Regardless of how long we are here on this planet, it does not even make a mark on what eternity will be. That's where Gods' plan comes in.
Forgive my ignorance but I have to agree with that statement if in fact there is an eternity, which leads me to the question, Why did he even bother creating it in the first place if it is only a stepping stone on the way to eternal life. Why didn't he just make us the way he wanted in the first place?
Different people have different ways of looking at and understanding such things.
My own way is like this. I don't believe that eternity is an infinite amount of time. That simply doesn't make any sense to me. I'm reminded of Rita Rudner's amazement at a friend of hers who was in labor for 36 hours. "I can't imagine that," she said. "I don't even want to do something that feels
good for 36 hours!"
Based on my experience here on Earth so far, I'm glad I'll probably die around age 70 or 80, if I manage to avoid those fast-moving semi trucks until then. I can easily imagine being thoroughly bored with life if I lived to 120 or 130, and feeling trapped.
Even if I have very little idea what I'm talking about, and it'd really take me 1000 years to get bored, how do you think I'd feel after a million years in Heaven? How about after hundreds of trillions of years? I'd be freakin' insane, and so would you.
No, I don't think eternity is an infinite amount of time. I think eternity is the
opposite of time. Or, more rigorously, I think eternity is a congruential simultaneity of at least six dimensions and probably more.
Think of it this way. In each of our first three dimensions--length, width, height--you can at least theoretically move in either direction at whatever speed and to whatever distance you like, and back again. But in our fourth dimension--time--we are constrained to move in only one direction (forward) at only one rate (one second per second).
We're used to that constraint, because we've been captive to it quite literally since the beginning of time; but when you think about it it certainly seems like rather an arbitrary limitation. Why are we limited that way, and who's doing the limiting?
I think eternity amounts to the removal of that limitation: the opposite of time. It's a bit mind-bending, though, because if I'm right, and in eternity we'll have complete access to all our dimensions, then we'll end up not being able to move at all: moving implies being in one place at a certain time and then in a different place at a later time; but without any limited-access time-like dimension, the concept of time--and therefore of moving--has no meaning.
It's fun to think about when you've got nothing better to do.
Another thing that's fun is to find a Southern Baptist and holler, "God is a simultaneity!" and see what he does.
