Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The mythical meme of “cutting waste and fraud”

Posted on by | No Comments

A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,

Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.

“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.

The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.

That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.

Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.

As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.

The US economy is a headless chicken

Posted on by | No Comments

Just because it’s showing signs of life doesn’t mean it’s getting better. For those who think otherwise, here are some questions to consider. (And yes, as someone has already demonstrated, there are ways to try to explain away each question; but as any baseball fan knows, if there are a lot of “ifs” and they all have to have the “right” answer for things to go well, things probably aren’t going to go well.)

Good work by Justice Stevens

Posted on by | No Comments

who wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in American Needle v. NFL. It was an interesting case, turning on the question of whether the NFL is a single corporate entity or a collection of competing corporations, and one with potentially huge ramifications. Had the Court upheld the NFL’s claim and allowed them to act as a single corporation, it would have been an immense transfer of power to the NFL which probably would have drastically weakened the players’ union; but in denying that claim (as they did, and rightly) there was the potential to significantly weaken the league. Justice Stevens’ ruling, from what I can see, did an excellent job of maintaining the necessary balance, laying a clear legal foundation for the NFL as a collection of competing corporations which must by the very nature of their business act cooperatively and collectively in much of what they do. As Doug Farrar sums it up,

Stevens basically said that the Supreme Court, and any other Court, would test function rather than form and avoid absolute impingement of any collective activity taken on by the teams,. But any act in concert with an eye on the evasion of antitrust law would not be allowed or exempted. In effect, as Berthelsen intimated in his statement, the NFL must operate under the same constraints as almost any other business. It was a sound and reasoned ruling that penalized neither side.

Nice job of threading the needle, that.

Politics in the end view

Posted on by | No Comments

I don’t make any apologies for blogging on political matters; I believe they’re important, and that we as Christians need to learn to see all aspects of life, including politics, with the eyes of faith. There are some things going on in our country right now that deeply concern me, and I think that concern is both warranted and appropriate. That said, there’s a risk in this, too—the risk of coming to overvalue political victories and defeats, to attach too much significance to them. It’s the risk of narrowed perspective, and it has contributed to the politicization of all too much of the American church (on both sides of the political divide).

To counter it, we need to pull back and reorient ourselves. We need to remember not only that this world isn’t all there us, but that for those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit, it isn’t even really our home. In Christ, we have been made citizens of another country, and given the life of the world to come; we don’t simply live in the present anymore—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. To be sure, we’re still waiting for the last last days—this isn’t to say that the end of the world is right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, itwill happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As my wife’s grandfather used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

As such, we ought not get too tied up in winning victories now; after all, we worship a God who has been known to do more with earthly defeats than worldly victories anyway. We need to work for what is good and right and true to the best of our ability and the best of our judgment, but we need to remember that in the end, winning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether we win or lose, God is in control; what matters most is not that we get our way, but that we do things his way, that we speak his truth in his love, fearlessly, every chance we get. If we do that, we can let the chips fall where they may, because by his sovereign will, he controls every last one of them.

(Adapted from “The Life of the World to Come”)

Politics by thuggery returns to the US

Posted on by | No Comments

Erick Erickson is right, this is profoundly disturbing:

In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.

A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.

500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.

Yeah, you read that right. The man in question, Greg Baer, is one of the senior corporate lawyers for BoA. He’s also a Democrat, but like animals, some Democrats are more equal than others.

Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.

Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.

The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.

Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, “Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate”—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to “play politics” with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn’t irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won’t say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.

If it isn’t surprising, though, it’s still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:

When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.

Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.

Going for the political jugular

Posted on by | 3 Comments

One doesn’t usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It’s a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate’s personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don’t count; that’s just boilerplate.)

The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in ’08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn’t even have his party’s nomination yet. It’s a good way to go, I think.

Song of the Week

Posted on by | No Comments

This song gets me every time.

Legacy

I don’t mind if you’ve got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who’s Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn’t matter much.

I won’t lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an “Atta boy” or “Atta girl.”
But in the end I’d like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world

I want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.

I don’t have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It’s an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.

Chorus

Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
“Well done, good and faithful one.”

Chorus

Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman

Response to feetxxxl

Posted on by | 3 Comments

So on Friday, I put up a post which was sort of about homosexuality but not really; my primary interest was to use that argument to consider our popular theology of suffering, which from a biblical point of view is thoroughly deficient. Predictably, though, someone popped up to ignore the actual content of the post and mount a spirited if more than a little muddled defense of homosexual sex, at fair length—which I think served, ironically enough, rather more to reinforce my point than to challenge it. Much of the content of those comments, I’ll address in that thread; but there were a couple attempts at scriptural argument to which I wanted to respond at greater length.

to start with where is the “easy yoke and light burden” in your condemnation of homosexuality

The same place as in my condemnation of adultery, murder, gossip, lying, substance abuse, theft, cheating, idolatry, and every other sin. Jesus is not here saying that he will never ask us to struggle against our sin—after all, elsewhere, he says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s clearly not in view. Rather, he’s saying two things. One, to pull from a pastor down in Florida,

The word “easy” simply means “fit for use” or “fits well.” Consider for a moment—in context, a “yoke” was used to harness one ox to another for working the fields. Jesus, being the master carpenter knew how to build well-fitted yokes that eased the burden on the oxen.

Did a well-fitting yoke mean the oxen would no longer be doing the work of plowing the field? No. Did it mean they would no longer be constrained to go only where the driver of the team told them to go? No. What it meant was that there would be no unnecessary difficulty and no unnecessary pain for them as they plowed, because the guidance of the driver—Jesus, in this metaphor—would be well-fitted to their size and strength as he sought to accomplish his will through them.

Two, to say that Jesus’ burden is light is not to say that if we follow Jesus, we’ll never have to carry anything that’s hard to bear; that’s just not life in this world. It certainly wasn’t for his disciples, most of whom would die painful deaths for their faith. But you see, a yoke holds together two oxen; the key is not the size of the burden, but the one who bears it with us. What makes the burden light for anyone who takes up Jesus’ yoke is that the believer is yoked together with the Spirit of God, and the Spirit provides the strength to bear the burdens we have to bear—and to bear them lightly, for all that they would be heavy to bear on our own. To find Jesus’ yoke well-fitted and his burden light, we have to actually accept it and put it on.

the fruit of the spirit of galatians the essence of the spirit of christ and the 2nd commandment( love your neighbor….) the summation of all new covenant law(gal,romans)

This comment betrays a very poor understanding of Scripture. It may be willfully so, since this commenter is trying to argue for a version of Christianity that has no vertical component to holiness, only a horizontal one (which, of course, would leave everyone free to define the latter as it suits them, without reference to the biblical witness). Here’s what Jesus has to say about that:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

You see, the first thing before all others is these: Love the Lord your God with absolutely everything that is in you. Commit yourself to him wholeheartedly, without reservation, and with absolutely nothing in your life that’s more important to you than him.

Put bluntly, then: if you aren’t willing to give up homosexual sex to follow Jesus, then you’re in violation of the greatest commandment. That’s idolatry, and it’s a sin.

Of course, this is also true of everything else, including many things which aren’t sinful, so in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that homosexual sex is sinful. However, I’ve never met anyone trying to argue from Scripture in favor of homosexual sex who did so disinterestedly, with no vested interest in the argument; everyone I’ve ever seen argue that position had an a priori commitment to demonstrating that the scriptural witness conformed to the position they wanted to take, and they would not accept or even consider the possibility that the Bible might flatly contradict them. As I’ve already said, it’s my observation that their refusal rested on one proposition which they would not allow to be challenged:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

They valued that more than they valued God; they would only accept a God of whom that statement could be true. That’s idolatry.

The Life of the World to Come

Posted on by | No Comments

(Joel 2:25-32; Acts 2:14-24, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11)

I heard a story once about a Scotsman who traveled down into England to visit some of the great English churches and listen to the great English preachers of the day. He was gone for a number of weeks, and came back shaking his head. When his friends asked him what was wrong, he declared that those English weren’t flying with both wings. That puzzled them, as you may imagine, and so they asked him what he meant; he responded, “I heard plenty of talk about Christ’s first coming, but nothing at all about his second.”

That Scotsman was on to something, I think. People tend either to focus very intensely on Christ’s second coming, or to pretty much ignore it. Again, it seems to me that reaction plays a part in this; we in the church have an unfortunate tendency to be embarrassed by our brothers and sisters who don’t do things the way we do, and to react against them, which usually results in our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Here, you may remember a little book by a man named Edgar Whisenant entitled 88 Reasons Why Christ will Return in 1988; he even doubled down the next year with a sequel, 89 Reasons Why Christ will Return in 1989. Of course, Whisenant was wrong both times, and made a lot of people look and feel foolish—and it’s a very natural human response to go to the opposite extreme and just say, “Well, I’m not going to think about that anymore.” This is unfortunate, because it reinforces a tendency that’s there anyway to think of our lives and the church and the political situation in this-worldly terms, and thus to overstate the importance of worldly success, worldly victories, and worldly methods.

When we affirm our faith by saying the creed together, we end by declaring our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, and that’s no afterthought. That’s nothing tacked-on. It is, in fact, every bit as essential to our faith as everything else we affirm. We miss that because we tend to think of it, again, in earthly terms as just the reward for being good and living a good life—as if God’s telling us, “You be nice and eat your broccoli in this life, and you’ll get dessert when I’m ready to give it to you.” Certainly, bribery can be very effective, as I’ve found with my own kids, but that’s really not what this is about at all. Rather, this is about the logical conclusion and completion of the life we live on this earth—our resurrected life in the kingdom of God, in the new heavens and the new earth, will be the same life we now live in Christ, only more so. It will be the new life he has given us with all the sin we still struggle with and all the pain we still bear finally removed, completely, from the picture. What we’re on about in this world is preparation for what’s coming.

This is, incidentally, the answer to those who insist that a good God wouldn’t keep anyone out of heaven. If you view heaven as nothing more than a giant party that anyone and everyone would enjoy, then the question, “Why would God keep anyone out? Isn’t he merciful?” appears to have some force. The truth is, though, that life in the kingdom of God will be the distillation of everything that those who reject God are unwilling to accept. Some years ago, I was talking with an atheist acquaintance of mine and he decided to go after me a little bit on this point; I looked at him and said, “I thought you don’t believe in God.” He said, “I don’t.” I asked him, “Would you want to spend eternity with God?” He said, “If God actually existed, no, I wouldn’t.” I said, “Well, that’s what heaven is; if you don’t want to go to heaven, why should God make you?” He looked at me for a moment and changed the subject.

The key here is that those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit are already living eternal life, however imperfectly we may realize it at times; the life of the world to come is not a separate thing, but an integral part of our life now. We don’t simply live in the present—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. We don’t tend to think of it that way; when we talk about the last days, we tend to think of a very short period of time right before Jesus comes again. The Bible doesn’t do that, though. Take a look at Joel 2, at the passage Bryan read a few minutes ago. This is describing the last days, the final blessing of God on his people, the great and dreadful day of the LORD, attended by all sorts of apocalyptic events, and ultimately by judgment. He’s clearly looking forward to things we have not experienced. But then look at Acts 2, as Peter stands up to tell the crowd in the temple what they’re seeing: he starts with this passage from Joel. You’ll note that Acts even uses the phrase “in the last days” in its translation of the prophet’s message. What the crowd needs to understand, Peter tells them, is that what they’re seeing isn’t anything they can explain on the basis of their own experience, because the world has changed: the last days that Joel predicted have arrived, and the new thing God promised has begun to happen.

Now, if biblically speaking, we’re in the last days, what does that mean? Obviously the prophecy of Joel has only been partly fulfilled; things that the prophet puts right together have so far been separated by almost two thousand years. You might say that we’re still waiting for the last last days. So this isn’t a statement about the end of the world being right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, it will happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that, if you will, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas, because what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As Sara’s Grandpa Van used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

Again, the key is that the life of the world to come isn’t just for the future, it’s the life we have now; this is why, as Paul says, we are not of the night or of the darkness, but are children of the light who belong to the day. And this is why we have hope, and why life makes sense, and why death is something that can be borne without despair; and this is why James can tell us to rejoice when we encounter various trials, and why Jesus can say, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” If this world and this life are all there is, then those things don’t make any sense; it’s all well and good for James to declare that “the testing of your faith produces steadfastness,” but is that really worth the price you pay for it? If this life were all there is, probably not; but Jesus says, “Rejoice and be glad”—why?—“because your reward is great in heaven.”

We don’t do what’s right for the sake of reward, or at least I hope we don’t; and there are far better reasons to follow Jesus than financial calculation. He wants us to do what’s right, he wants us to follow him, because we love him and we know how good he is and we recognize what an incredible thing he did for us and what an incredible gift he gave us. He wants us to walk with him because there’s no better thing to do and no better place to be. But there needs to be a reward—justice demands it. There needs to be a reward for those who serve others selflessly and without recognition, for those who do the thankless jobs without complaint or resentment, for those who spend years ministering to others and sharing the gospel and see no fruit for their work; and there needs to be a balancing of the scales for all the suffering of this life. Yes, God uses our suffering for good in our lives and in the lives of those around us, but—there just needs to be more than that. I’ve been thinking about this talking to Pam Chastain this week, thinking about the suffering of David’s foster mother, who has been dying a most unpleasant and prolonged death; it made me think of my grandfather, who spent eight years dying by inches, and various family members in the grip of Alzheimer’s. It’s easy to dismiss them with phrases like “no quality of life,” but much as we might see no reason for them to stay alive, God obviously does. Which means, it seems to me, that there has to be some good for them in it somehow. There needs to be something that makes it worthwhile, that makes everything all right.

And so we are promised our reward, not as a bribe, but as our assurance that the Judge of all the earth will do right. We are promised the resurrection from the dead—not some sort of ethereal existence as spirits floating around on clouds playing harps, but our whole selves, body and spirit, raised from the dead, perfected, the way they were supposed to be, with everything made right. We are promised the new heavens and the new earth, re-created, purified, made right. We’re promised a new life in a new-made world, all the best things about this life with all the darkness and sadness and pain and grief and loss and struggle and sin gone forever.

And we’re promised, most of all, that for which we were made most of all: life with God. There will be no separation between us and him; we will see him clearly, with nothing to obscure our view or confuse our understanding. We will live forever in the presence of the one who is the source of all goodness and beauty and joy and pleasure, including all that is good and right and true in us, and who loves us more than anyone else ever will or ever can. There will be no more doubt and no more fear; there will be no more need for faith, for we will see him face to face and know beyond any question that he is with us, and no more need for hope, because we will have every perfect blessing and all good things. Paul says that these three things remain, faith, hope, and love, and that the greatest of these is love; that’s because the time will come when even faith and hope will have fulfilled their purpose, and only love will remain. Only perfect love, the love of God. This is our promise; this is our reward; this is what everything else is for. This is what we live for, and it’s why we worship; it’s what God created us for, and it’s why we’re here.