And this is what he promised us—eternal life. (1 John 2:25)
I forgot the sermon long ago, but I’ve never forgotten the illustration that the preacher used. Describing eternity, he asked us to imagine a solitary bird who picks up a grain of sand in his beak from an Atlantic beach and then flies across the continent to deposit it on the shores of the Pacific. Imagine, he said, that our feathered friend flies back cross-country and repeats the process . . . again and again and again. In the incalculable time it would take that hypothetical bird to empty the Atlantic shoreline of every single grain of sand and deposit them all three thousand miles away, the preacher said dramatically, eternity would have just begun.
My teenage mind was reeling, but I got the point: Eternity is more time than I could possibly conceive. It was years later that I found he was wrong. Eternity is not endless time. Eternity is timelessness.
God created time when he created everything else. It’s the environment of his creatures but not of God himself, and one day we won’t need clocks or calendars either. C. S. Lewis suggested that the very fact that time surprises us so much (“How time flies!”) is a clue that we are destined for something that time cannot touch.
God has set eternity in our hearts (see Ecc. 3:11), but will we choose eternal life or eternal death?
Choose life, for time and eternity.
—Bob Black is professor emeritus of religion at Southern Wesleyan University, where he served for thirty-two years. He co-authored the denominational history, The Story of The Wesleyan Church.
© 2020 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
