Eternal and Everlasting

 When you live inside time it is nigh on impossible to imagine someone who lives outside time. Everything we do is dictated to and dependant on the passage of time.  We age.  We can only move forwards inexorably towards the time when we die.  We cannot see our futures and we cant return to our pasts.  Clocks tick and our brain cells die off as we hurry to get everything done that we need to achieve this morning, today, this week, this year, this lifetime.

Jesus doesn't hurry.  Maddeningly He is completely unrestrained and unbothered by the passage of time.  For Him everything is happening now.  And then.  And in the future.   For us, His sense of timing can seem frustrating and unfathomable.  Why hasn't He chosen to return or to intervene before now?   Why does He answer some of our prayers before we ask them and take decades to answer others? 

Not only does He stand outside time - making Him eternal - He is also infinite - making Him everlasting. We can't get our minds round the expanse of the universe or the thought that the light coming from the stars is a gazillion years old.  So how can we begin to understand the one who measures the galaxies with the span of His hands and spoke them into being before anything existed?

It helps me to imagine time as a ruler. I was born onto a certain place on the ruler.  Jesus was born before me and my sons were born after me and we all walk along the ruler until the appointed time of our death.  At which point we step off the ruler and into what surrounds it.  Eternity . But the ruler is held in Gods hand.   He sees the whole ruler from beginning to end and at any point He can insert and remove people from the timeline as He sees fit.  Mostly He lets time run its course.  But every now and again He intervenes.  He makes the sun stand still for a few hours, pausing time.  Or He speeds up the time it would take a body to heal so that it becomes instantaneous.  He sometimes gives people at one point on the timeline a glimpse into what is happening further along.   The most amazing this He does is that He puts eternity into our hearts so that even in the busyness of life as we travel along in time we have an awareness of our eternal surroundings.  We sense there is more.  We get glimpses of what lies beyond the boundaries of the ruler.   I wonder if, when we eventually step off it ,we shall fly.