Human pictures of paradise, God's heaven, the home of his people, are never satisfactory. As I wrote in my last post, fallen humanity's attempts at utopia generally turn into earthly hells. And this failure to grasp a pure vision of our home with God is as it should be.
Paul writing of God's Wisdom, hidden in past ages, explains how his contemporaries failed to understand the promise of God's Wisdom, Jesus Christ, and therefore crucified him. He goes on to paraphrase the Old Testament, linking Jesus with God's promises now revealed:
"Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him."(1 Cor. 2:9b)
Home with God is linked to the believer's relationship with Jesus Christ. He is the One we now know through the pages of Holy Scripture, opened to us by the Holy Spirit who is sent by the Father and the Son. Our joy is now in Christ Jesus who we are united to by faith. We know the Son, yet, only anticipate heaven.
I once read a nineteenth century story of a woman's supposed vision of heaven. Interestingly enough what I read was a vision of an idealized United States in the nineteenth century. In that particular heaven, on Sunday afternoons, great Reformation leaders such as Luther and Calvin came to a library and lectured.
Native Americans were still not quite Christianized so they lived apart and were sent heavenly missionaries. Young people wandered here and there embedding roses in the marble floors of mansions.
Even C.S. Lewis', description of the future with Aslan (Jesus), in his book, The Last Battle, seems less than satisfactory. But a great deal of what Lewis writes about our future with God, in his essay, "The Weight of Glory" is very satisfactory.
For instance looking at the verse "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," and equating it with Jesus' statement that no one can enter heaven except as a little child, Lewis writes how one of the beautiful traits of a good child, or a dog or horse, is their love of praise. He goes on to write:
"And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero's book. ... In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised."
But in my last post, Literature, Damnation and the Final Death, I wrote of Walter Wangerin, Jr, and his book Mourning into Dancing. I quoted Wangerin's picture of what he called Death Absolute, or the fourth death, the final death. He then wrote of the resurrection for those who belong to Jesus. I will end with his picture of our death and resurrection. It is long but beautiful:
"But I shall not perish! I, like the prodigal, will rather be coming home again!
No, this is not a wishful denial of the reality nor some incompleteness of the third death. My body will die. Every single relationship in which I now experience life--every relationship!-- will break. I will at once lose my place in the created world and friends and family and breathing, my reason, my senses and all my strength, yea, and my self--until the darkness is complete, until I am, from earthly perspectives, a nothing in a nowhere. I will die.
But I will not perish!
I shall not be lost utterly. I carry to the grave this promise: that 'God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish--' Perish: now what Greek word do you suppose is used there? Right, me apoletai, the familiar 'loss' in its extremity, apollumi. 'Should not perish' says the promise, 'but have eternal life.'
How can this be? If death is my impotence to maintain any sort of relationship, and if life is lived in relationship, how could I ever live again?
Because the God who created once is Creator still. Because God established a new sort of relationship by his Son--a new covenant in which God does it all, and we allow the doing. Its a one-sided relationship, wherein the impotent one, the monstrously incapacitated one, receives the benefit--as when a weak child falls, but the father holds her hand and lifts her up again. The lifting is pure gift. The new covenant is Grace.
This relationship can endure even when I am helpless. Especially then. This relationship endures though I am nothing in a nowhere--because I remain a something in the heart of God! This relationship endures in spite of the flat reality of the grave and my own dissolution, my crumbling into dust, because my side of the covenant is not fulfilled by my flesh and blood but by Christ's--who continues to live, yes, even while they bury me and the worms translate my subtle brains to soil.
'My sheep,' says Jesus, 'hear my voice, and I know them, and they shall never perish [me apolontai!] and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.'
I will die. All my resources will exhaust themselves. In myself and on my own, I will not be.
But the Shepherd remembers my name.
The Shepherd will whisper, 'Walter'--and though I have no ears to hear, yet the whispering Lord will give me hearing.
The Savior will cry across the divisions: Walter Wangerin, Junior!'-- and though I have no tongue at all, the calling will give me voice. The Word of God has always contained my own capacity to answer it.
Walter Wangerin, come forth!'
And straightway I will rise up, laughing and loving and leaping, alive: 'Here I am! For you have called me!'
Alive again, eternally."
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