Eternity is Everything

They say that “timing is everything.” “Here today and gone tomorrow,” the benefits we enjoy today may not endure forever.

The people coming to Jesus were looking for healing. They wanted a better life—a healthier, happier existence. Who doesn’t?

Jesus did heal them, but he had something more important to say. “Blessed are the poor,” he said. Blessed are the hungry, the hurting, and the disempowered. Blessed are the ones, he said, who are not healed.

It is not that health and prosperity were not valued. These blessed ones will prosper—their stomachs will be filled. They will be satisfied and honoured—they will know joy, just not right now. They will receive all that they are looking for—rewarded one day in heaven, though perhaps not now on earth. Those who receive their reward here on earth are the ones to be pitied—“woe to them,” Jesus said.

Eternity, we learn, is everything.

You can have your rewards now, or you can have them later. The rewards we realize today are temporal and fleeting. The rewards we reap in heaven are eternal. The whole of Jesus’s mountainside sermon will continue this refrain—that there are ways of being that are focused on the present and ways of being that are attuned to the eternal. Given that eternity is eternal, it doesn’t seem a difficult choice.

To be “blessed” is to be fully and finally satisfied. It seems oxymoronic to say that a hungry person could be sated or that a poor person might in actual fact be rich. It is hard to feel contentment when one lacks the essentials. But all of this might simply be perspective. In Christ, it is all just a matter of timing. Eternity is everything.

Respond in Prayer

Dear Lord, it is difficult to trust you when I feel the lack of things that seem essential. Help me to see my life from an eternal perspective. Help me to sense the blessing that will one day be mine in full, in Christ. Help me to be patient today. Amen.

Kent Anderson

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®).