Thread by @scottrswain

By divine design, our lives move forward not only in space but also in time.

Time is the divine calendar that measures our movements in mornings and evenings, days and weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries.

By divine design, time not only measures our movements.

Time also teaches us that our movements have a goal, a teleology, the eternal rest appointed for human beings at the foundation of the world (Gen 2:1-3).

The deep tragedy of life east of Eden is that, while time continues to measure our movements, it does not crown our purposes. We do not enter God's rest (Ps 95:11).

Time continues to measure our growth and our decline, our flourishing and our fading. And it marks our end: "We bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty" (Ps 90:9-10). This is our lot under God's providence.

But it is not our only lot.

In God's providence, the Son of God was born of a woman "at the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4). Because of his perfect obedience, and through death, he has entered into God's rest.

By faith in him, we may enter God's rest as well (Heb 4:9-10).

The end of 2020 marks a year of many losses and the end of many lives. We need not and should not ignore that in Pollyannaish fashion. Truly 2020 comes to "an end like a sigh."

But 2020, like all times before and since, also falls under the promise of Jesus Christ's coming, nativity, death, resurrection, enthronement, and second coming.

In Christ, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning & the end, time's arrow finds its target. In Christ, all losses give way to gains, all deaths to resurrections, all vanities to meaning and purpose. This, we trust, is true of 2020 as well. The Lord reigns.