The Mark, Part 1: Looking Ahead

Crazy days, no?

The pace of social change is increasing, and with it the uncertainty. A lot of people are really, really angry. A great many are scared. And there’s a pretty good-sized chunk of folks who are just tired of the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be a lot of discontent with the way things are going—a sense of “we can do better than this.” I’ve seen a few of my Christian friends express longing for the passing of this broken world and the coming of the next—“this world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through” and all that. And within Christianity there’s always a subgroup of folks who are shouting that every headline is proof that The End Is Near.

As a personal note, I’ll observe that I too hope the end is near, though I’m not much for “proving” it from this or that headline. Jesus said that he would come “in such an hour as ye think not” (Mt 24.44), after all. (So are they wrong, or am I? :-) ) Both Jesus and Paul tell us to “watch,” and that we can certainly agree on.

With that in mind, I’d like to consider The End for a bit.

I’ve called this series “The Mark.” Maybe you think that’s short for “the mark of the beast,” which is indisputably a chip that they’re going to sneak into us when Bill Gates forces us all to get vaccinated.

Not gonna go there, for now, at least.

I’m referring to a different Mark. Paul writes,

One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Php 3.13-14).

In the King James Version, which is where most of my Bible memorization has happened, the word goal is rendered “mark.” It’s the tape, the end of the race. It’s where we’re headed. Where the exertion ends and the celebration begins.

That mark.

I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about the end of the book, the denouement.

The bulk of the book, the storyline, the arc of the narrative is reasonably well known—

• God creates a perfect world as a place where He can fellowship with creatures in His image. (That’s us.)
• We reject His offer of fellowship and break the perfection of the world.
  • Sin brings injustice, suffering, and pain to life. 
  • Life always ends in death, for animals and humans. 
• God graciously works to undo the damage we have done.
  • In the midst of judgment, He provides for us to flourish.
    • Adam can still wrest food from the earth, though by the sweat of his brow. 
    • Eve can bear children—though only through pain—so humanity can grow and prosper. 
  • He raises up a people in Abraham—
    • To provide a vehicle for the Law and prophets and thus the Scripture. 
    • To provide a royal line for the birth of Messiah, the incarnation of the God-Man. 
  • The Son steps into human form, obeys the Law perfectly, and dies to pay the penalty for our sin. 
  • In the person of the Spirit, God restores spiritual life to His people and dwells in them to conform them to the image of His Son, so badly marred by their sin. 

That’s quite a plot.

But like any plot, it’s going somewhere; it’s working toward a conclusion, a resolution.

He’s going to restore Creation to where it was in the beginning, before we damaged it.

We read about that at the very end of the book.

Many Christians are surprised to learn that we don’t find very much about heaven in the Bible. We read a lot about the kingdom, the Millennium, but very little about what happens after that. The latter, the new heaven and the new earth, is pretty much limited to the last two chapters. 

We’ll spend the next few posts there.

Part 2: Down the Aisle | Part 3: The Look of the Big City | Part 4: Life in the Big City | Part 5: On Track

Photo by Béatrice Natale on Unsplash