Eternity

"When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'"
-1 Corinthians 15:54
     Last weekend my church had its annual Spring Bible Conference with the theme "In Christ, all will be made alive". I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and I started thinking about the resurrection of the believer. The last message we had heard was about the glory of the resurrection, and how those in Christ will live to be with Him forever. After coming home from the conference and taking a much needed nap, I began thinking about what eternity will be like. Although none of the messages touched directly on this, I wanted to share some of my thoughts.
     Ravi Zacharias often says that if we think about our perception of reality, we have to come to the conclusion that we were made for the eternal. "People often say things like 'my, how you've grown', or 'oh, how time flies'. Yet if we heard a fish saying 'wow, this water is wet', we would find that weird. That is, of course, unless the fish was meant to be on land". The only logical explanation for why we would be surprised at the passing of time is that we are not beings meant for a reality bound by time. God created us to be eternal beings, not finite beings.
     If we truly are meant to live forever, what would our lives look like? I thought about this question and I pondered an eternal existence. Won't life get boring after a while? Even in this short life, we struggle to find fulfillment. We look to many different things like television, the internet, relationships, and money to satisfy us. Despite the vastness of what is available to us in this technological world, we still eventually leave incomplete.
     The reason we can't find fulfillment in this world is that the things we look to are finite. Only something that is infinite can fill an eternal desire. The fulfillment we get from this world is incomplete. Even if we are satisfied for a time, the next day we have to turn to something else. The things in this world can neither completely fill nor completely sustain us. So is this what eternity will look like? Day after day trying to look for fulfillment, but always coming up partially and incompletely satisfied?
     No! The things this world has to offer are finite, but the God we will live with in eternity is infinite. He will both fill and sustain us, forever and ever. We won't have to look for fulfillment in anything else but God Himself. He is Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Eternity with God will be anything but boring. I don't know what it will be like exactly, but I am confident that it will be awesome. Have you ever thought about what it is that we are really looking for in our life? It's love. "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us (1 John 3:16)". In eternity, we will be able to have rest in the love given by the Father, shown through the Son, and made perfect in the Spirit.
-Smart