Whenever someone dies it draws attention to the fragility of life. One minute they are alive and the next minute they are dead. It sounds so final. It is final in this life that we see with our natural eyes. Those who know and love the Lord Jesus and who have received Him as their Lord and Saviour are now with Him in glory. To the uninitiated in the Christian faith this sounds rather "airy-fairy" or "pie-in-the-sky". Yet, the afterlife is more real than this present life. I don't think that the afterlife is something that starts once we die. Rather, I think that we leave finite time and enter eternity or unending time.
Eternity existed before God created the world and time. God always was; always is; always will be. God revealed Himself to Moses as "I AM" (Genesis 3:14). God is in a present state of being in our past; our present; our future. Jesus told the Pharisees "Before Abraham was... I am" (John 8:58).
I can have confidence and trust in God's care for me because God has already seen the future. He is already there, just like He has been in the past; He is still there too. I have a sense that eternity is all around us and that our solar system and beyond are all contained in "time", yet timelessness exists around it. Also God sometimes "opens a window" and allows some of the timelessness to invade our world. An example is at the transfiguration of Jesus when Moses and Elijah appear. (Mark 9:2-8).
Ecclesiastes 3:11 states "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." (NIV). As finite beings we would probably die if we were given any more timelessness (eternity) in our human bodies. That is why we need to be transformed and given spiritual bodies. God is Spirit; God is timeless. When we are changed we will be like Him and we will be timeless as well.
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