THE ETERNITY OF THOSE WHO BELIEVE
I Can’t Imagine!
(1 Corinthians 2:9)
Imagineering is a modern word that describes engineering in the realm of the imagination. Technology companies pay people big salaries nowadays just to think creatively and to imagine the possibilities that exist. Whether in science, medicine, productivity, entertainment, or education, the sky is the limit—as it always has been when dealing with the imagination.
When dealing with things that don’t yet exist, the imagination has free reign. By throwing off mental and creative restraint, people free themselves from constraints so that anything becomes a possibility. From infinite possibilities a few ideas emerge that contain the seeds of promise, and from those seeds sprout the innovations that change our world. But as today’s passage promises us, even the most creative person is powerless to comprehend the wonder and awe of what God has in store for those who believe and trust in Him alone for salvation.
In the Hebrew world of the Old Testament, “imagineers” were in seriously short supply. In those low-tech days, life was measured mostly by the five senses. So when Isaiah spoke of God, he spoke in terms of those senses: “For from days of old they have not heard or perceived by ear, nor has the eye seen a God besides You” (Isa. 64:4).
By New Testament times, the Greeks had turned imagineering into a full-time occupation (Acts 17:21). So when Paul addressed the subject of human wisdom about God to the church in Greece, he quoted Isaiah’s statement about ears and eyes, but he added to it the limitation of the mind (or, as it is translated here, the heart): “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9, emphasis added).
We could spend our whole lives imagineering about what eternity with God is going to be like without ever scratching the surface. But therein lies the excitement as well. Eternity with God is going to be infinitely greater than anything our finite minds can begin to conceive.
God’s Promise:
He has things prepared for you that you could never begin to imagine.
