We should all admire Kirk Cameron’s principled, brave outspokenness. He’s willing to use his platform and his celebrity to advance biblical truth. We should be cheering him on. Actors are trained to play to a crowd and seek the applause of their public, but it’s clear that the kid we once knew as “Mike Seaver” in Growing Pains is laser-focused on using his time to bring honor and glory to God, and Him alone.
Kirk Cameron Ignores His Critics – and We Should, Too
Christian evangelist and ‘80s heartthrob actor Kirk Cameron was trending on Twitter on Tuesday, as critics pounced on comments he made ahead of the release of his new movie, “The Homeschool Awakening.”
“The problem is that public school systems have become so bad. It’s sad to say they’re doing more for grooming, for sexual chaos and the progressive left than any real educating about the things that most of us want to teach our kids,” he said in a recent interview.
Cameron called out “those who are rotting out the minds and souls of America’s children” and suggested they were “spreading a terminal disease, not education.”
“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love for our great country: critical race theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether they want to be a boy or a girl, The 1619 Project,” he said.
He continued:
“If we send our children to Rome to be educated, we shouldn’t be surprised if they come back Romans. If we want them to love God and love their neighbor and feel gratitude and thankful that they live in the United States of America, the freest country on earth, then you’ve got to teach them those things. I realized that there was no better way for our family to do that than to bring them home and join in with this rich, robust community, with tons of curriculum to be able to have the flexibility and freedom to raise our kids the way we wanted them to be raised.”
Cue the Twitter dumpster fire.
Antagonists responded in a flurry of thousands of profane and rude tweets, attacking Cameron’s devout Christian faith and beliefs, his socially conservative views, his acting abilities and, not surprisingly, homeschooling itself.
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Isn’t Christianity Just An Oppressive Set of Rules?
Christians often give the impression to the watching world that the rules matter the most. We give the impression everyone else should also follow the rules we do, even though they don’t trust in Jesus. That doesn’t make sense and turns people off Christianity. If all outsiders see is restrictions, where is the attraction in that? We need to explain the wonder of being saved and the security from being in God’s family as the primary thing; how we respond to that comes second.
Whenever I ask someone with no experience of church what they think a Christian is, they usually tell me that they think a Christian is someone who tries to be good. Someone who follows a complex set of rules to try and obey their God. It is easy to see why people get that impression. After all, Christians do tend to avoid getting drunk and they do tend to go to church and read their Bibles. There are things Christians do that others do not and things Christians avoid that others think are fine.
Many kids who grow up in church circles might have a similar view to this! After all, their parents are always telling them things they shouldn’t do that their friends are happy to do.
Yet that idea of Christianity as following a set of rules misunderstands things completely. Like most half-truths, it ends up being a whole lie. A Christian is someone who trusts in Jesus as the One who saved them from disaster and rules their life. A Christian is someone who belongs in God’s family, and because of that is secure and blessed. It’s not to do with rules at all.
So why do Christians live differently to those who don’t believe? Well, that is a response to what Jesus has done for us. That sounds kind of abstract, so let me explain it using an important part of Biblical history and an analogy.
At the start of the book of Exodus, the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt.
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The Story of the Temple
We will forever be in God’s temple, the eternal place where God is known, served, worshipped, and present. Redeemed sinners, then sanctified, and glorified, will dwell forever with a Holy God because the Lamb who was slain ransomed them and ushers them into his presence forever in the perfect temple dwelling of God.
Temples do not have very positive connotations in the 21st Century. People often think of temples as being bound up with stuffy religious things like idols, icons, and the like. In the Bible, temple is an indispensable and foundational category for our understanding.
So we must ask ourselves: What is the Bible’s true vision for the temple? We need to ask questions like: What story does the Bible tell with all of its temple language? Where does the Bible’s story of temple begin? Where does it take us?
The Biblical story begins with humanity being banished from God’s presence. The big problem in the Bible from the beginning is this: We have been separated from God. God designed a garden paradise in which humanity was to dwell with him forever. But because of sin, he exiled us from the Garden and his presence. And so Genesis 4 all the way through to Revelation 22 sets out to answer the question: “How can sinful humanity dwell with God again?” Its answer is temple.
Creation’s Garden Temple
The temple theme begins in Genesis 1-3 where temple gets introduced as the meeting place between God and humanity. The temple mediates the presence of God to his people. The Garden of Eden functions very much in this way.
Jim Hamilton says:
“Shakespeare showed his genius in a theatre named the globe. It would be the place where he would display the stories of his creative mind and heart. The real world, where God shows his genius, is the archetype of the theatre where Shakespeare showed his. God built this stage to show his craft. The world is a theater for the display of God’s glory…It is the place where God is known, served, worshipped, and present.”[1]
Therefore, the world is God’s temple. Hamilton continues, “God built the earth as his temple, and in it he put his image and likeness. The realm that God has created is a cosmic temple; the image God put in the temple to represent himself is mankind.”[2] The world is God’s temple. Humanity is God’s image. The temple story begins on this foundation.
There is much evidence throughout Scripture that the Biblical authors view creation as a kind of temple structure. Genesis 3:8 says, “humanity heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” The literal phrase there is “God walked to and fro.” This same phrase appears again when King David comes to God, wanting to build him a temple and the LORD said back to David, “Since the day I brought Israel up from Egypt, I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling” (2 Sam 2:6-7). The language God uses for his moving about in the tabernacle picks up on the language God used for his moving to and fro in the garden.
In addition, the job description of the first temple dwellers, God’s first image-bearers, Adam and Eve, matches the job description of the first priests or temple-servants later on in the Bible. Adam and Eve also performed the first sacrifice in Scripture. We’re told, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it” (Gen 2:15).
This language is only used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the Levitical priests. Numbers 3:5-7 says, “The LORD spoke to Moses saying, ‘Bring the tribe of Levi near… They shall keep guard over the whole congregation before the tent of meeting, as they work at the tabernacle.’”[3] In this sense, Adam and Eve, God’s temple images in the garden, were prototypes of what would one day become priests in the tabernacle.
Priests were those who offered sacrifices in the temple on behalf of their own sins and the sins of the people. And so too Adam would have his sins atoned for, and the sins of his wife, through a substitutionary sacrifice that would “cover” or atone for their sins (Gen 3:21).
The Wilderness Tabernacle
Eventually, Jacob, one of the patriarchs, a descendant of Adam, Noah, and Abraham, would have twelve sons, and their descendants wound up enslaved in Egypt (Ex 1:13). God heard the cries of his people, and raised up Moses to deliver Israel from their slavery (Ex 2:23-3:10). He delivered them through the Red Sea and into the wilderness (Ex 14).
Israel sojourned there for much longer than they would have hoped. God judged them by prolonging their wilderness wanderings for forty years because of their thankless and faithless grumbling and idolatry (Ex 16; 32). But as he did in the garden, God would not give up on dwelling with his people.
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Lord, Savior, and Treasure
Jesus is first shown to be majestic and mighty. He is king, ruler, the Lion. He is sovereign, and fulfills our longings for greatness, for a ruler strong and mighty to impress us with power and win our trust and protect us and provide for us and give us life. But we long not only for a great human king. We long for God himself. And this Lion of Judah is not just Messiah, a human king. He is God himself.
One of the reasons that we love Jesus is his paradoxes.
In Jesus in particular, we see realities come together that our human instincts do not expect to be together, and then we see, with surprise and delight, that they do indeed fit together, contrary to our assumptions — and it makes our souls soar with joy.
The beautiful paradoxes of Christ expose our false and weak and small expectations. They remind us that we did not design this world. We do not run this world. And we did not design God’s rescue of us. And we cannot save ourselves, but God can — and does, in the Word made flesh.
As Christians, we confess that Jesus is Lord. That is, he is fully God. He is the towering, all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful God. As God, he formed and made all things, and every knee will bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus is Yahweh — the sacred old-covenant name of God revealed in Exodus. Jesus is creator, sustainer, supreme Lord of heaven and earth, almighty in power, infinite in majesty, our Lord and our God.
And we confess that Jesus is our Savior. Without ceasing to be God, Jesus took our full humanity: flesh and blood, human body and reasoning soul, with human mind and emotions and will, and with all our lowliness and ordinariness. Jesus had a normal Hebrew name: Yeshua, Joshua. In the incarnation, he added to his eternal divine person a full and complete human nature and came among us, as one of us, to save us.
So, Jesus is glorious as sovereign Lord, and Jesus is glorious as our rescuing, self-sacrificing Savior. And we come to Revelation 5 to linger in the paradox and beauty of majesty and meekness, of might and mercy, of grandeur and gentleness, in this one spectacular person.
Our Longings Met in Jesus
In verse 1, the apostle John looks and sees — in the right hand of God, the one seated on heaven’s throne — “a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals.” These are the eternal and hidden purposes of God to be unfolded in history, the mystery of his manifold wisdom to be revealed in the fullness of time, judgments against his enemies and salvation for his people in the coming chapters of Revelation. Centuries before, God had said to his prophet (in Daniel 12:4), “Shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end.” Now the sealed scroll is in the hand of God, in full view of all of heaven, ready to be unsealed.
John is riveted. He wants to know what’s in the scroll. What mysteries does God have to reveal? What wisdom of God, what purposes for history, might now be made known in this scroll? Then John hears in verse 2 “a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’”
Now, at this point, it might be tempting to run right through verses 3 and 4 and miss the weight of this moment in heaven. Not so fast. This is what the seasons of Advent and Lent are for: to slow down and feel the weight in the waiting. Instead of racing ahead to Christmas, or Easter, we prepare our hearts by pausing to feel some of the ache of what God’s people felt for centuries as they waited for the promised Messiah. Or the horror and utter devastation of what his disciples felt in the agony of Good Friday and in what must have seemed like the longest day in the history of the world on Holy Saturday. The pause, the waiting, helps us see and enjoy the risen Christ as the supreme Treasure he is.
So, the angel asks, “Who is worthy to open the book?” And verse 3 says, “No one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it.” No one in heaven. None of the four great creatures around the throne. None of the angelic elders who lead in worship. None of the angels, in all the heavenly host. Not Gabriel. Not Michael. And get this: not even the one sitting on the throne opens the scroll. Not the Father. Not the Spirit. So, heaven waits.
And if no one in heaven, then of course no one on the earth or under the earth. None living or dead is worthy to open God’s scroll. Mere humans like us are not worthy to unveil his great mystery. And so, heaven waits. “No one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it.”
Weep No More
John begins to weep, loudly. Perhaps he even wonders, What about Jesus? Verse 4: “I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.” John doesn’t tell us how long he wept, but mercifully, the announcement soon came.
In verse 5 — what an amazing moment — one of the elders turns to John and says,
Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.
So, now through the lens of verses 5–6, let’s look together at three aspects of the longing and aches of our souls fulfilled in Jesus, our Treasure.
1. We Long for Majesty and Might
We long to see and admire and benefit from greatness. And the voice rings out in verse 5, “Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered.”
“Lion of Judah” signifies that this is the long-promised king of Israel, the Messiah. In Genesis 49, as the patriarch Jacob neared death, he prophesied over each of his twelve sons, and said to Judah that his tribe would produce the nation’s kings.
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