My Salvation Shall Be Forever

¹“Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.” (Isaiah 51:6). The scientific consensus is that thanks to the law of entropy and the cosmic expansion of the universe, in just a few short billion years, every galaxy will wind down, every star will fizzle out and this vast, unknowable universe of which we are the tiniest of speck will simply vanish away like smoke. Here on Earth, the prognosis, at least for humans, is even more urgent and more bleak. Everywhere we look, from the climate to geopolitical tensions, things seem to be heating up at a disastrous wait. We won't have to wait billions of years for the heat death of the universe because if we are not careful our species doesn't have millennia or centuries left but mere decades. When we think of the earth burning up like an old garment or the heavens vanishing like smoke, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that in the grand scheme of things nothing we do matters so we might as well do nothing. The problem with this line of thinking is that just because we happen to be living on this incredibly fragile world trapped inside of an ephemeral soap bubble of the material universe, this does not mean that we belong here. We existed long before God said let there be light and first began to shape the formless void into the universe we know today. We will continue to exist long after the last trumpet sounds and the elements melt together with a fervent heat. This Earth and this universe are finite creations with a fixed expiration date, but the Salvation of the Lord is forever. Death has always been a part of the plan, but it is by no means the last part. It may be that within the next couple of decades the effects of climate change or a thermonuclear exchange or the eruption of the super volcano or the strike of a meteor or any or all of the plagues and disasters peppered through the Book of Revelations will descend upon us and utterly destroy life as we know it. Not to be flippant, but so what? We could witness the entire extinction of our species, but we could also have a much more immediate end to our world by getting hit by a bus, or succumbing to some terminal illness, or dying in a thousand other ways. Of course we should live life to the fullest and be wise and humble stewards of this precious gift that is planet Earth and do all that we can to multiply and replenish and preserve the best parts of it for ourselves and for our posterity. But this life, this Earth, this whole temporal universe is just one stop on our eternal journey. This Earth and this heavens will undoubtedly pass away, but the Salvation of the Lord will never pass away. Let us look to our future with a perfect brightness of hope and cheerfully do all that is in our power to beautify and sustain life in all of its forms for as long as we have breath and take comfort in the fact that as long or as short as that may be, our existence will continue long, long past the point when this universe has waxed old and vanished like smoke.