qondio.com/Qdtk

The nature of Heaven

By Arthur Webster

The after-life for most Christians is to be spent in a place called Heaven. The generally accepted idea is that those in Heaven spend their days either singing the praises of God or living the sort of ideal life that they were denied on Earth.

Despite the deliberations of many great minds, apart from physical reincarnation, there are no real indcations of what,precisely, the after-life will consist of. The many debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin seem to be somewhat pointless if the angels don't bring some enlightenment to us poor mortals waiting to shuffle off this coil.

Who, for example, will qualify for entry into a heavenly after-life? Obviously all good Christians will qualify but what about all those millions of people who live blameless lives but have never been introduced to Christianity? Are they condemned to some other place simply because Christians failed to inform them that their good works were wasted since God was not aware of them?

When, for example, did mankind start to qualify for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven? Was it in the ages of the old testament when God walked this Earth or was it after the sacrifice of Jesus? The blood of Jesus was supposed to wash away the sins of the world - but was this 'washing' retroactive?

Did the ancient cave men with their natural and instinctive lives simply fail to qualify because of when they lived?

Why, for example, do so many people who experience a near death trauma claim to have seen a brilliant light and dead relatives waiting to welcome them? Do the dead spend their time standing around waiting for others to die?

Will I become a bigamist in Heaven because I have had four wives? Will I suffer the consequences of an unintentional sin because the unwritten follow on to 'till death do you part' was 'also to keep thyself true till death do you reunite'? Will I be banned because of such sinful behaviour?

If Heaven is a place of spirit only, will it be possible to maintain an individuality or will we each become a part of the whole - a bit like the believers in Guaia accept?

As we age on Earth the days become much shorter and the passage of time accelerates to frightening rates. Does the phenomenon exist in Heaven? Will our lives or spiritual existence experience a similar acceleration or will time simply cease to exist?

Will death-bed confessions and regrets really allow the multiple rapist, murderer or genocidal maniac to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Is it possible for the most heinous of criminal lives to be washed away by a few words, no matter how sincerely meant?

When it comes to personalities, will we still maintain an individual character that other residents will accept or will the dead become a homogenous mass of identical beings with little to choose between them?

With the whole of eternity to fill, how will we pass the time?

My quest for answers has put me into many mixed situations where the questions themselves become entities that create hubris and discord.

It would be so nice to have a few answers instead of a whole raft of questions but there seems to be no way of knowing the nature of Heaven.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

My Local Gazette for Costa del Sol
Local news for Costa del Sol
www.costadelsol.mylocalgazette.com

Revelation 14:1,2 "And I saw, and, look! the Lamb standing upon the Mount Zion, and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand having his name and the name of his Father written on their foreheads. 2 And I heard a sound out of heaven as the sound of many waters and as the sound of loud thunder; and the sound that I heard was as of singers who accompany themselves on the harp playing on their harps. 3 And they are singing as if a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and the elders; and no one was able to master that song but the hundred and forty-four thousand, who have been bought from the earth."

Psalm 37:29 "The righteous themselves will possess the earth, And they will reside forever upon it."

You have certainly identified the source of "eternity singing praises".

Of course, in biblical and pre-biblical times 144,000 would have seemed to be an infinitely large number.

When you consider that if the number of people alive on the earth continues to grow exponentially (it has slowed down over the last few years) we will hit a point at which the number of people alive will equal or exceed the number of people who have ever lived.

A small heavenly host (an élite?) and a huge earthbound one - an interesting concept - first and second class heavens.

Jesus, on the cross said "It is finished." To me finished means finished - if we accept him. The previous dead will be given their chance. We will all have our chance.

I won't quote Revelations to you. To me that book reads like a Steven King novel.

Jesus never answered directly to questions of what heaven was like. He used parables instead. (The kingdom is heaven is like...) On the cross, to the "good thief", He merely referred to heaven as "paradise". To me paradise is paradise.

Time will have no meaning in heaven (at least in the way that we understand time), but we will have our "perfect" bodies.

Jesus comforted his disciples by telling them that 'in my Father's house are many mansions' to indicate that where he was going, there was room for them to follow.

Although this conjures up an image of a huge edifice, it could well also have been a metaphorical reference to help the disciples to be able to understand the concept of Heaven as a real place.

My own interpretation of 'it is finished' was that these words were an indication of the relief Jesus felt as His sacrifice, of which He had been living in some dread, had finally come about.

It is very strange that even the most devout of Christians that I have seen die really DID NOT WANT TO GO. As the specialist said, "they all say they don't want to suffer but they all go out kicking and screaming, willing to suffer hell on earth for just one more minute".

"It is finished" does indeed refer to the mission that Jesus had while on earth. His death, and the way he died was the reason He was born in the first place. It,along with His resurrection,was the whole point - and the core belief of Christianity. Was he relieved also. I'm sure he was. It was a horrible death.

It was significant that an unknown Roman soldier defied the rules and stabbed Jesus with his spear, presumably, to shorten his suffering. People who were crucified suffered agonies for as long as 48 hours before becoming unconscious or dying.

A case of compassion out of cruelty. To his last mortal breath Jesus was teaching us.

Excellent!! You have hit a very sensitive and real topic! I just think it is wonderful to hope and believe that there really is a better place that we are all going! Where we can all live happy and in love with no worries or illness. But sometimes the world around us makes it really hard to keep the faith!

I suppose if faith was easy, we would all have it.

When I read of thousands of people being killed together, like in the Haiti earthquake, I wonder how the sudden influx to the after-life is coped with.

Arthur, there will always be questions. We are all like kids on a journey (Are we there yet?...I'm tired, is it much further?) look at the big picture: A world so complex MUST have had a Creator, or at least a Being who drew the blueprint. So first acknowledge that He is (I AM!!). Then think for a moment that if he created you there must have been a reason. Now if you had been the creator of beings, how would you communicate with them. They thought of him as a huge, ugly, tyrannical, monster for thousands of years. It wasn't until He became one of them that they could see Him for what He was like. Think of the journey like seeing bits of it at a time; like you would see a few hundred feet ahead of a car with its headlights on traveling a dark highway. You can only see a little ahead but you keep going until you reach your final destination. That destination is in his presence always, no matter what it is like (Heaven, if you will). TRUST!!

One of the questions that I do not ask very often but which always creates mayhem when I do is as follows:-

If mankind is created in God's image, does that mean that God is as callous as mankind or is mankind as callous as God?

Before man became what we like to call 'civilised', he had a relationship with the world about him.

Look at our 'civilised world today. We treat other animals with tremendous cruelty. Food animals are slaughtered on conveyor belt systems. If you have ever walked past a slaughter house while pigs are being killed you will know that they are aware of what is happening to them from the sheer terror in their screaming.

If you have ever seen chickens and turkeys being fed into a killing machine, you will know that a high proportion of them are alive when subjected to jets of super-heated steam.

(If you have done neither of these things, try it, you might become a vegetarian!)

If it is within us to treat God's creatures so vilely, why should we expect Him to treat us any better?

Arthur, Arther, Arther...you have forgotten about man's "fallen" state. God is LOVE and created us to love Him and follow His commandments. One of those "suggestions" was what we should eat.(fruits and vegetables) He also gave us something we also give our children, FREE WILL. Your children do not have to love you. When they do love you, it's because they really do, not because you forced them to. Don't worry, we will be MORE like Him when we get to the place you are writing this Intel about!!

But don't forget that man is in a 'fallen' state because Eden was designed that way. A serpent that could talk to man was allowed into Eden, a tree of forbidden fruit was planted in Eden and man was built with a proclivity for investigation and disobedience.
Would it be unrealistic to believe that a high degree of resentment against God was instilled into mankind by the expulsion from Eden on account of a pre-determined error?
With no experience upon which to draw and with no proper training or induction, man should, surely, have been severely rebuked - not evicted into a world that was barren?
Wouldn't a God who loved His creation be more protective of it?
Just asking.

It may sound almost blasphemous to some to say, but God created us almost as co-equal with him. We had the same opportunity to fail as He did. We have made some pretty bad decisions with our God given powers over the centuries. We should quit blaming God and take back our God given opportunity to have "dominion" over the earth.

I certainly hope that God did not create us as omnipotent and all-knowing because, if he did, he failed big time.

I don't know about blasphemy but I certainly do not get the impression that we are even on the same page as God, let alone his equals.

The way mankind has organised itself into minor, self seeking groups and tribes, I fear it will never form a cohesive whole - rather it will continue to fracture and all the different Gods acknowledged by man will be blamed.

The copyright for this content entitled "The nature of Heaven" has been specified by the contributor as:

This content may be copied and distributed (but not modified), as long as the original author is acknowledged with a link back to the content page. If you use this content according to the license specified, you must link to the following URL: