As Good As It Gets

As Good as It Gets

Recently, I saw this sobering bit of graffiti: “This is as good as it gets.”

The corresponding spray-painted artwork depicted a somber-looking male face. The image was hard to decipher, but the message wasn’t. Even though I know better, the words made me sad. Not that they might be true, but that someone might think so.

Because it’s going to get a lot better than this.

I’m not sure what your circumstances might be. Maybe sickness or death or unemployment or bankruptcy or a broken marriage or a wayward child or something I can’t imagine consumes your every waking thought. And maybe it’s tempting to believe that nothing will ever change. Maybe the voice of the enemy is whispering despair in your ear and telling you that tomorrow will bring more of the same.

But that voice is lying.

Nearly two thousand years ago a band of followers of a Nazarene teacher came to see him for who he was: God in flesh. He lived and died before their eyes, and then—for forty days more—he kept showing up, raised and somehow blazingly new, even with his scars. “Wait in Jerusalem,” he told them, “for the gift that was promised to you” (see Acts 1:4). Some of them were probably so confused and frightened that they just wanted to go home to business as usual. Others were itching for a political coup, and still others, for a prominent place in a new movement. No doubt some believed, “This is as good as it gets.”

It wasn’t.

The one who died for them intended to keep on living for and through them. But first, he needed to fill their tiny waiting room with a hurricane of power and gift them with his permanent presence. But even that was nowhere near as good as it will get.

One day, he will defeat his archenemy once and for all, administer justice, and reign forever. He will undo the curse, reward his servants, and usher in a new heaven and a new earth. His rightful Kingdom will have no end.

That, my graffiti-splashing doomsayer, will truly be as good as it gets. Forever.

No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined anything quite like it—what God has arranged for those who love him.

1 Corinthians 2:9, MSG