Thought for Today
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
Isaiah 57:15 For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Matthew 19:16 Then someone came to him and said, "Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?"
“For before their [believers’] eyes will be that day when the Lord will receive his faithful people into the peace of his Kingdom, ‘will wipe away every tear from their eyes; [Rev. 7:17; cf. Isa. 25:8], will clothe them with ‘a robe of glory . . . and rejoicing’ [Ecclus. ( Sir.) 6:31, EV], will feed them with the unspeakable sweetness of his delights, will elevate them to his sublime fellowship - in fine, will deign to make them sharers in his happiness. (Institutes 3.9.6)” (Coffee with Calvin, pg. 11)
What is your understanding of “eternal life”? Do you, like Calvin and John of Patmos, look forward to being clothed in a robe of glory? Will ‘eternal life’ be an eternity of perpetual sunshine, a time of continual happiness where all tears have been wiped away? Calvin seems to anticipate an eternity of being fed with unspeakable sweetness and enjoying eternal fellowship with our Creator God.
To what are you looking toward in eternity? While you are thinking about that, how would you answer that question posed to Jesus? In fact, do you ever think about that question and about Jesus’ answer, “Luke 10:27 . . . ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’"
What does all of this mean? How does all of this translate to how we lead our lives? How do you apply this to where the rubber of our lives meets the road of our world? How do our questions affect our lives, the way we interface with society, with our governments and institutions and with each other? Maybe most of all, what does eternity even mean?
The Bible begins with Genesis 1:1 and those words about “the beginning.” Implicit in that verse is the fact that God somehow transcends time itself. God existed before time was created. How do we, as creatures created by God, even begin to understand that truth? We cannot fully understand that fact; we can only know that fact and accept that truth.
Before you get too befuddled by thinking about the difference between understanding and knowing, ask yourself, “Do I fully understand gravity?” Even engineers, the fount of all knowledge, only know how to manipulate gravity, how to calculate the attractive force exerted by all bodies on each other. Even engineers do not fully know or understand the why of gravity.
All of us know things we do not understand. We know that the sun rises each morning in the east. Some of us know about the earth’s rotation around a tilted axis and the earth’s travel around the sun on the plane of the ecliptic. We may even know about or calculate the force of attraction between the sun and the earth and the earth’s resisting centrifugal force, etc., etc. But do any of us fully understand that? “ . . . in the early part of the 20th century, Albert Einstein developed general relativity, a field theory of gravitation. Later, Einstein and others attempted to construct a unified field theory in which electromagnetism and gravity would emerge as different aspects of a single fundamental field. They failed, and to this day gravity remains beyond attempts at a unified field theory.” (www.britannica.com/science/unified-field-theory)
Do we need to fully understand everything we know? “Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—“ “Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” I have faith in Jesus, the Christ. Therefore I am assured of that for which I hope, that place already prepared for me in advance, to which Jesus will someday escort me. That’s enough for me to know and understand. Meanwhile, I love God with all I have and am, and I try to love my neighbor as myself. I can leave the details of eternity to our loving Creator God.
Live lives of love, trust God,
Pastor Ray