Abiding Forever: A Meditation on 1st Peter 1, for the 3rd Sunday in Easter

Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth

through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren,

see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently:

Being born again, not of corruptible seed,

but of incorruptible, by the word of God,

which liveth and abideth forever.

For all flesh is as grass,

and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.

The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:

But the word of the Lord endureth forever.

And this is the word which by the

gospel is preached unto you.

We lost another good friend this week to cancer, and he wasn’t alone.  In conversation with friends around the country, many have lost good friends and family this week to various scourges, pestilences, accidents, and calamities.  Death is easy enough to ignore when it is far away, but when it presents itself in the people we love, it is impossible to avoid.  The death of our friends and family is a reminder to each of us that death will come to us all, and each of us will transition out of this world into eternity.  It is a reminder of the ancient truth which St. Peter quotes in his first epistle, that even as people observe the brief cycle of life and death with the grass and flowers of the field, so too is the lifecycle of man in the view of eternity.  There are over six billion people in the world today; some who are being born, some who are living out their lives in a myriad of ways, and others who are dying.  And the billions who are in the world tomorrow will not be entirely the same as the billions who are here today.  In about 80 to 100 years, there may not be a single one of the six billion people alive today, still alive then… and yet there will likely be billions more across the earth.  The glory of mankind is indeed like a flower which blooms, and then fades away, brief in time against the ages of the world, or the echoes of eternity.

If our hope, or the pursuits of our lives, were oriented only toward this brief blossoming life, we would surely be a pitiable lot.  Solomon writes in his book of Ecclesiastes about how vain life becomes, if it is only a pursuit of those things which may be done between our birth and our death.  We may build empires and inheritances, but they are passed to others whose lives are likewise as brief as our own, and they may or may not honor the same principles and passions we did.  Life without a context bigger than our own breath becomes a fevered and frightened vagary, a pursuit of vanity after vanity while we try to outrun, out-maneuver, and out-smart death.  A life that we did not choose to enter, into circumstances we did not ordain, influenced by powers we cannot control, and waiting for death’s clock to chime our dismal chord is not a life of meaning or purpose, because it has no perspective and context outside itself.  A life in which we are our own god, by the power of our own word and reason, is a miserable and meaningless life of futility, suffering, sorrow, and pain.  This is not the life which the True God has given to us, but the devil’s lie we too willingly believe as we pridefully try to worship ourselves—a self-absorbed life which can only wait in fear of death, or despair into the oblivion of suicide.

Yet the life which God gives is so much more.  It is a life bound to His eternal, unending life, which can never be taken away or made vain.  His life is the source of all life, and in Him alone there is eternal purpose, dignity, and worth.  United with God, our lives sing in harmony with His, in joyous song that rings out forever.  In Him we find the eternal truth which dispels the vapid lies of devils and demonic men.  In Him there is peace and joy and celebration, where life finds it beginning and yet never has an end.  In Him, there is a context which lifts our eyes above the tragedies of a fallen world, and our minds above the fevered dreams of fearful men.  In Him who called all time and space into existence, who is the Alpha and the Omega—the Beginning and the End of all creation—is the timelessness which transcends beginnings and endings into eternal life.  In Him is the purpose we seek, the meaning which resolves the meaninglessness all around us, the joy which dispels all sadness, and the love which heals all wounds.  From Him came the life we live, and in Him is that life made whole.

And how does such wholeness of life come to mortal men?  In Jesus Christ alone—who alone is the eternal Son of the Father, alone took on our human nature that He might live and die in our stead, alone defeated our sin, death, hell, and the devil, and who alone rose from the dead to give His victorious life to all who would believe in Him.  In Christ alone, who is the very Word of God Made Flesh, comes the eternal Word of Life to each and every one of us:  the Gospel of Salvation by His grace, through faith in Him alone.  This is the Gospel which St. Peter refers to in his epistle, which is the eternal Word of God leading to eternal life.  While all of fallen man’s glory comes and goes like so many flowers of the field, this Word of the Lord endures forever, granting eternal life to all who abide in it by faith.  It is the Word by which we are born, by which we live, and the promise in which we pass from this world to the next.  It is a Word which cannot be undone by cancer, by accident, by villainy, or by any other force in all creation.  This Word, this Jesus Christ, is our life, our sweetness, and our hope—our reconciliation with God the Father in the power of His Holy Spirit, uniting our life with the blessed life of the Holy Trinity forever.

This is the Word of Life in which we live, and the promise in which we bury our friends, our family, and all whom we love.  This is the Word of Life which binds our loved ones to the eternally blessed life of God, and which binds us together in Him forever.  This is the Word of Life which gives us the assurance that no one can take His people from His omnipotent hands, and that all who abide in the eternal life of Jesus Christ, abide together in Him, in one great and eternal fellowship which the gates hades cannot resist.  This is the Word of Life which comes to you today, that you might abide forever in the love of God the Father through the Atonement of God the Son, rising up in the power of God the Holy Spirit to reflect the love, grace, mercy, and compassion of the Holy Trinity to everyone you meet.  This is the Word of Life which gives your life meaning, hope, joy, and peace which can never be taken away from you, even by death.  This the Word of Life which exchanges the short lived glory of your brief and fallen life, with the unending glory of the risen Son of God, given to you by grace through faith in Him alone.  Hear His Word of Life to you this day, that you might repent, believe, and live in Him forever, together with all the countless saints who shall live and abide in Him across all the epochs of the world—unbroken, undivided, made whole, and made holy by the Blood of His Cross.  Amen.