God has called us to eternal life.
Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
God has called us to eternal life. We have been invited in to share in the world restored when God reigns fully when his love and justice fill the earth. Though we wait for the fulness of eternal life, we begin even now to experience it. When we receive God’s grace and share it with others, when we seek to treat all people with divine dignity, when we love those who are hard to love, we receive a foretaste of the life that is to come.
In Southern California, I started going to Disneyland when both Disneyland and I were quite young. In those early years, one of the theme park’s attractions was the Monsanto House of the Future. It featured a tour of a “home” that claimed to represent the future. Though I’m not quite sure we’ve adopted the unusual design of the Home of the Future for our own residences, it did include a microwave oven, years before such a thing was readily available.
“There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” was known to be Walt’s theme song. He had a particular fascination with the future and sought, in his unique way, to bring it into the present.
Walt Disney, in his preoccupation with the future, reminds me of the Apostle Paul. To my knowledge, Paul did not build models of futuristic homes. But he did speak often of the future in his letters, urging his readers to live in the present with a future orientation.
In 1 Timothy 6:12, for example, Paul writes, “Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” Notice the middle section of that verse: “take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called.” The phrase “eternal life” (zōē aiōnios) literally means “the life of the age to come.” Eternal life is what will come when God restores all things and rules completely over heaven and earth.
Notice that we are called to eternal life.
God invites us into the life of his future when he will wipe away every tear where there will be “endless peace” and God will rule “with justice and with righteousness” (Isaiah 9:7). To put it differently, God calls us to eternal life.
Yet, this eternal life is not only something we will experience in the future. We are to “take hold of the eternal life” to which we have been called. This is something we do now. We hold on tight to the promise of a new way of living. As we do, we begin, even now, to experience dimensions of this life. Whenever, for example, we receive God’s forgiveness or forgive someone who has wronged us, we are participating now in something that will be fully realized in the future. Or, when we seek to make our workplaces more just, we are opening up a way for God’s future to impact the present. These are two of countless ways in which we can take hold right now of the eternal life, the life of the future, to which God has called us.
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