An Internship

Our lives now are an internship for the eschaton.

Onward p. 53

By that, Moore doesn’t mean, if we do a good job now, we’ll get hired into eternity. No, Moore believes fully in salvation as a gift of God through Christ. We don’t earn our way to heaven. And while I think he would agree with Steven Curtis Chapman’s song “Coming Attractions,”

Let Your kingdom come in me
Let Your will be done in me
Here on the earth as it is and as it will be in Heaven
Show Your glory to the world
Tell Your story to the world
Let my life be a preview of coming attractions

He’s aiming at something slightly different. Our life is a witness to the world of what’s coming—or at least it should be—but it’s also a preparation for the next. That’s Moore’s point here. He’ll go on to say, “Finding ourselves in his inheritance frees us from clamoring and fighting for our own glory or relevance. Seeing our lives now, and the universe around us, as precursors to the life to come, we’re freed from the ingratitude that turns away from God’s good gifts, from the apathy that ignores those God hears. We pour ourselves into loving, serving, and working because those things are seeds of the tasks God has for us in the next phase.”

And so while this internship is not earning us entry into eternity, it is preparing us for it. Therefore what I do now does matter.