Can’t We Skip to the End?
A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with a person from our church. We eventually got onto the topic of movies and he started talking about some of his least favourites. To my dismay, he mentioned The Lord of the Rings. I had to stop him because that is my favourite trilogy of all time!
As we kept talking, we got to the root of his issue - these movies are way too long. This is something I’ve heard from many people over the years. They say the movies are boring, drawn out, and overdone. As someone who can’t wait for the next opportunity to do a Lord of the Rings extended edition marathon, I don’t understand where these people are coming from.
Yes, The Lord of the Rings movies are each over three hours long, but the story is so grand that the time seems to fly by. My friend didn’t think so. At one point he said that he would rather skip to the end of the movies to find out what happens - to the scene where the hobbit Frodo throws the ring of power into the fire of Mount Doom to destroy the evil forces of Middle Earth (spoiler alert!).
Although this is Tolkien blasphemy, what he said really made me think. How many times have I wished we could skip to the end of things in real life? Not out of boredom, but because life can sometimes be difficult and painful. If only we could skip past the awkward moments, the hurt and heartbreak, and the loss and suffering in order to experience resolution, beauty, and joy.
This sentiment was shared by the people we read about in the Bible. In fact, the author of Psalm 13 calls on God, asking God to deliver him from his enemies. If only God would show up. If only they could skip ahead past their time of trouble to get to the part where God rescues them.
Psalm 13:1-2
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal fast-forward button so we can jump ahead to the good parts? And wouldn’t it be great if we could have one on a cosmic scale? Why does our world have to endure so much suffering and pain? Why is there so much meaningless destruction? News of natural disasters, wars, political divisions, poverty, pandemics, and the like, never stop.
By “the end,” I mean the end that Christianity teaches and has hoped for since the beginning - that God isn’t finished with creation and will bring restoration to all that has gone wrong. Jesus will return to complete the project of manifesting the Kingdom of God so that all who choose to belong to it can be fully resurrected into new life. This is God’s gift to the world.
Regardless of how things are going in the world or in our personal lives, the Bible gives away the ending. Jesus will return. God will bring justice. Evil will be defeated for good. Full restoration and reconciliation will come. Those who are found in Christ will be raised to eternal life. Love will prevail because in the end, God wins!
So what is God waiting for? Can’t we get to the good part already? How many more people need to experience sickness, poverty, war, hunger, slavery, abuse, broken relationships, loneliness, and death? Unfortunately these kinds of questions don’t have easy answers. They remain outside of the scope of our human understanding - just one example of our finiteness before an infinite God.
We don’t fully understand why God created the world within the bounds of time. God’s own timing and the reasons behind events continue to be a mystery to us. But what we do know is that things are not the way they are meant to be. There’s a deep longing within creation for wholeness and fulfilment. As Paul describes in Romans 9:22-23:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.
The only one who can fix this world is God. That’s the good news that Jesus came to bring 2,000 years ago. God’s plan of redemption, which was set into motion since the beginning, was taking new shape through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Regardless of how badly we mess things up by walking away from God, God never stops actively working towards a good end.
But until we reach that end, we’re stuck living in the story. As much as we might want to, we can’t skip to the end. We all learn this at some point, as Frodo also did in The Lord of the Rings. In a moment of fear, Frodo expresses to Gandalf (the wizard) that he wished the ring of power never came to him and that all the hardship they were going through never happened. Gandalf replies to Frodo that some things are not for us to decide. “All we have to decide,” says Gandalf, “is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Even if we could fast-forward to the end in real life, in doing so we would miss out on everything that happens in-between. Yes, we could skip the hard parts, but we would also miss the joy of new beginnings, the excitement of renewed hearts, the wisdom of learning difficult life-lessons, and the warmth of love lived out. We would miss the beauty of human experience, including our encounters with God. God is known and made known in the stories of our lives, but by skipping to the end we would miss the very story itself.
We would do well to heed the advice of Gandalf and make the most of the time that we have. How can we live out our faith and calling in the moments we are in? Yes, that means we have to endure the messy and hard parts, but as we live into those experiences, we also deepen our longing for something better. It’s this longing that has the potential to draw us closer to God - the only one who stands outside of time and the only one who can actually bring about a good end.