Hope or Hell in 2007? It's your future

Spirituality Column – #8 – January 2, 2007
Current! In Carmel newspaper

Hope or Hell in 2007? It’s your future
By Bob Walters

Hope, as we see the word in the Bible, is always about the future. Even when scripture refers to hope in the present or past, it is in one way or another talking about a future fulfilled, a desire denied, or an aspiration abandoned.

Tomorrow can be a rough ride.

With 2007 still stretching another 363 fresh tomorrows before us, for what do you hope in the New Year? What do you think you will find?

Here’s some good news. Satan isn’t there yet; he does not work in tomorrow. He works in our past and, when temptation triumphs, in our present.

How do I know Satan is in the past? Because our sin is in our past. We haven’t sinned in the future yet. That’s why Satan’s power resides in our past.

Hell is when you expect Satan, instead of Christ, to be in tomorrow.

Christ is our hope for the future because God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – the Trinity – are eternal; They are already in tomorrow. Satan isn’t eternal, but he does have perfect knowledge of our past and, with temptation and guilt, uses our past as a constant weapon against us.

While Satan may well visit each of us each of these next 363 tomorrows of 2007 and beyond, we know that in the very end, our past goes away and Satan goes with it. Even in this life, when our past goes away, Satan’s grip slips. But Satan’s persistence is never far from us.
There is a wonderful, all-purpose prayer from the Orthodox church, called the Jesus Prayer, that I love to pray when Satan shows up:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

We may not be able to dispatch our fallen nature, but we can work to dispatch Satan by focusing on Christ. Satan will try to come back, but Satan can’t threaten us from the future. He knows our weaknesses from our past and tempts us today.

Tomorrow – our hope -- is up to us.

I think the purpose of our life on earth is no secret and pretty simple … love God, and love others. What makes everything so, um, interesting, is our sin.

The only way to prevent sin is to perfect our relationship with God. I think we all know that isn’t going to happen in this life, but we try. And we always have the hope of tomorrow, where God, Christ and the Holy Spirit already reside.

Satan will only get there because he rode along with us. Hope only makes sense when Christ, the promise of our future, is in the equation.

So here is a question for the New Year: are you going to ride with Christ, or is Satan going to ride with you?

Either way, you’d better buckle up.

Walters, a Carmel resident, hopes his airbag deploys. Contact him at rlwcom@aol.com.