Eternal

A.M.D.G.

The song begins with Sonny (from POD) talking about the spiritual battle all humans live in. It is the battle of our spiritual nature against the physical world and sin it entails. We are all spiritual beings who just happen to have bodies, not bodies that happen to have souls. This is what War of Ages stands for, the battle against good and evil, right and wrong, truth and fallacy, God and the devil. (This, however, does not lead to the conclusion that the devil is the counterpart of God/ the complete opposite: Satan is an angel, a fallen one at that, and he was created by God; the true counterpart of Satan is St. Michael the Archangel).

So, the speaker is saying that he has been "fighting the good fight," as St. Paul would say, until something happens, something that causes him to fall..? To me this fall could have been induced by pride, suggested by the phrase, "I felt that nothing could touch me." He had what is known as "hubris," or believing that you are something that you are not, and this caused him to fall, similarly to the fall of Adam and Eve, also a sin of pride. Nevertheless, the speaker figuratively falls and then God watches that fall, though not in a spiteful manner, but in a concerned and loving way. He then reaches deep inside to his inner spiritual "warrior" and does what Jesus told his disciples to do- to set their faces like flint and not be shaken by the enemy, because the enemy can only harm our physical bodies that will inevitably perish and not our immortal souls, so long as we have God on our side and Jesus in our hearts.

A common theme of the album "Eternal" is overcoming obstacles in life and bouncing back from defeat. The speaker goes on to say in the first verse that although we are all human and make mistakes, he did his best not to let those mistakes cause any more damage to himself in the future, but to limit them to a one time occurrence and keep them in the past- over and done with. But, it seems that he is saying that he has now given in some and his failures are seeping into his psyche and effecting more than just his past. This is causing the things that matter in his life to go awry. It is not how many failures we have that determine how successful we are, but it is the way we better ourselves from those mistakes.

The speaker is frustrated because of his inability to avoid falling into sin and he wonders if he will ever be the person he is being called to be, or if he will remain in the vicious cycle of obedience and failure.

I think he is then saying in the phrase, "My very own existence may cost me everything" that his being alive as a flawed human in a sinful world might be too much for him to bear, and he is despairing that he is not good enough to merit the place God has prepared for him. The very fact that he is alive on this earth makes him susceptible to evil and failure, and he thinks that by the time his life is over he will have squandered everything that God could give to him.

Despite this anxiety, the man is simply thinking things over in his head in a humble, though somewhat excessive, way. He feels his earthly life is in control over his spiritual life. He still has hope, though, and he is praying to God to have true freedom from this world so that he can experience life to the fullest and not merely have physical life.

I think that his "undying mistakes" are the ones that he keeps repeating. I have to be honest now that I'm not positive, but I want to say that the whole "the undying mistakes that I've made have set my life apart and now I'm free" means that his repeated mistakes have caused his "flesh'/ his "existence" on this earth to be separated from spiritual life, so now his soul is free from the shackles of his flesh. Probably not, but that's the best I've got right now.

"Live for something" might mean to not go through life without a purpose and to use your God-given talents for His glory. The hope for nothing has me pretty stumped because the band is completely for having hope, so my conclusion is that the proud speaker is the one saying these things, and he is saying them so that people don't just sit around and hope without actually living with a purpose. Like the Bible says, faith without good works is useless. His pride still lingers though because he doesn't see the necessity of hope, but maybe I'm just thinking a little too much into it.

Finally, he knows in his heart that greater things are yet to come (thus he has hope) but they will not just be handed over to him, but he must fight to earn them.

N.B. God is Eternal; the Alpha and the Omega. He was, is, and always shall be. We humans, however, along with the angels that God also created, are immortal: we have a starting point, but no end, just like a "ray" in Math. God is like a "line" in Math with two arrows, no beginning or end. God alone is eternal.

A.M.D.G.