Levered From This World.

Sometimes you think, don’t you?  And sometimes you think it’s necessary in God’s plan that we are levered away from our dependence and attachment to this world.  You’d think that God has to make us decay physically in order to get us to focus our minds and hearts on things eternal.  It is true that the Lord has to take away from us the things we have been engrossed in that we could then give our efforts to meditating on the future life.  He has to take us away from that which is perishing and which will perish so that we concentrate our hearts on that which can never spoil or fade (1 Pet.1:4,5).  He has given to us a living hope by Christ’s resurrection, and has brought us to “an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

The very mention of an inheritance suggests that it is concrete, real, actual, something tangible.  Is this the “new earth” wherein righteousness dwells?  Is that our inheritance?  Or is it God Himself?  Perhaps it’s both.  Perhaps our inheritance is God the King of the new earth.  But whichever it is, the tent we live in on this earth will be dissolved and we will be clothed with immortality.

A Christian can be in good form, yet the body decaying.  Isn’t that simply amazing?  A Christian’s spirit can be rejoicing, yet their body shutting down gradually.  A believer can glory in the Lord, yet be wracked with pain. 

Puritan Richard Baxter’s (1615-1691) words ring true:

Come, Lord, when grace has made me meet
Thy blessed face to see;
For if Thy work on earth be sweet,
What will Thy glory be?

These are the great truths that believers hold on to. Or to put it in another way, these are the great truths that hold on to the believer!  These hold us like a buckler, a belt that holds everything else in place.  They give us stability in our lives.  They are the sheet anchor of our souls when the gales blow and the waves engulf us.  These are God’s provision for us as believers.  Oh, “how good is the God we adore!”