Quote:
Originally Posted by shag
The city…
Gal. 4:22-26
Hebrews 11:16
Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 12:22
Instead, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to myriads of angels
Hebrews 12:23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect,
Hebrews 13:14
For here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
Revelation 21:2
I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Question:
What exactly is the “non permanent city” in Heb 13:14, and what exactly is the “continuing city”?
(As well as the, “he has prepared for them a city”, in Heb. 11:16)
Are all of these passages simply speaking of the church, old covenant vs new? |
Abraham was called by God and promised several things: he would be the ancestor of a multitude of nations; he (through his descendants) would be a blessing to every family, nation, and tribe in the earth; he (through his descendants) would have a land of their own; and his descendants would be the people of God in covenantal relationship.
Despite these promises, he and his son Isaac and grandson Jacob nevertheless lived as Bedouins, sojourners or pilgrims, strangers or migrants living in the very land they were promised to inherit. They dwelt in tents or tabernacles, temporary dwelling places, basically like Gypsies. So he and they looked forward to something more permanent, something established by the promise of God and effectuated by Divine Providence and Power. Thus, they looked for something built and founded, designed and constructed, by God and not by man.
As dwellers in tents is used to indicate their current status (during their lifetime), the "city" is used to indicate the contrasting thing promised to them. Thus, the city to come, the permanent or "continuing" city, is a symbol of that Promised condition which would be permanent (as compared to their temporary existence as pilgrims and sojourners). They looked forward with faith in the promises of God, although with the visible eye they could only be viewed as travellers. The thing promised was as yet "unseen", that is to say, it was not yet manifested or come to fruition.
It is called "the heavenly city" because it is established and founded by God. It is identified with the same thing the church is looking forward to - the permanent society established by God. This is represented in the Revelation as the heavenly or new Jerusalem.
This is not saying that Abraham was looking forward to dying and going to heaven. Nor that he was looking forward to some future that had nothing to do with the actual promises made to him and Isaac and Jacob. Too many people try to reverse engineer or read modern Christendom's eschatology back into the Patriarchal faith. Rather than following the Bible and maintaining that the original Patriarchal faith IS the faith once delivered to the saints, taught by Jesus and the apostles, as well as the prophets all through the Old Testament scriptures.
God originally established a family in a Garden. That was the beginning of what should have been a heavenly society, the kingdom of God in the earth. But due to Adam's sin, and the following corruption of his descendants, the society was destroyed, only Noah and his three sons and their wives surviving. Noah's descendant Abraham was then called by God, to be the "father" of the reconstituted kingdom of God in the earth. Thus he is the "father" of the faith, or to put it another way, the saints walk in the same faith as Abraham.
Abraham was promised to produce a multitude of nations, covenanted with God, to bear the light and truth of God to all families on the earth. This is the message and "story" of the Bible. The "church" is simply those descendants of Abraham who are in covenant with God, as His people, the vehicle through which God's promises are being carried out. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the prophets, and the saints of the new covenant, all looked (and look) forward to the same thing - the fulfillment of the Divine Promises made to Abraham.
The problem is, many professing Christians these days have not examined what exactly they are looking forward to, to see if it is indeed the same thing Abraham was promised and which the Bible speaks of throughout its pages, both old and new testaments.
As far as the church's relationship to the "continuing city", the church - Israel in the new covenant - is that continuing city in its current pilgrim form. Just as Abraham and his family were the society or kingdom of God in the earth in its then-current pilgrim form. According to
Hebrews 13:14 the church in this world is still in its pilgrim state, looking forward to the manifestation of the promised goal. The Revelation depicts the city coming down from God out of heaven to the earth, which represents the final and permanent installation or establishment of the promised Abrahamic society or kingdom of God in the earth. This manifestation or establishment includes the submission of all nations to the rule of God through His people, and persists into the "eternal state". That is to say, once it is fully realised, it will be THE permanent condition of mankind, there being no other succeeding "societies" or social orders that would come afterward.
When he says "here we have no continuing city", he is referring to Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem was believed by the Jews to be the city of God. And insofar as it was the capitol of the society God had established (Israel) and the seat of the worship of the true God, in a sense, it was the city of God. But having rejected Messiah, it being rejected by Him and consigned to doom, t was "non permanent". It would not "continue", that is, it would be destroyed (AD 70). The soon destruction of the earthly city of Jerusalem was of no real consequence to Christians, since their hopes weren't tied up in and fulfilled by the earthly city and its polity. Rather, they looked forward to the permanent installation of the kingdom of God under Christ. Therefore, just as Messiah had left the city (called "the camp", in light of Jerusalem's non-permanency) to die and accomplish the will of God and the Atonement, they too should be willing to leave the city and not be confounded by its destruction.
To the Jews, the destruction of Jerusalem might as well have been the "end of the world", because for them it practically was. But for the Christians, the destruction of Jerusalem was just one more step along the journey to a more permanent goal.