Christianity and the Future
Jan 05, 2009
Well, money has been my topic for the last few entries but I want to break from that for something else (we’ll come back to it though!). This comes out of some thoughts I had while preparing my Christmas Eve talk. Our Christmas Eve service centered around Isaiah 11.6-10, which describes what God will do at the end of history. It is a beautiful passage, and along with many other sections of Scripture (see Revelation 21.1-7 for a good one) says that at some point in history God will renew every single aspect of His creation. He will end suffering, death, pain, tears, orphanages, hospitals, funeral homes, wars, etc. We will be at peace with our spouses, children, friends, and neighbors. Each country will be at peace with the other. Greed, poverty, and power grabs will be wiped away. Justice will be restored. In sum, everything will work right again.
As I thought about this, I came to see that it is a great promise that almost anyone, whether they believe in Jesus or not, will want to be true. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this promise is unique to Christianity. This desire for a world filled with justice, peace, love, fulfillment, joy, wonder, and pleasure (God’s promised future) is built into us. Innately, instinctively we want the promise of God’s future to be true. But ONLY Christianity really promises this. Politics only promises us a better way to fail; atheism promises only unknowing darkness after death; science, the 20th and 21st centuries’ great progresses promises a future where the sun burns out and everything on the earth atrophies and dies; even other religions only promise something like eternal consciousness or spiritual existence as an angel playing a harp on a cloud.
Now, many of you and many of your friends, who are not Christian, care deeply about social issues like poverty, environmental justice, world hunger, dealing with genocide and AIDS, etc. Yet you believe at a more fundamental level that the world was caused by accident and that eventually everything in the earth will simply die with the death of the sun. If you care at all about justice or any of these or other social issues, then such a worldview will not fit. If everything will be destroyed in the end, why work so hard now to save anything? On the other hand, if God is at work renewing all of creation, then we have the impetus to join Him now in His work. Only if the promise of Christianity is true do we have any reason to hope for the future and any reason to help in the present.
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -C.S. Lewis
