Have you ever noticed bow many people seem to have problems with God? There seem to be a lot, and a lot of the time it seems that the response to why they have problems with God is either evil, or lack of gifts bestowed on people (meaning 'he has not done anything for me lately', this belief of course being despite the fact that he allowed them to breathe for another day) but anyway.
Have you also noticed that many of these people (mostly non-christians) seem to still have a belief in some sort of heaven? Never mind that as a Christian this means the consequent hell belief must go with it, however this is not the point. I find it super interesting that while people can have huge issues with God that cause them to either reject him or choose not to believe in him (which has issues on its own, because even though God does not do things for you in your own mind does not mean you can choose to make him not exist)they seem to have no problems with heaven. While as a christian community our beliefs tend to lie in the fact that these two are inseperable, could it be that we have given the wrong idea of what heaven is?
Now it is hard to get into it without offering up a view of heaven that could seem suspect, because it is also hard to say "I know what heaven will look like" it seems to be a touchy subject, however i will try and offer up a view that can be expected by most, if not all.
The secular belief about heaven seems to be that it is this nice place that you get everything that you want. There is a warm fuzzy feeling that goes along with the idea of heaven that it is the ideal place to be. While I have no problems with this why is their concept of God so much different. You see the reason is that Christians have portrayed heaven like this for so long. As long as you are "in" it is going to be this amazing place that basically is everything that we want. I don't know that this is necessarily the right way to look at heaven the "everything you want" attitude. While I don't think this is necessarily wrong either.
I think that we must believe that heaven is in sync with the character of God. Heaven cannot be something that is out of God's character or contrary to his character that would defeat the purpose of a lot of other theology behind the Christian belief. However, it seems to have been portrayed that heaven can somehow be separate from God and/or his character, or the secular community is just picking up on things about the christian faith that they find appealing, and it could easily be either one or a combination of these options. Yet, I think that it must constantly be spoken and implied that you can't have heaven without God, heaven is an outpouring of God's character. It is the in essence the incarnation of his character fully realized by humanity, his character showed in the way that humanity can enjoy. It is relationship with God in it's fullest extent, a relationship with God that is fully realized.
So while it may be easy to separate God and heaven for the secular world, I think it is important to realize that this portrayal is not necessarily truth, and to keep reminding ourselves that in the end we get to spend an eternity with our creator and how wonderful it will be!
1 comment:
As a christian community we portray ourselves as elite members of a club who will experience the best of the best eventually in heaven. This comes across as arrogance to unbelievers and becomes a real turn-off for them. I wish we could humble ourselves before the world and accept that we don't have all of the answers (although we have some). We are all a work in progress and the more we understand "grace" the more we will realize we are just a step across the threshold of faith from where our unbelieving friends and relatives are. We need to love and not condemn them while continuing to seek God in our own lives.
Thanks for your challenging thoughts, Nick.
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