God's Endgame--April 17, 2024
[Peter said:] "And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send his Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets." [Acts 3:17-21]
So... what does God want to see happen with the world? What is God working toward in the course of history, both human history and cosmically speaking? Or in other words, what is God's "endgame" with the universe?
I ask for a couple of reasons. For starters, there's always some bit of news here or there that gets people thinking about the end of the world. Last week it was a handful of folks misreading their Bibles on eclipse day who were convinced the eclipse was a sign of the "rapture" (which--side note--is not even really what the Bible teaches). Today I read a news story saying that scientists think that measurements of decreasing "dark energy" in the cosmos might mean that the universe will end in a "big crunch" where the cosmos collapses into a single point (cheery thought). And of course, in the back of my mind is that concluding line of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," which says, "This is the way the world ends/ not with a bang but a whimper."
And along with that running chatter of sound bytes about the end of the world, an awful lot of people sitting in pews have been taught somewhere along the way that God is primarily interested in zapping people, judging sinners, and pouring out wrath on the reprobate mass of humanity. That was the official party line from the faculty of the fervently "Christian" college I went to, and it's on the airwaves of religious programming every day of the week still, not to mention crawling all over social media and the internet. A very large number of Respectable Religious folks who name the name of Jesus are convinced that God's big plan for the universe is mostly to damn the majority of people to hell and eternal suffering, to leave the earth to decadence and destruction, and then to offer a tiny sliver of humanity a spot in a celestial afterlife. That's pop culture Christianity for you--some variation or another on "Be good and believe correctly or else you'll be on the wide road to hell."
The trouble, however, with that telling of the story is that it doesn't actually listen to the voices of the Scriptures themselves. Because, to hear Simon Peter himself tell it--continuing on in a passage many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, God's capital-G Goal with all of creation is "universal restoration." The end of the universe's story, as Apostle Pete says, is neither a whimper nor a bang, but something more like the final chord of a symphony that resolves the tension of the earlier dissonance. It's more like the incandescent beauty of a sunset than the despair of endless fire. It's about the gathering up and mending of "all things," not the zapping and destruction of all but a tiny minority who earned get-out-of-hell passes for their good behavior.
In other words, God's intention for the whole universe is bringing everything to life--to share in the risen life of Jesus--not to give everything over to the power of death. God's design all along, as Peter tell it in Acts 3, has been advertised and announced through the prophets for God to make all things new. And the coming of God's Messiah, Peter says, was intended all along to be God's means of refreshing, renewing, and restoring all creation--so that all the universe could share in the resurrection life of Jesus. Anything less than that is a vision too small.
Maybe that's our real problem, for us church folk: all too often, our vision is too small. We think of our faith in narrow terms about our own individual afterlife--we think only in terms of "How do I make sure I get to heaven when I die?" rather than in terms of God's bigger endgame of making all things new. We treat the non-human world, from plants and animals to waterways and our atmosphere, as mere scenery and raw material for us to use and exploit, rather than things God cares about. We act as though God is basically preparing to incinerate the vast majority of the cosmos, save for a tiny fraction of humans who believed the right theology, did the right deeds, or racked up enough heaven-points, and as though God thinks that's an acceptable outcome of the universe's story. No wonder it is so easy for some Respectable Religious Folks to treat anyone who is different as less-than: if you already believe that God is hell-bent on wiping them out in a thunder of wrath, it will be very easy to treat others as unworthy of your time or empathy. We can end up shrugging off the deaths of countless faces as just not worth our time because we've been told they aren't important to God's big plan for the world. And that kind of theology ends up making us callous, cold, and indifferent--entirely unlike Jesus.
So there's good reason for us to pay attention to what Peter has to say. Listening to his message here in Acts 3, it becomes clear that we've been settling for a shriveled caricature of the real God, who actually intends to bring "all things" into the "universal restoration" toward which all of history has been moving. God's intention in Jesus has been to make all things new and to share his risen life with the world. The question, I suppose, then, is whether we'll turn around (that is, "repent") from our old, myopic vision and turn toward God's real endgame--the gathering up and restoring of all things.
That's a vision I could get behind. That's a picture so big it would take my whole life to try and take in. I think that's worth giving my time to in this day.
How about you?
Lord Jesus, captivate our vision with your expansive will to restore all things in your risen life.
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