Vocation

I have been reading about incarnation and reflecting on what it means. The question of how a good God could allow inexplicable suffering is one that I think about from time to time as I witness injustice. As Tim Keller writes, embracing the doctrines of the incarnation and Cross brings profound consolation to the suffering, and I think that is what drew me into Christianity — the fact that Jesus walked with people. Keller also writes about the palingenesis (palin: again, genesis: birth in Greek), in which the universe would wind down, history would be purified and start over.

Dostoevsky wrote:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. 

However, I cannot fathom what it means for Jesus to return and purge the universe of all decay and brokenness. I wonder how people have interpreted these texts in history, how they think about them today, and what it personally means to people as they go about their daily lives.