The Lord says, "The time is coming when there will be all kinds of food. People will still be harvesting crops when it’s time to plow again. People will still be taking the juice from grapes when it’s time to plant again. Wine will drip from the mountains and pour from the hills. I will bring my people Israel back from captivity; they will build the ruined cities again, and they will live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink the wine from them; they will plant gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant my people on their land, and they will not be pulled out again from the land which I have given them," says the Lord your God. (NCV)
I was reading an article the other day written by a hospice chaplain. The crux of the article was that, once we die, we will be without our bodies . . . and we will miss them.
"Too often, it's only as a patient realizes that he or she will lose their body that they finally appreciate how truly wonderful it is. . . . It isn't just health that [the dying] wish they had appreciated. It's the very experience of being in a body, something you likely take for granted until faced with the reality that you won't have a body soon. No matter what you believe happens after death, be it an afterlife, reincarnation or nothing at all, the fact remains: You will no longer be able to experience this world in this body, ever again." (From http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/16/health/dying-regret-body-hate/index.html).
And reading this article, I realized how wrong our doctrine is about death, how wrong our doctrine is about heaven, and how wrong our doctrine is about God Himself!
We—pastors, teachers, elders, Christians—need to talk more about what’s happening after this life. We need to read and learn and share about how flat this life really is compared to what it will be like to live eternally in God’s presence. We need to begin to focus on the reality of true life and stop hanging onto that which is temporarily and rather poorly functioning.
Paul Billheimer, in his book Destined for the Throne (a book every believer should read), claims that the sole and only purpose for creation was to create a Bride for the Son, a Bride that would rule and reign and be active in eternity forever with the Trinity forever, a Trinity that teems with creative power and desires, a Trinity that is resting from activity simply because They are waiting for their Bride, the Church:
"From the very beginning it was God’s plan and purpose that out of the riven side of His Son should come an Eternal Companion to sit by His side upon the throne of the universe, to share with Him His sovereign power and authority over His eternal kingdom. . . . This royalty and rulership is no hollow, empty, figurative, symbolic, or emblematic thing. It is not a figment of the imagination. The Church, the Bride, the Eternal Companion is to sit with Him on His throne. . . . We are joint heirs with Christ."
I think that we are defeated by this life because we fail to actually see what is coming. We default to dreaming about some kind of "future" here on this earth because our church leaders haven’t told us about how actually amazing and fantastic our lives will be in heaven. I think we have often become Christians because we don’t want hell rather than striving full energy toward an eternity that is more fabulous than we ever could imagine. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 NKJV).
The fact is, we will have bodies, but they will be bodies so much far superior to the ones we have now! Don’t you want a new body? A body that’s not subject to temptations or sickness or dying? Do you know that everyone is in the process of dying? This life is a terminal disease. Oh, we try to stave it off with eating certain things or exercising or medicines or surgeries. We try to look younger or act younger in the hope of pushing death further away. But the fact is, if we breath long enough, we will die from it. Breathing is a terminal act because at some point, we will stop breathing. "It is destined that each person dies only once and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27 NLT). We are destined to die. We are born dying. We wake up each day dying. This life is a dying proposition. And as such, we should understand the nature of these temporary bodies:
"For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down—when we die and leave these bodies—we will have a home in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long for the day when we will put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will not be spirits without bodies, but we will put on new heavenly bodies. Our dying bodies make us groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and have no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by everlasting life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. That is why we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord." (2 Corinthians 5:1-8 NLT).
Father God, even after His horrible judgment on the sinful Israelites, then promised that, once they had repented, He would bring them home, but not to the home they had known before. He was (and is) going to bring them home to a land that would never stop providing for them, a land that was so plentiful that need and work and want wouldn’t ever happen anymore. This is the God Who loves us! This is the God Who has promised us heavenly bodies, bodies that will be so far more superior than the ones we have. This is the fantastic, amazing, wonderful future that He has planned for us. Isn’t anything worth this? Is there anything you would still want to hang onto if it meant you would miss out on this kind of future? To describe heaven is to take every stupendously amazing and wonderful thing you have ever experienced, wrap them all up into one experience, and then know all that can’t begin to compare to one instant of what we have waiting for us. Father God is going to permanently plant us into His creation, but no longer as subjects. We will be reigning with Him, co-Rulers, as close as we can be to Him without becoming God. He has opened up His heart and His Throne for us! How can we not be looking forward to this?
© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.
For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com
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