Minding our Tenses Well: Day 5
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:34
And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 1:6
The Future Tense
Remember those grammar tests where you had to label the tense of the verb? Most of us caught on pretty quickly that anything that hadn’t happened yet was future tense.
That is also true of life as far as it goes. In theory, the future begins with the next mili-second and stretches out to the limits of our imagination, and every moment in between. That is a good definition if you are a clock or a calendar; however the God who set His created order within the flow of past, present and future, intended time to be the backdrop not the centerpiece.
All of humanity—people of faith and those who can’t be bothered—live in what we will call the foreseeable future. Because we are born into a fallen world inhabited by fallen people just like us, the future really isn’t foreseeable, but full of surprises. No one can guarantee that hardships and heartaches won’t be part of their future. Scripture, however, does promise that those who love God and follow His ways will find security and peace, even in the difficulties of this life.
The second type of future is the eternal future. It begins for everyone at the moment of death when we leave the realm of time and fully enter the mystery of eternity. The idea of entering the eternal question mark has been a real problem for mankind since someone started to think about it. Various attractive ideas have been proposed: an eternal dreamless sleep, the endless do-overs of Buddhism, a god who judges not, but accepts all (Jack the Ripper as your next-door neighbor for all eternity?).
Scripture has its own take on this mystery. Those who have made the complete and irrevocable choice to follow Christ can become forever citizens of the eternal heaven with all the rights and blessings thereof.
And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once, to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him. Hebrews 9:27, 28
Nancy Shirah
