance,” the place where they would live as God’s people. It was where—provided they maintained their side of the covenantal agreement—God would live with them and they with God. As both the foretaste of that promise, and the means by which they were led to inherit it, God went with them on the way, a strange holy Presence guiding and directing their wanderings and grieving over their rebellions.

So when Paul speaks of the Spirit as the “guarantee of our inheritance,” he is evoking, as Jesus himself had done, this whole exodus tradition, the story which began with Passover and ended with the Promised Land. He is saying, in effect, You are now the people of the true exodus. You are now on your way to your inheritance.

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