“Jesus answered him, ‘I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.'” Luke 23:43
My friend Debbie, a polio quadriplegic, recently died and went to be with the Lord. I said to a woman in church, “Just think, she’s free of her paralysis and pain!” The woman shook her head “no” and reminded me that Debbie is “asleep” and won’t join the Lord until the dead are resurrected.
That woman’s frame of reference is limited. We operate within the confines of time and space in this world, but God exists outside of time. It’s mind-boggling to think that He lives as the great “I Am,” always in the present tense, always observing the past and present now. We hear Him laugh at the confines of time when He shares His frame of reference: “A day, to the Lord, is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.”
Probably that’s why the Lord Jesus could say to the thief on his dying day, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Debbie is asleep in the Lord. But she doesn’t know that. Debbie, along with the thief on the cross, is today with the Lord in paradise. A twinkling of an eye, for her, has already passed. Time, for Debbie, is removed. When she and King David, Adam and Eve, you and I (if we die before He comes), awake from our sleep, we will all think that only a flash of a moment has passed.
It takes faith to have this heavenly perspective. Faith that is the substance of things hoped for. Faith removes all intervening time. Exercise this kind of faith the next time a believing friend dies and goes to be with the Lord.
Lord of time and space, give me Your heavenly perspective.
