[H]e chose us in him
before the creation of the world.
—Ephesians 1:4
On April 21, 2018, Nabi Tajima died in Kikai, Japan, at the age of 117 years, 260 days. Nabi was the world’s oldest certified living person—the last living human to have been born in the nineteenth century.
There’s a bristlecone pine tree in the White Mountains in eastern California that they say is 4,849 years old—appropriately named Methuselah. Methuselah is the world’s oldest living tree, according to dendrochronologists. If they’re right about that, the tree was 800 years old when the patriarch Abraham was born.
There is a sense in which you are older than Nabi or Methuselah, for Paul said you were chosen before the creation of the world. And you’ll live forever (Jn 6:47; 11:25–26). From before the world began to the world without end. You’re older than you think.
This life is the in-between time of immortality.