The new life that really matters

The recent birth of the writer’s delightful little grandson, safe and sound, and full of all the reassuring signs and sounds of new life, has been a welcome outcome to a much-loved daughter’s extended pregnancy and long-drawn-out labour. But though the delivery was painful and protracted, the young new mother is happy almost beyond words with her firstborn son, and she has experienced for herself the miracle of human birth.

Meanwhile, the rest of the natural world has burst into life again, as the much-needed rain and the growing warmth of the spring sunshine have combined to fill the gardens, the fields, and the trees with greenery and with all the tell-tale signs of future fruitfulness.

New life is all around us; and those of us who confidently believe that this is all the handiwork of God have every reason to give thanks to our Maker. For, as the Bible tells us, it is God who gives us "rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14:17).

And yet the God who brings new babies into the world, so full of life, and who ensures unfailingly that we are able to enjoy the return of each new season, has a much higher purpose with His world than simply the continuation of the life of mankind and of nature. For He tells us, in no uncertain terms, that He is bringing His creation slowly but surely towards the time when "all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord" (Numbers 14:21).

Like the parents and grandparents of each newborn child, the angels who appeared 2,000 years ago to the shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem rejoiced together when God’s own Son Jesus was born safely into the world. But that new baby was no ‘ordinary’ child, for in him was contained the seeds of the new life that really matters. As the apostle John later explained, his gospel (or ‘good news’) about this firstborn Son of God was written for us, in order that we might believe in Jesus, "and that believing, [we] might have life through his name" (John 20:31).

And the ‘life’ that John was talking about – the life that God offers us through belief in Jesus – is not the mortal, finite, life that we now experience, with all its mixture of joys and sorrows. Instead, the Son of God whom John knew personally and loved brought into the world a new life of a completely different kind – the eternal life that Jesus himself now enjoys in the presence of his Father. "For this is life eternal", said Jesus himself, "that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent" (John 17:3).

Those who are "in Christ" (through belief and baptism into his saving Name) can enjoy not only the experience of living now in their Lord’s daily presence, but also the certain anticipation of a much better life still to come, beyond all the labour and pain of mortality. And, when this ‘pregnant’ world has come to the end of its long ages of gestation, those who "are Christ’s at his coming" (1 Corinthians 15:23), will be part of a completely new creation, which will live in perfection in the everlasting Kingdom of God. For, just like the mother straining to deliver her perfect new baby through the searing pain of childbirth, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together"; but the time will soon come when the entire world is "delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21-22).

And then the world will see and enjoy the new life that really matters…