It Is Done!

As I said back in January, the sermon planning for this year coalesced around the sense that God was calling me to preach on revival, shaped by the reality that I didn’t know how to go about doing that.  I did a lot of thinking, and a lot of study, and spent a fair bit of time praying through it; what evolved out of that time was a sermon series composed of several chapters, each with a different emphasis.

As part of that, it seemed to me we needed to begin by looking at where we are now and where we’re going.  Unless you’re planning a trip around the world, it’s the beginning point and the end point that define your travel.  Of course, when you’re talking about true revival, you’re talking about something which is entirely a work of the Holy Spirit from first to last, so it’s critical to understand ourselves as we are in God and under his authority.  That’s what we’ve been doing in 1 Peter.  But 1 Peter points us toward the goal, to a reward at the end of the road which will be great enough and good enough to make all the hardships and grief of the journey more than worth it in the end; and so I thought we should begin this series by looking forward, to the glory that’s in store.  After all, while revival comes as a blessing to the world, that’s not its primary goal.  That goal lies ahead—further up and further in.

To revive is to make alive again, and we need to recognize that that’s neither meta­phor nor hyperbole.  God isn’t in the business of making people better, nor is he on about making the world a better place; he’s not just trying to patch up the damage sin has done to his creation.  He doesn’t see us as a fixer-upper in need of some repairs and renovations and a new coat of paint.  He’s going to remake everything, from first to last, from the inside out.  Every enemy and all that is wrong will cease to exist.  He’s going to raise this whole creation, and his faithful ones with it, from death to life—forever.

There’s a great deal we could say about this passage, but I want to focus on three points.  First, it’s not just that there will be no more human evil; there will also be no more natural evil.  Think typhoons, earthquakes, and those little accidents of timing that can make the difference between a harmless mistake and a traffic accident.  We see this in verse 1 when John tells us, “there was no more sea.”  The ancient world understood the sea as a force which was hostile to life and all human order.  Babylonian mythology identified the sea as the home of Tiamat, the dragon of chaos which the great god Marduk had to overcome and kill before he could create any other life; their attitude toward the sea was typical.  Though the people of John’s time made long journeys by sea, they stayed in sight of land as much as possible, and never forgot it could kill them at any time.

Whether a deep ocean like the Atlantic and the Pacific, or a shallow, land-bound body of water like the Mediterranean or the Great Lakes, the sea is treacherous even now.  The Greeks who told tales of Poseidon and the Kraken would have understood “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” just fine; some of Gordon Lightfoot’s lyrics would have been obscure, but the story would have come through loud and clear.  When the world is made new, John says, this power will be no more.  I expect the new earth will still have the ocean; but it too will be remade, and fully obedient to the goodness of God.

Second, pain, sorrow, sickness and death will be no more because God will live among his people.  Our greatest joy won’t be the absence of those evils that blight our lives in this world, but the presence of the One who is all good things.  He will be fully with us, in all his glory and goodness, always and forever.  All shall be well, and all shall be good, because he will be with us.  All fear, all doubt, all insecurity will disappear, for he will be with us, and his love for us will leave no room for such things.  All sense that we’re ignored, unappreciated, overlooked, misunderstood, or alone will be gone, because he will be with us, and we will know without question that he knows and understands us fully, and that he values us as his children.  We will never walk alone or unnoticed, because he will be with us; we will never walk in darkness, for he will be our light.

Third:  “It is done!”  None of this is uncertain, or merely possible; this isn’t something God’s planning to do.  He’s already accomplished it.  The work is finished.  We haven’t experienced it yet—we haven’t caught up to it—but it has already happened.  All things have been made new—wehave been made new—sin and death have been defeated, and Jesus rules over all as the King of creation.  We don’t see it yet, but we will.  We can count on it; we can stake everything on it, including our very lives.

This is why Peter could tell us, again and again, that our reward in Christ will be more than worth the cost of whatever suffering we endure on the way.  It’s why Jesus could tell us not to focus on our earthly bank accounts, but to concentrate on storing up treasure for ourselves in heaven.  It’s why Paul could write, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed to us”; and again, “We do not lose heart.  Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.  For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.  For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

This is bedrock.  As Christians, we don’t bet on the past, and we don’t put our trust in the present.  The past is the evidence of the faithfulness of God to remind us in the present that we can stake our lives on the future.  This is true whether our present circumstances are good or ill, whether all is going according to plan or we no longer even remember what the plan was, whether we have a sense of physical and material security or we don’t know where our next meal is coming from.  It’s true whether God is blessing us with worldly success or tempering and testing us through worldly failure.  Our future blessing and glory in Christ is more certain than our present, and even more firmly fixed than our past.  After all, our past as we know it is limited by our memory and our under­standing; but our future is held in the mind and promise of God, who is without limits.