A,MINISTRATORS AND PRIESTS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER

The parable of the minas tells the future beginning with the Messiah ascending and giving his followers the responsibilities to minister on his behalf while he is gone from earth. The rewards for faithful service will be the authority over cities.

1 Corinthians 6:2-3: Or do you not know that the saints – holy ones will judge the world? If the world is judged by you, are you not competent to constitute the smallest law courts? Do you not know that we will judge – have administration over angels? How much more matters of this life?

The phrase “do you not know” occurs 6 times in this chapter (verses 2, 3, 9, 15, 16, and 19). Paul assumed that the believers in Corinth would understand his statement about judging the future world including angels.

The concept of judging in the age to come includes administering the affairs of the people like was done during the time of the judges recorded in the book of Judges. We often think of future judging primarily focused on condemnation.

The context of this statement is managing the disagreements the believers had with each other. In like manner, we will have this responsibility in the age to come. During Jesus’ life on earth, the angels were over him, but after the ascension, the angels were in subjection to him. Such will be the case with us.

Matthew 19:28-30: And Jesus said to them, "Truly I say to you, that you who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for my name's sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life. "But many who are first will be last; and the last, first.

Luke 22:28-30: "You are those who have stood by me in my trials; and just as my Father has granted me a kingdom, I grant you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

2 Timothy 2:11-12: It is a trustworthy statement: For if we died with him, we will also live with him; If we endure, we will also reign with him; If we deny him, he also will deny us;

A share in that government as a co-ruler with the Messiah was offered as the gracious reward for all who choose to become involved with Jesus’ mission.

Revelation 1:5-6 (KJV): And from Jesus the Messiah, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, And has made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

Revelation 2:25-27: 'Nevertheless what you have, hold fast until I come. 'He who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end, TO HIM I WILL GIVE AUTHORITY OVER THE NATIONS; AND HE SHALL RULE THEM WITH A ROD OF IRON, AS THE VESSELS OF THE POTTER ARE BROKEN TO PIECES, as I also have received authority from my Father

Revelation 3:20-22: 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with me. 'He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with me on my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my Father on His throne. 'He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.'"

Revelation 5:10: "You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth."

Revelation 20:6: Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of the Messiah and will reign with him for a thousand years.

PRIESTS

Exodus 19:1-6: God wanted Israel to be a kingdom of priests.

1 Peter 2:9-10: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,

Isaiah 61:1-7: Priests and ministers of God

Luke 14:13-14: "But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Why is serving as administrators or priests a reward? What is the benefit to someone in their new resurrected life? A reward is something given in recognition of one’s service, effort, or achievement. The greatest blessing, we enjoy today is the benefit of loving God and others.

YAHWEH OUR FATHER’S REWARD

Ephesians 1:16-23: The prayer speaks of God’s call, inheritance, and power; not yours.

We are a part of Yahweh’s great hope. He has waited from the beginning to have a regenerated family, a new humanity, living in a regenerated world and heavens, so that He can live among His immortal, glorified, sons and daughters.

Revelation 21:3: And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them

Zephaniah 3:16-17: In that day it will be said to Jerusalem: "Do not be afraid, O Zion; Do not let your hands fall limp. "Yahweh your God is in your midst, a victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

Isaiah 62:4-5: It will no longer be said to you, "forsaken," nor to your land will it any longer be said, "Desolate"; But you will be called, "My delight is in her," and your land, "married"; for Yahweh delights in you, and to Him your land will be married. For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you.

The end is near! Are you spiritually prepared to hold fast to the end!

A HOPE THAT CAN ENDURE

What then does the Bible say hope is? How do we define a hope that avoids self-gratifying desires and also honestly acknowledges reality?

The Bible says, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Yehovah …I wait for Yehovah, my soul waits, and in His word I hope” (Psalm 130:1,5, ESV). We’re told to hope in one thing: God’s Word.

Now, God is pretty frank about the state of most of our dreams and desires. “People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Timothy 3:2-4). By this tangible representation of fact, humanity has made a brutal, wrecked place of the world; and of and by ourselves we cannot save ourselves or mend the brokenness.

Into the desperate cycle of pain, Yehovah Elohim - God by His son the Messiah Jesus has intervened, and that intervention gives us hope that one day the wrongs will be righted, justice will be done and forgiveness will heal. “For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Galatians 5:5).

This is not hope that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” Nowhere does the word of God guarantee that our lives will be better or richer in any material sense. This hope is not based on our own efforts, the state of our lives or future aspirations. Biblical hope is that God sees every act and motivation; He will grant justice and mercy; His strength will redeem and transform; His path and plans for our lives will ultimately be the most fulfilling because that’s where we will most clearly experience his presence.

John Piper put it this way, “If I am put down, I look to the emotional reservoir of hope for the strength to return good for evil. Without hope, I have no power to absorb the wrong and walk in love, and I sink into self-pity or self-justification. If I face a temptation to be dishonest, to steal, to lie, or to lust, I look to the emotional reservoir of the hope our God and Father Yehovah has given us for the strength to hold fast to the way of His righteousness, and deny myself some brief, unsatisfying pleasure.”

This is how biblical hope is intertwined with our faith (see Hebrews 11:1). In that same chapter of Hebrews, Abel is commended for his faith, which we might also read as hope. He was a herdsman, not exactly an illustrious career. As far as we know, he never married, never had children, and was murdered by his own brother at a young age. Nevertheless, we’re told, “Through his faith, though he died, he still speaks” (Hebrews 11:4). Our hope in God doesn’t guarantee success, relationships, legacy, or long life. Rather biblical hope pins itself on God’s purpose for us and how He will glorify Himself through our lives. The question we need to ask ourselves is, Are we living our lives to become more like the Messiah Jesus who was and is the outshining of his God and Father Yehovah. We become perfect as we strive to become more like the Lord Messiah Jesus. The amazing hope our God has given us through his promises that we who are new creation in the Messiah, will co-rule and co-inherit all the Jesus will inherit when he takes his place on the throne of David at Zion to begin his 1,000-year rule over the nation of the world that have survived God’s wrath.

This is what allowed Paul, despite all of his ordeals with persecution from secular powers and problems thanks to disgruntled church members, to write:

“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

In his podcast episode on combatting hopelessness, Gary Wilkerson noted, “There is this arrow from the Holy Spirit that penetrates all those walls of self interest and building up self. It breaks through that and says, ‘That's not what your heart was built for. You weren't built for yourself. You were built for others; you were built for God. You were built for his kingdom.’ No one is happy unless they come to that place of realizing ‘I’m not meant to live for myself.’”

Biblical hope is not the passive tolerance nor is it self-generated, although it does encompass the truth that there are many aspects of our lives that we cannot change by our own power. Biblical hope is not the individualistic self-indulgence of the American dream, although it does embrace the eager eye toward the future.

Our hope is a trust in our God and Father Yehovah who has made a way for us to know Him. No better words may conclude these thoughts than those of God’s word:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13).

Written by World Challenge Staff, edited and added to by Bruce Lyon

BETWEEN THE MOUNTAIN AND THE WAVES

Humility is one of the most difficult Christian virtues both to define and obtain. What is it exactly? How can we tell if we’re succeeding in becoming more humble?

“The Great Wave of Kanagawa, one of the most famous pieces of Japanese art, was created during some of the hardest years of Katsushika Hokusai’s life.

In the years immediately proceeding the painting, Hokusai had faced several serious health problems, his wife had passed away, and he had been forced to rescue a grandson from financial ruin, which left him impoverished. Hit by one disaster after another, he began creating “The Great Wave.” Mount Fuji stands in the background covered with a pale cap of snow, and the lighting on the mountain indicates that it’s early morning. It is believed to be a representation of serenity and the supernatural. In the foreground, a monstrous wave curls over men struggling in a boat, the foamy crest above them is jagged like claws. Most interpret this as the struggle of men against the violence and power of the natural world.

Hokusai had created several versions of this painting as a much younger man, but it was only in the wake of personal loss and suffering that he finally created the masterpiece that would become world-renowned.    

Reflecting on his own creative process, he wrote, “From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty, I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-five, I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty, you will see real progress…”

He mused, “Learn to cultivate the trait of humility. None of us are perfect. We all make mistakes, both in our personal lives and our artistic creations. It takes a lifetime to become a master, and even then, we may not achieve that designation. Be thankful for what you have been given and seek to be humble.”

As I researched the labour-intensive process of ukiyo-e, which Hokusai used to create “The Great Wave” as well as learned more about this exacting master of his craft, it struck me that true humility is rarely comfortable to be around.

A Blue-Collar Worker in Church

Modern church culture often associates humility with ‘being nice.’ The Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey discusses the fundamentalist Mormon sect, and how many people are bound in the relentless need to ‘be good’…or as their founder often said, “Keep sweet.” How does this work, though, with what we’re told about Jesus the Messiah who was perfectly humble and who also regularly annoyed, challenged and offended others?

Jesus offered his disciples an example of what humility should be. “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:10-14, ESV).

It’s easy to view this story as a good guy vs. bad guy story but recall that Jesus had a religious zealot and a tax collector among his listeners. This story was an invitation into humility for them both.

Most tax collectors or people who worked for the Roman government probably wouldn’t have gone to the temple in the first place. Why expose yourself to criticism and people treating you poorly because they knew you worked for a government they didn’t like or that you were going to demand a part of their paycheck? This tax collector, though, seeks God even when it means that he will be misunderstood and mistreated by God’s people. However, he doesn’t ostentatiously go to the front to prove a point about how God will hear him; he doesn’t cause a scene. He acknowledges that he is indeed a sinner. Maybe he took more money than he should’ve or let someone off the hook, knowing that this meant he wasn’t doing his job properly. Regardless, he almost demands God’s mercy because he desperately needs it.

His mistreatment at the hands of religious people doesn’t make him any less of a sinner than the rude, self-righteous Pharisee in God’s eyes.

The Hoity-Toity Church Leader

Condemning the Pharisee is easily done because they’re almost the Christian equivalent of Orcs or Stormtroopers at this point. What if instead we reframe the story in terms more equivalent to how Jesus’ listeners would’ve heard it?

Two men went into church to pray, one a senior pastor and the other a casino pit-boss. The senior pastor, standing by himself, prayed thus: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, porn-addicts, divorcees, corrupt entrepreneurs, or even like this casino worker who tempts people into gambling. I bring people to God every week through my sermons. I save marriages through counselling. I pray for three hours every day. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.”

Jesus points out that, despite all of the good this man did for the kingdom of God, he was not justified in the eyes of God when he went home that night. Constantly denying the gratification of sin is not piece of cake; budgeting and sacrificing in order to regularly give to others is no joke either. Jesus never condemns the Pharisees for their hard work and rigor in obeying God’s law. In fact, he says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:17-19).  

Rather, the Messiah Jesus condemns the Pharisee’s self-righteousness, his need to put himself above other people. Maybe because people criticized him, his calling ‘to live above reproach’ morphed into a need to prove that he was righteous, and that God had indeed called him to this work. Regardless, this man’s focus slid off of God and onto his own life and work as compared to other’s lives and work.  

I can’t help but wonder if Peter, blue-collar worker turned church leader, was remembering Jesus’ story about the self-involved pastor when he wrote to the early church, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:5-7, ESV).

Standing up front means everyone sees when you stumble. The Pharisee had to balance his call to a higher standard with an equally great need for God’s mercy, even if his partitioners condemned him for being broken and sinful like them. 

Mountain of God, Waves of Sin

How do we live graciously with difficult people? How do we accept the feedback of people who nit-pick work they could never manage themselves? How do we admit and repent publicly when we’ve failed? What silences the anxiety and fear that drives us to defend ourselves, paint ourselves in the best light and care far too much about how we’re seen?

Meeting God and keeping our focus on pleasing him is the key. In the God’s Eternal Pursuit series, John Bailey explained, “What drove the Apostle Paul, I believe, was two things: he had an encounter with Jesus, and he wanted other people to have an encounter with Jesus. The second part to that was he knew what it was to live under the law. He knew that it was a broken, dead, empty place.

“When he came to this understanding of the New Covenant in the Messiah Jesus, it so motivated him that he wanted to tell the whole world, and he did. In most of the known world, he planted churches and preached the gospel. It wasn't so he would have a great name. He did it because he was so impassioned to take the message of the New Covenant and the revelation of what the Messiah Jesus accomplished on the cross.”

This humility is passionate, not passive. It’s merciful to sinners but not indulgent with sin. The humble apostle nevertheless knew his calling and fought to protect the newly formed church. He led by example, knowing that he also desperately needed grace. He also caused riots with his evangelism, reprimanded churches, kicked people out of leadership. and wrote authoritatively about the labour and self-discipline required of true believers.

He was a master of his craft who captured the tension between the peace of the Messiah and the battle against our own demented sin-nature. God’s presence and His promise of salvation are a mountain in our lives, a point that must always be at the center of our work. However, often in the foreground are the whitecapped waves of an unsafe world where we will know heartache, temptation, and failure. Humility is holding fast to the truth, even when it makes us enemies, and yet also always acknowledging our dangerous penchant for self-interested blindness. We are living between the mountain and the waves. We must not lose sight of either, only humility will allow us to do this.

None of us are perfect; all of us are sinners. Sanctification takes a lifetime. Be thankful for what you have been given stewardship over and seek to be humble.

Written by World Challenge Staff, and edited by Bruce Lyon

GROWING IN THE DESERT

Jesus told his followers that with God, all things are possible, but do we believe that?

“The vast autonomous republic in western Uzbekistan, spanning the Aral Sea, is an environmental disaster zone,” The Economist noted. “Soviet-era central planners sucked the sea dry to irrigate cotton fields, turning the world’s fourth-largest lake into a puddle. The roads around Nukus, the region’s capital, are crusted with salt, a memory of the dried-up sea.

Around 90 percent of the sea is gone now. The exposed seabed stretches for barren miles where most plants, animals and people cannot survive. Some areas of the seabed are so toxic that the area has occasionally been called ‘the silent Chernobyl.’ One of the islands, Aralsk-, was a secret research facility where the Soviet government was studying bioweapons. Plague-laden rats were escaping the facility, and this combined with growing desert wiped out villages. The parched dirt in other areas is filled with salt and pesticides that were dumped into the sea; breathing in the dust-laden air can cause cancer, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis or a variety of respiratory diseases. Much of the landscape looks like the surface of the moon.

In an interview with National Geographic, a local named Yusup Kamalov said, “This is what the end of the world looks like. If we ever have Armageddon, the people of Karakalpakstan are the only ones who will survive because we are already living it.”

In these empty stretches of seabed, though, there is a spark of new life.

The Economist wrote, “Cotton is still the agricultural mainstay, but now liquorice [licorice for those of us in the U.S.] fields are popping up all over. The root crop has been cultivated in Central Asia for millennia, but it is becoming a booming business for dried-out Karakalpakstan. Not only does it grow well in salted land, says Khabibjon Kushiev, a biologist at Gulistan State University, it regenerates the land in the process by sucking salt out of the soil.”

The simultaneous fragility and resilience of the world and ourselves is a marvellous homage to a minutely attentive God who finds incredibly inventive ways to restore his creation.

There is an irony both gentle and lovely in the fact that a plant which is used to make sweet confectionary is helping to restore the earth that dictators and oppressed men once ruined. Moments like this glimmer with God’s humour and care in equal measures, His willingness to redeem what we imagine entirely beyond deliverance.

So many similar moments are found in the lives recorded between the Bible’s pages. Job’s life was torn apart by natural disasters, death, human evil, and spiritual attack. His personal world became a wasteland on multiple levels. He lost his children, wealth, resources, health, community standing and confidence in God’s care for his life. God knew it was going to happen, and many people read this book of the Bible and ask, “Why does God allow evil to happen?” What if the greater question was:

“How does God reveal Himself through the broken parts of the world and people?”

He has the power to undo everything evil, right? He could just snap his fingers and make the darkness go away. One day, he will do just that. For now, though, he chooses a quieter, more subtle way of eroding the destruction of sin.

This seeming paradox is poetically captured in one of Job’s laments where he says, “Yehovah has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. …Oh, that my words were written! Oh, that they were inscribed in a book! Oh, that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever!

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another (Job 19:9-10, 23-27, ESV).

Job prophetically knew that the coming one – the Messiah would come to earth; he was granted some inkling that God’s redemption plan would take a wildly unlikely turn when the son of the living God was specially created in the womb of a virgin Mary. He knew that somehow while his body was being destroyed by age and disease in a most gruesome fashion, he would also stand in it before his redeemer.

At the end of Job’s story, we’re told that his fortunes are restored, and he has more children. They could have never replaced the children he lost, but they would have been an undeniable and probably unexpected blessing. Would they have ever been born if the horrors of those earlier chapters hadn’t happened? Possibly not.

God’s method of redeeming and creating in the middle of our brokenness seems to routinely take very unpredictable paths.

When everything in our pasts and present lives looks hopelessly barren, how do we anticipate God’s hand? How do we continue to hope for him to arrive when we’re told that his arrival rarely ever comes as anticipated?

On this theme, Claude Houde explored the life of Joseph in Genesis with Gary Wilkerson, and he noted, “I believe that through every season Joseph allowed God to fashion his identity. The life that Joseph inherited at first was in a dark, dark, dysfunctional home all around him. I mean, there’s murder, there's rape, there’s a toxic home and a passive father and all that that stuff.” Houde points next to the dream God gave Joseph of the sheaves of wheat bowing down. “Let God determine what his true sheaves for you are in this season. We have a tendency to want to pick the sheaves. 'This is my reward. This is my harvest. This is how God’s got me.’ You sow in tears; you walk, carrying the seed, and you're rejoiced bringing his sheaves in your life.”

He summarized his ideas with “One of the greatest dream killers, I find, is the timetables we set. ‘By this point, I should be there’ and the outward measures. I think one of the greatest dream feeders is ‘Where I am now, I'm serving passionately, and I'm putting all my gifts into this, and I'm serving, and I'm trusting God.’”

Perhaps the strangest part of our Christian walk is the necessity of acknowledging the devastation in our lives. We must be aware of how catastrophically sin has ravaged our hearts and world. Only then will we be paying close enough attention to actually witness God’s redemption in action. It can be incredibly tough, even outright depressing, to confront the darkness around us and within us. It can cause us to lament and even question if God is present. However, you only get to see the sun rise if you watch the dark horizon, waiting, waiting, waiting in the chilly gloom.

Much of a disciple’s life is waiting in the dark desert and holding tight to the hope that the Messiah will enter into our most broken landscapes and begin to heal them. He rarely works how we image he will; he rarely snaps his fingers and makes all the gloomy barrenness disappear in an instant, not yet anyway. We want to rush him; we want to tell him how to get it done. We want rise up and meet him in the air and experience the new Kingdom of God right now. The Father moves in his own way and time, though.

As we wait, we plant small seeds, toiling over what looks like toxic ground and trusting that the Messiah can create new life and a healed land.

Written by the World Challenge Staff and edited by Bruce Lyon

YEHOVAH ALWAYS GIVE TO THOSE WHO ARE HIS WHAT IS BEST FOR THEM!

There is something in our minds that feels better when a person grows old and has experienced all of life and then dies. We say that they have lived a full life.

In Acts 13, Paul is being sent out on his first missionary journey. He is sent out by the elders of the Antioch church, and he makes a significant statement about death when he is asked to give a word of encouragement in the synagogue in Pisidia. (As a side note, I love how Paul is geared up and just already has something on his heart to share with this group.) As the text reads, Barnabas and Paul are asked, and then Paul just stands up and goes. As someone who preaches most Sundays, I love the idea of no outline, just God speaking to you and you speaking to people. Paul was a man who was hooked up to the well and out flowed the things that God put there.

Notice:

Acts 13:36. For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption,

Paul says something implicitly about life that could be helpful for us. Paul says that David dies after he had served his purpose to God. Essentially after he had done what God wanted him to do, David died. For some people, this may seem like harsh treatment by God to his servant. Why wouldn’t God give David a long, good life after how David served Him? David gave his life to God. Shouldn’t God give David a retirement package? You know like 20 years where David could do what he wanted or do the things he hadn’t gotten to do because he was busy serving God.

I don’t think David was just living for the Kingdom. I think David’s primary motivation in this life was the glory of God. Once David had done what he was supposed to do for that purpose, he died. You see this in elderly people quite often. As long as they have a purpose in life, they continue to live. But often when that purpose is removed, their health tends to deteriorate. This could be part of how God made us.

I think we undervalue how great it is that we are to serve God according to the purpose that He gives to us. Purpose in this verse could also mean plan. God has had a plan for the world of redeeming it and glorifying it and making it new. In the same way, He has started this work of making things new by resurrecting Jesus and then started the process of making us new by making us new creations in the Messiah and giving us new hearts. We get to take part in God’s plan and purpose for this world that is thousands of years old and ends with everything made new and God glorified.

It feels all too fitting that once we have fulfilled our role in God’s purpose and plan that we would die. The intended purpose for our lives is God’s glory (Isaiah 43:7). It feels proper and good that when we fulfill our intended purpose, we would pass away whether that is as a young or old or somewhere in between.

I am not trying to be insensitive to people who have lost friends or family members young. I know that hurts, and I’m sorry if you have. I’m trying/hoping to reconcile life and death as a Christian.

I lost my brother many years ago. He didn't make it to the millenium. He asked me a week before he died of canser what would happen when he died. He knew, but he wanted me to say it to him again. I said that when he closed his eyes and died is would feel like a split second and he would experience rising up the meet the Lord Jesus in the clouds, because as the dead know nothing he wouldn't know how much time had passed since he died. He died a week later and I closed his eyes that were wide open. I can't wait to see him in the resurrection! I am still allive because God has something more He wants me to learn, or something His wants me to do for Him at 80 years of age. Praise Yehovah my God and Father.