“there will be ten or twenty billion saints, each praising God for how He saved them. What a spectacle!”
Only God knows the number of people who have lived and who is and will be saved among them.
“First, you believed He exists, but it took Him two years to convince you that He would reward you for earnestly seeking Him.”
My first belief came when I understood God HAD to exist because the Big Bang required creation from nothing. Although I didn’t know of dark energy at the time, I knew a powerful force was needed to propel the universe’s matter and energy out of the black hole that would otherwise result.
My hesitancy came from fear of torture, for I hated pain. I didn’t really fear death, having grown up on WW II films and TV. I saw death for God as a heroic act. Torture, not so much.
This took place between the ages of 12-15. There’s the real miracle. My parents didn’t attend church, and I never had, yet God called me through a radio ministry and reading the Bible.
You're probably aware how fiercely the Cosmic Creation event was resisted for precisely that reason. Rather than the universe being static and having always existed, which gives evolution the quadrillions of years it would need, creation only 13.8 bya gives far too little time to explain life's origin by natural processes.