Thoughts on Eternity

Most people think that a thousand years is closer to eternity than a day is. After all, eternity is a long time, as is a thousand years, but a day is not a long time. And a moment...well, that's the shortest time of all, 'the twinkling of an eye' (1 Cor 15:52), the time that exists only for this point of time and is then lost forever. But the bible says that 'one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3:8). So, to God, a being who resides in eternity, a thousand years is no more than a day, and a day is no shorter than a thousand years. Some Christians see this as a mathematical formula, saying that since Christ rose on the third day, He will return during the third millenium (thousand years) after His death. Though this is a completely valid reasoning, I see other meanings in this passage. I believe a day and a thousand years are just examples to express a point. It could have said a million years is the same as an hour, or infinity is the same as a moment.

Infinity is a number without end. A day is the smallest fraction of eternity. Mathematically, you could express it as one over infinity. What is hard for us to comprehend is that a thousand years is just as small a fraction of infinity, as is a million years, and a billion years. Even a trillion years could be expressed as one over infinity. No matter how large a number you can imagine, it is still the smallest possible fraction of infinity.

A Christian friend told me that, though he believes he has eternal life, he can't imagine being around 470 million years from now (why he chose this exact number I do not know, but it will do). When I asked him what he thought of being around in 470 billion years, or 470 trillion years, he just told me to stop it, overwhelmed by the concept of eternity in relation to what we have in this world.

What I propose is that we aren't going to be alive 470 million years from now.

Ponder this. The bible calls the day of judgment the 'last day' (John 12:48) or the days just preceding them as the 'last days' (2 Peter 3:3). We will be transformed, but we will face no more days once we are. There will never be a day after the day of judgment, much less 470 million years after the day of judgment. So what will happen to us? Will we live for eternity, but not for one more day? How is this possible?

Another question I was asked once was whether or not I believe that God already knows what will happen to us. Does God know my future, all of the choices I will make? I answered yes. Then I was asked if I had free will. I also answered yes. I was told I'd contradicted myself, that if God knows what will happen to me, then it must already be decided. If it's already decided, then I don't have free will. To have free will means you have the ability to change what is going to happen. But if God already knows what will happen, then there's no changing it, and thus no free will.

I say that this logic makes a big assumption I believe to be false. It assumes that God has a past and future the way we do, that the time God experiences is parallel to ours.

You could say that time completes all free will. All of the decisions people have made before today were made using free will, but can no longer be changed. For example, Mark Chapman had the free will to shoot John Lennon, but once he shot him, there was no changing what he had done. Mark Chapman no longer has the free will to shoot John Lennon or not, because time has completed his action. God is both living today, looking at what we are doing,and living in the future, looking back at what we have done.

Imagine your life as a train moving at a steady pace along a track, the future ahead of you, the past behind you. This is how we humans view time, as moving at a steady pace, in a linear fashion. That which is behind us is finished, unable to be changed. That which is ahead of us is unknown, untravelled territory, which we have the ability to control.

So where is God in this?

What I believe is that God doesn't view time the way we do. He doesn't have a past and future, but, as an eternal being, encompasses all of time. Linear time is an illusion created for man's limited experience. The past and future DO NOT EXIST, except in our minds, in this moment.

Man views eternity as stretching from the far past to the far future, parallel to the tracks on which we ride. Since our time moves, we imagine that eternity must also move. I say that eternity resides in us. And since we only exist in this single moment, that eternity must also exist in this single moment.

Eternity is not yet manifested in us, but it will be. It is merely a seed. It will become fully manifested in us on the last day, at which point we will exist in the same eternity as God, an eternity without a past and future, without even one more day, an eternity that doesn't move at all, but just IS.

Since God is in us, his time does intersect ours, though not in the parallel sense. I guess you can imagine it more as a perpendicular intersection, like our train has its windows open and God's time is a breeze blowing straight through, passing through at every point along our journey.

Let's say that I were to die today. Looking at it from the point of view of my friends and family, I am dead. I used to be alive. I will be alive again some day. But for the moment, I am dead.

Now look at it from my point of view. I would not be aware of the time between my death and resurrection, as my friends and family would. To my point of view, I would go right from this life to my resurrection. I don't believe this is simply a case of me not being aware of the time in between. The years between my death and resurrection do not exist to my reality. My train does not stop for however many years pass for the rest of mankind between my death and the last day. Though my life will have appeared to stop and re-start to the rest of the world, my life never really stopped to my view, God's view, or Christ's view.

Picture the cross-ties underneath the train track as moments passing through my life. One cross-tie will be my death, and the next one will be my resurrection. To those still alive on Earth after my death, many cross-ties, many moments, will pass beneath their trains between my death and my resurrection. The moments in which I am dead are moments that do not exist to me, because I am dead to them, as I am dead to the illusion of linear time.

One question I have to ask myself is: What time frame did Jesus live in? When He walked this Earth, was His time moving past-to-future as ours does? Or was He alive in eternity? I believe Jesus was an intersection of the two, living in our time and also intersecting it perpendicularly with God's eternity, fully aware of both. Picture this in your mind. One straight line representing man's time being intersected perpendicularly with another line representing God's time. What image do you picture? Perhaps...a cross?

In God's time, a thousand years is a day, and I think it's safe to assume that two thousand years is also a day. If so, then, in God's time, Christ's death on the cross happened today, even in this moment. This makes a lot of sense to me. After all, how can Christ's death on the cross about 2000 years ago have the power of forgiving sins committed by people who didn't even exist yet? It only makes sense to me if Christ's death on the cross happened in a moment that never leaves, in an eternal moment. If our past-to-future time is the only one possible, then Christ could only have forgiven the sins of those who lived before, or at the same time as, Him; but not of those who lived after Him.

Another reason that I believe Christ existed in both times is something that would otherwise be a contradiction, one I've been puzzling over for a while and simply accepted as having meaning without knowing what that meaning was. Lazarus died and was resurrected by Christ (John 11:11-44). The maiden died and was resurrected by Christ (Mark 5:35-43, Luke 8:49-56). I think it's safe to assume that their deaths were equal in nature, that neither one was 'more dead' than the other. But look at Christ's words in each story. Christ plainly tells His apostles 'Lazarus is dead' (John 11:14), but says of the Maiden, 'she is not dead, but sleepeth' (Luke 8:52). So Lazarus was dead, but the maiden was not? I find that hard to believe. What I find easier to accept is that they were both 'dead' and 'not dead', an obvious contradiction, but also the obvious truth.

I believe that Christ was speaking from two different points of view. Christ was both a God and a man, living in God's time (eternal) and man's time (past-to-future). When Christ said 'Lazarus is dead', He was talking to His apostles on their level. They knew Lazarus was ill, but weren't aware that he had died. If Christ had told them 'Lazarus is not dead', they would not have understood, so he had to speak to them from the flesh. In the past, Lazarus had been alive. In the future, Lazarus would live again. But at that time, Lazarus was dead. So that is what Christ told them.

When Christ met with the Maiden's family, they already knew that she was dead. For Christ to say, 'the maiden is dead' would have been the truth, but would also have been stating the obvious. Unlike the apostles in the case of Lazarus, they already knew she was dead. When Christ said she was 'not dead', he wasn't talking to them from the fleshly level, the past-to-future perspective, but from God's level, the eternal perspective. To the maiden herself, no time passed between her death and resurrection, so she never really died except to those who knew her. And since the passage of time is an illusion God is not subject to, the maiden was never 'dead' to Him, merely suspended in sleep, and so Christ was speaking on behalf of the maiden and God when He said she was 'not dead'. So to Christ on the fleshly level, both Lazarus and the Maiden were dead. But to Christ on the eternal level, neither of them were ever dead and never could be dead as long as they are with God and God is with them.

So what happens at the end of the line, when all of our trains pull into the station side-by-side on the last day? I believe that our time stops altogether, the illusion ends. There are no more days or years to come and that we start viewing time as God does, non-linear, non-moving. It's hard for me to picture what this is like, mostly because I am so used to time and its effects.

Will we just stand still, never change, never move, never learn? Sounds kind of boring just being in one place and one state of mind forever. I don't think that's quite what we'll experience. I don't think man is capable of understanding what God's time frame, or Heaven for that matter, is like. I do believe that whatever Heaven is like, we'll enjoy it immensely and never want to go back to the world as it is now. 'But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him (1 Cor. 2:9).

I don't have any idea where these thoughts came from or how accurate or inaccurate they are. For all I know, I could be way off. I guess only time, study, and meditation will help and I'm certainly open for anyone to challenge anything I've said. I could be wrong, and if I am, I'd like to know that I am. I've decided to stop worrying so much about what comes after this world (a decision that, oddly, led to these thoughts). Even if I'm completely kidding myself and I perish after this life is over, so be it. I'd rather be part of God's world just for today than to never be part of God's world at all.

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