What if you knew then what you know now???

It’s my wedding anniversary today! I have been married for 3 years to my best friend- the coolest nicest man I have ever met. It has been an amazing 3 years, in which we have welcomed the birth of our little girl (who will be 2 in December!!!), and had many crazy fun adventures, and some difficult times also that have brought us closer together. I love my husband, and family.

Life has not always been this good for me. My teenage years, and through into my early twenties were difficult years of chaos, drama, isolation and loneliness. If I only I knew then what I know now. If I only I knew that in only 5-10 years I would be a contented Christian wife and mother. I cant help but think that the knowledge of future goodness would have helped immensely in the times when I was most struggling. I remember a Christmas when I was around 19 years old which I spent alone. I was isolated from my family, and remember only feeling intensely lonely on a day that should be so filled with love and laughter. Imagine if I knew of the day I would meet my husband, the day we would marry, the day we would begin our own family? Imagine if I had the knowledge of how un-lonely my life would become?! Imagine if I knew of all the wonderful friends that would soon enter my life?! Imagine if I knew that I would become a Christian and understand the ultimate love of God?!  I can’t help but think that if I had known this back then, my suffering would have been bearable- I would have had hope in the future that I knew was coming.

The amazing reality that I am learning about at the moment is that God provides this very thing to those who are saved. God gives us a hope in a future that we know is certain- a future in heaven.   And the knowledge of this future goodness helps us to bear our current struggles, because we know that they won’t last and our ultimate future is awesome.

How do we receive this future in heaven? This assurance of the goodness that is to come? First we must realise that we dont deserve it. We are all sinful people, who have broken the laws that God has given us to live by. Because every broken law deserves punishment, we deserve the eternal punishment of hell. There is nothing we can do, we have already broken Gods laws, we cant unbreak them- justice must be served. We deserve hell, like someone who speeds in their car needs to pay a fine, or a murderer deserves a jailterm.  Thankfully, God provided a way for us to go to heaven. He arranged for his son to ‘pay the fine’ for us. He sent Jesus to die on the cross, taking the punishment that we deserve, so that we can go free. We can go to heaven.

The assurance of this is given when Jesus rose from the dead 3 days after he was killed. Tim Keller explains it this way:

Jesus had risen, just as he told them he would. After a criminal does his time in jail and fully satisifies the sentence, the law has no more claim on him and he walks out free. Jesus Christ came to pay the penalty for our sins. That was an infinite sentence, but he must have satisfied it fully, because on Easter Sunday he walked out free. The resurrection was Gods way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

So what does this mean for us now? Keller continues:

What if you believe the resurrection is true? You believe that Jesus has died to save you- to redirect your eternal trajectory irrevocably toward God. You believe that God has accepted you, for Jesus’ sake, through an act of supreme grace. You are part of the kingdom of God. What then? Does the resurrection mean anything for your life now? Oh my, yes.

Isaiah, Amos and many of the prophets wrote about what God wants to bring about in the future- the kingdom of God, the new heaven and new earth, a healed material creation “The wolf lying down with the lamb; the child playing with the cobra and adder without fear” (Isaiah 11). Absolute wholeness and well-being- physically, spiritually, socially, and economically.

When John the Baptist sends a messenger from prison who says to Jesus in Matthew 11: “Are you really the Messiah? Are you the one who is bringing the kingdom of God?” Jesus answers: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matthew 11:5). That is the kingdom of God- Shalom- complete healing of all the relationships in the creation. We will be reconciled to God; to nature; to one another; and to ourselves.

And to the extent that that future is real to you, it will change everything about how you live in the present. For example, why is it so hard to face suffering? Why is it so hard to face disability and disease? Why is it so hard to do the right thing if you know its going to cost you money, reputation, maybe even your life? Why is it so hard to face your death or the death of loved ones?

Its so hard because we think this broken world is the only world we’re ever going to have. Its easy to feel as if this money is the only wealth we’ll ever have, as if this body is the only body we’ll ever have. But if Jesus is risen, then your future is so much more beautiful, and so much more certain than that.

Because Jesus died for us, because he paid the penalty that we deserve when he died on the cross, we know that when we die, we get to go to heaven. That assurance helps us with all of our struggles every day as we live with the hope of the glorious future that we will have in heaven. We dont have to look back at our lives when we are in heaven and say ‘I wish I had known then what I know now- I wish I knew how good it would all be- that would have made my struggling much easier to bear!’. We dont have to say that, because God is so gracious that he gave us this knowledge already.