One of the most stunning concepts I encountered in 25 years of teaching the Bible to adults came during a class on the doctrine of creation.
“God creates from the future, not the past,” said Dr. Ted Peters, on a video produced for the long-term Bible study CHRISTIAN BELIEVER.* “Our world and everything in our world is future dependent….To be, to exist, is to have a future. To lose one’s future, to have only the past, is to die….God is right now continuing to bestow on us a future.”
A person faced with imminent death grasps this concept rapidly. The sudden cessation of the need to plan for tomorrow, or 90 days from tomorrow – a basic human function – packs a staggering wallop. What does “no future” mean? What sheared-off cliff lies ahead? And what’s at the bottom? Or top?
So much of our society’s struggle with the meaning of life is a struggle of the spirit, entwined with a desperate sense on the part of too many people that their future is bleak, hopeless – or nonexistent. The tragic rise in suicides and (seemingly) meaningless violent acts is symptomatic of this dark truth. The American Center for Suicide Prevention tells us that in 2014 an average of 121 Americans committed suicide every day, making suicide the nation’s tenth leading cause of death that year.
The God-given human tendency to look forward, however, is predicated on the fact that each human has a past. I may or may not be proud of all, or some parts of, my past. I may wish to obliterate my past, ignore or gloss over it, or celebrate it. But neither you nor I can escape the fact that — like it or not — what has happened in our own past and in the pasts of our forebears can and does shape, to an enormous (but not inevitable) extent, our present and future.
Like it or not, our past becomes a foundation for our future.
Both of my parents cultivated in me a deep appreciation of the past – the past as it relates to my faith, to my ethnicity and nationality, to my DNA and gifting, and to my family of origin. I didn’t always understand what I now see was my parents’ deliberate attempt to instill in my siblings and in me a deep “knowing” as to how the past could –and would — shape my future decisions and actions.
Without always realizing it, I replicated my parents’ intentional teaching with my own children. And now, as my grown sons and daughter raise their families, I see how vital a realistic knowledge of the failures and triumphs of the past can be. I get it: Such knowledge can strengthen, enlighten, undergird and enhance the lives of the next generation. The lack of such knowledge can stunt growth, diminish understanding, poison relationships, and wither hope.
It has always been, and continues to be, my passion to mentor men and women, boys and girls to recognize the importance of both their pasts and futures. Even more, I long for each of us to understand one of the most liberating truths of the Christian faith – that in Christ the Triune God not only redeems us from ourselves and our past, but also empowers us to choose to break cycles of inherited patterns and behavior, and to embrace a future of joyous hope – hope that extends to “a thousand generations.” (See Ex. 20:6; Ex. 34:7; and Deut.7:9.)
And that is the theme and mission of this website.
*Christian Believer: Knowing God with Heart and Mind, Video Segment #4, Dr. Ted Peters, Abingdon Press, Nashville, c. 2005.
