Endless Exceeding

(new article tomorrow)

Job says that by God’s spirit “he hath garnished the heavens.”

Richard Jordan explains, “When He put the stars out there, He didn’t just go, ‘Ehh, here’s a few stars.’ He literally decorated the heavens. The earth is the center and He put the stars out there in relationship to that to make it interesting and to decorate.

“In the new heaven and the new earth, God takes away the curse of sin and all its debilitating effect. Think about how pock-marked the front side of the moon is. In the Flood, God brought sheets of ice out through the universe. He opened the fountains of heaven, and the water up there is the remnants of that. It was a just a hail storm of stuff.

*****

“Isaiah 9:7 says, ‘Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.’ Notice it’s the increase of His government. It’s not just that there’s no end to His government. That means that after the Millennium, when death is done away with, the increase is always going to be there. So eventually Planet Earth is going to become saturated.

“The heavens are divided into twelve sections. The earth is divided into twelve sections. Deuteronomy 32:8 says, ‘When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.’

“Things on the earth correspond to things in the heavens (Colossians 1). That’s why there are 24 elders in Revelation 24. In the heaven up there, there are universes, solar systems, whatever you want to call them, that correspond to ours.

“Revelation 22 starts, ‘And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
[2] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.’

*****

“In the new heaven and new earth, there’s going to be that 12-month cycle, and the way I understand that is, each month one of those 12 sections, it will be their month for the fruit and so forth.

“Each one of those months, people in that section of the earth are transported to one of these new planets. You’ll have a new Adam and Eve out there. You and I, as members of the Body of Christ, will be there to be what the Lord Jesus Christ was for Adam and Eve in the Garden.

“You understand the Lord God that walked in the cool of the day with Adam was the second person of the godhead. The difference is there will never be any sin. All that’s been settled. He’s going to create a universe populated with people who honor and glorify Him.

“Since it’s clear that ‘the increase of his government there will be no end,’ there’s going to have to be some way to extricate people off the planet. If we can send people to the moon, the Lord can get up there.

“One thing knowing all that does is it helps us understand that what we’re going to be doing out there is a whole lot more than just floating on a cloud.

*****

“It’s not true to say there’s no time in eternity. That would mean there’s no events. Time is the way you measure phenomena and the distance between events. If you don’t have time, there’s no movement. In eternity in God’s presence there is movement. So there has to be time in that sense.

“What there is is endless time in eternity. The Bible talks about world without end. Eons without end, that type of thing--ages to come.

“Here’s the part about that that thrills me: ‘That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.’ (Ephesians 2:7)

“There’s more than one age and in each age you’re going to show the exceeding riches of His grace. That means in this age, you’re going to show the riches of His grace, and in the next age, you’re going to EXCEED the demonstration from before. Every age will be more exceeding in the demonstration of His grace.

*****

“I use an illustration about Adam and Eve. Adam goes out and gets supper. He works in the Garden and comes home with a bushel of peaches and says, ‘Sugar, I think you’re going to like these. I ate one and they’re good.’ She says, ‘Man they are!’

“So the next day she takes those peaches and says, ‘You know, I bet if I sliced these up and put a little sugar on them they’d be even better.’ Adam comes home and says, ‘Man, these peaches are better than the ones yesterday!’ This is just exceeding good. So the next day, Eve bakes them and makes a peach cobbler. That’s better than the sliced peaches. It’s sort of goes like that.

“We’re going to have this endless exceeding, and what’s going to happen is ‘in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.’

“So, you’re just going to learn more about Him and appreciate Him more, value Him more, and you’re going to think it couldn’t get any better, and in the next stage, it’s going to be even better. You’re never going to stop learning more about Him."