Intimacy in relationships

Such will be the power of God to glorify and fully to sanctify his people, that the unity, freedom, and intimacy now most fully experienced in Christian marriages will flood all relationships among the people of God. The agape that has (so to speak) gained momentum within marriages, will flow into all other relationships as well. … in that Day such freedom and love and intimacy will be more than a concept, more than an ideal, more than a longing; it will have become our normal way of relating to one another – our daily routine. ^{(Knox Chamblin, Matthew, p.1091)}

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The stone tomb became the womb

The stone tomb became the womb through which the new creation was born into this world on the third day in the Person of Jesus Christ.

source: Resurrection and the New Creation: An Easter Sermon – Rev. C. R. Biggs

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When this toilsome warfare will all be ended

Oh! happy day, when this toilsome warfare will all be ended, Jordan crossed, Canaan entered, the legion-enemies of the wilderness no longer dreaded; sorrow, sighing, death, and, worst of all, sin, no more either to be felt or feared!

Here is the terminating link in the golden chain of the everlasting covenant. It began with predestination; it ends with glorification. It began with sovereign grace in a by-past eternity, and no link will be awanting till the ransomed spirit be presented faultless before the throne! Grace and glory!

If the earnest be sweet, what must be the reality? If the wilderness table contain such rich provision, what must be the glories of the eternal banqueting house?

Source: John Ross Macduff, ‘The Faithful Promiser’

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Heavenly lovers

note: In the quotes below Jonathan Edwards, the last of the Puritans, is not referring to husbands-wives but of loving Christian relationships generally. In the quotes below he describes the eternal love between God’s people.

“How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other’s beauty; how soon do they see all that is to be seen! … And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communication more intimate” (Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, 13:198).

“Heavenly lovers will have no doubt of the love of each other. They shall have no fear that their professions and testimonies of love are hypocritical; they shall be perfectly satisfied of the sincerity and strength of each other’s love, as much as if there were a window in all their breasts, that they could see other’s hearts. There shall be no such thing as flattery or dissimulation in heaven, but there perfect sincerity shall reign through all. Everyone will be perfectly sincere, having really all that love which they profess. All their expressions of love shall come from the bottom of their hearts” (Jonathan Edwards, Yale, 8:378).

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New Creation

“Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the ‘bondage to decay.’”

 

From Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720

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New Heavens and New Earth

In Revelation 21:1 and 2 Peter 3:10 we are told that the present earth and heavens will “pass away”.

Does this mean that they will cease to exist? Not entirely. The old creation will give way to the new creation in such a way as there will be a radical transformation of what now exists.

This might be illustrated as below:

This earth will pass away as a new creation emerges.

The caterpillar will pass away and the butterfly will emerge.

The tadpole will pass away and the the frog appear.

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one God and two worlds

A story is told about Rabbi Joseph Schneerson, a Hasidic leader during the early days of Russian Communism. The rabbi spent much time in jail, persecuted for his faith.

One morning in 1927, as he prayed in a Leningrad synagogue, secret police rushed in and arrested him. They took him to a police station and worked him over, demanding that he give up his religious activities. He refused. The interrogator brandished a gun in his face and said, “This little toy has made many a man change his mind.”

Rabbi Schneerson answered, “This little toy can intimidate only that kind of man who has many gods and but one world. Because I have only one God and two worlds, I am not impressed by this little toy.”

Philip Yancey, in The NIV Student Bible (Zondervan, 1996)

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