Who wants to live forever?

You may not have seen the film or read the children’s book Tuck Everlasting.  It’s the story of a family who drink from a hidden spring of water in the woods which turns out to be the fountain of youth or the spring of eternal life.  They find out from drinking it that they will live on eternally at the age they drank the water, doomed to watch the world go on without them.  People that they love grow old and die and yet they stay the same.  

The theme of eternal life and us wanting to live forever has been explored many times and I think it keeps coming back again and again because we’re creatures that are made to live forever.  Death is not the way things should be; it was not the way God designed things in the beginning.  We were made to live forever but because of Adam’s sin we are doomed to die.  So now although it grieves us, it seems right to us that we die eventually and yet we still yearn to live forever.  

One of the points that Tuck Everlasting makes (whether the author intended it or not) is that it isn’t right to live forever on this earth while everyone else dies around you.  There is something wrong with that.  We see in the book of Genesis that Adam andEve and their descendents had to die once they had eaten the forbidden fruit because to live forever in their sinful state would not be good.  It would be tortuous.  So part of God’s grace to them was that they die and He would send someone to make a way for them to go on to live eternally in God’s kingdom after death. 

Our hope as Christians is that this world is just a passing phase for us; a short 70-80 years and then we pass through death into eternal life where it will finally be right for us to live forever like the Tucks because our broken, sinful bodies will be no more.  We will have new, perfect minds and bodies and all will be good and all will be right at last.