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October 02, 2005
The Life of the World to Come
Isaiah 66: 18-24 / Revelation 21: 1-8
World Communion Sunday
October 2nd, 2005
The great old Nicene Creed that has guided our thoughts on Sunday morning for a while ends, echoing Scripture. “We believe . . . in the life of the world to come.”
It is pertinent that we should have these words before us on a Sunday when we take together the Lord’s Supper with Christians throughout the world. World Communion Sunday points our thoughts ahead to the great marriage feast of the Lamb that will be attended by people from every nation, speaking all the variety of languages, wearing all varieties of clothing.
This sacred meal also points us back to Jesus’ painful death for our sin. In this holy meal such a mix of the promise of great happiness along with a reminder of the grim reality of our sin that made Jesus’ death necessary.
The very idea of “the life of the world to come” is filled with longing, hope, and promise. That world won’t have the sadness and disappointment of this one. The life of the world to come will fulfill far more than every hope. God promises it. The Prophet Isaiah wrote God’s promise:
For as the new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before me, says the Lord; so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord.
This promise includes the continuing blessing of your reputation and your family all gathered up in worshiping God. How you and I value our reputations. How dear to us are our families. But more precious still is that kind of life the Bible calls “worshipping God.”
This end note to the prophet Isaiah reflects an earlier promise:
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains . . . many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths . . .the nations . . . shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Walking in God’s ways—this is the good promise that translates into beating swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, fighter-jets into passenger planes.
Not only that, but nature itself will enjoy the benefit. When the Messiah comes, Isaiah foretold, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.”
It is a happy prospect. Turn your mind loose.
Isaiah anticipated the forecast at the end of the Book of Revelation where John writes:
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 . . . and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men, He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.
John remembers the Garden of Eden when God walked and talked with our first parents. The evenings
were cool as these autumn evenings are now. The harmony of people with one another and with God made of every moment a joy.
John tells us in the great Apocalypse that when God redoes everything the holy city of God, the new Jerusalem will descend from heaven “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
What a picture! Every husband here can remember the time you stood at the front of the church awaiting your bride. Standing where I have stood for many weddings—including the weddings of many of you, I’ve watched the glow on the face of many a bride and groom. Sometimes they are so happy they cry! Sometimes they can’t get their vows out for either tears or laughter. It is a remarkable happiness.
I remember with enthusiasm when my own bride walked down the aisle. I could not remember her ever looking lovelier. Her face radiated more than momentary happiness. She was expectant of the new life together we had discussed so often. We were poor as church mice.
And so God tells us of the joy that awaits the descent of the “holy city of God” in terms of one of the happiest moments possible to us as people. This is what the life of the world to come will be like. It will include the end of all tears of sadness. No more death.
No more AIDS epidemics. No more Viet Nam wars, or suicide bombings in Iraq or Al Qaieda or drugs or family squabbles. And that’s just the start. The world to come will not only offer the end of what is bad, but the flourishing of every delight God created for His creation to enjoy.
But the end of the game, the life of the world to come involves a lot more than everyone being forever happy. God does not force this on anyone. There will be those who don’t want to focus on God. Isaiah writes so grimly of the end of those who have rebelled against God. This too is part of the end, the world that is to come. The Bible speaks not only of life with God, but of life in separation from God. God is so courteous. He does not impose Himself on us. We are free to reject God—and we can get away with it for a while, we think, in our self-sufficiency. It is quite possible, in fact, to reject God while speaking a lot about Him. Talk is cheap. Even talk of God may be cheap.
The Gospel we believe, with all these images of things to come, is not just about “pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.” What about now? Every image of the world to come begins with some analogy to things here and now. It will be an earth, not a new kind of planetary life.
In the world to come worshipping God will be natural, as natural as self-interest is to us now. Worship will not be forever kneeling and bowing, but every aspect of life will be an act of worship. When we do all that we do to the glory of God our worship will be totally unlike the sacrifices in days of old, or even like our solemn worship services now. God gets greatest joy now when we live in these bodies to His glory—that is, giving glorious examples of the goodness of His ways.
I wonder what formal worship will be like? There will be no need of preaching because God’s word will be so fixed in our hearts, translating into remarkable living. There will be no offerings—because there will be no need—or money, for that matter. There will be plenty of music, I expect. And our prayers will echo through every day as we talk with God—endless thanksgiving.
How will we be different then? Will we be like pawns that God will move around on the chessboard of eternity, finally placed so that we’re not forever prompted by self-interest? Will sin and death and the devil be in checkmate? Or will God somehow so re-order our wills so that we finally will choose only what is good, only what best fulfills every purpose God had in creating us?
One of you sent me this week a very thought-provoking article published in the Journal of Religion and Society, that deduced from a large body of evidence that “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD-infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.” Gregory Paul, the author of this study, used data from some highly respected sources.
This is not the kind of evidence we like to hear. It correlates with some of the less scientific evidence that troubles many of us. I am deeply troubled at the divorce rate among Bible believing Christians. I am distressed at the disparity between our most cherished beliefs and our behavior. I get the feeling that bearing grudges is seen as a sacred right, a duty one owes to oneself and family. Yet, every week we pray together to God, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I am deeply troubled that talk has become very cheap in the Church.
The inference Gregory Paul drew that religion is bad for people is hardly reassuring. What it tells us is that where the great ideals of our faith do not regulate how we live, we may sink to a level of living that is worse than the way of life of those who profess no faith at all.
What needs to happen in the Church is a new birth of being guided by what we say we believe. As a blind person needs a guide through unfamiliar terrain so we need a guide through the terrain of the world to come—as we are in it here. C.S. Lewis suggested that there is a continuity between our lives now and what our lives will be in the hereafter—even in heaven. Those who have cultivated our lives richly will have a greater capacity for joy in heaven than those who have responded essentially to momentary impulse. When the Book of Revelation tells of people casting down their crowns before the Lamb who sits on the throne, these crowns represent the laurel wreathes people have earned in life. They are God’s “Well done, good and faithful servant” that we will enjoy most by returning to God, whose service was our greatest joy.
We can forgive, but to do so we must let God guide us through the unfamiliar terrain of a forgiving spirit. We can do what makes our relationship to others here flourish with joy if we will live together in humility. We can be lavishly generous with our bounty so that we do not exemplify the rich and foolish man in the parable Jesus told—the rich man and Lazarus. We can make of mutual service virtually a sacrament. We can love sacrificially.
Jesus taught us, “Greater things than these you will do because I ascend to the Father.” He gave us His Spirit. And we will either turn ourselves loose to do as the Spirit of God prompts us, or we will sit on every right impulse God arouses in us so that it withers and dies—despite how much we talk about God.
Here and now God has given us the chance to participate with him in rehearsing how it will be in the new heaven and new earth. Think of the role your children play in the life of your home. The parents are analogous to God; they create the outlines of the environment—they provide the house, the food, the clothing, the rules to live by. But the input of the children is immense. Their personalities, their desires, their response to our love and direction have much to do with the life of the home. And we count the home happiest where parents and children live together in loving harmony, and then there spins off into new homes the delight that has been forged in the original home. Children shape new homes informed by all that they learned in their homes growing up.
In some similar way our heavenly Father tries to lure us into participating in the shaping of heaven and earth here, with the goal of enjoying the new heaven and the new earth which He will bring eventually.
In the local church we participate on a small scale in God’s plan that moves to a goal, a consummation in the new heaven and new earth. We are rehearsing the life of the world to come. What does this mean for us?
We should do a lot more things together. This place should be packed on the Lord’s Day with people seeking sustenance of spirit for the work of the Lord in the days ahead. We should mingle with each other often, sharing each other’s lives. At each gathering, whether it be of two families getting together for dinner, or of a large study group in its weekly meeting, our time should end with prayer for the congregation as a whole that we lean more closely together.
Then, when the gathering dismisses it should be with the understanding that we will lean toward each other continually. And as we lean toward each other, and come together on the Lord’s Day like this, our joint enterprise is worship. This is the cycle of life for God’s people in a congregation—looking forward to the life of the world to come in the living of our days.
We listened to Scriptures this morning from the Prophet Isaiah and the Book of Revelation that were very similar. We heard these happy words about a new heaven and a new earth where there is not sadness, about nations coming together to God.
We will presently take together the bread and wine that represent Jesus’ presence with us now, that represent His death for us, and that represent the feast we will share with Him in days to come.
What can you and I do this very day, this very week that makes of life of this community of faith a rehearsal for the life of the world to come. Let us make deeds cheap and words expensive. Let us rehearse the life of the world to come today and tomorrow. Let us join together in doing this, nobody left out. God needs us all. We need us all. I with you and you with me and us all together—let us rehearse together the ways of the life of the world to come.
Let us pray: O Lord, we thank you for the promise of the life of the world to come, for the new heaven and the new earth, for the end of tears and death and every ill. Grant, O God, that we may desire to be welcome in the world to come, and that we may rehearse its ways today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at October 2, 2005 09:30 AM