THE END!

And the Lord will be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one.  Zechariah 14:9 NASB

On that day:

Start here:  “But when he sees his children, the work of My hands, in his midst, they will sanctify My name; indeed, they will sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and will stand in awe of the God of Israel” (Isaiah 29:23 NASB).

Add this: “‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” (Acts 17:28 NIV).

Then this:  “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place” (Matthew 5:18 NAB).

Now, let’s investigate.

We have the tendency to assume that the creation will continue forever.  Oh, we know we won’t—at least not in this life, but because we throw around words like “eternal,” we imagine that life in some form or another, in this world or the next, will march on, that time will keep going in some fashion similar to what we experience now.  We don’t think about the real end of it all.  We ignore Yeshua’s use of the word “until.”  “Until heaven and earth pass away.”  Doesn’t that imply that at some point they will end, that there really will be an end to everything?  Consider Lohmeyer’s comments on the Lord’s Prayer: 

“ . . . and just as the name of God was before the creation, so too it will be after the consummation—indeed creation and consummation are only incidents in the being and activity of the name . . .”[1] 

“The name is before the beginning and after the end.”[2]

“So biblical thought recognizes a distinction, but not an opposition, between time and eternity; for both ‘come’ from God’s hand, and just as the world is time, so too God’s eternity is ‘time’ or even ‘the age of ages’.  God’s time does not reach from eternity to eternity, but ‘from age to age’ or ‘from ages to ages’.  Therefore here, too, time is not a constant and uninterrupted flow, without beginning and end, but it stands at the beginning, divides itself into ‘ages’, and reaches an end which is the transition into the ‘ages of ages’, i.e. into eternity.”[3]

“ . . . the predominant idea everywhere is not that of an empty, merely fleeting, time, but of an experienced time, or, more exactly, a historically filled time which is in fact expressed in this ‘coming’.”[4]

“Because God is the fullness of all that is to come and the power of all that is to come, and therefore quite simply ‘theComing One’.”[5]

“ . . . all being and happening is, because it is made through God, also made for God; its being in time and through time is a steady transition from being made by God to being fulfilled by God.”[6]

Before in the beginning, God.  After the end, God.

Is the creation permanent?  Once created, is it co-substantial with God?  Is it purposed to last forever?  Since Pythagoras invented the idea of the eternal soul, we have (perhaps) been deluded into believing that somehow, someway we will last forever.  But the Tanakh doesn’t support this.  It took the influence of Hellenism to come up with the eternal existence of us!  And ever since we’ve speculated on what it will be like to live in the other, eternal world; not once considering the possibility that the real game is God before—God after.  And nothing else.

When did we start thinking that God needed us to be around for all eternity?  He didn’t need us before this great creative experiment.  Does He need us after?

How would you adjust your thinking and your doing if there really is an end to everything?

Topical Index: end, Lohmeyer, Zechariah 14:9, Isaiah 29:3, Acts 17:28, Matthew 5:18

[1] Ernst Lohmeyer,  “Our Father”: An Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 76.

[2] Ibid., p. 77.

[3] Ibid., p. 93.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 94.

[6] Ibid.