The Day the Revolution Began

The main task of this vocation is “image-bearing,” reflecting the Creator’s wise stewardship into the world and reflecting the praises of all creation back to its maker.

The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

being.

The name for this is idolatry.

we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar around seventy years earlier, it marks the end of one era and the start of another.

This lawbreaking is a symptom of a much more serious disease. Morality is important, but it isn’t the whole story. Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself.

and the Creator’s plan for his creation cannot go ahead as intended.

In the biblical model, what stops us from being genuine humans (bearing the divine image, acting as the “royal priesthood”) is not only sin, but the idolatry that underlies it. The idols have gained power, the power humans ought to be exercising in God’s world; idolatrous humans have handed it over to them. What is required, for God’s new world and

As we saw, the tabernacle was designed as a miniature heaven-and-earth, a “little world” in which God and his people would meet. It would be a miniature Eden. Now, however, it would be placed under strict conditions, because of the danger of rebellious humans bringing their polluted lives into direct contact with the holy God himself.