CHRISTIANITY AND THE FUTURE
‘But, according to His promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.’
2 Peter 3:13 (R.V.)
The Apostles deal very much with the future life. They use the Christian revelation concerning it as an incentive to holy, watchful living. So much as this is clear. But the form in which they conceived the future was peculiar.
I. Christianity is the religion of the future.—It throws the light of what is to be on what is. The sphere of Judaism was exclusively the present, and in other religions we can seldom find any trace of the use of the future as incentive to goodness.
II. It reveals the future.—Yet a full and detailed description of the future cannot be given us. Why not? Because of the imperfectness and changeableness of human language, connotations, and associations. Such figures as ‘pearly gates,’ ‘golden streets’ suggest, they do not describe. They do, however, carry most true suggestions for us. All the figures of the ‘new heavens and new earth’ are intended to present this as the essential feature of the future—Righteousness.
III. And the future influences the present.
(a) ‘ We look for,’ implies a promise: therefore the future cultures faith.
(b) ‘ We look for,’ implies a place wherein is righteousness: therefore the future helps to purify us.
(c) We have not, but we believe the promise. ‘Faith is the substance,’ or present enjoyment ‘of things hoped for’; so that we who believe have heaven now.
Illustration
‘As the vision rises before us we cry again, bowed down by past failures, “Who is sufficient for these things?” There can be but one answer—he who wholly forgets himself in God Who called him; he who “lays down at the footstool of God his successes and his failures, his hopes and his fears, his knowledge and his ignorance, his weakness and his strength, his misgivings and his confidence—all that he is and all that he might be—content to take up thence just that which God shall give him.” ’