My friend Vic recorded a football game for me recently.  I was attending a wedding on short notice just before Christmas and unable to watch a particular game I had been looking forward to for weeks.  It was a high-scoring, exciting event that unfolded back and forth, tit for tat, blow for blow traded like two heavyweight boxers evenly matched.  At one point in the fourth quarter I think, as we munched the crackers and cheese that his charming wife so graciously provided,  Vic and I watched as the team we were both rooting for fell perilously behind.  Vic, who had watched the game previously and already knew the outcome, consoled me saying something concise like, “Don’t worry, it’s not over yet.”  That was encouraging to me as I considered that he undoubtedly knew something that I didn’t.  He concealed the details of what he knew masterfully.   He was right, of course, saying that there was significant time remaining in the contest, allowing for many possibilities.  As it turned out, our favored team pulled out a last minute victory, even scoring surprisingly on the game’s final play.  I told Vic that his recording of that game for me and watching it with me was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

Later I pondered how it is like that experience as we bring a message of hope to a world in dangerous times.  We know the outcome of history already because we have “read the end of the book” that is the Bible that prophesies of the Return of Jesus Christ in the darkness of the end-time, shouting his command as the Commander in Chief of all the angel armies.  We have “seen the outcome of the game” already as Vic had and therefore we can say to others as he said to me, “Don’t worry, it’s not over yet.”   The Bible says similarly, "Therefore encourage one another with these words."  God will have the last laugh so to speak as it says in Psalm 2 when the nations rebel and plot against Him uselessly and he laughs them to scorn.  You might say too that Jesus had the last laugh in the 5th chapter of the Gospel of Mark when he raised the daughter of the synagogue ruler Jairus from the dead.  Just minutes before Jesus himself had been laughed to scorn when he asked why the people were mourning and weeping when the little girl was only sleeping.  Death was like sleep to Jesus because as the Son of God he had the power to undo it instantly.  But the people did not yet understand that.  Just as most people would doubt today that Jesus can bring life and light out of the death and darkness all around.  Many would laugh cynically at even such a suggestion, but, thank God, theirs will not be the last laugh.  But God’s laugh at the end of history will not be a vindictive laugh,  neither will any of our laughter who laugh along with him.  It will be the laughter of joy and delight, as when the last play of a contest turns it the way you had hoped and longed for at last and after all!