Walking With the Word

Imagine you are setting out on a journey. You input the data into Google maps, and that familiar blue line appears showing your start point, some alternative routes, and the final destination. Let’s say for argument sake that you are going from Edinburgh in Scotland to Exeter in southern England.

Now imagine you are on the starting point of your journey, but you are not in a car, but a helicopter, and you are not going to fly along the route but fly straight upwards.

Up, up and up you go. There is the Edinburgh ring-road; there is the A702, then the A74(M) comes into view. You keep rising and you see Carlisle and the beginning of the M6. Up still further and Manchester, then Birmingham, the M5–the Cotswolds, Malvern Hills, the Severn Crossing and finally the sea beyond Exeter comes into view. As you keep going up until eventually you see the whole of the UK and an imaginary line of the journey you would have taken had you gone by road.

From up here you can see the end from the beginning.

“Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done.”

Isaiah 46:9-10

Now imagine that journey to represent you whole life: God can see the end from the beginning, and both as though they were happening at the same time. That’s how eternity works, it is outside of space and time—space and time exists within its endless bounds.

Your life is like a short line drawn on a never ending ream of paper; a blip on the music sheet in a hand-cranked music box; your note plays and is gone; like the grass of the field that withers and fades with each passing season.

Our life’s-journey seems long to us while we are walking it, but for God,

“Before the mountains were born or you [God] brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God… A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”

Psalm 90:2

A thousand years is nothing; the mere blink of an eye to God.

The expression, ‘everlasting to everlasting,’ could otherwise be understood as, ‘from eternity past to eternity future,’ which is a strange mix of eternity and space/time language, but this is the idea conveyed by Moses in this psalm, that before space and time came into existence, God already existed.

“The mind looks backward in time till the dim past vanishes, then turns and looks into the future till thought and imagination collapses from exhaustion: and God is at both points, unaffected by either”

A W Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Eternity is always now; there is no past and future, it is all the same to God.

We finite creatures are not fitted for eternity, which is why we were given space/time to live in. We meander along our route and life happens to us as we go along, sometimes taking the offered alternative routes, making choices, making mistakes and doing the best we can.

We are filled with the notion that although we know we have a limited life span, something is off, since we feel within ourselves that there should be no end; death is a mistake. We instead have the burden of life in a decaying body in a world which seems to constantly work against us. So, what is the point of all that?

“What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

God lives in eternity and sees all; Mankind is limited in his view and can’t even see the future of his own life.

Man was made for eternity, as well as for life in space and time. But man has lost eternity due to his fall from grace in the garden, having chosen his own way and not Gods, and now lives within that limited capacity. The gap between the one and the other must be bridged to satisfy the eternal ache we have within us.

“God’s eternity and man’s mortality join to persuade us that faith in Jesus Christ is not optional.”

A W Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

This is where Jesus comes in, the God-Man who bridges the chasm between the two realities. He lived the life of a man without making all the mistakes we make on our journey; a sinless life, taking care of the problem of our fallen-in-sin-nature—which keeps us from fulfilling our eternal nature and made us slaves to our fallenness; He defeated death, rising from the grave on our behalf taking care of the problem of death.

All of this shatters the problem of our space/time limitations and opens the way for Eternal life with God in-Christ. The blue line on the [google] map of our life, disappears and the whole world will be ours to journey forever; the short line on the endless ream of paper only marks the start of a longer, never ending line running into eternity; the momentary blip of the note played on the music-box, will become perpetual music, as we live in harmony with the everlasting God.

It turns out that the Eternal reality of God in space and time is none other than God Himself in Jesus Christ, who bridges the gap between the two and fits us for eternity.