
It’s a humane feature of earthly laws that you can appeal.
The law I’d really like to appeal against, though, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is roughly, everything gets old, wears out dies.
I’ve had it with seeing what Time and the Second Law do to people. What is this force that takes good people, drains them into a wizened hulk, then tosses them aside? How can that be right? I wish to appeal on behalf of the spry 85-year-olds I know who any time soon will hardly be able to climb onto their perch, and a little later, will have fallen completely off it. Good, strong people. Old age so isn’t fair.
Can you appeal? A lot of people, most of us, try to defy the Second Law or hold it back. It doesn’t really work, of course. But can you actually appeal? Since we are dealing with the created order here, we would have to appeal directly to the Creator. And we have a clue in our favour, namely the life, death and resurrection of God the Son, Jesus Christ.
So our appeal. Best to bring the issue to the One God and ask him to think about it in the light of his total Godness. That is, just be God, God. In all your total love, justice and mercy, faced with these things that you created, namely (1) the Second Law, and (2) people made in your image, made in your love, just be totally yourself.
If one can so speak.
And when you do that, what results? I don’t think we really can know. But I’m thinking, if the appeal is granted, and I can see how it might be, the eternal state that results isn’t just about halting time’s flow. I would quite to have my twenty-three year-old body back (halting time in that sense) but I’d quite like to hang onto my much older head, please. And when I think about it, the pattern of childhood, youth, midlife, old age, each with their attendant joys, are all lovely and I wouldn’t like to miss any of them. I wonder if Eternity will be still be roiled by the slowly passing seasons? I kinda hope so.
But it that’s the case, and if you appeal to God against the Second Law, asking God to be totally God in all of this, what does a successful appeal look like? I think it looks like hope, new birth, regeneration.
The really bitter thing about the Second Law is not really the ageing, or the weakening, or the becoming erratic and vulnerable. All that can be covered by love, at the end of life, just as it is covered by love at the beginning of life. No, the really bitter thing is when people fall away into a dark pit of hopelessness. So that I will never see them again. I will never know them again. I will never enjoy them again. We will never talk together again. Never again.
But if the wizened elderly were in fact seeds ready for a new planting, ready for a new life, still the essential them, but re-made for a new dawning world, all the losses on this side of things would be OK.