It's Not About Me - Max Lucado [11]
NOT EVEN GOD
MADE GOD.
Everyone, that is, except God. As we list the mind-stretching claims of Christ, let’s include this one near the top. “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). If the mob didn’t want to kill Jesus before that sentence, they did afterward. Jesus claimed to be God, the Eternal Being. He identified himself as “the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15 NKJV).
Scripture broadcasts this attribute in surround-sound. God is “from everlasting” (Psalm 93:2 NKJV) and the “everlasting King” (Jeremiah 10:10 NKJV), “incorruptible” (Romans 1:23 NKJV), “who alone has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16 NKJV). The heavens and the earth will perish, “but You [O God] are the same, and Your years will have no end” (Psalm 102:27 NKJV).You’ll more quickly measure the salt of the ocean than measure the existence of God because “the number of His years is unsearchable” (Job 36:26).
Trace the tree back to a seed. Trace the dress back to a factory.Trace the baby back to a mommy.Trace God back to ... to ... to ...
No one. Not even God made God. “From eternity I am He” (Isaiah 43:13). For that reason we have Jesus making statements such as, “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). He didn’t say, “Before Abraham was born, I was.” God never says, “I was,” because he still is. He is—right now—in the days of Abraham and in the end of time. He is eternal. He does not live sequential moments, laid out on a time line, one following the other. His world is one moment or, better stated, momentless.
HE KNOWS YOUR
BEGINNING AND
YOUR END, BECAUSE
HE HAS NEITHER.
He doesn’t view history as a progression of centuries but as a single photo. He captures your life, your entire life, in one glance. He sees your birth and burial in one frame. He knows your beginning and your end, because he has neither.
Doesn’t make sense, does it? Eternity makes no sense to us, the timebound.You might as well be handed a book written in kanji (unless, of course, you are Japanese).You look at the characters, and all you see is zigzagged lines. You shake your head.This language finds no home in your mind.
But what if someone taught you how to read and write the language? Suppose a native speaker had the time and you had the will so that day by day the symbols that meant nothing to you began to mean something?
With God’s help, the same is happening to you and me regarding eternity. He is teaching us the language.“He has also set eternity in their heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Tucked away in each of us is a hunch that we were made for forever and a hope that the hunch is true.
Remember the story of the eagle who was raised by chickens? From the floor of the barnyard she spots an eagle in the clouds, and her heart stirs. “I can do that!” she whispers. The other chickens laugh, but she knows better. She was born different. Born with a belief.
You were too. Your world extends beyond the barnyard of time. A foreverness woos you.Your heavenly life Everests the pebbles of your earthly life. If grains of sand measured the two, how would they stack up? Heaven would be every grain of sand on every beach on earth, plus more. Earthly life, by contrast, would be one hundredth of one grain of sand. Need a phrase to summarize the length of your life on earth? Try Jenna’s: “Just a moment.”
Wasn’t this the phrase of choice for Paul? “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17 NKJV, emphasis mine).
What if we had a glimpse of the apostle as he wrote those words? By this time he had been “beaten times without number, often in danger of death. Five times,” he writes,“I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes.Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep” (2 Corinthians 11:23-25). He goes on to refer to