Shiloh Lutheran Church
State College, PA
I’ve been thinking this week about “The Sad Café,” a song by the Eagles. The song is looking back on the restaurant where they hung out in the early days, when they were idealistic and excited about life, before everything started to go sour. “O it seemed like a holy place, protected by amazing grace. We would sing right out loud the things we could not say. We thought we could change this world with words like love and freedom. We were part of the lonely crowd inside the sad café.” They thought they could change the world. But now they’ve grown wiser and more cynical. Life isn’t like they thought it would be. It hasn’t turned out the way they expected. “Now I look at the years gone by and wonder at the powers that be. I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free. Maybe the time has drawn the faces I recall, but things in this world change very slowly, if they ever change at all. No use in asking why, it just turned out that way.” So they sing about how things were in the past, when they were full of youthful idealism, before they woke up to the harshness of reality.
This is a common theme: the idealism of youth crushed by the difficulties of life. There are many songs and poems that look back on a golden age of the past, when things were less complicated than they are now, when we thought we could make a real change in the world, when life seemed exciting and exhilarating, full of possibilities. And this sort of thing can also happen in our Christian lives. “God used to bless me, but something has happened and everything is going wrong in my life. Things just aren’t the way they used to be.” Or, “I used to be much more zealous. I spent time each day in God’s Word and in prayer, and I reveled in times of worship and fellowship, but now my life has become so complicated that I just don’t have time. I’ve dried up spiritually, and I wish I could go back.” Or, “I used to have great hopes for what I could accomplish for God’s kingdom, but people are so indifferent and cold. Nothing I do or say seems to make much difference. There really doesn’t seem to be much point in the things I do.” Or, “I accepted Jesus as my savior when I was 13 years old. Right now I have to make a living and support my family, and I know I’m not growing spiritually. I don’t feel good about the direction my life is going, but I don’t have time to cultivate a relationship with God.”
Over time, if we’re not careful, our spiritual lives can become focused on the past, when things seemed better, less complicated, more exciting. The people of Jeremiah’s time had every reason to focus on the past. They had a golden age to look back upon, when they were ruled by godly men, when God was at work among them, when even the surrounding nations could look at them and say, “the Living God is truly in their midst.” Things were better in the past. The nation has been in an extended period of spiritual decline. They’ve grown indifferent and have ignored the warnings of the prophets. They’ve been so determined in their idolatry that they’ve become worse than many of the surrounding nations. Now they’ve reached the point where judgment is inevitable. Soon the nation will be taken captive and deported to Babylon, 700 miles away.
But, rather than focusing on the past, Jeremiah tells them that God has good things planned for their future. Their immediate future is not the end of the story. They need to cultivate a longer-term perspective. There’s more going on than they can see at the moment. God isn’t finished with them yet, as He said two chapters earlier: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this land. For I know the plans I have for you... plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:10-11). God has good things planned for His people. They don’t need to live in the past.
Jeremiah is speaking to people who’ve been beaten down by life. They’re reaping the fruit of their own rebellion, it’s true. God is punishing them for their sins. But we need to consider how they got to this point. They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to walk away from the living God. They drifted away from Him in the midst of all the complications and pressures of life. At this point they’re living in darkness and confusion, and they’re angry at Jeremiah for all the horrible things he’s been saying about them. They want their lives to work out and they’re willing to try anything. But the things they’re trying lead them further and further from God.
Listen to the second part of verse 12: “They will be like a well-watered garden, and they will sorrow no more.” Their present condition is at the end of the verse: they’re sorrowing. Several other translations are more graphic than the NIV. The NRSV says “they shall never languish again.” Or this, in The Message: “Their lives will be like a well-watered garden, never again left to dry up.” They’re languishing. They’ve dried up. Life hasn’t been all they expected. Everything has gone wrong and they just don’t have the energy to keep trying any more. They’re like a garden that hasn’t been watered. The environment of this fallen world is destroying them; they’re being beaten by life.
There’s a character like this in the novel, The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler. Sarah and Macon had a twelve-year-old son who was murdered during a convenience store robbery. Before this, Sarah had been full of life. She enjoyed being around people, entertaining friends in their home, getting to know new acquaintances. She was outgoing and friendly. But now, everything has changed. She keeps to herself and has become a recluse. She doesn’t trust anyone any more. Here’s what she says: “Macon,... ever since Ethan died I’ve had to admit that people are basically bad. Evil, Macon. So evil that they would take a twelve-year-old boy and shoot him through the skull for no reason. I read a paper now and I despair; I’ve given up watching the news on TV. There’s so much wickedness, children setting other children on fire and grown men throwing babies out second-story windows, rape and torture and terrorism, old people beaten and robbed, men in our very own government willing to blow up the world, indifference and greed and instant anger on every street corner.... There are times when I haven’t been sure I could – I don’t want to sound melodramatic but – Macon, I haven’t been sure I could live in this kind of a world anymore” (pp. 133-34). The world hasn’t changed. The reports on the news are the same kinds of things as before, but she’s been personally touched by evil, and it’s changed her whole perception of the world. She can no longer look at life the way she used to. She’s been beaten down by life in this fallen world.
What Jeremiah offers in this situation is a vision for a different future. Yes, it’s true that things have been better in the past, but the past, even at its best, was only a dim foretaste of the future God has in store for His people. Although Jeremiah doesn’t use the word here, what he’s giving them is a vision of shalom, the Old Testament word for “peace.” This word, shalom, is one of the richest words in the Old Testament. It points to the idea of wholeness and completeness, the wholeness that results from God’s presence among His people. Shalom “is the result of God’s activity in covenant.... Shalom describes the state of fulfillment which is the result of God’s presence” (Theological Wordbook of the OT, vol. 2, p. 931). It’s the opposite of drying up and languishing. What he’s giving them in these verses, without using the word, is a vision of shalom: “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again” (NRSV). He’s giving them a vision of a different future.
Where is this experience of shalom going to come from? It’s going to come from the Lord. They’ve been looking in all the wrong places. They’ve been going after the Baals in a sense of desperation, trying to make things turn out better. They’ve been looking at the past, wishing they could go back to the way things used to be. They’ve been trying to do everything possible to improve their lives. But it’s all come to nothing, because they’re looking in the wrong places. They’ve turned away from the Living God, the only source of true shalom, and have turned to counterfeits, which lead them to one dead end after another.
It’s clear that they can’t accomplish it themselves by any amount of effort: “For the Lord will ransom Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they.” They are going to be overcome by their enemies, and they won’t have the strength to rescue themselves. Their enemies are too strong for them. Part of their problem is that they haven’t realized the desperateness of their condition. They’ve thought they could find a solution to their problems, that if they only tried a little harder or found just the right technique they’d be able to make things turn out right. The truth is that their only hope is in the Lord. He’s the only one who can bring shalom, who can rescue them from the hand of their enemies.
But if God is able to bring about this sort of change, why doesn’t He just do it? Why does He allow us to languish, like a dried up garden? Why has He allowed Israel to decline so far that the only remedy is to send them into captivity? Why does He allow bad things to happen in our lives? Why does He give us so much freedom, allowing us to destroy ourselves in turning away from Him, the source of all good? How do we reconcile God’s infinite power with the reality of pain and suffering and injustice in this world? If He’s so powerful, if He’s able to bring about shalom, why doesn’t He just do it right now? There are some answers we can give, which help to clarify things to some extent, but ultimately we are still left with an element of mystery. We don’t know why God has seen fit to order the world in this way. Job is never given a satisfactory answer to the question of why he experienced such horrible things. He is simply confronted with the reality that God is God, and he is not. He’s humbled, but not given an explanation. Paul discusses the problem of God’s sovereignty at some length in Romans 9-11, and at the end of chapter 11, when we might have expected some sort of explanation, he instead cries out in worship: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (vv. 33-36). We need to beware of allowing our present experience of sorrow to undermine our assurance of God’s power over the future. One day we will see all these things more clearly, and one day God will set all things right and will eliminate suffering. In this present world He chooses not to do so. We may not be able to fully explain why, but we know Him, and we know that He is good and wise, and that all power belongs to Him. We belong to the One who has power to accomplish His purposes, the One who’s given us a vision of a different future, a vision of a future where our mourning is turned into gladness, where God will give us comfort and joy instead of sorrow.
As we come to the end of 2013, we don’t know what this coming year has for us. Some of us may have a great year, the kind of year we’ll later look back on as one of the high points in our lives. But some of us may experience the kind of loss and pain that destroys people. We live in a fallen world, and God hasn’t seen fit to shield His people from the suffering that is part of life in this world. We don’t know what is in store for us in the coming year. God hasn’t promised us an easy time of it. Jesus and the apostles experienced trials and sorrow and difficulties, and they instructed us to expect the same. Jesus said: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Jesus is the one who has overcome the world. He is the source of shalom. He is the one who will bring about the kind of life Jeremiah describes in these verses. He is the source of our future hope. He is the one who can sustain our hope, even in this world where many peoples’ experience fits John Mellencamp’s description: “life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” Jesus has overcome this dark, hopeless world.
What is your source of hope as you begin a new year? Are you just a naturally optimistic person, who is sure that everything will turn out right? Life could beat that out of you this year if you have nothing more than a natural bent toward optimism. Sarah, in The Accidental Tourist, was a naturally optimistic person who found that life is not what she expected, that there is real evil in the world. But Macon, her husband, who is a natural pessimist, is not any better off. He doesn’t expect things to turn out well. Sarah says to him: “‘Everything that might touch you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without, said you never really wanted it anyhow’.... ‘I know you mourned [Ethan] but there’s something so what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things, I mean love or grief or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged’.... ‘Sarah, I’m not muffled. I... endure. I’m trying to endure. I’m standing fast, I’m holding steady.’ ‘If you really think that,’ Sarah said, ‘then you’re fooling yourself. You’re not holding steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule. You’re a dried-up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates’” (pp. 135-36). He’s a pessimist. Maybe he has a more realistic view of the world than she had, but he’s not any better off. He’s shriveled up in his own protective shell.
What’s the problem? We weren’t created to live in a world like this. Shalom, the kind of world Jeremiah describes, is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. When we live in the past, we tend to reconstruct the experience in our memory so that it feels like, at least then, we were living in shalom. Back then, life seemed to fit us better than it does now. We look back longingly on the way things used to be. When we accept the world as it is, when we become pessimists, like Macon, we dehumanize ourselves. We become less than what God has created us to be. It’s not as painful that way, but we’re diminished in the process. And blind optimism just sets us up for disillusionment. It doesn’t enable us to live in this world as it really is.
But these aren’t our only choices. As God’s people, we can face the coming year knowing that He, our Shepherd, is with us, and that He has better things in store for us than anything this world can offer. Living in the light of eternity, in confidence that God is preparing a place of shalom for us, will equip us to face the truth about life in this fallen world. Listen to these words from C.S. Lewis: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set out on foot to convert the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffectual in this one. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in.’ Aim at earth and you will get neither” (quoted in Patches of Godlight, by Jan Karon).
Throughout Advent we’ve been preparing ourselves to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and now in the Christmas season we’re celebrating His appearing. Why did He come? He came to deliver us from ruin. We were lost people, living without God in a world that is headed toward destruction. He came to deliver us from that. He has paid in full the penalty for our sin and rebellion and has opened the way for us to return to God. He is preparing a future of shalom for us: “For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd: their life shall be like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.” All this because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and then died on the cross, rose again on the third day and is now seated at the right hand of the Father interceding for us, preparing a place where we can live in shalom for eternity. Living in the light of that future hope, we experience genuine spiritual joy in this fallen world as He gives us foretastes of shalom. As Peter said to people who were suffering persecution for their faith: “even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8-9). Whatever else you resolve in beginning this new year, resolve to cultivate an increased awareness of our future hope, to learn to live in the light of God’s promised shalom.
Over time, if we’re not careful, our spiritual lives can become focused on the past, when things seemed better, less complicated, more exciting. The people of Jeremiah’s time had every reason to focus on the past. They had a golden age to look back upon, when they were ruled by godly men, when God was at work among them, when even the surrounding nations could look at them and say, “the Living God is truly in their midst.” Things were better in the past. The nation has been in an extended period of spiritual decline. They’ve grown indifferent and have ignored the warnings of the prophets. They’ve been so determined in their idolatry that they’ve become worse than many of the surrounding nations. Now they’ve reached the point where judgment is inevitable. Soon the nation will be taken captive and deported to Babylon, 700 miles away.
But, rather than focusing on the past, Jeremiah tells them that God has good things planned for their future. Their immediate future is not the end of the story. They need to cultivate a longer-term perspective. There’s more going on than they can see at the moment. God isn’t finished with them yet, as He said two chapters earlier: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this land. For I know the plans I have for you... plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:10-11). God has good things planned for His people. They don’t need to live in the past.
Jeremiah is speaking to people who’ve been beaten down by life. They’re reaping the fruit of their own rebellion, it’s true. God is punishing them for their sins. But we need to consider how they got to this point. They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to walk away from the living God. They drifted away from Him in the midst of all the complications and pressures of life. At this point they’re living in darkness and confusion, and they’re angry at Jeremiah for all the horrible things he’s been saying about them. They want their lives to work out and they’re willing to try anything. But the things they’re trying lead them further and further from God.
Listen to the second part of verse 12: “They will be like a well-watered garden, and they will sorrow no more.” Their present condition is at the end of the verse: they’re sorrowing. Several other translations are more graphic than the NIV. The NRSV says “they shall never languish again.” Or this, in The Message: “Their lives will be like a well-watered garden, never again left to dry up.” They’re languishing. They’ve dried up. Life hasn’t been all they expected. Everything has gone wrong and they just don’t have the energy to keep trying any more. They’re like a garden that hasn’t been watered. The environment of this fallen world is destroying them; they’re being beaten by life.
There’s a character like this in the novel, The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler. Sarah and Macon had a twelve-year-old son who was murdered during a convenience store robbery. Before this, Sarah had been full of life. She enjoyed being around people, entertaining friends in their home, getting to know new acquaintances. She was outgoing and friendly. But now, everything has changed. She keeps to herself and has become a recluse. She doesn’t trust anyone any more. Here’s what she says: “Macon,... ever since Ethan died I’ve had to admit that people are basically bad. Evil, Macon. So evil that they would take a twelve-year-old boy and shoot him through the skull for no reason. I read a paper now and I despair; I’ve given up watching the news on TV. There’s so much wickedness, children setting other children on fire and grown men throwing babies out second-story windows, rape and torture and terrorism, old people beaten and robbed, men in our very own government willing to blow up the world, indifference and greed and instant anger on every street corner.... There are times when I haven’t been sure I could – I don’t want to sound melodramatic but – Macon, I haven’t been sure I could live in this kind of a world anymore” (pp. 133-34). The world hasn’t changed. The reports on the news are the same kinds of things as before, but she’s been personally touched by evil, and it’s changed her whole perception of the world. She can no longer look at life the way she used to. She’s been beaten down by life in this fallen world.
What Jeremiah offers in this situation is a vision for a different future. Yes, it’s true that things have been better in the past, but the past, even at its best, was only a dim foretaste of the future God has in store for His people. Although Jeremiah doesn’t use the word here, what he’s giving them is a vision of shalom, the Old Testament word for “peace.” This word, shalom, is one of the richest words in the Old Testament. It points to the idea of wholeness and completeness, the wholeness that results from God’s presence among His people. Shalom “is the result of God’s activity in covenant.... Shalom describes the state of fulfillment which is the result of God’s presence” (Theological Wordbook of the OT, vol. 2, p. 931). It’s the opposite of drying up and languishing. What he’s giving them in these verses, without using the word, is a vision of shalom: “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again” (NRSV). He’s giving them a vision of a different future.
Where is this experience of shalom going to come from? It’s going to come from the Lord. They’ve been looking in all the wrong places. They’ve been going after the Baals in a sense of desperation, trying to make things turn out better. They’ve been looking at the past, wishing they could go back to the way things used to be. They’ve been trying to do everything possible to improve their lives. But it’s all come to nothing, because they’re looking in the wrong places. They’ve turned away from the Living God, the only source of true shalom, and have turned to counterfeits, which lead them to one dead end after another.
It’s clear that they can’t accomplish it themselves by any amount of effort: “For the Lord will ransom Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they.” They are going to be overcome by their enemies, and they won’t have the strength to rescue themselves. Their enemies are too strong for them. Part of their problem is that they haven’t realized the desperateness of their condition. They’ve thought they could find a solution to their problems, that if they only tried a little harder or found just the right technique they’d be able to make things turn out right. The truth is that their only hope is in the Lord. He’s the only one who can bring shalom, who can rescue them from the hand of their enemies.
But if God is able to bring about this sort of change, why doesn’t He just do it? Why does He allow us to languish, like a dried up garden? Why has He allowed Israel to decline so far that the only remedy is to send them into captivity? Why does He allow bad things to happen in our lives? Why does He give us so much freedom, allowing us to destroy ourselves in turning away from Him, the source of all good? How do we reconcile God’s infinite power with the reality of pain and suffering and injustice in this world? If He’s so powerful, if He’s able to bring about shalom, why doesn’t He just do it right now? There are some answers we can give, which help to clarify things to some extent, but ultimately we are still left with an element of mystery. We don’t know why God has seen fit to order the world in this way. Job is never given a satisfactory answer to the question of why he experienced such horrible things. He is simply confronted with the reality that God is God, and he is not. He’s humbled, but not given an explanation. Paul discusses the problem of God’s sovereignty at some length in Romans 9-11, and at the end of chapter 11, when we might have expected some sort of explanation, he instead cries out in worship: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (vv. 33-36). We need to beware of allowing our present experience of sorrow to undermine our assurance of God’s power over the future. One day we will see all these things more clearly, and one day God will set all things right and will eliminate suffering. In this present world He chooses not to do so. We may not be able to fully explain why, but we know Him, and we know that He is good and wise, and that all power belongs to Him. We belong to the One who has power to accomplish His purposes, the One who’s given us a vision of a different future, a vision of a future where our mourning is turned into gladness, where God will give us comfort and joy instead of sorrow.
As we come to the end of 2013, we don’t know what this coming year has for us. Some of us may have a great year, the kind of year we’ll later look back on as one of the high points in our lives. But some of us may experience the kind of loss and pain that destroys people. We live in a fallen world, and God hasn’t seen fit to shield His people from the suffering that is part of life in this world. We don’t know what is in store for us in the coming year. God hasn’t promised us an easy time of it. Jesus and the apostles experienced trials and sorrow and difficulties, and they instructed us to expect the same. Jesus said: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Jesus is the one who has overcome the world. He is the source of shalom. He is the one who will bring about the kind of life Jeremiah describes in these verses. He is the source of our future hope. He is the one who can sustain our hope, even in this world where many peoples’ experience fits John Mellencamp’s description: “life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” Jesus has overcome this dark, hopeless world.
What is your source of hope as you begin a new year? Are you just a naturally optimistic person, who is sure that everything will turn out right? Life could beat that out of you this year if you have nothing more than a natural bent toward optimism. Sarah, in The Accidental Tourist, was a naturally optimistic person who found that life is not what she expected, that there is real evil in the world. But Macon, her husband, who is a natural pessimist, is not any better off. He doesn’t expect things to turn out well. Sarah says to him: “‘Everything that might touch you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without, said you never really wanted it anyhow’.... ‘I know you mourned [Ethan] but there’s something so what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things, I mean love or grief or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged’.... ‘Sarah, I’m not muffled. I... endure. I’m trying to endure. I’m standing fast, I’m holding steady.’ ‘If you really think that,’ Sarah said, ‘then you’re fooling yourself. You’re not holding steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule. You’re a dried-up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates’” (pp. 135-36). He’s a pessimist. Maybe he has a more realistic view of the world than she had, but he’s not any better off. He’s shriveled up in his own protective shell.
What’s the problem? We weren’t created to live in a world like this. Shalom, the kind of world Jeremiah describes, is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. When we live in the past, we tend to reconstruct the experience in our memory so that it feels like, at least then, we were living in shalom. Back then, life seemed to fit us better than it does now. We look back longingly on the way things used to be. When we accept the world as it is, when we become pessimists, like Macon, we dehumanize ourselves. We become less than what God has created us to be. It’s not as painful that way, but we’re diminished in the process. And blind optimism just sets us up for disillusionment. It doesn’t enable us to live in this world as it really is.
But these aren’t our only choices. As God’s people, we can face the coming year knowing that He, our Shepherd, is with us, and that He has better things in store for us than anything this world can offer. Living in the light of eternity, in confidence that God is preparing a place of shalom for us, will equip us to face the truth about life in this fallen world. Listen to these words from C.S. Lewis: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set out on foot to convert the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffectual in this one. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in.’ Aim at earth and you will get neither” (quoted in Patches of Godlight, by Jan Karon).
Throughout Advent we’ve been preparing ourselves to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and now in the Christmas season we’re celebrating His appearing. Why did He come? He came to deliver us from ruin. We were lost people, living without God in a world that is headed toward destruction. He came to deliver us from that. He has paid in full the penalty for our sin and rebellion and has opened the way for us to return to God. He is preparing a future of shalom for us: “For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd: their life shall be like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.” All this because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and then died on the cross, rose again on the third day and is now seated at the right hand of the Father interceding for us, preparing a place where we can live in shalom for eternity. Living in the light of that future hope, we experience genuine spiritual joy in this fallen world as He gives us foretastes of shalom. As Peter said to people who were suffering persecution for their faith: “even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8-9). Whatever else you resolve in beginning this new year, resolve to cultivate an increased awareness of our future hope, to learn to live in the light of God’s promised shalom.
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