They Perish, But You Remain

Passage: Hebrews 1:1-12

The Doctrine of Providence, as presented in Lord’s Day 10, offends our sensibilities. The conviction that our God is in control of, indeed sends, even our lives’ most difficult experiences, confronts us like a slap in the face. The implication is that God willingly hurts us; willingly takes away people and property that we love. This is a hard doctrine to stomach.
When we respond to this doctrine with indignation, however, we fail to account for two things: first, the reality that pain and loss are inescapable in this sad world; second, that God’s goal for each of us is eternal life.

The canvass on which our lives are painted is a broken world in which everything we know and love will be taken from us. It will all, as the author of Hebrews states so poetically, perish. We lose all things but one: God himself.
We proceed through life acquiring stuff: accomplishments; credentials; property; relationships. This stuff, in itself, is good. But none of it is permanent. When any of it is taken away, we rail against an unfair cosmos as though somehow one of our rights has been violated. With our vision obscured by the (albeit good) stuff we’ve been given, we fail to focus on the one thing that matters most; the one thing that can never be taken away.

We belong to a merciful God who refuses to let us be completely blinded by the things of this world. With care and compassion God takes things away – sometimes one at a time; sometimes all at once. When he does it hurts – sometimes so badly we don’t know how we’ll recover. But none of these losses hurts us so much as the loss of one of us hurts God. God will stop at nothing to draw us closer and closer to him. It is when we embrace this that we become willing to relinquish into his hands any of the things that obscure him from view. Everything we call ours will one day perish. Only God remains.