Heaven’s Irresistible Appeal
We are a people who have come to believe that we not only can gain access to anything, but we have a right to everything. This has produced an anxious people, especially the young. Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation describes the result—a people that believe they can be many places at once as Kelsi Klembara writes, coining the phrase being “forever elsewhere.” It is that forever promise in our teaching and sadly in our preaching of the promised ascent from our discontent in the sufferings and pain of our being. This has led to a discontent that far surpasses Gloucester’s soliloquy in Richard III “Now is the winter of our discontent.” John Steinbeck played on that same theme in The Winter of our Discontent. In C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters Wormwood teaches the skills in exploiting this discontent. Our business is to get them away from the eternal and from the Present . . .it is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it, we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer floes, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays….Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future…We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor genuinely kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”
As Klembara writes, the pull to be “elsewhere” comes with the discomforts of pain, struggle, the effects of sin and sin itself.” And I find within the church a contemporaneity, a creating of something new in an effort to flee the present, or to seek the new–for hope is just around the corner. Disembodied promises to curb our discontent will always be there to tempt us.
The hope of the Christian is that in all that we have been, all that we are and can become is what John Piper found in The Supremacy of Christ in Everything. As Paul says: See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. Colossians 2:8
We look to the words of the writer of Hebrews. But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. Hebrews 1:2-3
The Apostle Paul was consumed by a desire to know Christ and become freed forever from the discontents of living a life without Him. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Philippians 3:10-11
There is an indescribable calm that comes over one when the irresistible appeal of heaven comes over one.
