Originally Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009
How long has it been since the world began awaiting the return of Christ? Two thousand years?
If you were Enoch from the Book of Genesis - your wait is twice that, at least! Thousands, and thousands of years . . . this is how long we have waited.
Some lose hope. The wait is too long for them. They become dispirited, and many fall away.
One of my elders, a person that had been raised in the belief that Jesus was coming soon - even in her lifetime - once admitted to me that she no longer looked for the return of Christ. She did not believe it would happen in her lifetime. She said that, immediately following World War II, many people thought that would be the end, but it wasn't. When Israel became a nation, that would be it. The Cuban Missile Crisis was expected to be the harbinger of Christ's return, but it wasn't.
Vietnam, urban riots, Watergate, Iran Hostage Crisis, Gulf War I, Clinton's legacy of "suicides," Obama's divisive rhetoric, etc., etc. Despair gives way to hope. We get our hopes up, and they get disappointed, over, and over, and over, again.
"It has been so long, so very long," we think. And it gets easy to believe that Jesus will never come back. Maybe we have been mislead.
But how long has it been, really?
You never saw Jesus Christ, but you love him; and still without seeing him you believe in him and are delighted with an inexpressible and exalted joy to be garnering the salvation of your souls that is the object of your faith.
Peter did see Jesus Christ - he lived and ministered with him for three years. He got to know the Lord, as a personal friend, more intimately than any other human that ever lived. He encourages these early believers, that never did see, and never would see (in this life), our Lord.
These are people that never saw Jesus, but were personally acquainted with Simon Peter, who did. As Peter wrote and encouraged them, so he writes to us. He might as well have been writing to us. He was writing to us.
I am turning the corner to my sixtieth year. That is over half of a century. My life now covers one-fortieth of the time between Peter and today.
My grandmother died ten years ago, at the age of 96. Ninety-six years prior to her birth, James Madison was President. She could remember things that happened in the 1910s, a hundred years ago. Her life was one-twentieth of the time between Peter and today. In eternity, following Christ's return, we will be able to line up 20 people whose lives intersected, and that span the time of Peter until today. I can walk a quarter mile from my house and find 20 people to say "hello" to, and it wouldn't even take a half hour.
I have clear memories from 1962, 1964, 1970, 1978, 1984 . . . and they seem as if they only happened a year ago, or even yesterday.
How long, really, has the world waited?
We are just like the people Peter wrote to. From then until today, two thousand years of separation, is nothing. We are but a blip in the span of Eternity. And God has placed the sense in our memories, that time passes quickly, to instruct us that truly we are here only briefly.
We are to focus on today, on now, on this instant. And Eternity is really nothing more nor less, than never-ending now.
Peter was there. He did see, and touch, Christ. And he wrote a first-hand account to the Church. He wrote them to people he knew. The testimony was true and reliable. He wrote to them, and us, and it is just like we were there reading his letter at its first opening.
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