“You can look, but don’t touch.”
Do you remember your mother’s admonition? She dared to take you with her to shop in a store FULL of wonders! Sparkly, fragile, pretty things all within reach! But, she warned you, “Don’t touch.”
“But—I WANT to!” To TOUCH was to say “This is MINE!”
“No-NO. Keep your hands in your pockets. Do NOT touch!” It might have been easier for her to say “Do NOT breathe.”
When you’re young, your sense of touch is so much more informative than your sense of sight alone. In the earliest stages of learning, a baby automatically reaches for things to put them straight into their mouth—their most reliable form of sensory investigation. It takes years before the sense of touch concedes that sight is sufficient to OBSERVE something fully.
Let’s go back—to Eden. The site of the first no-no. The first “DON’T TOUCH” zone. God put Adam in the middle of a beautiful place full of growing things and commanded him to cultivate, care for, and TOUCH everything. Think of it: Adam was tasked with cultivating the Tree of LIFE! It was his job.
God had not said, “Don’t TOUCH the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” He merely said “Don’t put it into your mouth.” But Adam and Eve, like little kids, disobeyed. It’s not that they COULDN’T resist, but they DIDN’T. Proving that even in a perfect world, yielding to temptation is so easy, but it can ruin everything.
“Therefore he drove the man out, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turned in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:24)
In other words, “NO trespassing. You can’t come back here. No-no.”
We may look at our past that way—a glorious garden of delights where all our needs were met and all our wants were ours to enjoy. “Everything back THERE was perfect. I want to go back THERE!” But, if the laws of time and space were relaxed for a moment—enabling us to retreat back to a place that we recall as being “perfect,” we’d find what Adam and Eve found. An angel with a flaming sword—“NO Trespassing.” Time only marches ONE way. We can never go back to Eden. Our past has passed.
Years ago, Pastor Robert Sabin preached a message about the dangers of “comparing the present evil with the past good.” It’s a big no-no. The comparison is not a fair one when we’re forgetting some things and ignoring others. Our imperfect memory and imagination continually paint the past with exaggerated colors like an enhanced photograph. Pretty, but not TRUTH. The “past GOOD” wasn’t ALL THAT good, and the “present EVIL” isn’t ALL bad.
Rather, it is wisdom, if we want to compare at all, to compare the past good with the PRESENT good—and the past evil with the PRESENT evil. Better still, we don’t need to borrow anything from the future or past to make our present perfect. Every chapter of life has its own highs AND lows, mountains and valleys, and both are needed to complete the ideal landscape for today.
On the other hand, sometimes we are prevented from moving FORWARD. At Mount Sinai, God told Moses, “You alone can proceed up the mountain of God, but not the people. Tell them, ‘DON’T TOUCH the mountain.’”
“Thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death.” (Exodus 19:12 KJV) The children of Israel had trudged so far through the desert only to find their path blocked. God had posted the mountain. “Private property—access restricted under penalty of death.”
Likewise, God has put up a fence between us and the mountain of OUR future. We cannot even put a toe over the line. We can plan for the future, prepare and anticipate it, but we cannot KNOW it for certain. No way. The WORD gives us clues, but even our sure hope of Heaven is shrouded in mystery. We will KNOW about tomorrow—tomorrow—and not before. People try to cross the line through the use of horoscopes, occultism and other devilish means, but those practices are sins with a death sentence. Not even predicting the LORD’s second coming is permissible. The future—like the past—is beyond the fence. NO TRESPASSING.
So, we are perpetually stuck between fences—in that tiny unstable space called NOW. We long to break free to relive the past and to know the future, but alas, we cannot. We’re locked by time.
What IS IT that we’re really longing for anyway? It’s that indescribable ache for something we’ve only seen glimpses of and felt for a fleeting moment. We’ve sensed it in the radiant colors of a glorious sunset—or the heartbreaking strains of music too beautiful for words. It’s the inexpressible something that fills our heart with love and joy but vanishes before we can identify it. We see the glow of it on the horizon and we try to reach for it through the fence, but we’re barred from getting any closer. We cannot touch it—we cannot claim it for ourselves.
C.S. Lewis talked about this continual longing for something beyond our grasp. He wrote, “Apparently, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. To be at last summoned inside (will) be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.” —The Weight of Glory.
So that’s it. What we long for … is the Glory of God! To not just be a spectator—not to claim it for ourselves, but to become a participant with Him IN it! In the GLORY of His Presence!
Lewis further defines it this way: “For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things …” The Apostle Paul described it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV)
That will be the moment we’ve been longing for. There will be no more pining for what is past or yet to come. Rather our faith and lifelong hope will become sight, in the eternal NOW, and we will have full and forever access to the GLORY of God! No more fences—no more barriers. When “the door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”
THAT, indeed, will be HEAVEN … and it will be HOME.
