…I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’… I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Isaiah 46:8-11, ESV)
Every round is chock-full of unknowns. We ‘peg it’ on the first tee, always facing the uncertainty of what will happen. We hope—even pray—that things will go well.
By the time we walk off the eighteenth green, that round is over. Every round is ‘bookended’ by the first swing and the last putt— whatever we did between the fixed boundaries of pegging it and doffing our hats is in the books!
We can mentally review the round, rehearse a better swing, and even go home and pout, but one thing is certain—we can never get that round back; it is in the books.
Speaking of rehearsing the swing, a good friend of mine told me a story about his five-year-old grandson. The teacher sent the grandson home with a note in his folder citing ‘disruptive behavior.’ When the mom called to inquire, she discovered the awful infraction: “He was rehearsing his golf swing in the lunch line.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m giving this kid a gold star and an attaboy. Heck, now that I think about it, we should start a GoFundMe page to raise money for a new set of sticks!
Analogously, just as every round has a beginning and an end, life on Earth has a beginning and an end—whatever our lives have been about is decided between the fixed bookends of birth and death.
The larger question that tends to haunt humanity is this: “Is there life after death?” If so, what does that look like? Do our lives truly “echo in eternity?” N.T. Wright puts it this way: “Is there life after life after death?”
Dip your toe into the waters of opinions about what awaits us “on the other side,” and you quickly encounter contradictory views.
The prevailing approaches to this critical issue are either the naïve “We are all going to a better place” or, with a shrug of the shoulders, the agnostic “Who can know?”
The spectrum of beliefs about the “afterlife” ranges from annihilation to reincarnation to reabsorption to resurrection. Pause to consider.
Scientific Atheism, if consistent with its assumptions, holds that we live, we die, and that is it. According to this view, we are annihilated— fertilizing daisies is all that awaits us.
Reincarnation, while there are diverse views, holds that we are corrupt and that it will take an endless cycle of returning in different forms to purge us of our deficiencies—pay attention to the widespread use of the language of ‘karma’ in American culture.
Pantheism argues for reabsorption. This view holds that when we breathe our last, like a raindrop falling into the ocean, we merge into the oneness of an impersonal Cosmos—the idea that we have eternal individual identities is a myth.
Christianity’s infinitely better outlook offers the most beautiful ending of all for the person who bows the knee— when we go the way of all flesh, our gifted souls go to be with the Lord. But that is not the end! We go there to wait! Wait for what?
We wait until King Jesus returns to remove the curse from his creation (Romans 8:18-25), awaken those asleep in Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), judge and punish all wickedness (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10), and transform the believer’s mortal body into one like his own, the immortal body that walked out of the tomb 2,000 years ago (1 Corinthians 15:50-58).
How do we know? The historical/biblical answer is this: There is One who has been to the ‘other side’ and returned in an indestructible body to tell us the “end from the beginning.”
Prayer: Lord! Cause men and women everywhere to explore this weighty issue.