Open Up the Heavens (6): Our True Assembly
“But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed steadily into heaven and saw the glory of God...And he told them, ‘Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing in the place of honor at God’s right hand!’” - Acts 7:55-56 (NLT)
In addition to the present ministry of Christ and the present empowerment and gifts of the Holy Spirit, rediscovering a robust doctrine of the ascension leads us to consider how the worship of heaven intersects our worship on earth.
If Christ is in a physical, glorified body in a real, physical place called heaven, what is that place like? How does Scripture describe it? How should the worship of heaven inform our worship here on earth? How are the two related? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when we think about the doctrine of the ascension and its implications for worship. The twelfth chapter of the book of Hebrews has long intrigued me. The author writes:
You have not come to a physical mountain, to a place of flaming fire, darkness, gloom, and whirlwind, as the Israelites did at Mount Sinai…No, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering. You have come to the assembly of God’s firstborn children, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God himself, who is the judge over all things. You have come to the spirits of the righteous ones in heaven who have now been made perfect. You have come to Jesus, the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks of forgiveness instead of crying out for vengeance like the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:18, 22-24).
I’d like to list all of the present realities the author says we have come to:
· Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.
· Countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering.
· The assembly of God’s firstborn children, whose names are written in heaven.
· God himself, who is the judge over all things.
· The spirits of the righteous ones in heaven who have now been made perfect.
· Jesus the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people.
· The sprinkled blood, which speaks of forgiveness.
That is quite a list of present realities! I’d like to share a comment by William Lane, a mentor and close friend of Michael Card. In his commentary on Hebrews, Lane writes:
The vision of arrival at the City of God poses for Christians a crucial issue: What is real? What is real to you? So long as Christians live as if the real is what can be touched, tasted, and grasped with the senses, as opposed to the realm of the spiritual which must be grasped by faith, they will not mature. Our attitude toward reality tends to reflect another aspect of the materialism which effects us so profoundly. If something lacks materiality, so that it cannot be grasped in a tangible way, we tend to dismiss its reality…Hebrews affirms that the greatest expression of reality is God and the assembly of those who gather in his presence.1
This is where the rub between faith and materialism really comes into play. Are we going to believe by faith that there is another reality that we cannot see, but is nonetheless real? Or are we going to dismiss the present reality of heaven because we are so infected by materialism and simply cannot truly acknowledge or believe in things we cannot see? Nathan Bierma captures the lure of materialism well in his book, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth. He writes:
Easing our grip on the material goods and work routines with which we anesthetize ourselves to the transcendent…we may get a glimpse of heaven itself, and reach for its glory without relenting.2
To me this is the question. This is the question we must settle when it comes to the present ministry of Christ, the present empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and the present sphere of heaven. Are we going to exercise childlike faith in unseen realities or will we continue to remain anesthetized to the transcendent?
If Christ is in a physical, glorified body in a real, physical place called heaven, what is that place like? How does Scripture describe it? How should the worship of heaven inform our worship here on earth? How are the two related? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when we think about the doctrine of the ascension and its implications for worship. The twelfth chapter of the book of Hebrews has long intrigued me. The author writes:
You have not come to a physical mountain, to a place of flaming fire, darkness, gloom, and whirlwind, as the Israelites did at Mount Sinai…No, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering. You have come to the assembly of God’s firstborn children, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God himself, who is the judge over all things. You have come to the spirits of the righteous ones in heaven who have now been made perfect. You have come to Jesus, the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks of forgiveness instead of crying out for vengeance like the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:18, 22-24).
I’d like to list all of the present realities the author says we have come to:
· Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.
· Countless thousands of angels in a joyful gathering.
· The assembly of God’s firstborn children, whose names are written in heaven.
· God himself, who is the judge over all things.
· The spirits of the righteous ones in heaven who have now been made perfect.
· Jesus the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people.
· The sprinkled blood, which speaks of forgiveness.
That is quite a list of present realities! I’d like to share a comment by William Lane, a mentor and close friend of Michael Card. In his commentary on Hebrews, Lane writes:
The vision of arrival at the City of God poses for Christians a crucial issue: What is real? What is real to you? So long as Christians live as if the real is what can be touched, tasted, and grasped with the senses, as opposed to the realm of the spiritual which must be grasped by faith, they will not mature. Our attitude toward reality tends to reflect another aspect of the materialism which effects us so profoundly. If something lacks materiality, so that it cannot be grasped in a tangible way, we tend to dismiss its reality…Hebrews affirms that the greatest expression of reality is God and the assembly of those who gather in his presence.1
This is where the rub between faith and materialism really comes into play. Are we going to believe by faith that there is another reality that we cannot see, but is nonetheless real? Or are we going to dismiss the present reality of heaven because we are so infected by materialism and simply cannot truly acknowledge or believe in things we cannot see? Nathan Bierma captures the lure of materialism well in his book, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth. He writes:
Easing our grip on the material goods and work routines with which we anesthetize ourselves to the transcendent…we may get a glimpse of heaven itself, and reach for its glory without relenting.2
To me this is the question. This is the question we must settle when it comes to the present ministry of Christ, the present empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and the present sphere of heaven. Are we going to exercise childlike faith in unseen realities or will we continue to remain anesthetized to the transcendent?
If we do acknowledge these things then the next question is, “So what does it mean for us when we gather to worship that we are surrounded by a heavenly city, thousands of angels, God, Jesus, and a great assembly of saints?” I love this quote by Annie Dillard in her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.3
This quote makes me think about the end of Hebrews 12:
Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe. For our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:28-29, emphasis mine).
Verses like this keep a tension between the fact that we are called to come boldly to God’s throne of grace; however, we are still to worship him with holy fear and awe! We can’t escape these divine tensions in Scripture. There is something about the nature of corporate worship, as it pertains to us coming into the present realities of heaven that should evoke a holy fear and a holy joy, at the same time.
It is at this point that we can learn from our Orthodox brothers and sisters. The following quote was taken from the website of St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in New York. It is a great window into their beliefs about worship and liturgy, heaven and earth:
Let the Christian consider well when he enters the church that he is entering another heaven. That same majesty of God which is in heaven is also in his church, and on this account the Christian must enter with reverence and awe.4
The Orthodox faith takes seriously the claims in the book of Hebrews and exhorts the Christians to “consider well when he enters the church that he is entering heaven.”
In the next post of this series we will look at what it means to live on earth as a citizen of heaven.
1 William L. Lane, Hebrews: A Call to Commitment (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 1985) 169.
2 Nathan L.K. Bierma, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2005) 39.
3 Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982) 52-53.
4 Website, St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church.
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