"This Too Shall Be Made Right"

We live in a horrifically broken world. Everything decays, all things break down, beauty turns to ugliness and that which is good fades away. Our lots fall to different paths but we all face death as the final enemy, and no one can escape. People are hopelessly wicked, despite what books say, and even nature groans beneath a curse. And the final, terrible nail in the coffin, the deepest and ultimate horror, is that it is all meaningless. This is the way the world has always been, and it is the way the world will always be, until the stars tumble on and the sun expires and all is left to utter darkness.

Unless, of course, we know the whole story.

Christians know that this is not the way the world has always been. It is not the way the world will always be. And because we know the beginning, we know the ending as well.

There is a God who created everything to be beautiful and perfect and good. Man committed cosmic treason of the highest order and brought down a curse upon himself and his whole world. A shroud of sin settled over all that is, seeped into every last nook and cranny of creation and began working toward its ultimate destruction, a disease that would not stop until all was ended. But the God who created is the God who redeems. He did not leave His world to fall to the disease of sin, but He planned from time immemorial how He would rescue His creation and His people. His own Son came to die, but also to live, to show people that there was a better way, that this was not normal, this was not the way things were supposed to be. We see the world around us and assume that death is the sine qua non of life. But Christ came to show us that there is a better day coming--a restoration, when the world shall be set right-side up and His Kingdom and His reign will be everlasting.

For now there is pain. There is brokenness. There is death eating through all things. But those of us who know the whole story can sometimes catch glimpses--short moments of beauty, which shine like a single ray of the sun through an otherwise unbroken blanket of cloud. There is a crack in the world which is ever-widening, which will continue to open until all is swallowed up, not in death but in victory. And the glory of the new world in which all shall be as it truly should be will infinitely outweigh everything in the life we know now.

For now, life is pain, everything is broken and death seems to reign over all. But fear not, my friends. This too shall be made right.