From Randy Alcorn:
"Spurgeon thinks of Heaven as a tangible place where our Savior desires to be with us. . .He refers to the present Heaven, where the spirits of God's people go upon dying, and to the future Heaven, where our bodies will be raised in eternal reunion with our spirits, so we will be whole and perfect people, united in giving God praise. Spurgeon says, 'Only the poor body descends, and that descent is for a very little while. They rise to be forever with the Lord.'
Many people can't resist spiritualizing what the Bible teaches about Heaven. Some people assume that Heaven is not so much an actual place as a state of being or spiritual condition. But that's not what Jesus said about it. He spoke of a house with many rooms in which he would prepare a place for us (John 14:2). Jesus told the disciples, 'I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am' (John 14:3). He used tangible, earthly, spatial terms to describe heaven. The phrase, 'come back and take you' indicates movement and a physical destination.
If we reduce Heaven to something less than or other than a place, we strip Christ's words of their meaning.
The Bible promises us that one day, after the Resurrection, Heaven will be centered on the New Earth -- the place where God's people will live forever. What are the implications of living forever on a transformed Earth? It means we don't need to look up to the clouds to imagine Heaven; we simply need to look around us and imagine what all we see would be like without sin and death and suffering and corruption."
~ We Shall See God, pp. 10 -11.
No comments:
Post a Comment