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

His people

On Easter night, the risen Jesus entered the upper room to the amazement of his people, and he 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 God. (Joshua 6: 1-20) He led them to conquer city after city, becoming skilful warriors. Truly, as Psalm 44 says, it was by God’s “right hand and arm” that they gained victories, and it was “because he loved them”. That was an amazing time.

Then they settled and cultivated the land, became farmers and gradually their civilization developed; 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 their own gods, 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 sufficient 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.

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.

God has begun a great step forward in humanity, starting in the cradle of Christianity, the West. In order to prepare this next stage he has shaken his Church profoundly. He has exposed ways that were defective, with the result that many whose Christianity was mostly cultural and based on custom have slipped away. It seems as though things have deteriorated, but in fact he is renewing us from within. He is challenging us to become more authentically Christian.

It may appear to some that God, in calling us to be more spiritual, is asking us to downplay the material world, but Christianity is immensely material - God became flesh, and was nailed with iron nails to a cross of wood - wood that had been the his primary material as a carpenter. He is in the process of renewing creation through human collaboration. The spiritual is pressing down on the world so that we and it can be filled with God.

God's being is far beyond our capacity to understand him. We are to relate to him through faith and love. But Christian faith is always seeking understanding both of God and or the world he has created for us. Over the centuries, God has inspired Christians to discover the laws he has set into his material creation, which has caused the flowering of thought and science in the West.

In recent years, much of this has become separated from its Christian roots, and we are faced with enormous potential for improvement which is deeply frustrated because, in isolating ourselves from the love of God, we have sealed the fountain of grace which enables us to properly love  each other. This can only be remedied by human beings maturing spiritually. God is busily leading us into the remedy.

He is causing the whole world to be shaken. Our knowledge of each other and the world has increased, leading us into a challenging time of flux. Cultures are mixing and also clashing. We are enthralled by the differences, and yet frightened of losing our identities nationally and as groupings in society. God has led us to this time in order to call us more deeply into our most profound identity - children of his created in his own image and likeness, called to bring the earth to flourishing.

There are many false "theories of everything" which offer world-views of how humanity is to advance. Only Christ is the answer. only Christ suffices.

The vision of the future offered by the so-called "progressive" philosophy has shown itself as brutalising, hopelessly inadequate and visionless. The next great remedy offered for the world's ills, Islam, is regressive and tyrannical; it claims to come from God, but  demands a type of faith which defies understanding rather than seeking it. One can only conclude that they both are constructs of brilliant but typically defective human thinking. The other dominant system, authoritarian dictatorship, never claims to be anything but human and succeeds in demeaning people, and chokes them.

Only the Spirit of Jesus moving in the Church proclaims that God has entered our world so that humanity can be incorporated into God. As the new stage in humanity's progress is being tumultuously born. God has been preparing his Church.   

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 brokenness of the human heart resulting from self-separation from God 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

Prayer leads us to increasingly becoming agents of God's will wherever and however he shows it to us, which will usually take 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 and sensitive our King 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, loving being. Our understanding fails to grasp him, but a knowing grows in our hearts. That knowing is that undefinable energy infused into us described by words like faith, hope and love. St Paul states that faith and hope will eventually disappear and creation will be restored in love as this age reaches its completion with the return of Christ.

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 as well. Remember how he told Martha “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11. 25)? He did not say "I will be resurrected"; he IS resurrection. 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 within him. He said: “I am The Life”. He is among us. Humanity is increasingly being drawn into that life.