save the best for last

I like to save the best for last. I eat my pizza crust-first because the crust is my least favorite part, and I want to get it out of the way. I like going to work early in the morning so that I can leave work early in the day. I loved my mom's chicken pot pie, but I didn't like the lima beans in it, so the beans were the first things I would pick out to eat (okay, not so much eat as swallow whole). You know those shirts that people wear--"Life is uncertain: eat dessert first"--I totally disagree. Who could be happy eating cake when you know that the lima beans are waiting?

I think that eating your lima beans first is pretty good theology. I don't want my best life now. I don't want to eat my dessert first. There are millions of people who are having the best the world has to offer--and they will spend all of eternity suffering the divine judgment. The whole Bible is showing a story that will end in the restoration and glorification of this fallen world. It's the ultimate happy ending, the ultimate best being brought out at the last. In this world you will have lima beans (or long hours and short weekends or rebellious kids or tumors or torture or death)--be of good cheer. He is infinitely greater than those things, and He is your infinitely great reward--your best for last.

Let the aim of believers in judging mortal life, then, be that while they understand it to be of itself nothing but misery, they may with greater eagerness and dispatch betake themselves wholly to meditate upon that eternal life to come. When it comes to a comparison with the life to come, the present life can not only be safely neglected but, compared to the former, must be utterly despised and loathed.

Let us, however, consider this settled: that no one has made in the progress in the school of Christ who does not joyfully await the day of death and final resurrection. Paul, too, distinguishes all believers by this mark, and Scripture habitually recalls us to it whenever it would set forth proof of perfect happiness. "Rejoice," says the Lord, "and raise your heads; for your redemption is drawing near." [Luke 21:28] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill, p. 716, 718