I’m not a big fan of televangelism. It comes across as flashy or melodramatic at times and lacks a certain grit of authenticity. So when Ricky Gervais published this tweet about faith healers, I don’t know if he was addressing the Hollywood version of people who pray for healing or all people who pray for healing in general.

Regardless of his intention, if you believe God still heals people, consider the gauntlet thrown down.

While I know that God still heals, it irks me to hear this challenge. Ironically, there are some psychics who actually hear accurate details too, but that’s not my focus here. The point is that Gervais is lumping the two groups together, pointing out that they don’t do these things because he thinks they are frauds. After all, if faith healers could really heal people, they’d work or at least hang out in hospitals and empty them out. If psychics really could see the future, they’d win the lottery all the time and avoid losing their businesses and avoid their own future health problems. Wouldn’t they?

I could chime in and argue that I know people who do visit hospitals regularly and pray for the sick they encounter. Not all of them are healed, true. But some of them have been. I could argue the exceptions to the rule, but what does that solve?

What right do I have to be offended? Gervais might be hitting a nerve that needs to be hit after all. Are all the people I know who pray for healing hanging out or working in hospitals? No. I know I’m not. Are any of them? Yes, at least a few.  But not the majority of them/us.

I acknowledge that faith healers do not work in hospitals, even though they contain an endless supply of people who need healing. And we haven’t heard about any hospitals where everyone walks out of the building fully healed and restored. I’m pretty sure even the corporate news channels would mention that if it happened.

You don’t see faith healers working in hospitals for the same reason that you don’t see psychics winning the lottery every week. – @rickygervais

And while I don’t appreciate having my friends and I lumped into the category of frauds, I must concur that we have room to grow when it comes to living our beliefs. We pray for people in parking lots and grocery stores and Starbucks, which is real and not the least bit inauthentic. We pray for people where we encounter them in our lives. But why aren’t more of us working in hospitals and healing everyone in the building?

If you visited Culture Feast since the relaunch, you’ve likely skimmed through the post on how Jacques Ellul challenges my eschatology (i.e. my understanding of how the End Times will unfold). I wouldn’t fault you if you stopped dead in your tracks and bailed after the first paragraph or two. After all, we all know at least one or two people who have used the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible as a tool to teach people all kinds of weird and completely unprovable ideas.

I get it. Most of us would rather just avoid John’s book of Revelation entirely. I held that view for about 15 years. My reasoning was that if we can’t actually know which interpretation is accurate, we’re wasting our time. And that’s not entirely untrue. We live our lives based on what we believe, and most of the faith is much more solid than the part about the future.

Stay with me for just a little longer.

While we CAN ignore the predictions of Revelation and still follow Jesus like his friends and followers did for decades before Revelation was written, we’ve lost an important part of our identity. Whether you realize it or not, Rapture theology has shaped your great grandparents, your grandparents, your parents, and you. Just as many families carry on traditions after forgetting how they started, seeing the world as irreversibly going to hell in a hand basket has now shaped society for generations. Our historical interpretation of the Rapture and the total destruction of this earth has led to a cataclysmic irresponsibility.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. – Revelation 21: 1

This one statement has led tens of millions of people to live as though nothing they do TO this earth matters. It’s a disposable planet. They’ll just get to reboot and live in a paradise someday, so while they follow an interpretation of Hebrews 11 that says they’re aliens/foreigners on this earth and should therefore only focus on the age to come.

All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. ¹⁴ For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. ¹⁵ And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them. – Hebrews 11: 13-16

I’m not surprised that writings like these could convince people that they are indeed foreigners on this earth. With the sense of separation and not belonging that comes from holding completely different values and convictions, the cultural rift is immense. In a very real sense, a person who has been given abundant life IS like an alien on a foreign world.

I get it. I went through that.

But I see that Christendom has failed the individual in connecting the dots between Genesis, the Gospels, and Revelation. God had/has a purpose in mind when He created man and woman. And while there is sin and depravity and suffering now in the picture, do we REALLY believe that His plans and purposes for humanity have completely changed?

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” – Genesis 1:28

Three ways to look at this original creative mandate for humanity.

1. The original mandate stands and is irreversible as it is a decree from God
2. The original mandate has been completely replaced by a new mandate because there is now a theme of Fall and Redemption in the Earth
3. The original mandate has displaced as the most important mandate, is secondary or tertiary to the Great Commission, but it’s still there in some form

It’s easy to adopt #2 because it’s the mindset you likely absorbed from parents and influential adults when you were a child.

After 20 years of church elders, pastors and teachers talking about evangelism and worship as the only things that really matter, it’s hard not to devalue other vital dimensions of life.

Maybe you’re an evangelist at heart. Or a worship leader. I get it. Our worldviews reflect our talents and place heavy priority on areas that we feel most fulfilled engaged with.

It’s not my intention to replace worship or evangelism with ecological stewardship. But stewardship was the original mandate before worship or evangelism. It’s part of the DNA of human beings to have this awesome and creative responsibility.

So what DOES the rapture have to do with permaculture?

Stay tuned. We’re going to get there.

As a child growing up around Methodists, Baptists, and Charismatics, I soaked up a hodgepodge of End Times theories. The most common End of the World issue was “The Rapture”, and whether it would come before the great tribulation, during the great tribulation, or after.

If you’re not familiar with these age-old religious terms, let’s get that out of the way. The Great Tribulation is the nickname for a predicted period of intense global calamity and suffering yet to come. Just imagine global pandemics, wars, destructive earthquakes, hurricanes, nuclear devastation, and you’ll get the idea. This period of global catastrophe is expected to end with the total destruction of the earth as we know it.

The Rapture is what people call a moment in the Future when Jesus will return from Heaven to gather true believers from Earth and bring them out of pain and suffering to join him in an epic banquet feast. John,author of Revelation, described a vision in which a NEW Heaven and NEW Earth are created which will never be destroyed.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son. But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

Revelation 21

Why the New Earth Concept Is Dangerous

People of faith seem to feel very little responsibility to steward Earth. Despite the fact that God created this habitat for man and woman to thrive and to oversee. Why aren’t Christians the most sustainable, regenerative, and ecologically active people on the face of this planet? Because why spend time on something that’s gonna just burn.

That’s right. Believers tend to see Earth as temporary, so they treat it like it’s disposable. They litter. They waste. They consume. They ignore.  And then they have the audacity to go out into the world and try to make littering wasting consuming disciples.

The World I WANT To See

People who accept and believe that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and that the garden was created specifically for them to live in and steward should lead the charge to innovate in regenerative agriculture. That means healing the earth, restoring the soil, replenishing nutrients, and fostering a more beneficial ecosystem than they experienced the day they were born.

It makes total sense to me that, if we could honestly reread Revelation and find a predictive path that excludes global destruction, we would discover a mandate to foster the paradise we wish to inhabit for all Eternity.

There are so many reasons why this interpretation would work. Just take stewardship alone. Why hand a brand new Earth to a bunch of worthless unfaithful stewards? Why would they suddenly take good care of Earth 2? Wouldn’t it rather make better sense to reward good and faithful service with an incorruptible version or enhanced version of the garden they have labored faithfully to establish.

That’s the End Times vision I WANT to see.

But am I pie-in-the-sky dreaming? Jacques Ellul seems to think so. In his book, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, Ellul makes a convincing case for the standard Earth-will-be-utterly-destroyed worldview.

He addresses my wishful thinking in this passage:

This description of human rejoicing in a universe of nature is not, as we shall see, a small theological error. This is fundamental. We can discern three essential elements: the New of God, the City, the Warning.

The first evidence is that the new creation, which is absolutely new, comes only through judgment and destruction: first, a radical crisis is necessary, annihilation that falls upon all: nature, humanity, history, and the powers. This death is inevitable in order that something truly new appear; this judgment is indispensable for the separation of the wheat and the tares. There is then no continuity. The city of God is not at the end of human progress, at the end of history by a sort of accumulation of the works of man; at this end there is found only Babylon. Our works then are not a linear and cumulative preparation for the celestial Jerusalem.

In the Apocalypse there is no idea of a fulfillment by historical progress. The old things that are effaced (the first heaven, the first earth, have disappeared) are characterized here only by Death, Suffering, Separation. All the rest that was the grandeur of man has never been exempt. All that which was happiness, good, beauty is transitory and passing. All was under the sign of suffering and separation: which was the sign not of pessimism, but of discernment of the most profound reality.

This statement flies directly in the face of the Bethel Church eschatology espoused briefly by Kris Vallotton and Bill Johnson. They’ve shared over the years that they see a very different End Times than the standard churn-and-burn eschatology. They have chosen to live as though believers have been given the mandate to usher in the Kingdom here on earth, and that what we do may establish the New Heaven and New Earth with the old’s complete destruction or disposal.

That’s a future I WANT to see, but I’m in pursuit of understanding what I should believe. As I’ve mentioned, I see the current mode of interpretation leading to a despicable irresponsibility. This result does not line up with what I know of the Father. He fashioned us carefully to be faithful stewards of this habitat he placed us within. Whether we need a new interpretation of Revelation or simply a more mature response to its current interpretation, I do not know.

I know that I see far more symbolism than realism in Revelation than I used to, so I’ve made it my mission to pursue a deeper understanding.

It’s happening right now. The institutional church is fading. Even while many megachurches are on the rise, the church as an institution is fading.

The power and the presence are not reaching levels we desire. We’re not living up to 1st Century Church. Two thousand years of history to learn from, and we’re still on the cusp of the great transition. The medium is outdated and the world has come to recognize that “talking” about what’s wrong with society is old hat.

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It’s time for the Church, both individually and corporately, to step up to the plate. A couple years ago, I saw a picture in my imagination of Christians all across the Metroplex working shifts like EMTs, responding to car wrecks and other calamities, to lay hands on the injured and see them recover.

One of the ways we will win our cities for Jesus is to be on call where we are. Like citizens deputized to stand in their neighborhood and refuse the spread of death and harm and instead usher in an atmosphere of health, wellness, prosperity, and connectivity.

Imagine if Christians were more concerned about the emergencies happening in the world they drive by than in the position they have within a single building somewhere down the way…

Why don’t we have believers responding to every accident along with police and firemen? As first responders, how many victims might be healed? As last responders, how many demonstrations of power might we be able to bring into our communities?

As most of you know, we’ve had a vision for the next phase for a while now. It involves a bigger house on some land, and becoming a community hub where families come together to eat, swap recipes and health tips, and like-minded people call on the name of the Lord in worship and prayer.

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This is a common discussion I find myself in whenever I meet a radical science proponent who believes faith has nothing to do with science. I just had this dialogue via IM, so I thought I’d share with you as an example.

DD: tell me how you know they’re (scientists) telling the truth. and you won’t be able to.

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