Imagine a world with no sickness. Nobody gets the flu. Nobody gets cancer. No more loneliness. No more broken hearts.
“Death will be no more,” according to Revelation 21:4: “mourning and crying and pain” will not exist. No more car accidents. No more late-night phone calls with bad news. No child will ever have to bury their parent, and no parent will ever again have to bury their child.
I boarded a subway once and sat near a man holding a large Bible. He was dressed in leather and grinning from ear to ear. I learned over and asked him, “Have you read that book?” He looked at me and grinned and said, “Not all of it, but I took a look at the ending and…I like how it all turns out.”
There is a lot we don’t know about the future, but we do know this: In the future kingdom of God, we will be perfect people, living in a perfect world. When God’s rule has finally become complete, we will find our happy ending – and it will never end.
This message is excerpted from the Bible study “The kingdom of God: Looking into the future” by Mark Allan Powell in the March/April 2022 Gather magazine. Today is the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
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