New Year

Anew year begins; what will it bring us? What is uncertain now will soon be known; also in this year it will become true again that concerns, sorrow, and plagues will be the man’s portion.

Has this always been so? Has this world been created to be a scene of much struggle and misery? Let God’s Word point us at the beginning of the New Year to another beginning—a beginning of which it is written that it was very good. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That there is now so much misery in this world has not been God’s work. His work was perfect. Sin destroyed God’s glorious work of Creation and made it all subject to the curse so that now, for the sake of sin, the whole Creation groans under the burden of God’s wrath and displeasure.

A new year—a new beginning of a year counted toward the coming of Christ, and it has to do with that beginning that God once gave to the world. For God does not want to surrender Creation to sin and curse forever. He wants to look after lost man and the world according to His purpose, which is that God’s Church may be gathered together, according to His good pleasure, and a new heaven and earth prepared for it—where it will be seen that everything God had made is very good. God is still carrying out His work.

Also, in this year God’s work will continue. This year will also be a year of “our Lord.” There is much uncertainty, struggle, trouble, and sorrow, but there is also expectation if we may look to “our Lord” and know the time is in the hand of Him who dwells at God’s right hand and carries out God’s good pleasure. God is busy making good that which He once made good also through His Son; after all, grace will restore what sin has destroyed.

Is there a new beginning for you, too? Not of the year, or all kinds of good intentions, but the beginning of God’s grace? You, too, were very good, but there must be a new beginning. That is not your new beginning but God’s new beginning with us. There is an “In the beginning” in Genesis 1, but also an “In the beginning” in a new dispensation of God, in the time taken for it by Christ.

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