Eternity and the Fate of the Temporal

When we who know the Lord are one day at last completely transformed, translated into the heavenly beings we were designed from the start to be, will we know both our origins in time as well as our previously barely known, eternality? What will we be in God’s eternal dwelling if not beings now living, as He does, outside of linear time? Yet, in that blessed state, will we still know our past, the temporally fixed existence that had its apparent start in time and was lived out in time?

There is almost an amnesiac quality to the Bible’s description of the future and infinite state of the blessed. The Scripture tells us of a day coming when all our tears will be washed away, just as all the former things of our once fallen existence will have passed from our consciousness as well. As perfected and eternal beings now dwelling in that eternity what might be the value of remembering our earthly pilgrimage?

All that may swirl through our heads and hearts today: our past, our present, our future, in short all the strands of our entire earthly existence, will they be eliminated from our consciousness or will something potentially greater take place?

Could it be that all the deep mystery of the divine that may have permeated our childhood, the aching deep calling deep in our present life, and the seemingly impenetrable and unknown future of our life here will all together some day, some final day of time as we have known it, be made right within us rather than only banished?

I’d like to think (and I confess that I may be “off-base” here theologically speaking), that there is such deep meaning in even the temporal life we’ve known here on earth that God will not suffer it to be lost so much as perfected and made whole to us. After all, even now, we appear to be somehow in the very center of God’s workings and intentions for the universe.

Sometimes these days I begin to feel overwhelmed by the weight of meaning just to be found in the natural world outside my window, a world that is somehow transcendently linked to the supernatural world that dwells invisibly behind it. The drama of God’s manifest and yet mysterious purposes, and purpose, lie out there beyond my ability to comprehend, but not my ability to apprehend. These are manifestations, no matter how fleeting, of glory, glimpses of the ultimate and they are being made known to my consciousness in the here and now, not in some future state.

Of course in that state we will know infinitely more than we do now, but perhaps our “nows” are somehow incorporated in a new way into our eternal future. Is the temporal lost forever in the eternal or does it become part of the eternal once we enter into the presence of our God? I do not and cannot know the answer, but I wonder….and I yearn to someday know the answer, even as I am known by the Answerer….