Have you felt like I have--that some things seem to last or go on forever? It did seem that all the political ads in my mail or on the TV or all the unknown to my contact list number calls or Potential spam calls or Unknown calls would go on forever! I am so glad that it all did come to a sudden end and didn't last forever. But then a new deadline came, and my mail and spam calls again seemed to go on forever. Whenever some deadline looms that someone somewhere thinks I should know about it, suddenly my phone gets very busy with notifications that I feel will go on forever and since I refuse to answer, I have no idea what they are asking of me and not knowing does begin to feel like they will go on forever! While I was waiting to be physically ready and working towards hip surgery, all the ways that kept me from the surgery seemed like my surgery was being postponed forever! I was told that my surgery date was coming but at times the pain made me feel like it was taking forever to get to that date.
Right now, everyone is anticipating Christmas. Perhaps their anticipation is a bit misplaced in that many are only looking to the glitter and glitz and the gifts. To some who don't enjoy those parts of this season, it seems to go on forever. To children anticipating the day of gift opening, the time until then seems to go on forever!
It is hard for us as mere humans to comprehend the idea of forever! To think of a God who has always and forever existed seems so hard to understand. We have the idea of forever and eternity ahead of us to think about but then there is the period of time before earth and history began that also was an eternity in the other direction of the beginning! Eternity pre-earth and eternity post-earth! With a difference. There was nothing tangible for us to know about pre-earth eternity but there will be a New Earth post-earth eternity! It all sounds kind of mind boggling. Imagine a vast endless ocean where you can travel forever without reaching an edge or a never-ending line that continues infinitely in both directions. Never reaching the end is eternity. It is much harder for us to grasp the idea of eternity past. The idea that something or someone has always existed and was never created, never had a starting point, never had a beginning… is an idea that is simply beyond my understanding. Just think about it. Picture in your mind right now how God has existed in the past for as long as a period of time that you can possibly think of. It will probably be a number that is well beyond your true ability to grasp
The people of the Old Testament were waiting for their Deliverer! They desperately wanted someone to deliver them from bondage and from cruel rulers. I am sure that they thought they were waiting for forever! But when He did arrive, they missed Him because they were looking to be delivered from the wrong thing. They wanted physical deliverance instead of what the Deliverer came to bring to them—deliverance from their sins. Today, we are also waiting for our Deliverer to come and deliver us! While some may think they want physical deliverance from disease and crime and war and famine and other disasters, what they really need and should desire is deliverance from the sins that each of has done! Only the Deliverer can rescue us, but it does seem like it is taking forever, an eternity, for Him to come back to deliver us! Soon does not seem so soon!
When I was a teenager, my father took his family—and me on an excursion! I loved his day trips and always looked forward to them. This one day we did not go too far away and I wish I would have paid better attention or written down some instructions on how to get there. It seems that there is something that Google doesn't know because it has not helped me figure out where I should go to find this point of interest that I remember. I know that as a young person, I was pretty impressed with the size of the rock he took us to see! We live in an area that had glaciers pass over this part of Iowa and those glaciers left many large boulders behind. One of those boulders landed permanently not too far away from us. And my memory thinks that this boulder was huge! It was not just an ordinary large rock. We were able to climb on this big, huge rock by going to the far side that was deeper in the ground. But the visible end seemed to be 8 or 9 feet high, and the top of the flattish big rock might have been twice the size of my kitchen. Maybe my memory isn't very good but still—it was BIG!
To this day it remains in my memory as an illustration story that my father enjoyed telling. It went something like this! High up in a North land far away, there stood a rock. It was 100 miles high and 100 miles wide. A huge cube of a rock! Once every 1000 years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock is worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by! Perhaps I am easily impressed but that rock I stood on was BIG and in no way compared to eternity rock, but I could not imagine that BIG rock could ever be worn away during eternity! And it was in no way as big as the eternity rock. I was impressed by how long eternity must be! The whole idea of forever just takes over my mind and I get consumed with trying to comprehend it. Just as surely as I spend some time trying to grasp the idea of “eternity”, it naturally turns my mind towards what heaven will be like, bringing on a sense of incredible expectation. I know we can’t imagine eternity in heaven with any kind of accurate anticipation, still I long for a better land ahead living everyday with Jesus as my neighbor! And my loved ones with me!
I like various ways to try to understand a big, big number! Any number we can speak about is a finite amount. It is always possible to mention a number that is larger. Scientists speak of the "googol." A googol is 10 to the 100 power—you have to like math to enjoy that number! That is 1 followed by 100 zeros and is inconceivably large. Then there are googolplexes which they believe is the googol raised to the googol-th power. If that number were written out, there would not be space on earth to contain the pages required to do the writing. In fact, it is said they would more than fill our galaxy. Once again, my mind cannot comprehend such an idea. God and his infinite universe is more than I can understand.
If you could count to 250 in a minute—if that were possible—and do it day and night, it would take you about 1,000 years to count to 100 billion! Then multiply this by a few trillion which might be the probable number of galaxies. Does that help you understand Christ's words: "All power is given unto me."? Again, hard for me to comprehend but not hard for God—who has existed for eternity past and will exist for eternity to come! It seems kind of ridiculous to try and figure out the concept of eternity when the fact is “eternity” is outside of finite human understanding. We cannot fully understand it, grasp it or communicate it. The best we can hope to do is get a glimpse of it, attempt to describe it in part and perhaps give examples that give us some sort of sense that eternity is “however long we can imagine added to infinity”.
It is too hard to wrap my brain around eternity because most things here on earth have a beginning and an end—they aren't eternal. We just cannot think that way.
While I am created in God's image, I am not created with a mind like that of a God. Some people want to say earth was created a long time ago, billions of years ago. Others reason that according to the Bible, earth was created around 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. For finite human beings, either number is hard to imagine what life was like to not have cars and airplanes and they have only been around for about 130 years. Again, my mind gets all befuddled thinking about time and eternity. The problem is as humans we can more easily grasp what may exist forever into the future because we understand the idea of something coming into being that did not previously exist. In other words, it’s a little easier (but not truly possible) for us to understand that we could be created and then exist forever although we don’t in reality have an authentic understanding of what “forever” actually is. We just know that it goes on a long, long time into the future, way beyond what we know to be the longest period of time we can conceive. In light of eternity, that amount of time isn’t one day closer to the amount of time that God has truly existed because no matter how big that number is, God has existed for that long, times that long again, times that long again, times a trillion times that long again, and even then you haven’t lessened the time that God has existed by a fraction of a second.
God asked Job a series of questions long ago in chapters 38 and 39 and Job didn't have any answers. Questions like where were you when the earth was made? And who defined the boundaries of the ocean? And can you make lightning appear and strike where you direct it? And a whole series of questions that Job had no answers for. I wouldn't have had answers either! Job's response was, "I am nothing.... I will put my hand over my mouth in silence....I have nothing more to say."
There are a lot of things we can't get our brains around, and Job couldn't either. That's OK. We aren't God. Moses told the people, "There are secret things that belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our descendants forever." This to me seems to say that there are things I won't be able to ever understand. I think that "eternity" probably is one of those concepts I'm not supposed to understand.
Abraham followed God's directions—some would say he followed God around--with the intention to live forever with Him forever in eternity. He did not expect to live on this earth forever. He wanted to obey God even when the future was uncertain. The people mentioned in Hebrews 11 were longing for a better country—a heavenly one with a city that God had prepared for them. God's love for us is so way beyond my comprehension. God loves me is the same idea--the extent of His love is way way way beyond my understanding.
Here is one more “eternity” story for you to think about.
Picture with me a bird, a sparrow. This sparrow flies over to a child’s sandbox in your backyard. He digs up one grain of sand and begins to fly up into the air towards the moon. Pretend that he is capable of flying out of our atmosphere and through space, nonstop without ever taking a rest. Our little sparrow flies past the moon, past Mars, through the asteroid belt beyond the eye of Jupiter and through the rings of Saturn all the way to Pluto. He drops a grain of sand on to Pluto and begins the return flight home.
Once arriving back home he takes a second grain of sand and begins the same journey back to Pluto. Over countless billions of years our tireless little bird transports what would be little more than a small pail of sand back-and-forth to the farthest planet. Now imagine that he must empty the entire sandbox one grain of sand at a time. When he is done with the sandbox, he must fly a couple of miles over to the local beach and remove every grain of sand one by one by one. When he’s finished with that beach the poor little guy then flies across the ocean to the Sahara Desert and must strip the entire desert of sand one grain at a time and deposit it on the planet Pluto.
When that sparrow is done, he will not be one grain of sand closer to lessening the time of eternity by one second. No matter how many times you multiply this scenario by whatever incomprehensible numbers you can verbalize, you will still have not scratched a day out of eternity.
I can't wrap my mind, thoughts, around big huge numbers, or eternity or God's love. This is the challenge—Let God wrap His arms around us even though we can't wrap our minds around eternity or God and His love.
I still want what really is Forever! My place in God’s Kingdom!