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Richard Wright's Essay: The Metaphor Of Voluntary

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Like a farmer, a disciple of Christ is heavily involved in creation as they produce crops and care for animals. While farmers deeply love creation, pest, disease, and bad weather are constantly attempting to destroy everything the farmer has accomplished. Despite all their good work, crops fail, animals die, and the land is slowly degraded. Yet, farmers continue to work towards sustainability, undeterred by the multitude of challenges they face.
As a metaphor, the farmer, helps me better understand discipleship by illustrating how we must work diligently to care for creation as we will have to give an account to the Creator for how we have used it. At the same time, we must remember that creation belongs to the God. As Deyoung and Gilbert statse, “The final event—…the creation of the heavens and new earth—it all happens when and only when King Jesus returns in glory, not before” (263). In this way, the farmer metaphor relates to the pilgrim metaphor in that it …show more content…

Wright argues, “The proper response to idolatry, is therefore not dualism, the rejection of space, time, or matter … but the renewed worship of the Creator God …” (Wright 227). Even though we cannot heal creation fully, our work with should enrich our worship of God, allowing us to fully enjoy what He has given us. In this way, the farmer is like the kingdom worker in that he enjoys his work so much he keeps doing it despite all the challenges that he faces. At the same time, creation’s degradation should cause disciples, as it does farmer, to produce as much produce as possible by earnestly preaching the gospel. Deyoung and Gilbert argue, “To proclaim the inauguration of the kingdom and all the other blessings of God without telling people how they may become partakers of those blessings is to preach a nongospel” (47). Once Christ comes back to judge humanity, there will be no hope for those that are not citizens of God’s

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