What is Our Hope for a Broken World? (Repurpose Your Life, Part 5)
Series: Repurpose Your Life (Part 5)
Author: Dr. Steven L. Childers
Title: What is Our Hope for a Broken World?
Article 5: Question 5: What is Our Hope for a Broken World?
Our news headlines make it clear that our world is horribly broken. Disease, corruption, violence, poverty, and injustice are ravaging the lives of billions of people.
This brokenness is not just physical and spiritual, but also cultural, economic, and political. Like a deadly virus, it’s contaminating and threatening the foundational pillars of civilization, including our families, schools, governments, politics, religion, media, and the arts.
As followers of Jesus, what is our hope for this broken world?
There is an unseen spiritual reality at work in the world, and the only ultimate solution is found in God’s promise that he will eventually make all things right.
So how has God promised to make all things right?
The Good News of Jesus Christ
The good news is that the Father’s creation, ruined by humanity’s sin, is being redeemed by Jesus Christ and restored by his Spirit into the kingdom of God on earth.
In the first century, God’s rule, God’s kingdom entered the world to make all things new in a way it never had before through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, God promises to give all who believe in him not only the forgiveness of sins but also a new heart and a new world when Jesus returns.
The Good News of the Church of Jesus Christ
In the meantime, Jesus is continuing his cosmic restoration project to redeem and restore broken humanity and the world through his Church. The Church is the only institution that God has promised to build and to bless for the sake of our broken world. Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).[1]
God works through all kinds of institutions and organizations, but the church is God’s primary instrument for making his “kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). Jesus is not the head of any other institution or organization except the church.
Nations will rise and fall. Governments, institutions, and organizations will come and go. But the church of Jesus Christ will remain forever.
This vision of seeing God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven reflects the vision of Abraham Kuyper who famously said: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “'Mine!”[2]
God promises that the blessings of salvation in Christ will eventually reverse all the sinful effects of the fall on not only our souls and bodies, but also on all our societal institutions and structures. All the sinful distortion and twisting of fallen humanity and creation away from God’s original design will be gone when Jesus makes all things new.
The Apostle Paul saw all the churches he planted as Kingdom Outposts through which the spreading flame of the gospel, in word and deed, would be released to glorify God by making his invisible kingdom visible over, not only human hearts, but also over every broken structure and sphere of life until it reflects the order of heaven.
This is our ultimate hope in life and death.
Footnotes:
[1] The Apostle Paul writes that “God's intent is that now, through the church, his manifold wisdom should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 3:10).
[2] Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.