In His hands

Jesus has the whole world in His hands and the government of all things shall rest on His shoulders.

“By Him all things were made that are made, both visible and invisible things. He is before all things and by Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16-17).

The CERN Large Hadron particle accelerator is trying to identify the elusive Higgs Bosun, a phenomenon that occurs at critical, high-energy moments of matter formation. It is surmised that it accounted for the evolution of the universe in the time immediately following the Big Bang, when the violent energy of that Genesis moment provided favorable conditions for the kind of physics that was required for the formation of matter.

Scientists recognize that non-mass particles (neutrinos) acquire mass somehow and that gives them the force or momentum to contribute to the formation of matter. Somewhere in all this thinking is another phenomenon, aptly called, “The God Particle”, which less reverent observers have called “Dark Matter”, but only by way of describing it as something that remains dark to our understanding.

Dark matter comprises 70% of the mass of our universe, so in effect our knowledge only embraces 30% of the scope of the universe.

The point I wish to make, however, is that there is an unknown context accounting for the substance of our universe. Because the basic energies of the universe are a function of mass, we must also conclude that the universe is held together or consists by the same, as yet undiscovered means. We also accept that another unknown phenomenon played and still plays a major role in the formation of matter.

Is it coincidence that Colossians captured the essence of forming and sustaining in one concept: namely in Paul’s assertion that Christ is the formative and sustaining force of the universe.

It is also interesting that the Higgs Bosun is effective only for a brief period, after which the resulting matter continues to evolve, behave and transform according to prevailing laws of physics.

In John 3:8, Jesus, again in that amazingly economical style that is so characteristic of supreme divinity, said: “The wind blows where it wants to”. Thus, consistent with what we are already concluding about Higgs Bosun, the brief period of matter formation yields to a world that is self-sustaining within the bounds of God’s rules and laws.

That actually provokes another thought. The current state of our earth’s climate is also “blowing where it wants to”, within the bounds of God’s laws (the physical constraints of the universe).

The problem is that such a closed system will and does respond to all stimuli. Thus, when we breach the laws of our world and mess around with the fine balances that sustain our beautiful heritage, the winds will counter-act to balance the system. So when it does all go wrong, we really will have no one else to blame but ourselves.

Yet, for all that, life will go on until Christ has subdued all His enemies and placed everything at the feet of His Father – only then will He withdraw His sustaining power, to dematerialize matter into its constituent particles: and then He will fold up the entire universe as a garment and time shall be no more.

Dust shall return to dust, matter shall return to its constituents and the universe will collapse into its infinitely massive, infinitely dense rest state, until, He literally and physically holds all in His right hand. Then He will lay it all at His Father’s feet.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

Made in heaven

Where did it all begin and what keeps it all going. Scientists want answers that the bible provides.

The CERN laboratory that traverses Switzerland and France, will host the largest particle accelerator in the world: The Large Hadron Collider. A series of 5,000 powerful electro-magnets will accelerate bunches of charged nuclear particles (protons) along a circular track, which has a 27km radius. The resulting collisions will generate heat many times the surface temperature of the sun.

Some feel that this multi-billion-dollar global participation project will lead to an earth-bound black hole or some other wild catastrophe. That is all highly unlikely although conditions inside the accelerator represent a controlled bomb, with a magnitude of around 160kg of TNT. The complex assembly has been designed in order to contain the significant energy surges expected within the collider.

One of the greatest objectives of the experiment relates to the so-called “Higgs Bosun”, named after the person who first theorized its existence. Higgs observed that mass-less particles like neutrinos acquire mass, which doesn’t make sense. Of course all matter has mass, so many would say there is no issue here. An example to make the point describes how a party of people will gravitate towards a celebrity and then follow her across space, giving her “mass” and “momentum”. The mechanism that gives mass to otherwise mass-less matter is the Higgs Bosun, or so they theorize.

I am in no position to argue, except to say that it is not an elusive particle or undiscovered phenomenon that contributed to the formation of matter. Rather, the bible says, “All things were made by and consist through, Jesus Christ.”

That is a powerful idea contained in economical language. In X-Men 3, Jean is resurrected by her immense powers, to be called, “The Phoenix”. Her power is then co-opted by a dark megalomaniac, Magnetron, who focuses her destructive force. At full tilt, her power literally dematerialized people and things, causing their atomic consistency to dissolve into nothingness – a bit like what happens when you put Aspirin into water.

The movie captured something of the power that holds the whole universe together. It will not take power to destroy all matter. Rather, the removal of the power which sustains the universe and by which it consists, will result in the dematerialization of everything as we know it. That is what the bible means when it says, “All things consist (are held together), by Him”. This idea is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, which defines that without sustaining energy, all matter would regress to disorder.

Paul’s words in Colossians, introduce further thoughts relating to Christ’s preexistence and His role as the agent of creation. I will explore that in the next article, but to conclude this article I refer back to a simple and timeless chorus that takes on new meaning in this context, “Because He lives we can face tomorrow”.

The very fact of His existence is what keeps the universe intact and that energy is being expended all day, every day until it be taken away - at which point a dematerializing universe will be a cloud of particles that He will fold up as one would fold up a garment (Hebrews 1:10-12).

(>(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

From then till now

Time is ultimately a function of the universe. Its existence defines the beginning and end of time.

Revelation 10:6 speaks of Him who created all things, creation being the context of time. The verse then concludes with, “and time shall be no more”. The implication is that time is peculiar to the creation, which is empirically correct for time is only possible where something has a defined beginning and end.

It amazes me that a man living 2,000 years ago could articulate such an elegant concept well before his time.

We can only appreciate the concept of time within the created domain of God, that particular event horizon which defines the universe as a subset of divine time. When this created spectacle ends and is done away with, the fringe between time and eternity will be done away with – and “time shall be no more”.

So biblically and empirically the only reference point for time must be outside of time and the only “object” we know of that is independent of time is the eternal creator who made us and determines all our times and seasons.

By 1970 leading astrophysicists, including Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, had extended relativity theory to embrace time and space. The result was the space-time theorem which concluded that general relativity was not only valid for the entire universe but that space and time must have originated in the same big-bang moment. Hawking concluded that time had a finite beginning, which coincided with the beginning of our universe. Therefore time as we know it is limited to our universe and is a sub-set of non-time or eternity.

The arguments proposed thus far, call for an absolute reference point, external to our system, as a basis for time. If that external reference point is also moving, also subject to time, then it is not absolute, merely a relative reference point. But because the Big-Bang moment defined the beginning of space and time, by implication time is limited to the universe and beyond that is another dimension that is independent of time or space.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

Time only time

We are part of a vast moving thing where our little parts move fast relative to the overall machine.

Logically, the furthest universal point from the centre of the universe is where space ends and eternity starts. At that fringe, time virtually stops or becomes infinitely slow, because we cannot conceive of anything beyond the fringe of the physical universe.

Accordingly, the universe appears to be a static, stable ball to any external observer. But below the surface all kinds of things are happening and enormous energy is being expended.

Inside the system are many sub-systems and we are part of a sub-system or galaxy, called the Milky Way. Inside that are further sub-divisions, ours particular neighborhood being called the solar system: a small planetary system orbiting around a dwarf star, which we call, “the sun”.

The universe is so massive, that we have adopted measures that are relevant to our context. A meter would mean little in universal terms, where we have defined distances in terms of light years. Similarly, seconds, minutes or even hours have limited value to our own context.

Nonetheless, we use certain fixed reference points to track earth or solar time. We cannot feel ourselves going around the sun, but know that we will have 365.26 days and nights before we finish an orbit of the sun, a period that we call a year. Each time we pass through a single rotation, we mark off another day in a 365-day cycle. Thus, rotation around our axis is part of a great clock mechanism that helps us keep track of ourselves.

We use the sun to define time because it stands still whilst the rest of the solar system moves relative to that fixed reference point. However, even if we did not move at all, an equivalent period of 365.26 days would elapse to age us by one year. That introduces a point that I have been trying to make over the past few weeks. Time cannot be measured from within a system, because everything inside the system moves relatively to everything else. We need to a fixed, independent point of reference to define time.

Now of course, the sun may be static within our system, but the solar system moves within the Milky Way, which in turn wanders through clusters that are also moving through the vast expanse of the universe. To get to an absolute measure of time we at least accept the need for a fixed reference point, but the ultimate fixed reference point must be external to our universe.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

Eternally yours

Is time an heaven virtual eternity or is heaven just an eternal dimension, which lives outside time?

The fine line between eternity and time (or time that is so slow that it is virtually infinite), can only be depicted using Calculus, because an infinitely small fringe separates the two. Let me prove that.

Traveling at about 1,700 km/h, you can complete a single orbit of the earth within 24 hours. If you rise from the surface to orbit the earth say 500km above the surface, you can only achieve a 24 hour orbit by traveling about 130 km/h faster, because you would have to travel at least 3,000 kilometers further in the same 24 hour cycle. At 1 million kilometers away, you would need to reach more than 250,000 km/h to keep up. However, going the other way, to the center of the axis you would be traveling infinitely slowly or practically standing still, for you would travel no distance in a 24 hour cycle.

4 billion kilometers away you would need to go at the speed of light to keep up with anyone orbiting near the surface of the earth, who would be happily achieving a 24 hour orbit at about 1,700km/h. But as you can’t go faster than the speed of light, you would start lagging (actually at the speed of light you would be infinitely massive so the slow down would start a bit before that). If a day is the measure of a single orbit, then a day would get longer and longer, the further you go from the center.

Okay, earth is not the center of the universe and certainly one could go around the earth 20 times a day in a space shuttle, without changing the lapse of time i.e. 24 hours later you would still be one day older. However, within the context of the universe, we are the moving parts of the system and not able to just step outside and fly around the thing, so we are inextricably linked to universal time.

As with all massive objects (it is true of all mass), the universe has its own gravity and, by implication, its own gravitational center. Everything in the universe orbits around a common axis, defined by the common center of the universe. Near the center, it is possible to ease through a universal day, but towards the fringe a day would become ever longer until it nears eternity.

Logically, we must eventually reach a point where time is so slow it can be regarded as infinitely slow – scientists use that kind of language to describe a theoretical level that exceeds practical measurement and can only be deduced through Calculus.

Thus, what I can do near the core, at say 1,700 km/h, might age me by one (universal) day, but at the fringe of the universe, one day would equate to billions of years. Theoretically, the breaking effect at greater radii would result in a spiral that would merge yesterday into today, so space-time would effectively stand still. I therefore suppose that the fringe of the universe may be quite static, despite the enormous upheaval below the surface. That is a bit like the calm, static exterior of the human body, which covers all kinds of underlying biological activity.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

Day and night in heaven

There is biblical and empirical support for the idea of time in heaven even if it is not solar time.

I have shown in recent articles that God is the only observer that remains independent of time. Jesus rightfully said that the times and seasons belong to Him. In saying so, Jesus excluded Himself. By implication He is a subset of eternity, for He had a beginning (He is a Son) and that beginning was after the eternal beginning of His Father – mathematically His own inception = ∞ + n.

God stands outside of the dimensions of time and thereby defines time – He alone can determine time’s beginning and end, for He is before time and shall continue beyond time.

Heaven is a product of God’s hand and, by implication, is also subject to time. The time context of Jesus is effectively eternal for although He is introduced after His Father, His age is a function of eternity. Heaven probably falls into a similar category, having been around for so long that it is virtually eternal. However, both the Son and Heaven have time imposed on them, by implication.

In 1 Corinthians 15:25 we read that the Son must continue until He has put all things under the feet of His Father. There is a complex theological exchange that will arise from the conclusion of His works, which suggests that the distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit will return to a singularity that will be inherited by the Son.

In Revelations we also read that a new heaven and a new earth will emerge at the consummation of the ages. This indicates that heaven is truly bound by time and has a limited life-span.

All of these complex musings, point us to the reality of time in heaven. There are a number of scriptural hints which confirm this, namely Revelations 4:8-11, which says that the angels worship Him both day and night, and Revelation 8:1, which speaks of silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.

The problem I have is in reconciling time and eternity and rationalizing how they exist side-by-side. Perhaps heaven, whilst not being eternal as such, yet being virtually eternal, merely exists where time is so slow that it almost stops. That is an intriguing idea, but more next time (no pun intended).

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

God is personal

God is eternal. He also became a man. He transcended and transcends time and space to relate to us.

The all seeing, all present God is not only able to become a relevant observer of the broad physical context of the universe, or the galaxies and systems within the universe. He is consistently the same, warm, loving, pure, unchanging God across all of the created universe and no creature will ever be able to step away from Him.

David confirmed this in Psalm 139, where he concedes that even if he made his bed in hell God would be there. He would be as real on the highest mountain, in the deepest sea and on the remotest object of our universe. His spirit fill all of the universe and He is everywhere at all times, divinely bending space-time to be universally relevant and always accessible.

I mentioned in an earlier article that all time is defined by Him, including heavenly time. I described heavenly time as “event horizons”, great epochs that come and go in the onward advance of God’s eternal domain.

But here is a wonder. We are also subject to seasons (event horizons), despite also being subject to measured time (days, hours, seconds). We are not only partakers of God’s divine nature, but we also live within the continuum of divine time. Indeed, physical time is merely a measured, discrete subset of divine time.

Now consider this that the God who defines all our seasons, who causes things to come to pass in our lives, is also uniquely relative to those seasons and able to experience all that we go through, to give us a unique time and place experience. He not only knows the hairs on your head, but He bends time and space to place Himself right in the heart and essence of your personal struggles. Not only does He mark the timing of our seasons, by which means He is the sole determinant of when our seasons will end, but the combination of God and Time gives us a unique perspective of God.
Let me explain. The moon orbits the earth and to someone standing on Jupiter that is all so clear and understandable. But to you and me down here, we merely have a more discrete time and space concept of the moon – we see it there, now, and marvel at its beauty – the big picture is lost to us. Well, in the same way, God, a function of a far bigger context, presents Himself uniquely and personally to us within the personal seasons that He specifically defines for our lives – it is a perspective that is so unique to that no one else will ever see Him or know Him in the same way.

© Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

God is not an exception to universal laws

The laws of the universe do not make a convenient Quantum leap, to explain for the mysteries of God.

God is the ultimate absolute, the only ultimate constant in all the universe. All things are relative to Him and yet that principle still does not violate Einstein’s relativity principles. God is not a quantum particle, an aberration that conveniently violates the laws of the universe that explains away everything that is otherwise too hard for us to understand.

The dark ages resolved troubling mysteries, by burning dissidents on the pretext of heresy, such that many subsequently disproved theories were just accepted in spite of contradictory evidence. Well God is not a blanket explanation for all that cannot be explained, because the laws that define the universe is ruled are never violated by Him, but upheld by Him. He is not an abstract idea but an empirical fact.

God is not bound by time and space but is in all places at all times and is therefore able to be relative to all moments of time and space. Einstein accepted that time is fixed and light is absolute, but he introduce the notion that space-time could be warped or bent, a phenomenon that has been observed for distant objects that lie beyond a black hole. The light from the object is bent by gravitational forces inside the black hole leading to misreadings about the location and movement of the observed object – it basically is not where it should be, giving rise to distortions that are not unlike the phenomenon we see when a stick is pushed into water – the light passing through the water travels slower and makes the stick appear bent.

Although God is independent of His creation, He remains constant through all the twists and turns of our complex universe. He is simply constant, but He is never some form of divine exception to the laws of the universe. It is not that he has become the servant of such laws. Rather it is because the cerated universe became subject to His laws and the laws that govern eternity. We ar emerely a subset of an eternal dimension, but physical laws remain constant across both dimensions, because God is constant across both dimensions.

As such, all things are judged to be relative to Him. The function of the Son of God was to reconcile us back to the unmoving, unchanging absolute value of a righteous God. God cannot move to accommodate us, but through His Son He has enabled us to shift our posture or position from a place of condemnation and spiritual bankruptcy to a divinely assured position of acceptance and reconciliation.

© Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

Time and eternity

Time is limited to created things that all have defined beginnings. But can there be time in heaven?

Whatever God made must be relative to Him and subject to Him, by implication. Thus the entire universe is a subset of His absolute constancy. Time and Space are relative to Him and exist by and for Him.

Jesus, though also eternal, is a sub-set of His (Eternal) Father, with a defined beginning (Eternity + n). He will also continue (reign) within the context of this universe, until He has restored all things and put God’s enemies under His feet (1 Corinthians 15:25-28).

Jesus was mandated from before the foundations of the earth, to restore order to a universe that had been corrupted by the rebellion of Satan. The process of restoration fulfills Newton’s laws, by which all things must revert to a rest state.

Project earth was God’s response to sin, but to explain that will take much more space than this article can afford – indeed there is not enough space in the universe to describe the depth and power of God’s eternal wisdom. Suffice to say, that God needed to set a precedent for the judgment of sin and so made His spotless Son subject to the law and its supreme penalty, so that He might subject Satan to the same laws.

So what we have is a time horizon involving Jesus and the earth, which has a discrete beginning and a defined conclusion: an end. Within that season are many bit-parts and sub-plots, each with seasons that involve specific people or peoples. The key plumb-line, for all that happens on the earth, was the cross, which coincidentally also defines time before and time after. The cross is the sundial of God that cast its shadow on the past and became the fulfillment of all that went before. But it also cast a shadow on the future, to define its conclusion.

Human time has been set relative to Calvary. Recently we started speaking of BCE (Before the Current Era) and CE. But that merely removed references to Christ from the notations “BC” and “AD”. It did not alter the fact that the climax of history was when Christ hung on a cruel Roman cross for the atonement of sin and the judgment of Satan.

The outstretched arms of the savior reached into all the past and all the future and embraced all space, as far west and east as space will go. The vertical of the cross took the cross beyond dimensions of time and space into the physical-spiritual dimension, for after he died, Paul declares in Ephesians 6: “He descended to the lowest parts of the earth and then ascended to the highest heaven, so that He might fill all things”.

Thus He stooped as low as humanity can stoop to take us to the greatest of all heights, but in doing so He reached all people of all time and in every culture and creed, for He is the King. He is the only true potentate, the savior of the world and the light that shone in darkness to bring light and hope to those who live in the shadows.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com

In a relative world are there absolutes?

The theory of relativity was ground breaking, providing us with a new way to look at space and time.

Einstein not only defined light as the universal constant, he also defined relativity around that same law. His thinking repudiated centuries of thinking that presumed the earth or sun to be the reference point for all universal observations.

His thinking shook the world, because it made all observations of space-time, “relative” to the position of the observer, regardless of the observer’s position.

That is a useful line of argument, but it breaks down instantly if the observer steps out of the universe, for then all time and space events inside the system must be uniquely relative to the absolute position of the external observer. This does not refute relativism, it confirms it. God is the external observer who defines all time and all existence, relative to His absolute constancy and as such all space-time is ultimately relative to Him.

Jesus confirmed this, saying that “the times and seasons knows no man, but His Father only”. So even Jesus is subject to the ultimate absolute and as such His Father was His only reference point throughout His lifetime ministry.

This brings up an interesting idea. We have always concluded that there is no time in heaven, for eternity is timeless. Whilst that has merits, I must conclude that relativism is still constant in heaven, for Jesus abided by that law in His life and will continue to do so until he rolls up the heavens like a garment and time is no more.

Eternity has no finite beginning or end, but within eternity are discrete seasons that do start and end – in fact “Project Earth” is one such example of a season with a defined beginning and end. To that end we can empirically confirm the beginning and we also know that there will be an end, for the sun is slowly burning out.

Seasons are event horizons. They are also time-based, because they have a beginning and an end. So we can safely conclude that time does exist in heaven. This agrees with relativism, in terms of which eternity is only true for the absolute, external point of reference, namely The Father. Thus all sub-sets of His domain are also sub-sets of eternity and thus subject to time: that includes heaven, which having been made by Him does have a defined beginning and an implied end.

I will explore this further in my next article.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com