Man’s horizons are constantly stretching. For years now, I have sat on the edge of my seat following the missions of NASA and other space and aeronautic organizations, amazed at how far we as a species have pushed the boundaries of what is possible. Every new discovery ignites my imagination. I was sure we reached the pinnacle when the Rosetta mission landed a probe on a comet, but then water was discovered on Mars. I eat up the pictures Hubble beams back to earth in awe of the enormity and number of worlds God fashioned with His fingertips (Psalm 8:3).
When I was a kid, I wondered if we would ever explore those worlds. Now I know we will.
My church recently went through a study on the book of Ephesians. Something snagged my attention, and it is found in the latter part of the following passage.
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-7, emphasis added).
This passage offers an amazing view of eternity. It tells us the gospel, and then tells us where the gospel is leading us. This is our ultimate destiny: the exceedingly rich grace and kindness of God being displayed to us for all eternity. We have to understand what this means.
Anyone who has any measure of religion will try to imagine what heaven will be like. From cartoons that tell us we will sit on clouds playing the harp while gently flapping our wings, to books such as Heaven is For Real which give us a picture that is not so different than the cartoons, many ideas exist about what heaven will be. But in this passage we catch a glimpse of the reality. Heaven, eternity, is designed to show the glory of God.
There is a quote from William J. Bouwsma’s John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait that might help us here: "There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice."
Set alongside passages such as Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:20, it is clear that God’s revelation through His creation is not a thing reserved only for eternity future, but is something we can experience now. Imperfectly, because our understanding is imperfect and our bodies are fallen.
It is easy to speak of eternal matters and still have no idea what we are talking about, so it is important to always be expanding and pushing the limits of our imagination. I would like to take Calvin’s statement and go further with it so that the sheer magnitude of this reality can grip us:
There is not one atom, not one point of space that is not meant to show forth the infinite glory of God. Everything, from the most enormous star in the universe to the smallest sub-atomic particle that dances on the fringe of existence, was made for this purpose.
There are infinite points of space in our bodies, and all of them preach infinite grace to us. How many points of space are there in the planet? In the solar system? In the galaxy? In the universe?
Imagine for a moment that day in the future when all mortality is swallowed up by immortality, all sin is done away with and forgotten, and all barriers between us and imperfections are gone. The Marriage Supper of the Lamb is finished, and eternity, the new heavens, and the new earth unfold before us. We stand at the brink of the ages to come. Our senses are now fully capable of comprehending all matter, and our spirits are able to understand all things. We are ushered into our new home, our new Eden, and urged to begin searching out the unsearchable riches of God. The mysteries NASA had only scratched the surface of will be wide open to us. I can only imagine there will be a moment of hesitation as we are all overwhelmed at the prospect of searching out a universe of glory upon glory.
We will never reach the end of the journey, the searching out of God in perfection. But we have all eternity to try. Everything, even now in our fallen estate, is screaming at us the love of God. We must be about the business of this great discovery. The eternal pursuit of infinite grace begins now.
