In this article we are looking into the far-distant future, when the human race is fully at one with God, evil has vanished without trace, and death is a thing of the past. The Bible goes no farther than the close of the Millennium, with which is associated the disappearance of evil and the entry of reconciled men into everlasting life. Jesus alluded to that time in the words "come ye blessed of my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (Matt. 25.34). This, says Paul, is when Christ, at the close of his Millennial work with mankind "shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, the Father, that God may be all in all" (1 Cor.15.24). Of the state of humanity after that moment there is barely a hint, only that "the dwelling of God is with man .... and there shall be no more death… for the former things are passed away... behold, I make all things new" (Rev. 21.3-5). "Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind" (Isa.65.17). "In the coming ages" says Paul, God will "show the immeasurable riches of his grace" (Eph.2.7). The unassailable principle which the Bible enunciates with clear and definite voice is that life goes on; life is endless.

The idea of eternity is difficult to grasp and even today there are varying definitions of what is meant by the words 'eternal' and 'everlasting' in the Bible. They are usually rendered from the Greek aionian and the Hebrew olain, both of which imply duration or continuity in time as well as permanence of quality or state. This idea of duration, of continued progress in time, is increasingly being abandoned in modern thought and the thesis advanced that eternity is equivalent to timelessness, a condition of no-time, an eternal "now" in which the past, present and future exist simultaneously. It is almost as if some types of mind shrink from the prospect of perpetual conscious existence subject to sequential change and continuing experience, rather preferring a kind of Nirvana in which the mind ceases to concern itself with external activity and sinks into the embrace of a universal Consciousness having no purpose of object beyond the serene contemplation of an unchanging environment. This is not the Bible view; God is a God of action and activity, of ceaseless creativity and continuing achievement, and all his creatures are intended ultimately to take their places in an orderly system of created things of infinite variety and continuous development. And this implies duration and a consciousness of duration.

It is debatable whether intelligent life can continue on any other basis. Edmund Parsons, writing on the metaphysical problems of Time ("Time Devoured" 1964) has said that "all consciousness is consciousness of change, with duration as relative to it". Dr. Eisely ("The Firmament of Time" 1961) says that life, unlike matter, has a definite origin at a point in time and continues travelling in a unique fashion in the time dimension. Current investigations show that intelligent consciousness can only subsist when it is continually aware of, in contact with, and affected by, the varying characteristics of a changing environment. Life in eternity must be thought of as continued progress through new experiences and into new fields of knowledge, without end. Thus space, time, life and progress are all infinite and there can be no end or boundary to any of them, just as there can be no end or limit to the creative power and activity of God.

Coming back from these rather exalted heights to the position of the redeemed and perfected human race at the end of the Messianic reign, the fact has to be faced that this planet earth, admirably adapted as it is for continued human life, is limited in size. The original Divine commission at man's creation to "be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1.28) has been measurably accomplished already, although the present fashionable forebodings about the earth's inability to support more than the seven thousand millions it has at the moment are wide of the mark and quite inaccurate. Under the present social system, controlled by greed and characterised by ignorance, it may well be so, but under the beneficent and wise administration of the Messianic Age the position will be very different. It has been reliably calculated that if full use was made of the available land surface and of usable solar energy reaching the earth sufficient food could be produced for fifty times the present population, although the planet would be uncomfortably crowded long before that number was reached. But even so, if life is to go on into the unlimited future it is clear that man must either migrate from the earth or stop procreating. The second alternative is sometimes thought to be unnatural, but is this really so? The same thing happens in everyday life. In the traditional life span of seventy years the procreative period of a married pair does not exceed some twenty-five years; the family is complete and the process ceases. It might well be that in a communal or racial sense God has ordained things the same way. If at a certain point in history, the original commission and power to "increase and fill the earth" will have achieved its purpose, and the power so to do comes to an end, the analogy with the individual family is exact. In such case the human race could be regarded as a unit of Divine creation, complete within itself and properly settled in this home in space which has been created for it.

The alternative — successive migrations to other homes in space — if considered from the purely physical standpoint, bristles with difficulties. Asimov, in "Planets for Man "(1965) says that, assuming the necessary technical problems could be solved in the next hundred years, it would be necessary from the year A.D. 2100 onwards to send into space 900,000 persons every day in order to keep the population of this earth within maximum limits. How such a number would survive, either on the journey or upon arrival at destination, is not stated. In any case no space-ship had been designed or even imagined which could make such a journey. There are high hopes of reaching our neighbour planet Mars, perhaps in 2030, but this is as far as serious thinking goes. The colossal amount of materials which would have to be taken from the earth's resources to transport and support such emigrants on such a scale on their way to a planet outside the solar system, even if such were possible, would exhaust the earth's total supply in a very short time, and leave the situation worse than before.

The problem, though, is not really a physical one. If it should transpire in the purpose of God that men from this earth are to commence a new life at some other spot in the far recesses of the Universe then it can be expected that Divine power will call into action forces unknown to man and outside the range of his powers, to do what he cannot do of himself. The idea of instantaneous transfer to another life and another world is a familiar one in ordinary Christian theology. Scripture teaching is plain that at his Coming the Lord Christ takes to himself his faithful; the Apostle Paul describes this as a "change" from earthly to heavenly conditions (1 Cor.15.35‑50), as being "caught away to meet the Lord" (1 Thess.4 16‑17) where the word used literally is 'to be snatched away' . If such an instantaneous transfer is to be the experience of certain specific individuals, the Christian Church at one time in earth's history, and we know that this is the case, then no reason exists to doubt the feasibility of the same thing in a different sphere and to a different end at another time if such should be the Divine Will.

One apparently insurmountable objection to the idea that the earth will be the home of humanity to all eternity is the popular scientific view that the sun must one day cool down and in consequence all life be extinguished upon earth. A very complete process for the formation and eventual disintegration of stars has been worked out on the basis of observations and calculations from which it is believed in authoritative quarters that the sun has only about five thousand million years of useful life left to it. Having used up most of its hydrogen it will, in consequence of its reduced weight, enlarge in size and destroy the earth by its corresponding temporarily enhanced heat; it will then slowly cool and the solar system become a frozen and lifeless waste. If all this is true then there is obviously no eternal home for man upon earth. But no one can be sure that it is true. After all, no man has actually observed such processes taking place, for the time scale of the stars is too vast. In fact, observations of the past one hundred and fifty years, from which the stellar processes of twenty thousand million years have been deduced, are on the same time-scale as if a man, knowing nothing of Nature, should take a movie film of the plant life in his garden for just one quarter of a second and on the basis of that brief record form a complete theory of the growth of plants from seed-sowing to flower and fruitage during a complete year.

The theory of a dying sun is not universally held. One school of investigators believes that in its journey through space the sun sweeps up hydrogen to replace that which is consumed and converted to heat, as though the fire is being stoked up as fast as it burns. It has been discovered in quite recent years that the vast stretches of "empty space" between the stars are not empty at all; they are full of free atoms, mainly of hydrogen, and because space is so big and the stars in it so relatively small, the material composing the stars is only about one ten-thousandth part of all the substance there is in the universe. The remaining 99.99 per cent is distributed loose throughout all space. The sun with its planets is travelling through space at a speed of 60,000 miles per hour so that it must inevitably collect a lot of that material in its course. Even the earth, much smaller, is known to be picking up a thousand tons of matter from outer space every day, in its course round the sun. However, this view is no longer widely held, as the amount gathered is much smaller than the amount used in any period of time. Observations of other stars and supernovae support the idea of our sun eventually running out, swelling and dying as mentioned above.

If someone suggests that, even so, in the infinity of eternity even this vast store of matter must be used up and where is the next lot coming from, science is already well on the track of the answer. A few generations ago it was almost universally believed that the entire universe was getting colder as the heat from the sun and stars was dissipated into space and that nothing could ever recover that lost heat. That belief was based on the so-called 'mechanical' view of the universe which regarded it as a vast machine powered by heat; when the heat was all gone the universe would come to a stop, cold and still.

The principle which gave rise to that theory was the then fairly new science of thermodynamics, treating of the relation and interaction between heat and energy, a science which dictates the design and capability of every kind of power generating device and every machine which needs power to drive it — since all power comes primarily from heat, through the agency of coal, oil, sunshine and so on. The chief apostle of this science was Nicolas Carnot (1796-1832) who was a good engineer but made no claim to being a theologian. He defined his thesis in terms now known as the "second law of thermodynamics" but he was talking about steam‑engines and not about stars. Nevertheless it became fashionable to say that the universe cannot go on forever because of the second law of thermodynamics. But the universe does not consist fundamentally of steam-engines; it consists fundamentally of stars, and today different counsels prevail. The nature of the processes going on inside the stars is better understood, and there seems to exist a very real possibility that the energy generated by the annihilation of matter in stars is, at a later stage and elsewhere in the universe, reconstituted into matter which can be transformed again into energy. However, a contrary argument is that, although new stars are indeed formed from the remnants of old ones, as atoms and molecules are gathered together by gravity until large enough to form a new sun, energy is not transformed into matter again. Hence, the universe left to itself will either cool down or, if there is enough matter in it, attract itself into a smaller and smaller size until it ends in a big crunch. However, scientists are beginning to perceive the rudimentary principles of a driving force which maintains the universe in ceaseless action and reaction the effect of which is to continue eternally the chemical interchanges between matter and energy upon which all life depends.

That driving force is God. He is the source of the energy which powers all creation, which under certain conditions and at one time appears as matter and under other conditions and at another time is manifested as active energy again. He is the source and sustainer of all life, which makes the use of that matter and that energy to function in its appointed manner. The universe is not a dying creation but an eternal one because it is sustained by the eternal Creator, "in whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breath of all mankind" (Job 12.10). With that fact firmly established it matters nothing whether mankind is to find his eternal home on this earth or experience a later change of habitat from an old home due for dissolution to a new one newly blossoming into flower. The power of the Most High is adequate for the transfer, and since, to the redeemed, heaven is where God is, and God is everywhere, the geographical location, so to speak, of the "new heavens and new earth" which is the inheritance of perfected mankind is surely a minor issue. The Biblical pictures and foreviews of that consummation are expressed in terms of this earth as we know it, but that is the only possible manner in which the glories of the future can be described to men who have never known anything else but this earth. No matter where man may find himself in the eternal future it will always be a true picture; man's outward physical perfection, adjusted and adapted to a perfect outward environment, allied with his inward mental and moral relation to his Creator and his God, will ensure his absolute happiness and content in whatever place it pleases God that he should dwell.

So man approaches, not the end, but a new beginning. Perhaps that is, after all, the mystery of creation, a succession of endings that are also beginnings. Life goes on, reaching always forward, ever finding something new and something greater and grander on the way. There may, after all, be a more profound truth than has ever been suspected enshrined in those words which God utters when the world of human insufficiency gives place to the Divine rule of the future; "the former things are passed away; behold, I make all things new."

AOH