Sermon Central
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An Observation About Eternity
Contributed by Jonathan Spurlock on Feb 5, 2024 (message contributor)
Text, Ecclesiastes 3:11, American Standard Version: He hath made everything beautiful in its time: also he hath set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end.
Every day we live takes us one day closer to the end of our earthly journeys and face to face with eternity. We read in the Scriptures any number of places where the writer makes mention of “forever”, ‘Everlasting”, and so forth.
Even Solomon got one thing right when he wrote “He (God) hath set eternity in their heart”. Most religions have an idea of an afterlife, at least, even though their definitions don’t even come close to what the Bible teaches: either everlasting life in God’s presence, or, everlasting torment in flaming fire for those who reject God and the plan of salvation.
But what’s a little unnerving to me is that the closer we get to the end of this age, the less we hear about eternity itself. I don’t know why this is the case, but maybe it’s something we should think about. I mean, it’s one thing to rejoice because we believers are going to spend forever with Jesus in Heaven, but it’s something way different to think about people, even some we know, who are facing forever in Hell.
Now, maybe you’ve heard some of the same illustrations which were relatively popular years ago (at least, these were used a lot). Here’s one: take the number of every knife, spoon, and fork on the earth’s surface, multiply that sub-total by one million, let that represent years, and when all those years were over, eternity would have just begun.
Here’s another I heard a preacher use many years ago: Suppose a bird could fly from Earth to the edge of the universe carrying one grain of dirt or dust at a time. By the time that bird carried every speck of dust, dirt, or whatever from Earth to the edge, eternity would have just started.
As good as those are, if for nothing else to get someone thinking, they don’t reflect that every person lives in the past-now-future “system” so that even when one does nothing—like, sleep—he or she goes to sleep in the “now” that became the past and wakes up in the future.
Maybe we could think of eternity as being forever in the “here and now”, always experiencing a constant, never-ending repetition, for, well, forever. There is no end in eternity, and too many, I think, fail to realize this.
Forever in Heaven? Thank You, Lord, for salvation. Forever in Hell? Don’t do it. Accept God’s gift of salvation today!
Scripture quotations taken from the American Standard Version of the Bible (ASV)
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