Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way onto the Internet for Winter, Christmas, the birth of Christ, Santa Claus, and so much more..Jesus Holds the Future in his Hands
Before the Archives building in Washington, there is a statue by Robert Aiken. It is the seated figure of a woman; a large book in her lap is opened at the last page, and on the pedestal are chiseled these words: “All that is past is prelude. The future begins now.”
In the book of Revelation, God is referred to as the Alpha and Omega. These are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, signifying that God existed at the beginning and that He will exist long after time has ceased to be recorded. In short, God is eternal. Since Jesus existed with the Father even before creation, and since Jesus, at the time of the Ascension, returned to the side of his Heavenly Father, it is surely logical that Christ will be in all of our unknown tomorrows.
To think of the New Testament only as a record of things past is to make a tragic error. The New Testament is a record of God’s mighty acts in the past and man’s response, but it is also a book which is very much concerned with the future. The Christian takes hope when he knows that his life does have a future tense.
When a young man knows that within his organization there is a real future for those who qualify, he will regard no temporary sacrifice too great, no task too irksome. Take away from him a worthy goal and he will daily begin to crumble into the dust.
Lift this to a higher level: when God ordered life he ordered it the way that it is, so that man could mature, grow, develop, climb, aspire. This is what J. A. Hatfield calls “the urge to completeness”.
Tertullian, the great church father, once wrote of the Christian:
He knows that on earth he has a pilgrimage,
but that his divinity is in heaven.
It is no accident that God has put within our nature what Plotinus called a “sense of the yonder”. On this bank and shoal of time we cannot help peering into the eternity from which we came and to which we go.
Many of you will recall seeing the film “The Titanic” which was based on the historic marine tragedy. There were, on this ill-fated ship, many of the world’s great men and women. As the ship went down a few women and children escaped by means of lifeboats, but the majority had no hope of being saved. As the band played, Mrs. Strauss, the wife of the famous musician who had brought melody to the world, was invited to board one of the lifeboats. She meditated for a moment, then turned to her husband, and clasping his hand, lovingly said, “I have been with you all these years, and I am not going to leave you now”, and together they journeyed into the nearer presence of God.”
When our brief little hour upon earth comes to a close, it is a great comfort to know that the same Jesus whom we have loved and served all our days goes with us, hand in hand, down through the dark valley of death, up, up vista’d slopes of eternity. on a path that leads to “the house of many mansions, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”.
All of this is part and parcel of the Unfolding Drama of Christmas-the message par excellence. It is a past drama of God’s coming to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a present drama of Christ’s entry into our hearts, and it is an ongoing drama which time cannot terminate. It is a drama without end.
Lift up your hearts!
Jesus Christ is the same,
yesterday, today, and forever.
