Quotes about Future

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It isn't a matter of doing things to earn God's favor. It is not about trying to obey dusty rulebooks from long ago or far away. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world.

Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of G-D as the waters cover the sea. That remains a surprising hope, and perhaps it will be the artists who are best at conveying both the hope and the surprise.

If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present.

What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

What matters is eschatological duality (the present age and the age to come), not ontological dualism (an evil "earth" and a good "heaven").

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

Our confidence in the future restorative justice of God may even give us confidence to do justice ourselves in the present. We are called then, to stretch out the arms of our minds and hearts and to find ourselves Christ shaped, cross shaped, at the intersection of the past present and future of God's time and our own time. This is a place of intense pain and intense joy, the sort that perhaps only music or poetry can express or embody.

That vision of the future—an ultimate glory that has left behind the present world of space, time, and matter—sets the context for what, as we shall see, is a basically paganized vision of how one might attain such a future: a transaction in which God's wrath was poured out against his son rather than against sinful humans.