What you look for you will find (or where is heaven?)

When you picture heaven what do you picture?

Go ahead and close your eyes and try to visualize it now...

You may think of Angels floating on clouds playing on harps (because everyone loves harp music). Or you may think of a place where dis-embodied spirits float to and fro, perhaps you envision mansions and streets of gold. But these fanciful images are placed into our collective mind by culture not by scripture.

"Think of all the jokes that begin with someone showing up at the gates of heaven, and st. Peter is there, like a bouncer at a club, deciding who does and who doesn't get to enter. For all of the questions and confusion about just what heaven is and who will be there, the one thing that is the generally agreed-upon notion that heaven is, obviously, somewhere else. And so the questions about heaven often have an otherworldly air to them."-Rob Bell

Where and how you begin the story, and where and how you end the story, shapes and determines the story you’re telling.

One way to look at the big picture of the Bible is to see how scripture follows a story-arc, we call this narrative theology. It traces through the bible building as it tells the story of God and his creation which was broken and he how seeks to restore it. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is one story of the Kingdom of God coming near and it culminates with Heaven and Earth merging into one when God and humanity dwell together in the Resurrection.

But this is not how we tend to tell God's story. We tell a story of brokenness and sin. We talk about how this world is broken and marred by this "original sin." We tell our story of being "born into" this sin. This has become the dominate way to tell the "Christian" story.

There is nothing wrong with telling the story of how sin entered the picture, and how it effected all of creation. Indeed it is important to acknowledge the fact that sin still infects creation to this very day. But, when we begin with sin when the fall is the starting place, and the death of Jesus on the cross is the ending, then our story becomes one of escape instead of restoration.

The story begins in Genesis 1 NOT in Genesis 3. The story begins with a good and loving God creating and stepping back and declaring "it is good." And then this good and loving God then creating us in his image. Our story starts in the Garden, with everything just as God intended it to be, with God walking with the man and woman...

And

The story does not end in some sort of tribulation period and great climatic battles...

The story ends in Revelation 21

"Then I saw 'a new heaven and a new earth,'for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.”

If you took out sin from the Bible you’d have a four page pamphlet, kinda like a Gospel tract. But, unlike a tract it would be a story we would want to read. You’d begin with Genesis 1 and 2 and end with Revelation 21 and 22. You begin with a perfect garden and end with a perfect city. Genesis 1 and 2 paints a picture of a participatory lifestyle where God and man co-habitate the same time and space.

Revelation 21 and 22 paints a picture of a participatory lifestyle where man engages with God and they co-habitate the same time and space. There’s no distinction between heaven and earth in Genesis and the fusion of heaven and earth at the end of Revelation leaves no distinction between the two.

All things have been made new, and the story ends here….on earth, the same place it began.

A story that begins with Genesis 3 begins with sin, and if you start with this premise in your story then your goal is the removal of sin. To get rid of the problem. But a story that begins at Genesis 1 the goal is “how do we get back” to shalom and restoration and peace. What is the larger story that you are telling? Is it just how to get rid of sin?

"A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven." - Rob Bell

Heaven is where God is storing Earth’s future, bringing hope not rooted in escape but engagement, not evacuation but reclamation, not in leaving but in staying and overcoming.

Or to put it another way materiality is not the issue, rebellion is the issue.

"When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that's a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and weather they're getting enough water and if their roots are deep enough. Soil under the fingernails, grapes being trampled under bare feet, fingers sticky from handling fresh fruit... For there to be new wine someone has to crush the grapes. For their to be no more war someone has to take the sword and get it hot enough in the fire to hammer it into the shape of the plow." - Rob Bell

So go back and read Genesis 1 and 2 and then read Revelation 21 and 22 and think of what heaven will be like. Read the prophets when they reveal glimpses of what God has in store for the world:

Isaiah 2 & Isaiah 11 & Isaiah 25 & Amos 9 ...

"By the way when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off, chapter 4. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd." - Rob Bell

Now what do you think heaven will be like?

Final note

"On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there." Revelation 21:25 .

What are gates for? Gates are for keeping people in and/or out... Hmmm

Also check out my "official" review here.

Can we please put to rest the war between Science and Faith?

Have you ever forgotten anything - an appointment, an important birthday, something at a store, where you left your wallet or keys? Have you ever had an automobile accident that was your fault - due to a laps in attention or judgement? If your mind is capable of having important memory lapses or being responsible for serious accidents, how do you know when you can trust it?

Is it possible that you're really insane, so insane that everyone knows it but you? Is it possible that everyone is just humoring you, pretending that you're normal, but you are actually out of touch with reality? Or maybe you are just dreaming,. Maybe you're a character in someone elses dream, and of course this whole thing seams real, since the other persons imagination wills you to think it's all real. How do you know these possibilities aren't true?

The Eskimos, I'm told, have dozens of words for snow. They would never think of saying, "its snowing," any more than we would say, "Weather is occurring." The statement is to general to be of any use. The specificity of their language causes them to see differences among types of frozen crystalline precipitation that are lost to the rest of us. Is it possible that your language similarly blinds you to many important spiritual distinctions and realities that others, who don't limit themselves to what they can describe or have personally experienced, can see clearly? And is it possible that all human language guides our thoughts into ruts that keep us from knowing reality in other, perhaps fuller, ways? Is it possible for out minds to go beyond the normal limits of our languages?

In ancient times everyone "knew" the earth was flat. Before Galileo's day everyone "knew" the sun rotated around the earth. Before the Civil War many people"knew" that slavery was completely justified. How do we know that many of the things we think we know today won't be shown to be false in the future?

Scientific knowledge is based on repeatable experimentation. As data increases, as hypotheses "work" under repeated testing, one makes an inductive leap form specific results to generalizations, which are accepted as "knowledge" or as "fact." There is a great little handheld game called 20Q. The makers of the game claim that if you think of an object and answer the games questions it will untimely correctly guess what you are thinking. And the game has done just that millions of times for hundreds of thousands of users. However there is a flaw in the game. If you think of gazebo, the game will not be able to guess it... Which raises a great question. Is something true just because it works consistently?

Consider for a moment the thoughts of Albert Einstein:

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain , they do not refer to reality.
- Ideas and Opinions

The supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love.
-The World as I see It

The mechanics of discovery are nether logical nor intellectual. It's a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence and analysis and experiment confirm (or invalidate) the intuition. But initially there is a great leap of the imagination.
-Crossan, The Dark Interval

"A sudden illumination, rapture, intuition, intellectual love, a great leap of the imagination"... They sound like the words of a poet or prophet, not a scientist. But science is a creative process involving many faculties in addition to cold hard reason. The popular MYTHS of the objectivity and certainty not withstanding, knowledge and belief are not enemies. They are partners in the search for truth.

What then is the relationship between faith and knowledge? What if faith, instead of being a step back from the limits of our ability to know and understand, could actually be a flight beyond the rim? What if the word "knowledge," used to denote certainty gained by rationalistic and empirical means, is actually only appropriate foe mundane facts, pedestrian inquiries, common commodities? what if there is another category of reality in the universe, no less real just because it doesn't it doesn't shrink itself to our instruments and portals of "KNOWLEDGE"? What if that category, call it mystery or spirituality or even faith, dwarfs all of our knowledge, just as space dwarfs our little earth? Are we humble enough to look up from the little things we are so proud of comprehending and controlling, to face massive realities and humbling mysteries greater than ourselves, and therefore greater than our ability squeeze into out little boxes of "certainty" and "knowledge"?

Are you willing to step off the narrow ledge of knowledge to soar into broad spaces of faith?

*** If this has helped you in any way, then please consider watching Rob Bells "Everything is spiritual DVD, and or reading Finding faith by Brian McLarian. Both of these resources help me in the shaping and direction of this post.***