promises

Brad East:

The gospel does not promise you health. It does not promise you wealth. It does not promise you anything in this life except the person and work of Jesus. You may or may not get married; you may or may not have children; you may or may not live long; you may or may not live well. You may suffer trials, you may endure squalor, you may know little more than pain, fear, and isolation. You may be homeless and friendless, utterly abandoned by this cold, dark, unforgiving world. God does not promise to spare you any of it. In fact, Jesus himself promises that some of us, just by being his followers, will suffer these things as a result (John 15:18–16:33).

This is absolutely unquestionably correct, though even if you have attended church all your life long you may not have heard it.

But what promises have we been granted for the world to come? Here C. S. Lewis in “The Weight of Glory” is helpful:

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe — ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.

It is noteworthy, I think, that many Christians today are somewhat embarrassed by these promises; they are extravagant, after all. But I don’t think it’s the extravagance that bothers Christians; rather, — and this I think is something Brad suggests in his excellent essay — the discomfort is that they would prefer other gifts. Ones they can see and count now. Why should we have to wait?

Lewis continues his meditation:

The first question I ask about these promises is: “Why any of them except the first?” Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols. For though it may escape our notice at first glance, yet it is true that any conception of being with Christ which most of us can now form will be not very much less symbolical than the other promises; for it will smuggle in ideas of proximity in space and loving conversation as we now understand conversation, and it will probably concentrate on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of His deity. And, in fact, we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always do fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed — in fact, with hymeneal or erotic imagery. I am not for a moment condemning such imagery. I heartily wish I could enter into it more deeply than I do, and pray that I yet shall. But my point is that this also is only a symbol, like the reality in some respects, but unlike it in others, and therefore needs correction from the different symbols in the other promises. The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love, with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and relieving each other, are supplied.