The Big Story of the Bible is that the whole story is just the preamble to the really big story - the realer story, the most real experience of all - eternity with God. It's what we were made for and this side of heaven we live in what CS Lewis called "shadowlands." These are the lands where we see in a mirror only dimly because our sight and capacity are limited by our separated condition - from God. But Jesus the healer reconciler has come and with His grace he changed the whole direction of the story from separation from God to reconciliation with God. It happened by His grace, you get it when you receive him. How kind of God.
Well it's pretty dynamic to me that the closing sentence in the whole Biblical story is "The grace of Jesus Christ be with God's people. Amen." Of course, that would be the closing word on the Bible because Jesus is God's main character in the bible. That being so, "the grace of Jesus Christ be with God's people. Amen" is the opening word on eternity. Jesus and His grace - the door to eternity. So God's last words of the bible become the first words - the opening sentence in the much bigger much realer story. Yes, eternity begins for us because of Jesus and His grace.
Pretty exciting to me that the last words of the Bible's big story would be the first words that open the book on the story of eternity. Strikes me as being Just like God to do something like that. I think CS Lewis had it about right when he concluded his big story of Narnia with these words - "And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." (Last Battle. 183-184)
