THE GOOD NEWS AT THE END
A children’s catechism class was learning the Apostles Creed. Each child had been assigned a sentence to repeat. The first one said, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The second child said, “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son…” When he had completed his sentence, there was an embarrassing silence. Finally, one child piped up, “Teacher, the boy who believes in the Holy Spirit isn’t here.”
Last, but not least, the Apostle’s Creed gets to the Holy Spirit, but mentions only that we believe in the Holy Spirit without listing any of His attributes. It might be difficult to make the connection between the Holy Spirit and the five phrases that conclude this creed. The key to the connection is empowerment. The Holy Spirit is God’s authority within the church and so empowers believers not only for mission, but equips us with gifts for service and provides us with the promise of what is to come.
Jesus told His disciples that acting as a counselor; the Holy Spirit would guide them – and us – into all truth. On Pentecost when they received the Holy Spirit they were then able to accept and process all the information they had received from Jesus while they were with Him. Without the Holy Spirit they did not have the necessary clarity to understand. The Holy Spirit is the driving force behind the church, the one who keeps all things running and according to plan.
Besides that, the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin before we are even aware of our need for Christ. Without the prompting of the Spirit, you would not be able to be a Christian, and as a Christian you should pray to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit dwelling within us that creates real Christian community. Just using the name Christian or gathering in a church does not make for Christian community.
Because we should always think in terms of Christian community, it requires a bit of explanation as to why the next line of this creed is about our belief in the holy catholic church. Some churches substitute Christian for catholic, but the meaning is the same. This word means universal and when used with a small c indicates all of Christ’s followers of all denominations. In other words, the entire family of believers around the world. We are not primarily Methodist or Lutheran or Baptist – we are Christians.
The church is a living, breathing reality. When we say we believe in the church we don’t mean we believe in a building or a place to meet. We believe in what the Holy Spirit empowers and guides and directs into ministry. Since we call ourselves holy we know that we are set apart for service to God in the world but not of the world. Part of what keeps us set apart is the communion of saints. This is not in reference to the sacrament, but rather a relationship. We commune with each other; we commune with all the saints past, present and future because of our common connection in Christ and our common confession of Him. We hold that in common and it connects us to each other.
Just look at the book of Acts to see what the early church and how interconnected they were. They ate together, the met together for study of God’s word, they shared what they had to provide for others, they worshiped together every day. Never once is a committee mentioned – a group of deacons perhaps, but no committees. I fear that is a more contemporary device born of necessity. But even so, we are a communion of saints as well as sinners, and as such, we may not believe that we are saints. That word is usually reserved for those who have lived extraordinary lives and are honored after death.
The hymn “The Church’s One Foundation” speaks of the communion that the saints of the past and those still living share with the Trinity: “Yet she on earth hath union With God the Three in One, And mystic sweet communion With those whose rest is won, With all her sons and daughters Who, by the Master’s hand Led through the deathly waters, Repose in Eden land.” A saint is anyone who has believed in Jesus and lived an obedient life in anticipation of eternity with God.
The next line of the creed places part of our anticipation of eternity front and center. We believe in the forgiveness of sins. This is a biggie. If we don’t believe in this we are in trouble. Forgiveness is at the heart of the crucifixion. In the Old Testament God gave His people a set of commandments to obey and a sacrificial system to atone for their sins when they didn’t obey. The Old Testament understanding of forgiveness as pardon for rebellion, symbolized by tablets of stone and the heavy veil that separated the holy of holies from the worshipper. These are external things.
The New Testament understanding of forgiveness is restored relationship, focusing on the transformation of the human heart and restoring the believer into intimate communion with God and His Church. Oddly enough, the origin of this New Testament forgiveness is found in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, “This is the covenant I will make with them. . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” This verse is a reference to the power of forgiveness that cleanses us within, makes us holy and fills us with the Holy Spirit.
This takes us to the last two lines of the creed, perhaps the most theologically charged statements of belief that we can make, because they carry the element of supernatural truth and power. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. The whole certainty of our faith is linked to resurrection. Paul knew that it was of utmost importance to understand the truth of resurrection. He made the ultimate statement of belief in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ has not been raised our faith is in vain.” The whole thing would be for nothing. We would be like the characters in the Wizard of Oz standing before the Great Wizard and all the while there was nothing but a mere man behind the curtain running the show.
Paul included another “if” statement, “If for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied above all people.” What good would it be for us to hope in Christ in the present, but not in the future? Our existence would be measurable rather than immeasurable. Our lives would end with what the Bible calls the first death; that is, the death of the body. We are all dying a bit each day as time moves us forward.
On one occasion Michelangelo turned to his fellow artists and said with frustration in his voice, "Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures on the one theme of Christ in weakness, Christ on the cross, and most of all, Christ hanging dead?" he asked. "Why do you concentrate on the passing episode as if it were the last word, as if the curtain dropped down there on disaster and defeat? That dreadful scene lasted only a few hours. But to the unending eternity Christ is alive; Christ rules and reigns and triumphs!"
The second death mentioned in Scripture is the eternal death apart from Christ. Christians will not suffer this death because we will be resurrected as Christ was. So what do you honestly believe about Christ and the resurrection? Is it all just fire insurance in the end? We can speculate about the way it happens or how we will look, but the important thing is that we realize how we are changed, and what a drastic and remarkable thing it will be. Paul compared it to the transformation of a seed into a plant. When you plant a seed it does not come up out of the ground and remain exactly like a seed. The plant itself has a whole new appearance.
Paul spent a great deal of time explaining the difference between the mortal human body and the resurrected body. Resurrection is the opposite of the earthly life. The human body is perishable, dishonorable, weak, and physical. It originated from dust of the earth when God created the first Adam, who was mortal and died. The resurrected body, however, shares none of these qualities. It is imperishable, clothed in glory, powerful and spiritual. It originates in heaven through the last Adam who gives us new life, immortal life, and victory over death.
Why does Scripture speak of victory as the opposite of death and not life? The reason is that in biblical theology death is not “natural” as a part of life, but it is the enemy of life caused by human rebellion against God. The enemy has been defeated and God’s original purpose for creation has been restored. Do you look upon death as your enemy? Rest assured that the battle has been won for you already and that when your body has served its purpose God’s plan for you is just beginning.
Everlasting or eternal life is promised by Jesus in the most famous verse of the Bible; “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not die, but will have everlasting life.” Notice that we are exempt not from the first death, the natural human death, but we are exempt from the second death or separation from Christ for eternity. Instead, we have eternal life. But what does that really mean?
If you are like me, you have difficulty picturing living forever because our days on earth are filled with complications and frustrations as well as joy and happiness, but can you really imagine what life without the negative aspects would be like? As defined by the Blue Letter Bible, eternal life is life real and genuine, a life active and vigorous, devoted to God. This is not the sitting on a cloud, harp-playing existence of our imagination, but life as an act of worship where the absence of sin completely transforms the very nature of life. For all eternity we will be brought deeper and deeper into the full glory and mystery of the Trinity. We will learn to love Him and one another in deeper and deeper ways.
C. S. Lewis imagined a fictional bus trip that the dead took from hell to heaven in his book The Great Divorce. This portion I will read is the best description I think we can find from our human perspective. “Son, you cannot in your present state understand eternity. . . But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have this and I’ll take the consequences,’ little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.
Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”
Life everlasting, eternal life, eternity or whatever you call it will be the only place free from sorrow and sadness and the memory of pain and loss and anger. We would not want to spend one minute longer than we had to in a place where those things existed, but the moment we believe in Christ and accept His gift of salvation, our eternity begins. It may not seem that way, but we live within the vision of God’s kingdom even before we join Him forever. This is how we are able to survive the harshness of life and the damage to our hearts and souls that result from life on earth.
Because we believe all these things that the Apostles’ Creed proclaims, we are able to have hope for a future that completes God’s purpose for us, a future that alleviates all our suffering and pain, and a future that places us in close proximity to the one whom we have prayed to, believed in, and worshiped all these years. Jesus called it home. It waits for all of us who wait on the Lord.
