Most everybody mistakenly believes that eternity - or the life that follows this one - is represented by the dawn of new time that extends forever forward without a terminus. Such an opinion may be represented graphically as such:
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However, this doesn't jive with what the Bible says. First, the Bible says "In the beginning, God..."
Didja ever ask yourself, "In the beginning of what?"
Well, it's not the beginning of God, because the statement says that in the beginning, God was already there.
It's also not the beginning of the earth. or the heavens, or anything else listed in Genesis 1. All that came after "in the beginning."
I submit that the "beginning" was the beginning of time. If that be the case, you might be led to ask, "why did God create time?"
If you do, you'll eventually come to reason that time is a tool that God has created to complete his purpose (redeeming his creation for eternal fellowship). He then gave us stars, the sun, days and nights as a way to measure time so that we might have evidence of the advance of God's plan toward completion. If you've never thought of it that way, perhaps you should. Otherwise, it's like taking part in an 8-hour conference in a windowless room with no clocks or watches or breaks. If you've ever had a whetting of that sort of desperation, magnify it to the scope of deity, and then give thanks that God gives us a measure of his progress toward completing his work.
But I digress...The Bible also talks about a day when this earth will go buh-bye, and God will create a new heaven and a new earth as an eternal residence. Time ends. Eternity begins. There won't be any more time. There will be no sun. No nighttime. No changing seasons. Not "new time," but "no time." There will only be "the forever 'now'."
It's the type of thing that makes my brain go so jiggy that I end up typing a lot of phrases using "scare quotes." And if I weren't typing, I'd probably be compelled to scrunch my fingers by my ears when I said these terms, so you'd either know I was either talking about something slightly incomprehensible, or phantom scratching dandruff from my temples.
I can't wrap my wee brain around "no more time." Graphically, it looks simplistically like this, with the left parenthesis being "in the beginning," and the right being the end of the world as we know it. And I'm feeling fine.
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By faith I believe my future is living outside the capsule, in the eternal now, with the God who created me.
Now, just for fun...here's a taste of eternity, the same way "Sweet-N-Low" is a taste of real sugar. This website allows you to experience life in 'zero time.' If only for a few seconds.
March 15, 2006 12:28 AM