I don’t recall a time when everyone in the world experienced such global uncertainty. A global pandemic, the death of loved ones, economic crises, that along with the political insecurity in several places around the globe.
It’s been a tough year on us all, and who would believe that it’s half gone already! We’re tired of social distancing and the feeling that we and everyone around us is somehow leprous. We long for life to go back to normal… or at least have some idea when it will go back to normal. As I sat at my desk, my thoughts wandered back to those “good old days” and it felt like I was stuck in a nightmare with no foreseeable end. It was then that the words of a fictional character who also thought he was stuck in a bad dream and awoke to a different reality rung in my ears,
“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” cried Sam.
The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter 4
Is everything sad going to come untrue? Can this be true beyond the scope of fictional stories- albeit brilliant- and children’s happily-ever-after fairy tales?
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more…
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away…
Behold, I am making all things new.”
These lines are not from another fictional story or a children’s fairy tale. These lines are from the Book of Revelation in the Bible, which I believe to be ultimate reality.
But it sounds too good to be true. We’d all love for it to be true, but come on, you’ve got to be realistic! Do you live on the same planet? Do you know how many people have died from COVID-19, do you see the riots, the racism, the inequality, the oppression? Do you know how many people have lost their jobs? It will take years to rebuild the world’s economy. Enough fairy tale talk; this is just religion, the “opiate of the masses,” as Karl Marx put it.
But what if it were true? What if what our eyes see is not ultimate reality? Wouldn’t it be worth exploring? And I’m not talking about a better life after death. The story I’d like to share- and please give me a hearing (or a reading) to the very end- isn’t only about the “not yet.” It’s about the “already” too.
Part of the reason why it is so hard for us to “social distance” is that we were designed for relationships. Part of the reason why we cringe at racism and inequality and oppression is because we have an internal moral law that tells us that this cannot be right. Part of the reason why we long for life to go back to “normal” is because we long for a structured life. And the list can go on.
I believe in an omnipotent (all powerful) God who lived in perfect eternal fellowship within His triune being. Because He is also omnibenevolent (all good) and is the very embodiment of love, He desired to create beings in His image to share His existence and being with. We desire relationships because He is a relational God. We cringe at the way humanity has gone awry because He has written His moral law on our hearts. We long for structure because He who created such a perfectly fine-tuned universe with infinite intricacy and detail must be a God of order.
And so He created a perfect world with perfect human beings with a free will like Him. Unfortunately, they quickly made wrong choices, in essence telling God that they wanted nothing to do with Him; that they would govern their own world and would redefine good and evil.
The world we live in today is a result of those choices, which impacted everything: our relationship with God, with one another, with creation, even with ourselves.
God could have decided to destroy His creation in its entirety and go back to living within perfect harmony in His triune nature. We messed everything up. We deserved it.
But that’s how I- as a limited human- would think. Thankfully, He isn’t like me. He doesn’t give up on us as quickly as we give up on one another. And so He decided to put things right again, but He couldn’t just restart; He had to redeem. We had sinned and someone had to pay the price. He had to buy us back (redeem us) from the stranglehold of sin and Satan. And so this omnipotent omnibenevolent God became man to die the death we should have died, so that we may live the life He should have lived.
And it is through His life, death, and resurrection that He makes untrue every sad thing. He makes untrue our broken relationship with God, by bringing friendship where there was enmity. He makes untrue our broken relationship with others, by giving us supernatural ability to love others as He loved us. He makes untrue our broken relationship with ourselves, by healing our hearts, restoring meaning and purpose to our lives, and helping us achieve our full matchless potential- who we were created to be!
One thing remains: the pain and death that we continue to experience in a broken world, and the brokenness of the world/creation itself. That is the “not yet” part. Christ will return again, and when He does, He will give us glorified bodies to live in eternity with Him. And don’t worry, we won’t live in eternity as spirits aimlessly flying around in the sky. As the passage I quoted above says, God will create a new heavens and a new earth; a new perfect reality where we will get to be unique and creative and productive. We will even reign with Him, yet with zero pain (Rev. 5: 9-10)!
It is then that EVERYTHING SAD will come UNTRUE.
My friends, no other worldview has the power to make EVERY sad thing untrue! If God does not exist, and we are just the result of mindless, purposeless forces, then we have no basis on which to call anything good or evil. Evolution doesn’t care about truth; it only cares about the survival of the fittest. If we are just dancing to our own DNA, then we are no different than the animals, who I doubt would ever be bothered by a pandemic or social distancing!
If you would like to explore being in an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, ask Him today. He is closer to you than you can imagine. And begin reading the New Testament gospels while asking Him to reveal Himself to you. He is a God who loves to reveal Himself. He will give you hope, but not a flimsy “just have hope” kind of thing. The word for hope in the Bible is the Greek elpís- which means expectation of what is certain! He will give you certainty in the midst of global uncertainty.
Everything sad is going to come untrue!
It begins here and now and lasts forever.
Really forever, not fairy-tale forever.