Time Flies

Years pass and men die but the purpose of God goes on. We look back on the year that is quickly passing and most of those who began the year with us are still with us, but some have fallen asleep. Times grow more difficult as the troubles of the world thicken, and the clouds of coming danger become more threatening. Do we realize the truth of the saying that the righteous are taken away from the evil to come?

Yet there is a thrill in the thought that we are living in the last days, and that the salvation and that of the world, is nearer than when we believed. We have been warned against these days, and against being overmuch cast down, but we must lift up our heads because they are heralds of better things. Perils have been passed so far in this year, and others are rising up in the distance now, yet though mountains be removed and cast into the depths of the sea, we need not be hopelessly afraid. Loud roars the storm also to those who hear a deeper voice across that storm.

Storms are occasional and passing things; calm is the normal condition of creation. To God, who has contemplated the world of men since the beginning, this reign of sin is but an episode, it will pass “as a watch in the night” (Ps 90:4). We pass our years as a tale that is told, and are actors in but a short chapter of a long story. But it has its happy conclusion. The order of the history of mankind, and God’s dealing with them from the beginning to the establishment of His purpose in the Kingdom of His Son, is peace – war – peace.

There was peace in the Garden of Eden. There will be peace when the earth is the renewed Garden of the Lord, but between these two gardens stretches the wilderness of sin, with its wanderings and wickedness, its serpents and idolatry, its murmurings and thirst, its fightings and fears. A wilderness march of thousands of years.

Bro Gilbert Tevere (Mutare, Zimbabwe)