Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Orange Moon Wednesday, March 23, 2022 "Time and Eternity"

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…


"Time and Eternity"

    

    Theologians and philosophers often ponder the respective natures of eternity and time.  Most conclude the realms to be exclusive of one another in substance, most notably in the sense that eternity does not merely consist of a very lengthy period of time.  Forever rather bears a different nature and and protocol altogether.   The Lord Jesus Christ confirmed this proposition:

    "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent" (John 17:3).

    Time involves duration, the sequential passage of one moment after another and our experiences therein.  Eternity, conversely, involves relation, the personal and intimate knowledge of the Creator.  We might say, "Time is about what.  Eternity is about Who."  Time emphasizes the physical, the visible, the tangible, the heard, the touched, and the felt.  Eternity places primary focus on the spiritual, the personal, the known, and the being known (without eliminating or minimizing material realities).  Time demands our rapt attention, requiring our response to its realities.  Eternity will forever give the grace of knowing something - Someone - whose full heart of loving, relational reality will fill our hearts with the same.

    "And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:26).

    Eternity has already begun for born again believers in the Lord Jesus, albeit in limited measure.  We know God.  Moreover, to some degree, we know Him as we will know Him.  This constitutes the very essence of our salvation.  "if any man love God, the same is known of Him… Ye have known God" (I Corinthians 8:3; Galatians 4:9).  Thus, while eternity will not merely be an extension of time, it will forever continue the relationship with our Lord that began in the temporal moment when we trusted the Lord Jesus.  In this sense, God has already "made us sit together in Heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:6).

   Forever awaits God's sons and daughters in Christ with endless and boundless doings of delight.  Everyone of them will be infused with the personally known and tangibly realized reality of our Lord.  He will "fill all things" (Ephesians 4:10).  Thereby, He will immerse our being with the Light we presently "see through a glass darkly," but which we will then see through Christ more brightly than we can now imagine (I Corinthians 13:12).  Time and eternity are not the same.  However, the Lord we met in the passage of moments will be the same Lord we will know in the unending glory of forever, the eternal knowledge of God for which He made us, and unto which the Lord Jesus died to redeem us.

"But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus."
(Ephesians 2:4-7).

Weekly Memory Verse
    We had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead."
 (II Corinthians 1:9)

    

 

   





 





































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