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Devotion by N.T. Wright
‘Now, my dear family,’ Peter continued, ‘I know that you acted in ignorance, just as our rulers did. But this is how God has fulfilled what he promised through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. So now repent, and turn back, so that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshment may come from the Lord, and so that he will send you Jesus, the one he chose and appointed to be his Messiah. He must be received in heaven, you see, until the time which God spoke about through the mouth of his holy prophets from ancient days, the time when God will restore all things. – Acts 3:17-21
I remember a hot, hot walk in the Scottish highlands. (It’s true: there are times, even at altitudes of 4,000 feet, when you can be just as hot in Scotland as anywhere in Europe.) We climbed Braeriach and Cairn Toul, the third and fourth highest mountains in the British Isles, on a cloudless and windless day, and walking at a good pace, too. For the last few miles back down the path we fantasized about how it would be when we got back to camp. There would be water to wash in, a stream where we could cool down our feet after we’d taken our boots off; there would be tea and food … but most of all we wanted something cold to drink. (We’d long since gone through the water we’d brought with us.) Only a few more miles … and then, what was this? A Land-Rover was coming up the track towards us. It was one of the camp staff. ‘I reckoned you’d be hotter than you thought you were going to be,’ he said. ‘So I put a couple of crates of this and that in the car and brought it up.’ We stared in amazement, and then, gratefully, got stuck in to the various soft drinks he’d brought. It tasted good, good as it only tastes when you are tired and dry. It was still good to get back to the camp, but the refreshment had come to meet us before we even finished the walk.
That is the image we need to have in mind in reading this passage. Like some other bits of the New Testament, even good stories like the ones in Acts can get a little dense, and we can miss the big things that are going on. The point to watch for here is verse 21. There is coming a time when God will restore all things. And, though that final day will be truly wonderful, it can be anticipated with ‘times of refreshment’ in the present. This is one way of putting a central truth for which the early Christians had a wide variety of expressions. God would ‘sum up all things in Christ’ (Ephesians 1:10); through Christ, he would ‘reconcile all things to himself, making peace by his blood, shed on the cross’ (Colossians 1:20); he will make ‘new heavens and new earth, in which justice will dwell’ (Revelation 21:1 and 2 Peter 3:13); he will overcome every power which destroys and corrupts his good creation, so that eventually God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28); the whole creation will be ‘set free from its slavery to decay, to share the liberty of the glory of God’s children’ (Romans 8:21). Like so much early Christian belief, this is basically a Jewish belief about the future, based on the solid rock of belief in God as both creator and judge, but rethought now around the events to do with Jesus. In this present passage we can actually watch this process going on.
The ultimate promise of verse 21, that there will be a final restoration of all things, is firmly rooted in the Jewish prophets. What has changed now is that the final restoration has already happened to Jesus himself: what God is going to do to the whole of creation, he has done for Jesus in raising him from the dead. That is why Jesus now remains ‘in heaven’, in other words (as we have already seen) in God’s sphere. Heaven is the place where God’s purposes for the future are stored up, like pieces of a stage set waiting in the wings until they are needed for the final great act of the play. When Jesus finally reappears, heaven and earth will come together as one. That will be the great renewal of all things.
But we don’t have to wait, so to speak, until we get back to camp. When people turn away from the life they have led, and the wicked things they may have done, and turn back to God—the technical term for all that is the solid old word ‘repent’—then ‘times of refreshment’ can come from the very presence of the Lord himself, a kind of advance anticipation of the full and final ‘refreshment’ that we can expect when God completes the work at last. This notion of ‘refreshment’, though itself unusual in the New Testament, is by no means unusual in Christian experience, as again and again, in worship and sacrament, in reading the scriptures, in Christian fellowship and prayer, we taste in advance just a little bit of the coming together of heaven and earth, the sense that this is what we were made for, the new world which we shall finally enjoy. It is there, available, ready for all who seriously seek it.