The current of joy

One thing that good movie directors have learned to do is to blend together the past, present and future of a story.  Flashbacks are woven into the story, and you don’t always know where you are.  Of course, in a good movie it will make sense eventually.  But you get a sense of how it all ties together.

I guess I’ve never thought of the apostle Peter as an artist, and I don’t know if he would make a good movie director or not.  But it’s with amazing skill that he weaves together the past, present and future when he writes to the “pilgrims of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia”.  In 1Peter 1:3-9 you can sense a current and flow of time.  Nothing is restricted to the present moment.  The past, present and future must all be “present” in the believer’s life.

In the past God brought us to life, through Jesus’ resurrection.  But that is what transforms our past and future.  Today we have a living hope of the

future – we will get an inheritance that can’t be destroyed.  We hope in the full revelation of the salvation, which began in the past and is complete only in the future.

Today, we are being kept through God’s power, through faith.  It is that faith that is proven through the trials we face.  Because of the hope and faith we love the Lord Jesus, who we believe in even though his visible work on earth is in the past.  We rejoice, because we are already in the process of receiving our salvation.  And in the future, everyone will

look back at the love and joy we had, and see it as evidence of the true faith we had.

In the 1994 finale of Star Trek:  The Next Generation, Captain Picard finds himself jumping from the present, to the future, to the past.  He must get the crews in all eras working together to save the world.  They have different roles to play, but must focus on a common goal.

Perhaps we sometimes try to keep the past present and future too separate in our lives.  We make our new birth an event of the past which doesn’t impact us today.  We relegate “heaven” to a vague future.  But we can learn from Peter.

Read the passage, and notice the flow in the language.  We are receiving the result of our faith.  We are being kept.  Our salvation is ready to be revealed.  It’s not so much that we have to try to be happy right now.  We are in a process of believing – of rejoicing – of a growing love relationship with Jesus.  It’s alive, moving, simple, and complex.  It’s time we brought the past present and future together and felt the rushing joy of God’s salvation, in spite of the hardships of today.  He is ever present.