Matthew 24:35 Meaning Heaven and Earth Will Pass Away

Everything you would use to measure permanence is on its way out, the sky included and the ground under your feet. Their passing is a change rather than a wiping out, the old creation put through fire and brought back new.

What stands is the speech of God, because that speech is God Himself reaching toward you and not information about Him. A word from Him is alive, and it does what it says. So a commandment heard on Sunday is never advice that might age out of usefulness. It is the one piece of ground that will not shift while everything around it is being remade.

Anicca: Impermanence

Heaven and earth, the surest-seeming things there are, are placed first in line to go. The dome of sky and the floor of ground, which every eye takes for permanent, are named as first to leave, the way a candle that has burned all night is nearly done at dawn. Nothing built of parts is exempt, and these are the biggest parts of all.

Dhamma: The truth that holds

Set against everything that dissolves is the one thing said to remain: the teaching itself. It stands on a truth that needs no world to prop it up. Even with sky and earth gone, it does not go.

Akāliko: Not bound by time

These words are deathless because time has no purchase on them. What is true does not grow old or run out; the last age finds it as sharp as the first. All else ticks toward its ending while this alone keeps outside the count.

Saṅkhāra: Formed, conditioned things

Heaven and earth fall under the heading of made things, and every made thing comes undone. Their passing simply tells the truth of how they were put together. The saying draws the line between the assembled, which ends, and the unmade, which does not.

Everything on earth passes away and the Face of your Lord remains: only one thing does not wear out Sufis reach for this line of the Quran whenever the ground shifts under them. It sorts everything a person leans on into two piles: what has a shelf life, and what does not. Almost all of what we count as solid sits in the first pile, and knowing that changes how tightly a person holds it.

Tajdīd al-khalq: creation renewed at every moment Ibn Arabi held that the world is made fresh at every instant, never carried over from the moment before. A river looks like one steady thing while the water in it keeps changing. So the passing of things is already under way, quietly, and someone who sees it stops waiting for a far-off collapse.

The world is a bridge, cross over it and do not build a house on it: nobody settles on something moving Al-Ghazali passes this old saying of Jesus along in his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Using a thing and settling into it are different; a person can enjoy a house, a job, a body, without treating any of them as the place they finally arrive. The difference shows when something is taken away: whoever was crossing keeps walking, whoever had built loses their footing.

Kalimat Allāh: the Word of God The Quran calls Jesus a word from God, and Ibn Arabi builds his chapter on him around that name. A word in this sense belongs to the one speaking rather than to the air it travels through. So it keeps its force long after the setting is gone, the way a promise still holds once the room where it was made has been torn down.

Fanāʾ and Baqāʾ: passing away and remaining Junayd spoke of a person losing what belonged to them and finding what belongs to God still there. Much of what we call ourselves is on loan from the world: our standing, our roles, what people say about us. When those are taken, someone who has stopped leaning on them is still upright, held by something the world never handed out.