Hello everyone,
I took a couple of days off to spend with the family and enjoy the warm temps here. I also celebrated my 52nd birthday last Saturday. Denise and I also attended the funeral of a friends that had been fighting cancer for 6 years. This prompted me to think about life and how temporary it is. (James 4:14 You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life like? For you are a puff of smoke that appears for a short time and then vanishes.) This begs the question: What then? We always hear about death being the end of life. It is so depressing. I am thinking that this should not be so negative. It is the natural cycle of things, in a sense, like they say in the “Lion King” … “The Circle of Life”.
As a Believer and Follower of Jesus, the Christ, I wonder how this cycle fits into the “big picture” of eternal life. The following paragraph describes what I believe is God's blueprint of a human life. It is not a scientifically approved view. It is just a simple thought of a simple country boy. I hope that it helps you if you have questions like me.
It seems that there are three stages of life that we are able to notice: embryonic (birth), physical (life), and spiritual (eternity). Although we cannot know, in this stage of our existence, whether anything comes before or exactly what happens after we transition into eternity, I notice that God seems to do things in sets of 3. With this concept in mind, I expound that thought into the miracle of our life and how we mature from creation (birth) to education (life) and into the image of God (spiritual celestial bodies).
I believe that life BEGINS at conception. Our physical existence starts to evolve from a single cell embryo to a fetus to a fully formed baby in a mere 9 months. However, our soul is sparked by the touch of God in that magic moment of conception. Once our allotted time in our mother's womb is fulfilled, we transition into our present environment for another 80 – 90 years (average). As all you parents know, even the incubation of babies cannot be accurately mapped to a specific time. Sometimes, children are early, sometimes they are born after the doctor's “due date”. If you embrace that concept throughout our transitory evolutionary stages of birth/life/eternity, we can better see how God has planned our progress into his Kingdom.
After we have gleaned all the nourishment allotted in the womb, we begin another transition experience toward eternity. We learn to love, to interact, to acknowledge The Creator. Numerous books and sermons are out there concerning “the meaning of life”. I think that meaning is merely to LEARN how we are to live (for eternity), just as we had to learn how to live in our mother's womb. As a matter of fact, that analogy is used several times by Jesus and the apostles. 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will known fully, just as I have been fully known. Paul acknowledges this transition here as well. Once our allotted time has been spent, we experience another birthing process into the spiritual realm. Jesus pointed this out several times in his teachings as well. He even compares this transition with the pain and troubles incurred in the delivery process of birth.
After we suffer/experience the transition of physical life into our celestial bodies, we use our life lessons to worship and honor The Creator as we were initially intended to do. (Genesis 1:26 – 27). I think that the first “Adam” did not sport a physical body until he partook of the fruit. From that point until the Kingdom of the New Jerusalem, we have to RE-learn the purpose of why we were created and how to fulfill that purpose. Once we have been transformed, we can only THEN really begin to fulfill that purpose. Our sin and shortcomings are the result of our free-willed spirit and, as a result, have to rely on a blood sacrifice to bridge the gap between the physical and spiritual dimension. The main point of attack is on the spiritual plane. This attack is masked by The Adversary (Satan) by temptations of the flesh and by trying to refocus the war between humans to the physical realm. The REAL war is in the spiritual realm. God even points out the weapons of that warfare (Ephesians 6 : 10 – 20) and where the focus SHOULD be.
So, as we look at the “big picture” of life, we see that death is only the channel into another phase of our life. Like birth; death is only the means to an end and not the end to a means. We should focus our life to learning God's curriculum for our purpose in this life by searching HIS Word and living our faith through our knowledge of salvation from an eternity in a real hell. Instead of seeing our faith and spiritual knowledge in a theoretical setting, we should LIVE those concepts and embrace the knowledge of things to come. All the materials we accumulate during our “puff of smoke” are merely tools we should use to evolve our souls into the eternal lives by managing these insignificant “treasures” to advancing our relationships between our fellow life-students as well as between us and our Creator.
Until, next time ….
May God Bless You and Yours
Gene
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