An Open-ended Closure

The year of 2014 is quickly coming to an end. That crunch time – last minute papers, projects making up a precious fifty percent of your grade, exams over the last hefty chapters, the colossal studying for those comprehensive finals – has just passed (for some, soon-to-be over)! It’s time to take a deep breath and consider in retrospect what this year truly means to us.

Sitting in my chair right now, it’s rather easy to casually say, “Ah, another year has flown by.” But really, here are some major events that happened and/or are currently happening in 2014: the Ukraine/Crimean crisis, disastrous incidents of major passenger carriers, heightened terrorist activities, epidemic virus outbreak, and I recently learned that a spacecraft landed on a comet in November.

Yet, I am still here – sitting in my chair, recognizing that throughout the year the world has been screaming accolades and chaos, well, mainly chaos. In our youth, we may not have felt that sense of urgency or emergency as much. Imagine sitting in that famous “situation room”: the weight of war is on your shoulders and tragedy surrounds you. Or, imagine you were the breadwinner of a family of four and you just lost both your job and savings. What kind of epiphany would save us at the end of our rope?

The natural human impulse is to try and fix the world around us—a handful of good-hearteds responding with zeal for a good cause. And yet people have been trying to fix the world for as long as the world has been, with little result. What should be our response?

Sometimes, a change of perspective is all it takes to stave off despair. The eyes of faith see, that despite the chaos around us, Jesus is still Lord. Peter triumphantly proclaimed in his day, “this One is Lord of all” (Acts 10:36).

Our Lord Jesus is not only the historic Christ, He is living now in resurrection and ascension interceding for us and administrating the universe. In ascension, He was crowned with glory and honor (Heb. 2:9) and was inaugurated to head up all things, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth (Eph. 1:10). In Revelation 19:16, He is called the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Behind the chaotic scene, there is a divine order. Ephesians 1:9-10 show that this heading up in Christ is unto the arrangement (or, can also be literally translated economy) of the fullness of the times. It’s all working out to come to a closure. Christ is in charge.

Then what’s so open-ended about it?

Ephesians 1:27 states that God subjected all things under His feet and gave Him to be Head over all things to the church, which is His Body. To the church is an important phrase. On one hand, Christ is the holding power of the entire universe and the sole Administrator on the throne. On the other hand, we as part of the church must also join our Head by praying “Your name be sanctified; Your kingdom come; Your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth.”

The Lord Jesus needs our cooperation to bring a proper closure to this age. It is not a matter of whether this age will end or not, it is a matter of when. This whole universe is yearning for Christ to return, to bring in the true restoration by establishing His kingdom in full.

What an epic responsibility on our part, yet the application is profoundly simple. At the brink of another new year, let us turn to Him and pray:

Thank you, Lord. We thank you for who You are to us. Marvelous things You have done for us in 2014. Now save us from just dwelling in our paneled houses while Your house lies in ruins. Lord, cause us to consider our ways. Cause us to not only care for ourselves but for You and for Your coming.

By: K. Limanjaya