Depth, Height, and Perspective

To discover, in many ways, is first to rediscover. Visioning the future requires being fully aware of the past. Redemptive change, so much needed in this world, must be rooted in the things that remain--that have stood the tests of time and human history. Christians are not spiritual orphans, devoid of memory. They are children of an eternal Father whose mighty acts in history are the sum and substance of their being. Every incentive we may propose to move us forward must be rooted in perspectives beyond our own.

Samuel H. Miller puts it well: "To lose the Bible is to lose more than a book; it is to lose the order of magnitude in which our lives grow to greatness. To lose a tradition is to lose more than a tradition; it is to lose depth, in which we may be strongly held against the storms of the present. To lose the myths and symbols which seem so inexplicable in contemporary terms is to lose more that stories and things; it is to lose a wisdom we are incapable of articulating without the assistance of ancient strugglers with realities greater than words and mightier than reason.

"It were well," Miller concludes, "if we spent one-tenth the time and attention we give to the flotsam and jetsam of the daily paper on the profoundly rich wisdom of the past.... The present, after all, can scarcely be understood in terms of itself" (The Great Realities, Harper, 1955, pp. 18-19).

Surely we cannot live in the past. Nor need we. But to cut ourselves off from it in the present, especially in moving toward the future, is unimaginably short-sighted, not to mention prideful. The Pentecost first promised in Joel, chapter 2, when "your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams" was fulfilled when the Spirit of the risen Christ descended on the earliest Christians (Acts 2). And we should not forget that it happened when they "they devoted themselves to the apsotles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42).

To move toward the heights we all long to see and achieve, we must learn again to live in the depths with God and his word, where eternal perspectives abound.