Eternity and Eastertide: A Meditation
Resurrected Jesus restores eternal awe, and a personal encounter with Him explodes our empirical, emotional, and experiential engagement with the world.
Christians desperately need eternity to invade our reality. Like an anaconda slowly constricting its prey, many believers today are being suffocated by an experiential, emotional, and empirical way of engaging the world. In this narrowing, the eternal is edited out, and the temporal is elevated as ultimate.
Eternal awe is what loosens the grip, widens the horizon, reawakens our souls, and resurrects the way we engage God and His world. At the center of this awakening is a living Savior: the risen Jesus, willing and ready to encounter you personally.
Eternity in Christian Discipleship and Leadership
I have conducted both formal and informal research with dozens of Christian leaders, from pastors to nonprofit executives, examining how Scripture’s revelation of God’s eternal nature and purpose forms discipleship and informs Christian leadership (or, as the case may be, how little it does).
A key insight emerged repeatedly: while pastors and Christian leaders overwhelmingly affirm God’s eternal nature and purpose, most struggle to explain how those truths meaningfully shape discipleship and leadership in practice. Eternity is professed, but not often practically applied.
It is something like the booster rockets that launched Artemis II, falling away once orbit was reached. Many Christians embrace God’s eternity when they come to salvation, for eternal life, but once they enter the orbit of ordinary discipleship, the significance of eternity falls away. What initiates the Christian eternal life is rarely what shapes and sustains it.
And the effects are devastating.
When the eternal is absent from our everyday lives, underdeveloped in our discipleship and leadership, both individuals and Christian communities begin to normalize a diminished way of engaging God’s world and adopt secular sources of salvation, security, strength, significance, and satisfaction. When eternity is doctrinally affirmed but practically eclipsed, the result is eventually discontent, discouragement, and growing disengagement from God and His purposes.
The Science of Awe
Eternal awe explodes the frame through which we engage the world. But what is awe?
In 2018, the John Templeton Foundation released a white paper on The Science of Awe, surveying more than seventy-five studies. Awe, they concluded, is the feeling we experience when we encounter a “perceived vastness” or a “need for accommodation.” Put simply, awe is what happens when something is so beautiful, massive, or magnificent that it overwhelms our normal categories for understanding reality.
We know the sensation: Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, surveying a mountain range, or watching a breathtaking sunset. Looking upon something so weighty and wonderful that words seem too small. Awe is often felt in the body before it is processed in the mind, something like breath being taken away, eyes widened, jaw dropped, skin tingling. Physiologically, we know it when we have encountered something greater than ourselves.
Awe breaks through the frame through which we normally engage the world by presenting us with a reality too vast to handle, too glorious to diminish, and too heavy to ignore. For Christians, this awakening starts with creation, where the eternal God reveals Himself generally through the beauty, order, vastness, and power of the world He has made. But creation’s awe is only the beginning, not the complete picture. The glory that broadens our view through general revelation ultimately guides us to God’s more personal self-revelation through His Word and His work in Jesus Christ, where our engagement of reality is transformed by encountering God’s eternal nature and purpose.
Special Revelation: Eternity in New Creation
In Scripture, God unveils His eternal purpose of salvation: a plan established before time (2 Tim. 1:9), accomplished within history (Acts 2:23), and given so that people might know Him personally and eternally (John 17:3).
Jesus is the center of God’s eternal purpose, the eternal Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3). Jesus is the eternal God who entered creation so that His people might behold God’s glory and come to know Him savingly (John 1:14; 17:3). In Jesus, eternity and history meet, and eternal awe is awakened. Through His life, death, and resurrection, God reveals both His eternal nature and His eternal purpose, inviting His people to participate in both.
Eternal Awe: Resurrection Reframing
People are revived and renewed when they behold the scope of God’s eternality, both who He is and what He is doing. Nowhere is this more clearly revealed, or more personally experienced, than through encounters with the risen Jesus. Meeting Jesus explodes the narrow boundaries of an empirical, experiential, and emotionally driven engagement with life. And this reframing is deeply personal. Consider three examples:
Resurrected Jesus explodes the empirical:
Thomas had once been ready to die with Jesus (John 11:16), but after the crucifixion, he refused to believe the resurrection without tangible proof (John 20:24–25). His framework for reality was enclosed by the empirical, what he could see and verify.
Jesus did not shame Thomas for his demand for evidence. Instead, the risen Christ met him personally, inviting him to examine His wounds. Confronted with the resurrected Lord, Thomas’ empirical limits were shattered. His doubt gave way to worship: “My Lord and my God!” According to church history, Thomas carried the gospel to India.
Resurrected Jesus explodes the experiential:
Peter’s story reveals the limits of interpreting life through experience alone. After denying Jesus three times, Peter retreated into shame and returned to what was familiar. His experience told him failure was final, but experience is never the entirety of the story.
When Peter encountered the risen Jesus on the shore (John 21:1-19), everything changed. Around a simple breakfast, Jesus restored him with His steadfast love and recommissioned him for His eternal purpose: “Feed my sheep.” Shame was swamped by grace. Discouragement gave way to delight. The one who failed publicly would become a pillar of the early church (Galatians 2:9). The resurrection reframed Peter’s story within God’s greater purpose.
Resurrected Jesus explodes the emotional:
The same pattern unfolds on the road to Emmaus. Two disciples, overwhelmed by grief and confusion, walked away from Jerusalem saying, “We had hoped…” (Luke 24:13-35). Their emotions interpreted the cross as defeat and the end of the story.
Their feelings, though real, were not ultimate.
The risen Jesus met them in their despair and reframed their understanding by opening the Scriptures, showing how all of God’s Word pointed to Him. As Jesus spoke, their hearts began to burn. When their eyes were finally opened, sorrow gave way to joy, and hesitation turned into urgency. The disciples rose that very hour to proclaim the resurrection.
The Eastertide Invitation: Eternal Awe in your Everyday
In each encounter, Jesus does not dismiss what is empirical, experiential, or emotional. Instead, He redeems and reframes them for His disciples to engage the world for His glory. The resurrection expands reality. Eternal awe breaks into our lives through resurrected Jesus, restoring our vision so that we no longer interpret God’s world from what is immediate or immanent but from what is everlasting and eternal.
Risen Jesus is willing and ready to encounter you, too. God’s Spirit reveals the risen Jesus and restores eternal sight through His ordinary means of grace. Eternal awe is not sustained by occasional inspiration, but by regular, grace-filled rhythms through which God continually reframes our vision and refocuses our hearts. These include (at least) corporate worship, private Bible study, prayer, personal retreat, small group community, disciple-making, sacrificial love, and surprising generosity.
Eternal awe comes from encountering the risen Jesus, convincing our hearts of realities unseen as we learn to live by faith in God’s eternal nature and purpose rather than being ruled by emotions, experiences, or empirical realities.
Jesus has risen! This Eastertide season, Jesus wants to explode how you engage the world through personal encounters with His eternal nature and purpose. Will you let Him in?
