Time & Eternity
Time and eternity are like two hands of the same clock. One which moves quickly enough for us to see and relate to it (time), while the other (eternity) moves significantly slower than our attention span can tolerate. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” exemplifies this concept. We must otherwise occupy our minds for enough time to pass that it registers as a single grain of sand on eternity’s beaches. Philosophically one might wonder, what’s the point of time (or this short life) when eternity rules? The Holy Bible states, “Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.” (Ecclesiastes 3:15 NIV). Heavy stuff! God has never been bound by the constraints of time as we understand it. 5,000-7,000 of our years ago, our Lord began doling out glimpses of what was in store for those who were watching the shadows move on their sundials and also for their descendants. Was God seeing the future? Not really, for God there is no future or past there is simply eternity, which has no beginning and no end. The only way which we can functionally envision something with no beginning or end is to follow the line of a circle, which would ultimately bring us back to where we’ve already been, to the point where what we’ll experience, we’ve experienced before. Assuming, of course, that we prevail long enough to complete this eternally long life lap.
God will call the past into account! We know that our bodies won’t survive a journey of this duration, but our souls could, with the help of Jesus. So there will come a time when our surviving spirit is called upon to account to God for it’s every thought and action registered over time. Certainly that includes our lifetimes, along with our ripples of influence which wave out well past our individual short life splash. What we do now, we’ll need to justify later (is our misunderstanding), but of course there is no “later” for God, for the “I Am”, there is only now. “I foretold the former things long ago, my mouth announced them and I made them known; then suddenly I acted, and they came to pass.” “Listen to me, Jacob, Israel, whom I have called: I am he; I am the first and I am the last. My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together.” (Isaiah 48:3, 12, 13 NIV). Now, not later is when we must begin the accounting. In eternity, now matters, “later” is just another human delay tactic.
JC Calkins with COMMON SENSE 4 UNCOMMON PEOPLE
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