Until—The Promise Embedded in One Word When We Face Human Tragedy
Note: This article is part of a weekly devotional series I’m writing in 2023 on the book of Acts. To receive yours for free, sign up here.
The images from Nashville this week are too much to bear.
Three children murdered. Three adults gunned down.
On an otherwise normal Monday morning. At school.
Lord have mercy.
The immense grief we’ve experienced this week put me in mind of a poem by Margaret Atwood entitled “Up.” In it she describes a familiar challenge:
You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can’t get out of bed.
She goes on to question what is it that keeps us tethered to the mattress, pondering whether it’s the fear of the unknown future.
After all, it is “immense as outer space. You could get lost there.”
But it’s not the future that is the problem, “nothing so simple” as that. The problem is
The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.
That’s how the past week feels.
Like gelatin filling our lungs.
Why should we ever get out of bed?
I wonder if that’s how the disabled man in Acts 3 felt.
Unable to walk. Dropped off at the Temple every day. Left to beg.
Every new day the same as the last.
And then came something extraordinary, when Peter and John restored him to wholeness.
After the healing of the disabled man, the worshipers at the Temple were astonished and rushed to find the source of this miracle. They found the apostle Peter.
And Peter began to preach.
We saw last week how Peter first deflected all credit away from him and John. The healing was not the result of their extraordinary power or godliness.
The power is in the name of Jesus.
But this was not the sum of his sermon. He was just getting warmed up.
Peter went on to declare the gospel to his fellow countrymen:
- God had fulfilled his promise to their ancestors by sending the Messiah Jesus (v 13 and 18),
- his suffering and death fulfilled OT prophecy (v 18),
- God raised him from the dead (v 15),
- the apostles bore witness to the resurrection (v 15) and performed miracles to validate his claims (v 16),
- so now forgiveness and restoration are available even for those guilty of his death, if they repent (v 19).
Good news indeed.
This apostlic proclamation, this kerygma, announced the fulfillment of God’s plans to redeem his fallen world.
And yet, as Peter made clear, the story wasn’t finished yet.
The Risen Messiah had ascended into heaven, and he commissioned his apostles as witnesses. Empowered by his Spirit they healed in his name and testified to his gospel throughout the earth.
The book of Acts tells the story.
A story that continues to this day.
The age Peter described, this period of the Messiah’s ascension and the spread of his message, is the age we live in right now.
But, Peter added, this age is not the final one. His generation and ours inhabit the era of the ascended Christ. Then comes a powerful little word, a word that gives hope to us in our darkness.
Until.
Another age is coming. Life as we’ve always known it is not how life will always be.
Hear how Peter described what awaits us:
Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets (v 21).
The age of ascension will give way to the age of restoration.
When every wrong will be made right.
When every injustice will be rectified.
When the dead will rise immortal.
When my sister Lynda will breathe again.
When every tear is dried and every sorrow erased.
When we ourselves will be everything we hoped to be, everything we dreamed we could be.
When all will be made new. Everything restored.
What a day.
Even so, come Lord Jesus.
That little word—until—inspires hope when we are depleted, courage when we doubt, faith when we lose heart.
As the hymwriter puts it, “When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.”
Until.
What is now will not always be. We know in part. We speak in part. But one day that which is perfect will come.
So we wait. We endure. We believe.
Until the day faith becomes sight.
Yet there’s a danger on the other side.
If forgetting the promise of “until” tempts us to lose faith, holding to the promise presents the opposite temptation.
To think that what we do now doesn’t matter.
After all, God is going to restore everything one day. So what’s the point of leading my team well, or preaching another sermon, or advocating for a better world?
Strange, isn’t it?
Our brokenness can turn faith into nihilism.
“God will restore everything some day. Thank God I know him so I can be at peace in this messed-up world. I’ll just pray and leave it to him to straighten things out.”
Put another way, it’s the danger identified in a communion prayer from the Book of Common Prayer.
Eucharistic Prayer C is known as the Star Wars Prayer because it praises God “at [whose] command all things came to be,” including “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
But the part I have in mind comes at the end, when one particular danger concerning the Lord’s supper is brought to mind:
Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.
The concern expressed here is that we might use communion in particular, and the gospel in general, solely for existential purposes, that is, to reassure our fledgling hearts, to make us feel whole, to experience inner peace.
Solace, but not strength.
Pardon, but not renewal.
But friends, grace never leaves a person where it found them. That’s why the prayer goes on to say:
Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.
The promise held out in the gospel—the promise of the word until—does more than reassure us that all things will be restored. It empowers and renews and emboldens us to act in Jesus’ name right now for the good of our families, our friends, our communities, our neighborhoods, our world.
This is the very point we read at the beginning of Isaiah 56.
After his prophecy of the suffering Servant who died and rose again (ch 53), the worldwide jubilation brought about by the Servant’s success (ch 54), and the free call of the gospel to people everywhere (ch 55), Isaiah essentially answers the question, “What now?”
Now that we have been forgiven through the Servant’s work, now that we have been restored to oneness with the One True God, now that we have bought bread without money and wine without cost, what are we to do?
Isaiah’s answer is direct:
Maintain justice,
and do what is right,
for my salvation is close at hand
and my righteousness will soon be revealed. (Isaiah 56:1)
In our nihilism we might conclude, “If God will restore everything some day, I don’t have to be concerned about injustice now. That’s God’s business, not mine.”
Isaiah turns that logic on its head.
Notice the word “for.” It’s precisely because God will restore everything, it’s precisely because God will make his righteousness known some day that we act justly and do what is right in the here and now.
Before “until” happens we have work to do.
Which is precisely what the apostle Peter was doing in Acts 3. Here was a disabled man unceremoniously left to panhandle on the Temple grounds.
And Peter healed him.
In that instant the man got a foretaste of what the “until” has to offer.
He sampled the coming restoration of all things when his useless legs received strength and he was free to run.
A little taste of the coming kingdom.
In the here and now.
That’s what our work can be this week.
That’s what your leadership can do for your team. It can give them a taste of the world that is yet to be. Even if they don’t yet know Jesus, you can give them a taste of Jesus’ final restorative work.
And it’s not just your formal ministry or professional leadership. It’s all of life.
The promise of “until” infuses everything with meaning.
So advocate for better gun laws. Work for improvements in the treatment and care for the mentally ill. Bake cookies for your local police precinct to say “Thank you for putting your lives on the line for this community.”
All of it matters.
We won’t be able to change everything.
But we might be able to change things for one person. Maybe even for a lot of people.
We can give them a taste of the restoration that God will surely bring. For them. In them.
And until “until” becomes reality, we can entrust ourselves to Jesus.