ETERNAL LOVE

ETERNAL LOVE by Keith Giles

We know from God's Word that there was a time when reality as we know it did not exist. In Eternity, a reality which is reality itself, God existed eternally prior to the Creation of all things.

At the point of Creation, which is something slightly easier for our minds to conceive, something came into being which never existed before- Time and Space.

If the angelic beings existed prior to the creation of Time and Space, they would have looked upon it as something wildly unique and utterly strange. To a being for whom Eternity is commonplace, the concept of a miniature reality with a beginning, middle and end, populated by organisms bound by this space, and limited by time, it would have been a wondrous and completely awe-inspiring work of genius. And it was.

For us, mortals bound by the limitations of space and time, and largely unable to conceive of a reality beyond this one that has eternally existed, it is the idea of Eternity that seems strange and foreign and utterly confusing in many ways.

"How could God have always existed?" one of our children asked out loud recently in house church. None of us had an answer for that, but we all could share the wonder expressed by the question.

As a young boy, about nine years old, I can remember lying on my bed and pondering just this question. I surmised that it was impossible for God to have always existed and therefore someone had to have created God. But who? I decided to call that person "King" and in my imagination I placed him as the creator of "God". This satisfied my imagination for about thirty seconds because I quickly asked myself, "Then who created King?" The conundrum was endless, I realized and so I quickly reverted back to the idea that, yes, God was eternally existant all along because there must be some being who created everything and yet who, himself, did not need to be created.

Just a few weeks ago I was thinking about how God can never have a new idea. It hit me because I had read a statement in a book I was reading about how God had supposedly "discovered" something new. I immediately dismissed this statement as false since it is impossible for God to have a new thought that He hasn't already had from Eternity. God doesn't learn because He already knows all things. This is why we say that God is Omniscient. He knows the end from the beginning.

As I thought about this inability for God to have a new thought I realized that this meant that the idea of me, and of you, and of everyone who had or will ever live on this Earth, was also Eternal. This concept riveted me for several minutes.

Could it really be possible that, in the numberless eons previous to the creation of the entire known Universe of space and time that I was a completely, fully realized idea in God's amazing mind?

This means that, not only will I spend Eternity with God in the flesh after my life here is over, but that in some ways I have always been in the heart and mind and imagination of God...even before I was born on this Earth some forty odd years ago.

You were also in God's imagination for Eternity. He knew you, even before he formed you in the womb. You are his beloved and he gladly created everything that we know and experience, even knowing that it would cost him great suffering and unimaginable pain on the cross in order to make a way to be with you forever.

You are so loved!

-kg