What is truly the one thing that money can’t buy?
It’s time!
Nobody … and do mean NOBODY … not even Donald Trump or Bill Gates or George Soros or Oprah Winfrey or Warren Buffet or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk can buy themselves a single second of time … as Steve Jobs found out on October 5th, 2011. His $8.3 billion bought him a pretty good life here. He could buy pretty much anything he wanted except … time.
But what if?
What if you could buy more time? What would you give for one more month or one more year when your time was up? What would you give if you could live forever … for all eternity? If you never had to face the uncertainty of death?
This is the central theme of Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 novel “Tuck Everlasting.” The main character is a young girl by the name of Winnie Foster. She comes from a well-bred, wealthy, respected family. She dresses in the finest clothes and is afforded every opportunity. But her affluent lifestyle comes at a price. Her days are planned out for her … she’s not allowed to run free or play as the other children do … so one day she escapes and goes exploring in the woods surrounding her family home. It is then that she encounters the “Tucks” … a close-knit family with a mysterious past.
The mystery is that the Tucks have found a spring at the base of an old oak tree that has a curious property. Anyone who drinks of its waters will become immortal. You stay at whatever age you are when you drink from it. The parents were in their mid-forties when they drank from the spring … and will stay in their mid-forties forever. The oldest son, Miles, was in his mid-twenties and will stay in his mid-twenties forever. The youngest son … Jesse … is 104 years old … but will be biologically 17 years old forever.
Of course, Jesse and Winnie fall in love and Jesse wants Winnie to drink the water so that they can be 17 together forever. But before she drinks the water, the father … Angus Tuck … takes her out in a boat in the middle of the river. “Look around you,” he tells her. “[This river, these woods] are teaming with life. It’s flowers and trees and frogs. It’s all part of the wheel. It’s always changing, always growing … like you, Winnie. You were once a child … now you’re about to become a woman. One day you’ll grow up and you’ll do something important. You’ll have children, maybe … and then one day you’ll go out … just like the flame of a candle. You’ll make way for new life. That’s a certainty … that’s the natural way of things.
“And then there’s us,” he sighs. “What we Tucks have you can’t call it living. We just … are. We’re like rocks struck at the side of a stream. Do you want to say stuck at the side of a stream?” he asks her. “Do you want to stay stuck as you are … right now … forever? I just want to make you understand that you can’t have living without dying. Don’t be afraid of death, Winnie … be afraid of the unlived life.”
As one reviewer put it: “Babbitt’s book explores the concept of immortality … which might not be as desirable as it appears to be.” From Babbitt’s point of view, immortality or eternity are like rocks stuck at the side of a stream. That’s a poignant image … rocks sitting by a stream unchanged and unmoved by time as it flows by them. “For some, time passes slowly,” Babbitt writes. “An hour can seem an eternity. For others, there can never be enough. For the Tucks, it didn’t exist.”
Here’s the amazing thing about time. We can’t see it or touch it … yet it flows … it moves. Yesterday flows into today … today flows into tomorrow … always flowing … always moving in one direction … forward … never backwards … which tells us what? That time … like a river …has a beginning … a source. Time moves in a certain direction. For many, like Babbitt, it moves towards some dark, mysterious, unknown goal. All the Tucks can do is sit on the banks of time and watch as it sweeps people and events past them … towards a destination that the Tucks will never reach … an end or a conclusion that they will never get to experience.
Given the way that Babbitt describes it, immortality doesn’t sound very desirable, does it? In the end, Winnie decides not to drink the water but to live life to the fullest in the time that she has. For me, Babbitt doesn’t touch on the true tragedy of the Tuck family. As the Apostle Paul so beautifully and succinctly points out, to be present in the body is to be what? Absent from the Lord. The Tuck family is trapped in their bodies forever … forever they are trapped here on earth. As I said earlier, time flows in a very specific direction. It flows from its source … God … and it carries us towards a very definite destination … a destination that the Tucks will never get to experience.
Last week, I briefly mentioned that we will all live forever. The question is … which eternity will you live in. Everyone alive today is going to be alive somewhere forever and ever.
The concept of “Hell” isn’t too popular or too well received today. Even though Jesus describes Hell as a place of “everlasting” or eternal fire (Matthew 25:41), some people … including many Christians … claim that there is no literal fire connected with Hell.
Okay. Let’s assume that they’re right. Suppose there is no fire, no brim stone. Suppose Hell is everything in the world minus God. Minus His love … His grace … His influence. Suppose Hell is everything in the world minus the good and the godly and the moral and the pure and the clean and the righteous? C.S. Lewis described Hell as “everlasting ruin, a decay, crumbling, retreating into yourself, a loss of all rationality and joy, a plunging into misery. But, it’s a self-plunging. It’s a gnawing and an ache, but it’s oriented inward, downward into the abyss” (www.crossway.org/articles). Who would want to be in a place like that? I wouldn’t want to be there for five minutes, would you? Let alone eternity! Heaven, on the other hand, says C.S. Lewis is the opposite of Hell. “Heaven is this ever-increasing, further up, further into joy, into God, into life” (www.crossway.org/articles). Sounds like a much, much better place to spend eternity, don’t you think?
There is eternal life apart from God and there’s eternal life spent with God … amen? As the Apostle Paul explains in 2nd Corinthians 5:6-8: “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
Jesus was not some rock sitting by the stream of history. Jesus was not just some historical figure who lived and died during a certain period of time. “He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:2-3). Jesus not only existed eternally, He was actually an agent in the process of creation. He was not a man who suddenly appeared on the world scene. He is God … who has always existed.
In John 8, Jesus angered the Jewish religious authorities by proclaiming His eternal nature: “If anyone keeps my word He shall never see death.” “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who is dead?” they asked. Jesus’ response was so stunning and so upsetting that some of the people picked up stones to kill Him. What did He say that was so upsetting? “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was … I am” (John 8:48-58).
I AM … the holy, personal name by which God identified Himself to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Abraham WAS … God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit ARE. The name “I AM” describes God’s self-existence. It refers to His forever existing in an eternally present tense.
From our perspective, everything happens as a series of successions or events. One thing relates to another … like links in a chain. Our days are like pearls strung together on a thread. One event triggers another but we can’t foresee what’s to come. Not so for God. God dwells in eternity. He exists in the past and in the present and in the future … all at the same moment. At this very moment, God is here. At the same time, He is with Abraham. And … right now … He exists as the slain Lamb on the throne as John saw Him in Revelation. For God, later is the same as earlier. The end is the same as the beginning. “Now” is the same as “then.” To Him, a day is like a thousand years .. and a thousand years are like a day (2nd Peter 3:8).
In Jesus Christ, time and eternity meet. “He is the image of the invisible God,” Paul writes, “the first born of all creation. For by Him all things were created … things in Heaven and on the earth … visible and invisible … whether thrones or power or rulers or authorities … all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things … and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-17).
Jesus, in one of His final moments with His Disciples prayed: “And now, Father, glorify me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world began” (John 17:5). The glory that Jesus had BEFORE the world began. The Apostle Paul described the incarnation … God becoming man … in this way: “[Jesus] who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made Himself nothing … taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Philippines 2:6-7).
What does that mean to us? It means that God cares for us. This is not a God who, as the deists claim, created the world, wound it up, and sent it off into space and never took an interest in it again. He is not like the Tucks … creating time and then sadly watching it pass by. He created time … and then He stepped into time.
If God did not care, He never would have come. He certainly would not have allowed Himself to be abused and crucified if He did not love you enormously … Amen? The eternal God stepped into time and space so that you could get to know Him … so that you could be forgiven and inherit the eternal kingdom of Heaven. “No one has ever seen God,” says the Apostle John. “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made Him known” (John 1:18). The poet Milton said that Jesus “forsook the courts of everlasting day, and chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.” If that isn’t love, well … I don’t know what is, amen?
What else does this mean to us? It means that God has a plan, and His plan is this: Jesus came from glory and He wants to bring you into that glory. In Jesus’ prayer that I mentioned earlier, He also prayed: “Father … I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory … the glory You have given me because You loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).
He wants you to be with Him … and that has always been His plan since the beginning of time. The Apostle Peter explains it this way: “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers but with the precious blood of Christ … a Lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world … but was revealed in these last times for your sake” (1ST Peter 1:18-20).
The prophets spoke of it … Jesus promised it … and the day will come when you will inherit it … the plan of God to bring you into an everlasting Kingdom that started long before time began. That Kingdom has a king … Jesus! … who has reigned in glory from before the world began and will reign long after the present world order is over.
The plan is … and always has been … to give us eternal life. The Bible says: “This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love! Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1st John 4:9-10).
This has been God’s plan from the start and it is taking the world in a specific direction regardless of what the godless may do. No one can resist Him. His plan is for those who love and serve Him … and the future for those who belong to God is more glorious than anyone can imagine. As it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1st Corinthians 2:9).
Jesus … the Eternal One … stepped into time and history to deliver us from eternal hell. God’s plan of salvation was in His heart from the beginning of time. It’s an eternal plan. And God has loved You from the creation of the universe. Romans 16:5 calls God’s plan of redemption “the mystery kept secret since the world began.” According to Paul in 2nd Timothy 1:9, God’s power and grace were already given to us “in Christ Jesus before time began.” The Apostle Peter declared that Jesus “indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (1st Peter 1:20). The Apostle Paul spoke of the eternal life, “which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began, but has in due time manifested His word through preaching” (Titus 1:2-3). Ephesians 1:4 says that “He chose us in time before the foundation of the world.” Hebrews 13:20 refers to “the blood of the everlasting covenant.” Revelation 13:8 speaks of those whose names are “written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
This is the central message of my life and my ministry and I want to share it with you as plainly as I can. God in Heaven … having created human beings with eternity in our hearts and knowing that we would live somewhere forever … saw the dilemma of His eternity and our morality. I can imagine way back … way, way back … in the chronicles of eternity past, God thinking: “What shall we do? Every human being is going to live somewhere forever. I want them to come and live with me ... but because of their failure and sin and rebellion, I cannot bring them here. What shall I do?”
Indeed … Almighty God took His one and only Son, Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, and said to Him, in effect: “Son … will you go down to that earth and live there for a period of time? And will you take upon yourself their sin? Will you die in their place? Will you allow eternity to touch time at a place called Calvary?” And He did! Jesus came down in the fulness of time … born of a virgin, He joined the human race. He was God’s eternal Son coming to live in this realm of time and space. The Eternal Son of God ascended Golgotha one day … hung on a cross while the Romans crucified Him … spilled out His crimson blood for us … died as Christ the Eternal God … dying in our stead in a moment of time … and rising from the dead three days later … and is currently seated on His Eternal throne … where one day we will be with Him forever and ever!
“Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and grow weary and the young will fall exhausted.” But …
“But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:28-30).
A promise that is as true today … and will be as true tomorrow … as when God first made it thousands of years ago… because a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day to our Eternal God, amen?
