E - Eschatology

James Cathcart July 07, 2023 2 0

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Ephesians 1: 3-10

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Are you someone who likes to peak at the last page of a novel before deciding if you’re going to read it? If so I want you to know that you are a terrible person.

Haha, not really!

But I do find it hard to fathom why people would want to ‘spoil’ the ending of a book. If authors wanted us to read that first they’d have put it on the first page y’know. It seems weird to me that people would want to cut to the end like that. But from what I’ve heard, it can come down to investment. There are so many books in the world, more than we can ever possibly hope to read, and so it may be that judging a book — not by its cover, or its first page — but by its last can be reassuring.

Eschatology, our first humdinger of a word in our A-Z, is a theological term for the study of last things, especially with a sense of mortality, end times, judgement and apocalypse. I often have ambivalent feelings about eschatology. I appreciate a general sense of the big picture but I’m not especially drawn to thinking about endings and last things. But for some, knowing where this is all going is important, and I get that. Because there are absolutely times in my life when knowing the end point has helped me decide how much to invest, like the prospective reader browsing in the library.

And so what about the end of it all? In the fullness of time God will gather up. All week I’ve been thinking about how we find a place to belong with God and in Ephesians we see the culmination of being enfolded in God.

As I said in the post about Divinity we reach the problem of using language and metaphor and analogy to talk about something which is bigger than language and metaphor and analogy. The future, a beautiful canvass still coming together, is currently glimpsed by us only in broad brushstrokes. But when it comes to this book, I believe its message on the last page, like the first, is one of love, belonging and peace.

PRAYER:

Dear God,

First to last

we are yours

Amen.