Tag: image of God

Your Eternal Self

The post explores the concept of eternity through a theological lens, comparing God to a geometric line that exists infinitely. It discusses the nature of the spirit and body, eternal life, and the implications of sin on existence. It emphasizes God’s desire to recreate believers in a form suited for eternal life.

It is admittedly hard to conceptualize what “eternal” means. We can think of a long time, but not eternal. I sometimes use a math concept to get people to understand what they are. It helps.

God is like a line in geometry. I line goes infinitely in both directions. When Moses encountered God in the burning bush, he asked for God’s name:

14 God said to Moses, “Yahweh” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘Yahweh has sent me to you.’”

Exodus 3:14

Yahweh is a verb form of “to be” not found in English. God always was, is, and always will be, is what is means. He is the whole line. People who don’t believe in eternal life think we are a segment. A clear beginning and a clear end in death. God has made us to be a ray. We do have a beginning at our conception. We do not pre-exist this except that God knows us. But we will have no end.

Our bodies clearly have an end. The body you have is a segment. You may feel the terminal point creeping up on you right now. We are more complicated than just a body. We are for now this body, our spirit, and the interface between the two, our soul.

Having a spirit is clearly a part of being created in the image of God. It is not cognition, intelligence, emotion, or imagination. It is something not properly a part of this universe. Our spirit is coupled with this body through a mechanism that has not been revealed to us. It is probably something on a very small scale, perhaps the micro-tubules found on our neurons.

What faculties are resident in our spirit? I’m not sure. It does become hard to sort. Things like memory, reason, consciousness, even senses can all be associated with parts of the brain which belongs to the body, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are resident there. They may just interact with the body there. People having a Near Death Experience (NDE) can have all of the above without use of the body.

One thing I can say with certainty is a part of body and not the spirit is our sinful nature. The genetic damage we have all inherited that builds our body to be unreceptive to God and inclined to sin is cooked into the flesh. That is why we need to physically die. We need to get rid of this body when it is time.

Can our spirit simply float around without a body for long? Paul suggests that this wouldn’t be desirable:

5 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

2 Corinthians 5:1-4 (ESV)

Being “unclothed” in verse 4 is being a spirit without a body. You really don’t want that. You want to be “further clothed”: to get rid of your current body/tent and upgrade to a body built for Heaven (v.1). I would assume that our spirit will interface with that body either through a similar means or something completely different.

Don’t think that you are done. God is very determined not to lose in the struggle for this time-space continuum. While your body for here is damaged and will die, He wants to remake this universe and remake a body for you for this universe.

How would that work? Now we are pushing a bit into a mystery. We don’t know how that will work. At the time of Judgment Day, Christ’s visible return, and the making of a New Heaven and Earth, there will a resurrection of the dead. Will God recycle what remains of earthly bodies? Not sure. I doubt it. He will make something that is uniquely us. Do we still have the “(body) eternal in the Heavens?” I would assume from the word “eternal” used in 1 Corinthians 5:1 that the answer is “yes”. I will be a spirit connected to a body or bodies at that time and forever.

Can I mess this up? Until we get rid of our sin-damaged body the answer is “yes”. We are saved completely by God’s action. Jesus kept the Law. Jesus absorbed the eternal punishment for our sin by being forsaken on the cross. The Holy Spirit has connected us (if we are connected) to Jesus. Normally, through the process of baptism. We can throw this away. The biblically listed methods of doing this are: distorting the Gospel (Gal. 5:2-4), being unrepentant despite the pleas of the Spirit (numerous verses), neglecting God’s means of keeping our connection viable (Parable of the Sower), refusing to forgive (Lord’s Prayer/Matthew 6). After our death, there is nothing to suggest the possibility of undoing our salvation. Isaiah 65:20 is meant to be rhetorical.

Is a damned person eternal? Their resurrected body doesn’t seem to be:

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

Malachi 4:1-3 (ESV)

They won’t need a body for the New Earth because they won’t be staying.

46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Matthew 25:46 (ESV)

The Way That We Are Made

What makes a human being special, if anything? A Materialist would say that nothing is special. We are just a biological robot doing what chemistry is forcing us to do with no specific purpose. Materialism is a very disparaging philosophy that doesn’t fit our experience. I don’t believe it at all. I experience myself making choices, contemplating my existence, living with purpose; and even though I have not died and returned from the dead yet, I have a sense that I am not limited to my physical lifespan. That may lack scientific vigor, but the atheistic claims of a Materialist do as well, and are clearly rubbish.

Human beings are more than interesting chemistry. Complex chemistry is a part of our being, but not the whole of it. Most people have thought so. The dissenters have a clear bias–they don’t want God to exist.

The Bible says something different about humans. It says we were created in the “image of God”. What does that mean? I don’t think it is the common meaning of the term “image”. The Bible declares several times that God is a spirit or is spirit. While the meaning of “spirit” is also vague, I would gather from usage that it means that God is not set in his appearance by a defined physical form. Part of being created in the “image of God” is having a part of our being not connected to a defined physical form.

Our bodies are a “defined physical form” the way I am using the phrase. The Bible speaks of humans as also having a “spirit”. Our spirit may be what we experience as consciousness. But our spirit is not the whole of us. We are body, and possibly bodies, and spirit. Our spirit can be liberated from connection to our body. That is what death is. Our spirit can interact with our body. That is why we can control it and that is what is observed when mapping brain activity.

We know that our earthly body can die and decay. Our spirit cannot, which is another aspect of being made in the image of God. We are eternal. While I do not believe in reincarnation, I understand the Bible to say that we can have a heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1). In that case, our spirit is interacting with a body made for the physical dimensions of Heaven. I also know from the Bible that we will have a “resurrected” body. In this case, our spirit is interacting with a recreated, indestructible body built for the physical dimensions of this universe. Being eternal, we will never lapse into non-existence.

Being created in the image of God means, among still other things, that we have an eternal, non-material part that can interact with material bodies that can exist within their respective physical realms. This is theorizing that Heaven is a parallel universe to this universe rather than a remote part of it. The same can be said for Hell. How we will spend eternity depends on our relationship with God.

Humans were not created by God to be in an antagonistic or forsaken relationship to Him. We were created for Him, to be with Him. But that relationship was broken a long time ago. When we come into being at our conception, we do not arrive with a good relationship and with an unblemished image of God. God creates us, but in the sense that He created the biological system of reproduction that makes us. We do not start from scratch. As such, we inherit physically a nature that is antagonistic to God and under God’s judgment. (Romans 7, Psalm 51:5 et al). The only fix for us is Jesus. Jesus’ actions created the opportunity to repair our relationship with God. God seeks us out to connect us to Jesus; and, if successful, to restore us to what we were originally intended to be.

Would we know this without being told about it by God? I doubt it. We would only experience a vague sense of something amiss. We would see a troubled and often ugly world made painful by human actions. We would walk blindly into our own deaths, perhaps expecting the end of our existence. Finding instead a far worse continued existence.

Created in the image of God is what we are for better or worse. Thank God, He did not abandon us to a hopeless fate.