Unveiled Face

Unveiled Face has a great post about Ecclesiastes 12 and futility also citing Romans 8, and 1 Peter 1 he says:

Wow! Only in Christ can we see two amazing truths: (1) That God himself subjected all of creation to futility, and (2) that in Christ, this futility itself is redeemed – futility becomes hope, just as the pains of a woman giving birth are joyful pains of hope – so long as her focus is on the future!

These realities really have some incredible application to my life: how I wish I grasped this in my (earlier) youth! I have had so many times of frustration in my life, getting irritated that thigns were going wrong, that stuff broke, that I wasn’t achieving things that I planned – and all along it was not Murphy’s law but rather God’s intention that things will always go this way. And if we read on in the passage, we see that it’s God’s intention that we have faith in the unseen future with patience. Just realising that God has intentionally turned the world over to futility (initially in judgement) and that in Christ this is fully redeemed to the point that futility itself now has a purpose of hope – that realisation is totally empowering to my day-to-day life, and I think that it would be empowering to many more people if it were preached that way.