Eternal life, 3 – the future

Followers of Jesus have long stressed the future implications of having eternal life, perhaps to the point of overemphasis.  According to the most common modern view of Christianity, the main benefit and growth from deciding to follow Jesus is, to put it bluntly, ‘to get your ticket punched to Heaven.’

I’ve been discovering recently that the greatest implications of my faith apply to the here-and-now, not just what happens when I die.  There are incredibly rich (and challenging) teachings on how life here is altered and transformed into living out the kingdom of God; the behavioral changes caused by faith go beyond simply preparing in this life to finally enjoy existence in the next. 

Christians overemphasize the future aspect of our faith, and as a result, I often tend to downplay it to bring some sort of balance to the equation.  But, there was a reason it was emphasized so much in the first place – and yes, much of it has to do with life right now.

There are some stories that everyone knows the end. Somehow, remakes still entertain us. Prequels (aside from the Star Wars ones) can keep our attention, even though we know how everything will end up. With our faith, there shouldn’t be any suspense. The end is set. We know how everything is going to end. But, actually getting there is often a difficult, trying, and challenging growth process. And, in the midst of really scary and tense moments, knowing the end of the story is a huge comfort and motivation to keep going.

We are faced with overwhelming evil, suffering, and injustice in the world. Systems of oppression, legacies of injustice and even poor individual choices tell us every day that nothing will ever change. Centuries of established, learned and ingrained oppression can’t be undone by one person. We can’t do anything to repair those relationships, restore those identities. In those moments of overwhelming and crippling doubt, it’s hard to see the benefit of even those small actions, those baby steps, towards reconciliation.

At times that attitude can be healthy. It’s easy, when serving other people, to come to believe that I personally am responsible for the growth and development of whatever it is I’m doing. A feeling of paternalism can emerge, in which the people served are perceived to be incapable of growing without my help and guidance.

Ultimately, all change is in the hands of God. We can do nothing to create lasting change – that’s an issue with the individual heart and the guidance of the Spirit. Certainly, we are the vessels through which God moves – and we have a clear responsibility to act when called upon – but all the legwork happens in God’s power.

And, when we’re hopeless and convinced that nothing can change, God let us peek at the end of the story he’s writing – the good guys win.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 20:3-4)

It’s not our fight. We win in the end. And with that in mind, I hope we can take that next small step towards that future reality.

From small to big

I’m taking a break from talking about eternal life for a week, since there have been more recent developments on my mind.

I’m discovering recently how God will take a small sacrifice and, over time, let that work grow and develop into something significant.  I’ve seen how tasks/jobs have deepened and have taken on increased spiritual importance, and crazy ideas in the minds of a few people can lead whole groups of people into action. In hearing those experiences I’m left marveling at how God is the one doing all the important legwork.  The fact that things have grown and developed is not because of my talents but only because God wanted it to be that way, and took small steps and let them grow into bigger things.

• In Genesis 12, God calls Abram out of his home to travel to Canaan, saying that he will become a great nation and a blessing to other peoples as well.  Abram has to leave to fulfill this covenant.
• In Genesis 15, God establishes the covenant, saying that Abraham will have a child.  Here God puts no behavioral requirements on Abraham.
• In Genesis 17, God confirms the covenant with Abraham, saying again that he’ll become a great nation, but here, he has a catch – there’s the claim that Abram and his descendants must always keep the covenant, which is proven by the sign of circumcision.
• In Genesis 22, after the scene with Abraham trying to sacrifice Isaac, an angel comes and says again that God will bless Abraham and make a nation out of him because he was obedient and even gave up his son to God.

 So it seems like it wasn’t only a one-time thing.  It took a long time to get from the calling Abram received back in Babylon to arrive at the fully-developed covenant that not only included God’s promises but also Abraham’s commitments (i.e. circumcision) as well.  Over time, as Abraham matures into what God had wanted him to be, the terms of the covenant (and perhaps Abraham’s awareness of his calling) change.  Even after Abraham took that first step out in obedience, God still had other things to teach and show him related to his calling.

 Throughout the Scriptures it seems like most often God doesn’t suddenly call people out of the blue to go and change the world.  The 12 disciples follow Jesus for 3 years, and don’t really discover God’s desire not only to restore the Jewish people but also bring reconciliation (to God, and others) to all nations until years later.  Oftentimes, discovering a calling is a long process of development in which thing simply go from small sacrifice or movement to the next, and, over time, a person suddenly realizes he/she has come a long way from where they started.

Henry Nouwen says, “The more we are able to discern God’s voice in the midst of our daily lives, the more we will be able to hear when God calls us to more drastic forms of displacement.”  Because, ultimately, those little things can become something big later on.

Eternal life, 2 – the past

After finishing this post, I recognized how long it took to explain some of my ideas on eternal life applying to our past. It’s a thorny issue, and there’s no way that I could ever cover all the implications of these thoughts. I hope, though, that it could spur on imaginations to flesh out these ideas, ignore those thoughts that miss the mark, and go on to even bigger ideas.

Considering how eternal life brings a new, fuller life to the past seems counterintuitive. Eternal life, after all, seems to be used as a synonym for heaven, the future, the glorious beyond. The past is fixed: I can’t take back that stupid comment I said this morning, and the Colts can’t go back and beat the Patriots this time around (but they will come January – you wait and see).

Nonetheless, we are defined by our pasts. Our past experiences are foundational to how we picture ourselves and our environment, whether we remember them or not. Where and how we grew up, the things we’ve done, the struggles and pains, each of these things have left their mark on us and made us who we are today.

When we begin to structure ourselves around the life Jesus has for us, it means that every part of our lives – even the stuff that’s already happened – changes. Yes, facts are facts, but when we have eternal life, we begin to see and interpret events in a different way.

Dan Allender, president of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, wrote a book emphasizing the narrative quality of each of our lives. Our lives are a story, he argues, written by an Author who crafts your life experiences to prepare you for some future work, which more often than not is tied to where you’ve already been.

God shapes our lives, even when we aren’t looking or thinking of Him. God’s planning for our lives began a long time ago, and God has known what we’ll go through since before all time (now, there are some logical questions related to predestination and other things that I can’t really touch right now, so I’ll skirt that idea for now). Anyway, Scriptures hint at this reality:

“Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalm 139:17)

Sometimes, our past history is cheerful and bright, but often it’s not – our pasts are often filled with extremely dark, difficult and downright evil moments. Histories like this are all too common, and we often see ourselves as needing to ‘get away’ from our pasts because they are simply too much to bear.

When people talk about eternal life, it always seems to be a wonderful gift, something unquestionably good. But, if we’re looking at breathing new life into our pasts, it can be very difficult. Being a Christian is rarely easy, even when it comes to eternal life. That being said, it also must be clear that God does not want evil to happen to people – our terrible pasts are not part of God’s master plan in the world. The question of evil in the world’s a complex idea, and I don’t know if I could address that concept adequately either. But, I do know that often, as in the story of Joseph, God uses terrible situations for ultimate good.

Some thinkers, absolutely brilliant theologians, contend that for some people, their pasts are too difficult to bear. There is too much pain and evil in their history and, in the end, God will make us not be able to remember our pasts, and our wholeness will in part come from forgetting the pain we’ve endured. We go through terrible, terrible things, and often to reclaim our lives and understand God’s role in our lives we’ll need to get help. Recovery, in all its forms, is a lifelong process that goes through ups and downs, good and bad days.

While forgetting may be one way to solve this hairy issue, I’m not sure I agree. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared with his physical wounds from the crucifixion; those wounds that serve for our healing and redemption.

That’s a model that I think applies to us as well – our moments of greatest weakness are often those times that God is working the most in our lives. Just like Christ’s wounds brought us healing, our own struggles and pains can help other people going through similar issues. In a fairly well-known passage criticizing the hypocrisy of people who can “dish it out and can’t take it,” (Matthew 7:4-5), Jesus attacks people who obsess at small errors in other people while ignoring big ones in others. Perhaps there’s truth in approaching Jesus’ advice from the other side. He says:

“You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Taking that plank out of the eye is a difficult process, certainly. As hard as that experience is, we “see clearly;” we gain maturity and can approach our past experiences with a patient eye and see God in them. And when we reach that point, we have something to offer someone else who is hurting: whoever may be struggling (with a similar eye problem, perhaps). For example, I’ve seen, in my brief experiences with it, how people in addiction have learned to draw from their experiences and struggles to reach out to someone else who needs help, understanding, and advice.

Going back to the idea of our lives as a story – once we understand our past story, we can understand God’s role as the Author and Designer of our lives. The bad and good both have served to develop us into the person we are today, and, if we begin to live with eternal life in us, we see those events differently. And, at that moment, Allender says, we can begin to co-write our story along with God. We capture the essence and the direction the past has pointed us to, and then we can step out (in faith) towards wherever our past may be suggesting for us.