Eternity Amnesia.
Forgetting forever.
This is an affliction that won't appear in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) It's not a psychological malady. It can't be treated by a physician. It will go undiagnosed even with an MRI. Its symptoms though, once we've learned to identify it, will seem as readily apparent as a bad case of the measles.
Paul David Tripp in a book titled Forever: Why You Can't Live Without It, draws attention to the mostly overlooked fact that "someone has entered the house of Western culture and stolen a precious family heirloom, but most of us don't know a robbery has taken place."
The Larceny of Forever
This "larceny of a forever" is an affliction that causes us all to grossly overestimate the importance of what is happening to us in the short term.
It renders us disabled in the face of pain, though the Scriptures urge us that our now pain will seem a pittance to our later exuberance.
Eternity amnesia tricks us into a state of living where it seems advisable to inject a paradisal importance to the events and relationships that were meant to point us to Paradise and whet our appetite for it, and for Him, the desire of Nations.
It is a serious and immobilizing condition.
For one thing, while suffering from this near-sighted malady of heart, there isn't much about the "giving up", sacrificial, burden-bearing, life of following Jesus that is depicted for us in the New Testament that makes any sense, especially, if this life is our terminal destination.
But, if we are able to appropriately hope of life that goes on and on, only as it was intended to be, in a dazzling world where “all sad things have been made untrue,” what the Scripture calls “new heavens and new earth,” then suddenly this life becomes a preparation for another kind of life and not our final stop.
We are Forever People
The apostle Paul was quick to note that because we are forever people who will eventually cheat the ruthless villain of death, because our Captain has conquered it and promised us that it will merely be a portal to our new, never-stopping life---we can now "give ourselves fully to our work in the Lord, because we know that we do not labor in vain."
It was he who also did the religious math, and reckoned rightly, “if it is only for this life that we have faith in Christ, we are to be pitied among all men."
Turning Down the Volume on Impolite Screaming in our Ears
Knowing that we are preparing and perhaps more importantly, being prepared, for a new kind of existence takes so much of the pressure out of this one. It removes the sound amplification from our assailing troubles that tend to scream so impolitely in our ears.
If I remember that Jesus gives me life on a new planet that will not ever terminate, in a world where sorrow has been banished and where strife has been vanquished, then the teeth on my present troubles as a father, husband, pastor, friend, neighbor, and son are knocked out.
If I realize that paradise is coming and I am preparing for it now, I do not have to expect the acclaim with which people view me, or my relationship with my spouse, or the success of my children or the home in which we dwell to be my paradise.
When it rains on your wedding day, as a forever person, instead of sulking inwardly at the cosmic insult, you are permitted to smile any way, thinking “Well, why on earth wouldn't it rain? Today isn't paradise, just a preview of the joy that we’ll later know in increasing and unstoppable measure."
When I don’t labor to remember the hope of a coming forever that can solace every sting, I am vulnerable to sucker-punches from the passage of time.
A photo my bride took of my younger son and me walking along the sidewalk, hand-in-hand, him in his little red Keds, and a precious body that rises to my knees, can,--- if I'm stuck in eternity amnesia, lock me into a dungeon of wistful melancholy, because I will be debilitatingly sure, "somehow, someway, life is galloping too mercilessly by. The kids are growing up too fast. The paradise of enjoying these little lives is is too quickly evaporating.”
And if I expect that no evaporation should or will take place, I'll be fearful and controlling and will need them to stay young, to stay “ours”---and I won't permit them to grow.
I Don’t Have to Pack Paradise in by Next Tuesday
But, if we will dwell together in forever (a forever that has actually started now!) and if the eruptions of joy that nearly undo me when I hold them, consider them or anticipate being around them are merely foretastes of an exponentially, multiplying joy that will be the air we all breathe for the rest of forever with the God for whom we were made, on a good earth that has been retooled for flourishing life, then I can tolerate the pangs of them growing, because I know I don't have to pack paradise into this life.
Tripp writes, "those unfulfilled longings, which none of us escape, do not so much announce to us that this world has failed us, but rather they alert us to the fact that we were designed for another world. Peace in this world is found only when we live with the coming world in view."
I'm hoping today we might take the Apostle Paul seriously when he joins a chorus of other biblical voices in urging us "to fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen."
The prescription for not losing heart, not giving up, not being destroyed by the considerable disadvantages of dwelling in our time and place are that we always keep in view the One “who is invisible”, and who is planning on letting any and only those who entrust themselves to Him share in the inheritance of the new world that He alone has earned but that He is overjoyed to share with His prized, beloved, eternity-amnesiacs .
When your spouse disappoints you, your job lets you down, time moves too quickly, or disaster interrupts too rudely, let us remember that "it is NOT only for this life that we have hope in Christ."
Death be not proud...
And then let us join John Donne, if we must be cynical, like our age, and aim our sneers toward death itself and all its cousins on the family compound named disease, disappointment, and disaster:
"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me....
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."
-----
Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.