The Long Journey Home

In the beginning, God created absolutely everything, including his own image-bearers, Adam and Eve.  Then they bailed on him and were separated from him.  God has been trying to bring mankind back to himself ever since.

The Bible contains the Journey of All Journeys.  From the creation of The Heavens and The Earth to the unveiling of the New Heaven and the New Earth, it’s the journey of God and man together and apart, intimate and distant, elated and despairing.  It’s the story of every human being who ever lived, of their acceptance or rejection of All-Loving, All-Knowing God. 

Here’s the basic plot line:  Mankind does “what is right in their own eyes.”  God, the jilted bridegroom, begs them to repent and turn to him to restore their relationship.  Even after multitudes of warnings they still don’t repent and he sends calamity on them.  They turn their hearts to God and cry out for him to save them, which he does.  Then they get a little lax and go their own way.  Again.  Over, and over, and over again.  The circumstances and characters change, but the basic cycle remains the same.  

This epic runs from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses to the Judges to Kings Saul and David to the divided kingdoms to captivity and through the generations to Jesus, then to the Apostles and the early church clear down to us. 

To you.  To me. 

This journey is our journey.  Set against the backdrop of Good versus Evil, a world at war, we play a significant role in this life and death adventure drama.  Our choices matter, all of them; big and small, public and private, physical and mental and emotional and spiritual. The consequences reverberate to successive generations.  Our choices become our eternity.

Yes, the journey home is a long one, full of peril, but also full of hope, because in the end (Spoiler Alert!), we win.  We Christians do arrive Home.

 

And we all live Happily Ever After.