Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Reality 101 #2

Most of us human beings live in a way that is the exact opposite of the three-in-one God: we are disconnected from God and from each other. That is to say that we are alone inside our own heads (and hearts) and that we don’t feel a constant outpouring of warm, sweet love flowing into our hearts from the hearts of those who love us.

Most of us think of heaven as a perfect place where we will be happy even as we continue our disconnected lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suspect that it would never even have occurred to God to create that type of a heaven. God has existed eternally in a state of connectedness; the persons of the Godhead have never been alone and have never lived outside of that warm and perfect flow of mutual love for one another. The only exception to this were those awful hours when the Son of God hung upon the cross bearing our sins.

So what kind of a vision of eternity would you expect the eternally connected three-in-one God to plan? Do you think He plans a heaven where you can decide when you want to visit Him, enter His presence from time to time, and then leave? Absolutely not! God Himself is heaven. Going to heaven means going to dwell in the constant flow of God’s presence and of God’s love. There will never be a time in heaven when you feel like you are alone – or that you feel like you need to be alone. And there will never be a moment when you do not feel the constant flow of God’s love directly into your innermost being.

If you want to sound pious and theological you could say that in heaven we will dwell in a state of perpetual bliss. If you want to put it into the common language, when we get to heaven we are going to shoot up the strong drug of God’s love and stay eternally high in His presence.

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