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Transcript 328D — The Word "Forever" in the Bible
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum
CALLER: Brother Camping, I've been having difficulty with some of the Old Testament statements regarding admonitions that are made, and they use the word "forever." And also some of the prohibitions which are to be forever. What takes this away? There's so much of it in the Old Testament, this particular thing, forever and ever.
HC: Now you know why that is.
CALLER: No, I don't.
HC: The question is raised: Why do we find so frequently in the Old Testament, about this or that going on forever? The reason is that while God was dealing with national Israel in an historical setting on this sin-cursed earth, He was presenting through them God's eternal plan of salvation. He was speaking actually of spiritual truths that had everlasting consequences.
As an illustration of this, when He was talking to Abraham, He promised him the land of Canaan, did He not? He said, "Look to the north and south and east and the west. All of this land I will give you." How long was he given this land? Forever, forever.
Now that immediately tells us that God was not speaking about the literal land of Canaan insofar as this sin-cursed earth was concerned, because the rest of the Bible indicates that this universe, this earth, is to be burned by fire. It's to be totally destroyed at the end of time. Anything that exists today will be gone. And so God has to be talking about another kind of a land of Canaan, a land of Canaan that will go on forever, which can only be the New Heaven and the New Earth, where we will live forever with the Lord Jesus Christ.
The proof of this, incidentally, in Abraham's case, was that he didn't make any attempts to buy any land. He didn't make any attempt to own any. He finally bought a piece of land when his wife Sarah died in old age. But we read in Hebrews that he lived here as a stranger and as a pilgrim. Moreover, it declares there that he was looking for a heavenly city, a city whose foundations were made by God.
He was looking beyond the physical land of Canaan, at an eternal Canaan, namely, the eternal salvation that God was providing. Whenever you see the word forever in the old Testament or New Testament, you can know that it is going beyond history into eternity. Therefore, it's not speaking of something that's relating to this sin-cursed earth. It's relating to the New Heaven and the New Earth, or to salvation itself, which is eternal in character.