By Elliot Ritzema
It seems like everyone I know feels tired a lot. We’re worn down by work and by our other commitments, and in our off hours, we try to relax. The most readily available way to relax is to watch something on a screen, so we log on to our favored streaming services, and in our fatigue we are paralyzed by the overwhelming number of options available to us. Or we try to get more sleep but are kept awake at night by the never-ending list of tasks that dances through our heads.
Now it’s the new year, and we resolve that things will be different: We will get off the couch! We will exercise more! We will eat better! We will read the Bible every day (you’re doing great at this one so far, by the way)! Before long, though, we may feel the pull back to our old routines of hurry and fatigue.
In this context, when we read the words, “Look, I am making everything new” (Revelation 21:5), or “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2Corinthians 5:17), or “the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children” (Romans 8:21), we long for them to be true but can wonder how it will all come to pass. It can seem so different from the way our lives currently are.
Toward the end of his massive book City of God, Augustine says something astonishing: Jesus “died so that those who come to life through the remission of their sins might live no longer for themselves but for him…who died for all for our sins and was raised for our justification—and this in order that we, believing in him who justifies the ungodly, and being justified from ungodliness as if brought to life from death, might be able to take part in the first resurrection which now is.”
Augustine was drawing on several Scripture passages—mainly 2 Corinthians 5:15 and Romans 4:5, 25—to make the point that while there is a future aspect to Jesus’s making everything new, there is a present aspect as well. Those who have believed in Him have already been brought to life from death. Our bodies get tired and age, and we groan as we wait for the decay of all creation to be reversed. Everything has not yet been made new. Yet we now have access to the Spirit of God, a never-ending source of renewal and creativity. In this time between Jesus’s first and second advents, He is renewing creation. When He returns, He will complete a project that has already begun.
The One who was truly alive died to make us alive, and so we need not fear death. In the meantime in our day-to-day lives, we also don’t have to live always tired and dissatisfied. The renewal that is coming for all creation can come to us now by Jesus’s Spirit in us.
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