Quotes About Eternity

Living to create an earthly legacy is a short-sighted goal.

Paulo disse: "Antigamente eu pensava que todas essas coisas eram muito importantes, mas agora as considero sem valor algum, por causa do que Cristo

mientras que lo que no se ve es eterno.

I never was , but am always to be . No one has ever seen me nor will they . Yet I am the hope of all who live . What am I ? page48

I never was , but am always to be . No one has ever seen me nor will they . Yet I am the hope of all who live . What am I ?

Dieses ist das erste Vorgefühl des Ewigen: Zeit haben zur Liebe.

Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die, while mountains and rivers went on for ever and did not notice the passing of time.

In a letter, Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, wrote to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522 about the possibility that people could turn to God after death, asking: Who would doubt God's ability to do that?

God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2). So does God get what God wants?

But the first Christians didn't see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.

In the religious version, you'll often hear that when this happens, one group heads to a good place, and the rest of humanity heads to a bad place. (The people who tell this version of the story are always in the good group, coincidentally enough.) And so your job is to get as many people inside the tent/club/religion/group as possible so that when that day comes, you can all escape together and go somewhere else.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

There's a line in the Bible about the God who is above all and through all and in all. Just one line, but so massive. Above all and through all and in all.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.

Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

We crave coming together and connecting with others because this is what the entire universe has been doing for billions and billions and billions of years.

That's what Spirit does, it brings about new creation. And what was true thirteen billion years ago is true now.

If you don't have that, you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell. The problem, however, is that the phrase "personal relationship" is found nowhere in the Bible.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.