How Long is Eternity?

The Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index recorded a paper loss of $1 trillion across the market for the day, a first!

Bill Bryson (in his book, Notes from a Big Country) gives a fascinating illustration of just how much this is:

If you were locked in a vault and you could keep every dollar bill you initialled, (we're assuming that you initial one bill every second and that you don't need to eat, sleep or take comfort breaks!)do you know how long it would take you to make a million dollars?

Twelve days of non-stop effort would earn you a million dollars.

120 days would give you $10 million.

1200 days - $100 million. That's over three years to get a paltry $100 million ... Still a long way to go ...

After 31.7 years, you'd be a billionaire.

But wait, there's more ... we're still only at the billionaire stage ... Keep initialling, Kiddo!

After initialling a dollar bill every second without stopping, it would take you 31,709.8 years to get to your first trillion!

"How long is eternity?"

How long will I exist either with or without the eternal rewards God wants me to have? If you’re a non-Christian, how long will you exist out of the presence of God?

If you had a bird in your backyard next to a sandbox. And you take a pail, fill it full of sand, and then let some of the grains of sand fall through your hands. One bucket of sand has thousands of grains of sand.

Let’s imagine that you could instruct that bird to pick up one of the grains of sand in its beak, fly to the moon and drop it off. Let’s say it takes one million years for the bird to get to the moon. He puts the grain of sand down and flies back to earth. It takes a million years for him to get back. He then picks up the next grain of sand and flies back to the moon. He drops off that grain and flies back to earth—a million years there, a million years back.

One by one the bird takes each grain of sand in your sandbox to the moon. When he is finished, you take him down to the Atlantic Ocean and the beach which runs along the coast. You tell him, "I want you to start clearing off the sand on this beach one grain at a time."

He starts there, then works his way up to Miami, then to Jacksonville, Hilton Head, Charleston, New York City, Boston, and up toward Maine. He takes each grain of sand to the moon one at a time, a million years there, a million years back. When he’s done with all of that, you take him out to the West Coast and from Mexico all the way up to California and Oregon, you tell him to take one grain of sand at a time and fly it to the moon.

When the bird finishes with all of that, you say, I’ve got this other little spot called the Sahara Desert. I want you to clear the sand off of that place one at a time." When he finishes that, you say, "Three-fourths of the surface of the earth is water. Let me drain the oceans dry. At the bottom of the oceans you have a lot of sand. Take all of that sand to the moon, one grain of sand at a time, a million years there, and a million years back."

When he finishes, if you could add up all of the millions of years it had taken to remove all of the sand from all of those places, eternity would just be beginning. (How Long is Eternity? By Dr. John Ankerberg)

Isaiah 57:15
For thus says the High and Lofty One
Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:

“ I dwell in the high and holy place,
With him who has a contrite and humble spirit,
To revive the spirit of the humble,
And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.