The Eternity Quotient

Mention eternity and most, if not all of us think about the length of the same

I do not know whether you realise that this is so one dimensional.

We think of eternal life as a life that is so long it has no end. It is millions, even billions of years long.

While it is that, I want us to look at another element, one that we are wont to forget, yet it is so pivotal to the whole idea of eternity. Otherwise, hell would be another eternal life.

I want us to move outside the quantity dimension to be able to appreciate this lesson.

Look at Isaiah 65: 20.

A death at a hundred years is treated as an untimely death or the death of a child. Yet a sinner living to a hundred years is accursed.

This simply means that a different yardstick is being used. Or simply that the yardstick is not the quantity or number of years being lived.

Let me take us to another verse.

Remember one of God’s days is equivalent to a thousand years? Yet do you realise that in the same verse one day is as a thousand years?

It amounts to the same thing.

One is looking at the quantity dimension while another is looking at a completely different dimension. I will call it the quality dimension or element.

Let us look at another verse as we progress.

Remember in Psalms where a day in God’s court is better than three years elsewhere?

I hope this is getting you thinking about this dimension even as I try to share what God’s word teaches about the same. Then we will be on the same page as we look at eternity and stop thinking is as a simply endless time of idleness. Or what do you think one can be doing for a billion years without getting extremely bored?

My grandmother lived to over a hundred years. She buried all her agemates. Then she went on to bury her children’s agemates. And she was wondering very many times why death was always overlooking her when picking on who to take.

This for me is how eternity would be if all it contained is endless time.

Yet we know that heaven, though eternal, can never be boring.

Why do we think it can’t be boring yet it is endless?

That is what I want us to examine.

Many times, we are unable to grasp the reality of God being existent from eternity to eternity because our finite minds are unable to stretch that much.

We know God was there before Genesis 1. Yet that is where our eternity begins. We simply can’t imagine anything or anybody being existent before our beginning. That is the main argument atheists and evolutionists put across, simply because the Biblical narrative leaves out what was there before the beginning apart from saying, ‘in the beginning God ...’.

The Bible also says that Christ was crucified before our beginning. It is only for our sakes that an actual crucifixion happened in our context so that we can then appreciate the enormity of God’s love.

What am I aiming at?

Time is just one element of eternity and therefore cannot be used to gauge the same.

There are other dimensions of eternity that are recorded in the scriptures. I hope to get you thinking about a few of these dimensions.

Isaac lived to 180 years and it is said he died full of days.

Moses died at 120 and was full of days.

David died at 70 and the same book says he was old and full of days.

Jeroboam’s son died in his infancy because God found something of worth in him.

How are those days counted if quantity is the yardstick?

Let me get to the first point in this.

Relationship with God is the first thing I want us to look at. And that is what the verse in Proverbs that I mentioned earlier is stressing.

God created us for a relationship with Him. How we relate with Him determines not only where we will spend our eternity but also the quality of that eternity.

Eternal life starts here. And it starts with a relationship with God.

That is why God would take an infant to heaven before he has experienced life here because that is really what matters to God. The infant’s eternity was bound to be defiled by the family he was born into, possibly being derailed by the same.

How we relate with God is the real test of eternity. And this because God and not time is the determinant of that eternity. How serious we are with God determines the quality of that eternity and not the length. We can’t equate the few days the infant lived with the 180 years Isaac lived. Or even the 70 David lived to the same 180.

Stephen died as a youth while John the revelator lived a very long time. Yet we cannot say that God favored John over Stephen. Both lived full lives because they lived it in God’s presence in obedience.

Simply saying, the mark of eternal life is obedience to God’s revelation.

Enoch is an example of what I mean.

Enoch walked with God and was not because God took him.

His relationship with God tore through the curtain separating this world and the next, between the temporal and the permanent, between the mortal and the immortal.

And he translated as a mere youngster if we compared his age to those of his father or son.

But his relationship with God was so good that death and age were completely overlooked as God needed that relationship to thrive on the other dimension.

His walk with God was so portent that it simply overshot this dimension to the next.

How to establish a relationship with God is what the Gospel is all about. How to maintain that relationship is what discipleship is all about.

At the centre of both is the revealed word of God, the Bible.

How we relate with the Bible is therefore an indicator of the level of eternal life we can experience because the God who revealed it is the only ingredient of eternity, for want of a better word.

I hope I have got you thinking