May 20, 2007
Background Scripture: Revelation 21:9-22:5
Devotional Reading: Ephesians 1:15-23

Some years ago, after I had completed leading a seminar on “Life After Death” at a Dallas church, one of the ministers on the staff said to me wistfully, “I wish I could believe in that – but I can’t.”

“What do you believe in?” I asked.
“I believe this life is the only one we’ll have and we have to make the most of it,” he answered. How, I wondered, could he continue as a Christian minister and not believe in God’s promise of a life with Him beyond this one?

This was the first time I had gotten this response, but not the last.
The more I have pondered this, the better I have come to understand – though not agree with – this point of view.

If someone would “like to believe in that,” why can’t they?
One answer, perhaps the most important, is that many become so dominated by a materialistic concept of life that there is little room for spiritual realities. Our world seems to demand that we believe in either science or religion, but not both.

For the person who believes only in reason and scientific authentication, a life after death seems too good to be true.

Trusting the promises

Along the way I have shared the following concerns and convictions:

Dag Hammarskjold: “In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.”

L. Harold De Wolf: “Is the fatal cancer or heart failure the last word of God to faithful men and women? If the answers are affirmative, then at its very core life is untrustworthy.”

Georgia Harkness: “(Without it) there is no real answer to the brevity of human existence or the unmerited pain that ranges throughout the life we know.”

John Cobb: “Personal existence can matter ultimately only if it matters everlastingly.”

I believe the question of a life with God beyond this life is not an optional or inconsiderable part of  our Christian faith. A life beyond this life validates our faith in God.

I confess I don’t have a clue as to how God surmounts all the problems and works this out, but just because I can’t make a tight little system of it does not invalidate my faith in God.

There lots of things about God that escape my powers of reasoning. But faith, hope and love can all be experienced without understanding of them.

What’s it like?

Once again the value of John’s Revelation is not in the details – the length, breadth and height of the new Jerusalem, the decoration and number of  its gates – but in the truth behind them. The New Jerusalem is like nothing we humans can imagine.

It is beyond the best of our guesses. Do we need to know more than that?

We may not know the daily schedule, but do know that we will need no holy temple there, for in place of it there is “the Lord God the Almighty and  the Lamb” (21:22). And “the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (21:23). There will even be a “healing of the nations” (22:2).

How will God pull that off? I don’t know, and I don’t have to.
Harry K. Zeller, Jr. has put this faith in verse:

The stars will live for a million years,
For a million years and a day,
But God and I will live and love
When the stars have passed away.

This farm news was published in the May 16, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.