⁴⁷ Remember how fleeting is my life.
For what futility you have created all humanity!
⁴⁸ Who can live and not see death,
or who can escape the power of the grave?

–Psalm 89.47-48 (NIV)

The above comes from a psalm which laments, in part, God’s anger and seeming withdrawal from his people. The psalmist wonders how long they will be subject to God’s terrible wrath. How many times in our own lives have we wondered what life is all about and where God is in it all. It is the great existential question that confronts each one of us.

As this Easter season winds to a close this week, it is important for us to remember the Christian hope and promise that is available to all who are willing to humble themselves and accept it by faith through grace because it provides a powerful antidote to the despair that is inherent in the passage above.

Yes, our life is fleeting. It is fleeting because we are a sinful and rebellious people and this has caused death to enter God’s good creation and caused us to suffer exile and alienation from God, the Source and Author of all life. That’s the bad news.

But the Good News is that God does not want that for his Image bearing creatures. He wants us to live so that we might love and enjoy him, both in the living of our mortal days and forever. That is why God became human and bore the punishment of his wrath himself. In the cross of Jesus God has offered us a way out of our exile and alienation from him. He has done the impossible for us so that we have a chance to live.

The Good News does not end with the cross, however. We also have the hope and promise of the Resurrection, which points to God’s New Creation. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God validated who Jesus was–his game-changing Messiah. But the Resurrection also points to a more wondrous promise. It points to New Creation, the time when God’s dimension (what we call heaven) and our dimension (what we call earth but which basically refers to the cosmos) will be fused into one great dimension. The curse of humanity’s sin will be ended forever and we will be beneficiaries of God’s complete and healing transformation. Our dead bodies will be raised and transformed into new resurrection bodies, the kind that Jesus now has, and we will get to live directly in God’s presence forever.

Our destiny is not some disembodied state. It is New Creation, the new heavens and earth. Whatever that looks like it will be glorious and wonderful beyond our wildest imaginations because God is a wonderfully generous and kind God. And in the interim, the time between Jesus’ resurrection and the New Creation that will be ushered in when he returns again in great power and glory, we have the promise of his Holy Spirit to help us see our way through this sometimes difficult life.

Jesus has gone into God’s dimension (what we call the Ascension) and is now the rightful ruler of this universe. He hasn’t checked out on us. To the contrary, he still loves us and still wants us to find the life he came to give us. He still prays for us and still sends us his Spirit to help us become the people he created us to be. And he bids us not to be afraid because of this great reality. He is with us to the end of the Age and we will get to live in his direct Presence forever in the New Creation.

Here, then, is a total package for hope. We have the assurance of Jesus’ abiding Presence with us here and now to help us navigate through this life and live it with meaning and purpose. And when our mortal bodies die we have the hope and promise that not even death itself will be able to separate us from Jesus and his great love for us. And in the final analysis, we have the hope of New Creation in which we will never be afflicted by any of the nastiness that this life offers us. God has promised to wipe away all our tears and there will never again be afflicted with sorrow or sickness or fear or separation or alienation or any of the other ugliness that besets us.

If this does not give you real hope, I don’t know what can. This is our Easter hope. It is a real antidote to despair and existential loneliness. It is available to anyone who is humble enough to admit that he or she does not have what it takes to conquer all of life and/or who seeks more out of life than just self-aggrandizement. If you have not yet accepted God’s gracious invitation in Christ to you, what are you waiting for?

Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!