"Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name..." - Philippians 2:9
For all of my life,
my thoughts have been fixated on the future. I started reading science fiction at a very early age. I reveled in the TV show "Disneyland" (later, "The Wonderful World of Disney") and especially when the topic was "Tomorrowland" or somehow dealt with space travel or life in the future.
For more than half my life, I have understood that my personal future is a real, concrete, physical existence in a pristine, restored universe. All credit goes to my God, creator of the universe, commonly known as Jesus.
If you happen to be a reader who is not yet a believer — perhaps you think you'll never be — don't "tune out" just yet. I constantly learn from and am challenged by the people I meet here on Steemit, regardless of differences in our beliefs. Even if you do close this article, I hope you'll check out my other writing on a wide-range of topics. Here's a Topical Table of Contents.
The Most Popular Person?
By Artyom Sharbatyan CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
At times I wonder about the oddest things...
I began wondering recently what it will be like to meet the God-Man, Jesus, in person. All the promises of scripture point to this coming reality. Most Christians share this expectation.
Songwriter Chris Rice,
in his title song on the album "Deep Enough to Dream," imagines falling asleep deeply enough to dream of being able "...to reach out and touch the face of the one who made me." Just thinking about the wonder and privilege of that coming moment chokes me up and fills me with great anticipation.
However, I imagine that there are going to be some logistical problems.
Won't Jesus be the most popular person ever in heaven?
Pretty much everyone who has had their life transformed by the LORD Jesus is going to want to see him. We will all want to express our undying gratitude, and to spend time with him. How is that going to work, considering that there is one and only one Jesus, while there are many millions, and perhaps ultimately billions, of his followers?
On the last day, when the dead in Christ are raised incorruptible and we who are alive and remain are transformed into new, imperishable bodies, there will be a vast and innumerable crowd of people, every one of us wanting an audience with Jesus.
Please don't get me wrong.
I'm not trying to be flippant here. I'm not trying to ridicule anyone or anything. I seriously wonder about things like this.
Even now, in the present time, I imagine logistical problems.
The most recent Global Crude Death Rate I've been able to find indicates about eight people of every thousand die each year. Of the present estimated world population of 7.4 billion, on average about 187 people die every second.
Religious statistics estimate the percentage of Christians on the planet at around one third. This in itself is interesting, because it matches the symbolic value in apocalyptic literature such as the Book of Revelation. If accurate, about 63 believers die every second.
Some Deep Thoughts
Photo courtesy of Ben White and http://unsplash.com
Are you starting to see the problem?
There's no way humanly possible, for Jesus as a man to meet and greet the number of redeemed who are moving on to glory each second. Even if we pessimistically derate that number by a factor of ten, there would be six people per second ushered through the pearly gates, being introduced to The Man.
I'm not really worried about this.
Just very curious. My suspicions are that I have much to learn about the contrast between "time" and "eternity." I'm sure that Jesus/God has this all worked out.
I've shared some of my meditations on eternity with my readers before. For example:
and
"How To Deal With That First, Rough Morning In Heaven..."
Continuing in a speculative vein, once all the dust has settled and we begin our blessed existence in Glory, we will have, literally, all the time in the world to visit with Jesus. Sure, there will be countless numbers of us, eventually populating billions of planets throughout the universe.
Populating billions of planets...
Photo courtesy of JPL/NASA
Recalling my math, there are an infinite number of complex numbers between each and every integer. Eternity is probably a lot like that mind-bending math postulate.
Another way of looking at it,
perhaps we'll be able to spend one-on-one time with Jesus whenever we wish. Perhaps eternity is non-linear, non-sequential. We may be able to multiplex our time, our attention, our location. We may never again have to worry about having to choose between two events happening at the same time; we may be able to experience them both.
I truly do look forward to personally visiting with Jesus one day. I already talk to him pretty much on a daily basis. I can hardly wait to find out exactly what that will be like, and how the details will all work out.
Your thoughts?
FIN
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