Context For Hope

We tend to choose or fall into the context by which we manage (live out) our lives.  That becomes the whole human scope for an individual life.  Those contexts, whether chosen or accidental in details, are many in number.  Persons are responsible for the consequences of their own choices or those factors that are permitted to attach themselves, and have no legitimate claim to whatever is rejected or omitted from their life choices.  The dominant context resulting tends toward emotional gratification to greater or lesser degree, even when it can be supported by cerebral faith evidence that we have worked through on our own.  We offer to ourselves thoughtful arguments, perhaps with persuasive natural evidence.  The evidence is not wholly natural, which is to say that faith evidence is presumed beyond replication by persons holding different presuppositions than our own.  This is part of the old saw: Compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges.  Even though there is vast similarity between the ideal culture of the naturalist and the Christian, the difference is significant to outcomes.  The main difference relates to faith context.

Perhaps most persons like the simplicity of all human matters measured in nature’s terms.  Christians must live in a world visited by both nature’s scope and God’s.  Often that is a difficult matter, to be managed by imperfect persons with no physically traceable attachment to spiritual reality.  It is proposed to be the Kingdom of God, offered by the Word of God, a Word that is subject to a variety of interpretations, even rejection.  Without the gift of divine faith, Christian beliefs and claims seem wishful.  Certainly the differentials between secular humanism which finds its base in nature will be at some odds, even if in friendly exchange, with faith that rests its continuity in revelation and affirmation of God through Jesus Christ in personal human life.  That belief is the difference between mortality and immortality.  In the New Testament, immortality is sometimes identified as hope residing as a faith factor to mankind.

Many reports have been made through the centuries of persons claiming to have died, observed life beyond nature, even for some seeing Jesus on the other side.  The reports are almost universally a narrative of what might be identified as ecstasy.  The situations were so magnificent that the persons did not want to return to mortal life, but had no say in the matter.  These persons represent a broad spectrum from peasant to royalty, male and female, old and young.  Most were uttered by persons with no particular point to make except to note the experience.  A few retracted their stories after the interest had subsided, but so many maintained their reports, perhaps lived changed lives, and did not attempt to turn their experiences into either a special honor or financial improvement.  They were sincere.  We are checked in making too much of the reports knowing the fantasies of mind, the effect of vivid dreams, and the rafts of hallucinations that have occurred.  At the same time the possibility is present as in Lazarus; and the lad at the window who fell during a sermon from the Apostle Paul; and, especially the experience of Jesus.  The appearance of Samuel to King Saul and the Witch of Endor, with the showing of Samuel – would qualify for consideration in what we are reviewing here.  The experience of Jesus in a life of earth and heaven suggests possibilities.  The touch of mortality and immortality is not to be taken as impossible, even if improbable.  The problems of verification are so great that we lose our way in trying to make more of it than witnesses giving us pause.

Immortality is likely based in God as the originator of all life, and on that we carry our faith so to live by faith and not by sight.  Life on which he places his image cannot be ended – as human endings are understood..  God’s life principle is eternal, and becomes ongoing – continuing in some context.  Scripture identifies progression to heaven or hell.  Scripture does not offer soul sleep, or annihilation, or some other exotic possibility for a life, but a continuation that either includes the Kingdom of God or an alternative that so disturbs us we do not do well in defining it.  God offers redemptive faith that includes what human life really wants: love, meaning, peace, and life ecstasy with God after death.  Christian confidence is entirely related to the announced purpose of Jesus Christ in human hope for life’s transition.