Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

idolatry is always the perversion of something good.

Greed is the perversion of the God-given instinct for the proper enjoyment of the good creation.

The proper response to idolatry is the renewed worship of the Creator God, which sets the context for the proper enjoyment and use of the created order without the danger of worshipping it.

he equips humans to help in the work of getting the project back on track. So the objection about us trying to build God's kingdom by our own efforts, though it seems humble and pious, can actually be a way of hiding from responsi-bility, of keeping one's head well down when the boss is looking for volunteers. Not that one can go on eluding God's call forever... but still.

God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected-imaged, if you like-into his world through his human creatures. He has enlisted us to act as his stewards in the project of creation. And, following the disaster of rebellion and corruption, he has built into the gospel message the fact that through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit,

God builds God's king-dom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. That, I believe, is central to the notion of being made in God's image.

if you want to help inaugurate God's kingdom, you must follow in the way of the cross, and if you want to benefit from Jesus's saving death, you must become part of his kingdom project.

He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation. That is the inner dynamic of the kingdom of God.

God longed, in other words, to re-establish his wise sovereignty over the whole creation, which would mean a great act of healing and rescue. He did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles.

"God's kingdom" and "kingdom of heaven" mean the same thing: the sovereign rule of God (that is, the rule of heaven, of the one who lives in heaven), which according to Jesus was and is breaking in to the present world, to earth.

The work of salvation, in its full sense, is (I) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.