By Greg Forster; part one of a series. In this series, I’ll be looking at our daily work as a holy war to destroy the devil’s works. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” He won the victory for us on the cross, of course. But as our work becomes cruciform it becomes a…
By Greg Forster: part eight of a series. The title of this post pulled me up short when I wrote it. I was just following the format for all the titles in this series: Just Imagine, God a Farmer! Just Imagine: God a Doctor! But this one’s different. “Just Imagine: God a Father!” It’s amazing. Just imagine it! God .…
By Greg Forster: part seven of a series. The image of God as king is very familiar in other contexts – especially as the importance of “the kingdom of God” in the teachings of Jesus is being rediscovered. But what we may not always realize is that a king is a worker! As with the image of God as a…
By Greg Forster: part six of a series. In my last post I noted that, without realizing it, the biblical images I had chosen for imagining God as a worker could be organized in a progressive scale based on what the various kinds of workers had stewardship over: God as a doctor: Human body (material bodies of intelligent creatures) God as…
By Greg Forster: part five of a series. This wasn’t intentional, but in this series on imagining God as a worker one of the things that’s emerged for me is how the different kinds of workers used in the Bible to depict God are differentiated by the levels of life in the creatures they work on. We’ve seen so far:…
By Greg Forster: part four of a series. Adam was not only a gardener; he was a farmer. He was called to bring the world under cultivation not only to make it beautiful but to make it fruitful. In this, Adam was like God. In many parables, Jesus represents God as the owner or manager of a farm or other agricultural…
By Greg Forster: part three of a series. If the profession of shepherd is “largely lost on us today” that of the doctor is not. To the contrary, the difficulty for us is to understand how remote and exotic – and shameful – it was in the biblical world. While the shepherd’s work is foreign to us, we are actually too…
By Greg Forster: part two of a series. In a talk on Sending Disciples to a Pluralistic World, Vincent Bacote said: “Many Christians live in an imagination desert, unable to connect faith to vocation.” That’s a deep insight – that it takes imagination to make the connection between faith and work. And Bacote draws the work/imagination connection tighter when he…
By Greg Forster: part one of a series. Do we really think of God as a worker? We may say he is one, citing John 5:17 or other passages. But does our concept of God match our theology? How we imagine God is one of the most profound formative influences on our faith and life. That’s why scripture gives us…
By Greg Forster: part eleven of a series. It’s only a totally random coincidence that I wrote this, my final post in this series on the kingdom of God, on the doorstep of Easter. But I might as well have planned it, because I want to propose a reversal of our inadequate models of the kingdom that will bear some…
The Green Room 