Thoughts on Halloween

I check the morning news and read of a local school teacher murdered with a box cutter by a 14-year-old student. I read of people beheading others in the name of holy war and religion. I notice local movie listings that include scenes so gruesome, I make my eyes look away so the images won’t visit me again while I sleep. I visit the local Dollar Store with my kids and am greeted with a wall of plastic, bloody limbs: arms, legs, and fingers. Bags of bloody fingers.

My fourth child, my sensitive one, the one prone to worry pins a note on the front door: “Don’t let Oreo outside!!!”

Oreo is our fuzzy, black family cat, and today is Halloween.

Last week we remembered the death of two family members: my niece, Bailey, who lived only 77 days on this earth, and her brother, Noah, who lived only a few minutes. We still grieve, because death is not right.

We were created for life, not death. We were meant to live forever.

We have forever inside us, and it creates a natural disappointment with the brokenness of the here and now.

Paul Tripp, Forever

Originally, God created us for Himself. We were meant to enjoy Him forever in a loving relationship. But Adam and Eve sinned and we are now all infected with sin. The wages of sin is death. All of this madness, the gore, gruesomeness and injustice is brought about by sin. And the death is not just physical, it’s also spiritual and we know we weren’t born for this.

We groan for something more. We know intuitively that this place is messed up–death, sickness, hate, murder, war are all so very wrong.

That’s because inside we are souls that will never die. We’ll live on forever in either heaven or hell. Hell was created for Satan and his demons, not people, but when we chose his side and joined his ranks, chose to sin and enjoy it, we chose his pitiful destiny.

But

Thanks be to God,

for loving us enough to send His own holy, precious Son to be murdered for the murderers, bruised for the most despicable on the earth, nailed to a cross for those wielding the hammer. Wounded for me.

Thanks be to God for sending Jesus to take the payment for my sin on the cross.

It was my sin that held Him there, and yours, too.

And we can be free from the curse of the second death by looking to Him and trusting Him with our life, death and eternal future.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16

The choice is ours to make:  Heaven or hell.

In Christ, we have hope. Hope for eternity. Hope for perfection.

You see, God has designed that this would not be the final destination for his children. He knows that this is a terribly broken world, that, in its present state does not function the way that he intended. This world is not a safe place to look to for a sense of well-being. For that, we need to live each day knowing that this world is not intended to be our final destination, and that God is preparing us for another world.

Living in this present world is designed by God to produce three things in me: longing, readiness, and hope. Rather than deepening my drive to have it all now, the disappointments of this present world are intended to make me long for the next.

Paul Tripp, Forever

 

Longing for home today.

Love,

Sarah