(The Nationalist, 1 November 2004)
What is heaven like? If our imagination could have a idea of what it was like, it wouldn’t be worth having. But we probably still imagine it as a better version of the best that earth has to offer.
There are three statements in particular in the Bible that have something special to say about it: – ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’. (1 Corinthians 2.9)
‘God will dwell with them; they will be his people, and he himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…’ (Revelation 21.3-4)
‘What we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed. All we know is that, when it is revealed, we shall be like God because we shall see him as he really is’. (1 John 3.2)
Heaven is a state of union with God. If we are to be united to God in heaven, we must have had some unity with God on earth. Life and death are part of one process, like two sides of one page.
‘Death is the touchstone of our attitude to life. People who are afraid of death are afraid of life…. If we are afraid of death we will never be prepared to take ultimate risks; we will spend our life in a cowardly, careful, timid manner…. Too often we wait until the end of life to face death, whereas we would have lived quite differently if we had faced death at the outset. Most of the time we live as if we were writing a draft for the life that we will live later. We live, not in a definitive way, but provisionally, as though preparing for the day when we will really begin to live…. Only awareness of death will give life this immediacy and depth, will bring life to life, will make it so intense that its totality is summed up in the present moment. All life is at every moment an ultimate act’. (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh, Sobornost, I.2, {1979}, p.8)
I don’t believe that God is a celestial Anne Robinson, playing The Weakest Link, happily chucking out those who haven’t make the grade. But the people to worry about are those who are cruel or who refuse to forgive.