Thy Kingdom Come: A Blumhardt Reader - Plough

very different from that which this will of God prescribes,there always will arise out of this root which has penetratedhumanity people who will be as intimately bound up withthe will of God as were the apostles and the prophets. Theseare people who will know that everything else derives fromthis unswerving, relentless will of God to make all thingsnew—everything both for our own personal lives with alltheir woes and obstacles, storms and defeats, and also for ahuman race which has been forced to pass through so muchtrouble, so many defeats, and so many disappointments.In Christ people can know and experience that we stand inan on-going process, a progressive development, that is leadingto a consummation, to an end of which it will be said:“See, the home of God is among mortals...see, I am makingall things new.” All sorrow will have ceased, even the blacknessof death. The death of man will have been transcendedthrough a creative act of God, so that the struggles in whichwe still stand today will have come to their end.The Lord Jesus, so to speak, always stands at the far bordersof the present. Consequently, it is understandable that,for him and for his first disciples, it seemed that at one blowthings could all be different tomorrow. We may think thatthey were deluded; but if so, it was a glorious delusion andthe greatest of truths. If Jesus had hesitated to step out tothe remotest boundary and say, “The present may come toan end tomorrow,” then he would not have been that powerfulpersonality who again and again calls into being people1