Past Joy, Present Woe & Future Bliss

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Fri, 20/06/2025 - 00:00

Is this a bad time to be alive? There is currently war between Israel and Iran; illegal migration is out of control; churches keep closing and other gods’ temples keep getting built. Belief that marriage is a union between a man and a woman may soon be worthy of prosecution, and one half of the British Parliament wants to allow the legal killing of the sick and the elderly and has just voted to remove restrictions on infanticide. What a hell hole this is! Little wonder people like me are increasingly interested in the past and enjoy museums and books. Twenty-first century Britain is a moral and spiritual sewer, and the day is coming when the Lord will flush it clean.

This spring, I went to the Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham. There I could stroll along an Edwardian high street, enter drapers' shops and sellers of fancy goods, and afterwards call at the Pit Village’s Wesleyan chapel for quiet repose. I could then catch a tram to 1950s town, or to Pockerly, the 1820s farm and hamlet. Dewey eyed with nostalgia, the past seemed to be an attractive alternative to the present. Yet this, too, is a sham.

The past might appear more settled compared to our topsy-turvy times, but it was also subjected to violence, novel ideas and undesirable social change. Those for whom 'the past' was their present did not consider it a golden age, and they likely harked back to even earlier times. In truth, every period of time from Adam’s fall until Christ’s return is characterised by nastiness, unhappiness and uncertainty. Pockerley had to put up with the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars; the Edwardian high street sat in the shadow of a looming Great War and the happy folk of 1950s’ Britain reasonably expected a nuclear holocaust. No, let us not look back to the good old days or the golden olden times, for they were little better. Rather, look forward: Jesus Christ is coming again to reign and to rule. That is the golden age to which we all aspire, His is the Kingdom to which we must belong.

The 1900s, the 1820s and the 1950s were still all better than our current time, I think, but those are not the periods into which the good Lord planted us. This fetid century is where our battles shall be fought and races won. Let us be faithful in the here-and-now, ahead of our fully enjoying the world to come.