eternity and yellowstone
So much is said about eternal life in many Christian circles. As well it should be. Jesus was always talking about it, Paul wrote about it, leaders asked Jesus about how someone gets it. It was a big deal in Jesus’ day, and it still is today. The seeming downside of eternal life is that one has to die to get it. While I am looking forward to eternal life, I am not looking forward to dying … call me crazy, but I like it here.
Recently I spoke to someone about this very thing. I asked him, if we are born dead (spiritually speaking) then how is it that we can receive eternal life while living, and then have to die to get it again … sounds confusing. We often hear about so-and-so who “entered eternal life” ... which means that she died. Is that really when we enter eternal life?
Several years ago my wife and I went snowmobiling in Yellowstone Park (to you conservationists who are cringing … I am sorry, if you did it you would like it too). We rented the snowmobile in a small town in Montana, and we headed out. We drove for a while near main roads. As we drove we went by large rivers and streams, saw a few waterfalls, and were in dense forest. After driving for about 45 minutes we finally saw a sign that read, “Yellowstone National Park.” We drove past it and entered the park. The scenery did not change much for the next hour or two. We passed a sign that read, “Welcome to Wyoming”, so at least I knew that we were actually driving somewhere. There were cliffs, trees, rivers, streams … a lot of beauty. While this was all good it was nothing like what were about to see.
We went up a hill, and came around a bend in the road, and for the first time I saw what I thought Yellowstone would look like. There below us was a endless expanse of rolling hills and meadows dotted with buffalo herds and deer, that went on into the horizon. We stopped, stared and said nothing. We could not capture the massiveness of what we were seeing.
Maybe eternal life is like this … a snowmobile ride through Yellowstone. There was a point at which Beth and I did enter Yellowstone. The scenery was pretty, and there were moments when we stopped to take in a waterfall … but it was still forest and streams similar to before … but this was Yellowstone. In this life when one finds eternal life there is newness for sure, but at the same time we are on the same earth, in the same bodies with the same surroundings. We live with a different perspective, but we are in the same place. We have eternal life here on this earth now … not someday. Maybe then death is not entering eternal life, but the realization of exactly where you are when you crest a big hill, and sit at the top of the hill mystified by the beauty that surrounds you. While we may experience eternal life here we are still unable to see the fullness of it, that happens when we enter the presence of God.
The beauty of eternal life is that it is here now, and it is available. The implications of “eternal life now” point to the fact that becoming a follower of Jesus is not about getting in the gate of heaven some day when we die. It points toward us living out the reality heaven and eternal life here on this earth. It is a mission.
Death then, while a result of the fall, is not a hard right turn where we mysteriously graduate into something else. Rather, the eternal lifeline has a point where it begins in this life on this earth. When God gives that lifeline to a person, there is no end to that line. We then should become people who are less preoccupied with death when we speak the gospel and more concerned with life and living. Living in such a way that we tell others in word and action of the availability of eternal life here and now.