We cannot be anything but created beings. We think and reason and feel according to our nature as creation. How then do we understand eternity? How do we understand something that is outside of our first principles of existence? In thinking of eternity we often think of it as a continuum, or like time–that never ends, but keeps going on and on, like a mathematical infinity. But of course we know that this understanding falls woefully short of real eternity, because time itself is somehow bound up in the that which is created.

The Apostle Paul says that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If we desire to understand eternity, let us then look at Jesus Christ, in whom the fulness of deity dwells bodily, that is, eternity. God is all and there is none beside him. So eternity is not some independent idea to be examined and toyed with, but rather it is an aspect of God’s character. All the more reason, then, for us to look to its revelation in Christ, who is that of God which became man to commune to us God’s life and essence. Jesus does not say “think of me as I think of the Father” no, he says “abide in me as I abide in the Father.” And many other passages also show that knowing God is not of propositional understanding but personal experience, fueled, certainly, by this objective knowledge that is revealed, but only efficient if approriated subjectively to the individual. As it says in Colossians 3: “For you have died, and who you are is hidden with Christ in God.”

So we see that eternity can be nothing if it is not relational. What and who God is can only be real to us insofar as it is in personal relationship with him. So also it is with eternity. Eternity is not an unending timeline. Though certainly its character is that it has no beginning and no end, this is because neither does God, and eternity is that unchanging unchangeable nature of God’s being. And the knowledge of it is found in Christ.

If then we are in Christ and our lives are hidden with him, we see that our every breath and thought and word and action is eternal in significance. They are temporal in that they pass away and are thought of no more, but they are also eternal because they are expressed in the relationship that God has established with us in Christ.

Therefore, what greater crime than to not be content, for who we are now and what we are now is given in order that we might express through it what is eternal, that is, of God’s character. For this reason scripture tells us to first put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony, to then let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, and to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly. Such things are practical, real time ways of living, which are in fact eternal; not that we have conjured up eternity by our actions, but that eternity is and always has existed in God as a relationship and is therefore given to us to partake of in Christ by faith.