Coming Soon

My earliest memory in life is seeing Jack Nicholson play the Joker in the movie Batman from 1989.

I was 2. Probably shouldn’t have been there. I have this vague recollection of seeing the Joker, screaming, and hiding under my blanky.

Batman was huge back then. My brother and I had a big ole’ poster of the Dark Knight crashing through a skylight on the wall in our bedroom. We had all the action figures, the trading cards, the comics. When Michael Keaton played him again in 1992 in Batman Returns, we were there.

(I was 5—probably shouldn’t have been at that one, either.)

After that, Michael Keaton left, the role was recast, a new team of filmmakers put out a couple of awful Batman movies, and the franchise fizzled out.

But this year, on Super Bowl Sunday, something incredible happened. Warner Bros. released the first preview for their big, summer superhero flick, The Flash, and in that commercial, Michael Keaton smiled at the camera from behind a thick black mask and uttered two immortal words: “I’m Batman.” 31 years since we last saw him suit up, Batman, my Batman, will again take up his never-ending war on crime in Gotham City, and I (and my brother) will be there with popcorn to see every second of it. That commercial promised a new world that’s coming soon: a world with more Keaton Batman films.

We’re told that God has a future planned for his people and for this world. The book of Revelation calls it “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1), where

the dwelling place of God is with men. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” (Rev 21:3-5)

Now, on the first Easter, something truly incredible happened: when Mary met Jesus—alive again!—the world got a preview of all the things that God’s supposed to do one day. We got a glimpse of God’s future, in the present, right in the middle of life. The wondrous Easter miracle that we celebrate, Jesus’s resurrection, is really just a foretaste. It’s a sneak peek of what God has planned for the world and our lives one day, coming soon.

We hear that God’s supposed to wipe every tear from every eye. Well, he started with Mary’s tears that morning. She was weeping for her dead teacher, until he walked up to her and said, “Woman, why are you crying?” Christ wiped the tears from her eyes. And our turn’s coming. Mourning and crying and pain, we’re told, will be no more, just like they were banished from that garden on Easter morning.

We hear that death will be no more. A tomb, of all places, should be drenched with death. But on Easter morning, Jesus’s tomb was empty and blazing with life. Death was “no more” in there. And our turn is coming. One day, our graves will be empty, and our death-drenched world will be blazing with life and resurrection.

So Easter, as wondrous as it is, is only a preview of coming attractions. It promises a new world that’s coming soon: a world where we can see Jesus face-to-face, a world where death no longer stalks us and the people we love, a world where pain is a distant memory. Jesus’s resurrection foretells a world where all those old things have passed away, where God’s made all things new.

Listen to this week´s devotional here!