A Cosmic Family and Kingdom

Through the ages many scholars have deemed that Paul’s primary concern was justification by faith, i.e. those with faith in Jesus have their sin forgiven and are set right with God. This is what salvation through faith in Christ still means to many (most ?) people.

In contrast James D. Tabor (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012) asserts that God’s purpose revealed in Christ was something far greater – he called it “a mystery.” He mentioned it in passing only six times in his authentic letters. The only place where he gave an explanation of this “mystery” is found in Romans 8. Tabor puts it in these words:

The mystery Paul reveals is God’s secret plan to bring to birth a new heavenly family of his own offspring. God is reproducing himself. These children of God will represent a new genus of Spirit-beings in the cosmos, exalted in glory, power, and position far above even the highest angels.

In Romans 8:29-30 where Paul set out the complete process of what this “secret plan” is, he summarily described it by the single word glorification: (We are) …those who are known, chosen, called, and justified, finally to be glorified.  All this depends on “Jesus’ resurrection … his transformation to a life-giving Spirit-being, with a glorious spiritual body.” (Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:7; Philippians 3:20-21; 1 Corinthians 15:51-53.)

According to Paul this is what awaits us beyond death. But he did not stop there. The process of our glorification is already taking place. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 (cf. 4:16) he made it clear that day by day we are being spiritually transformed into those future spiritual beings.

Writing as long as a generation later, the author of Colossians 1:15-17 showed how much he depended on Paul’s thinking, possibly even to making use of some earlier material by Paul himself.

But what is glorification? The British edition of The Good News Bible may have given us the best definition in Romans 8:30. God … shared his glory with them. That is to say, we shall be like God because God has shared with us God’s own spiritual life as he already did with Jesus.

If one searches the term The Glory of God in art one gets a remarkable number of nature scenes – sunset, sunrises, flowers, forests, sunlight shining through clouds and so on and on. The Jews had a word for it – kabod which was manifested in theophanies, often associated with earthquakes, fire and storms (Ps. 18:7-15; Job 38). Brilliant gold is the colour most often used to depict divine glory. Revelation 21:22-27 describes a vision of the New Jerusalem as a city of light without sun or moon because the light comes from the glory of God. Rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures referred to the glory of God resident in the temple as shekinah from the word meaning “to dwell.”  

Paul was not very specific about the exact nature of coming kingdom of God. Yet he believed in universal salvation following a final judgment. Those dead or alive who already believed at Christ’s return would enter the kingdom first followed later by all others. (Rom. 2:9-10; 1 Cor. 4:5; 1 Cor. 15:20-28.)