Nehemiah 9:5
Then the leaders of the Levites…called out to the people: “Stand up and praise the Lord your God, for he lives from everlasting to everlasting!”
Time defines our lives so completely that it is very hard to understand eternity. I recall hearing about heaven when I was a child and I concluded that it was a very unattractive idea. I assumed that there must be a lot of worship going on in heaven and so I built up a picture of it being like a never ending church service. The service I had in mind started with a brilliant presentation by the angelic choir who sang beautifully for 650 years. This was followed by a welcome and some notices, which were relatively brief at only 200 years. And then there was an absolutely amazing sermon that had 1,400 extremely good points and went on for 2,000 years. I decided that heaven probably wasn’t for me! Fortunately, heaven will be nothing like that. It is beyond time, just like God.
Whenever the Bible talks about God being eternal it is as a springboard to worship. God has no beginning and no end. He is never in a hurry and he is never late. The past, present and future are all the same to God. In the New Testament we learn that Jesus and the Holy Spirit have always lived with the Father. The apostle Paul wrote of Jesus: “He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together” (Colossians 1:17).
Charles Spurgeon, the famous Baptist preacher, wrote: “Do you not know that God is an eternal, self-existent being, that to say he loves now, is, in fact, to say he always did love, since with God there is no past and can be no future? What we call past, present and future, He wraps up in one eternal NOW. And if you say that he loves you now, you thereby say that he loved you yesterday, he loved you in the past eternity and he will love you forever.” Understanding eternity is beyond us, but what we can understand is that we are loved. Our response should be to worship God, just like the people in Nehemiah’s day.
Question
How do you relate to the concept of eternity?
Prayer
Eternal God, I praise you for your infinite greatness. I fall at your feet in worship and adoration. Amen