This Page will require more than usual concentration, consideration and response than most of the other Pages in this series. We are dealing with experience, and experience is sufficiently related to eternal perceptions more than we may have imagined. The main concept, for our purposes here, relates to the time factor that is so meaningful to the creation, and we relate it to earth experience. We relate it to our understanding of all things earthly. Einstein, as we have noted elsewhere, believed time had a beginning so time itself was as much a part of whatever started the natural context as was anything else in the human experience. For the Christian the Creator of time was God. For the humanist it appeared with the creation, likely perceived as beginning with the big bang of an explosion that set the universe going as we have come to know it. The point here is that God primarily operates in eternity, secondarily in time. We do not understand eternity but have theories about it that relate to an ever present (presence), with no beginning and no ending. Eternity provides constancy of divine life (self-conscious) sustained without time. It cannot be explained in terms of nature, and belongs to the supernatural perception. Perceived it is not explained. The human being can perceive truth or falsity without understanding that perceived.
An evidence of the eternal is found in spiritual experience, and may be suggested in any experience of human beings. Experience of any kind has something of eternity in it. We feel it is beyond time, and there is a feeling of timelessness in it. I possess a feeling of timelessness in my marriage of 57 years, broken only by the death of my wife. I feel the same thing with my children, a timelessness that hovers in me whether I am with them or away from them. All this is in perception. It is an experience of life that I don’t want to lose and believe survives, in some inexplicable way for me. This is spiritual experience.
Jesus captured the point when he talked with Nicodemus one night. Nicodemus was an intelligent fellow, successful in life, seemingly needing nothing more than he appeared and possessed – but more than the masses of persons around him. Nevertheless he knew that something was missing. Jesus made a startling statement to him: Persons must be born again. He was not told to do better with his property, with his sophistication, with the circumstances of his life in nature. He needed to be born again. Nicodemus proved his objectivity when he followed up with questions so to understand what a statement like he just heard meant. (John 3) He had not gone beyond human reasoning, whereas Jesus spoke in parables that related to experience relating to faith beyond nature. Persons are born, in the natural sense, to a natural life with clues to something larger. There is a spiritual life even for the evasive person, as the evidence proves, as in conscience. What direction will that take? Will it be muffled, perhaps die? The genuine spiritual life is to be found in a new experience to which the individual must be born. That birth may be in a smooth experience that may include ecstasy, as some women have reported in natural birth. Or, it may come with a kicking and screaming, as some women have reported in childbirth. Jesus even used the strain of birth experience in his explanation. C. S. Lewis witnessed this in his conversion. One of my children told me that she does not remember a moment when she did not rest her soul in Jesus Christ. Her beginning was in the beauty of the transition reported by some children. My own birth pangs continued for some weeks until I submitted to the birth of spiritual life provided by Jesus Christ and achieved through the midwifery of the Holy Spirit in my life. Christianity is the new birth of the individual that admits to a context of eternity, even while the person remains in the life of nature. As my mother delivered me to the life of nature, so the Holy Spirit of God delivers me to the life of eternity. This last adds considerable change to the life of time, without denying that the two are joined. Time offers a limited experience in the course of natural life. Eternity offers a continuing experience dominated by the presence of God and his kingdom that are unchanging. It is accented here that it is an experience. It does not have material substance, does not have the accoutrements of natural contexts, but does have in those contexts a shadow of that which is to come. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020