God’s eternity and our time

WE need to understand the relation between God’s eternity

and our time with respect to our creation and our life in general. We

have to understand that our creation by God, of course, happens in

eternity, because everything that God wills and does is all done in

eternity.

            In that case, everything is done instantaneously, if we

have to use our human terminology to describe the workings of

eternity. In eternity, there is no beginning or end, no past and

future. There is no change even if there is life and dynamism, there

are no stages. All happen at the same time and are kept always in the

present.

  

            But insofar as we understand our creation by God, it has

to take place in time, since we are always subject to time because of

our human nature and condition. Time is a creation of God meant for

us. As his creation, time is also in his eternity.

  

            We have to understand then that God’s eternity can bear

our time. How that works exactly is a mystery that we cannot fully

understand. Somehow we get a glimpse of this mystery by considering

what St. Peter said in his second letter: “With the Lord one day is

like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.” (3,8)

  

            What we can draw from this fundamental point about God’s

eternity and our time is that our creation takes place in the whole of

time, or the whole of one’s lifetime here on earth. In other words our

creation is a work in progress until it ends with the end of time or

of our life.

  

            We cannot say that our creation took place only with the

creation of Adam and Eve, and from there we are pretty much on our

own. It would lead us to think that God committed a mistake in

creating our first parents with so good an endowment which they later

on misused. And from there, God had to make the corrective measure of

our redemption.

  

            God does not commit mistakes. Man’s creation, his fall and

his redemption are all lumped up in the eternal, timeless plan of God

for us. In other words, our creation goes in stages in time. God

continues in time to create us. His creation of us in our time

involves putting us into existence and all the events that happens in

our earthly existence.

  

            He continues to interact with each one of us, and we

should also try to continue interacting with him. This is a

fundamental truth that we should always be aware of and try to live

out as best as we can.

  

            The “finished product” of our creation is when we are

fully conformed to the resurrected Christ, which is how God designed

us to be from all eternity—that is, that we be image and likeness of

God in Christ and children of his.

  

            To achieve this, we have to cooperate with God’s plan to

the point that we become another Christ, who as the Son of God is the

very pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our damaged humanity

through his passion, death and resurrection.

             Living this truth of our faith will surely fill us with

joy and confidence in spite of all the trials, difficulties and

failures we can experience in this life. We have no reason to fear as

long as we are aware of this fundamental truth about ourselves and are

corresponding to it.

We always need God’s grace

MAKE no mistake about it. We always need God’s grace. On

our own, we can only do evil. Whatever good we think we can do without

God’s grace is only apparent. Sooner or later, that good will have no

other fate but to degenerate into something evil.

  

            Actually, God’s grace—at least what is known as the actual

grace—is always available. But we need to be aware of it by constantly

asking for it so that our actuations will always be according to God’s

will and ways even as they are also according to ours.

  

            Let’s always remember that our life is always a life with

God. Considering that we have been created in God’s image and likeness

and are children of his, everything in our life is infused with God’s

spirit which we have to learn to be aware of and to correspond to as

best as we can.

  

            Christ affirmed this truth when he said he is the vine and

we are the branches. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear

much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” (Jn 15,5)

  

            We have to overcome our strong tendency to think that we

can be just on our own, wrongly thinking that this is how we exercise

our freedom. Our freedom can only be true freedom when it is exercised

with God who is its source, its power and its end.

  

            The autonomy that we enjoy in this life, especially in our

temporal affairs where we are legitimately allowed to have different

views and opinions, should never be understood as being totally

independent of God such that we can even go against God’s will.

  

            Without corresponding to God’s grace, we are bound to

misuse our human powers. If our first parents, still in their state of

original justice, managed to sin because in a moment they lapsed into

forgetting God and following the suggestion of the devil, how much

more us who have been born already with the handicap of the original

sin.

  

            Without corresponding to God’s grace, the use of our human

powers will be distorted and will just convert into all kinds of isms.

Our intellectual activity, for example, will fall into

intellectualism, the exercise of our will into voluntarism, the joy of

our sentiments into sentimentalism. These human powers become easy

prey to the wiles of our wounded flesh, the deceptive charms of the

world, and the tricks of the devil.

   

            Our will, for example, which is what enables us to be the

image and likeness of God and is therefore our most powerful human

faculty, can be misused such that instead of becoming like God, we can

choose to become like the demon.

  

            For us to correspond properly to God’s grace, we need to

be always humble, always feeling the need to be in his presence and to

know his will in an abiding manner. May it be that no moment passes

without being with God and interacting with him.

  

            We have to regularly examine ourselves to see how we can

plug the hole that takes us away from God’s presence. This hole

usually takes the form of the pride that we can derive from enjoying

our God-given endowments. Instead of thanking God for them and using

them for God’s purposes, we simply enjoy them on our own, using them

entirely according to our will and designs.

  

            May we always be desirous of God’s grace!

Fundamental and radical

IT’S good that we from time to time revisit the truth of

our creation, since that comprises the most fundamental and radical

truth about ourselves. Such consideration would definitely give us the

most basic as well as global picture about ourselves. It would remind

us to develop the proper attitude, outlook and perspective of our

life.

            Now that we are beginning a new liturgical year with the

celebration of the First Sunday of Advent, I feel this revisiting of

our creation is timely.

            Revisiting the truth about creation will certainly show us

that God is the source of all reality, of what is true, good and

beautiful. He is the foundation of the unity of all the creatures. He

spells out the proper relationship that should develop among us and

all the creatures.

            Nowadays, with all the galloping developments around, we

tend to forget about who we really are, what the real purpose of our

life is, and how we ought to behave as a consequence.

            Nowadays, we seem to be simply reacting to what we have at

the moment, much like a knee-jerk reaction that definitely will miss a

lot of things, especially the essential ones.

            There are now a lot of distractions. Our proper focus in

life is vitiated, a situation that is a fertile ground for many other

anomalies to arise. This religious indifference and ignorance can

easily give rise to all sorts of isms—agnosticism, atheism,

polytheism, materialism, etc. These are what we are seeing these days.

            We need to return to the basics, to the fundamental and

the radical. We have to reaffirm the truth that there is God who

created everything. The least thing that we can do in reaction to this

truth is that we have to relate everything to God—at least to thank

him and ultimately to glorify him, since that is the final purpose of

our life.

            Forgetting or ignoring God will only lead us to an unreal

world which to us can seem to be real because of our capacity to know

and to will. We don’t realize that our creation by God is an ongoing

affair, not a one-shot deal, since it’s the very existence of

creatures that is involved.

            God does not only fabricate us and leave us on our own

once our fabrication is finished. His creation means that he gives us

existence and keeps that existence which, in our case, since we are

made also spiritual, will last forever. His creation is a continuing,

never-ending affair. What we call as providence or God’s continuing

governance over his creation is just another name for his continuing

creation.

            There is a big difference between a fabricator or

manufacturer and the Creator. Only God is the Creator. We are only a

fabricator, or at best, a procreator as is the case of parents who

beget children. In the latter case, the parents simply cooperate in

the creation of another human being. That’s why their conjugal act is

a very sacred act that should not be degraded into a merely sexual

act.

            It’s indeed a big challenge now to spread this basic truth

about the implications of our creation by God. Our life is a shared

life with God. A direct corollary to this is that we ought always to

be aware of God’s presence and interventions in our life. In fact, as

much as possible we should try to feel the divine even while we are

immersed in the things of the world.