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Sunday, dri­ving down through the wilds of rural South Carolina, we crested a hill and real­ized that in advance of the front edge of a storm sys­tem, wide beams of light were break­ing through the light cloud cover, reach­ing down to touch each hill­top. I wish I had a picture–it was an incred­i­ble sight, but I was dri­ving, try­ing to make up the time after get­ting lost, and couldn’t get out my camera.

Such beams of sun­light are noth­ing more than that–bright light catch­ing the dust or wisps of cloud in the air and light­ing them up, much like a flashlight’s beam can be seen in a dusty room. Artists (par­tic­u­larly in com­puter graph­ics) call such beams of light “god-beams”, since peo­ple are fas­ci­nated with such ethe­real phenomena–they appear to reach from heaven to earth and look so real, yet are intan­gi­ble and hard to cap­ture on film. The incred­i­ble sight that after­noon put me in mind of a few things appro­pri­ate to the Sabbath we were trav­el­ing through–the incred­i­ble beauty of even a bro­ken world, and what Christ’s return may hold.

I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by hymns such as It Is Well With My Soul that speak to what our Savior and King’s tri­umphant return may look like (lyrics quoted below from Cyberhymnal):

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Such incred­i­ble, spine-tingling sights such as a bril­liant patch of sun­beams break­ing through the clouds from an unimag­in­able bright­ness make me think about what that day may look like. The Lord gives little-to-few details, but what he does men­tion hint at a pretty spec­tac­u­lar event. From 1 Thessalonians 4, 16–18 (ESV):

For the Lord him­self will descend from heaven with a cry of com­mand, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trum­pet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encour­age one another with these words.

Or Isaiah 34:4, also from the ESV:

All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree.

Whenever I see sun­beams like that, I think of His return. It may be just be the poet in me, but I imag­ine a clear sky, bluest of blues, cloudless…when sud­denly like the sun break­ing through the clouds, the true light of heaven breaks through into our world, out-shining the sun, and the very fab­ric of our real­ity rolls away. I have no doubt it will most likely hap­pen dif­fer­ently, prob­a­bly in a way unimag­in­able to me on this side of the event. But the thought excites me nonetheless…to crib from C.S. Lewis, when Christ returns, why, then it shall be spring!

May we always live in the knowl­edge that Christ is coming–neither to for­get the Master is return­ing, nor to atro­phy our tal­ents idly wait­ing, for we are to be found working!

(I’m not delv­ing into the niceties of inter­pret­ing end-times prophe­cies here, as legit­i­mate as those dis­cus­sions may be. Suffice it to say that I believe that the Second Coming of Christ is indeed set forth as a phys­i­cal, actual, (if more-than-physical, as well) event that will occur, but has not yet. The details of the tim­ing may indeed be a legit­i­mate the­o­log­i­cal dis­cus­sion, but this is not the forum or time to go into that.)