Eternity

For God to have any meaning, there must be an afterlife. If life now is all that is or can be, nothing else matters. But if there’s more, God can’t be dismissed.

On the other hand, what would this afterlife need to be like for us to live there for ever? It could start with the earth in all its glory, but now without storms or volcanoes, poverty, squalor or disease. And the same goes for us. There’d be no murders or lust or stealing or envy or lies. For heaven to work, we’d have to be sanitized. If not, we’d end up fighting again. Without perfect truth, goodness and beauty, heaven would be a war zone, but if this heaven’s a place worth having, it must be run by a God worth having.

But why would a perfect God want us? Perfect implies He’s complete as He is, so why would He need admirers, especially failed creatures like us? As we are, we’d be repulsive to infinite goodness. For Him to want our company, He must have a love that is kind and endlessly patient, never self-seeking or easily angered, a love that protects and trusts, hopes and perseveres. So that explains who God is, but why would He bother with people like us? With love there’s no secret agenda. Any God who loves that strongly would also be good, and someone that decent would also be hospitable.

But what about us? Would we live on as particles in an ocean of infinite understanding, all life’s mysteries now explained? Sure, we’d have knowledge but where’s the fun in that paradise? Stripped of our own identities, how could we hope to explore for ourselves a world of endless adventure? And that’s the heaven Christ promised. Like Him, we also get born again in our own perfected bodies.

And now to the crux of the matter – this promise only works if Christ really rose from the dead. We know that in our natural world, no one returns from three days dead. For Christ to be resurrected, there must be a supernatural power. Death doesn’t negotiate, but on the other hand, is the Resurrection nothing but a myth?

Now a myth is somewhere and nowhere, some time and never, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... The Resurrection tells a different story.

Crucified and then buried three days, on the Sunday after Passover in Jerusalem in AD 30, Christ rose not as spirit but in His human body, nail holes still scarring His hands and feet. That sounds like a concrete event. For it to be real, there should be some record in history. Let’s hear from the Roman historian Tacitus.

Remember that Rome excelled at quashing rebellions, but that Christianity showed a remarkable resilience despite intense persecution. Why did it survive? Tacitus reports:

“Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome....”

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired....”

Now ask yourselves? Would such numbers in so many places be willing to endure such persecution for the sake of a long dead and discredited human leader, or did their courage reflect a greater faith? Did they perhaps believe in a risen Christ leading them to paradise? This is inconclusive, but why stop there with so much evidence for and against on the internet? What if Christ really did conquer death? That would demand your attention.