Today’s nugget of truth is connected to yesterday’s musings on waiting. Waiting is hard for us because we are a people ‘who belong to eternity stranded in time.’ (‘Joy In the Journey’, Michael Card) We can’t imagine anything other than time and we don’t really understand eternity. Ecclesiastes 3:11 TNIV tells us that God has ‘set eternity in the human heart’, but that means there is a daily tension in our lives. We live on earth, but long for something more. We feel so hemmed in by the pressures of time and yet we yearn for the freedom of eternity.
God is eternal (Gen 21:33 TNIV, Deut 33:27 TNIV) and does not dwell in time. From everlasting to everlasting, He is God (Ps 90:2 TNIV). He gives us many promises about eternal things (eternal life being the most obvious!) These are mostly difficult for us to imagine or grasp.
The more we progress in the Christian life, however, the more we realise that God’s truth is timeless. It doesn’t matter if a promise was made centuries ago, a promise is a promise to God. We grow more confident in our daily living (in our time-bound lives) as we realise that God is always true to Himself and His Word and is not trapped in time. We can trust Him to take care of our everyday lives, because nothing is too small or insignificant for Him and nothing is too large or difficult for Him. Mark often says that God will move heaven and earth to work out His plan and I’ve recently had first-hand experience of that! (I Stand Amazed)
I’ve always loved science-fiction films and love those that involve time travel. I loved the ‘Back To the Future’ trilogy and various other films that deal with travelling in time and space; I’m a big ‘Doctor Who’ fan.
But no matter how many ways people try to describe those things or imagine them, I’m not convinced by their veracity, just entertained by their ingenuity!
What I have become convinced of in the past thirty years is that our times are in God’s hands (Ps 31:15 TNIV) and that however hard I find it to imagine eternity, it is real and true and will involve a lot of people worshipping an eternal God!