“Neil Plantinga notes that although Jesus asked us to pray for the kingdom to come, many of us whisper our prayers so God can’t quite hear them. ‘Your kingdom come,’ we pray, and hope it won’t. ‘Your kingdom come,’ we pray, ‘but not right away.’ When our earthly kingdoms have had a good year, we don’t necessarily long for the kingdom of God to break in. We like our own set-up just fine.”- John Ortberg
“My people aren’t paradise people. We’ve lived in Minnesota most of our lives and it took a lot out of us. My people aren’t sure if we’ll even like paradise; not sure that perfection is all it’s cracked up to be.”- Garrison Keillor
In Chapter 12 (“Normal at Last: Heaven”), the final chapter of Everybody’s Normal. . ., John Ortberg states his belief in regard to why many people fail to look forward to heaven. Thye badly misunderstand what the Bible says about it.
Instead, many people carry an image of heaven as something akin to a cartoon. But the writers of Scripture used images of what they knew to convey what they did not know.
As C. S. Lewis explained in The Problem of Pain:
“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of heaven ridiculous by saying that they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not read them at all. All the scriptural imagery — harps, crowns, gold, and so on — is of course a symbolic attempt to express the inexpressible. . . . People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, he meant that we were to lay eggs.”
Above all, in heaven we finally live in community. Hence, we experience deep, intimate, joy-professing, trusting relationships. In our true home. In heaven God’s building a community of blessed life with Him, heaven’s most glorious inhabitant and primary sustainer. And, normal at last, we shall see Him.
Today’s question: How hard do fellow Christians find it to let go of our earthly kingdoms? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: the annotated bibliography of Everybody’s Normal . . .“