New creation

Such practices become the ordinary means by which the Holy Spirit shapes believers into people who increasingly love God with all their heart and love their neighbors as themselves.

N.T. Wright and the Hope of a New Creation by T. Scott Daniels.

I remember vividly the first time I heard the name N.T. Wright.

It was about 30 years ago.

But this critique has come not from Wesleyan Arminians, but from those in the Reformed tradition who read Wright correctly as undermining views of justification that don't lead to sanctification.

In other words, Wright gets critiqued for the same things and by the same people that most of us in the Holiness tradition get critiqued for.

The Resurrection, New Creation, and Holiness For Wright, the key to understanding New Testament theology is the resurrection of Jesus.

He has argued that for most first century Jewish believers, there were three things that were expected in the eschaton.

Well, this is the fifth episode of a five-part series we've been doing on the podcast called Resurrection as a Way of Life.

We've been exploring the importance and key role of the hope of new creation and resurrection in the mind and heart of a follower of Jesus.

And in this teaching, we're gonna explore the final pages of the Bible, the, the depiction of new creation in the Book of Revelation, and how crucial it is to understand the way that the Bible talks about this new universe as new.

Because it both means that it has profound discontinuities, ways that the new creation will be unlike our current way of experiencing the world.

But at the same time, the way that the final pages of the Bible describe the new creation shows there's also lots of continuity.

In other words, there's lots of ways that the new creation will be similar to the world as we know it.

It's both similar and dissimilar.

And what does that mean? And why is that even important? If the question has never occurred to you why that's an important thing to think about, I'm gonna hopefully convince you that it's a really, really important thing to think about how the new creation is both different and similar to our current world.

So we know that there was other people raised from the dead.

So why does the scripture say the firstborn over all creation? Have you thought about that? What does that mean? How can Jesus be the firstborn over all creation when we know for a fact throughout the Old Testament there was people raised from the dead? So what he's saying in Colossians, you are the generation on the planet today that is the new creation.

If you see Jesus, the resurrected one, as completing His assignment from the, before the foundation of the world, and you are in Him before the foundation of the world, you are part of the new creation that's walking this earth.

He's the firstborn over all creation.

That's a very important understanding for you to have.

Are you part of the new creation, or are y- or are you part of the first earth, the earth that was flooded? Because it's very clear that when Jesus went to hell, He preached to the ones that were in the first earth.

He preached to the ones that would never, uh, understand their assignment in heaven before they became flesh He showed them that He was the promise that they were spoken to about in Him, and they had the choice.

They had the choice to belong to the generations that walked this earth long before Jesus, and the generations that'll walk this earth long after Jesus.

I'm hoping to do a small seminar this November.

seminar on Jesus, if you will, but particularly the scripture I just gave which was 2 Corinthians 5 17 that we are a new creation in Christ Jesus.

I think it would be great and I've already written this seminar by the way.

It would be great for us to spend time asking the question, so what is new now that we are in Christ? And it's almost exhaustive.

AGAIN, I COULD TEACH ON THIS ONE VERSE FOR DAYS, MAYBE A WEEK OR TWO.

I'M JUST SAYING SOME THINGS VERY BRIEFLY, BUT IT'S TALKING ABOUT THIS NEW CREATION, OLD THINGS ARE PASSED AWAY, ALL THINGS HAVE BECOME NEW, AND ALL THINGS THAT ARE IN THE SPIRIT REALM, THE PART OF YOU THAT WAS BORN AGAIN, ARE OF GOD.

THERE IS NO IMPURITY IN YOUR BORN AGAIN SPIRIT.

SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT WHEN YOU GET BORN AGAIN, YOU STILL GOT SOME OF THE OLD NATURE IN YOU AND THEN YOU GOT THIS NEW NATURE AND SOMEHOW OR ANOTHER THEY'RE FIGHTING AND STRIVING BACK AND FORTH.

So you don't look at it so much as you look through it.

Like everything else in the new creation, the river does not point to itself.

It points to God and the Lamb.

That river, it flows from a single throne where God and the Lamb are seated.

And John plainly tells us Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit's whole work is turning us to see the glory of the Father and the Son.

the glory of God constantly before us so that what Adam and Eve lost sight of in the garden, you and I will never miss in the new creation.

Our eyes will behold his glory all the time.

Those phases, those eras and emphases are like this.

Creation, fall, promise, redemption, church, new creation.

Don't worry, we're gonna walk through that the rest of our message this morning, and we're gonna do it in a short amount of time.

So buckle up, here we go.

And we're not yet there.

And that's where we're going.

The final moment, the final movement of scripture is new creation.

Here's what 1 Thessalonians 4 says.

Now look at verse 17.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

Old things have passed away.

Behold, all things have become new.

And he asked the question, how can a man be born when he's old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? And Jesus said, verily, verily, I say to you, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

In verse 7, he said, marvel not, I say to you, you must be born again.

And so as a child of God, when I come up out of that watery grave of baptism to understand I am a new creation in Christ, I'm a new man, I'm a new woman.

My life is now redeemed.