Our most beloved stories focus on times of crisis. Humans may say and think that we long for peace, but as a species we secretly think such times would be too boring. We are drawn to drama, to the aid of the underdog. Something deep inside elicits exciting existence -- times of horror haunting us, of evil evolving in our midst, and of crisis crushing us unless we can vanquish the demons and go from victims to victors. Even if we don't truly long for terrible times, we at least crave stories of such.
This is perhaps why some scoff at the Bible's promise of eternal life. Some supposedly wizened teachers' words betray an obtuse opinion that God never made any cosmoses prior to our own, and that He likewise must never have done any other creating after leaving off constructing our cosmos -- except, they happily confess, His maintenance of a boring, fabled home of harp-strumming angels floating on cumulus clouds. How boring.
Yet the Holy Scriptures paint a different picture: war in the heavens, fought amongst angelic species predating us, and who (like humans) have broad capacity for choice, even to rebel against God. The precocious prospect of counting epochs like days and millennia like hours, as we develop continually through aiding young, unique, future species, is enthralling to this whispering warrior, who is quite certain that Eternity with the Good Guys will be far more exciting than even our grandest imagination can grasp.
One academic type has argued that it is proof of our evolution that we have grown from caring about family to village, from village to caring about state, and from state to feeling patriotic about nation. He argued that the next step in our evolution is to care about our global populace. Listen: It is neither evolution nor good when the expediency of the masses overrules the conviction of conscience of the individual or minority. Finally, in the end, it will be maturity, not evolution, that truly takes us even further than caring about all humans globally, onward to caring for new species God has not even created yet. There will be battles against evil. Wars against tyrants. Excitement. Crisis. Are you up for it?
