Change & Decay in All Around I See

It has been one of those annoying weeks. The toaster stopped working. Then the aquarium’s filter. Then the fridge. Then the car. And then the roof leaked. Everything is decaying and inclined to malfunction, especially in my household. The repair and replacement costs I contemplated with disrelish. Having heard of several people suffering illness, however, I was reminded to be grateful that my body, at least at the time of writing, is in reasonable working order. This, too, shall conk out one day, for it is part of the same, molecular realm.

Life in a fallen world is characterised by decay and decline. Nineteenth-century liberals danced before the altar of the goddess Progress: everything was getting bigger and better. Although this might have been true of technology, and remains so, the industrial scale of the carnage of the trenches belied their breezy optimism. Likewise, Darwinian evolutionists imagine a positive direction for biological entities: with time’s passing, more desirable traits and features are acquired, while less helpful ones are dropped and erased. A wonderful, steady ascent to perfection! Yet as a photocopied sheet gets grubbier and duller with each copy’s copying, so physical bodies, present and future, deteriorate and decline. The world is getting worse, not better; lifeforms are corrupting, not improving. Our bodies, cars, houses and world are subject to the law of death and decay, and must needs be repaired and patched up, endlessly. H.F. Lyte wrote Abide with Me in 1861, and noted:

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;

Earth's joys grow dim; its glories pass away;

Change and decay in all around I see;

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

We look forward to the place in which there is no corruption or decline, no more death and dying, no more breakdowns and breakups. Pity the poor, benighted atheist, whose only hope is a few short years on a decomposing, groaning planet.

And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Rev 21:21-27, AV