We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What is Heaven?
READ THE BOOK - FIND THE RHYTHM
21 comments:
Interesting question!
NT Wright said in a sermon, I listened to, that is was "not a place to which we might get 'eventually' after we die". But what else? This was what I was told my whole life...
What is heaven?
Where God is, is heaven! Or where God will once reign or be, is heaven.
Heaven has something to do with God Otherwise there is no heaven.
A place where the joys of earth are enhanced and
known in full.
I picture incredible nature scenes to
explore, as well as parties and reunions,
new wines, fruits we have never tasted on earth.
One thing I wonder about: the toil and pain we
experience on earth can bring us to new heights and greater depths of understanding. I wonder if this "climbing" will be gone in heaven or just different.
Lukas,
Thanks. I think Wright is moving along the right lines. What else? How about the wholesale renewal of the earth in the presence of God?
Anon.
Thanks. True, and a good way of starting out - where God is looks like it will be in the midst of his people in a new heaven and earth.
Angela,
Thanks. Good thoughts. In the renewed earth in God's presence it appears that there will be some continuity and discontinuity, but that pain and suffering will not be part of that new world.
Reminds me of the Sunday our pastor asked the rhetorical question to which he received verbal responses: what is hell? One person said it was a place to which no one wanted to go. I retorted that we all know some who should.
What? No takers? No correction to my smartassness? OK.
Heaven began when I opened my soul to God. I live as if I had one foot there and one foot "not" there. Grace, justification, sanctification,carry me closer to being eye-opened to it, but I am part there now. I experience it when I step out of my self-centeredness. But right now, I have to go pick up my guitar from the repair shop and can't spend any more time on here for now.
Carter,
Thanks. Just got back. Maybe hell should be a place some people do want to go?
Carter,
Interesting perspective. How does one open one's soul?
C.S. Lewis said that some would prefer hell to heaven, for heaven to them would be hell. How does one open one's soul? Surrender. Choose to let God change you, even if it means breaking your long held straws. At least that was my experience.
Carter,
Thanks. I see more now that to open one's soul is being used as a metaphor for other truths.
Hey Greg,
A place where there are no taxes or welfare.
Place where God lives.
Streets paved with gold and nobody ripping them up.
Place where Jesus saw Satan fall from like lightning.(saw not caused)
Place where Christ says "he's with me".
Endless discovery because God is Infinate.
Harry
Mans quest for meaning, his inexhaustible desire to hope ... are they pointing to a real object like heaven? Or to human beings fearing and trembling in the face of death and hence turning inward, shutting off reason and sense experience fleeing from reality and creating an object which quiets their individual angst?
Subective makeup for the face of death or objective reality smashing the face of death?
And maybe the answer to this question should not be given in looking at scientifical evidence and proofs and reasoning but with looking whether it creates a redemptive movement in the here and now for human beings giving up in the face of death, for the weak, for those who are overwhelmed by their evil context. Does it help them in real life? Then maybe it does point to something ... at least it helps them, maybe there is more ...
Mans quest for meaning, his inexhaustible desire to hope ... are they pointing to a real object like heaven? Or to human beings fearing and trembling in the face of death and hence turning inward, shutting off reason and sense experience fleeing from reality and creating an object which quiets their individual angst?
Subective makeup for the face of death or objective reality smashing the face of death?
And maybe the answer to this question should not be given in looking at scientifical evidence and proofs and reasoning but with looking whether it creates a redemptive movement in the here and now for human beings giving up in the face of death, for the weak, for those who are overwhelmed by their evil context. Does it help them in real life? Then maybe it does point to something ... at least it helps them, maybe there is more ...
I am sorry for having post it twice. It did not seem to work first and then suddenly I had two of them. Greg, can you please remove one of the two and this comment which I am writing here.
Harry coe,
Thanks. Excellent thoughts. I assume that you mean some of these will be in place on the renewed earth.
Sisyphos,
Thanks. Yes, at least pointing to something and maybe more - way more than either the objective or subjective sense can supply.
What is interesting to me is the idea that we are surrounded by heaven and are just insensitive to it. I read Hebrews 11; take a breath and read the first verse of 12 and think, "They are with me now?"
Carter,
True. Yet, there is also, according to Hebrews, a race that is set before us that is going somewhere - it has a destiny of joy, which will culminate in the final renewal of all things.
I don't disagree. Now we see in part. Then we will see in full.
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