Saturday morning and this Monday morning found me jetting off down the road on impromptu errands by myself. I am learning to make the most of these unlooked-for opportunities, so I remembered to grab the Chris Tomlin CD to which I'd treated myself for Christmas.
Rolling along to the cranked up, multi-lingual version of How Great is Our God, I find I need to keep a weather eye on my speedometer. All the kinks and knots break loose in me, while I listen to beautiful, strong voices praise God. I sing along on the Russian and the Spanish solos, and can recognize when the Portuguese and the Swahili come in. Belting out phrases here and there in accompaniment of the real singers is absolute enjoyment. But most of that enjoyment is in just feeling the anointing washing over my life at the moment. At the end of the song, a Chinese singer intones the verse that opened the song, but in his native Mandarin, not English. I haven't any knowledge of Chinese, but by then it matters not that I can't understand his words: I know what he is saying. Glory fills my soul, and I am just waiting for the clouds to part.
It strikes me every time I play the song, that when all we who are His get to heaven, it will be a gathering of all languages, colors, sizes and shapes, as God puts humanity back together in obedience and worship. I know that many who refuse to come to Christ believe that they are being required to conform to a cookie-cutter pattern that will strip away their individuality, but this is nonsense. That is in fact what the world's rulers are currently doing, with their campaigns to equalize all aspects of the human condition (through centrally-standardized health practices, birthrates and deathrates, educational curriculum, revisionist history, and political correctness that stifles the free expression of thought).
God, who created a nature of such incredible variety, also cherishes the variety in man, and humanity in heaven will be a crazy quilt that testifies to God's diverse creativity.
Sometimes I go all the way back to Babel, where men disobeyed God yet again, deciding to hang together and build a city as a monument to themselves. Poor fools, we didn't imagine that this would have crippled the development of our potential and of our purpose on the earth as rulers and stewards. So, shazam! our language was broken up into families, and people were forced to seek out and stick to those whom they could comprehend. Now we were forced to spread out, stake territories, learn to live from the nature we settled. Soon we had disparate ethnicities and cultures. And although this did not need to follow, there came in fears and antagonisms between people groups. And God needed one man to start the process of putting the world's peoples back together to form One People, His People, an obedient People, and He chose Abraham.
Abraham's supreme descendant, Jesus the Christ, went to the cross of Calvary to shed His blood for the sins of the whole world, past, contemporary, and future. Then He rose from the grave, and before ascending to heaven to sit down at the right hand of the Father, He commissioned the believers to go everywhere, preaching the gospel to the ends of the earth. What was this assignment, but completing the work that had begun in Abraham, who was justified by his faith, in God's sight.
Across centuries, millenia in fact, the gospel of Jesus has been translated into hundreds of languages. The good news of God's love and of His quest to bring home all He has foreknown, unites people of every land in the language of praise. No matter the syllables and sounds or the syntax, it is "How Great is our God!" I get a tiny glimpse of heaven in that song, of every language exulting in the glory and the goodness of God, and finally all being able to understand one another.
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