Eternity

As human beings, we struggle to even comprehend the meaning of the word “eternal.” To begin, we need to make some distinctions. First, we need to distinguish God’s eternity from our eternity, or timeless eternity from everlasting eternity. His life is so full that he doesn’t experience it in a succession of moments like we do. Our eternity is better thought of as everlastingness. Everlasting means that we will last forever. We never get outside of time; we live within time forever.

But, more than that, we will exist either in a state of everlasting joy and life, or in a state of everlasting destruction and death. The Scriptures (Matthew 25, Revelation 20) teach that at the end of history, Christ will return, raise the dead, and execute a final judgment. At that time, the righteous—body and soul—will enter into the Joy of God forever, and the wicked—body and soul—will enter into Misery forever. The common names for these two eternal destinies are Heaven and Hell.

I want to focus on two issues. One is a fear we have about Heaven and one is a concern we have about Hell. Our fear about Heaven is this: we worry that we will be bored. We know that we are promised unending joy, but we struggle to believe it because we fear that having “arrived” at Joy, Joy will grow old and stale to us. Our desires always outrun their satisfaction. Desire dies in its fulfillment. We get what we want, and we find that it’s not enough. And our repeated experience of this phenomenon, in every aspect of our lives, creates the fear in us that Heaven will be no different.