Friday, January 28, 2011

Thesis 24

God is not stingy. He will not be satisfied with getting a couple of billion people into heaven. It would be an insult to his grace. God’s mercy and the enormous sacrifice of Jesus deserve a hundred billion people in heaven.

To get hundreds of billions of people into the kingdom, life on earth will have to go on for a good many more generations yet. God promised at least five times that he is faithful to a thousand generation (Deut 7:9, 1 Chron 16:15, Ps 105:8). Some numbers in scriptures are used figuratively, but if any number deserves to be taken literally, surely it is this one. For God is to keep this promise covenant, a thousand generations of people would have to live on earth subsequent to his promise.

A new generation is born on earth about every twenty years, so we have had about 500 generations since the time of Abraham. This means that we could have another 500 generations on earth, or 10,000 years, to fulfil God’s promise. That would be just about right to get the full number of people that God wants into the kingdom.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this excellent post

Christian said...

I think that the 1,000 generations concept does a great job at nerfing all of the current end time theories that are quite popular now and for a long time yet, ha!

I think this is one of your best points.

500 said...

To think about the concept of our world only being 500 generations old, and half way to 1000, is amazing. The responsibility that God places on our lives is enormous from this perspective. If every God fearing couple allowed God to dictate their number of offspring that would lead to many God fearing people over 500 more generations.

Lets say that from each couple comes 10 children (which is possible outside of western paradigms) and they have 10 children each (provided that there is a parter available for each) that ends up being 10^500 or 500 zeros after a one. All hypothetical but with God very possible for one God fearing couple to become a nation of potentially faithful men and women capable of numbering 10^500. Sounds like sand on the seashore to me.