Forever

16 Oct

Forever

When I was ten years old, my fifth grade teacher asked the class what we thought we would be like or be doing at the turn of the century. The purpose of the exercise was her philosophy that, having lived a full decade, we should know what we wanted to do as adults and focus on that for the rest of our academic careers. When I thought about the year 2000, all I could imagine was my age. I would be an old woman. I imagined myself looking a little like my grandmother. But I couldn’t imagine anything else changing around me.

When I reached the year 2000, I wasn’t as “old” as I thought I would be. Chronologically I was that old. However, I was healthy, active, and still had a lot of energy. But life had changed around me in ways that I couldn’t imagine as a ten-year-old. Many people who had been part of that ten-year-old’s life were no longer here. Now, 20 years since the turn of the century, even more people I thought would always be there when I was a child have left this life. I can only imagine how those kinds of losses felt to someone like Roberta McCain who died this week at age 108. To live so long and be preceded in death decades ago by your husband, as well as by two of your children and almost everyone that you had ever known, must have caused her to occasionally wonder why she was still here. Life is generally a lot shorter for most of us.

Isaiah 40:6b and 8 gives us hope in the midst of so much bereavement. This life is not all there is: “All flesh is as grass and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field…The grass withers and the flower fades but the Word of our God shall stand forever.” We normally think of the Word of God as the Bible, the written record of God’s interaction with human history and of Salvation through Jesus Christ on the cross. But John 1 describes the Word of God in terms of the Creator and Light of the world who became flesh to live among us, the Lord Jesus Christ:

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shone in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through Him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lights every man that comes into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto His own and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-14).

What should be our response, then, to the Eternal Word of God? The Apostle Peter tells us that faith is what God requires of us: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to His abundant mercy, has begotten us again unto a Living Hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, that fades not away, that is reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:3-5).

In demonstration of the expected outcome from faith in that Living Hope, the Apostle Peter quotes the Isaiah 40 metaphor later in that same chapter: “Seeing you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, love one another with a pure heart fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which lives and abides forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower thereof falls away. But the Word of the Lord endures forever and this is the Word which, by the gospel, is preached unto you” (1 Pet. 1:22-25).