We’ve all met people who see themselves stuck in a rut, caught in a perpetual cycle of where they are. I’ve been there, and I am sure you have, too. But the simple fact is that I’ve never been here before, and neither have you.
No matter how little we glumly think of where God has abandoned us in a particular place of despair, we’ve been carried further and faster than the mind can imagine.
While doing research for a science fiction novel I wrote a few years ago, I came across some breathtaking numbers. The Earth rotates at 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, while orbiting the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Sun is moving around the center of the galaxy at 400,000 mph even as the galaxy itself speeds outward at 1.5 million mph relative to the cosmic microwave background.
The immensity of God’s creation is staggering.
It also means you have literally never met anyone who has never been anywhere.
In the time you’ve taken to read this, you’ve moved between 35,000 and 45,000 miles, with some back-of-the-envelope AI-checked math accounting for directional vectors. And where you were when you started, you’ll never be again.
Reality puts a quick lie to the pagan religions of yore (and even today). They have all viewed the world as static “cycles.” Eternity past and future are the same, they claim. In such a worldview, existence is philosophically and practically tiresome. No wonder they yearn for oblivion.
Yet through the natural revelation of science and the special revelation of Scripture, we know now what they did not. There was a beginning, and there will be an end. In the middle, a journey unlike any other.
Perhaps that beginning was 5,786 years ago, as some Jewish priests calculated, or 14 billion years as the cosmologists have asserted. It started with either a single blast of light at the command of God, or a Big Bang brought on by … well, whatever.
And, yes, someday it will end. Some of those cosmologists calculate a future where the universe collapses back on itself in a Big Crunch, while others postulate that it will expand ever outward and grow cold in a “heat death.”
More radically than either of those, Scripture tells us Christ will return, and what we know of today will pass away and be replaced with a new heaven and new earth.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Each of us is an explorer, boldly heading to a distinct future. No matter where you were or where you are, God has you on this journey. Recognizing it as such, we can stare dumbly at our feet or forward in awe of Him who spoke creation into existence.
