To Imagine the Eternal

To imagine the eternal.

Job 19:25-26
25 I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
26 And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God; (NIV)

Did anyone suffer like Job? In one fell swoop, he lost everything, his children, his wealth, his health. If this wasn’t enough, there was no compassion from his friends or his wife. Yet, through it all, he found victory because he was able to see past the moment into the promise of God. Faith is the victory.

I say it often that we must decide that God is either God or He is not. We can’t be halfway in. We can’t choose to believe that Christ died to save our souls but choose not to believe that our suffering is temporary and working toward the purification of our souls. We must hold firm in our faith that God never breaks a promise. He has promised to deliver us out of all our troubles, if not now, then.

How is it that those who have a strong faith can find their life and their faith consumed by the fires of Hell reaching upward? How we imagine our existence in those moments will keep us down or resurrect our spirit. Faith is the victory.

Faith is to see and choose to believe what is unseen. Our physical sight is limited to our concept of time. Eternity operates outside of time so that what will be, has already been from the beginning. There has never been a moment within this realm of time that eternity did not know God is the Victor. When we imagine ourselves in the present, it can seem that God has been subdued. But we are not finite beings. We are eternal and must imagine ourselves so. To imagine the eternal is to know that the suffering marks the battle wounds of a war that has already been won. We are the bloodied champions with swords raised high amongst the enemy defeated. There is no victory without a battle and no battle without pain. But sweet is the pain of the champion and in Christ, you have already won.

In every hardship, we don’t have to wonder. It is not a mystery. We will overcome. Our physical body does not exist in the eternal, but our spirit does. In the pain, we must wrestle our spirit away from the grip of this moment and see the eternal for our victory is in the faith we have for the eternal God.

Prayer: Lord, help me take captive my thoughts in suffering and remember I have already won the battle I am still fighting. Amen.