What will last for eternity?

I don't know if you are like me but I have always heard that there are only two things that will last for eternity - human souls and the Word of God. I think I first heard this at a Bill Gothard seminar about 20 years ago but I've heard it in many other places. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure I've said it a time or two myself.

Now I wonder if that is true.

That line that only souls and the Word of God will last for eternity is usually used in service to a pietistic agenda (I'm not using "pietistic" in a perjorative sense in this case). The agenda is to get people more busy about witnessing and studying the Word of God. Both are good and necessary things. This exhortation is also often used to get people to quit spending so much time in "secular" activities and hobbies and get involved in the work of the church. We pastors are constantly on a drive to get more volunteers to fortify all of the programs we come up with and so we often use the aforementioned rhetoric about souls, the Word of God and eternity to guilt people into being more involved. I should qualify that - many pastors aren't consciously trying to use guilt manipulation, they sincerely believe that only souls and the Word of God lasts for eternity and simply are sharing their passion.

This has two effects that I can see - it causes Christians to be less committed to their so-called "secular" occupations or to use those "secular" occupations for "spiritual" purposes. For instance, they go to work not chiefly to do a good job but to witness. Instead of having lunch with their co-workers (which would enable them to build the kinds of relationships which would foster witnessing opportunities) they read their bible at their desk.

I'm still slowly reading Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth, and today I came across the following words on page 86:

In eternity, we will continue to fulfill the Cultural Mandate - though without sin, creating things that are beautiful and beneficial out of the raw materials of God's renewed creation.

This means that every valid vocation has its counterpart in the new heavens and new earth, which gives our work eternal significance. We cannot know exactly what life will be like in eternity, but the fact that Scripture calls it a new "earth," and tells us we will live there with glorified physical bodies, means that it will not be a negation of the life we have known here on the old earth. Instead it will be an enhancement, an intensification, a glorification of this life. In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis pictures the afterlife as recongizably similar to this world, yet a place where every blade of grass seems somehow more real, more solid, than anything experienced here on earth.

In our work we not only participate in God's providential activity today, we also foreshadow the tasks we will take up in cultivating a new earth at the end of time. God's command to Adam and Even to partner with Him in developing the beauty and goodness of creation revealed His purpose for all of human life. And after He has dealt with sin once for all, we will joyfully take up that task once again, as redeemed people in a renewed world.

These words are exciting to me, yet they are a bit hard to get my mind around. In my early Christian years I bought into the material/spiritual distinction and was wholeheartedly on board with the idea that the only things which lasted for eternity were . . . so on and so forth.

Yet, as I have studied the latter chapters of Revelation 22 and have done a bit more reading and meditation I have come to the conclusion that there is far more continuity between this earth and the eternal state than I had previously thought. Certainly there is continuity and discontinuity, the question is where the lines lay and to what degree. But, I agree with what Pearcey is saying here - there is far more continuity than we can imagine.

This brings back to mind a few things from my childhood. When I was a kid I didn't think about God much but when I did I sometimes thought of eternity. The idea that we would live for eternity somewhere, whether heaven or hell, was horrible to me. Of course, if I had to live somewhere, heaven sounded better than hell, but from what I had heard of heaven it sounded like a pretty horrid place itself. In heaven we would be kind of floating around on clouds, kind of like angels and that sounded horrible to me. I had been to church a few times and pretty much hated it, and somehow heaven sounded like the eternal church service. I had heard that God would be there and that was somehow supposed to make it better, but I didn't see how even God could make it better. A church service was almost tolerable for an hour, but for an eternity???? Ughh!! Although I didn't know the fancy-schmancy term for it, I was really a young annihilationist, hoping against hope that when I died that would just be it.

My problem was that heaven was a place where I would get to spend an eternity doing something I could barely tolerate for an hour a week. So, when I would have these thoughts, which would usually come at night as I was going to sleep, I would force myself to think of something else - usually I would relive a football game I had watched on tv or imagine myself as Fran Tarkenton, scrambling away from the Oakland rush, and throwing TD's and winning ballgames.

When I became a Christian those fears never came back - knowing who Jesus was and knowing that heaven would be spent with Him made heaven seem more attractive. But still, if we're sitting in the eternal church service, even with Jesus there it sounds pretty boring. And, this whole idea that only souls and the Word of God lasted for eternity didn't really motivate me to witness much. After all, what was I witnessing about - the fact that you too, yes you, could join me in heaven for an eternal church service.

One of the things that scared me about heaven is the idea that we would be doing the same thing over and over again, every day for eternity. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds like it would get monotanous and that heaven will eventually come to look like the punishment of Sisyphus.

Of course my hope in all of this has been that when I die and go to heaven, I'll get a new nature that will enable me to love the things I fear now. I figure it's just sin in my life that causes me to fear the potential monotany of heaven, and its definitely sin that causes me to not want to spend an eternity in worship (even if it is like a church service). So, my hope has been not only in the fact that I will go to heaven, but that I'll have a new nature with which to enjoy heaven.

But if heaven is going to be something like this earth perfected, where we will continue to work and play and be creative, that adds a whole new dimension to it. I won't say that I've gotten my mind around the idea of eternity yet. It's hard for me to imagine what I'll be doing this time next week, much less what I'll be doing 137,463 years from now. But the notion that the new heavens and new earth will be something like this earth, and that even our vocations on this earth may have some carryover into eternity opens up a world of possibilities. That gives me some hope here on earth. In the worldview that says that only souls and the Word of God last for eternity, this leaves 98% of life for 98% of Christians irrelevant to their eternity. But, if this life truly is preparation for eternity and if that preparation goes beyond the "religious stuff" we do here, this opens up a whole new realm of possibility for us here on earth. I still can't get my mind around exactly how, but its exciting to contemplate. This could mean that everything counts for eternity, and not just those activities that are self-consciously devoted to witnessing or reading the Bible.