Tag: eternity

Birthing Babies

A hospital delivery room is not for the fainthearted. I blacked out when one of our five children was being born (not quintuplets; it would have been far worse!). I was seated and didn’t fall over or pass out, but for a few seconds it was like someone had turned out all the lights, like one of the times I donated blood. Many are those who will bear witness that these venues are regularly characterized by a lot of yelling, blood, and gore. Until the process is complete, “birthing babies” can be very stressful, in particular for the mom giving birth and sometimes for the dads in attendance, who have been known on occasion to literally pass out during this miraculous phenomenon.

Spiritual birth can also be a painful experience. It is true that there are those who come to Christ at an early age in life and never look back. But even these must have their own “mini-Gethsemane” in the act of surrendering their (perhaps pliable, yet) still independent wills to Jesus, and the process doesn’t stop there. But for a large percentage of us, getting to, upon (“I am crucified with Christ”), and beyond the Cross of Jesus Christ can be a real life-and-death struggle because our own wills have been in in the ascendancy for so long.

There is a very real danger in the church when well-meaning (or at times self-serving) clergy and others try to inject their own “epidural” into those struggling to find God by providing misguided and human-inspired words of comfort and enablement instead of interceding and trusting God to save them, no matter how difficult and painful the “delivery.” I sat in a church “stuck in the breach” for a full year knowing that I was in a lost spiritual condition, but was absolutely unable to do anything about it. There was a hindrance and I was helpless to do anything except to ask for prayer and to hold on to hope as if my life depended upon it, which it did.

You may lose your grip on faith for a time, but you can never, ever abandon hope!

People who give up all hope are the ones who take their own lives, or are overpowered by Satan and consciously reject the claims of Christ for eternity. I could have prayed a thousand “sinner’s prayers” during my time of crisis and nothing would have changed, because God had a perfect plan for redeeming my soul, and that plan would unfold only in His timing and through His means. But when it was fulfilled, it would be real. It would be, not by reason, but by revelation. My pitiable portion of faith would become alive.

Our flesh, even without Satan’s added prompting and deception, can be the biggest deterrent to a genuine salvation experience. There are many things that can hinder salvation and then being filled with the Holy Spirit. It is often said, “Jesus doesn’t clean His fish before He catches them.” Much more accurately, Jesus doesn’t catch His fish until they “come clean.” Jesus doesn’t deliberately go around looking for rocky ground to sow His seed. There may be many obstacles in my heart that prevent me from seeing the true Gospel. Perhaps it is a root of bitterness or unforgiveness against someone that I, in reality, have no intention of surrendering. Perhaps it is a private addiction or some other sin that I consciously try to conceal from the piercing, convicting laser-light of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps I am expecting to come to Christ, but only as long as that doesn’t mean giving up any of my idols in the process.

As a friend of mine often says, “We need to let GOD save people!” That is not to say that God does not want to use us to sow, water, feed, and cultivate. That is a huge part of our mission during our stay here; to make disciples for Christ. But if a person doesn’t recognize they are lost and are in danger of eternal judgment, what are they going to be saved from? In the scriptures, repentance always precedes salvation. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to reveal our lost state, and then to bring us safely and methodically through the delivery process.

That process will inevitably involve a Gethsemane of our own will, but one of God’s making, with the loving objective of our eternal adoption as His children!

 “Then he said to me, ‘This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel saying, “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,” says the Lord of hosts.’” (Zechariah 4:6 NASB)

God, T-Rex, and Black Holes

As I write this post, cosmologists, astronomers, astrophysicists…and just regular folks like me who would be hard-pressed to distinguish between quantum entanglement and a bad hair day…are in giddy anticipation of the imminent release of the first ever photographic “images” of a black hole. Of particular interest: the “supermassive” black hole believed to anchor the center of the vast, spinning Messier 87 Galaxy, about 55 million light years from earth! Well, of course you can’t actually see black holes because they’re invisible, but what you might expect to see based upon computer simulations is a boundary, a shadow, evidence of an event horizon defined by the shape of super-heated plasma swirling at near light speed around the periphery of many of these unimaginably dense objects (but only until that matter, including light, gets devoured by the inexorable force of gravity, never to be seen again…except in Hollywood).

If seeing a black hole is on your bucket list, the soon to be released images are probably about as close as you would ever want to get to one!

In principal, there is a rather unremarkable, “Jewish-looking” fellow (if kosher labeling is still permissible) sitting at the very back of the cosmology classroom, who would love to contribute to the discussion, but the professors simply never call on him. (Would it be different if his surname was something else, like Einstein, perhaps? Hmm).

John 1:1-5 “In the beginning was the Word [gr., logos; aka, Jesus Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9 “That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.”

Every new scientific discovery; every new innovation; every new breakthrough in medicine, physics, engineering, technology, and cosmology…not to mention the elegant toolbox of mathematics for their description and the capacity for their observation…all these things have already existed in the mind of God since before time was even initiated. For us, these increasingly rapid developments are just incremental insights and progressive revelations into the eternal nature and consciousness of an infinitely wise and powerful Creator!

Job 38:31-33 “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, Or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth a constellation in its season, And guide the Bear with her satellites? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, Or fix their rule over the earth?”

Like the expanding universe itself, God is forever filling all things with the knowledge of the glory of Himself, which Jesus also shared before time began.

John 17:1-5 “Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, even as You gave Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”

Isaiah 9:7 “There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this.”

Imagine two equally passionate paleontologists in this present life who both – upon being interviewed for a documentary science program about theropods – unashamedly “gush” over the fossil remains of, let’s say, the formidible, terrifying…and thankfully, extinct…Tyrannosaurus Rex. One “digger” cares nothing about the claims – either upon his soul or upon his bone pile – of some obscure Creator-God. His peer, on the other hand, has “eternity in his heart” and is growing to know his Redeemer intimately. The one will never experience anything pertaining to his passion beyond dead, dry bones. But the other might well be in for some surprises in the New Heaven and the New Earth, where things won’t be eating other things in order to survive, i.e., (formerly) predator and prey will coexist peacefully along with the (glorified) children of God:

Isaiah 11:6-9 “And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze, Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain, For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea.”

“You have a T-Rex?”

“We have a T-Rex!” (famous movie quotes).

1 Corinthians 2:9 “But just as it is written, ‘Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, And which have not entered the heart of man, All that God has prepared for those who love Him.’ ”

Of course, only eternity will reveal the still hidden mysteries of God and our passion and our focus in heaven will not be upon the creation, but upon our “betrothed,” our precious Savior and Redeemer who was willing to pay the ultimate price, forfeiting His own life and blood in exchange for our salvation, to deliver us forever from the power of sin and death!

God gave mankind an innate curiosity about our amazing cosmos. There is nothing ignoble per se about the search for intelligent life on other planets and in other solar systems. But if the “spark” of life as we know it does indeed emanate exclusively from a (largely disavowed and discredited) deity commanding an invisible spiritual dimension that parallels our own, then there may be a very, very long wait, depending on God’s timetable. Could it be that a diminutive, watery blue marble hung in space, literally bursting with life in every conceivable form, is the singular oasis of bio-diversity in an incomprehensibly vast physical universe? Again, only eternity will “tell.”

Romans 11:33 “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”

Even throughout eternity we, as glorified believers in heaven, will continue to grow and progress in our knowledge of the immeasurable depths of God in Christ Jesus. Why can we never completely “catch up” with God? Because He had a really, really big head start! How big?

As big as INFINITY!

In the gospel of Luke chapter 16:19-31, Jesus tells the parable of two deceased men who awaken to find their souls on opposite sides of eternity; one died rich and the other died poor; the one is forever receding from the glorious presence of God; the other is forever drawing closer to Him.

Which side of eternity will you be on?

-∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ (?) ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

(All scripture quotes NASB; some Bible verse punctuation and bold italics, mine).

Salvation and sexual reproduction? The new, revised 2019 paperback edition of my (ghost-written) book, Born of the Water Born of the Spirit, can be found at the following link. It is also available as a Kindle ebook download: