Eternity - a working definition

For a while I've been contemplating doing a public service by explaining the meaning of "eternity," as in dwelling with God for eternity in heaven. Then I realized I already did that years ago. So, it will save a lot of time to just repost that blog from February 2006.

 I began by contemplating the issue of blaming God for bad things happening to “good” people. The correct response to bad events is to run to God as a refuge in a storm, but we so often blame Him instead. A picture- a little boy is playing in the yard. His mother is watching from the porch. She sees a storm cloud on the horizon. She calls him to come in, but he ignores and continues to play. When the storm draws near, a lightning bolt flashes and thunder booms. The boy, afraid, runs to his mother and clings to her. We should be like that with God. But then the analogy leads to a question. The mother is not in control of the storm, but doesn’t God control everything? If my loved one is killed in a car wreck, couldn’t God have prevented it? Common responses include “God allows hardship in our lives to help us grow,” “this terrible thing happened to spare the victim from something even more terrible,” and “Satan is out to destroy all that God created.” The latter is the focus of my train of thought. Indeed the scripture says that Satan is “a roaring lion, roaming to and fro, devouring whom he will.” So how does he do it? He uses time, I believe. God created time, along with everything else in the natural world. “In the beginning… night and day…and He pronounced it good. “ So time was inherently good, since it was created by God. At some point, though, Satan perverted it to evil. Witness all the injunctions in scripture to look beyond the temporal. “Pray continually..,” Focus on God (eternal) rather than the present. In all situations, be satisfied. Keep your eyes upon God, and all these things will be added.. Prophecy is an illustration of how the Holy Spirit exists outside the framework of time. Without beginning…without end. So how did Satan pervert time? More fundamentally, where did evil come from? The Bible says that Lucifer and a third of the angels in heaven (beings created by God) rebelled and were cast into hell. How could the creation of a holy and essentially good God think to do this? God must have chosen to allow the possibility. The very fact that He took the time to pronounce most of his original creation “good” (Genesis) indicates that He was fully aware that there was such a thing as “bad” even at that “time.” [Hard to avoid using that word!] By so allowing, the act of worship on the part of the angels and man is rendered meaningful. Otherwise it would be a robotic gesture, devoid of sincerity. If a being has no choice but to praise the Creator, of what value is the act? When He allowed the possibility of rebellion to exist, He knew that some would employ it, and He created a way to deal with it – hell. So, returning to the question of how Satan perverts time, consider this picture. A town is built on a seismic fault. In the town there is an important footpath that connects two principal areas. An earthquake occurs and creates a wide rift, splitting the town and the footpath in two. A construction worker who was fired long ago by the town council and harbors simmering hatred builds a thin bridge across the rift re-connecting the path in a seemingly generous gesture. The town tries to continue life as normal. However, the bridge is so narrow that people are constantly losing their footing and falling off the bridge into the chasm below, much to the delight of the evil bridge-builder. Only by walking carefully down the center and keeping their eyes on the point where the bridge meets land can anyone successfully cross. The original path was time as God intended – a safe passage between birth and death, surrounded everywhere by eternity (immersed in creation). The (intentionally) poorly built bridge is time as Satan has perverted it, surrounded all around by certain destruction – the chasm which Satan also caused in his struggle to destroy and pervert God’s creation. God’s victory is already determined, but by keeping us focused on the temporal – taking our eyes off the Lord as we walk, Satan can cause us to stumble and go down to destruction. However, by keeping an eternal perspective we can walk in confidence.

This led me to think about the meaning of “eternal.” The most common idea of this is “infinite days.” This is another of Satan’s perversions. After all, we all know nice people, even loved ones, who died without knowing Christ. Can we really believe that as we go about our daily lives, they are being tormented in hell, day after day, and that it will never cease? There is a ratio problem here. According to this, most people who ever lived or will live are being punished horribly for an infinite number of days for sins they committed during a finite lifespan, even if they were very good in an earthly sense, and died without Christ because no one told them the Gospel. Sorry – does not compute. This alone will turn most reasonable people away from the Christian faith, especially if it is used as a scare tactic. The counterpoint does not fare any better. Tell a teenager who can barely contemplate surviving a one hour church service each week, “you need Christ because then when you die you get to go to heaven and praise the Lord for eternity.” He thinks of singing hymns every hour of every day, day after day, without end, and he runs screaming the other way. So what is eternity? Most people have had the experience of being so intensely involved in something they love doing that “time just slips away.” People talk about how “time stopped” because they were so engrossed. I think this must be what it’s like in heaven. Not that we think about what tomorrow, or the next hour, or the next minute will bring. But just being here “now,” and loving it so much that nothing else matters. How else can we explain that some of our loved ones will not be there, yet there will be no tears. It won’t matter. The time-less experience will be so enthralling that we can’t think of what we are missing. Yet it won’t be the same constant activity. On earth, time and change are inextricably linked. It’s time to do this, time to do that, … In heaven our activities will change, but not because time is flowing. One friend recently told me about worshiping in a church where the worship service was not run by the clock, and how much more meaningful it was compared with a regimented traditional service. Similarly, in hell the devastation of realizing one is separated from God is static and permanent, though not infinitely repeated.

 Some might say that Christians are just people who haven’t had enough trouble in their lives to be angry with God. On the contrary, most Christians I know have had far more than their share of trouble. That’s because Christians are specially targeted by Satan. Why should he bother with the unsaved? He’s already got them in his snare. All he needs to do is maintain a low profile and see to it that they disregard him as a child’s foolish construct, or consider him amusing, like a trick-or-treater dressed up with a pitchfork and a tail. Anyone who sees him for what he is will run frantically to God for protection. Therefore he preferentially attacks and devours those who are running to God, or stymies the witness of those already in God’s protecting arms. Time (perverted) is a tool Satan uses in this way. Most people get into trouble in life when time owns them, rather than them controlling it. It seems unfair to them that God would give them a finite amount of time, and not bother to tell them how much they have. So they spend their lives (time) trying to figure out how to accumulate as much as possible in the shortest time. In the business world, “time is money.” In the academic world, a certain amount of publication and research funding is expected per unit time. We agonize about not having achieved measure X in time Y. The cure is to follow the scriptural admonition to focus on what is eternal and pray continually. How can we do this? Our very lives ought to be lived as a constant, ongoing (time-less) prayer to the Lord. God desires us to rest and dwell in Him, and, if we have strayed, to run to Him in times of distress. When storms come, we must remember that whether God created the storm to drive us into His arms, or whether it is Satan’s doing, the response should be the same – run to the Lord.