Our Awesome God: Eternity Beyond Earth's Limits

Phil Wickham - What An Awesome God (Official Lyric Video)

The Vastness of Existence

Living on this planet Earth in the vastness of the universe presents an awesomeness about our existence and what makes us exist. Sometimes, I think we are hardly well acquainted with the lifeforms we share this Earth with. Limited by the natural elements of sound and light, our ability to perceive is lacking, even with instrumentation.

In my view, all the planets could be inhabited with lifeforms so radically different from us but fully adapted to the environments they are in, just as fish take to water as we take to land. However, that is another story.

Time in the Eternal Spectrum

We live in a spectrum of eternity; time as we measure it is an infinitesimal fraction of that expanse. In the infinite stretch of eternity from the past, through the present, into the future, everything exists and then does not. Yet we have the imagination of time travel in both directions that can surmise everything is happening at the same time, though our experience of it is limited to the present.

A star somewhere in the firmament is born as another dies, yet it could take billions of years for the light from those stars to reach us. What we then experience in the present is in the distant past of that star. It is a mystery, and there is likely more that transcends the limitations of light in speed and for sight, that could carry us into any time in the span of eternity.

Wheels Within Wheels

In the Scriptures, we read of wheels within wheels. Viewed in the context of time, each wheel has a hub and spokes to the rim and edge of the wheel. If eternity were a wheel, from the hub, you could have a view of any part of the eternal landscape that presents as a sphere of wheels engineered in awesome craftsmanship that defies explanation. Time becomes a place you choose to belong in or observe. [Bible Gateway: Ezekiel 1]

Another wonder is shared by Apostle Peter about the concept of time in the eternal scheme of things, when he says, "that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" [Bible Gateway: 2 Peter 3:8].

Eternal Life Beyond Earthly Limitations

The longest-lived man in the Bible lived for 969 years; Methuselah did not live the length of a Lord's Day. Then just consider the coming of Jesus Christ, who gives eternal life to those who accept Him as Lord and Saviour.

We are taken out of the limitations the Earth, light, and time impose on us as we decay in earthly living to a dimension that is sure to blow any earthly mind away. Our God is an awesome God.

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Thought Picnic: In our symbolic aquariums of our human existence

Fishes in a world

At a sauna there was an installed aquarium full of fishes of different sizes, colours and surprisingly temperaments. Some swam around excitedly even cresting where the air meets the water as if to take a breath, some idling listlessly and others apparently shy and docile hiding behind stones probably not wanting to be disturbed. The spectacle a calming effect on the observer.

I have always been fascinated about aquariums, though I wonder if the entertainment of human beings to the wonders of the deep in ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans are to any other purpose than the abuse of the predominance of humanity to the detriment of other life forms.

Obviously, they need to be studied and understood, the abuse and misuse of some has brought great health benefits to us, but is there is a better way?

The Pisces think tank

To an extent, I have begun to detest zoos and apart from the real effort of conservation brought on by our creating the loss of habitat for economic purposes, anthropomorphic climate change and hunting within the threat of extinction, we all can share this planet without exterminating each other.

The aquarium looked like a fish world and I began to put human thoughts in the heads of the fish. Do they think there are other aquariums like theirs just as we wonder if there are any Earth-like planets with inhabitants like us or lifeforms we can begin to understand? Goldilocks zones at distances that boggle the mind.

In each aquarium that we have built and filled with fishes, have we adopted the role of a demigod in making that nature suitable for their habitation? Keeping the water clean, ensuring it is oxygenated, feeding the fish, observing closely their health and wellbeing with the taking of action to arrest anomalies. Are we like fish to a divine being in the same sense?

By dorsal velocity

Consider a situation where the fish was able to escape its aquarium to experience life outside it and then we realise that to escape earth we need to take essential parts of our earthly environment with us, a life-supporting kit as we put a fiery rocket to our backsides to escape. It would be madness to the fish, it would have been madness to man just over a century ago.

Then just two days ago, I boarded an Airbus A380 with the capacity for a village from Johannesburg to Paris for a journey of 10 hours 55 minutes at 40,000 feet (12.192 km) altitude which in a straight line would be 5,430.95 miles (8,740.26 km). I did that return journey 5 times in the space of a year.

This our capacity for mad adventure is more or less the norm, yet, we would find it strange in fish, yet, we are gleefully entertained out at Hermanus, South Africa, between July and November when whales flip out of the water and we can watch from comfort terra firma.

Fishing for meaningfulness

None of my thoughts are fully formed on the comparison for aquariums and fish tanks to our earth of somewhat diminishing resources with explosive population growth in some parts of our world. However, I do recognise that we live in different kinds of aquariums within national boundaries that confer citizenship as well as limitations in travel where others have privileges, opportunities and means to leap between aquariums of humanity without much of a care about it.

Global travel, we have probably mastered, space travel after the moon landings has gone no further than International Space Station with considerably finite resources. Interstellar travel is still the stuff of wild imagination and science fiction, even that had helped our understanding of how to live better on earth.

The human body for all its resilience is still quite fragile, there is still much to learn about ourselves and the many organisms we share the earth with. I do wonder if the fish see us as some other lifeform and as they swim to the sides of the tank or the top of the water, they are trying to communicate with us and in all our human predominance masking our apparent idiocy we have not learnt to say a common hello to the fishes in our aquariums.

Editorial: The morning after the world ended

A rugged earth

And so the earth is reborn as morning broke very much like the first morning, you wonder what happened to the scientifically predicted end of the world that seems to have passed without event.

The earth itself has seen many destructions and renovations, the earth at the beginning in Genesis did pre-exist, but it was without form and void, the backstory told later on informs that it was the domain of Lucifer’s rule before he rebelled and in one instant all life was wiped off the earth for an indeterminate period of time.

The life-forms of that bygone age are what we see as fossils of dinosaurs and the measure of time is an eternity that stretches from millions into billions of years ago.

Flood for a new beginning

Creationism gives the context to a post-Adamite destruction of all life that breathes air with the floods of Noah who with his ark saved both his family and all species of breathing animals.

Another destruction is pending, the one that was to be preceded by a rapture, yesterday, a tribulation, a destruction and the creation of a new heaven and new earth.

What our dear scientist missed was the fact that he had no clue about that scheduling. The omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience of God can be explained in natural terms.

Hubs, wheels and spheres of time

The dimension of time in which God dwells is like the hub of a wheel that extends out to the circumference where we find ourselves in a sector of a greater and mightier purpose than we can fathom, but that is the concept of eternity, it has no beginning or end because it is at the centre of all things and we calibrate our three-dimensional sector of this in units of measurable time.

The analogy of the wheel is probably what we can fully understand because we can create movement when it is properly attached, the mind-blowing dimension to this is a wheel in the form of a perfect sphere, multidirectional and self-propelling – in that situation you cannot have a hub as you would for a wheel but astronomers would probably appreciate the contexts of gravity, centrifugal and centripetal forces and much more.

The folly of man

What our scientist tried to do was have a peek into a point on the surface of a hub of hubs of spheres of dimensions of time and pinpoint with accuracy an event that even Jesus Christ said neither He nor the angels knew apart from God the Father.

It is hard enough predicting the weather, the markets ebb and flow with forces that are almost indeterminate, we cannot predict our own demise or even with any certainty the course of our lives and yet somebody wants to predict the end of the world. Amuse me.

Once again, his dimensions were out of sorts, his measurements in earth-bound units of finite time and he expected to offer a perspective of eternal purpose – what folly – for that again, his credibility has been questioned and we should expect another excuse and the world will continue until that expected but unknown date.

Good morning, world.

Planet Earth joins the Star Wars

More acronyms than nuclear weapons

When President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) popularly known as Star Wars, many wondered about the militarisation of space and the consequences for peace.

We were still in the Cold War and though Russia and America were beginning to point less weapons at each other under the SALT treaties SALT I and SALT II which became START and then the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), one did wonder if the limitations in the use of nuclear weapons had not become a proliferation of multi-letter acronyms of the same agreements rehashed every few years to maintain the similitude of relevance to the world at large whilst others did their thing.

My gun is bigger

At least the impression people have had is that except in times of war, when any belligerent sovereignty wanted to flex their well-oiled Schwarzenegger muscles in some sophisticated arms, they had the common courtesy of informing their colleagues in this facile beauty contest of their intentions to test.

Greenpeace goes into overdrive, all the leftwing anti-nuclear groups excite their proxies in all political and news forums, some governments pronounce caution no condemnation, the UN does a bit of sabre-rattling coupled with an African rain dance and when enough publicity has been gained for the event, the test goes ahead as planned; condemnation follows displeasure, probably a boycott and sanctions in tow but nothing seriously binding.

The country proves its mettle and a tick goes into the acknowledgement register of all other countries that they are no more to be trifled with; such is the power of gun-boat diplomacy.

Get your gun, Xian

Little did we know that Star Wars did not have to cost that much and follow all that rigmarole of unnecessary protocols; simply find an ageing weather satellite and shoot it down, as China did.

China sent up an anti-satellite ballistic system to destroy the satellite; America, Australia and Canada have already criticised China for taking out the ageing man-made object which was put into orbit in 1999, others are supposed to follow suit very soon as news breaks across the globe.

As it transpired, “The US believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of co-operation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area”, if I read that right, it would appear someone forgot to put the agreement on paper, hence nothing about the letter of co-operation regarding conduct in the civil space area.

Next time you see a shooting star, just remember, the earth has now joined the Star Wars and it is China that did it first.