A Christian doctrine of creation builds on four foundational statements. First, the mind, will, power, and freedom of God account for the universe and everything in it. The one whom we call Jesus Christ was present and active in the creation of the universe; all creation is His possession and serves His purpose; and as long as the universe lasts He will sustain it.

Second, the heavens and the earth serve as the setting in which God seeks to be united in covenant love with mankind. Humans hold this exalted place, because God made them in His image. He implanted in man some measure of His mind, will, power, and freedom by which He created the world. Because of this we can know and love God, we can govern part of His creation, and we can respond to Him in communal solidarity.

Third, creation is good. Fourth, Christians view nature as God’s creation. Where others say, “nature,” we say, “creation.” When we say, “nature,” we mean, “creation.”

In this last sermon on the Christian doctrine of creation, we have to add a fifth foundational statement. This creation with all its beauty and mystery and suffering will someday, somehow give way to a new creation.

If you’ve ever had a hard time trading in an old car or saying goodbye for the last time to the house you grew up in or handing over the keys to your office, those same emotions, taken to a different level, properly go with the loss of a city, never mind the loss of the planet. We love this world. The idea that it could be dismantled is disquieting, not only because we don’t like change, but also because it is home. For most of us, it has been a good home. We need compensation for such a loss.

The truth is that most of the time, we resist large scale change to our lives. Most of the time, we avoid such change, but sooner or later, it comes. The world in our lifetimes has experienced major changes. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s  speech on the Washington Mall, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and September 11 come to mind. In the last six months profound changes in American journalism have asserted themselves. Since Christmas Day, we have seen unprecedented expressions of liberty and the hunger for liberty in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Southern Asia.

For your consideration I would like to link these profound changes with the fifth foundational statement of our Christian doctrine of creation. Today offers an appropriate occasion for doing that, for reasons I hope I can make lucid in the next few minutes.

The Herald of Change
Today is Palm Sunday, and sometimes our traditional way of celebrating it obscures its meaning. It is appropriate, for example, for children to wave palm branches around and retell the story of Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, and we wouldn’t want to change it for the world.

But it’s good to remember that Matthew, Mark and Luke say nothing about children on that occasion. I’m sure children were around, because children like parades. The only reason they would not have been around was their mothers’ fears of what might happen that day. After all, it was no ordinary parade. It was a most political parade. Turn with me to Mark 11:1-7 for a closer look.

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ tell him, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”

They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it.

To appreciate what was going on in that ride, I want you to hear the Jewish prophet, Zechariah, who wrote these words 500 years before Christ:

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and having salvation,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9)

Your king comes to you, said Zechariah, riding on a donkey. The crowd that day saw what was happening as a major political event. That’s why in verses 9-10 the crowd shouted, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” It was people power in the streets of Jerusalem.

Another Old Testament episode sheds the same light on Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem. 2 Kings 9:13 tells the story of a military general named Jehu. When a prophet anointed him King of Israel, this was the response of his men: They hurried and took their cloaks and spread them under him on the bare steps. Then they blew the trumpet and shouted, “Jehu is king!” According to Mark 11:8, many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields.

It had been nearly six hundred years since such a thing had been done in Jerusalem. It was done for Jesus, and together with His symbolic ride on the donkey, it portrayed His entry into Jerusalem as a deliberate, royal act. In other words, Jesus’ action said openly, and many took it to mean, “I am the king of Israel. I am the one the prophets wrote about. I am here to fulfill the ancient longings of my people and the ancient promises of our God.”

Jesus’ dramatic ride heralded change. That alone would make Him suspect in the eyes of many. To herald a regime change of the magnitude his ride suggested would make Him an enemy of the Jewish and Roman state in the eyes of many responsible persons. Later that week, when He predicted the utter destruction of the Jewish temple, He made it clear that unimaginable change was coming. There might be ways to prepare for the changes, but changes, big changes, were in the offing, and they revolved around Jesus Christ. Everything nailed down was about to come loose. But even in that supreme crisis of Jesus’ public life no one fathomed the greater change that was taking place right before their very eyes.

We Have Turned the Corner
As in so many cases the Apostle Paul, a decade earlier, first articulated the real change that had begun with Jesus Christ. Here are the chief passages in the New Testament.

Galatians 6:15 says: either circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation. He just dropped that into his letter with no explanation. We gain insight into his thinking from 1 Corinthians 15:22: For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

Adam was the first man in creation. What did Paul mean by comparing Jesus with Adam? The most natural way of understanding this is that he thought of Jesus as the first man in a new creation? Verses 45-47 of that chapter confirm this line of thought.

So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, Christ, wasa life-giving spirit.  The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.  The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven.

In 2 Corinthians 5:17 the apostle noted the progress of this new creation within the heart of the old creation in these words: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ – if anyone is in solidarity with Christ by faith – he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! Jesus did not just herald a regime change in Jerusalem. He heralded a new creation of which He was the first man, of which we also are citizens, and of which change our baptism is the visible symbol.

Someone may say, “But the old hasn’t gone; it is very much with us.” Yes, but the Apostle John caught a vision of the change that is underway, when he said that the world and its desires are passing away – 1 John 2:17. In 1 Corinthians 7:31, the Apostle Paul also said that this world in its present form is passing away. So, yes, the old is very much with us, but even as we watch, it is disappearing before our very eyes.

Intimations
It is worth noting that these New Testament themes were not without precedent. The longings for a better world have long burned within the hearts of suffering humanity. Isaiah, 800 years before Jesus, in Isaiah 51:6, intimated the end of the old creation. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath; the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail.

Isaiah also intimated how a new creation might compensate for the loss of this one that has been our home, when he wrote: He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore (Isaiah 2:4).

The New Testament continues this vision of a new heaven and a new earth in Revelation 21:1-4. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the HolyCity, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
We should love the present world, the old creation, as a lion-tamer loves lions – with genuine affection and respect on one hand, and on the other with a proper sense of distance and danger.

My affection and respect for the world arises out of my unshakable conviction that God does not disdain human life. He hates the way our sin has marred His creation, but He gave us marriage and family and work and government and science and the arts. They fill our lives with purpose and action. They provide practical ways for human beings to love one another, even if we don’t think of it as love.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine God, drumming His fingers on the table of heaven, marking time until the old creation ends. Apart from sin, this experiment in human freedom and love was His idea. He is in this with us for the long haul, and He is at work to bring about something spectacular.

And so, for a moment, let’s lift up our eyes from our immediate responsibilities, and try to see a bigger vision of the hand of God in human affairs. Politically, the hunger for freedom worldwide has manifested itself in more ways in unlikely places that ever before. The supreme court of Ukraine overturned a fraudulent election, and without violence Ukrainians went to the polls and elected a different person.

More than eight million people in Iraq and eight million people in Afghanistan voted, 40% of whom in Afghanistan were women, and in Iraq women won one-third of all elected positions in the national assembly. Elections have been held or scheduled in Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and even in Saudi Arabia (but no women voters there, not yet).

The booming economies of China and India bear eloquent witness to the power of a free market economy to lift people out of poverty and to bind nations together in greater dependence on each other’s goods and services.

In China, Christianity is booming, as it is in South Korea, The Philippines, Indonesia, all of Africa south of the Sahara, all of North and South America. In Europe there are new stirrings of spiritual hunger. What does it all mean? Consider this.

And he, with all wisdom and understanding, made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment – to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ (Ephesians 1:9-10).

The political, economic, and spiritual ferment that encircles the earth is not the kingdom of God. There will be suffering and hardship ahead. But I am prone to interpret what is happening on the whole planet as preparations for the coming kingdom. Bible students often point out how the Roman Empire with its laws, armies, roads and common language unintentionally made the spread of Christianity much easier.

Today, billions of people want liberty and to better their lives, and they want God. This remarkable spiritual and material infrastructure may be preparing Earth for another Triumphal Entry, and this one will not be cut short, as all things in heaven and on earth will be brought together under one head, even Christ. Stay tuned. Don’t miss the party.