We live in a world of change and decay. Almost nothing remains constant. A glance at a 30-year old picture of someone shows how much change can occur in such a short time. The neighborhood in which you grew up no longer exists if you are past 60 years old, or perhaps even much younger than that. The creek where a man swam and fished as a boy is now only a shallow trickle of pollution. The farm of hay fields, pastures, and wood lots is now a subdivision of houses and condominiums on tiny plots of grass intersected by asphalt roads and parking lots. Our physical environment indeed changes greatly within just a few years!
Our world of ideas, thoughts, and interests also undergoes sweeping changes, sometimes with far greater rapidity than that of material things. Did you ever read a newspaper or magazine that was several years old? How strange, and sometimes how funny, the things of current interest then seem now. But at that time they were by no means strange or funny. A book that is ten or twelve years old is usually irrelevant today. No one would want to entrust his health to a doctor whose training does not extend this side of 1990, or even 2000. We want to speed forward in all things with the cutting edge of progress in knowledge, science, and technology.
At the same time that we anxiously anticipate these changes and in so many ways reap great benefits from them, there is also something unsettling and foreboding about them. We wonder if the conversion of arm land to building developments will someday diminish the food supply and irreparably upset the balance of nature. Who is pleased when he sees graying hair, wrinkling skin, and sagging shape when he looks in a mirror? How does the author feel whose books are out of print, no longer read, and now forgotten? What about the person in a profession who must interrupt his career with a year's sabbatical to retain so that he can come back and continue his work more effectively? Although we usually welcome change and enjoy benefits from it, there comes with it an ambivalence that takes its toll on our psychological constitution. At the same time we wish for change, we also want something unchangeable, something permanent. Things which endure serve as reference points in the swirling change to give us an orientation in life that is comforting, stabilizing, and very meaningful.
There is very little in the category of the immutable in the world, but the statement in Mrk. 13:31 reveals one of those few. And no little or insignificant thing it is! It is the sum total of what Jesus said while he preached and taught here on the human plane. His words are called the WORD OF GOD, the PERFECT LAW OF LIBERTY, and the GOSPEL. They may even be called the INCORRUPTIBLE SEED by which human lives may be "born again," (I Pet. 1:23). This body of language has been in the world now for almost two thousand years; and if the world endures another two millennia, it will still be here as "the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes," (Rom. 1:16). Nineteen centuries ago it was being preached in Greek, and those who received it in faith and obeyed it were saved by it. Nine centuries ago it was preached in Latin, and those who submitted their lives to its guidance were led by it into the waiting arms of Jesus at death. In the present century it is being preached in English to those who will be converted into saints of God by its power. And if the world survives another ten centuries, in the year 3015 the words of Jesus in some new language will still be heard on this earth and will still lead receptive souls to eternal salvation. Finally, when the universe is "rolled up like a robe," (Heb. 1:12), and consigned to eternal oblivion, only the words of Jesus will continue into eternity to preserve in perfect peace and joy those who now conform their lives to its holy principles.
