Every Tear Will Be Unshed

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Oft uttered as the living accompany the dead to their place of rest, scripture’s final prophet promises with his penultimate vision that one day— on the last day— “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

“Mourning and crying and pain,” John the Seer says, “they will be no more.”

But the dead do not cry.

And the saints sing the sanctus; they do not weep.

So whose eyes will the Lord turn from tears to joy?

Whose cries will the Lord transfigure into laughter?

Crucially—

This is not simply a promise of what God will work in the future. This is a promise of what God will work from the future.

Last week, I wrote an essay reexamining how predestination is not the dread doctrine caricatures of Calvin have made it (You can find it HERE). Quite the opposite, in shifting the doctrine of predestination to the third article of the creed, to what Protestant theologians termed the work of the Spirit, the Reformers made clear that the doctrine of predestination is simply the doctrine of justification conjugated in the active voice.1 Thus, predestination discourse is fundamentally just assertion of the gospel’s character as pure and unconditional promise and, as such, functions chiefly as a homiletical rule for those who speak gospel.

This relocation of the doctrine from the dogma’s first article to its third does not remove all the moral quandaries predestination provokes. As I wrote in a separate piece, the love God announces in the gospeling act is unconditional; therefore, the will of God is absolute, encompassing not only the event of the gospel but all acts. If God is determined to justify all apart from works, then God determines all acts.

It is a strict corollary to the Reformation doctrine of justification:All things happen by God’s will.

Whatever God wills must indeed happen, as the medieval theologians put it succinctly, and exactly as God wills it. Thus, if God wills some things to happen as acts of human choice, then they will happen and happen in no other way but this way. Needless to say, if every happening happens by God’s will, then the will of God soon appears morally suspect to us— and does so on Christian grounds. Indeed two wills of God seem to emerge before us, the will announced in the gospel as unconditional love and the will displayed by history as ambiguous at best. History is red in tooth and claw and suggests straightforwardly that, as Robert Farrar Capon admits in the Third Peacock, “If we are facing facts, God has dangerously odd tastes: He is inordinately fond of risk and roughhouse.”

As announced in the gospel, the will of God is absolute because it is immutably determined as love.

As seen in history, the will of God is absolute in that it is altogether undetermined— whatever happens, happens as the happening of God.

According to Robert Jenson, the synthesis of these two determinations brings us to the Spirit: “a determinate reality that just by the actual character of its particular determination is utterly free.” The Holy Spirit, so says the Nicene Creed, “spoke to us by the prophets.” But when the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah or Amos, it did not arrive to them as a series of sentences. The Lord Jesus is the Word who came to the prophets and thus did so from the future. That the Holy Spirit spoke to us by the prophets is but an indiction that what makes this spirit holy is that is the Spirit of Jesus.

Just so—

The Holy Spirit is the Power of the Future.

The Holy Spirit is futurity.

This is why “life everlasting” belongs to the third article. The Holy Spirit is the freedom of of Jesus’s future to transform and renew all previous events whatever.

That is—

The Holy Spirit is the freedom of of Jesus’s future to work backwards, transfiguring all of time such that every tear will be un-shed and every mournful groan un-cried.

Language fails here. Though it is inconceivable, it’s nonetheless the promise.

One day all sad things will come untrue.

The promise with which John the Revelator concludes scripture is that the Holy Spirit will heal your whole timeline, mend everything that is broken, every wrong you’ve wreaked, every sin you’ve suffered— without undoing you, all of it will be undone. Redemption will happen not just to dead bodies but to all things, not just in the future but backwards, to all of time— all of time will be transfigured so that all sad things will come untrue. The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. '“The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken,” Robert Capon writes, “it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified.”

Short of the End, we cannot conceive how the children Russia has stolen from Ukrainian mothers can fit into the will of Jesus’s Father. But, Robert Jenson contends, “we can conceive— in hope against hope— that triune structure of God’s reality by which this unimaginable transformation will be accomplished.”

God alone ordains your salvation is a necessary form of the gospel.

God alone ordains all is its correlative.

About the troublesome implications these two axioms call up, Jenson writes:

“Rightly understood as pneumatological statements, these are assurances and solicitations from the last future, promises of the encompassing sovereignty of the transformation to come: The winds that sweep through history and your life are but eddies and currents of the breath of new creation.”

Right now, in the present, the Holy Spirit is at work from the future to transfigure the past.

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1

The passive voice: You are justified by God (in Christ, by grace, through faith alone). The active voice: God alone justifies you (in Christ, by grace, through faith).