[In three of these Sunday afternoon evangelistic services, I would like to explain, on the basis of God's Word, how we who know God through Jesus can look to the future with hope (ed: later the series became 5).This question is also important because all of humanity today is increasingly searching for the future. There is already a lot of scientific work on what the year 2000 will bring. A new, young science is emerging, called futurology, which uses the current rapid pace of technological and social development to predict the likely course of events in the next century. Only the likely course of events, of course! Because, God forbid, if nuclear war broke out, all future predictions would be ruined. So this discipline also expects contingencies. With this caveat, however, it is possible to draw broad outlines of the probable future. Thus, we must expect an increase in automation, the growing prevalence of computers, much greater exploitation of the potential of deserts and seas, rising prosperity, longer leisure time, a rise in the general human life expectancy, the influence of atmospheric conditions, and so on. Of course, with all the downsides of all this great technological progress. All this is placed on a long scale between hope for the future, excessive optimism or excessive pessimism, happy hope or utter hopelessness, confidence and despair, according to one's own temperament. In any case, futurology is an interesting and extremely useful science.The Word of God is also constantly dealing with the problem of the future. What we can hope for in the future. What hopes and expectations we can have for the future of humanity, the world and our own individual existence. As in futurology, the Bible presents the future as a projection into the future of facts in the past and present. But from a very different perspective, and especially from a very different perspective than futurology. For while every human vision of the future and every human calculation of the future must reckon with the fact that a dark, impenetrable curtain - death - stands in its way, the biblical vision, penetrating this very curtain, contemplates the near and distant future in the perspective of eternity! Let me state here and now, as the most important fundamental doctrine of the whole Christian hope: the Christian hope for the future looks towards the future in which God's actions in the past and in the present point. So, it is not by God's past and present actions that we infer the probable future, but we can look forward to that future with complete certainty and prepare for that future because that future has already begun! Christian hope is a well-founded hope and not a guess, not a calculation of probabilities. Our hope for the future has a basis, a concrete basis, in what God tells us in Jesus and what He experiences with us through His Holy Spirit.
Such a well-founded future hope is the resurrection. Of course there are others, but I would summarise what I am saying today: the future as resurrection! The resurrection is always a topical and exciting problem because the biggest problem for man is death! We simply cannot accept the idea that death is the end of man, like a squashed caterpillar or a broken tree branch. I have seen so many times that when people stand at the funeral urn, around a small white urn with a handful of ashes, there is a painful question in their eyes, unspoken - sometimes even spoken: where is the one who loved so much with a heart that was already dusty, who worked so hard with a hand that was dusty, who caressed so much with a hand that was dusty, who spoke so kindly with a lips that spoke to me or kissed me? Is that all that is left of him? A handful of ashes? Impossible! There must be something more. But what is there more? Some console themselves with the consolation that it will live on in their descendants. Your name, your genes, your tendencies, your character will live on in your children and grandchildren and their grandchildren. But who has no children, or no offspring? Whose family dies out and no one carries on his name? Is he wiped off the face of the earth forever? Is that the end? Is that really all there was? Or does man live on in his works? In his eternal creations? But who has one? A Michelangelo, a Zoltán Kodály, the works of some very privileged talent will surely survive as long as there is human culture in the world - but their creator? What has become of that, what will become of that? Or will someone's memory survive death? For how long? "His memory lives forever", I read on many tombstones in the cemetery. Yet so many of them are neglected, sunken, untended graves that stand in stark contrast to the main one. "Forever." Does that mean for a few years, a few decades at best? Then comes the next generation and they have no idea who it was whose memory was supposed to live forever! In any case, it is no longer alive in their memory!
And even if you lived on in your descendants after your death, or in your works, or in the memory of many, many people, would that be enough for you? Not for me! And by human reckoning, five sons will carry on my name and my memory. But for me, for my "I", it is very hopeless, hopeless for the future. For the future of the someone I am. My person. Not my name, not my work, not my memory, but my "me". Surely, all this hope for the future is no more than what I saw the other day in the cemetery in Csepel. Above many, many graves, the same tombstone. Broken at the waist, its wilting foliage drooping downwards, sadly surrounding the name of the dead. I wondered! How sad that the artistic vision of the gravestone carver could only have gone so far. But sadder still that this is all that most people have faith in! This is how he sees death. Tragic lightning strikes, knocking life over, breaking it in two. No more! Only death! How horrible: the future as death!
No! - God cries out to me in Jesus. Do not see the future as death, but as resurrection! You have every reason, right and ground for this triumphant hope even in the face of death! How did we say the basic theorem before? The Christian's future hope looks to where God's works in the past and present point. The greatest work of God in the past was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead! The resurrection of Jesus was a decisive battle against the hitherto thought invincible power of death. Thus says the apostle Paul: "Jesus was raised from the dead, and became a genius to those who had fallen asleep." Genius means: the first, the beginning, the start of a process. Jesus is the first of the dead to be resurrected. The word "tender" indicates that he is not the only one, but the first. So the resurrection is already accomplished in one man. This past act of God that happened on that first Easter morning is like a birthing process that, once started, can no longer be stopped. He is moving on towards His purpose, which is nothing less than the final conquest of death by the resurrection of the dead. Gentle, it means that Jesus is at the head of the triumphal procession of those who have risen from the dead. Just as the awakening of nature can no longer be delayed in the spring when the first snowdrops blossom, so the resurrection of the dead can no longer be delayed because it has already begun in Jesus. So this is the resurrection of Jesus! It is the past act of God that points unmistakably to the future, to our resurrection!
But there is also an act of God's Spirit in the present which also points to the resurrection. For the believer in Christ, the resurrection is not just a future expectation, but a reality already experienced here and now! Resurrection for us will not begin after we are dead and buried. It begins here, in earthly life. The moment we begin to truly believe in the risen Jesus. Because Jesus also said this: in the believer in him, the Spirit of God creates a new life. He begins to germinate eternal life, but that too is just a beginning, pointing to the future. Yet, we already have eternal life within us, to which we will one day be raised in its fullness. For those who belong to Christ now, death is only the end of their earthly existence, but it can no longer separate them from the risen Christ, and the coming resurrection only reveals and fulfils the eternal life we already have in us by faith. So the resurrection of Jesus is the believer's assurance that eternal life has already been given to him on this earth. It is the full assurance of the basis of the hope that we look forward to our individual future as those who have been raised from the dead, because the Spirit of God is already accomplishing that in the life of the believer.
Indeed, in contemplating the resurrection of Jesus, we learn even more about the mystery of our own future resurrection. The disciples had several encounters with the risen Jesus. They were amazed and horrified to see the same Jesus risen whom they had buried and yet, somehow, very different from the one they had buried. They knew him and they didn't know him. They were both glad to see him, like a good old friend, and afraid of him, like some mysterious celestial phenomenon. They saw him appear and disappear. As if he were on his way from this visible world to the invisible world of God's glory. In any case, these mysterious appearances of the resurrected Jesus took place on the very edge of His and our world of experience as mysterious but certain indications of the future of human life. That is how we know we are going in that direction! That is what we are becoming! So will be our resurrection! Just as we wear the image of the earthly man, we will wear the image of the heavenly one - the risen Jesus - to be like His glorious body! There is no fantasy or speculation about an unknown future. It is only a drawing of the lines of experienced facts further into as yet unknown territory. A grasp of the promise given in the fact of Jesus' resurrection and transfiguration. That is why the disciple John says: "We know that we shall be like Him" (1 John 3,2).
This proves that we too will be raised bodily. And that immediately after death. Not in the way many people - wrongly - imagine. That in some way the earthly body, once buried or burned in a crematorium, will be resurrected, the tombs will be opened and the old dead will come out. No! The body in the Bible does not mean the substance of our bodies, not the measurable amount of flesh-bone-muscle-water. It is of the earth, and with death it returns to the earth. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But the flesh in the Bible is more the person, the individuality, the existence. It is the mysterious, visible something in which the even more mysterious, invisible self manifests, speaks, acts. That visible essence of me that breathes me, that makes me know that I am me and not someone else. So the resurrection of our bodies means precisely that after death we do not live on like a raindrop in a pond. We do not melt into some general spiritual mass, impersonal, like a drop, a part of universal Life, but God preserves our individuality, our personality, our identity, our conscious and recognizable uniqueness, even after death. So we continue to live consciously, personally, only then in a higher form of existence, still unimaginable for us. Paul expresses this change thus. He is lost in corruption, he is raised in incorruption: he is lost in shame, he is raised in glory: he is lost in weakness, he is raised in power. He is lost in sensual flesh, he is raised in spiritual flesh. There is a sensual body, and there is a spiritual body." (1 Cor 15:42-44) In other words, God completely restores our physical and spiritual life from death. The resurrection will be a radical renewal. But it is not a totally new thing. Perhaps we could say: 'I am being resurrected as a completely renewed person, but I am being resurrected! The old me, but with new life. The earthly self, but to heavenly life. The mortal self, but to eternal life! I remain essentially the same, qualitatively different.
Here is the future as resurrection. It is also your future, the future of your personal self. And in this future hope that looks beyond death, this present life on earth takes on a completely different perspective. Never before has theoretical anthropological teaching attached such importance to the human body. On the one hand, the belief in the resurrection prevents us from disparaging our bodies. For this body is not a prison in which the soul is imprisoned and eagerly awaits release through death. I see my body as the area of God's Holy Spirit in which He is already beginning to work the effects of Jesus' resurrection. So that already now, here, the figure and the spirit of Jesus may be revealed through it. For this reason, the believer loves and cares for his body as the possibility of the visible manifestation of the Spirit of Jesus. For the Spirit of Jesus within us is manifested in the movements, words, attitudes and actions of our bodies.
But the resurrection faith, on the other hand, also protects us from overestimating the body. From making this body everything! From making this body only an instrument of pleasure, with which to enjoy the pleasure of food-drink-love. If it becomes corrupted, old, then it is the end of everything worth living for. Any exaggerated cult of the body is like holding snow in your hands. I hold it, I squeeze it, I fear it, I cherish it, even though I know that one day it will melt and roll out of my hands without saving it. That cherished, cosseted body, with its potential for so much pleasure, will inevitably fall out of my hands. The resurrection believer does not despair when he sees his body decaying, for he has the promise that even if "our outward man is corrupt, the inward man is being renewed day by day" (2 Cor 4:16), and will one day shine forth as a new creation, glorifying God. What a triumphant hope this is! So there is no need to fear that this body will grow old, no need to despair if sickness ravages it, for "if this our tabernacle on earth falls, we have a building in heaven" (2 Cor 5:1).
It is in the faith of the resurrection that man feels his true responsibility to the whole of physical life. This is why the apostle Paul, when he speaks of the future as the resurrection, draws the final conclusion of his long discourse in this very practical exhortation: 'Therefore, brethren in love, stand firm, steadfast, zealous always for the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.' (1 Cor 15:58)
Amen
Date: 22 September 1968 Evangelization.