I attended the funeral, yesterday, of a woman some years younger than I who had died after years of fighting cancer. As I sat in the church, looking at the stained glass window before me, I was suddenly struck by a feeling of peace, of comfort, of love, and of joy that she must at that moment have been feeling, safe in the arms of her God. I was momentarily overwhelmed by the desire to feel that peace with her, to be beyond the troubles and everyday minutia of this world and to be welcomed by a Father who loved me so much that He had watched His Son die for all the wretched little things that I do wrong day after day, and to be wrapped in the arms of the One who had willingly suffered so much humiliation and unthinkable pain out of love for me. Me.
And I thought. We Christians in America are engaged in a battle to protect our right to worship God, our right to speak freely of what we believe, and to follow those beliefs in our everyday lives. We do not yet need to hide our faith, to worship in small groups in homes with the Bible hidden where searching police can not find it. Many other Christians in the world do live like that and have lived like that for decades, but we do not. And it is important to fight to keep those rights as we see so many of the “elites” of our land, secure in their enclaves on the coasts, worship not God, but themselves, while groups like the LGBT movement and Freedom from Religion attempt almost daily to tear God out of our lives.
But though we fight and argue and pray for a return to godliness in our country, we should not let the fight consume us. What God wills, will be. If indeed we are on the very edge of the end time, there will come a religious awakening before the return of our Lord. And we should work to bring it about, but through it all, let us remember that however dismal the fight seems to be, however we are sneered at and distained for our beliefs, we already know the ending to this book. Evil loses. God wins.
And waiting for us is that indescribable peace, comfort, and love that those who have gone on before us are living even now. We do not know what heaven looks like. John described the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem being of pearl and the streets of the city made of gold, his attempt to describe the beauty of an indescribable place. And the idea of our lives in heaven to be consumed by singing and playing upon harps may come from Isaiah 38:20 where King Hezekiah, who had been told God would heal him, wrote a song in which he said:
“The Lord was ready to save me;
Therefore we will sing my songs with stringed instruments
All the days of our life, in the house of the Lord.”
“All the days of our life” no doubt means just what it says and “the house of the Lord” is the Temple. This is not a reference to our only occupation throughout eternity in heaven. Nonetheless, can we imagine that we will notworship and sing praises to God?
Revelation 21:4 gives us a clearer picture in some respects when it says, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” No more sorrow, tears, crying, pain, or death and we will live forever in the glorious presence of God! That is what is in store for us, today, tomorrow, in a decade– whenever God takes us home. It is this image that should sustain us through our days with all their little annoyances and through the sometimes great tragedies. God has control over it all. The chorus of one of my favorite songs says “ And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of His hand” (Joncas, Michael, “On Eagle’s Wings”). In the palm of His hand, safe, always in His control. Paul understood this so well as he went about his missionary journeys, finding himself more than once in a prison cell from which he might very well never emerge. Yet he wrote to the church in Rome:
‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35-39 nkjv
This is the faith, the assurance, the knowledge, that sent all of the disciples except John to martyrdom. This is the burning faith that sustained hundreds of thousands of Christians throughout the centuries who were killed for their belief in God. This is the faith that needs to burn within us. We are already the victors, no matter what our enemy may think or say or do. Even in death we win. Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Philippi, “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21 nkjv). If our lives are so truly wrapped up in Jesus, that faith, that assurance will be ours and we can say with Paul “to die is gain” and mean it. It is not that we wish to die before we have accomplished what God wants us to do in life, but rather that when death comes, we can welcome it as a step into a better life, that life of indescribable peace, love, and joy that for a moment in time I glimpsed at that funeral.
In the face of eternity with God, the tribulations of this life become nothing.