A distinguishing feature of the Christian gospel is that it is not an abstract system of thought. It is not a set of ideas floating free of time and space, detached from the world we actually inhabit. The gospel is tied into history because it is the story of reality — the whole of reality, from creation to consummation.
The living God creates this world. This world falls. And then — and this is the staggering claim of Christianity — he enters it. He comes into historical space and time to redeem it. Not from a distance. Not by decree alone. He comes in, in the flesh, in a particular place and a particular moment, so that this historical world, this actual earth, might be renewed.
This means our God is a God of history. A God of real place and real time. And to stand in the places of Scripture is to feel that claim differently than reading about it ever quite produces.
What Artemis teaches us
Consider Ephesus. In Acts 19, we read of the great crowds who fill the theater and cry out — for two hours — Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. She was the name to be named in Ephesus in the first century. The most celebrated goddess of the Aegean world. Her temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The silversmiths of Ephesus built their livelihoods on her cult. When Paul's preaching began to threaten their trade, Demetrius the silversmith stirred up a riot: if this gospel spreads, he warned, the very majesty of Artemis will be impugned.
That warning is, when you stop to examine it, a remarkable admission. The majesty of Artemis will be impugned. What kind of deity requires the ongoing labor of her devotees to maintain her magnificence? Artemis needed her minions. Without the silversmiths, without the shrine-makers, without the vast apparatus of the cult, she had no majesty to speak of. What a small god.
And yet she was the name to be named in Ephesus.
What is Artemis today? A minor historical curiosity. If anyone has even heard of her, they are quite proud of themselves. The temple is rubble. The cult is gone. The silversmiths are dust. The crowds who filled that theater and chanted her name for two hours are entirely forgotten.
And Jesus Christ — who entered history in the same century those crowds cried out her name — remains Lord of this heaven and this earth today.
Raised above every name
Ephesians 1 declares that God raised Christ far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. Every name that is named. Including the great names of the first century. Including Artemis. Including Nero. Including every power and pretension that has ever tried to occupy the place that belongs to Christ alone.
The ruins of Ephesus are not merely interesting. They are an argument. They are the physical, material evidence that the claim of Ephesians 1 is true. The names that seemed permanent have faded. The name that seemed scandalous — a crucified Jewish teacher, proclaimed Lord by a handful of his followers — has proved more durable than empires.
Standing in Ephesus, you feel the weight of this in a way that reading about it never quite produces. The marble streets are still there. The theater where the crowds chanted is still there. And the god they worshipped is nowhere.
While the church that Paul planted in that city, and that Timothy pastored, and that John addressed in his Revelation — that church is still meeting, in some form, in that region today.
History moving toward glory
The gospel does not merely claim that God acted in history. It claims that history is going somewhere — that the God who entered it in the first century remains Lord of it now, and will one day wrap it all up into glory.
This is what makes the places of Scripture matter not only as archaeology but as theology. They are not monuments to a past that is over. They are waypoints in a story that is still moving. The same God who was present in Ephesus — who acted through Paul and cared for Timothy and sustained the young church that met in those streets — is present in the church today, in its own place and time, in its own geography and moment, moving toward the same consummation.
Surely the Lord is in this place. Not only in the ancient places. In yours.