Wrapping our Brains Around Eternity | Dr. John Ewart

Hey everybody, this is Pastor John Ewart from Inglewood

Baptist Church in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina.

Thank you so much for tuning into our podcast.

You're going to hear from God today as we share from his word

about important issues facing your life that can guide you

according to the Bible. All right, So thank you for

being here and appreciate you if you're a guest here as we begin

a new series for those who are listening later, thank you for

listening and hope that if you have any prayer requests or any

needs that you'll contact us at the church.

Also hope that you'll tune into the other podcast episodes that

we have so that that you might be able to pick up some of our

other series. This coming Sunday, I'm going to

begin our series in Romans, and we're diving pretty deeply in

chapter 1 already, and so we'll be in chapter 1 this week.

If you would like one of these journals, these are wonderful.

They're blank on one side with the scripture on the other.

Great place for you to take every single note you'd ever

want to take from a book study. I have the complete set of these

things. This is what I do in my quiet

time. And so we have the book of

Romans in the bookstore, and I believe they will be open even

tonight after this session if you're interested in one of

those. So pick those up and you can

follow right along with the with me.

So I look forward to that. But here at midweek, we're

starting the Heaven, Hell and Hereafter series.

And I know that you want me to get into angels and you want me

to get into demons and you want me to get into hell and you want

me to explain Hades and you want me to do all that.

And we will, I promise. But we needed to do a little

more general backdrop to get us going.

And so we've we're calling this session wrapping our brains

around eternity. And if nothing else, we're going

to praise the Lord tonight and acknowledge who he is.

Because eternity is a big word. And we need to understand it.

Because obviously when we start talking about heaven and hell,

we will be in that subject matter.

And I'll get to that in just a second.

But we're going to break down all those other pieces over the

next several sessions, and so I hope you'll be back and hope

you'll tune in for that. I appreciate very much the work

of some friends of mine as well as some people that I've read

for years. I appreciate Paul ends and his

work, Doctor Paul Ends, Doctor Wayne Grudem, Doctor Miller

Derrickson, and others who have written on some of these

subjects. I just appreciate them.

Always want to give due credit to sources whenever I possibly

can remember to do that. And So what we're talking about

is eternity or eternality. And we need to talk about this

for a few minutes. I don't know if you've ever had

a session just about this before to talk about not only God, but

us. And so let's talk about

eternality for a moment. The eternity, the eternity of

God is partially understood by this.

And I want you to note, I said that on purpose.

We partially understand this. We do not understand this fully.

We cannot understand this fully. And that bothers people.

In fact, one of the problems in the world today is they want to

understand everything there is about God, be able to dissect

it, box it and and catalog it. And that's part of their

problem, because you can't. We have revelation from God.

He reveals to us what we need to know, but does not necessarily

reveal everything about Himself. And so we understand this

partially as it relates primarily to time.

And so we're going to be on the subject of time quite a bit

tonight. And so because we can't grasp it

all, it's, it's frankly too great for our little minds to

fully comprehend. We, we struggle, the human mind

struggles with the word eternal. We struggle with the concept of

forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

What does that mean? It's hard for us to wrap our

brains around that. And so tonight, as we kind of

lay the foundation for this whole series, because heaven is

eternal and hell is eternal, we need to talk about eternal

first. And so let's talk about this

just for a few moments because we do struggle with it.

So by definition, the eternality or the eternalness of God is is

partially defined in the fact that God is not limited or bound

by time. Now Wayne Grudem gives us a more

extensive in his systematic theology gives us a more

extensive definition and he says God's eternity may be defined

further as follows. God has no beginning and or

secession of moments in his own being.

That's an important phrase more than you know.

And he sees he sees all time equally vividly.

Yet God also sees events in time and acts in time.

Now, what in the world did he just say?

Well, sometimes this doctrine is not called the eternality of

God. Sometimes this is actually

called the doctrine of Infinity. And so you have this idea of

affinity wrapped up into this as well.

Some of you when I say the word Infinity, you're thinking of a a

doll that in a spacesuit that flies to the air and you're

buzzing your lightyear. But to be infinite is to be

unlimited. And, and what this means is this

doctrine teaches that time does not time cannot limit God.

Now not everybody wants to believe that.

Well, tough because the Bible teaches it.

So with God, there is no what we would call the secession of

events. In other words, we live with one

event happened the other. We have past, present, future.

Something happened today, something's going to happen

tomorrow. You got to understand God

transcends all of that. I'll talk about that a lot.

I'm going to be redundant, repetitive.

I'm going to say the same things over and over again to try to

help you understand. Pizza, pizza.

All right, so God is above all temporal limitations.

Time does not have anything to do with limiting him or

determining what God can or cannot do.

So what we recognize is God's eternity then goes backward into

a Infinity, and it goes forward into Infinity.

There was never a time God was not, and there will never be a

time when God will not be. And that's hard for us to wrap

our human brains around, frankly, because we are living

in a very mortal, very finite existence in this physical world

that we are living in now. And so we recognize that God's

eternity also is really related to his name.

When you go to Exodus 3, you know this verse, you just may

not know it's Exodus 314, but this is the verse where you know

the the burning Bush around that, where Moses is getting his

Commission. And God said to Moses, I am who

I could do it better. I am who I am.

Is that better? Is that more like the movie?

All right, very good. And he said, say this to the

people of Israel. I am has sent me to you so many

and I would be a part of that. Many understand that this is

this version of I am that I am is actually a version.

It's the present tense of the Hebrew verb haya, which is the

verb to be. In other words, he's declaring

his own eternity in the sense that I am I, I always have been,

I always will be, I is there ain't no time where I weren't.

I'm here and it, it reflects his eternity and that he is the and

this is a phrase that you'll see sometimes in literature.

He is the continually existing one.

That's a good description of God, the continually existing

one. Now in the Greek mind and in the

Greek language and biblical language, there are at least two

kinds of time that are described in the Bible.

If I were to talk about Second Corinthians 517 with my

testimony last week, I would talk about the idea of new.

And this, this word also gets tied to these words.

But there's one word, chronos, which you can see chronological.

You can see how we get English words from that.

And this is the, the, the physical time that we, we see

around us. This is the Earth spinning

around the sun. This is the earth spinning on

his axle. This is a day, this is a year.

And these are things that we chart.

We still don't chart them perfectly, but we can chart them

to some degree. But there's another kind of

time, Kairos, which is related also to this idea of newness.

But this idea of Kairos, which is God's time, this is

different. This is a qualitatively

different description of time. It's not so much quantitative as

it is qualitative. I'll explain.

So God's time is what the theologian, and I've mentioned

this in some previous session before.

I'm going to elaborate more on it tonight.

But this, this is what the theologian and writer CS Lewis

would call God's unbounded Now. You got to think about those

words. Don't let these words throw you.

In other words, his now has no bounds.

His now is everything. His now is unlimited.

So what that means is, is that at this very moment, right now

and, and what will stretch into eternity for everything to God

is right now. There is no past.

There is no present. There is no future.

He sees it all at the same time, and so he already knows.

He already sees. And so with God, there is no

distinction between that timeline that we live on.

We're stuck in the timeline. We're stuck in Cronos.

God lives in chaos to our Kairos to where there is no timeline.

And I'll make my point stronger in just a moment.

So all things are equally and always present to Him.

Now you can't understand that I don't understand that.

I can describe it, but I can't comprehend it because I have no

reference point for that in my own existence.

So what we see is, is that there is no past that has come and

gone, nor a future that has not happened yet for God.

And that might freak you out. That might also help you

understand predestination and election better.

This foreknowledge is the key to everything in the sense of of He

already knows. So this doctrine also helps us

relate, and I'm going to come back to that, don't worry.

This doctrine also helps us to understand God's

unchangeableness, right? Because of who he is, because of

his relationship to time. God is unchanging.

God is the same when? Yesterday.

What? Yeah, today and tomorrow or

forever. Hebrews 13/8.

He's the same yesterday and today and forever.

Not just because He is consistent.

Now that's true. He is perfectly consistent.

That is part of this. He is the same because he's

consistent. And often that would probably be

how we would think of the verse. God never changes.

He's always the same. He's not going to be

inconsistent. We would talk about that, but

that's not all this verse is referring to.

He's also, he's not just, he's not just consistent, but it also

is the fact that he absolutely transcends time.

He is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever, because for

him it's all right now. It's the same moment for him

now. Again, hard for us to get.

God's eternity is is described in Scripture, not contained, but

described. Listen to the psalmist in Psalm

Psalms 90:2

90, verse 2, before the mountains were brought forth or

or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting

to everlasting. You are God.

Now what is everlasting to everlasting means That's again,

it's a part of the fact that there there never was when he

was not and there never will be when he is not, He has always

been. So it's true that God is not, is

not changed. It's true that God does not

change. He's unchangeable, but you got

to hear me. One of the reasons for that is

that time cannot change God. Time does not change God.

I don't know about you, but time has changed me.

It has no effect on God. It has no effect on His being.

It has no effect on His perfection.

It has no effect on His purpose. It has no effect on His

promises. It doesn't change his word.

It doesn't change his will, it doesn't change his his purpose

in life. So time has no effect.

And this is going to be weird for a minute.

Hang in there with me. Time has no effect on God's

knowledge. For instance, God never learns

new things. God never forgets things that

would that would mean a change to his perfect knowledge.

God already knows those things. He's already seen those things,

so the passing of time does not add to or detract from God's

knowledge. He knows all things past, He

knows all things present, He knows all things future, and he

knows them all equally and vividly, as one commentator

would write. Thus He is the Alpha and what He

is the beginning and the end. So in Revelation 1/8 he says I'm

the alpha in the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and

who is to come the Almighty. And there's nothing like him.

And the fact that God never began to exist can also be

concluded from the fact that God created all things.

He was here before anything else.

So before God created the universe, there was no time.

I've talked about this before. You've got to think about what

time is to us. Time to us is a part of the

creation. So there was no time before

Genesis 11, at least not in the sense of a succession of moments

one after another. There was nothing happening

before, during, or after. So when God created the

universe, he created time, and when he began to create the

universe, and before there was time, God always existed without

beginning and without being influenced by time, because time

didn't even exist. So time therefore does not have

an existence in itself. But like the rest of creation,

time absolutely depends upon God's eternal being and power to

keep it going. So let me just make sure in case

you haven't been here in the past, to make sure I'm being as

clear as I can to. So time is measured in certain

ways. How do we measure a year?

What is physically going on? Right seasons.

But in in space, what's going on?

The earth is going around the what?

Correct. How do we measure a day?

The Earth spinning on its axle, None of those things existed

before Genesis one. There was no sun, there was no

moon, there was no solar system, there was no orbit.

There was no spinning on an axle because it didn't exist.

There was no time. Now we get we get wrapped up and

trapped into it because we base our entire existence upon it and

we Fred over it and we're worried about it and we regret

it and we look forward to it. But it's just different with

God. All of existence, all of his

existence has been and is always somehow present.

I'm not trying to explain it to you.

It's beyond this, but this is difficult for us to understand

it, for it's a kind of existence far different than we can

experience here. So this becomes an issue of

belief. In fact, Psalm 90, verse four,

that same Psalm I read earlier, but verse 4 instead of verse 2

says the following. It says for 1000 years in your

sight or but as yesterday when it is passed or as a watch in

the night. So God can remember 1000 years

like you would remember today or yesterday or better perfectly he

can he can see it all or second Peter 38, which kind of builds

on the same idea, the one that you might know more.

But do not overlook this one fact beloved, that with the Lord

one day is as what 1000 years and 1000 years as one day.

Now that doesn't mean that 1000 years is exactly a God day.

It's just symbolizing the fact that his ability to know and to

see all at once is unlimited and he sees it and can see it all.

So he knows and understands who we are and what we're going

through. So to God, an extremely long

period of time to us just happened.

It's just happening. Sees.

He sees and he knows all events, past, present, and future with

equal vividness. So God's relationship to time in

a way is a way, in a way that we don't and cannot experience.

His experience of time is not just some.

It's not just like he's impatiently enduring eons and

eons of endless duration. That's not how this works at

all. He has a qualitatively different

Kairos experience of time, and this is consistent with the idea

that in his own being God is timeless.

He does not experience moments like we do.

There is no past, there is no present, there is no future with

Him. In the same way.

He is not like us. Isaiah writes about it.

He says declare and this Isaiah 4521.

Declare and present your case. Let them take counsel together.

Who towed this long ago? Who declared it of old, old, old

ode, That's ODE in it, an ode to somebody.

Was it not I the Lord? And there is no other God

besides me, a righteous God and a Saviour.

There is none besides me. In other words, there's just

nobody else like me, or listen to Psalm, or excuse me, Isaiah

Isaiah 46:9

46, verse 9. Remember the former things of

old, for I am God and there is no other.

I am God and there is none. Like me declaring the end from

the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.

And hear that phrase saying, my counsel shall stand, and I will

accomplish all my purpose. So even from ancient times, he

knows already what's coming, what's coming today.

He knew that before time began. In a moment, we're going to

personalize all this so it can give you a headache if you

contemplate this theological trigonometry too long.

But at the same time, I want us to lay this foundation so that

we can understand eternal life that we experience, which we'll

talk about more in a moment. I've used the illustration, but

some of you were not there and some of you have never seen it,

so bear with me for a moment. You just have to understand.

And so let me do it one more time.

Let me talk about the line and the .1 more time.

Some of you could stand up and do it instead of me.

But this is the way I would teach this in a seminary class

and everybody look at me and say that's way too simple.

And then they'd think about it for a minute and come back and

thank me. I didn't think of this, but in

geometry, a line is the distance between two points.

You all remember your geometry, a line between two points.

Some of you younger folks probably in it now.

When you turn a line on its end in geometry, what does it

become? A point.

God sees the point. We're living the line, and

that's the difference between us.

I can't see the point. I have to live the line.

But when God turns it on its end, it's a single.

A line is a single point when it's on its end.

That's how God sees. God sees it all now.

God knows what I'm going to do tomorrow.

He knows what I'm going to say tonight.

He knows what I'm going to do wrong next week.

He already knows. And so that ought to affect our

lives, and we'll talk about that in a moment.

We also recognize that His eternality, His eternality is

related to His eternal rule in His Kingdom.

Listen to the psalmist in Psalm 102, verse 12.

Psalms 102:12

But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever.

You are remembered throughout all generations.

There's never a time when he's not.

There's never a time when God is not in complete control.

There's never a time when he loses his sovereignty.

There's never a time when God's not on the throne.

Oh, sometimes in evangelism or in an illustration, we'll talk

about, have you moved God off the throne of your life?

And you know, will you get off the throne of your life and put

God back on the throne of your life?

That's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about the eternal heavenly sovereign throne of the

universe. He's in complete control.

Now, lest I be a hypocrite, let me also point out and then the

original definition by Wayne Grudem.

We also said that he sees all time equally vividly.

Yet God also sees events in time and acts in time.

So even though God is not affected by time, God still

works in Chronos. He does still work in our time.

He does that. There are times that we while

God sees everything as an eternal now, he nonetheless in

relation to man and in relation to this physical creation that

he developed and and made for us.

He does work through secession of events in our timeline for

us. That's for us so that we might

know him. So even though he stands above

time, he also sees the events in time and he acts in time.

For example, at Christmas I preached A sermon series called

the Fullness of Time based on Galatians 4 because I'm

fascinated by that phrase. I still am relates to this to

some degree. Galatians 4, four and five,

where it says, but when the fullness of time had come, God

sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to

redeem those who are under the law so that we might receive

adoption as sons. So we recognize that God is

manipulating time. God is orchestrating history.

God is orchestrating time. God is working in our timeline

with us because that's how we can relate to him.

We can't relate to the unbounded now.

We need him to work in our past. We need him to work in our

present. We need him to work in our

future so that we can relate to it and understand it.

So he does. So he'll do something tomorrow

and he'll do something Tuesday and he'll do something on

Sunday. I pray.

So even though he's above it, he still works in it.

Now, if you, if you don't understand, there's a word for

that. It's a, it's a really fancy

theological word. God transcends time.

God is not affected by time. God doesn't need or have to live

within time, but he chooses to work within our time frame to

help us. There's a really fancy

theological word. It's called grace.

That's what that is. As the creator of God, he knew

we would have to have that. Well, he knew we couldn't

relate. We couldn't comprehend this

stuff without that. I, I can't identify with

unbounded now. I can't identify seeing it all

at once. It would blow your brains out.

And so he recognizes that we need this and he's extremely

gracious to do that. And so not only do we see him

sending himself in an Incarnate, I'll get it out.

Incarnate form is God the Son and Jesus to to live, to be one

of us, to walk alongside of us in Chronos in a life that was 30

something years long with with a beginning and an end of his

earthly time. But we also recognize that he

does it incarnationally with us every single day in a very

similar way to where the God, the Holy Spirit is walking with

us intimately, step by step by step along the line, because he

loves us that much and he wants us to know him that much.

That's how much this God will lower himself.

That's how much this God will make the effort.

That's how much this God will work to be able to relate to us.

Now you show me another world religion where that happens.

Doesn't exist like that. While we were yet sinners,

Christ died for us. Does not exist in any other

world belief system. Everybody else, everybody else

is working their way up the ladder.

Everybody else is somehow going to achieve or appease or or or

or avoid or pray. They don't get zapped in some

fatalistic belief system. A law is not that way.

Hinduism would not be that way. Buddhism is not that way.

Islam, Judaism, they're all works.

Righteousness. That's what makes Christianity

the truth. It's because of who this God

really is and the way he interacts with us.

And he doesn't have to. He didn't need to for him, but

he sure needed to for us. And that's his love and his

grace. So how do we share in some of

this, which is what this series will be about?

The theologian Millard Erickson, who wrote a very thick book that

I once had to read all of says this.

He says being created in the image of God, man also has an

eternal dimension. And that is part of this image

of God idea. Not all of it, but part of being

created in the image of God is the fact that we will have

eternal life. And one of the things that we

all, we, we often don't think about, and I need you to chew on

for a moment because I have, I have debated this with people,

is all of humanity will exist eternally according to

Scripture. And that's something we don't

always think about. We are not annihilationists.

Now let me talk about that for a second.

We're going to talk more about that when we talk about hell

later. Annihilationism, I mentioned it

in our theological series, probably this summer.

Annihilationism is where you believe that people go to hell,

but that hell is short term. So they go to hell, they burn up

and they're gone and they cease to exist.

So they get thrown in the lake of fire, they burn up and

they're gone. I once had in a church I

pastored, a 200 something year old church that I pastored.

I had a senior adult man who taught a senior adult Bible

study and he was annihilationist.

I learned and he taught annihilationism in the in the

Sunday school class basically. And so I called him in and we

had to have a long conversation. So I prepared a pretty lengthy

document on here. You ready for the title?

This will sound like almost like I went to school.

You know, the eternality of, of punishment, right?

Because one of the things that I'm going to say again in future

sessions is you. You can't have an eternal heaven

without an eternal hell. Jesus used exactly the same

words in original language for both.

And so hell is just as eternal as heaven.

And yet there's a a percentage of American population, even

among the evangelical church, they like heaven, they don't

like hell. And so from an emotional

standpoint of God and the problem of evil, why would a

good God send somebody to hell? Which we're going to talk about

all that, I promise. So if you have those questions,

you need to keep coming. But in that frame, there's no

way this could really last forever.

And so you've got to understand that everybody now listen to me

it and and I'm going to I'll, I'll rephrase this and, and put

this in its right place in future sessions.

So don't throw rocks at me tonight.

In this session, everybody's going to receive a special body

so that it can endure. OK, We talked about resurrected

bodies for believers, but you got to understand that everybody

is going to receive the special ability to be tormented forever

in hell as well. And not everybody but those who

don't believe. And, and that's something that

people often don't think about. Well, there's no way.

There's no way the body would quit thinking about this.

Quit. You're living in Chronos.

Quit living in Chronos. That's not eternity.

Eternity works on K Rock Kyros. And so there's going to be

eternal bodies for people in hell too, and it's going to last

forever. It doesn't mean it saves them

from the pain or the torment, and I'll talk a little bit about

that on Sunday. As far as why God takes sins, so

much more so in a week or so when we get to Romans, the end

of Romans one and two, where he talks about God's wrath.

So, but specifically in the new heaven and new earth, which are

yet to come. Another question exists, and

some of you will have strong opinions about this because I

know your fascination with eschatology.

I'm very familiar. Will time still exist in the new

heaven and the new earth? And many say no.

In fact, there's an old hymn, you know it, when the trumpet of

the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more, right.

And we also read in Scripture, for example, Revelation chapter

Revelation 21 · chapter mention

21. Some of you are delighted.

I'm actually in Revelation. I'm studying Revelation verse by

verse in the mornings along with numbers because of course those

2GO hand in hand. Who knows that's what I'm doing

though. So Revelation 21 says and the

city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of

God gives it light and it's lamp is the Lamb and it's gates.

This verse 25 and it's gates will never shut, be shut by day

and there will be no night there.

And then Revelation 22 five and night will be no more.

They will need no light of lamp or sun for the Lord God will be

their light and they will reign forever and ever.

So no sun, no moon, no night. So, so so not the same kind of

Kronos time that we would experience here for sure.

So we know it's different, at least it's different.

But we do see in heaven in the descriptions of heaven in the

Bible that there are series of events.

Some things happen first, some things happen next, some things

happen next. So there is a version of time.

It's just a very different version of time.

And so I, I won't say there'll be no time, but I will say that

it's going to be God's time and very different from what we

experience now. And we're going to talk a whole

lot more specifically about each one of those things.

I promise in the days ahead, what it exactly is going to

happen in heaven and those orders, we're going to hit all

that. So we're going to experience

eternal life, but not in this exact duplication of God's

attribute of eternality. Does that make sense?

We're still not God in our eternal life.

We're still not God. We're not.

We're not of a part of a group. The LDS church kind of believes

our branches of them believe that we get to become gods.

We don't. We don't get to become gods.

So if that disappoints you and you want to turn in your

membership badge, just remember Chucky T at Englewood Baptist

dot com. If Gene Davis hears me, he will

actually create that e-mail address.

There is AC Taylor now I've been told.

I don't know if you even know that, but there is AC Taylor

now. I've been told so anyway, I

don't know what's in there. Don't want to know, don't want

to look, but it won't be exactly the same.

In other words, we're not going to become God in terms of His

attributes, but we're certainly going to experience the duration

of time that will never end. That's a fact.

We know that for sure. In fact, listen to an

interesting verse. It's kind of hard to understand

sometimes, frankly. I preached A sermon series out

of Ecclesiastes a few years ago and and it was the first time

I'd ever done that. I don't know why I enjoyed it.

We did that at a large church where I was an interim pastor

and it spent the summer in Ecclesiastes.

And I had, I had several seminary professors in that

church and we were talking through it because at times it

can be a little bit of a complicated book.

I mean, I the basic jest is there, but listen to

Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 11.

Ecclesiastes 3:11

He has made everything beautiful in it's time.

Also, he has put eternity into man's heart yet so that he

cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the

end. So even though we have and, and

when we get to a sermon or so into Romans, we're going to talk

about general revelation again and the fact that there's this

innate sense in man that a God exists, creator exists, that

something beyond him exists. Every single culture has some

version of worship, for example. It's a pretty steady trademark

of the definition of culture. And so it's hard to understand

that that even though humans have this innate sense of life

beyond themselves or a being beyond themselves, we cannot

understand the greatness. We can't wrap our heads around

the eternity of God himself or, or the scope of his creativity

or the way in which he will bring time that our Cronos time,

our timeline to a close. And so it's an amazing thing

beyond us to a large degree that we still don't understand.

And so it's hard to understand these things.

But eternal life in the New Testament eliminates the

boundary line of death. But death is still a foe.

It's still something that we fight here at times, but the one

who has eternal life already experiences the kind of

existence that will never end. And that's an important part

that I want to camp upon for a moment.

And I'm actually going to camp in a in the shortest verse I

could possibly find. And that's John 647.

I was actually criticized not long ago for my belief about

salvation, which I found interesting.

And I look forward to the conversation I pray that I get

to have with the individual who criticized me.

But mine's a pretty orthodox biblical view.

His was not. But anyway, in John 647, it says

truly, truly. I say to you, whoever believes

has eternal life. And I really need us to grasp

this. So as I've shared with you about

462 times, Tim Luper's keeping track.

So this would be 463. Tim looks at me like, what are

you talking? So he's like that puffer fish up

there. It's like, what?

Thank you, Tim. Thank you.

You're you're you're your servant always.

Yeah. And you really are.

You're a blessing. So Jesus is speaking here and

whoever, whoever piste owes. And I've I've shared this word

with you over and over again, but I need you.

I really need you to grab it and understand this because as

you're sharing the gospel, which we're going to be hitting heavy

in Romans, the whole book's about the gospel.

And so as we're sharing with others, we need to understand

this part of it explicitly. So this verb, I wish we didn't,

I wish we didn't translate it the way we did.

That's, and it's very common in almost all your translations,

they have the word believe or something like believeth or

something, because this word is simply the verb form of the noun

for faith. So the noun for faith is pistas.

And so peste uo is simply in Greek, you add, think of a

prefix or suffix that you don't call them that, but that's the

best way to think about it. You had some prefix or suffixes

in there and suddenly it's a verb.

It's not a noun anymore. And so the word believes

wherever you see it almost 100% of the time.

There were a couple of exceptions, John 316's the same

many, many verses that have the word believes in.

It's always the same word. And this word peste uo, which is

a very common normal verb in Greek, it means to, it means to

faith. And so I, what I really wish

this verse said is whoever faiths has eternal life or, or

whosoever faiths in him would have eternal life because it

emphasizes this need for faith, right?

And so the idea here is, is that I am faithing in God.

So the word pissed us then, which means I got to back up.

And of course, So what does that mean?

What does that word mean? Right.

Well, the noun for faith doesn't just mean believe.

And that's where this English word throws us.

Because when we use the word believe today, often times we're

thinking of a mental exercise. You know, I believe something.

I know something in my brain and that gets people in trouble and

that messes people up. We have people who think they're

Christians who aren't Christians.

We have people who don't understand salvation because of

this and, and all kinds of mess. And so we've really got to

understand, and I shared about this in sermons about salvation

before. And but the word pistas for

faith means to depend upon it means to trust, It means

literally to put your whole weight on something.

You know the old chair illustration where I sit in the

chair, right? And I put my whole weight in the

chair. And for me, that's significant.

In fact, this week I was watching some of the chair

exercises and Charles, I think we only had to throw away four

or five chairs with four. OK.

So bless you all's heart. Some of you might want to do

that more. But anyway, so, so I have no

idea whatsoever what I'm talking about, but but this idea that I

can study this chair, I can believe in this chair.

I, I can study the tensile strength of the metal.

I can understand the cushion, I can understand the fabric.

I can know the company who made it.

I can understand the little man in Taiwan who made every single

screw that went into that chair and the kind of metal he used.

I I can understand this chair is rated to hold up X number of

pounds. I can study every, I can go to

Amazon, read the whole product description.

I can get it all down in my brain.

That's not Pistas, that's knowledge.

It's not an important. It's good to know those things.

It's important to know all the facts about Jesus, isn't it?

We're going to talk about that extensively in our Roman study.

What all did Jesus do? What is this thing called the

gospel? Paul's going to talk about every

facet of it. And so I need to know those

things. Jesus was born in who Jesus is.

I need to know that. And Incarnate God, he's, he died

on a cross. I need to know that.

And he rose again. I need to know these things.

But that alone is not going to save me.

We're saved by what? Through what, right.

So it's this incredible combination of this incredible

free gift of God, of grace that he gives to us.

And then there's this, this aspect of faith that has to be a

part of the experience. Now, some would argue that God

has to give me the faith to believe in him.

Romans, you can see it almost, it's like a gifting.

And so if and if the more reformed you are, the more

you're going to lean in that direction to where I can't even

muster up the faith. God has to give me the faith or

I can be over here a little more to where I'm the one who's

believing and trusting in him. And some people say that's a

work. So there's this weird

counterbalance between the two. Are y'all tracking with any of

this somewhere in here? It's the truth.

In His nature of love, He gave me free will.

In His nature of holiness, He demands a price.

And I have to work through that with Him.

And so the Holy Spirit's helping me.

I have no problem saying the Holy Spirit's drawing me to Him,

the Holy Spirit's convicting me of him, the Holy Spirit's

helping me to believe. I have no problem with those

words. But in the end, I have to faith,

I have to, I have to put my, put my whole weight on him and lift

my feet up in the air and recognize that he alone can hold

me. I've used the illustration

before of repelling. I used to repel off of

mountains. I know it's a big rope, but

anyway, so, so we used to go repelling, we used to go hiking

and we'd go repelling off of these cliffs.

And, and the first time you ever do that, some of you who are

first responders or military, you know what I'm talking about.

Your first time you lean back on that rope and that rope

stretches and you can hear it stretch and you can hear that

knot tightening up and the webbing or the harness that you

have on us tightening up. And you're not real sure of that

between you and those 150 feet down on those rocks, whether

that ropes going to work or not. But you got to put your whole

weight on it. You got to put your whole weight

and that and that's what this is.

So that that's not even my point tonight.

I just thought that was good to throw in.

Is that OK? So that has to happen.

If you're here tonight and you've never done that part, you

need to come see me or Charles after this thing's over with,

and let's talk to you about that.

I want you to see the verb, that little bitty verb in John 647.

It says who? Truly, truly.

I say to you, whoever believes has, What tense is that present?

Now? I want us to grasp that.

I know some of you know this. I know you, you, you cognitively

get this. I want you to embrace this.

If you have trusted in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior,

if you have depended upon him, if you've faith in him, if

you've done what you need to do to be saved, you are eternal and

you have eternal life now. And so this isn't just about

heaven. This isn't just about later

after death. We're going to talk about what

happens at the moment that you die.

We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about what

happens, what heaven looks like, the best we can muster up with

our finite languages that we try to muster up.

We're going to talk about who's there and who's not.

And we're going to talk about hell.

We're going to talk about SHIELD.

We're going to talk about Hades. We're going to talk about hell.

We're going to talk about all that stuff, but your eternal

life begins with Christ right here, right now.

And so we're supposed to be living right now like we're

there. You need to start living more in

Kairos than Kronos. Makes sense Now I'm trapped.

I'm trapped in chronic. I mean, I used to have hair.

I did. I used to be beautiful.

I mean, I mean, telling you MUI guapo, I'm, I'm telling you just

just beautiful. Maybe not quite that, but time.

I'm a part of a creation that's decaying.

I'm part of a creation that's groaning.

I mean, you can feel it in the morning, but spiritually, I need

to believe I'm living in Kairos. I, I, I need to transcend this

more. You understand what I'm saying,

that this place doesn't need to drag me down that much.

We're beyond it. I can't escape its effect.

I, I can't escape all its pressures.

But in my heart of hearts and my prayer and my time with God, I

can recognize this stuff can't really touch me.

When I die, I'll be more alive than I've ever been.

I'll be free from a vessel of clay.

And this groaning, this temporary affliction does not

compare to the eternal way to glory.

And so the problem with that is, is that's a good thing to say at

a funeral, right? But we need to be living that

now. That's needs to be our attitude

toward one another. That needs to be attitude toward

the people who don't know about it.

That needs to be our attitude toward him.

I, I want others to experience that too.

I want others to know him and to experience him.

So let me read to you a section. I hope you can track with this

from CS Lewis. Some of you have read Lewis,

Some of you never have. Sometimes reading Lewis can be a

little complicated, but in his book The Screw Tape Letters, the

Demon Screw Tape is writing to his nephew Wormwood, who's a

demon who tempts people so recognize that good is bad and

bad is good in the language they're using.

So when he talks about somebody being the enemy, he means Jesus

or God. He says you being a spirit, will

find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion.

So he's talking about the fact that this demon is assigned to a

person and he's supposed to mess that person up.

That's what he's supposed to be doing.

That's the idea between Lewis's work.

But you must remember that he takes time for an ultimate

reality. He supposes that the enemy God,

like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others his

past, and anticipates others his future.

Or even if he believes that the enemy once again Jesus or God,

does not see things that way, yet in his heart of hearts he

regards this as a peculiarity of the enemy's mode of perception.

He doesn't really think, though he would say he did, that things

as the enemy sees them are things as they are.

So if you tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are

one of the innumerable coordinates with which the enemy

harmonizes the weather of tomorrow.

In other words, how you know, as we pray to God for the weather,

does God actually work? He would reply that then that

the enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers, and

if so, they did not pray freely. But we're predestined to do so.

And he would add that the weather on a given day can can

be traced back to through his causes to the original creation

of matter itself. So that the whole thing, both on

the human and on the material side is is given from the word

go. In other words, he's arguing the

fact that man has no freedom. Man is completely controlled and

he has no free will. And all this is just what the

enemy God forces to have happen. Keep listening for a minute.

You don't have to agree with Louis, but listen to him.

What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us that the

problem of adapting the particular weather to the

particular prayers is merely the appearance at 2 points in his

temporal mode of perception. In other words, it's just a

coincidence of the total problem adapting the whole spiritual

universe to the whole corporal universe.

So the physical and the spiritual together that creation

into in its entirety operates at every point of space and time.

Or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to

encounter the whole self consistent creative act as a

series of successive events. Just bear with me.

Why that creative act leaves room for their free will.

Is the problem of problems. The secret behind the enemy's

nonsense, God's nonsense about love.

How it does so is no problem at all.

For the enemy does not foresee the humans making their free

contributions in the future, but sees them doing so.

And his unbounded now. Now listen to this last line.

He didn't get anything else. Get this.

And obviously, to watch a man doing something is not to make

him do it. So this last bit.

And now here's the really hard word for you.

There will be no test, by the way, no pop quiz is This is the

idea of irreversible predestination.

There you go. In other words, God doesn't

foresee the humans making their free contributions in the

future, but sees them doing so and is unbounded now.

And obviously, as that last sentence goes, to watch a man

doing something is not to make him do it.

So that words God already knows. Here's the bottom line.

In his love, pretty amazing. Don't understand it?

It's pretty mysterious. Take some faith.

But in his love for us, He's allowing us to live in Cronos

and He allows us to make decisions.

He allows us to do smart things and we also do dumb things.

And he already knew we were going to do those things.

He sees them all and is unbounded now, but that doesn't

mean that every one of those things is predestined.

And I have no choice. This is the balance.

We still have free will in the Chronos.

He's watching us. He knows about it.

Does God already know who's going to heaven and hell?

Yes. Does that mean that nobody has

any hope or choice? No.

And that's the incredible balance of grace and that we're

living in this freedom to even mess up, to even reject him

because he loves us that much to allow us to do that.

So let me read one last thing and I'll start winding this up.

This is more Lewis, just for a second.

We this the last time I'll read CS Lewis.

You'd be all right, All right. We must begin to correct the

admittedly, admittedly false picture of Providence which we

have hitherto been using. That picture, you will remember,

was false because it represented God and nature as inhabiting

common time. They don't.

So in other words, the physical and God don't inhabit the same

kind of time. We've been talking about that.

But it is probable that nature is not really in time, and

almost certain that God is not. This is some conjecture by

Lewis. Time is probably the mode of our

perception. There is therefore in reality no

question of God's at one point in time, the moment of creation,

adapting the material history of the universe in advance to free

acts which you or I are to perform at a later point in

time. Get this sentence.

You'll get this one. To Him, all the physical events

and all the human acts are present in an eternal now.

The liberation of finite wills and the creation of the whole

material history of the universe related to the acts of those

wills and all the necessary complexity is to Him a single

operation. In this sense, God did not

create the universe long ago, but creates it at this minute,

at every minute in Kairos. So in other words, He has given

us this ability. Now.

Gang, you got to understand this.

This a gift. I say it, and I'm not sure it

clicks. We don't deserve to exist.

We did nothing to exist. We exist by grace.

This world exists by grace. We're able to breathe and have a

heartbeat because of grace. And within that amazing

timeline, we also have the ability to choose or to reject,

to claim him or to deny him. And over the years, I've met

people who've done both. But I'm thankful that sitting on

the throne, and we're going to talk about that is a sovereign

God who already knows. So when he gives us verses like

I'm not going to give you more than you can handle, I'm not

going to allow you to be tempted more than you can take, it's

because He already knows. He knows you.

He knows you better than you know you.

He knows He knows what your tomorrow's going to have.

You don't know what's going to happen to you 10 seconds from

now. You live in an extremely fragile

state on the line. But then again, maybe it's not

fragile at all because we sit in the hands of a sovereign God who

loves us, who takes care of us. And here's the amazing thing

that we're going to talk about in the future sessions.

He's even created a place for us to go to live with him forever.

Now, in the meantime, here on the Kronos, here on the line, we

got work to do, we got things to put together.

We got people to tell, we got people to share, we got people

to teach because we want as many people to be there with us.

And if you don't care about that, you're missing the heart

of God. You really are because that the

whole reason he did all of this in the 1st place, the whole

reason he fashioned all of this, the whole reason he's watching

over it all at once all the time is so that we could know Him and

bring him great glory. And so he wants as many people,

He wants the nation's to know him.

He wants everybody to know him so that we can share together.

You know, part of my testimony that I didn't share too well, I,

I have regretted several parts of that.

Number one, the one thing I'd want to say, and I shared this

at a breakfast the other day, but I want to say this on a

Wednesday night because I shared it initially on a Wednesday

night is before my parents died. They're both saved, They're in

heaven. And I didn't get to say I forgot

to say that was a dumb thing to leave out.

But part of my part of my early spiritual walk was just as dumb.

So I'm saved, but I'm not baptized yet.

I mean, this is foreign to me. You can understand church is

foreign. We don't, you know, I don't, I

didn't understand how all that stuff worked.

And so I, I the guy who led me to the Lord's Baptist.

And so I'm I'm going to the Baptist Church and my best

friend, Jay Bird Buffalo meet Yahoo once a week.

Wahoo young. So we remember where we were

raised. He, he's accepted Christ and

we're standing there. We're both tall.

I mean, I was just tall when I was 14, you know.

And so we're standing there together and he, he, he's

elbowing me during the invitation at First Baptist.

And he's go, we need to go down front.

We need to go down front. We need to go get baptized.

And I literally physically grab him.

And I say, that wouldn't be cool.

And I I physically stop him from walking out into the aisle to go

forward to be baptized. I'm Dumber than a rock.

Well, I should have known what my next week was going to be

like. He's on me every day and he and

God's on me every day. And I promise that that next

Sunday morning, I beat him to the punch and I was John out

running Peter to that, down that down that aisle to do what I

knew God wanted us to do. I'm thankful for chances.

I'm thankful for grace. I'm thankful for the way he

watches over us. So take comfort.

You're never alone. You're never unwatched.

You never, you're never not cared for.

You're never not loved, no matter what you think of

yourself, no matter what you think other people think of you,

you've got an eternal Father. He's on a whole different

wavelength. And take joy in that.

Now, we're also going to talk about the fact that He hates

your sin. We're going to do that in a

couple weeks. In Romans.

I mean, we got to talk about God's wrath.

That's a word that people don't like in our culture today, but

we'll get there. So thank you all for tonight.

Let's pray, Father, we're grateful.

We're grateful that we don't have to try to figure all this

out on our own. I know tonight, Father might

have been a little little redundant or much, but Father, I

just wanted to make sure we, we took a session and acknowledged

who you were and your relationship to eternity before

we just dive in to talk about what we want out of it, what we

get out of it. I wanted us to talk about what

you put into it. So Father, thank you for

creating. Thank you, Father, for for

providing an opportunity for us to even know that you exist, a

way for us to know you and to have fellowship with you and a

relationship with you. And I pray, Father, that that

relationship just deepens as our discipleship grows.

But Father, also pray that we're very careful to be aware that

you didn't do that just so that we could keep it to ourselves.

But Father, you've blessed us with a gift of grace so that we

can bless others by telling them about your gift.

Now, Father, if there's someone in here physically in this

session or someone listening to this online right now and they

have to acknowledge they've never.

They've never faith in you. They've never put their whole

weight into what Jesus has done for them.

The Father, they would come and talk to us, contact us, reach

out to us so that we might know how to help them, just to know

you. Thank you for the opportunity to

know you. Thank you, Father, that you're

watching over us carefully and you're going to guide us and

you're going to bless us in Christ's name, Amen.

God bless you all. Thank you so much for being

here. Thank you so much for listening

today. And I also hope that you'll go

to [email protected]

as well as our app and find many other resources that will bless

you and your families. Thank you once again.