Life Everlasting

Sixth Wednesday After Pentecost

Today concludes our Wednesday series on things some people have trouble in believing in the Apostles' Creed. The final words of the creed are "and the life everlasting." 

There are a number of questions regarding this phrase that I don't want to go into in detail, but will mention. Can you be a Christian and not believe in eternal life? Yes. I should note, however, that Jesus and all the NT writers believed in eternal life. Did most of the people of the OT not believe in eternal life? Not exactly. Almost all of the OT writers believed that after you died, you continued in a sleep-like existence called Sheol, which was under the earth. Do animals go to heaven? Yes. Read Romans 8:18-25. The entire creation will be redeemed. Will I be reunited with loved ones who have passed on? Yes, I believe this, although I have no clear Biblical evidence to back it up. Are the testimonies of people who have had near death experiences of heaven to be believed? I'm dubious but not dismissive. Do people become angels after they die? No. The Bible is explicit and consistent that angels are a different order to being from humans.

Like the creed, I believe in the life everlasting. But what exactly is the life everlasting. I have a case to make. For most Christians throughout Christian history the life everlasting has meant continued living in some form in an infinite extension of time. My contention is that life everlasting is something totally other than time and totally other than space in the dimensions we know. 

In Sunday School I have used the example of the 1890's mathematics book Flatland to illustrate this. The book features the King of Lineland whose world is a single line. For him, all he can perceive is a point or not a point. There is no other place to look than straight ahead. The Kind of Flatland is hugely more advanced. He perceives in two dimensions. He can look side to side. He can perceive not just a point, but a line. The line may be short or long. It may be only a point. He can perceive multiple lines with variously lengthed spaces in between lines. Then there is Spaceland. This is where we live. We are far advanced over the linelanders and flalanders. We perceive in three dimensions, depth, height, and length. The linelander thinks that nothing exists other than a point, because a point is all he can perceive. The flatlander thinks that nothing exists other than lines, all sorts of lines and all sorts of spaces in between. If I, a spacelander, were to put my hand on a flatlander's world before him, he would perceive my hand as a line coming from out of nowhere. It would be coming out of nowhere because he cannot perceive the depth dimension in I live in.

This is all much easier to explain if I have a dry erase board in front of me and can demonstrate it along with explaining it in words.

In the resurrection appearances in the gospels, Jesus seems to come out of nowhere, be here for a while, then vanish into nowhere. The Ascension is another example of His vanishing into another dimension. When angels appear in the Bible. they come out of nowhere and later vanish into nowhere. Can we understand that like the linelander and the flatlander, we spacelanders cannot perceive any spacial dimension beyond our three? That does not mean that there are no spacial dimensions beyond our three. Can we understand that God's realm may lie in a dimension or dimensions beyond our spatial perception? 

So far I've have only talked of sight perception. There are other sorts of sense perceptions that we humans have. Our dogs have an  entire realm of smell perception that we have only the faintest sniff of. Our telescopes perceive vast galaxies far beyond our visual perception. Black holes suck in all matter including light within their gravitational pull. Do they spew it out in some other dimension. We don't yet know. Electrons can be in one space and then another space, without going through the intervening space. Do they move into another dimension, then back into ours? We don't know. 

At the speed of light, time stops. The light we see from, for instance, the star Rigel is the light that was there 520 years ago. That is to say that it is 520 light years away. Rigel may have burned out as a supernova sometime in the last 520 years but we can't know that until its light no longer shines where we are.

If we time-machined to year 1800, not all that long ago, as time goes, and told someone that we could make an accurate two dimensional representation of them, like a painting only more accurate, while at the same time sending that representation in only a second or two to someone else on the other side of the world, and they would see it exactly as we see it, they would say "impossible." Then they would ask who took it over to the other side of the world. Was it an incredibly fast ship and incredibly fast horse? We would then tell them, "No, it was something you can't see or touch or smell or hear, that goes up to a complex chunk of metal we put in space, which sends it back down to a device the person on the other side of the world is holding, a device which then reproduces it exactly a we see it, and does this all in a couple of seconds. No way.

All we have discovered in science and technology, to my mind, makes heaven and God and the whole spiritual realm far easier to believe. We now have such clearer analogies. 

I've gone far afield here and haven't really talked about my subject, life everlasting. So here is is in a couple of sentences. To God and God's realm all time is as an instant. God stands both outside of time and in it. Heaven is another realm both spatially, temporally, and in a hundred other ways we don't even know about. Only our imaginations can perceive it at all. And imagination will be our theological subject next Wednesday.

Faithfully,

Christian