monoxide and, with a splash of sunshine, emit puffs of oxygen. Each puff is not
significant “but get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough
period, and you can change the world. For 2 billion years this was all the life
there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level
in the atmosphere to 20 percent – enough to allow the development of other,
more complex life-forms.”
Imagine that – 2 billion years to get us from primeval nothingness to
the highly developed civilization we have today. And all during this time of
apparent neglect, “the Spirit of God hovered upon the face of the waters.”
(Genesis 1:2)
Bryson also notes that the native Aborigines have been in Australia for
“perhaps 45,000 years, perhaps 60,000, but certainly before there were modern
humans in the Americas or Europe.”
And those primate aborigines of 45,000 or 60,000 years ago – so forgotten
by history but with descendants living similar lives today in the Outback – still
live on in the spiritual world.
We sometimes wonder where the Church and the Academy might be in
100 or 500 years, and what our country and world might look like then. But
another 2 billion years!
And while our lives may seem long enough in this world – especially for
those nearing the end – we will all still be living in the spiritual world 45,000
and 60,000 years from now, but without any concept of passing days, years and
millennia.
To the Lord, it is all a seamless continuum – 2 billion years in the past, 2
billion years in the future – without any sense of time constraining His vision.
To us it is all just mind boggling.
Eternity sure is a long time.
(BMH)
count me in
The word “atheist,” I read recently, originally meant people in ancient times
(especially Christians) who didn’t worship the pagan gods of Greece and Rome.
Christians were the original atheists! I see an opportunity here to borrow some
of the cachet of an increasingly popular movement in our time. When asked to
bow down to the secular gods of our age – nature, science, “progress” -- I’ll just
say, “no thanks, I’m an atheist.”
(WEO)
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