| “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” |
| —Ecclesiastes 3:11 |
I never stopped to think about the phrase, “And it came to pass.” Because, like the phrase “Once upon a time” that often appears in fairy tales, it repeatedly comes up in Scripture with the regularity of a “Verily, verily” or “Finally, brothers.” But, this time I paused in my reading to realize that, at some point, all the instances of our lives “come to pass.” They may have begun, but they also will end. They have “come to pass.”
As much as we like to hold on to the familiar, we are told in Matthew 24:35 that even:
Heaven and earth will pass away.
Things come…to pass.
Now perhaps that kind of statement shakes your foundation a bit. If we believe that God is the “Blessed Controller of all things,” we can relax in the knowledge of a wise and loving Father God planning out and executing the unfolding of our futures.
In Revelation 21:6 we read the words of Jesus Himself:
“I am the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.”
We also have the word of God in Psalm 139:16 that:
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Another way to look at this phrase, “And it came to pass” has to do with troubles in our lives. Sometimes we think they will never end—that God has ordered something and we have to deal with it forever. Not so. We should remember that troubles too have “come to pass.”
The psalmist in Psalm 42 and 43 was downcast because of trouble in his life. But he spoke these words to himself three times:
What are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
In a sermon I heard once, the pastor called this “the eventuality of God’s work.”
We can rest in the knowledge that our wise and loving Father knows just how long our troubles will last. Whether they have their ending at some point down the road on this earth, or at the moment of we die here and live anew in Eternity, they will end.
And, oh yes, if you are a child of God by faith in Jesus Christ, you can know for a certain that not only do things “come to pass”—but that truly, we will live “happily ever after.” How’s that for an end to the story?
