This quote (first said here) is truth. There are many beginnings, but no end... ever! You might quote scripture to dismiss the point, but that's not what it means:
Revelation 1:8 "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.""I am" is who God IS. He is without a name in the true sense of the word; he just IS and has always been! He's called "God" for our benefit.
Exodus 3:14 "And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you."In essence God is saying because "I AM", I am reality (I Am That I Am). Because God is with us, that validates his existence, God doesn't need for us to call him a formal name. After all, since he's "The One True God", how many others are there? None! We don't have to distinguish between Gods because there are no other Gods!
You might say "Well, God commanded that we have no other gods before him! (Exodus 20:3) .There must be others!" Not so! God refers to himself as elohiym in the Hebrew. He also refers to other gods using the same word. It's the context which distinguishes between "true God" and pretenders. Translators distinguish between Gods using a capital "G" for the One True God and small "g" for all the others who are not true.
Elohiym (Elohim) is the name the Hebrew people called El. Elohim is plural, not that there are multiple Gods, but that there are three aspects of God who theologians call the Trinity (the Godhead), and refer to the three aspects as "persons". (I believe that the concept of "persons" is what confuses people about the Trinity. It sounds as if there are three people, since persons designates "beings". God is one "being"! He is "I Am" with "am" defined as "present first person singular of 'be'." (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). God is saying "I Am because I Be", designating himself as a "being", not multiple beings!
Incidentally Jesus referred to himself when he walked in water as:
Matthew 14:27 (YLT) "...and immediately Jesus spake to them, saying, `Be of good courage, I am [he], be not afraid.'"Jesus called himself "I Am" "eimi ego" transliterated from the Greek. This is better than saying "My name is God" because he was merely CALLED Jesus and Immanuel (God With Us). Like He said to Moses: "I Am". Jesus is "I Am" as God is "I Am' because Jesus IS "I Am"! Jesus is "I Am" in the flesh and is the same One who spoke to Moses. (See John 1).
No let's go back to the Hebrew word transliterated as El. Elohim is the plural. El means "Strong One". "God" is not His name. God is the Hebrew JHVH (English characters for the Hebrew) which means "to be". Thinking back at what was said before, "to be" means "I Am"! From JHVH comes the Latinized word "Jehovah". Jehovah is not God's name for he has no name. It means merely that "He Is".
Since, we're not to use God's name in vain, it's the names which we have given him that we're not to use without reverence. His mere existence is enough to warrant not be frivolous!
"I Am" means he "is". God had no beginning. He just always "was"! God has no end either. He always "will be". Therefore, there was never a time when God wasn't and there never will be a time when God isn't!
From the viewpoint of God, "beginning" has no meaning. For us it began with God:
Genesis 1:1 (YLT) "In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth --"The KJV is not as clear. "In the beginning" was not God's beginning, but it's the beginning of matter. Before matter, what existed was boundless never-ending "nothingness" along with God. (Oh, how lonesome God must have been!)
Therefore, for mankind, there was a "beginning"! It's when Adam was created. Our individual beginning is abstract! I know what you're thinking! "It's at birth!" How wrong that is!
Jeremiah 1:5 (I Am speaking) "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee (Jeremiah); and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."We existed as "beings" before we were ever born, according to God. This is reinforced by the spiritual communion between John the Baptist and Jesus while each was in the womb! (Luke 1:41). Therefore, a trait of human beings is our person-hood in the womb. When does "personality" or person-hood start? It commences with the other systems of the body. Person-hood starts at conception! Most orthodox Christians believe life has sanctity and exists at fertilization when each system of the body begins to develop. At birth the baby has personality and systems which are in proportion to each other and support one another. That's the norm!
Now let me exercise that brain which God gave you to use! Females are born with one to two million immature eggs. One of those eggs became you. God planned your existence in your mother when she was born! Think on this! Not only did God know you in your mother's womb, but he planned you in your grandmother's womb for that is "you" when he "placed" the egg that would be you. Using iteration in this manner, God knew you in the beginning! Hence, I contend that your beginning was with the creation of Adam and Eve!
Do you think that's far-fetched? God promised Abraham that Jesus was to be his own seed 42 generations before Jesus was ever born! Furthermore, God planned the physical birth of Jesus when he cursed the serpent! (Genesis 3:15).
So you thought that "you" began at birth! How gullible you are! That's why we're all special! We were born in the image of God (remember who God "Is"):
Genesis 1:26 (YLT) ' And God saith, `Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness...""Our" needs some further explaining! We know that "The Word" (called Jesus after he was incarnated; John 1) was with God in the beginning. Two of the three of "Ours" is at least "The Word" and "I Am". Because of who God "Is" (Spirit) it would appear that mankind was made in the pattern of God: Mind, Body and Spirit (of which the soul is the cup). I contend that with his foreknowledge that we were made in the physical image of Jesus, not the other way around! God knew in advance how Jesus would be constructed and we are an image or shadow of him, not the other way around. (Bursting your bubble!)
My point is this; God knew what I would look like when Adam and Eve were created. He knew what you would look like. Not only that, but God knew your mind and spirit back on Day One! God didn't wait until you were born. His is truly "planned parenthood" and because he loves you, that makes you special! Special people (or God's creatures) should never be destroyed. It's man's attempt to put asunder what God has made!
The reason we were created was for ETERNAL communion with God! That means there is no end! We are for his pleasure and his love. When Adam was raised from the clay, I was raised up with him and so was you! God had joy in his creation, being an excellent craftsman. However, he had to make a tough choice: Were we to be automatons who blindly followed how he programmed us, or would we be loosed without a defined path? In his wisdom, God didn't want mere followers; he wanted love! Love is not a resource to be programmed. It's a cause and effect relationship for us. We love God because he first loved us! (from 1 John 4:19). He was the pattern for us. God patterns love for us and it was from the beginning!
If we love God, it's because he did something for us! God died for us. It wasn't anybody else on the cross, but God himself. "I Am" made the sacrifice "I Did" is what he was for us! Don't think of Jesus as another person or even another being! It was God who died on the cross experiencing the same emotions which we experience. We were made in his image. He felt our pain just as we do because we were made in his image.
I have made my point: "We have a beginning, but it was with God's initial plan... to make me in his image... and you!" Our beginning was when Adam was made flesh. That's when I believe that the person who I would be was assigned a soul, being made in God's image. At that time, God had a plan for me!
I saw a quote today: "...Visualize the end from the start." (Nabil M. Jamal). It was on a sign at the high school. God had a plan. He visualized it from the start. It was for him to have company for eternity. What God saw from the start was eternal life for his creation! His "view" of us was that we would live forever. We, created in His image, will never end!
John 3:15 "That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.""The end" which God visualized at "the start" was that there would be no end! When I was "born-again", from this "new start" I had this vision "There will be no end!"Wise men would say "Visualize 'no end' from the new start!"
On the flip-side, there is "no end" for everybody! If unbelievers think "This life is all there is!" what they see at the end is "nothing". With a view of nothing at the end, they never start. Those who have a faulty view of eternity, are never born again. As such they never get to the starting line! Why worry about the finish with nothing to motivate? Because there is an "end" for non-starters. It's eternal death. It's not "death" from a deterministic standpoint, but a living death... FOREVER.
Before I got to the starting line I looked at what I thought would be "the end". There was no ending in sight. I would face eternity! What turned my mind's eye is a fiery hell in isolation. I looked upon eternal life and said "That's my hope!" I visualized "the end" and that motivated me "to start". The hope I visualized at the start was that there would be no end!
1 Thessalonians 5:8 "But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation."It's "hope" I saw at the starting line and I'm running a great race because God is my trainer! Way to go God! You have a great plan!
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