God gives us several promises. The one that stands out for me is the promise that everything is going to be OK……in the future.
The key to this idea is the distinction between the end…….and the future. The end implies that everything stops. For most of us death is our definition of the end. The Bible doesn’t use the term “the end” very much. When it does it refers to the end of our temporal world and by implication, the beginning of God’s timeless world. God’s timeless world will have no end. The term “the future” covers both the remainder of our temporal world and the endless non-temporal world of God…….paradise. “The end” is an idea that is limited to our world. It will not have any meaning in paradise.
The heart of the Bible is the business of surviving our time in this broken time constrained world until the end…….and doing so in such a way that we can reach and enjoy the timeless, endless future that follows.
The old testament is, in essence, God’s attempt to teach us how to live in such a way that we can reach him……..reach paradise. Because that is what he wants from us. That is all he wants from us.
It didn’t work.
The new testament is God’s “plan B”. It is a workaround that will allow God to populate paradise in spite of our failure to run his world the way he wants it run. I guess that God is patient too.
The world we live in is not paradise…….you probably guessed. Paradise is somewhere in the future……after “the end”. The trouble is that we have to wait. And that calls for patience on our part. You and I have to survive dealing with all of the broken stuff……. all of the broken people who come our way every day. In the final analysis, we have only two jobs to do in this broken temporal world.
Love God…….and that includes Jesus.
Love the broken people who come into our lives……every last one of them.
It is not going to be easy to keep loving when we are confronted by pain, loss, disappointment, rebellion, evil………..and even death.
But, we have to keep doing those two jobs until the day we die……until the day when we transition from “the end” to “the future”…………..until we reach paradise.
And that is a good working definition of patience.
I wait for you, O LORD; you will answer, O Lord my God.
David, NIV
“you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
The angel Gabriel, NIV
You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”
Jesus, NIV
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
God, NIV