Alien Love

My novel, Aliens Are God's Children Too, explores may issues in life. Yes, it is science fiction. It also has Christian themes infused into it. It is also a romance. It explores love as expressed by creatures on other planets. It also explores the idea of how God's love might be expressed through intelligent life on other worlds.
"Love never ends," says 1 Corinthians 13:8a (NRSV). To put it another way, “Love is eternal.” Scientists talk about infinite things. Mathematicians use infinity as a device in doing a number of critical calculations. When scientists and mathematicians talk about infinity however, it is an incalculable distance or amount within our created universe. The human mind hardly comprehends the infinite in any useful way outside of science and mathematics. This is not a new challenge.
An eon is a stretch of time so long that no one can fathom it. Plato, a few years before the birth of Christ, coined a new word: aionios. What he literally meant was eternity. Eternity means having no beginning and no end, no change and no decay. Whereas an eon means indefinite time you cannot measure, eternity has nothing to do with time or anything measured. There is nothing created or destroyed in eternity. There is no past, present, or future. Eternity can only be applied to God.
The Greek word used in the New Testament which we translate eternal literally means without time, growth, past, present, or future. There are two areas where this word eternal is used in the New Testament. First, it is used in terms of covenant. When God makes a covenant with us, it has a beginning but has no end: Time is literally meaningless as far as God’s covenant is concerned, and that covenant cannot be destroyed.
The other way that the New Testament uses eternal with is hope. Our hope is eternal. The idea of eternal life is crucial to Christian faith. It is fundamental to our understanding of who Jesus Christ is, who God is, and how God works.
I am not one to do statistics of the Bible very often, but I have been fascinated by what I have learned about the word eternal. Eternal is coupled with a number of different words one to three times – except for one word. Eternal is coupled with life – eternal life – forty-four times. It makes us stop and realize how crucial the concept of eternal life was to the early church. It predominates the writing of John, of the Apostle Paul, and of all writers of the New Testament. How many times do we read, “His steadfast love endures forever" in the Psalms? Notice this word steadfast. It is coupled with dozens of different words in the Old and New Testament, but steadfast is coupled with love dozens of times. Love is constant. That brings us right back to the statement of the Apostle Paul in the eighth verse of I Corinthians: Love never ends. Love is steadfast. Love endures forever. We can really celebrate the ultimate source of the love that we receive from our mothers and fathers, for all love comes from God.
Once we acknowledge that idea and assimilate it into our minds, then we begin to get a feel for how much our God loves us. Moreover, we get a feel for how important it is to let God’s love flow through us, that others might see God's love in us. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful, nor is it arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice at wrong, but love does rejoice in the right. Love does bear all things. Love does believe all things. Love does hope all things. Love does transform all things with triumphant fortitude. Love never ends. Indeed!