Yes, Eddie, amazing isn’t it! Everyone expected God to throw a fastball and instead He threw a change-up!
And when does this seemingly endless cycle actually come to an end? The Baha’i claim that we already have a new heaven and a new earth, though any rational person can look around them and observe that the world has not changed. Indeed, it appears to be getting worse, not better.
As you know, the physical Earth will eventually be destroyed, in some billions of years, when the Sun expands as it runs out of fuel, but the composite elements will disperse to form new suns/planets. It’s an eternal universe and a VERY BIG GOD running the whole show.
And what happens to humanity when this event occurs?
A Creator presupposes a creation. The former is absolute while the latter is contingent.
Don’t really know. It’s possible that In that length of time, science may develop means to travel to other planets. The creation/worlds of God are infinite and are constantly coming into and going out of existence, but as long as there are people living on earth, God will provide them guidance.
God is unique, alone and beyond the reach of any human mind. The creation is NOT God…The creation is the result of God saying…“Be”.
Nick, what do you believe will happen to you when you die?
Very Catholic!This is the difference, Nick. We, as individual Catholics, do not decide what the prophecies mean and how they will be fulfilled. Teaching authority was given to the Church, not each individual member of the Church. Relying on the promises of Christ himself to his Church, we trust that no error will be taught by that Church concerning faith and morals. We submit to that teaching authority and accept its judgment.
Steve, that is always the 800 lb gorilla, isn’t it? We all ask and ponder over that question. I will tell you that Baha’u’llah, The Bab and Abdu’l-Baha have revealed more about the next world than God has ever allowed to be revealed before. The exact nature of the next world is withheld from us because 1. There is no language to describe it, and 2. We would want out of here, pronto! It is all available on the net if you’d like to explore for yourself.
Thank you. So is there any need for salvation or does one attain their eternal reward by progressing through human knowledge and effort?
The most important thing is not its length, but that it is a cycle. It entails the faith that God’s guidance is never exhausted, and that no people, however distant in the past, were deprived of God’s guidance and mercy. This is a very important theme in the teachings of the Bab and Baha’u’llah. The reference to a thousand years is almost incidental to that, in one work of Baha’u’llah I know of he says
For the Bahai converts in the West, many from various forms of pre- or post- millennial Protestantism, this rang a bell. The “thousand year” element is probably over-stressed in Bahai secondary literature as a result. I do not think the period was important to Baha’u’llah’s picture of past religious history, which doesn’t fit a simple chronology, but he makes it a marker of the future, by stating that the next Manifestation, who is to renew/replace the Bahai revelation, will not come for a thousand years.