Ready for Eternity?
If you were to take a quick look through your house, you would obviously find a variety of items. Each one has its own distinct “life span.”
For example, I once had a backscratcher that lasted about fifteen minutes. My son got it for me with tickets he earned at a Chuck-E-Cheese type place. As I happily used it to scratch my back, the cheap plastic thing snapped in half.
Milk doesn’t last too much longer than that backscratcher. If you don’t use up all the milk within a week or so of buying it, you’ll be pouring cottage cheese into your cereal bowl. When your milk “plops” into the bowl, or smells like an outhouse in August, those are bad signs!
Some things last longer. A jar of peanut butter or a can of soda could last a year or so. Unless they are in my house where peanut-butter is eaten by the spoonful and soda is guzzled like a Suburban guzzles gas.
Other things come with a lifetime warranty. I once had a basement done with ceiling tiles that came with a lifetime warranty. I’m glad they did because I had to replace seven of them within the first six weeks of installation.
Yes, even stuff with lifetime warranties doesn’t last. We see things dying, decaying, rotting, rusting, and breaking around us every day. All of that should cause us to realize that life here on earth is not going to last forever.
But guess what? While things were not made to last forever, we were! When life on earth is finished, that will not be the end of the story. In many ways, it will be just the beginning!
The Bible says, we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down -- when we die and leave these bodies -- we will have a home in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long for the day when we will put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will not be spirits without bodies, but we will put on new heavenly bodies. Our dying bodies make us groan and sigh, but it's not that we want to die and have no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by everlasting life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. ~ 2 Corinthians 5:1-5
Did you happen to notice in the above Scripture that our earthly bodies were referred to as tents while our place in Heaven was referred to as a home?
What is a tent? It is a temporary structure. You cannot live for years and years in a tent. I, myself, don’t understand why anyone would want to stay even one night in a tent. God invented houses and running water for a reason!
A tent is not created to be a permanent dwelling. A home, however, is meant to be permanent. What does it all mean? Life here on earth is meant to be temporary. We just need a tent for that. But what comes after earth is eternal, and because it is eternal, we will need a permanent dwelling.
Amazingly, the Scripture also says that God prepared us for this. The idea that there’s got to be something more was sown into us by God Himself.
King Solomon would write, God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart… ~ Ecclesiastes 3:11
Because the Lord has sown this into us, we instinctively know that there must be something more.
For example, let’s say your neighbor has a little baby boy growing inside her womb. Everything he needs to be healthy and strong is in that womb, yet the womb is not all there is for this little guy. The short time in the womb is just preparation for life “on the outside.”
Likewise, our few decades of life on earth are preparation for eternity.
Therefore, it is important to realize that in eternity there are only two choices: Heaven or Hell. What we choose to do with God and His Son Jesus on earth will determine where we spend eternity.
Do you know where your eternity will be spent?
