by Pastor Mark Downey
April 20, 2014
Scripture Reading: Malachi 4:5-6
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you actually leave them. I hate to think that these trying times (some say trials and tribulations) will someday be the good old days. I guess the good old days were when we thought it couldn't get worse. A good barometer would be leadership. There was a day when all it took to impeach a president was illegal wiretapping or having sex with a White House intern in the broom closet. About 200 years ago the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Today's sermon really is not about nostalgia, but we do have a memory system that recalls times of happiness. But, how far back in time do we go to determine that happiness. Individuals can certainly go back, usually to their unencumbered childhood (before they became tax slaves), and say the good old days were the happy days. I can remember when I was 4 years old and the neighborhood boys began digging holes in the backyard; we were treasure hunters and the world was our oyster; nothing could dispel our elation of shoveling a deep pit. However, it became anticlimactic when our shovels hit something metallic, which wasn't a treasure chest, but a water pipe. What concerns me with this message is how far back in time do we go to determine the happiness of the White race.
Time is a like a river, you can't touch the water twice, because the flow that passed will never return. The good news is that there's more water where that came from. If we were to pick a time in the Bible that comes closest to the good old days, it would be the Garden of Eden, sometimes called Paradise. We don't know how much time elapsed before the Fall of Adam, but it must have been a splendid time of goodness, because sin had not yet entered the world; the good had not yet been contrasted to the manifestation of evil. But, when it did, after the Fall of man, days of goodness were only fleeting and transient. Once, Adam fell from grace, from his glorified body to a carnal physical body, he must have thought, “Wow, those were the good old days.” Hindsight is always 20/20. The word 'paradise' is not found in the Hebrew, but the idea is not lost in the Greek word paradeisos (#3857) as used in Rev. 2:7, which simply means “park i.e. (specifically) an Eden (place of future happiness).” The park or garden of Eden signified an exquisite place of delight and pleasure.
