When I was a little kid, my parents or my brothers would read
fairy tales to me. Did that happen with you? Or did you ever read
fairy tales to your kids? You know the kind I mean. They’d start
out with “Once upon a time…” And you’d get the story, and of course the
hero would defeat the villain, and it would close with “...and they all lived
happily ever after.”
When we’re little kids, we can believe in happy endings. But
then life hits us. Sometimes life hits us pretty hard. Bad stuff
happens to us. Bad stuff happens to people we care about. The hero
does not always defeat the villain. In fact, we learn that a lot of times
there are no heroes and no villains. Sometimes, bad things just happen,
and there’s no one at fault, no one we can blame, no one we can get mad at.
A lot of times people don’t seem to live happily ever after. And
so, it’s easy to lose faith in happy endings.
We still want to believe, though.
That’s why Hallmark Channel movies are so popular. That’s why there
are so many TV stations showing reruns of shows like Andy Griffith. We
want to believe in Mayberry. We want to believe in a place where the
problems are simple and can be resolved with a little common sense and some of
Aunt Bee’s fried chicken. We want to believe in happy endings.
Our Bible reading for today
describes what we could call the ultimate happy ending. It’s the happiest
of happy endings, at least for those of us who are Christians. It
describes the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. It describes the New
Jerusalem, coming down from heaven. It describes God living with God’s
people.
Listen again to how this is
described: God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be
no more death or mourning or crying or pain...To the thirsty I will give water
without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are
victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my
children.”
It goes on to talk about the river
of life. It says its water is “as clear as crystal, flowing from the
throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city.
On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of
fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for
the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.”
That’s a pretty happy ending.
Now, it’s not going to be a happy ending for everybody. The fairy
tales did not have a happy ending for everybody, either. As you heard,
the verses also say that “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the
murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters
and all liars,” they all receive the second death. But for the rest of
us, those who remain faithful to God and believe in Jesus Christ as their
Savior, there is the happiest of happy endings. There is eternal life,
without any crying or pain, in the presence of God.
We’ve asked the question many times,
“Why does God allow all these bad things to happen?” In the world
described in the book of Revelation, nobody will ask that question, because the
bad things will not happen. In fact, I kind of get the impression that,
at that point, we won’t ask any questions at all. Not because asking
questions will be forbidden or anything, but because we won’t feel any need to
ask questions. There’ll be nothing more that we need to know, nothing
more that we feel we need to understand. There will just be eternal love
and peace and joy in the presence of God.
And so the question is, do we
believe any of that? Do we believe in that happy ending the book of
Revelation describes? Or do we consider it just a fairy tale, something
that sounds good but that really has nothing to do with the way the world
really works?
It’s not an easy question to answer.
What we’re being asked to believe is something that often runs counter to
our human experience. We’re asked to believe in a world that is not like
the world in which we live. It sounds good. We’d like to believe in
it. But how can we?
I started out by referencing how,
when we’re little kids, we do believe in happy endings. We do believe
that good can defeat evil and that people can live happily ever after.
Maybe that’s part of what Jesus meant in Mark Ten when he said that we
need to come to faith like children. Remember what Jesus said there?
“Let the little children come to me, and
do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly
I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child
will never enter it.”
Little
children accept good things. They don’t question them. They don’t
suspect anyone of having hidden motives. Little children can accept that
people love them without wondering why. Little children can accept that
God loves them without wondering why. Little children can accept that our
faith can lead to a happy ending. And little children can believe that,
in the end, God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth, a place where
God lives with us and we can live in love and peace and joy. A place
where we can all live happily ever after.
Little kids
can do that. Can you? Can you put aside your adult cynicism?
Can you put aside your adult worries and concerns? Can you put
aside your adult fears? Can you receive the kingdom of God like a little
child?
Again, it’s
not easy. That adult cynicism, those adult worries and concerns and
fears, exist for good reasons. One of the reasons we adults question things
so much is that we’ve gotten burned. We suspect people of hidden motives
because we’ve run into too many situations where people had hidden motives.
We wonder why people care about us because we’ve run into situations
where people just pretended to care about us for what they could get out of us
and when there was nothing more they could get they dropped us. We did
not stop believing in happy endings because we wanted to. We stopped
believing in happy endings because there were too many times where they just
did not seem to be true.
But you
know, there are a lot of times in the Bible where things did not end happily.
A lot of the prophets had miserable lives that ended badly. A lot
of the original disciples’ lives ended badly, too. And Jesus’ life on
earth ended about as badly as it was possible for it to end, being killed on a
cross.
But here’s
the thing. In each of those cases, what appeared to be a bad ending was
not an ending at all. I’m sure some people thought it was. But it
was not. A prophet’s life might have ended badly on earth, but they went
to heaven and another prophet was called to carry on God’s message. The
original disciples’ lives might have ended badly on earth, but they went to
heaven and more people were called to carry on the message of Jesus.
Jesus’ life on earth ended badly, but it led to the forgiveness of our
sins, Jesus was resurrected, and the Holy Spirit has come to carry on the work
of God.
And that’s
what we need to remember in our lives. What we see as a bad ending is not
really the ending at all. Again, go back to those childhood fairy tales.
They had all kinds of twists and turns, right? There were times
when it looked like the villain was going to win. If our parents had
stopped reading the story to us before it was over, we’d have thought the
villain did win. But we would not have believed that. We’d have
known better. We’d have known that there had to be more to the story,
that the happy ending was still to come.
That’s what
we need to remember if we’re going to receive the kingdom of God like little
children. Sometimes, when we look around us, it looks like the villains
are winning. And if we thought this was going to be the end of the story,
we’d think the villains are going to win. But we know better. We
know there has to be more to the story. This is just a plot twist.
The happy ending is still to come.
When will it
come? We don’t know. We don’t know how long the story is. As
we said last time, we may be near the end, we may be in the middle, or we may
still be near the beginning. This story is not like a book, where we can
look to see how many pages are left. It’s like an oral story, a story
told by a storyteller who might go on for a long time or who might be almost
done. We simply have no way to know.
But if we
have faith, if we have faith like little children do, we know the happy ending
is coming. We know the good is going to win. We know God is going
to win. And we know that if we have faith in God and believe in Jesus as
our Savior, we’re going to win, too.
The Bible
promises us a happy ending. Can you believe it?
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