There are wide ranges of dining opportunities available to us. We can enjoy take out, drive through, or casual in house dining, complete with waiters and menus. If we want to jazz it up, we can experience linen napkins complete with crystal and silver flatware.
Yet we get the most for our money at a buffet. Our choices are endless, with the meals laid out in an entreating display designed to tempt us to indulge.
We want to be at a buffet.
God’s creation is a buffet of the most impressive sort. Let’s see what God has provided on his buffet bar:
In the first display we find life.
Genesis 2:7 tells us:
“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
When we are born, we slip a serving of life onto our tray. We anticipate its aroma from the very first moment.
The second display gives us those things that share our world with us.
Genesis 1:24 tells us:
“And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’ And it was so.”
This dish adds culinary variety to our lives. Its aromas mingle with those from what we’ve already received, and our existence is so much sweeter.
The third display is continued life.
1 Corinthians 15:51-55 tells us:
“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ ”
This is our dessert, for once our first two dishes are consumed, we can dip into the sweetest of God’s offerings, eternal life with the Father.
How do we receive this final culinary concoction? We find that section of the buffet in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
When we live an upright life before God and the world, all of God’s good things will be ours to consume; and that includes everything on God’s heavenly buffet. We will see laid out before us our own life and that of all humanity, the creatures that share our world with us, as well as our eternal reward for walking with the Holy One.
When we visit God’s diner, we will leave stuffed to the gills.
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