You were made for eternity. Yes, you. You were made by God, for God, to express His glory in the earth, and to share in His eternity. Your hope of eternal life was established before the world began by the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2). Now, you may be wondering and perhaps asking the question “Why on earth would the Creator of the universe be interested in me?” Or perhaps you may be asking, “Why would someone like God use His time to pursue someone like me?” God is interested in you and is pursuing you because He loves you! God made you to have fellowship with Him. God is after you because you have a part of God in you carrying around. God wants to preserve Himself in you. Inspite of you and inspite of me and inspite of our faults and shortcomings, God loves us too much to let us go. God is so intent on sharing His eternity with us, that while we were still sinners, He sent His only begotten Son, Christ, to die for us (See Romans 5:8).
The truth is, when we are far away from God, God misses us far more than we miss Him. From the beginning, it was never God’s intention for any of us to perish but that all of us would, through repentance and true faith in the Lord Jesus, come to Him (See 2 Pet 3:9, 1 Tim. 2:4 ). God is so intent in having us come to Him that He did not wait for us to make the first move. The Bible says in Romans 5: 8 that, “While we were still sinners Jesus died for us.” God would rather have His only begotten Son die in our place so that He may reconcile us to Himself, than to live without you and me (See John 3:16). Remember always then, that the blood of Christ was shed so that you and I would not be lost, but through His reconciling blood, and redeeming love, be drawn back into fellowship with God. That fellowship begins with developing knowledge of God which moves us to repentance, positions us for forgiveness, develops holy attitudes in us and sanctifies us for worship. Having worshipped, we are then equipped to serve God through Christian service (mission to the world). In both our worship and service to the world, we are constantly reminded by the Holy Spirit of the promised return of Jesus. That reminder keeps us faithful as we anticipate the return of Christ to usher us into that eternity for which God made us (See for example 1 Jn 3:2).
The Bible further indicates in Ephesians 2: 4-5 that “God is rich in mercy and because of His great love with which He loves us, even when we were dead in trespasses He made us alive together with Christ. By grace you are saved.” That is good news and a good reason to rejoice in the Lord. Hallelujah! More good news! God never intended for anyone to perish but for all people to come to Him through repentance and share eternity with Him. Let me just say this. Eternity with God has always been part of God’s plan for your life and destiny. Hell was not made for you and me. Hell was made for the devil and the devil’s angels. Listen to the words of Matthew 25:41: “Then the Lord will say to those on the left (that is, those who intentionally did not come to Him through faith and repentance), depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Hell was not prepared for you. Eternity with God has always been your destiny. Chose Him, believe Him and His Christ, Jesus, and eternity with God shall be yours. The idea is that those who choose God in time will get to relate to Him in eternity with the gift of eternal life. But those who, in time, choose evil over good, the devil over God, have decided for themselves to relate to the devil in eternal torment and misery.
Notwithstanding that however, do not become overly preoccupied with hellfire and brimstone and the massive unending burning lake. Instead, think about heaven and eternity with God. The writers and preachers of the first century were using metaphors that would depict for their readers and listeners what it would be like existing without God for all eternity. It would be like hell. It is to be thirsty and not having a drop of water to quench that thirst. It is to be hungry and not being able to satisfy that hunger. Living apart from God is hell because it would be like having excruciating pain and having no relief from that pain. Living apart from God is hell because it is like being lonely and not finding good company. In hell you will have no one to talk with because everyone who did not choose to believe and live with God will be preoccupied with hunger that cannot be satisfied, thirst that cannot be quenched, severe pain that cannot be relieved, and endlessly perplexed by their own loneliness that cannot be escaped.
You were not made for a place like that. You were made for a place where the Bread of Life is always in abundance. You were made for a place where the Fountain of Living Water is always freshly flowing. You were made for a place where there is no more pain and no more loneliness because eternity with God is a state of great and joyful fellowship and communion. I encourage you to become preoccupied with the thought and conviction of eternity with God. Begin that journey to eternal communion with God by accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, today (see Romans 10:9-13).
God is a communal God who lives in fellowship with Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is seeking to invite and embrace us into that fellowship and communion. God made us to pursue eternity and to have fellowship and communion with Him. From the beginning God has put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastics 3:11). This is an intimation of the timelessness to which human intuition is persistently caught up in the pursuit of God’s divine revelation and promise. Eternity was not placed in our hearts to be merely contemplated. It was put there by God for us to pursue. We were made as creatures of time; but time will never be enough for us because our completion is only found in the timeless God. God placed eternity in our hearts and it has become a sort of built-in satellite that signals us to a grander frontier beyond temporal horizons, to the horizon of the invisible and eternal. Eternity has been the pursuit of generations. Many before us died with their hearts yearning for it and buried with their faces positioned and ready to greet the arrival of another and more glorious life, which death cannot hinder. Indeed, those who lived and died believing in the Lord Jesus, who conquered death by His resurrection, shall also be raised up with Him. We were made for eternity and God placed that desire in us for us to diligently and faithfully pursue.
God placed eternity in our hearts so that we would not become satisfied with and therefore surrender to, the mundane and unworthy. Rather, God placed eternity in our hearts so that we would invest our time and efforts into viewing life and death with the perspective of eternity. God placed eternity in our hearts and minds so that we would know and believe that there is a superior existence and indeed, Someone more desirous and more superior than who we are, where we are, and what we have attained in space and time. Because God made us with eternity in our hearts, we were made to submit to that superior existence and pursue the Source of divine excellence from whom we emanate in the first place.
Eternity with God is therefore a predisposed preference for our pursuit implanted in each of us by God. Now, we may chose to believe that, suppress it, or deny it; but it does not make it any less true. We were predisposed to choose God as much as we were predisposed to share in God’s eternity because God is intent on having eternal fellowship with us.
Inasmuch as we may be creatures of time, and living in time, and finite though we are, we have the affinity to yearn for the Creator and the infinite by virtue of the God-implanted sensor in each and every one of us. This God implanted sense or desire for eternity in our hearts, implies that God in creation constituted us with the potentiality to become offspring of God. If in creation we were so constituted, then in His final consummation, we, having believed in Christ and accepted God’s gift of grace in Him, will realize that potentiality.
This finite grasping for the infinite is God’s blueprint in us that motivates and inspires us to follow His design for our growth and development in Him. We were created to be blessed and our hearts were designed to not settle for less than what God intends for us. That way, when we follow any other design, our hearts are left unfulfilled and still needing to yearn after God. That is why, no matter what we have already experienced, accomplished, or have had a foretaste of in this life, it is never enough. Because eternity is implanted in us, nothing less than that future glory to which we may attain in this temporal life, will satisfy us. St. Augustine grasped this essential conviction when he made the point that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God.
Since we were not created to find fulfillment in ourselves, but rather, in God, eternity and the realization of our greater potential, which is our transformation into the glory of Christ and therefore the holiness of God, must be God’s ultimate design for us. If indeed we see an affinity between Christ the Son and God the Father, and, if indeed we believe that the Holy Spirit has and is engrafting us into Christ the Son, then we should not find it difficult to accept that the human selfhood is being moved toward Christhood and if toward Christhood, then toward the image of the One who made us, and who was in Christ, reconciling us to Himself. This is the affirmation of 1 John 3:2: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Selfhood, indeed the full human potentiality is only realized in accordance to the degree of affinity that the person has developed in his/her relationship with God. We human beings are always becoming, always transforming, always being renewed and transformed to become like the divine essence from which we were created. Our eternal purpose is to become like Christ.
Through creation, God conferred Himself to us and fit us, in time, with the capacity for a virtuous living that prepares us for eternity. The believer’s life that came out of the splendor of creation, where God conferred Himself on us with the capacity to give of ourselves to others as we participate with divinity in the liberation of the cosmos, is destined to exist in the realm of the eternal. That life, emerging from creation and therefore from the Mind and Spirit of God, having fallen because of the sin of disobedience, has been lifted up by divine grace to start a new life through the conviction of sin, repentance, forgiveness, justification, and sanctification.
As the Holy Spirit works in us to conform our new life to Christ, He is also stretching our faith, widening our imagination, fitting us with new ways of thinking, and extending our hope to see and understand that we were made with the fiber of the eternal God. If, indeed, we emanate from the eternal God, it follows that we also have the potentiality for eternal duration. Assuredly, it is God that made us; we did not make ourselves.
Since all things created come from God, it follows that the moral and divine DNA of God is intertwined in our humanity. That way, the more dominant trait in us, God’s moral and divine DNA, and therefore God’s divine will, ultimately will prevail over the human will or tendencies. It is that dominantly divine (trait) nature of God in us that continues to override those natural and humanly innate and recessive traits or nature in us that so often make us weak, prone to evil, and driven by conflicting imperatives. That divinely dominant trait, inherited from our Maker, stirs up in us attitudes and behaviors that are fitting for believing sons and daughters of God. God made us to behave like Him in the world. If we were made in the image of God with the similitude of God, and if it is indeed in Him that we live and move and have our being, as attested by scripture, not only are we His offspring, we are also inheritors of His eternity. You were made for eternity. (For a more indebt discussion of this and other spiritually inspired chapters, please purchase my book “Made For Eternity.” It will elevate your thoughts and transform your life).
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