Weekend Reads: Expanding the kingdom and following Christ

God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth

By Greg Beale and Mitchell Kim

What is a temple? Ideally speaking, it is a place in which God dwells. Centuries of metaphorical usage may have obscured for us the obvious significance of a phrase like “the house of God,” but the fact is that God lives in His temple like you live in your house.

This is relevant precisely because God created this earth to be like His heavenly temple: “He built his sanctuary like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever” (Psalm 78:69, ESV). This was seen clearly in the beginning, when God specially dwelt in Eden and there had fellowship with His people. Adam was supposed to expand the boundaries of Eden and fill the earth with the revelatory presence of God. He failed. So God provided an actual temple in Jerusalem. There, He lived among His people. Then He preeminently revealed Himself in Christ, who is the true temple because He is the true dwelling place of God among men. The church is like the lampstand in the old temple: It shines the light of Christ to a dark world. The church is like the court of the Gentiles: It is trampled underfoot by the wicked. The church is like the incense altar: It prays day and night. Ultimately, the church is like the Holy of Holies: God dwells in it, and someday His Holy of Holies presence will expand to fill the entire New Heavens and New Earth.

Such is the basic storyline of Greg Beale and Mitchell Kim’s God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth (IVP Books, 2014). This is biblical theology at its best: rich, allusive, big-picture building, and applicatory. Beale and Kim will help you see how the entire Bible centers on the theme of God’s presence with His people—and what that means for daily life.

Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

By Mark Labberton

“At your church, will I meet people who are like Jesus?” Mark Labberton, then pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, Calif., found this question so incisive that he more or less wrote a book about it. Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today (IVP Books, 2014) is an extended meditation on vocation. Hint: It’s not about personal prosperity. Rather, the main thing is “the vocation of God being lived through the vocation of the church for the sake of the vocation of the world.”

Called is one of those books where you think that either it is brilliant or he’s just using a lot of big words. I’m pretty sure it’s the former. Labberton’s major premise is that God is making all things new. We participate in this coming of the kingdom by living consistently as followers of Jesus. At the same time, salvation is not a reward for performance; “Our first vocation is to be the beloved. The primacy of God’s unearned love alone makes this possible.” We are beloved in community. Worship, especially the sacraments, reminds us of this corporate identity. It also frees us to actually live like Jesus—not perfect, but consistent. “When those who claim to be followers of Jesus never seem to get … to the place of pervading faith and love, something is wrong with the faith or with the person, or both.” Actually living as part of the church will show us our need for grace faster than anything else. But it also gives us the opportunity to show “unexpected love.” We do this by living out the wisdom that is “character in action in the face of life’s real needs.”

Labberton can be overly cerebral—he is the president of Fuller Seminary, after all—but his teaching works.