Quotes about Eternity

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.

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.

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.

heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future. That's not a category or concept we find in the Bible. This is why a lot of translators choose to translate aion as "eternal." By this they don't mean the literal passing of time; they mean transcending time, belonging to another realm altogether.

Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away From one another once you are agreed That life is only life forevermore Together wing to wing and oar to oar

For this is love and nothing else is love, The which it is reserved for God above To sanctify to what far ends He will, But which it only needs that we fulfil.

A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him.

Everyone is possessed with an irresistible desire to know his relationship to the Infinite.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.