Called to Be a Royal Priesthood: The Biblical Story and Our Response

By John E. Huegel

This book is divided in two parts. The first part is the story the Bible tells of God’s presence in the world beginning with creation and the rebellion of the first humans, followed by God’s project of restoration in the chosen people of Israel, its fulfillment in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the final consummation at the end of time. The second part is an exposition of what the Bible teaches our response to the story should be. The author points out that the Holy Spirit reveals to us our union with Christ in his death and resurrection. This enables us then to practice the virtues that lead to holiness, which is the foundation of our vocation as kings and priests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669816904

John E. Huegel

John E. Huegel was born in the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico, the son of missionary parents. He also served as a missionary of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Mexico for forty-two years. During that time, he was the pastor of various Protestant churches, professor and president of the Union Evangelical Seminary in Mexico City, and director of the Center for Theological Studies in the city of San Luis Potosí. After he retired in 1996, he moved to Texas, where he served briefly as professor of pastoral theology in the Edinburg Theological Seminary and was interim pastor of three congregations. He has written various books in Spanish and English. He is married to Yvonne West, and they live in New Braunfels, Texas. They have four adult children who all serve the church in different ministries, and eleven grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2022 by John E. Huegel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Unless otherwise marked, all Scripture quotations are taken from the NIV, the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/30/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

840595

I

dedicate this book to my grandchildren:

Jonathan, Missy, Evan, Isaac and Aaron,

Ándre, Benjamin, Alecsandra and Jasmine,

Joel, Ellie and Carlos,

and my great granddaughter, Sofia.

CONTENTS

Preface

PART ONE

Pléroma Tou Chrónou,

1- God’s Good Creation

2- The Human Rebellion

3- God’s Restoration Project

4- The Arrival of the King

5- The Hinge of History

6- The Consummation

PART TWO

Nepantla

7- Living in nepantla

8- The Advocate

9- Three Adversaries

10- United with Christ

11- The Foundation of Holiness

12- The Royal Priesthood

Appendix

End Notes

PREFACE

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The Bible has been an important part of my life since childhood. My father read the Bible to us almost every evening in our family devotions, and I heard its stories frequently retold in Sunday School. At the age of ten I began exploring the Bible on my own and have enjoyed reading it almost every day during my adult life. When I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Howard T. Kuist, the Professor of English Bible, introduced me to the serious study of the Bible through his courses on the inductive and recreative methods of Bible study, and these methods have informed my own reading and teaching of the Scriptures.

Two norms have guided my study of the Bible. First, I have taken Jesus’ words seriously when he said to the Jewish leaders, You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life (Jn 5:39,40). This warning has helped me to avoid going off into unproductive tangents.

And secondly, Paul’s words to Timothy, All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2Ti 3:16,17), have informed my life and guided my ministry.

More recently I have come to a new appreciation of the Bible as story, a grand overarching, all-encompassing story (Eugene Peterson); what can be considered a meta-story, a story with its main character, plot, conflict and resolution. The Bible contains history, but is not primarily a book of history; it contains doctrine, but is not primarily about doctrine; it is fundamentally a narrative, a story of God among us.

From time immemorial people, societies and even nations have told stories to make sense out of life, as they attempt to answer questions such as – Who are we? What are we doing here and where are we heading?

A good story stirs our imagination, invites us to participate in it, and elicits our response. Stories have the power not only to shape our personal behavior, but also that of societies and even the destiny of nations. For example: early in the history of the United States a story found its way into the national consciousness that saw the country as divinely destined to rule the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This became known as manifest destiny, and it fueled the westward expansion of the nation, motivated thousands of people to take the long and arduous trek westward and even supported a war against Mexico which obliged that country to surrender more than half its northwestern territories.

The story the Bible tells is a composite of many lesser stories, some based on actual historical events, some on events that could be actual or not, and others, such as the parables Jesus told, that are fictional. This grand story of Holy Scripture invites us to engage with the living God who created everything good and formed human beings in his image, and when humans rebelled, defaced his image and ruined his creation, he then set about to repair everything.

The story the Bible tells takes place within these passages, or two bookends of Scripture:

The first in Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the last in Revelation 21:1, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

In this book I will attempt to explore the story the Bible tells and what our response to it should be, and so, have divided the book in two parts. In the first, I will attempt to give an overview of the biblical story, and for a title, have given this section the expression Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians:

pléroma tou chrónou, the fullness of time (Ga 4:4).

With this phrase the Apostle is referring to the climax of the story, the coming of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God’s dealing with Israel and the inauguration of his reign.

For the title of the second part of the book I have used a word from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs:

nepantla, which means in betweenness.

In this section I will flesh out what I believe should be our response to the Biblical story, how we should live out our lives in the time between Jesus’ first appearance and his appearance at the end of time in what we call the consummation.

At the outset I must acknowledge that I have been deeply influenced in my thinking by the writings of Professor N.T. Wright, and must confess that I have not only quoted extensively from his writings, but that many of his insights have become part of my thinking.

I invite you to join me as we consider the story of Emmanuel, God with us, with its fascinating and unexpected twists and turns and how we are to respond to it.

PART ONE

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Pléroma Tou Chrónou,

the fullness of time.

In the fullness of time,

God fulfilled his promise to Israel by sending his Son,

who through his ministry, death, and resurrection,

inaugurated the kingdom of God.

1

GOD’S GOOD CREATION

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For everything God created is good. 1 Timothy 4:4

He has made everything beautiful. Ecclesiastes 3:11

The Biblical story begins with the narration of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. I suggest that in order to initiate our consideration of creation, you read Genesis 1:1-2:3 aloud:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day.

And God said, Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water. So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault sky. And there was evening, and there was morning – the second day.

And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning – the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning – the fourth day.

And God said, Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky. So, God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

And God said, Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind. And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the seas and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food." And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning – the sixth day.

Thus the heaven and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

When I was seven years old, my Aunt Fannie Lane, a gentle Christian lady of Presbyterian persuasion, gave me a leather-bound, red letter King James Version of the Bible, and it became a cherished possession. A few years later I decided to read it through in a year, three chapters each weekday and five on Saturday and Sunday.

I soon observed that at the top of each central column of cross references for chapters 1-4 of Genesis there was the date of 4004 BC. At the time, this date did not bother me, but later, when in a course on historical geology I was confronted with the paleontological table, I began to ask myself how creation could have taken place in 4004 BC in the light of what I was studying. I learned that the date 4004 BC had been calculated by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650 and found its way into many King James editions of the Bible.

As I pondered the Biblical record, I thought of the possibility that the six days of creation were not necessarily twenty-four hour days, for the term day could be a figurative way of referring to epochs. The Bible itself states that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day (2Pe 3:8). I finally decided that whether the events described in Genesis 1:1-2:3 occurred in six literal days as many people believe, or whether they took place in a slow process over millions of years as the paleontological/geological timeline seems to indicate, what was of foundational importance was that God was the Creator of everything. The Biblical text is abundantly clear - by repeating the name of God thirty-three times in just thirty-four verses it is emphasizing that God created the universe and all that is in it. He is the initiator, the one who completes and sustains the whole creative process.

I believe the conflict between faith and science is not about how and when creation took place, but rather about whether the universe is the result of random forces or the intentional work of a merciful and wise Creator. If we are here by pure chance, then surely Sir James Jeans, the English astrophysicist, was right when he wrote:

We find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances, terrifying because of its inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye, terrifying because of our extreme loneliness, and because of the material insignificance of our home in space – a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world. But above all else we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own; emotion, ambition, and achievement, art and religion all seem equally foreign to its plan. Perhaps indeed, we ought to say it appears to be actively hostile to life like our own.¹

If there is no merciful God who created the universe and who reaches out to us in love, and we are here by the accidental interplay of cells and molecules, the cosmic loneliness and existential meaninglessness are truly terrifying. But the Biblical story unequivocally affirms that God created the universe and all that is in it. If this story is true, then the God who is present in our vast expanding universe also holds our planet, a tiny ball in immense space, in a friendly embrace, and he infuses meaning into our very brief sojourn on it.

The Creation of Functions

John H. Walton, Professor of Old Testament in Wheaton College, insists that the record of creation in Genesis must be interpreted in the light of other ancient Near East creation narratives. In his book, The Lost World of Genesis One, he compares the creation text of Genesis with other ancient Near Eastern creation narratives, and concludes that this text, like other ancient narratives, is not about the creation of matter, but creation as a process by which functions, roles, order, jurisdiction, organization and stability were established.² His study of the Hebrew verb bara has also shown that this verb is used in many places in the Hebrew Bible to indicate the creation of functions.

Walton then goes on to point out that on the seventh day, when the Biblical text mentions that God rests, it doesn’t mean that he is resting like we think of rest, but rather that he has finished the various tasks related to creation, and out of primeval chaos has established stability and order. Now God can assume his rightful role of ruling it. The cosmos is his temple, and he is seated in the control room of the cosmos. He is present and in command of what he has created. He not only created everything but is also intimately involved in the ongoing creative and sustaining process. Creation is his temple and he has assumed his rightful place in the temple from which he guides and rules the universe.

Like other Near Eastern gods, in his temple he has placed an image of himself. This image, however, is not made of wood or stone, but is a living image of himself, the living God. We read, "So