Perspective – seeing beyond evil…

 “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”          2 Corinthians 4:17

 “Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d’un art.” – “Evil is done naturally, without effort, it just happens; goodness is always a creative art.” – Baudelaire

Following up from last weeks post on “Renewing Innocence”, we strive to find a measure of healing for our wound of suffering by considering the idea of “Perspective”.

Learning to look on life with the right perspective will strengthen our faith and increase our joy. It is easy to cut down a tree compared to the effort of many seasons to produce a strong trunk. A mother, after spending many long years nurturing and rearing a child, can see him lost in seconds to a madman’s bullet. The bullet is cheap and easy…the love worthy and costly.

Heaven is always found in the costly.

Effortless evil seems so powerful and influential in this present world. It hangs heavy in the air, polluting our hearts and minds. Death and suffering carry a status and authority which stamp a Satanic lie of fear onto even the bravest of hearts. Evil seems so real and tangible. Hell is the cheap give away, offered freely to man like a loaf of stale bread.

Christ invites us to a more costly banquet. He offers his own life to nourish us and speaks his true word. In truth, “troubles” are light and momentary. Compared to costly love, and life that has the quality of eternity, they are as nothing. In fact the difficulties themselves somehow work to unveil the coming of a glorious unseen, eternal reality. Have you learnt to fix your eyes on this reality?

At the end of the “The Great Divorce”, C.S. Lewis marvellously proclaims this mysterious truth. Hell always seems so big when you are in it.

“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of even a little heavenly bird on a bough, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule…”

The sufferings of this world will never veto heaven nor cast a stain on eternal glory.

Look beyond today’s trials and troubles and cast a glance into heaven.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.  The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope  that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”   Romans 8: 18-20

The monstrous power of evil, which tyrannizes the world, will come to nothing.

“Dost thou lie so low?  Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,  Shrunk to this little measure?”  Julius Caesar, 3:1, Shakespeare

Just think of this….

What incredible power evil would have if once you had wronged someone, you, the person you had wronged, and God would remain permanently marked by it!

Would there not in the eternal memory of wrongs suffered resound a hellish laughter of the seemingly defeated and yet strangely triumphant underworld, triumphant because it has succeeded in casting eternally its dark shadow over the world to come?

To be fully overcome, evildoing must be consigned to its proper place – nothingness. Non–remembrance does precisely that, as Kierkegaard insisted: “To forget”, he noted, “is to take back into nothing.”

Karl Barth thought no differently: “To the past and to oblivion” is where God’s word consigns das Nichtige, that great destructive “something” that is most properly nothing. (Church Dogmatics 111/3 p.352)

So as Christmas dawns, let us embrace innocence afresh; as a New Year comes before us, let us consign whatever great “something” that has destroyed in 2012 to its proper place of insignificance compared to the glory that awaits to be revealed in us in 2013 and beyond. Renew my perspective Lord!

May the blood of Jesus cleanse and heal, and the Holy Spirit empower you…

I’ll leave you with a wonderful opportunity to “cast amnesia” and “forget about all that evil that they feed ya” from the “Black Eyed Peas.”