What's forever for?

So what's the glory in living?

Doesn't anybody ever stay together anymore?

And if love never lasts forever

Tell me, what's forever for?

-- Michael Martin Murphey

It is more than a bit facetious to say that forever is a long time.

The U.S. Postal Service is coming out with "Forever" stamps. The Cape Girardeau post office on Frederick Street doesn't have them yet -- I checked. These new forever stamps are scheduled to be offered at around the same time the price of a first-class stamp is set to rise from its current 39 cent rate. No matter how high the cost of stamps rises, the forever stamp will "forever" be good for mailing up to one ounce of first-class mail at 39 cents. So we are told.

I suspect I will buy a lot of these provocatively named stamps -- I like a good deal.

The word "forever" has religious connotations. There are 290 references to the word "forever" in the pages of the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the word translated into English as "forever" literally means "into the age." It's a translator's decision that renders "into the age" as "forever."

The word forever has a static quality -- endless time, time with no end, going on and on into infinity. A little hard to grasp the meaning with a finite mind. But I get a sense of sameness; forever sounds like it might be a bit boring. The words into the age, however, are dynamic in intent. They suggest an adventure is coming. They seem to promise something new and exciting will be unfolding.

Try this famous passage of Jesus, then, with the literal Greek rendering:

"This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live into the age." (John 6:58)

This notion of "into the age" reminds me of that classic scene from the movie, "2010," in which an apparition appears before a noted NASA scientist, warning him to leave the orbit of the planet Jupiter in two days' time.

"Why?" asks the scientist. "What's going to happen?" The answer he receives is "something wonderful."

That's the sense of the text, I think. Something wonderful will happen to us. Easter gives us that promise. The promise of eternal life. If you want to call it living forever, that's OK. But try using the construct "into the age." It's closer to the Greek text and it carries the sense of excitement and possibility and wonder that Jesus may have really meant.

Jeff Long is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau. Married with two daughters, he is of Scots and Swedish descent, loves movies, and is a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.