One of the most important things we can teach our children is that people will always let us down. I’ve tried all their lives to teach mine to have realistic expectations about human nature, others and their own. This way when people inevitably do let us down, we are less likely to react in anger or self-pity or revenge, in other words negatively. One of my favorite responses to stories of annoying people in the lives of our kids is a question: Why has God put that person in your life? To learn how to love them! That itself is an annoying truth because it implies that people are not in my life primarily to make me happy, or to make my life easy. No, like everything else in our Christian lives, God uses people for our growth and his glory, and often for their good as well.
If you are perchance a Beatles fan you will recognize the words “Don’t Let Me Down” as a John Lennon song from the Let it Be recordings. For some reason I haven’t been able to get the song out of my head for the last week or so, and I thought . . . there’s a blog post in there! Ergo, blog post. I can’t help but thinking that John is singing somewhat tongue in cheek because despite Yoko Ono’s influence, John was a realist. Unlike Paul who is a happy clappy kind of guy, John had a dark side, and he knew people always let you down. I think part of the song’s meaning is that he doesn’t like it one bit!
I always wonder about deep thinking people, like Lennon was, who try to put life together without reference to God, and especially God in Christ. The song’s lyrics reveal a tension in his mind that reflects his inability to put life’s contrasts and contradictions together, love and disappointment, fulfillment and despair. It’s ostensibly a love song, in a John Lennon kind of way, and it’s clearly about Yoko. She meant so much to his life, to his finding meaning in his melancholy hopelessness, that he couldn’t bear the thought of her letting him down. That’s a lot of weight to put on another human being, but apparently she could bear it; she never did let him down, until he left her, shot down by an assassin’s bullet at the too young age of 40.
She did let him down, of course, because she couldn’t address his most important need, reconciliation to his holy Creator God. She couldn’t save him from his sin or death, nor has she the power to resurrect him at the last day to eternal life in a new heavens and earth. We have to continually remind ourselves, and our children if we have them, that God’s promises are fundamentally eternal in nature. If you read through the Old Testament’s use of the word forever, many of it’s 289 uses refer to God’s kingdom and promises. We are meant to understand that the Bible doesn’t use the word hyperbolically, as in a really long time, but literally, as in for-ever, eternal, unending. How stupid, not to mention that it would be a lie, if the references to forever meant a long time until you die. No! If our hope isn’t eternal, it is worthless.
Practically what this means for us, and what we must continually impress upon our children, is that God’s promises are primarily eternal, not temporal. Our sinful, and understandable, tendency is to long for salvation from our circumstances. If only I had this spouse, or house, or friend, or car, or vacation, or money, then I’ll be happy and fulfilled. No you won’t. Happiness and fulfillment are as fleeting as are the passing days of our lives. That is why our hope is in the fact (of which there is an enormous amount of evidence) of Jesus of Nazareth having been resurrected from the dead. This prophecy, given by Isaiah given some 700 years before Jesus proved he was God on the first Easter morning, is our hope:
6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8 he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.
This mountain was that upon which Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead; he will never let us down.
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