Eternal Life To Take In Immeasurable Riches

"Every day for all eternity - without pause or end - the riches of the glory of God's grace in Christ will become increasingly great and beautiful in our perception of them. We are finite. They are 'immeasurable' - infinite [Ephesians 2:7]. Therefore, we cannot ever take them in fully. Let that sink in. There will always be more. Gloriously more. Forever. Only an infinite being can fully take in infinite riches. But we can, and we will, spend eternity taking in more and more of these riches. There is a necessary correlation between eternal existence and infinite blessing. It takes the one to experience the other. Eternal life is essential for the enjoyment of immeasurable riches of grace." (John Piper, Providence [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020], approximate Kindle location 3130)

The Hope Cherished By The Nations

"And it is in Him, too, we already see the concluding expression of the prophecy fulfilled: 'In His name shall the nations hope.' [Isaiah 11:10, Romans 15:12] And by this fulfillment, which no one can deny, men are encouraged to believe in that which is most impudently denied. For who could have hoped for that which even those who do not yet believe in Christ now see fulfilled among us, and which is so undeniable that they can but gnash their teeth and pine away? Who, I say, could have hoped that the nations would hope in the name of Christ, when He was arrested, bound, scourged, mocked, crucified, when even the disciples themselves had lost the hope which they had begun to have in Him? The hope which was then entertained scarcely by the one thief on the cross, is now cherished by nations everywhere on the earth, who are marked with the sign of the cross on which He died that they may not die eternally." (Augustine, The City Of God, 20:30)

Count the cost

I recently saw this quotation from Mama Bear Apologetics:

Most people don't really want the truth. They just want constant reassurance that what they believe is the truth.

At the same time, I'm reminded of what Blaise Pascal said: "Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

Of course, the statement is indeed the case for many people, but let me take it in a different direction:

Many people might want the truth if they're able to receive the truth in a way convenient to their lives. However, when it comes to the truth of Christianity, that's not possible, because Christ and Christianity teach a message that's quite inconvenient to us, to say the least! The gospel cuts to the core of our beings. Our acceptance of Christ means the death of the old, death to old patterns of thinking and living, death to our very selves. Indeed, the Bible exhorts us to count the cost of living a life committed to Christ. Many people aren't willing sacrifice their very lives for this truth which is The Truth. Many people aren't willing to crucify themselves so that their old selves are dead and buried, laid to rest six feet under, even though the one who does will receive a new birth with a new life, better than anything they could have ever imagined in their prior life, for what was prior is death, compared to the life to come. A life eternal.

Changing the biblical metaphor, many people prefer to remain in the womb and die there. They're like a baby who refuses to be born. A baby who prefers swimming in the swishy safety of his mother's amniotic fluid rather than coming into the solidity of life. A baby who prefers to have his lungs breathe in liquid rather than to have his lungs take in life's first breath and expand to fulsome health in oxygenated wholeness. A baby who prefers to remain attached to and reliant upon his mother's cardiovascular circulation system rather than to have a living heart beating and pulsating and perfused with a newness of life all its own. A baby who prefers to remain with his eyes tightly shut rather than coming into the world to behold its bright colors and beautiful sights and (surely best of all) the face of his maker who loves him and called him to come forth.

Silent figure in a wheelchair

John Goldingay is prominent liberal OT scholar. He used to be even more liberal, but watching the inexorable progression of his wife's MS gave him a newfound appreciation for the resurrection of the body

It’s hard for people who knew Ann only in her latter years to imagine her as a person full of regular human strength, full of drive and energy, as she was...When we started dating, she was a top student in her medical school and also the lady vice-president of the London University Christian Fellowship; there was a glass ceiling for women (I think there probably still is), and this was as high as a woman could get.  Through her life from then on she served God and served other people, though in changing ways.  For the first third of the years that she lived with MS, she combined with aplomb being girl-friend and wife and mother, student and doctor and psychiatrist, not to say clergy wife and professor’s wife.  Then the course of the illness changed and she gradually lost her physical capacities and her capacity for remembering things and so on, so that for most people in California she has been a silent figure in a wheelchair.  "Ann's Eulogy"  

I met a medical student called Ann, who in due course became my wife. Soon after we started dating, she diagnosed herself as having multiple sclerosis, with which she and I then negotiated for forty-three years until she died in 2009. 

One of the first papers I published required me to think about demythologizing, a more important topic in the 1970s than it now is. I concluded that I would be quite content if Bultmann was right and the idea of resurrection and eternal life is not to be taken literally. As Ann's illness became more and more disabling, I changed my mind and came to attach importance to the fact that Ann will be able to dance on resurrection day. 

As a young assistant rector (curate, in Brit-speak), I once expressed satisfaction in a meeting of the church council that the introduction of a new prayer book would mean less use of the Psalms in worship. Singing them seemed torturous and tiresome. My rector withered me across the room with a look at which he was expert, and declared, "One day, my boy, you will need the Psalms." I am only sorry that he didn't live long enough for me to acknowledge to him that he was right. The freedom in prayer modeled in the Psalms became important to me. I think the medics had told us that multiple sclerosis doesn't usually affect people's mental capacity. I suspect they were simply lying; certainly it had a terrible effect on Ann in this respect. Early on, I did not realize that the slowing of her mental functioning was why she was having difficulty with her work as a psychiatrist, which naturally made her anxious and so preoccupied by her difficulties that she had no energy to be interested in me. It was as if she had left me. I would get up in the middle of the night and cry out to God about it, and I recognized that I was praying in the manner of the protest psalms. 

Ann's illness made me mull over the question of suffering, though not exactly to fret over it. I am always a little puzzled at the way many people are troubled by it as a theoretical question–usually people who don't have much suffering to fret over…The nature of God's purpose in the world makes it not surprising that God sometimes acts to put things right, and also not surprising that God doesn't very often do so. Jesus' resurrection is the guarantee that God's purpose will find fulfillment and it enables some fulfillment now, but the day of ultimate fulfillment and of our resurrection has not yet arrived, which makes it natural that in the meantime death, illness, and tragedy are still realities. In between Jesus' resurrection and ours, it is natural that there are some healings, but also natural that there are not many… 

…I know that God's declining to heal Ann has turned me into a different person from the one I would otherwise have been, and a person whose scholarship has aspects to it that it wouldn't otherwise have had…It is an example of the way the Scriptures "explain" suffering in terms of where it can lead rather than what caused it. I (Still) Believe: Leading Bible Scholars Share Their Stories of Faith and Scholarship(Zondervan 2015), 95-97.

You have to wonder how someone can say they'd be content that the idea of resurrection and eternal life is not to be taken literally. I suspect the reason is twofold:

i) For some professing Christian intellectuals, theology is an abstraction. They play with ideas. 

ii) They take intellectual pride in looking down on traditional orthodoxy, looking down on Biblical promises that the average Christian clings to for dear life. 

However, Goldingay's experience ripped away the glib liberalism of his early days and forced him to take refuge in the only source of consolation available. Although it's a pity that he's still so liberal, his experience is a useful example of how liberal theology just isn't a viable alternative. You can't live liberal theology in the face of what the worst life has to throw at you. Traditional theology is the only haven. If all your hopes are vested in this world, and the world turns against you, what's left?  

The Gospel of life

The Gospel of John could be called the Gospel of Life. It has far more references to life than the Synoptic Gospels. Not only does that include direct references to “life” but also “living,” as well as “death”–which, of course, stands in explicit or implicit contrast to life.

In Johannine usage, “life” is shorthand for “eternal life.” This includes the present assurance of immorality, as well as the future resurrection of the body. 

Yet there’s more to it than immortality or physical life. Mere immortality can be a curse. The damned are immortal, and that’s part of their punishment.

But for Christians, eternal life involves participation in the life of God. He shares his life with us. In the process, he shares himself with us. His goodness and beatitude. Everything that overshadows our fallen existence will be banished by the light of his life, shining in our soul and brightening our eternity.

The Gospel of John is good to read or listen to if you are grieving the loss of a Christian friend or relative. The refrain of life eternal which echoes through his Gospel edifies the sorrowing heart.

A second childhood

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because he does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber’s dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And I find that I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky;
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.

(G.K. Chesterton)

Dying Testimonies of Saved and Unsaved

Dying Testimonies of Saved and Unsaved (1898) by Solomon B. Shaw here, here, or here.

Another book by Shaw here.

HT: Annoyed Pinoy.

God's orchard

J. Douglas MacMillan relates the following anecdotes in his book The Lord Our Shepherd (Bryntirion Press, 2009, pp 106-109):

I have met people who have said, 'Mr MacMillan, I am afraid I can't have Christ at all, because I am still afraid of death.' Now I have to look at this through the eyes of the apostle Paul. Paul could say, 'For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain', and he could also say, 'having a desire to depart and to be with Christ; which is far better' (Philippians 1:21, 23). But let us not forget that Paul also had to say that death was an enemy. More than this, he said it was the last enemy, and we praise God for that.

Can I again use personal experience? I remember the morning of the day on which my father died. Rather, it was the day before, the Saturday morning, for he died just after the entrance of the Sabbath. (He went on the Sabbath to his rest with his Maker on 16 June 1957, two years and two days after I was converted.)

On that Saturday morning I was going out on to the hill early. My father had been ill for three weeks, and as I looked into his room before going out at half-past six that June morning, he was propped up on pillows looking out of his bedroom window on to a kind of long, sweeping hill that rose behind our house. He was very weak, but he looked at me and said, 'Hello, Douglas, are you going out?' When I said 'Yes', he said, 'Sit down, sit for a minute.'

Then he said, 'What do you see out of the window, Douglas?' So I looked and told him, 'Well, I see the sheep just beginning to come down.' (The sheep always go up to the top of the hills at night to sleep - and many a Christian could learn a lesson from that. Go up to the hills before you go to sleep at night.) He said, 'It's strange, you know' - and a smile came over his face. (I had noticed a strange light in his face as soon as I went into his room.) 'It's strange, you know. I can't see that now at all.'

I said, 'What do you see?' He said, 'It's strange, I'm looking out of the window and it's as if I was looking into an orchard. It's a very beautiful place, and I can see people and I know a lot of them. I can see my mother and I can see your mother.' (I had lost my mother six years before.) Then he smiled again and said, 'Do you think I am seeing into heaven? I think I am.' He said, 'I have been on the doorstep for three weeks' - he had been asking people not to pray that he would get better - 'and I am going to go over it today.' Then he said,

For forty years I have followed Christ, and for forty years I have prayed for grace to live for Christ, and for forty years I have prayed for grace to die like a Christian. I have always been afraid secretly - never admitted it, but I have always secretly been afraid that I wouldn't get grace to die. But now I see how stupid I was. God wouldn't give me grace I didn't need until I needed it; and when I need it, I have it.

He said, 'Don't be afraid of death, it's going to be wonderful.'

I was with another minister two weeks before he died, a man who loved the Lord. His wife and son (also a minister) told me of their experience with him. He had been very weak, and he was a very gentle, good man, who was steeped in the Scriptures. He had not mentioned to his son or to his two Christian daughters or his wife that death was drawing near. In fact, when I was visiting two weeks before, one of his daughters (a nurse) was very concerned about him. When I asked her why she was crying she said, 'Oh, Dad had a bad night and, you know, when he got better this morning he didn't seem to realise how near death he was, and he was talking about his cabbages. Do you think there is anything wrong with my father?' (She meant something wrong spiritually.) I said, 'No, there's nothing wrong.'

They told me that two hours before he died, he sat up in bed (for days before that he had barely been able to move), and a light came on to his face and he said to his son sitting beside him, 'Get your mother, bring them all down. I am seeing into heaven and I can see the Saviour. He is with me.' His wife came down and she started to cry (who wouldn't?). But he said, 'Peggy, don't cry. This is what I have been waiting for. This is my coronation day.' He was like that until he passed into the glory that he was seeing. It is a wonderful thing to see God's people go home to the Father's house; and it is a terrible thing, on the other hand, to see people go out into eternal darkness.