The Beginning and the End
Canon Liddon. Revelation 21:5-8 And he that sat on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said to me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.… "It is done." There is often a difficulty not of the reason so much as of the imagination, in thinking that anything will end, or at least anything in which we are actively interested. Men look out for a graduated sequence in the course of events. Catastrophes, we are told — catastrophes are discredited. Why events ever began to succeed each other at all, to what events are tending as their final goal — these vital questions are never raised; but this one-sided way of looking at the facts of life is seized upon greedily by the imagination, which thus will clog and choke the equitable action of the reason, will throw unwelcome facts into an arbitrarily-chosen background, will involve plain conclusions in some cloud of mystic indefiniteness, and will thus create a confidence that, somehow or other, things will for ever go on very much as they do. Now this appears, first of all, in the power we many of us have of putting aside altogether the thought of death. You are a young man or woman just entering life; will you be, some little time hence, admired, well spoken of, or the reverse? You do not know. Will your family life, some years hence, be a centre of warm affection, or a scene of unspeakable discomfort and misery? You do not know. You do not know how you will die, but of the inevitableness and certainty of death itself you are, or you ought to be, as well assured as of your own existence. Each stroke of the bell echoes the voices of the angels, echoes the voice of God: "It is done," "It is done." And the same difficulty of entering into the fact that that which exists now, and here, will come to an utter end, appears in our way of thinking about organised human life, about society. You study a section of human history, you mark man's progress from a lower to a higher stage, you observe the steps of social and political growth; the task of imagination in conceiving that it will all utterly end becomes increasingly difficult. It looks so stable and so strong, so vigorous, so justly self-reliant, so based upon high courage, upon keen sagacity, upon hard common-sense, that nothing, it seems, can avail to shake it. It is so easy to put out of account that which is not obtruded upon the sight, to make no allowance for the unforeseen, to assume that the apparent is the real, and that the real of to-day is always permanent; and so men drift on until something happens that startles the world out of its dream of security. And still more difficult do men find it to accustom themselves to the conviction that one day this earthly home on which we live will itself be the scene of a vast physical catastrophe. The course of nature — the phrase itself helps to disguise from us the truth — the course of nature seems so ascertained, and, within certain limits, so unvarying, that the mind recoils from the thought that one day all this ordered sequence of movement, of life, of growth, and of decay, will suddenly cease, buried in the ruins of a vast catastrophe. Law, it seems, will effectually prevent the occurrence of any such catastrophe; it could only, we are told, be anticipated even by an apostle in the unscientific age. Now, let us observe that such a catastrophe need by no means imply the complete cessation of what we call law, but only the suspension of some lower law or laws through the imperial intervention of a higher law. We see this suspension of lower by higher laws constantly going on around us; indeed, it is an almost necessary accompaniment of man's activity on the surface of this planet. You and I never lift our arms without so far suspending and defying the ordinary operation of the law of gravitation. St. Peter, when arguing against the scoffers of his day that because all things continued as they were from the beginning, therefore the promise of Christ's coming had become practically worthless, points to the flood, points to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And yet these catastrophes were brought about by the operation of existing laws; and if this was so, is it inconceivable that He, in whose hands and whose workmanship we are, should have in His illimitable universe other and more imperative laws beyond even those which more immediately surround our puny life? — moral laws which have their roots in the necessities of His eternal being, and not mere physical laws which He has made to be just what they are according to His own good pleasure. These are the three elements involved in the Christian representation of the second coming of Christ: the end of all human probations, the final dissolution of the organised or social life of mankind, the destruction of man's present home on the surface of the globe-there is nothing in them, to say the very least, violently contrary to our present experience, nothing more than an extension of the facts of which we have present experience. Individual life abounds with the presages, with the presentiments, of death. The aggregate life of man, human society, contains within itself many a solvent which threatens its ruin, and the planet which we inhabit is a ball of fire, which may easily one day pour out over its fair surface the pent-up forces which already surge and boil beneath our feet. And when all is over, what will remain? "He said unto me, It is done; I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." God, the Almighty, the All-wise, the Compassionate; God, the Infinite, the Immeasurable, the Eternal Father, Son and Spirit, undivided essence God remains. There are two principal reflections which you should try to take home with you. One is the insignificance of our present life. It is natural that, so long as they can, those who believe in no future life should exaggerate the worth of this; it is indeed their all, and when before their eyes it begins to break up, they have no resource but despair. But we Christians have a hope, sure and steadfast, of a future which is infinitely greater than the present, and which can assure to our immortal spirit true union with Him who is the true end of its existence, a satisfaction which is here impossible for us. The instability and perishableness of all human things are but a foil to the eternal life of God. And the other reflection is the immense importance of life. Yet, this life, so brief, so transient, so insignificant, so made up as it is of trifles, of petty incidents, of unimportant duties, is the scene upon which, in the case of every one of us, issues ere decided, the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate, issues immense, issues irreversible. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. WEB: He who sits on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new." He said, "Write, for these words of God are faithful and true."