Who Wants to Live Forever?

I was thinking of an interesting hypothetical proposition a few days ago. If someone had the power to guarantee that you would live to be exactly eighty years old and die on your birthday, would you take the deal or would you rather take your chances on living longer and not knowing exactly how long? Or the possibility that by not taking the deal you might die tomorrow? "Deal or no deal?" OK, what would it take, eighty two years, ninety years? "Deal or no deal?"

Now I know some are asking what kind of idiot sits around and thinks up stuff like this? Well, I suppose I can blame it on the fact that at the age of fifty five, I have just become the father of a beautiful little three year old daughter, who I would like to see grow up, graduate college, and become a mature, wise, happy wife and mother.

OK, back to the deal. There are no guarantees of good health in the deal, just that you will live as long as agreed upon. I am the substitute teacher of the Living Word Sunday School class in our church. The average age in the class is maybe around sixty five, and one thing that we all agree on is that we all want to live forever, but not in these tired ,old, worn out bodies. We don't want to keep trying to fix them up, prop them up, and patch them up, we need new bodies. When you're in your twenties you don't know this, our class does.

When Adam and Eve sinned, God had to put an angel guarding the way to the Tree of Life so that they were not able to continue to eat of the tree and live forever in their sad, sinful condition. Genesis 3:22-24. In the book of Revelation 22:14 in the end of time we see that God allows the redeemed to once again partake of the Tree of Life. In 1 Corinthians the fifteenth chapter, Paul summarizes the entire message of the Gospel, what Jesus Christ accomplished in His death and resurrection. I encourage you to read through the chapter a couple or three times this Easter Sunday.

In 1 Cor. 15: 50-54 Paul assures us of the answer to our dilemma. Yes we can live forever, but not in these old, sinful, painful bodies. "I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed_in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption. and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

We have this hope, only in Christ. What a wonderful faith we have been given by God's grace.

Happy Easter everbody!