To what lies ahead

I caught myself in a cultural blind spot today. Which is fun, actually. May the Lord always make of his Word an iconoclastic, misconception-busting, presupposition-rattling agent in my life.

The verse was this: "But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13,14).

I would have bet dollars to donuts that the words read "straining forward to the future." We moderns talk a lot about "the future," by which we vaguely mean that heady land of limitless possibility which we somehow own and engineer.

Paul's phrasing suggests a subtly different conception. There are things which "lay ahead" in my life. They are already marked out. "In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them" (Psalm 139:16).There will be tests to see if my faith is genuine (James 1:3). Expect these. God is rooting for me to pass these tests, so that I will become "perfect" (v.4), so that he can bless me (Matthew 25:21).

My impression from the Bible is that the future is good for two things and two only. The end-of-all-times Future, when Jesus returns and there is joy unending, is good for fantasizing on, to get a second wind. The shorter term future is good for making plans and setting goals --- as long as it is understood that the planning is an activity we do in the radical present, which is the only place we really ever move and live.