"So who created God, then?" A question often asked by atheists. The question itself is of course flawed and anyone who asks it is simply asking the wrong question since God is eternal – see bold above. Eternity is something we all (along with the atheists) find difficult to understand. Maybe it’s because we mortals try to understand only through our own experiences and the things that we can physically see and touch. A man named Thomas, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, was no different and refused to believe in the resurrection of the dead Messiah without physical sight or touch.
Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” – John 20:27-29
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You may skip over the obituaries section as you flick through the JEP but we mortals, whether we like it or not, all have a beginning and an end, a birth and a death. Those two dates will be engraved on our gravestone and what is marked in between these two dates is merely the “-“ the dash.
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“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. John 3:16
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We, you and I, are living in the dash! “-“ is such a short space of time in history and so pathetically insignificant in eternity.
How is it possible for us to comprehend something with no beginning and no end without either seeing it or touching it? How conquer unbelief?
There was a time when the world was thought to be flat. If you sailed too far the consequences were perilous because you’d fall off the edge. It was this same unbelief that refused to accept anything outside of personal experience, sight and touch, since nobody, out of fear, had travelled any further.........until Columbus in 1492 AD.
Through this man’s simple ‘belief’ we all “discovered” another dimension and the world, as we know, became no longer flat, but round. No definitive place to start or finish; no edge; no corner. One permanent sign from God was given to us during the lifetime of a man called Noah – as in “flood”..... The rainbow. At that time this was a very special and miraculous sight. For years I was led to believe that all rainbows were arches, arches with a start and a finish, with one end and another. This sign was given to Noah as a sign of goodwill from God himself as a promise to all mankind. But this sign, truth be told, is not an arch but a glorious circle, a circle, not just of colour but a circle of light, with no beginning and no end. What changes the arch into the circle is …perspective!
We only see the arch because we are looking from the ground upwards. To see the full circle we must look.....from above. This is God's perspective. It’s when we view things from this angle – from above - that we begin to see things very differently.
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A few days ago many Jersey folk saw the glorious rainbow in the skies over the Island as captured beautifully in the JEP (Tuesday 18 December 2012, page 22). Albeit from a different perspective, could it be that we were actually looking at the very symbol of God Himself, the symbol of his eternity, without beginning or end?
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“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” - Isaiah 9:6
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And there’s more. When God spoke with Noah with regard to the rainbow, he was promising to all humankind, today’s Jersey folk included, that he would not judge the world in the same way that he did in Noah’s day, by aloof condemnation. Instead he had (and has) a plan, a different way to judge the world......
So could this celestial phenomenon be God's way of actually saying to us - "I intend to send my eternal self to you."?
It’s this message of God coming to mankind – to earth - that runs all the way through the Bible.
It’s the eternal God Almighty who comes to us. |
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