His Love Frees

“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. (Revelation 22:12) 

Yesterday, I was on a beach in hot weather for one of my children’s birthdays. At one point, I was sitting on a wall by myself whilst many teenagers ran around the baking sands nearby; laughing, jostling each other and chasing one another like primary school kids, despite a pretence at adulthood. I overheard a group talking about their own names and why they were called so and so; animated conversations about nothing in particular. 

It seemed so timeless as the young people had fun before the soothing ebb and flow of the tide and in front of a light blue marble sea, stretching to the horizon of the Bristol Channel. That far-point marks a frontier beyond which – hundreds of miles away – is my home town. I can often find myself looking at it and wondering what my loved ones, family and friends still living there, are doing at that moment. And yet if I could miraculously fly there suddenly, it would also be so familiar; despite the sea, fields, hills and rivers between us.  

“Time, distance, space.”

It’s a phrase that has bounced around in my mind for years now. I am fascinated by the concept of the limitations of our existence compared to the omnipresence of God. Those young people on the sand will soon be middle-aged, like me. And yesterday, I was one of them. That’s time. 

I think of distance – the fact that those we love may not be in our immediate vicinity. They could be at home a few miles distant, or the other side of the ocean, or their bodies dead. An existence in another space. In a sense, they seem vanquished because they’re not evident in the nearby location in which we dwell, and yet they’re not forgotten by God, even the hairs on their heads have been counted by Him. We know by faith that they’re extant beyond the borders of here-and-now, even though we cannot see them.

I think what I’m writing here sounds strange and perhaps hard to understand, even confusing. Apologies for that. I guess what I mean is this: when you weigh up existence, it cannot be qualified based on what you see, hear or perceive immediately. The narrative of creation’s history contains paragraphs, pages, chapters and books, of which we play a small part. And yet the wonderful thing is that we’re entwined with the eternal God, with our names written by His Son, Jesus Christ, in a book of the living, regardless of fanciful notions of time, distance and space imbibed by us today. 

And that’s why it feels so galling when people live everyday lives pretending God isn’t there. I have to be careful of that myself and keep placing the Lord, my heavenly dad, first in all things because His love is life in all its fulness. I don’t want to live days on end without holding his hand. That’s why I choose Christ again and again. He is freedom.

Time, Distance, Space – God may seem beyond our immediate perception but He is definitely not. He sees us more than we can see him. Whether we feel separated by loved ones because of a horizon of geographical distance, or separated by the horizon of a bodily death – nothing is lost in Christ. Time, distance and space are compelled to exist under the authority of God. 

Jesus once said about the dangers of ignorance in regards to the times we live: “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed.”

As the apostle Paul wrote: “For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”