Eternity!
2 Corinthians 4:18
ETERNITY! What a heavy, heavy word! We all
tend to treat the material, sensible things of time as realities and eternal
things as fables. We must reverse our thinking. Eternity is reality! We deal
with reality only when we deal with eternity. All the arrangements and
attainments, relationships and experiences, joys and sorrows, successes and
disappointments, hopes and fears of life in this world are without meaning
unless they are seen and measured by eternity. Lost or saved, blessed or
cursed, justified or condemned, everyone of us is
living upon the brink of eternity. Very soon we must leave this world where all
things are temporal and enter into that world where all things are eternal!
Everything in this world is temporal and
passing away. Nothing here lasts very long. Everything around you is decaying,
dying, and coming to an end. The only thing you have now that you will carry
with you into eternity is your undying soul. What will it profit you,
therefore, if you should gain the whole world and lose your soul? See that you
value nothing in this world more than you will value it when you are leaving
this world. Set your heart upon Christ, heaven, and eternal life! Hold
everything here (and everyone) with a loose hand. Be prepared at a moment's
notice to leave it or lose it. You must soon do one or the other.
In that world to which we are going
everything is eternal. Heaven, all its blessedness and glory is eternal. Hell,
whatever that horrible place and condition of darkness and torment is, is
eternal!
What we are here we will be in eternity.
Thomas Brooks wrote, "The great weight of eternity hangs upon the small
wire of time." This is the day of grace. There will be no other. You must
enter the ark before the Lord shuts the door. "Now is the day of
salvation!" You will not enter heaven when you die unless you are made
righteous before you die (Rev. 22:11). Death changes nothing but our place of
existence.
Blessed is that person who, in the face of
eternity, can truthfully say, "I trust Christ." That person has
eternal life and shall never die! Christ, by his blood obtained eternal
salvation for all who trust him and offers it freely to you by the gospel. If
you die without Christ, if you perish under the wrath of God, the fault is your
own. No one else can be blamed.
Don Fortner