- I have always been amazed, captured by and infatuated with God’s grand mysteries being revealed in bite size tastes in this life. Call me weird or simple minded but when I see the sun rise each day, my first thought is of Him and His majesty being revealed in this new day. When I see the beauty of new spring life, I have the same wonder, awe and Hallelujah in my heart. For these, the ‘foretaste’ of His eternal presence: I’m starved! My soul is drooling!
Last Day: The Dead will Rise
Isaiah 26: 19
Their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy…The earth will give birth to her dead.
Thought for Today
We have always been the people of the resurrection. Many people get fixated on going to heaven, and I get it. Barring the blast of the final trumpet, heaven is our next stop, but it is not our last stop. From the moment of the Fall God promised to restore what was lost in the Garden of Eden. We were created in God’s image when He made us with body, mind, and spirit together. To leave human beings as spirits in heaven is to relegate them to something less than they were created to be. It would mean that we no longer exist in God’s image. This has never been God’s plan. Heaven and hell were created as the realms of the angels. Human beings have been temporarily allowed into them until Christ sets all things right. God has made it clear through the prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, that we would be restored to all that God intended us to be. We will have new bodies and live on a new earth with God Himself in our midst. Just like God always dreamed it would be. What a glorious hope we have been given!
Prayer
Lord God, thank You for promising to restore things to the way they were always intended to be. I look forward to seeing you face to face in the flesh. Amen.
Devotional Quote
What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. ― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
Quote of the Day
A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. — Phyllis Diller