Reflections on the Resurrection, Part 3: Ancestors and Generations Gathered in One Place at One Time

On the day when all are raised from the dead, every generation that has ever lived will be simultaneously present. Every single person back to our First Parents. This means that every age will be represented, and not only every age, but every iteration of culture and ethnicity–including every extinct and forgotten tribe–will be alive again, present and transparent before the Lord, from whom all tribes and fatherhood will have come. You will meet your great great grandfather and the king he lived under.

 

This reality alone will reveal many secrets and mysteries. Forgotten stories and unexplained riddles of family lines and the histories of whole people groups will be conclusively revealed before the eyes of all. Who came from whom. Who fathered whom. Who made which fateful or blessed decision that set the course of descendants. The dark and forgotten past that shrouds the vast majority of people’s understandings of their context will be fully discovered. The myths and false narratives will evaporate. We will all learn the full story of ourselves and our ancestors, for we shall see them all at once and in one place.

 

Men, women, and children will behold one another. Those who had lived side by side and those we had only heard about or read about. Those known to us only in the form of a tale or two. Time and death will be removed, and all of us will stand as a gathering of Adam’s race before the one who created us with the intent that He would dwell with us and us with Him.  The Lord will assess and render final decisions, judging in us and among us that thing that had interposed through our choices and our ignorance to separate us from Him–namely, sin. The mystery of evil will be removed, as will the implementer of evil, Satan, the father of lies, who fathered no one but polluted the line of God’s image bearers, the human race. All that had blocked love and fellowship will be removed. And the father of all fatherhood, the originator who thought of, who conceived of each nationality and tribe and tongue, will be fully present with us, and we will be fully present with Him. And the books will be opened of not only individual histories, but the histories of families, of communities, of nations, and of generations. And on that day there will be reward and loss of reward; justice and mercy; doom and destiny; comfort and consternation. All will be assessed with both clarity and compassion on that day in the presence of all and in the presence of the one who had actually been with us when it had happened, though our eyes may have been closed to it at the time: Jesus, the Son of God suffering, serving, interceding, and anticipating the day when He would see us face to face.

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