6 For I am already being poured
out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. 7 I
have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Now
there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the
righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to
all who have longed for his appearing.
Personal Remarks
9 Do your best to come to me quickly, 10 for
Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to
Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. 11 Only
Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with
you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry. 12 I sent
Tychicus to Ephesus. 13 When you come, bring the cloak that I
left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.
14 Alexander the metalworker did
me a great deal of harm. The Lord will repay him for what he has done. 15 You
too should be on your guard against him, because he strongly opposed our
message.
16 At my first defense, no one
came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them. 17 But
the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message
might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was
delivered from the lion’s mouth. 18 The Lord will rescue me
from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him
be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
I took the service at Temora Uniting today. (Temora is a small town in NSW, 80 ks from Wagga Wagga). These are my thoughts on this passage:
This is Paul’s
farewell discourse really. It has lots
of personal touches, and advice he gives Timothy for his continued
ministry. He talks about being poured
out like a drink offering; He talks of
fighting the good fight and finished the race, and keeping the faith. The poignancy of this reaches us down the
years. Notice right at the end in verse
18 he says that The Lord has delivered him from the lion’s mouth and will
deliver him from every evil attack. This
was a time when Christians were fed to the lions and Paul knew this might be
his fate. Most scholars agree he died a
martyr’s death. When he talks about deliverance, he isn’t talking about
physical deliverance; he’s talking about deliverance via death, to the world
beyond.
This is what Matthew Henry says: “With
what pleasure he speaks of dying. In verse 6 He calls it his departure; though
it is probable that he foresaw he must die a violent bloody death, yet he calls
it his departure, or his release. Death to a good man is his release from the
imprisonment of this world and his departure to the enjoyments of another world;
he does not cease to be, but is only removed from one world to another”(end of
quote)
Paul is contemplating heaven.
One of my friends, after a trip to the UK, posted a
photo of a beach scene somewhere in Scotland, and this prompted a friend of my friend gave this description of an
experience she had recently at the beach.
She
was visiting Loch Aird Gorge on the Great Ocean road. (For those reading from another country, this is a beautiful coastal landscape which is at the bottom of Australia, featuring chucks of land which have separated from the mainland and are called "The twelve apostles" - although there are now only 9 of them; the others having disappeared into the Southern Ocean)
She wrote:
“ I had one of the most surreal experiences of my life there. It was the
height of Summer, in Dec '94 and a scorcher of a day, so I had taken my shoes
off to walk on the beach. When I got to a cave, I walked in quite a way into
the pitch black. There was shallow water
flowing through the cave which was freeeezzzing cold on my bare feet! I
remember after a while when my eyes had become accustomed to the dark, I turned
around and looked out to see beyond the mouth of the cave... golden sand and
blue ocean. It was the weirdest sensation, being in a freezing cold, pitch
black cave yet only 20 or 30 metres or so away, it was a roasting summer's day.
I've never forgotten that! Venturing in there was a foolish thing to do in
hindsight. I didn't have a torch at all, and could easily have stood on
something nasty with my bare feet or worse still, fallen down a hole. But I
came to no harm and have a lasting memory of a very special experience.”
This
experience might describe what our expectation of heaven might be; our earthly existence is darkened at times,
we are so prone to our physical limitations of cold and heat and illness etc;
yet we always look out onto the bright landscape of heaven, through a portal.
We can sometimes just about see the sunlight and the blue and the promise of
that space with God, on eternity's horizon.. There is even the idea that as our
eyes become adjusted to the darkness, we develop "heavenly eyes", so
that we see more clearly on earth, what is really important (as you could see
the dimensions etc of the cave). Our lives are dark sometimes (as in the cave
experience), but we always have the promise of passing back to the light,
either here, when the grief/pain is overcome, or when we go to heaven. I think this is what Paul was thinking about.
How do we get to heaven? Do we have to be good enough? There are many people who think this
way. If you are a good person, you’ll go
to heaven. But who measures
goodness? If you are a sliver short of a
mass murderer, do you get to heaven? If
you live a fairly moral life, will that ensure your ticket to paradise? But who measures what morality is? Some people say that if what you do doesn’t
hurt anyone else, then it’s OK. And
perhaps if you only have a tiny slip up in the morality department, you still
get to heaven.
If we
think in this way about heaven, then we might be tempted to become like the tax
collector in the Luke 18. “I’ve never looked at a porn site, so I’m better
than that neighbour of mine who is always downloading dirty pictures”. And I never swear, so I’m better than most
people”.
While there’s a lot to be said for observing the moral
and ethical guidelines of the Bible, and especially for observing the golden
rule; it certainly makes us stable, kind
and happy people - I’m not sure it gets us to heaven.
Some people think that God is only a forgiving God,
not a judge, and that means they can do whatever they like in their life and
when they die, God will still welcome them to heaven. I’m not sure that’s right either.
What gets us to heaven, is acceptance that we cannot
do it ourselves, no matter how good we are, because our best will still never
quite come up to the perfection of God.
We will always be dogged by our humanity. We ask God to forgive and accept us the way
we are. We believe in Christ’s
resurrection, and his promise and ability to resurrect us.
That brings me to my second point. What will heaven be like? We can’t really know. We know it will be a
place where there are no more tears. It
will be a happy place; it will have God
in it and all will be well. These are
just my ideas really.
It will be a place of reunion, I think, where we meet
our family and friends who have gone before.
That will be a great day, I think. Love is the thing that endures. God would be going against his own divine
precept if love born on earth didn’t continue in heaven.
It will complete our life here. Our questions will be answered; all perplexities and tragedies will be
explained; we will see our life on earth
from the heaven side of our lives, and all will make sense.
I think there will be work to do. It might get a bit boring otherwise. But it
won’t seem like work. It will be a place
of harmony. No workplace bullying here. No hunger, no want of any kind.
There are some
lovely verses in Isaiah 65:17-25, which describe a lovely picture of heaven
Verse 17says the former things won’t come into our
minds; no bad memories. Verse 25 says
everything harmful will be banished;
verse 18 says there’ll be joy and gladness; verses 20 to 25 says there will be fullness
of life, security, rewarding work, fellowship with God, and peace
But we don’t really
know what it will be like. Even as we
look at these Isaiah verses, we can’t really comprehend it. If we knew all things in heaven and earth,
we’d be like God and the knowledge would be too much for our finite earthly
consciousness. It would be like trying
to explain our world to an ant.
So here we are, in between these two worlds so to
speak. We await here, living in our physical bodies, and look to heaven to
come. We live in the “promised but not
yet” time; and while most of us, enjoy
our life in this “waiting state”, and probably hardly ever think about heaven,
we are, still, in a sense “waiting to be called home”. When I was a girl on the farm, I’d be outside
playing with my siblings and we could be a long way from the house. But we’d always know when it was dinner time
because my mother had a cowbell, which she would take outside and ring, when it
was time to come in. My father would
hear it, and we’d all down tools and toys and come in for dinner. We all of us will experience a time when, for
us, the heavenly cowbell will ring, summoning us home. It ought not be an experience to dread, even
though we will not know the manner of our going, or the time. God is in charge of that. We only have to live, always in the knowledge
that this place we inhabit now, in our physical bodies, is not our final
destination.
Life is precarious;
it is unpredictable. The truth
is, we could be called home any day, or
we could be here for many more years.
So, we should live every day, in a sense, as though it will be our
last. We should give ourselves over
every day to the indwelling spirit of God.
This is a lovely way to live;
this living a day at a time, according to the will of God, so that whatever
our changing circumstances are, our constant is God, and our peace is knowing
that at the end, there will still be God.
And because his mercies constantly renew us, even
while our bodes are getting older every day and subject to decay, our spirits stay
fresh and invigorated. Some years ago now, my brother send me a birthday card,
with a picture of a young woman on the front, with a hole in the front page, so
you could see the woman’s head on the page underneath. The front cover was a shapely and beautiful
young woman (in cartoon style), but when I opened it, the picture was of a hag
woman, with wrinkles and everything drooping, and a caption which said “who on
earth put my head on this wreck of a body?!?”
Our bodies do indeed start to decay and age, even as our spirit stays
the same. God can put a new and vibrant spirit in our aging bodies; a spirit which enables us to live with love,
service, dignity, gratitude, peace in a world which is held in the tension of
the promised but not yet; a world which
is changing, uncertain, sometimes very evil, violent, unforgiving. We are like changelings. We live in the world of the here and now
amongst people whose pursuit of their own pleasure knows no bounds; yet here we are, with this seed of eternity
inside us quietly and patiently and obediently waiting for our “cowbell call”
to go home. , We can rejoice that we are
held and valued by God, as we live out his precepts here and now, amidst a
world often dark with its own sin.
We
can’t know all the answers about heaven;
trying to understand heaven is like trying to put a huge hot air balloon
into a shoebox. But I’m sure of one
thing. God, having begun a good work in
us, and setting our feet on that last, best journey, will not allow us to
tumble off it or led off into the abyss. Like Paul, we trust God to bring us
safely to His heavenly Kingdom.
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