resurrection
THE FIRSTBORN OVER ALL CREATION
DISCOVERING AN EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY WITHIN
Resurrection
RE-DESIGN
Jesus’ death and torturous sacrifice is for all creation and us as imagebearers all the more incredible when you consider he did it all fully human and fully God. At no point during His life here on earth did He allow His humanity to swallow His divinity. Nor to have His divine life overpower His human frailty. He was partaking wholly in humanity and wholly in Trinity at every single second. Moment by moment held in tension. He lived and then died human too. He spent three days fighting for His body. In fact did not leave His humanity behind even in His resurrected immortal body. He came back human – eating, speaking, vulnerable, embodied and touched. Appearing to the women first and only then the men. His human embodiment raised up incorruptible. When Thomas touched Him, we discover that He also retained His wounds! This throws into question how we define perfection. He exists resurrected and re-designed as the first fruits of the resurrection of All Things. The cross, death and resurrection has a ripple effect, both backwards and forwards, in the timeline. Jesus fulfilled everything predicted of Him. Every promise, every covenant, every Psalm, every law, as a fully human man and then ascended to the right hand of the Father, as the only begotten Son. He is there now, with all things under His feet, human now, and forevermore. The Trinity has welcomed His humanity into full fellowship.
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24 Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he “has put everything under his feet.”Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.
– 1 Corinthians 15:12-28
Every priest goes to work at the altar each day, offers the same old sacrifices year in, year out, and never makes a dent in the sin problem. As a priest, Christ made a single sacrifice for sins, and that was it! … So, friends, we can now—without hesitation—walk right up to God, into “the Holy Place.” Jesus has cleared the way by the blood of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before God. The “curtain” into God’s presence is his body.
– Hebrews 10:11-12, 19-20
“… the Christian gospel . . . tells how for the world’s redemption God entered into history, the eternal came into time, the kingdom of heaven invaded the realm of earth, in the great events of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.”
– F. F. Bruce
Firstborn of New Creation
THE PROTOTYPE
We were made in the image and self-portrait of Christ from the start: human. So we are modelled after the second person of the Trinity, the Son. We were great imagebearers, who subsequently fell and no longer respresented God well. We became more like poorly lit selfies. Until Jesus comes, as the professional and perfect self-portrait of God, now we can see what we were meant to be from the start, but could never attain. He has to grow into His imagebearing ability as both the Son of God and the Son of Man, which He does in moment by moment choices. In his death, He enters into our broken selfie imagebearing as he takes on our sin and dies, only to rise again as the first-born and first fruits of the Coming Kingdom. Every prototype is the fulfilment of the blueprint and template for many others to follow. We will all be raised into a new incorruptible human body, exactly like Jesus’ resurrected body. He is right now the prototype of what we will become as new Humans in the New Heaven and New Earth. Indeed He became a creature to redeem all of Creation and made of atoms to save every atom. The resurrection is the dynamo that will transform all that we see and all that we don’t see into the likeness of Jesus from start to finish.
Re-Design
THEME
The theme of Re-Design is something all creatives understand. While working on an architectural plan, a website, doing project management or hearing from a client in a consultation, we have all had to work with other factors to achieve the right results. God has worked with us, making us players on the stage of Creation. Our choices, successes and failures are all woven into the overall design. A patchwork of glory and gore and loose ends, which when turned over, we get to see what God was doing all along. He has been working on the same project all along and will bring it to a glorious completion. Indeed, our work and lives are included and given a prominent position as we are His imagebearers.
Entering into the story…
To be like Jesus, as resurrected and renewed human persons, is not just our future hope. It is our present calling. John’s first letter twice exhorts the church that the sign of being in God’s love, individually and communally, is that “in this world” we are to look “like Jesus”! Listening to Jesus and the Father by the Spirit, we are to participate with the Triune God in the life of the Kingdom already in our midst, empowered to participate in both glory and suffering. – Cherith Nordling
Read the passage linked below and imagine the scene as if you were a movie director working with the characters. Often, we do not enter scripture with our humanity intact and we do not dignify the characters we find there by giving them their humanity in return. The goal of Lectio Divina is to meditate on the scene we find there and allow the characters to speak to us by vividly imagining the scene as if we are standing there physically too. Ask Holy Spirit to make the scenario come to life as you read using all of your senses to visualise everything in the scene…
John 20:1-29 – Jesus Comes back in a Fully Human, Resurrected Body.
Jesus starts popping up everywhere. He reappears in a human but incorruptible, resurrected body. He must look similar but not immediately recognisable. Most of those He appears to He has seen in the last week, yet, when Mary sees Him or the two disciples on the road to Emmaus or when the other disciples or Thomas see Him at first, they are stunned when it dawns on them! Still, He is human, He can be touched, seen, interacted with and He speaks to them. Often He asks for food. His humanity is fully intact. He is the prototype of what we will be, since we are made in the image of God at the start, we will also be made in the image of God in Christ in the end. How amazing.
He’s back! Imagine the surprise? What would you be feeling if you were in the room? If you were Mary? Or the two on the road back to Emmaus? Or if you were Thomas who immediately says, “I will only believe if I can touch His wounds?” Ok, lets stop there for a second… Why does Jesus in His resurrected incorruptible eternal body, carry His wounds? What does this mean? This is not my idea of perfection? If He did not have the scar tissue, would Thomas have believed? Poor Thomas is now always known as “Doubting Thomas”. Yet, if you were there to see the wounds yourself, I think we would be fascinated too. I might want to touch them as well… Indeed, Jesus gives them full access to His side, His head, His hands, His feet. The marks are all over His body, though there is no pain. What does this mean to you? The lamb slain from before the foundations of the world is now back from the dead and He retains the marks of His sacrifice. What a way to memorialise His redemption of all things?
If Jesus’ story of His life and death and resurrection are carried forward into the prototype of what we will all become as imagebearers of God in the new Creation If His story is etched into His body, will we also carry marks from this life into the next? I don’t know… We don’t become something else, we become embodied spiritual human beings, in the final resurrection just as Jesus did here! How wonderful and weird to think about! 1 Corinthians 15 is all about Resurrection and it is fascinating to read.
Click here to read the story of Hiro Onoda and consider how it syncs up with Thomas, who could not believe until he saw for himself!
1) Prepare: Close your eyes, breathe, focus your mind, and ask God to enter into this time of prayer with you. Ask God to speak to you through this image.
2) Lectio (read): Open your eyes and scan the image. Note what draws your interest, but continue to scan the whole image. Close and rest your eyes a minute.
3) Mediatio (meditate): Open your eyes and let your eyes be led. Focus on just the part of the image that caught your eyes and name it. Close your eyes, seeing that piece of the image in your mind.
4) Oratio (pray): Open your eyes and look again at the piece of the image that caught your eye. Allow it to bring forth a word, image, or emotion. Close and rest your eyes.
5) Contemplatio (contemplation): Open your eyes and gaze at the whole image. What is God speaking to you today through this image? How will you respond to Him? Spend time processing that with God. Pray or journal about it.
In John 21, a very interesting thing happens. Peter, the same disciple who refused to believe that Jesus would die, but who had correctly stated that Jesus was the messiah, had gone on to deny Jesus three times. On the third time, when Peter swore he did not know that man, Jesus and Peter’s eyes locked. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times” – Luke 22:61
Judas and Peter had both betrayed their master and denied him. Judas committed suicide as a result. What had Peter done? All of the disciples were left reeling by the events of a few days ago. They were left disappointed, confused and destitute. Their Messiah was in the grave. So what would they do? It turns out that for most of them, what they knew was fishing, so they went back to what they were familiar with. Peter and John and a few others were back in the boat when a familiar figure greeted them from the beach, yelling out, “have you caught anything?” It turned out they had not. Nothing all night long. Nothing to show for it. The figure told them to throw their nets over the other side and they weren’t strong enough to pull all the fish in. It seems their story was about to turn full circle. Then the disciple Jesus loved said to Peter, “It’s the Master!”
When Simon Peter realized that it was the Master, he threw on some clothes, for he was stripped for work, and dove into the sea. The other disciples came in by boat for they weren’t far from land, a hundred yards or so, pulling along the net full of fish. When they got out of the boat, they saw a fire laid, with fish and bread cooking on it. Peter did not hesitate. I am sure he was not sure what would happen next if he did run towards Jesus, but he also did not dive overboard and swim away. I am sure it took as much courage to run toward Him as he had mustered before to walk on water out to Jesus. He dove into the water and rushed toward Jesus. What a weird situation. What do you say to a friend who is back from the grave? I’m not sure what the protocol is for that. I’m sure it was pretty awkward, but Jesus softened the blow by telling them breakfast was ready. The scenario was so familiar and yet, Jesus was back and different all at the same time. There was no doubt it was really Him!
They ate together. 15 After breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Master, you know I love you.”Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” 16 He then asked a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” “Yes, Master, you know I love you.”
Jesus said, “Shepherd my sheep.” 17-19 Then he said it a third time: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”Peter was upset that he asked for the third time, “Do you love me?” so he answered, “Master, you know everything there is to know. You’ve got to know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I’m telling you the very truth now: When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but when you get old you’ll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you don’t want to go. He said this to hint at the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. And then he commanded, Follow me”.
Three times Jesus asked that heart wrenching question and I am sure that the questions rang in Peter’s ears as he recalled his denial. Three times. Heart breaking, Peter reaffirms His love for His master. I’m sure it was harder to do each time Jesus asked. Yet, this is a beautiful, vulnerable and intrinsically human exchange between Jesus and Peter. Two human beings exchanging heartfelt words and a restoration of a disciple.
15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. – Hebrews 4:15-16
Christ has wounds
Creation has wounds
The Church has wounds
The World has wounds
So we all have a Saviour who is wounded and by His wounds will heal all as the sacrificial lamb and High Priest over all.
Embodied Spirituality in Practice
A DISCIPLINE OR PRACTICE TO INCORPORATE INTO YOUR LIFE.
23 Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
– John 12:23-25
IMAGEBEARER: TENSION REFLECTION
Getting in touch with our own baptism into Christ’s life, death and resurrection…
Notice the Tension between Death and Resurrection in the gospel account. Where do you feel…
Death is a pre-requisite to Resurrection. We cannot receive resurrection unless we partake of death. Sometimes, we think the reverse is also true, if we had not sinned, we would not need Christ. However, it may have always been the plan that Christ would come in human form. How else would God make one family out of Trinity and Humanity forever. The start of the Bible is about a Trinitarian God making all things, but Creation and Imagebearers have no place being in true Trinitarian Fellowship with God. Only when Jesus comes as the Spirit of Christ born into the human race do we have a mediator between God and man. Only He is the Way, the Truth and the Life to bridge the gap between eternal God and finite man. God wants to marry the two into a new reality. The end of the book seems to lead us back into relationship, just like the start… But actually it is more than that, it is a marriage between image and Imagebearers. The two shall become one. We will always be human and God will always be God, but now our humanity has a place of permanent home in Trinitarian Fellowship, all because of the God-Man, Jesus. He is the missing link so to speak between God and Man.
Life comes out of death.
23 Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
– John 12:23-25
The lamb slain from the foundation of the world has been the template for how new life comes from the start. There is a change from living for self to becoming something of a metamorphosis from one state to another. Death is the step in between, a loss of the old and a birth into the new. It is transformative, painful, surrender, sacrifice, loving, the loss of all things. A change has to occur in us for new life to spring forth. We are filled with potential, but it has to be sacrificed and then we become made new. We are perfected through the things we suffer. If this is the template used in the prototype of Christ, how much more true will it be for every other son or daughter of God to be brought to glory in His image?
Howard Malmstadt was a modern spectroscopist, futuristic innovator, and prolific educator. At the height of his career, he left to become a missionary with Youth With A Mission and co-founded what would become the University of the Nations.
Tom Bloomer (Provost Emeritus of the UofN) says the following about him:
What did Howard leave us? Many things could be said, but here are some that stand out to me.
— A brilliant example of lifelong learning that is innovative and modular
— A wide-angled vision of missions defined at its broadest, including the Arts, the Sciences, in other words all of the Lord’s Creation: it all fell, so it must all be redeemed. Jesus came for that purpose, and He calls us to join Him on that path.
— A collaborative way of working that was team-based and committed to the success of others
— An intense desire to help others learn, every day, at every meal, at any cost
— A restless creativity that wonderfully diverged from the paths others trod
— A clear-eyed view of the stakes involved in training for missions: the same as his training in World War II, a matter of life and death for multitudes
— A rigorous commitment to excellence that was an example even to the scientific community
But above all, Howard was to me an example of excellence crucified. Like Jesus whom he followed, he was not content to stop with being excellent; but he turned his back on the recognition, finances and positions that could have been his at the height of his scientific career and joined . . . us. YWAM. He turned his back on the contemporary idol of excellence for the sake of excellence, and laid his professional life down to come and help clear weeds from the grounds of a broken-down hotel in order to start building a University that would become, in the phrase he received from the Lord in prayer, a “multiplier for missions.” Then he spent the next 25 years working at educating us toward his vision of this global university that would significantly advance the Kingdom of God.
So what must we do to receive Howard’s inheritance? It’s simple, but far from easy: Spend a lifetime becoming excellent in one area, then allow the Lord to break that excellence into pieces, to be able to use it to feed needy multitudes.
Here is a related Spiritual Practice called “Healing” for you to explore.
Application
DISCOVERING AN EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY OF DESIGN CREATIVITY AND THE ARTS.
At each step along the itinerary of the Biblical Timeline we will look at how the following themes come into play at each juncture of the journey…
If we don’t understand Trinity, we get very confused about the basic aspects of our faith. The God-Man died as a human being. If God had died the whole universe would cease to exist, as He upholds all. Every ounce of evil in the demonic world was focused on this one man hanging on the tree. This was the chance to end Him for good and derail all of God’s plans for redemption, re-creation and reconciliation. If Jesus dies as a human being, the chink in God’s armour was not only revealed in Adam, the original imagebearer’s utter failure would now also be confirmed in Jesus, the final imagebearer’s death! To succeed over God’s plan in this one man, is to condemn the whole plan to hell. All creation, every creature, the genealogy Israel, God’s plan for every Gentile, His new creation. The inclusion of all things and the reconciliation of God to include all things in Christ. All must be put under His feet as High Priest and human being forever included and incorporated into Trinitarian fellowship. Jesus is the skeleton key to heaven and to hell, He unlocks possibilities that were only before hinted at, but now about to become a new reality. It all flies or falls with Jesus of Nazareth! Resurrection is the one thing that Christianity hinges upon, going forward and indeed rippling back through time. Without resurrection, everything we believe is a lie and a facade. Jesus would need to resurrect as He lived. Fully God and fully man, for the rest of eternity. It was the plan of God in sacrificing the lamb who was slain from before the foundations of the earth. God foresaw the necessity of Jesus becoming human in His imagebearing for God and for us. He partakes of our human life, so that we can be included in His divine life. The family of man and the family of Trinity are married together in Him. In His birth, His life, His death and in His resurrection. If we skip a step, we have nothing!
Our shared humanity with Christ is the key to everything. He did not just die in our place, He died as fully human. He also went into the abyss knowing that God would somehow by His power give Him as a human being the ability to ransack hell, arise into heaven and take His place at the right hand of the Father in the presence of the Holy Spirit to partake of Trinitarian Fellowship as the Spirit of Christ in a human body. So when Paul says everything has been put under His feet, Jesus is the name used. In Jesus we find a joining of God and imagebearer as it was always intended. God has fulfilled the part of Father and also the part of only begotten Son. He does what every faulty imagebearer could never do, as the perfect imagebearer. He is fighting for His humanity through the grave, through death, He is infected with every disease and partakes of all human suffering and will not leave to return in resurrection unless it is with His body. If He arises as the Spirit of Christ, He has lost something in the process. Jesus is fighting for all things in the process of His death, burial and resurrection and he will come out embodied, integrated and wholly human, just as He was born and died fully human. His desire is to do the same in us and in all creation. To take every imagebearer and present them before God as fully human, blameless and perfect in His sight. To do this, He must come back fully God and fully human and then ascend, forever baring the marks of His suffering as the lamb of God. He defeats sin and death, so that we can follow Him into the same incorruptible human resurrection as the firstborn of the New Creation. All things will be included in this resurrection from the dead in time.
When Jesus starts appearing to His beloved disciples, women first and then the men… He does so in a new incorruptible body. Paul speaks of this at length in 1 Corinthians 15. In every place He appears, they have found beforehand that He is missing and left a gaping hole punctured in their reality. It has left them deflated, depressed and destroyed the faith that they once had in the Messiah who had been with them for years of fellowship. Jesus’ body was somehow transformed by the power of God, yet it is the same body. He did not exchange His previous body for an upgrade, somehow, the same body is transfigured into new. This body still bears the marks of His suffering so that we realise it was a once and for all suffering. When I think of perfection though, I do not think of scar tissue. So, Jesus is fully matured and perfected through the things that He suffered. This new body can do all the things he could do before, but now has been endowed with an ability to walk through walls, appear and disappear while still eating, talking, handling things and as real as it ever was. How does this show what God will do in us, as His plan all along is to use Jesus as an image of God that we will become in our own image bearing. He is embodied and at our resurrection, we will be too. Will we have scars too, I don’t know, but we will be recognisable and the story there will be connected to the story here, yet without pain, sorrow or sin. Jesus chose and chooses to partake in our humanity not just for 33 years on, but for the rest of eternity, the change is a permanent fixture of His being. There is no going back now, He came as a missionary into our family and now has taken our humanity, language and culture, redeemed it and included it in His Trinitarian family. In the same way we might bring the best of other cultures back into our own family customs and life.
Jesus, in His person, Has brought all things together in His being. He did this as the son of Man, taking the whole of the scriptures, the law, the prophets and fulfilling them in our midst, as a human being. Perfected and sinless in His humanity, He was not just a spiritual saviour to save the spiritual aspects of creation, He was also a physical creature to save all of the physical world. He became all things to save all things. In this one man, we find all men. Just as all sinned and fell in the first Adam, so all will be made alive in the second Adam. God made it all in the beginning and is wanting to resurrect it all in the end too. So, where we see disease, we know that it will not always be with us. Where we encounter death, we also know that this is a temporary state of being. It was not there in the beginning and likewise will not be there in the end. Where we see suffering, we know too that God will wipe every tear from our eye. This is the promise of God for all things. So what of the hell we have created here, it will be removed and all who will not partake of this Trinitarian fellowship will by their own choice choose not to be included. It is God’s desire that all will come to repentance, but there will be some who refuse to be where He is and so they will receive what they wish. God’s desire is not to predetermine who will be saved but to allow us to choose if we will accept His life, accept that we will be transformed and that we will be with Him where He is, but for those who desire to be anywhere but where He is… He will honour their choice and give them every chance to choose differently. God made all things and has made ransom to get all things back into a glorious new creation, where we will be embodied and our languages, tribes and tongues and all that makes us distinctive will be included in a cultural procession of the glory of all nations submitted at God’s feet.
When Jesus appeared with His scars, it was scar tissue, there is no pain or agony in His resurrected body, however, it is important to Thomas and all of the other disciples that He is embodied and that they can touch him, put their fingers in His side and that He is still one of them. Thomas would not have believed if Jesus did not return in human form. If they could not embrace Him, break bread with Him and have communion with Him. Indeed Communion is an embodied experience. It is done with our whole bodies. It is a human table with human food to celebrate that Jesus was a human being. That His body was broken and that His blood was spilled for us. It does not get more tangible than that. So, now when we pray “in Jesus name” we are not pleading with Him or wishing that if only He understood what it was like down here, if only He could feel what we feel or know what disease does to human cells or how death wreaks havoc to white blood cells as the cancer spreads or the tumour grows. If only He could feel the after-effects of rape or the emotional scars of abuse or the way a bullet rips through tissue. Well, actually He does understand all of it! There is not a pain that He is unfamiliar with. Every gut wrenching moment of life, He has watched from the first groan of the fall up until His own death on the cross and on until this very moment. He hears, He watches, He enters in. His heart has always been for the abandoned, the broken, the voiceless and the homelesss and hopeless. He came for the sick, not the healthy, for those in prison, not the innocent. If He can save the worst of humanity, the most lost, the most antagonised, the most leprous and the forgotten and destitute, then everyone else is included in His victory anyway. There is no Imagebearer who is too far gone for God. Even the worst of genocidal dictators can be found in Christ, with their dying breath, yet they will still answer for what they have done as Imagebearers.
This is good news for all humanity, but even better news for designers, for dancers and for those of us who build things, work in construction or do town planning, plumbing or any physical labour. Even those of us who build websites, or virtual worlds. Our work matters. What is of God will last. We will find beautiful music that we have written here that will be played in heaven, there will be cultural artifacts that God will redeem from every culture on earth. Wonderful fashion, beautiful choreography in incorruptible bodies, we will sing, we will work and our work will remain. What is not of God will be removed. We will neither remember it nor feel it’s affects as we have here. Our work will matter there just as it matters here, but it will be pure delight, and an endless joy. We will learn new things and all the gaps of time and situation and circumstance here will be complete there. So, we would work hard with an expectation that our work here when done to the glory of God will appear there. Equally those who have lived here as Imagebearers in broken bodies, with bad hearing, bad eyesight or in wheelchairs will there live with incorruptible and whole bodies. We will see and hear and move with ease. Our eyes will be opened to see Heaven and earth unified once more and we will see not just some things but all things. Cherubim and seraphim and all of the angelic hosts will be with us along with many creatures familiar and unfamiliar present and accounted for.
This resurrection life is not something we are waiting for, it can be experienced here and now. We can pray for healings and like Jesus experience it here. We can discern what God would have us do, like Jesus and act in obedience as He did, all while being fully human as He was. Our lives are fuller and deeper as we embrace all of our embodied spirituality. We will engage in baptism, communion, in worship and intercession and meet as a body of faith, which also is at work in every area of life, as educators, creatives, scientists, politicians, businessmen, artists, parents and pastors. It will take all of us, all of our vocations and all of our physical and spiritual gifts expressed in the body to see every Imagebearer hear this good news of the gospel of all things and to enter into this fellowship that Jesus offers us to be with this Trinitarian God for eternity. We can come as we are, fully human and be transformed moment by moment into the likeness of His son. Aware that not all has been made right, but it will be. That not all suffering has ceased, but we are moving in that direction and that all creation will be redeemed so we can live toward that end. We live in the now-and-not-yet between the times and there is much joy to experience and also much suffering to be had in the process. The joy will win out of this we can be assured… This is abundant life, where Christ’s yolk is easy and His burden is light. We pray in His name and He understands every word as if He is one of us, because of course He is!
Creative expression
INSPIRATION AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION FROM A CREATIVE
MAKOTO FUJIMURA
FINE ARTIST:
Mako Fujimura is forging a new kind of art not just through his work, but with his life. An internationally renowned painter, he is also a deeply generous spirit, as dedicated to the welfare of his community — the art community, his church, his neighborhood—as he is in the purity and integrity of his craft.
Creative Assignments
DISCOVER THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST AS THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE NEW CREATION OF ALL THINGS
Assignment: Think about the Resurrection accounts. How does the prototype of Christ show you how your body will be resurrected too? We will be New Creatures, made of Atoms like creation, able to eat, will we have scars as He does? Why does He have scars? Read 1 Corinthians 15 and write a few paragraphs in response to it envisioning your own resurrection body and how you think it will be based on what you have discovered in this stop of the Biblical narrative. How does Jesus continue to be The Image of God now and for all eternity as fully God and fully man?
This is a chance to express yourself creatively. Perhaps something in this part of the timeline has challenged, excited or inspired you. You may want to think about how you could express that through drawing, writing, painting, filming, designing or photographing something to share with others here at creativeimagebearers.com.
Optional: In addition to the assignment above, please write a haiku, poem, song or create a piece to express yourself and share it with us!
Submit Creative Assignments
This is where Creative Imagebearers submit their creative assignments for each module of the coursework.Final Take-Away to give context…
PROVOKE THOUGHTS, QUESTIONS…
Jesus’ death was torturous. He said to the Father, ”If there is any other way, let this cup pass from me”, but then submitted sacrificially to have His body broken and His blood poured out for us, a sacrificial lamb. He is the image of God sacrificed for all imagebearers to be found in Him. He also said, “Take up your cross and follow me!” So, we are called to follow the lamb of God to the cross too. We are not promised safety, what God has done in Jesus, He longs to do in us. So, just as Jesus’s body was laid into the grave, it was the same body that was raised back to life. Just as He suffered much, we will also suffer. As the world hated Him, it will hate us. But be of good cheer, He has conquered the world, sin and death and by this one seed falling into the ground and dying, all of us, in resurrected bodies like His will be raised up when He returns again and makes all things new. Heaven and earth united.
He took His excellence to the cross and became nothing for us. He lived a life of sacrifice, a man under authority to the Father and submitted to the Holy Spirit moment by moment. In the Garden of Gethsemane he begged, “Let this cup pass from me, but not my will, your will be done.” This was a man who was totally submitted to God. What He models in life, He also modelled in death. Like Isaac he laid down His life. Jesus becomes the fulfilment of every covenant in life and in death, He is the fulfilment of the sacrifice to make a way for all creation, all families, every nation and ushers in a new kingdom, everlasting and incorruptible. One not made by human hands and everlasting. He is the prototype of this new reality.
Just as Jesus has a resurrected body, so will we. He is the first-fruits of the New Creation: A new Heaven and a New Earth. In fact all of reality will be redeemed and recreated based on Him. Just as we were made in the image of the Word of God in the beginning. So, all will be made anew in the image of Him in the end. All things will be placed at His feet. He is incarnate now, after the ascension and seated at the right hand of God once more. The second person of the Trinity and the second Adam for ever. What God did in Christ, perfecting Him in His suffering. He will do in us too. So, if we suffer, we recoginise the deeper purpose of pain is to make us in His image, in life, in death and in the kingdom to come. We will rule and reign with Him as His creative imagebearers both now and forever.
