Throughout history, man’s bias has been of his own time, a chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it, affecting how we see both history and the future. Our self-importance seems to breed a deception of self-improvement, a myth of progress leading us to think of the culmination of time as in our purview. Given the variety of modern media, it would be easy to entertain such a view, amusing ourselves with the developing events of the day with titillating speculation. Breaking news seemingly announces more clues of history’s denouement. And yet, today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fire-starter.
Tag Archives: The Fall
We Do Not Know Our Time
In our daily Bible reading schedule, we recently finished the book of Job, and though I have gained much from Job, it can at times be a feat of endurance to finish. Our English translations don’t help much, rendering the Hebrew poetry wordy. And after the beginning of the story from the supernatural realm to the devastating tragedy that is Job’s life, we can get lost in Job’s dialogue with his so-called friends. On and on, back and forth, one is struck by their lack of mercy but also Job’s candor. But what Job and his friends are both guilty of is what I call “karma Christianity,” or theologians call the “retribution principle,” “the idea that God blesses those who are righteous and punishes those who are wicked in this life. If a person is blessed, that is proof that he is righteous. If a person suffers hardship, that is proof of sin in his life.”[2] Such teaching was popularized in the last century in a movement called the “prosperity gospel,” but it was nothing new. What charismatics were selling on television is the same thing Job and his friends believed.
When Everything Sad Comes Untrue
In his mercy and by his grace, God has dealt with our sin problem: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Positionally, by God’s grace through faith in Christ we are perfectly righteous. Practically, through his Spirit we are enabled to live in obedience to him. And while in this life under the sun, we battle our sinful flesh, Christ is preparing a place for us where the inequities of this life are not true, where the righteous don’t die, where there is no folly nor sadness because sin no longer is. This is the Christian hope, that in the final consummation, we will hear from heaven “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5), and on that day everything sad comes untrue.
Dust to Dust
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven (3:1), Solomon says, all of which is upheld, directed, disposed, and governed by God’s “most wise and holy providence.”[2] This does not mean that the child of God knows or understands everything. Though God has “put eternity” into our hearts, we cannot “find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Such is our human limitation: how we see often lacks a providential perspective, and even what we see is jaded by “the remnants of sin abiding in every part” of our flesh.[3] We see, for example, injustice in the world and unrighteousness seems to run rampant, but does this imply that God is neither just nor righteous?
The New Has Come
Like many catastrophes, the Fall came without warning, but unlike many catastrophes it came with deceptive subtlety. In the midst of the Garden, Satan in the form of a serpent deceived Eve, who sinned by eating the forbidden fruit and shared the temptation with Adam, who ate too. And so fell our ancestors, and the human race, “from their original righteousness and communion with God,” and as a result they “became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all parts and faculties of soul and body,” as our Confession of Faith puts it.[2] In the history of human tragedies, the first was the worst.
Planter, Pastor, Preacher 