let’s take a moment to consider how God gradually develops his salvation in stages.

His people

On Easter night, Jesus entered the upper room to the amazement of his people, and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. It was the culmination of 2000 years of God’s preparation for creation’s renewal, which he had centred in his chosen people, Israel.

Long ago, God took a tribe of slaves out of oppression in Egypt. Then he led them through the desert for 40 years in which these wild spirits gradually made a covenant with him, because they saw his mighty deeds. It was his “right hand” alone that brought them victories.

Remember how Joshua and Hur held up Moses’ arms in prayer to bring them victory over the Amalekites? (Exodus 17: 8-12) The walls of Jericho tumbled down as they processed around them praising him. (Joshua 6: 1-20) He led them to conquer city after city, becoming skilful warriors. But it was by God’s “right hand and arm” that they gained victories “because he loved them”. (Psalm 44). That was an amazing time.

Then they settled and cultivated the land, became farmers and gradually their civilization grew, they started recording their history in books. But it was also a long period of centuries in which he stopped feeding them like babies – they had to grow up. They struggled to abandon their own tendency to invent religions, and slowly learned to deal with the real God in the way he demanded. All their worst vices came out and they had terrible times of crisis, but after two thousand years, they were at the stage where there were enough of them ready to receive the Messiah.

After Jesus had ascended to Heaven, God’s chosen people assumed their new name “Christians”. It was time to bring all people into Israel. He stunned them with spiritual victories as they converted the Roman Empire and assimilated the wisdom of many cultures especially the Greeks.

As they continued their journey of converting new peoples throughout the world, holiness flourished alongside depravity, all the worst vices came out and they struggled each in their day with evils within themselves.

A great Christian culture developed. Its fruits were: human rights, university learning, science and democracy, universal education, the founding of hospitals, to name a few. But that too was a preparation stage from which the next development is to take place. God’s renewal of creation is progressive not static. Where is there proof of Xtian development?

What is the next development in God’s plan? In a prophetic poem, Christopher Fry writes:



Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake…  (The Sleep of Prisoners)

Our own day and age.

In the cradle of Christianity, the West, he has allowed his people to be diminished in recent years. He has shaken us from our customary ways and challenged us to become more authentically Christian.

Over the centuries, the Christian urge to understand God’s good creation has caused the flowering of thought and science in the West. Much of it has become separated now from its Christian roots, and we are faced with enormous potential for improvement which is deeply frustrated by our pagan inability to share and support eachother. This can only be remedied by human beings maturing spiritually.

The process of Christian weakening in the West is God’s way of recalling us to rely more deeply on his right arm and his love. Human development was reaching soul size. He is calling us into the exploration into God. Only as that progresses will the world find the true secret of progress which is not primarily in the discoveries of science, but in the maturing of the human heart in Christ.

Now it is the depravity and brokenness of the human heart that is to be faced. We are to come before him to intercede and believe that the walls of our inner Jerichos will fall. Affairs are now soul size. He is urgently calling us to recognise our royal priesthood which requires us to intercede more profoundly. That means a greater life of prayer.

God’s donkeys

It also means increasingly becoming humble agents of his will wherever and however he shows it to us, which will usually takes the form of fulfilling humble tasks. It is in these that we will be purified and increasingly collaborate with him in the refining of humankind like gold.

Our King comes riding on a donkey. Not a pretty animal, stubborn, sounding like a fog-horn, designed to pull and carry heavy loads. No one writes songs about donkeys. But there is a cross marked on its back, and for millennia it has carried our aged, infirm, pregnant mothers and precious children. It is the humble servant of the King. And how humble our God is!

We are his donkeys today, bringing him to a hungry world through offering him all our works and prayers, the “spiritual sacrifices” St Peter spoke of (1 Peter 2:5).

We must never underestimate the immense power of prayer. When we open ourselves to God in prayer, we journey into his mysterious, ineffable being. Our understanding fails to grasp him, but a knowing grows in our hearts. That knowing is that undefinable activity called love, and love will never be complete until all are bonded finally with God and all his restored creation.

The Holy Spirit is the hidden agent in the Trinity, the catalyst and choreographer of this love which fills the universe. He is bringing the universe into the wholeness and holiness of the Trinity. We are his chosen collaborators. The name of this God-charged phenomenon is Church.

Through his Church, God is gathering all creation into communion

As people today rightly claim their freedom to take responsibility like adults, traditional communities have become fractured and new so-called ‘communities’ are springing up in social media. They are virtual and far from virtuous, lacking the richness of physical touch. But the fracturing is preparation for the communion inspired by the Holy Spirit to become more apparent. As our hearts grow in the prayer of loving our Father, love and responsibility for others become more active and spreads, and the world itself is gradually changed. This is the dynamic we have to understand. There is a great difference between natural human communities and the communion which is the fruit of the Spirit.

 At Easter his people first met the risen Lord. In reality, they met themselves. Remember how he told Martha “I am the resurrection and the life”? It is not just Jesus who rose two thousand years ago, it is us along with all creation that are in the process of rising from the dead. He said: “I am The Life”. He is among us. Humanity is increasingly being drawn into that life.