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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Many physicists like to say that our cosmos has a life span of some 14 billion years and that we’ve used about 3.5 billion years of it to date. In other words, we have just 11 billion years of evolving before things pack it in.
If this were true, depending on your point of view, this would either be a comforting thought or a massive disappointment. That is to say, one consequence of this theory might be that Christians expecting an imminent return of Jesus (to save Planet Earth) may as well relax and find something else to do other than preach repentance. The end is not nigh.
Then again, people who have no such sense of this “Advent hope” might take refuge in the thought that there’s plenty of time for getting things right before facing the consequences of their behaviour. Reincarnationists could reason that over the next 11 billion years, humans can be recycled until they perfect themselves.
Being a Seventh-day Adventist (rather than a reincarnationist), I wonder about the physicist theory. If they are right about how long the cosmos has to go, is this necessarily incompatible with the belief that Jesus’ second advent is on the horizon? Not really. God may interject Himself into our cosmic time frame yet again at any time—to ensure our further and safe passage into the future.
Moreover, a long time frame need not change the foundation for our ethics and commitment to Christian teaching. Obedience to right and commitment to truth need not have a sunset clause. Conformity to God’s Word needn’t be conditional upon His coming back soon to either punish or reward. It could be premised as a service of love—because God first loved us.
If time persists longer than we expect, does it really matter? Death and eternal life are separated by a blink at any rate.
Of course I didn’t always think like this; I was trained to think just the opposite. As a child, I was warned to be good because, “Daddy’s coming home soon”; in school, because “The teachers on their way”; and, at work, “The boss’ll be checking up.”
Now I face “performance management” as an annual judgment day. In performance management, one reviews one’s achievements, goals and strategies in order to satisfy our overseers that we’ve not been indolent. We promise them to place our work above all else in our lives. (Well, not exactly, but it feels that way.)
But should life be lived as though a cosmic performance-management gun was pressed against our temples? Should the ethical basis for our existence be asserted in the context of an impending final sunset?
I think not. The “end of all things” serves as a promise and a warning to unethical beings and bad behaviour, and signals that evil will not persist forever. But it provides neither stimulus nor direction for doing the Christian thing.
Christianity is not a religion of fear in the face of a precipice, but one of love—fear-repudiating love. It calls for ethical behaviour because it’s in the nature of love to be ethical. This motive has no deadline against it. It has no contingency factor built into it in relation to a looming judgment.
Love doesn’t behave itself because a red-light camera is watching. Love doesn’t become itself because it fears the Second Coming. No, love is fearless and relentless. It’s an eternal principle of selflessness that exists irrespective of timetables.
Love began an eternity before our planetary system, and will persist well beyond any time physicists may set. So when it comes to ethics, Christians are asked to participate on the basis of that eternal love principle.
It was in this spirit that Ellen White, the visionary co-founder of Seventh-day Adventism, wrote to her son in 1890, saying: “What my future course may be the Lord knows. He hangs a mist before my eyes that I shall only see the present, and I am content it should be thus. I am resting in the love of God with a peaceful trust and a happy assurance. I am not worrying about the future.”
What an inspired confession! What great existential advice for all of us—for all time.
Extract from Signs of the Times, January February 2004 .
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