Eternity? Creation? God? Me? What On Earth Is Going On?

ETERNITY?

CREATION?

GOD?

ME?

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?

Laurence Lilley

Published by Laurence Lilley at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Laurence Lilley

Australia

COVER PHOTO BACKGROUND:

Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STSc1) and the HUDF Team

ABOUT THIS IMAGE: This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. (Hubble comment.)

It's an incredible experience to realize that every one of those lights is a galaxy with tens or hundreds of billions of stars each. Our Sun is but one of a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, which itself is but one of a hundred billion galaxies. Tiny does not seem adequate to describe how small we are in this vast and amazing Universe. (From a NASA forum post.)

The cover background photo is a small portions of a very large Hubble photo of Creation in the infra red zone beyond the range of optical telescopes - dating back to more than TEN BILLION YEARS in time and Light Years in distance. Their light has been travelling all this time for the telescope to be able to record it. What looks like blur in the background of the photo is simply endlessly more of the same.

Most of what is captured in this photo has never been seen – nor even imagined - by humans in any previous age

PERMISSION TO USE MATERIAL.

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Thank you for your message in reference to the use of Hubble images.

So long as STSc1 is in the credit line and proper credit is given you may use the images within the public domain. Also STSc1 would appreciate a copy of any published material for our archives.

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"Scripture quotations taken from the Amplified® Bible,

Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission."

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James Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.

Thomas Nelson Publishing, Nashville,

Tennessee, February 19, 1991 \

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About This Book

Introduction

Chapter 1 We Start Here

Chapter 2 The Intention

Chapter 3 The Big Bits

Chapter 4 The Little Bits

Chapter 5 A Glimpse Into Eternity

Chapter 6 This is Where We Come In

Chapter 7 Taking Shape

Chapter 8 Setting the Stage

Chapter 9 A Nation Worships

Chapter 10 That Mess Has Gotta Go

Chapter 11 It’s Not What You Know, It’s WHO You Know

Chapter 12 Jesus Commissioned the Word of God

Chapter 13 Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Chapter 14 Oh Connie! You Really Messed Up

Chapter 15 Let’s Get Serious Now

Chapter 16 The Tide Turns

Chapter 17 The Plan is Taking Shape

Chapter 18 We Are Not Here To Play Games

Chapter 19 Assembling. It’s Getting Together

Chapter 20 The Five Fold Fantasy

Chapter 21 The How To Chapter

Chapter 22 Here We Go – Let’s Do It

Chapter 23 Getting It Working

Chapter 24 God Has An Agenda and You Are Part Of It

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

SUMMARY: Creator God made a copy of himself, and called him man. The fact is, humans are designed to be a duplicate of God and a union of life with God. When he is missing from our lives, we are incomplete and dysfunctional. The book tells how that situation is remedied. That happens through the interaction of men and women and Holy Spirit, resulting in us developing into becoming of ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’. A duplicate of Jesus. The purpose behind all this is an exciting, never-ending adventure way beyond human capacity to even imagine. Read all about it.

The book is not about religion. It is saying that God has people – including you - on this planet for a purpose beyond our ability to even imagine – and the human race – including you – is missing it.

I am saying that you are built to be and are intended to be, the same species of being God is. That’s how he made us. That’s the point of it all. Don’t blow it. We are talking Eternity. Don’t blow it. Simply because you are human, you are made to be a copy of God.

What Jesus achieved while on the cross has made it possible for you to be restored to being what God built humans to be. That is where we are aiming. God has made it possible for you to get right back to that original intention – and that’s what this book is all about.

Not everyone is going to like this. Ministry professionals tend to skim through the material looking for something to disagree with. Don’t bother. Religious traditions have so screwed up people – and especially ministry folk - that when they come across non-traditional confirmable fact, they get upset.

For the rest of us who are looking for reality and straight answers – you will love it. It will change your life.

Where this book comes from is that after a 30 year absorption of very solid Evangelical teaching from infancy – (I learned to talk saying Bible verses) – I realised that what we were doing in church was not making a lot of sense. Nothing was adding up. Nothing was happening. So, at 30 years of age, I deliberately set out to discover what Creator God had in mind when he made people on Planet Earth.

For 53 years – added to that previous 30 – yeah, I’m 83 - I have never let up. I have been digging and searching and researching - and listening – so as to really get into the heart of God’s intention relating to people on Planet Earth. And I am still being God-smacked on a regular basis.

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INTRODUCTION

ETERNITY? CREATION? GOD? ME?

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?

Us little humans simply don’t have capacity to even imagine – let alone see or understand – the sheer Almightiness and Holiness of God. He really is God Almighty - Eternal Creator – of everything.

What’s going on is that something of cosmic magnitude is going on. What is happening on our tiny Planet is so huge it is scary.

Creator God built us human men and women a different class of being, more advanced than anything he has ever made. He had discarded his normal template and made us an entirely new species, patterned on himself.

What was really on his heart is that for eons Father God has deeply desired to have family with whom he could interact as being his equals. His Son is the delight of his life. He dreamed of having a huge big family of sons and daughters who would be just like his Son. And that is the way he made us.

We people are of such unimaginable consequence to God it has him doing things so extra-ordinary and almost-out-of-character, we are baffled. He made us the pinnacle of Creation, his glory blazing out from inside us; full-blood sons and daughters of Lord God Most High; the same status in the household as Big Brother himself.

That’s how he made us. But considering how we all turned out, we have a situation on Planet Earth that defies belief. God knew what was going to happen when he made our first parents, but he went ahead and did it anyway.

Why? What is it? He has squillions of angels to keep him company. His home is Heaven. And just look at us!!! National establishments around the world spend serious resources trying to convince us he doesn’t even exist. They are so scared of him they go to endless trouble to get this non-existent God out of their country.

As a race, we humans have defied him. Why would he want to mess with us? If any of us were God, we would have written off the whole bunch of us a long time ago. But he didn’t.

What is it he could see in us that made it worth his while for Eternal Creator Jesus to submit himself to the atrocities inflicted on him at Jerusalem, just so us pathetic humans could get back to being the union of life with Father he built us to be?

Take a look. That is Eternal Creator God Almighty skewered up there on that Italian gallows. Why? Being executed as a criminal. Why? On this Planet. Why? What On Earth Is Going On?????

If only we could catch a glimpse of the magnitude of the majesty our Father God, and Jesus and Holy Spirit built into us, how different life would be. How different we would be. We are not designed to be scrabbling around where we too often find ourselves. We are not wired to be messing with some of the stuff that tends to occupy so much time and attention. We do it anyway.

Yes, of course, there was Adam’s Fall. But do we really know about being Lifted Back Up Again? It would make such a difference if we did. That colossal clanger Adam managed to pull was not the end of everything. It did create problems, massive problems, but regardless of what those difficulties might be, nothing has changed of what Father intended when he built our prototype.

The fixed and unchangeable eternal intention is that God set out to have a family who are the same species of being he is, and to this very day, what he set in motion way back then remains right on target, and we are part of it.

In the early couple of chapters we look at the mess, and how that is fixed. The being ‘Lifted Back Up Again’. At what can be changed in us as the result of the Restoration Jesus achieved when he died.

Then we try, quite unsuccessfully, to get our heads around the impossible vastness and complexity of Creation ‘out there’, and to understand that the Bible tells us in several places, that without Jesus, nothing was made that he did not make. I still find it very difficult to relate the Jesus I know, to being the Creator of the overwhelming magnitude of it all. Then we come back to Earth and attempt to even try to imagine atoms and cells. These are far more intimidating than anything out there in space.

The inconceivable, incomprehensible, impossible fact of the whole situation is that the Bible tells us that without Jesus, not one atom or galaxy exists that he did not make.

It is almost frightening to realise that this is the same Jesus who wants so much to be living his life inside us. He is here to share himself with us. His deepest desire is to make his home in us and live in us and complete us. He became like us so we could become like him.

Let’s try to catch a glimpse of the magnitude of the amazing, humungous, majestic magnificence of what we humans are intended to be and are intended to be part of. We really have no idea with whom and with what we have got ourselves involved. Walk softly. We are on holy ground.

People know. We really do know. Whatever it is going on between God and us - we know.

While folk are trying so hard to block God from interfering with their life-style, lying there wide awake at two o’clock in the morning, deep down, they know that something vital is missing from their lives. Church people too.

People are starving for substance and reality, desperate for a real, tangible, relationship with God. They don’t seem to realise that the life-style they cling to so ferociously - all that football and beer, the movies and church and clubs and making money - is in fact, their futile frantic clawing desperation to get back to the Garden from which they had been expelled. Longing - yearning - to talk with their Dad in the cool of the day. God-starved people - all screaming for that broken fellowship to be restored. Deep, deep down, they really want to know God.

Well – it is God who has built that desperation in you. He is trying to get you back to where you belong. The same God who has set off that pressing urgency in you, is right there where you can talk to him - right now. Tell him you want to know him. Just ask him. He’s listening. He wants you back. He needs you back to being what he built you to be.

And he made a provision so it can happen - Church. No – ‘church’ is not a dirty word. Church is a device God invented and the real thing exists to get you connected with him and to help you get back to his original intention, which is nothing less than you being the same as Jesus is. Anything else is optional extras and doesn’t have much going for it. At its simplest, church is two people and God sitting around talking with each other. Just you and someone else and God. You can start there.

I am going to talk quite a bit about ‘church’ throughout the rest of the book, because ‘church’ is part of the world we live in and we recognise it has something to do with God. But to really get to the heart of the matter – Jesus only mentioned Church one time. But he talked about his Father’s Kingdom more than one hundred times. That is the real issue – and everything going on in church is supposed to be getting us ready for Kingdom involvement – and it is not.

The foundational fact is that God designed Church to enable ordinary people to become extraordinary people. Church is designed to, and is intended to, get you restored to the original intention of you being duplicates of Jesus. Yes – that IS in the Bible.

But we have a problem. There is CHURCH and there is church. People involved with church programs and rituals and traditions and doctrines, and general religious carry-on, know what they are doing and believing is not working, and are starving for reality and substance. They return home as frustrated as they had left.

Genuinely ‘born again’ men and women with Holy Spirit living inside, know that Jesus did not submit himself to the horrors of the cross just so they can sit on a pew and be fed a very forgettable – or even a normal forgettable - sermon every Sunday morning for the next fifty years. Can you even imagine anything more futile and ridiculous???

Right now, across the Western world, people are walking out of church by the million, weary of rituals and programs. They want to really know God. They hunger for reality.

And no wonder! Father’s real CHURCH is the BODY OF CHRIST. Your human body is made up of many different structural components ‘assembled’ into being a functional entity. You know how it works. Arms, legs, ears, eyes, kidneys – all cooperating so the whole thing can do what needs doing. In exactly the same way, Christ’s body is made up of many different structural components. The original word for Church is Assembly. And that is not talking about a bunch of people lined up on pews – it is talking about the many physical functional component parts making up the body Jesus lives in on Planet Earth, being all together, with every component interacting with Holy Spirit and each other and producing a result. And you know you are part of it and you belong there.

Interacting is what all your uncountable body components do, all working together in living, practical, productive cooperation with each other, so you can move around and get things done. That’s what the Body of Christ is for – so Jesus can move around and get things done. The purpose of the existence of your body’s many structural pieces is NOT to dismember the components and line them up in rows on pews that are bolted to the floor. If we did to our bodies what we have done to Christ’s Body, we would be dead from starvation – not too mention mutilation - long before we reached school age. Most church people are starved, atrophied, dismembered and dead and are simply rows of dried bones propped up on pews and having buckets of sawdust sprinkled over them every Sunday morning.

The intended ‘result’ from CHURCH is, that through the interaction of the many component parts composing the BODY of Christ and thus making it functional - by working together with Holy Spirit and each other, ordinary people are transformed into becoming extraordinary duplicates of Jesus – the same as - but more advanced than – was Adam when God breathed himself into his nostrils. With Holy Spirit working together with these many different Body members, people metamorphose – means change - into becoming of the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ - duplicates of Jesus – and is the most exciting and almost unbelievable transmutation – means changing into something else - of men and women and teenagers and children that has happened to humans since Adam was made. Yes – it really is in the Bible.

That’s one reason we are so important to Father. The delight of his heart is Jesus. He wants to see Jesus duplicated in you and throughout the human race, just as he intended when he made Adam, and we are not of much use to him until we get there.

And there is another consideration.

Eternal Creator God Almighty has been working on a huge development project for Eternity and is ready to move into the next stage. And he has specifically and deliberately made us the same as he is, to be his family, and to work together with him on this project and to be part of this exciting family enterprise - because he needs us to be the same as he is so we are able to do what he does. We give more attention to this in later chapters.

In the Western world at this time, the BODY OF CHRIST is virtually non-existent. Instead we have church – and this is a pathetic substitute for what Jesus was talking about when he said he would build his Assembly. Church – the Body of Christ – is supposed to be the representation of God on Planet Earth, and in the Western world, it is not.

The whole thing about people is that they are on Planet Earth for God. They are intended to be grouped together as his family - as his representation. It didn’t happen. Right now, in the western world, quite simply, God has no representation.

So, instead of people being God’s solution, they are the problem. With no observable God being around to bother people - as a race, as nations, the vast majority of people