We want a do-over. A fresh start. Especially when we go into a new year or a new season, we want a clean slate to start again. Maybe we just want to go home. It’s a visceral yearning, and the answer to the existential dread so many suffer from. But there’s some very good news! The greatest reset is coming.
At the end of the Bible, right at the end, comes the promise that everything will be reset, renewed, and restored:
“And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 21:5)
It’s a peculiarity that the western mindset values things going ever onwards (consider the positive connotations of words like “progress” and “forward” compared with words like “backward” and “regressive”) yet some see the highest ideal as going back to the beginning. There is a yearning to return to the way things were originally. And actually that countercultural idea might be nearer the mark from God’s point of view.
Eden was perfect until sin entered the world. From that point onwards, I would suggest, the entire Bible is about a mission to get back to God’s original intent.
We see this in God’s pattern for the tabernacle. The Ark of the Covenant was designed with two angels, wings touching, hovering over the mercy seat, as if guarding the place of God’s presence like the two angels guarding the way back to Eden. The entire structure is like a massive signpost back home to Eden in all the decorations and symbolism.
God has made a way back into His presence, and He invites us to come.
Back to the Father. Back to His original design. Back to the beginning — the greatest reset in history. Back to the ancient way.
The crossroads and the ancient path
Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16)
The history of God’s people typically goes like this:
- God speaks through revelation and puts His people on the right path.
- Over time, wayward humanity drifts away from God’s way and ends up going badly off course.
- God intervenes, usually through a prophet, and gets things back on track again.
- Given time, wayward humanity drifts again, and so on.
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Israel’s story is replete with such resets, as is church history. We struggle to stay on the straight and narrow. However, now many are feeling the urge to return to how things were done in the time of the Early Church. Agnostic social commentator, Douglas Murray, observed a pattern among several of his friends who have recently come to faith:
“They have gone to the most traditional forms of that faith… they don’t go to the weaker forms of it because they want to drink as directly from the well as they can.”
Yet the origin, the source, the tree, the root, is with God’s covenant to Israel which was made open to all. It’s not in man-made traditions or the accoutrements of religion — just simple love and trust in the Jewish Messiah. We need to find our way back to the beginning. Back to the ancient path.
The first century after the birth of Yeshua was a mighty season of God’s intervention on earth — arguably the greatest of all time. The Messiah had come to restore and reset the terrible scourge of sin on the earth, and rose again, leaving His Spirit to help us live His way. The first believers were largely Jewish, at least initially, and were faithfully following in the footsteps of the Jewish Messiah in line with all God had laid out in the Scriptures. They were ordinary sons of Israel who celebrated the biblical feasts, worshiped at the temple, and now they were rejoicing that the promised Savior had come. Gentiles were included into the family and the door to salvation swung wide to whosoever believed. For a time, at least, they lived together as one.
Since then much has happened. Reams and reams have been written by Christians over the ages, rewriting and overwriting the covenant with Israel and reinterpreting the story as if the Jews were no longer part of it. Meanwhile, Israel’s leaders were doing much the same thing in the other direction, adding line upon line, cursing the “minim” who believed that Yeshua was indeed the Jewish Messiah, and insisting that rabbinic rulings were of higher import than God’s.
So much manmade waffle has crept into both traditions and we have wandered far from anything the first disciples would recognize as “The Way”. We badly need a reset.
The earth is crying out for a reset
Paul writes in Romans 8 that the whole of creation is yearning for redemption. We haven’t cared for God’s earth as He asked us to, or farmed the way the Bible instructed us. We’re are not stewarding the planet as we should, but the whole subject seems to have been hijacked for nefarious purposes. The “reset” proposed by the globalists is a counterfeit that just goes to show the original is worthy of emulation, like the antichrist pretending he’s the Messiah. Their plans are a cheap fake that will only end in disaster. The real reset will be far more glorious.
The Bible says that the whole planet will eventually wear out completely. Revelation 8 describes the blow by blow breakdown that comes as part of God’s judgement. But it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of a new one.
All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. (Isaiah 34:4)
Lift up your eyes to the heavens and look at the earth beneath;
for the heavens vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment,
and they who dwell in it will die in like manner;
but my salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will never be dismayed. (Isaiah 51:6)
The author of Hebrews quotes these ideas in chapter 1, when talking about the everlasting kingdom of the Messiah:
“In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
You will roll them up like a robe;
like a garment they will be changed.
But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.”
(Hebrews 1:10-12)
When we understand that what is coming is eternal and far, far better than the mess we have made here, it is easier to endure the sorrow of watching God’s world breaking down. We yearn and groan with all creation for the Messiah to come and bring His reset — to take ys back to the manufacturer’s original settings.
But we don’t have to wait for the Lord’s return to taste God’s kingdom. Like a bucket full of sand and shells can give someone an idea of the seaside without ever actually visiting a beach, we can have a small sample of the real deal right here and now. God’s peace, God’s joy, salvation and real fellowship with Him is available to us today, even as we wait for God’s kingdom to come in its fulness to come on earth as it is in heaven. We can set up an embassy here, even as we wait for everything to be reset and renewed completely. That day is coming!
“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash
